L'America

by Martha McPhee

  She took it all so seriously, crying on Cesare's shoulder, feeling humiliated and exhausted from too much work and school.

  "Bet," he would say soothingly, and he would pat her head and rub her toes and then hold her away from him in order to look at her with levels and layers of feeling. First love, love for her determination and ambition, her fearlessness, her willingness to do anything. Then the lurking confusion. He had had fun with the pizzas certainly, but in the end, what did they really amount to? And why in the world did she care about an Albanian? Then he would think of Sissy Three toasting Claire, "the woman," and her dream. He could see something, some vague scrap, a clue: Beth was at the beginning of her dream. She was just beginning to put the yarn on the needle, didn't even realize she was doing so. What were his dreams? Was he even, really, allowed to dream?

  "I'm still your Bet," she would say to Cesare. Somewhere she wondered, but she never stopped believing: he was in love; she was in love. The vast divide didn't seem so vast. He was her Cesare, her Caesar, her emperor. A pause, then she was seized again. She wanted to make and to do and to create. A part of him wanted to take her away from all this and that same part of him couldn't get around the notion of her having to waitress and of her having ambitions that revolved around food, pizza no less. How proud she looked when Bruno savored her pizza, her face lit with meaning and purpose and consequence. Ambition.

  Cesare, though he didn't admit it to Beth, hardly acknowledged it to himself, felt humiliated for Beth when she proudly counted her tips, more than a hundred dollars in cash and coins made from waiting tables. "We're rich," she had said. All he could think about was how dirty the money looked, how dirty it was making her hands. That part of Cesare wanted to take her back to Italy and buy her things and keep her safe and protected and give her everything she had never had: together they would make a simple family—two children, a dog.

  It was easy, though, to be caught up in the ecstatic energy and pace of Manhattan, the electricity, the lights. Peep shows; girly shows; Men Only; XXX; prostitutes on the West Side Highway; Broadway; a man showering, naked, in front of a full-length window, full-length erection; everyone seemed to have some kind of leather accoutrement, funny hair—colored or spiked or shaved. Cesare's letters home were endless, so much to describe.

  Eventually Dario visited him. Skinny Dario with his exquisite inability with the English language—he made no sense in America. He wanted his espresso, "Corto corto, come in Italia." He wanted his pasta, "Al dente, come in Italia." He wanted his big meal at midday, "Come in Italia." He wanted everything to be as it was in Italy. Catching the football nearly knocked him over. At Claire, where Cesare took him for a week, he complained about all the odd people. He didn't so much complain as continually comment on the fact that there was an Indian and a black woman and a Chinese guy, commenting by way of not-so-subtle jokes. In Città only the maids came from other countries. Then he started complaining in earnest about constipation and blamed it on all the strange foods he was eating at Claire—all those curries Preveena made them eat. He didn't want to do any work there because his stomach hurt. (There was nothing people disliked more at Claire than someone who didn't help out.) Mostly, however, he wanted to see Sylvia. He had been thinking about her ever since she left Greece. He asked until finally Beth begged her to come for a visit from Boston where she went to college. She blew in with her flirty smile and all her plans but absolutely no romantic interest in Dario. "What was I thinking?" were her exact words to Beth. Beth turned her own impatience on Cesare. "Why do Italians think so much about their bowel movements?" she demanded. Even she had not been spared detailed accounts of Dario's incessant intestinal antics and it had made her remember that more than one dinner conversation in Italy had revolved around people's bowel movements. Bea's sister had constant constipation and ate sticks of licorice, administered by her father, with the hope that it would release her bowels. When Dario left, Beth and Cesare were both relieved. "Let me know if I ever become like that," he said to her.

  Then he would step out of Beth's world and into the grandmother's, with Beth putting on a pretty chiffon calf-length dress, black pumps, a strand of pearls around her neck, studs in her ears. Before him she transformed into a prim girl almost unrecognizable: a girl made for an expensive life that should be handed to her and not sought. Suddenly Beth was not the ambitious girl he knew. Seeing her this way he understood the role the grandmother wanted him to play, even if Beth did not. As they rode uptown in the cab, Cesare left the one reality for the other, knowing which one he preferred and which one he would choose if only he could.

  The grandmother's reality was marked by crystal chandeliers and benefits at the Met (the Museum) or "hearing" an opera at the other Met. "My local theater," she was fond of saying. The big event of the season was the production of Wagner's Lohengrin, "From which the Wedding March originates," the grandmother informed him. For this event and for the party she would host "to introduce him," he needed a tuxedo, which she bought for him herself at Paul Stuart, "Where my husband bought all his clothes. Just feel this material," she said, fingering the fine wool of the tuxedo pants, inadvertently tickling Cesare's leg as he stood before her in full black tie. She sat before the many mirrors in the upstairs lounge of the formal-wear department, her image reflected for Cesare to infinity. In Italy there were not such big stores as this. An Indian salesman who had been at the store for years, and who had been the personal shopper of Grammy's husband, helped them find the right suit. Grammy knew everything about the salesman (wife in India, three daughters, no sons, tremendous regret, sends money home, family won't consider coming to America), but she did not know his name. She told him Cesare was an Italian prince. "Betrothed to my granddaughter. A big wedding as soon as she finishes college. Of course, we'll buy an even better tuxedo for that occasion—which will be celebrated at the Pierre, nothing less. Unless, of course you'd like to marry in Italy?" she asked, suddenly looking at Cesare, catching the Indian up in the drama of expensive matrimonial decisions, making him, Cesare noted, nearly pant with expectation for financial gain.

  At her party to "introduce" him, he was the prince as well, and he obliged, indulging the grandmother. "Made in Italy," he said, making all the ladies laugh, and he spoke to each one of them, answering their numerous questions about banking and socks and shoes and the subject of his dissertation, which concerned the history of dyes, how the commodity became bankable. They were privately suspicious of his Italian origins and had discussed it with the grandmother previously. "He's a Catholic after all," one woman had warned. They associated Italians with the Mafia or with the gondoliers who rowed them peacefully over the canals of Venice or with their daughters' stories of being pinched while strolling through the Forum. At all this the grandmother had laughed and declared him a prince from a noble northern Italian family. "I've seen the villa," the grandmother had said. Verification. Proof. "Do you realize his family owns the only existing fresco painted by Benvenuto Cellini, perhaps the only painting ever made by his hand?" The ladies were well cultured. Culture was their currency. This detail inflated Cesare in their eyes as Grammy knew it would. They were fluent in the language of money and so was Cesare, though his ability with it was far more subtle and discreet.

  At the party, elegant matrons swirled around Cesare, vying to impress him. One, with a blemished apricot complexion and auburn hair piled atop her head, attempted to engage him on his dissertation topic. She wore a particularly lovely dress with a brocade bodice in gold, and though she was not young, she was youthful. Her name was Gimbel, her husband was, "in retail" as she explained, but the detail of who she was was lost on Cesare, just as a Bianchi would have been lost on her. She sipped a flute of champagne and ate hors d'oeuvres continuously, plucking them from passing trays proffered by young waiters in white with gloved hands and bow ties. "Did you know that one of our presidents, William Howard Taft, had a son who died because dye from his blue sock got into a cut on his left foot? As a result
there was a revolution in the sock dyeing industry here." Cesare had heard something like that, but he wasn't certain it was Taft's son or if a revolution had occurred. "Progress," Cesare said. "And penicillin."

  Other ladies asked him other questions, telling him about their grand tours to Venice and the Amalfi Coast, about Positano honeymoons, trips to Cinque Terre ("Cinque" mispronounced with a soft c), Florence (one said Firenze with a flourish), and Pisa.

  Grammy's apartment had big picture windows overlooking the Hudson, upon which floated one enormous and heavy barge. Cesare watched the barge and briefly wondered how it was that some of the richest people in America lived in rent-controlled apartments in New York City. Beth had explained to him the complicated system of rent control, which had been designed to benefit low-income families but was enjoyed by the rich. It reminded him of the complicated infrastructure of Naples that allowed the wealthy to flourish and the poor to remain poor.

  Beth snuck up behind Cesare and kissed him. Throughout the party, he had watched her floating among the ladies, making small talk, graceful like a swan. He wished his mother could see her. She was elegant. He remembered his mother trying to tell him without being insulting, but being insulting just the same, that Beth's manners were atrocious. There was nothing atrocious about her. She was pleasing her grandmother by pleasing her grandmother's friends. At a party for Carnivale hosted by his parents at the Città villa, he recalled how she had tried to talk to his parents' friends but then seemed to give up and hardly spoke to anyone. At the time he had imagined it was because she was shy around the older more formal people. Now he suspected that his parents' guests had made no effort, having no idea what to say to her. So much interest was shown to him here, but in America they were more familiar with the foreign, infatuated even, eager to impress. "My childhood," Beth said. "One half of it anyway." Schizophrenic, he imagined, thinking of the other half, of Claire.

  And then they would be at Claire. Beth's father never called to ask her to come, but his gravitational pull was strong nonetheless. At least every other weekend they went to Claire. Sometimes Cesare went by himself. Beth studied the farm's books, helped do the things that needed getting done in the spring with the apples. She and Cesare hauled strawberries to New York restaurants in June, blackberries in July, raspberries in August. Cesare grew to understand how all the various pieces fit into Claire's operations: the goats for goat cheese buttons; the bees for honey; the tourists for a night's stay and cash; the reenactments for cash; the slaughtering of the beef, the pigs, the chickens, and on and on.

  At the grandmother's party, Claire, the woman, and Claire the place were both spoken of. On a wall in the living room hung an oil portrait of Claire when she was a girl, a lovely girl with strong eyes and dark curls; her fierce intelligence seemed to emanate from the very paint like rays of sunshine. Looking at it, the ladies would say, "An odd end for the dearest girl." Something they surely said each time they saw the portrait, never accepting or reconciling themselves to her fate, haunted by it themselves even though they had outlived her already by a lifetime.

  At Claire there was one snapshot of Claire, taken moments before she was hit. She is smiling, her head turned to look back over her shoulder. She has climbed the wall and Jackson has said her name and she has turned knowing he will take a picture. The smile says, "I've seen what's on the other side of this wall and you haven't. I know what lies beyond. I want to take you there." Sissy Three caught Cesare studying the photograph. "It is not a coincidence," Sissy said, "that this is the only picture of Claire Jackson has." Beth was in New York and Cesare was visiting Claire by himself this time. He had been in America about eight months. He had heard Sissy Three speak on more than one occasion about Claire's dreams. He had not yet been able to penetrate Jackson, to get to a level of intimate conversation. Cesare understood he never would, that Jackson's own daughter never would, that Jackson wasn't designed like that—because of who he was or because of fate. Jackson, for the most part, kept busy with the chores of the farm and with his letters to Washington, working at a vast and dark desk late into the night. On the walls of his office were indecipherable charts and graphs and diagrams. Endless clippings from magazines and newspapers scattered the floor. Jackson still spoke to Claire, and Cesare was beginning to understand that if Jackson's own daughter couldn't find a way to talk to him about the futility of these conversations neither could he.

  Cesare looked at Sissy's beauty pouring from her eyes and lips and asked her quite simply, "Why have you devoted your life to the casual dreams of some other woman?" Day in, day out, they ran this farm and made it work. Cesare had come to enjoy working with his hands—milking the goats; picking the early summer apples, the strawberries; fertilizing the fields; talking with Jackson about a day when America would not depend on the Middle East for fuel, predicting the grave dangers of doing nothing. Claire even sold berries to New York restaurateurs, negotiating keenly the price per pint. Sissy looked Cesare in the eye, held him with her gaze, and answered, "We all need to believe in something."

  "It's not clear though if this is really what Claire would have pursued," he said.

  "Yes it is." She flexed her hands in front of her. They were slender and long and beautiful. Better a farm than hands, he supposed. She could have spent her life believing in her hands.

  "How do you know?" he pressed.

  "Because I believe in the idea and I believe that her life has to amount to something, that lives have to amount to something," she said. And that is all she would allow on the subject. She's crazy, he thought. They're all crazy. But then he banished the notion, fearing it would break a spell.

  Filippo Tommaso Marinetti writes about history consuming itself, regurgitating itself, repeating itself endlessly. We're tricked into believing in history's linearity. But it circles and circles and circles around on itself, learning little, trapping itself like the snake that eats its own tail. Fishing on Claire's swollen spring river, Preveena casting her line easily with the gentlest snap of her wrist, sari drenched and bunched at her ankles, resolved Cesare's confusion unwittingly and quite simply: "Jackson is stuck, like one in quicksand, in the past." She cast again. For a long time they were silent, casting, catching nothing, their flies skipping gracefully across the rapids. Then Preveena said, "Beth, however, is not. Jackson has somehow managed to set her free."

  With her words the Polaroid image emerged, fully focused, and Cesare could finally see his life and Beth's with inescapable clarity. He sees Sissy Three toasting Claire at Thanksgiving. He sees Preveena fishing. He sees Beth concocting grand schemes out of pizzas. He sees Fiori. He sees the Cellini fresco with the outsized lovelorn girl. He sees his father in his garden working at the weeds. He sees Jackson tethered to the ground of Claire, chasing the smile of a beautiful girl. He sees history eating its own tail. He sees five hundred years of Cesares and Giovanni Paolos. He sees. He sees. He sees. He sees Claire, the farm, an elaborate homage to a personal past. Fiori an elaborate homage to a personal past. Jackson freed Beth. Cesare's father did not free him. Cesare had wanted to save Beth, or so he had imagined. What he really wanted was to free himself.

  Cesare had left the Indian and Paul Stuart with the tuxedo, the shirt, the cummerbund, the bow tie, the cuff links, suspenders, and vest, thinking about Beth's roommate with her pink hair and ripped tights and of the Indian salesman who lived in Queens, his family in India, and of all the juxtapositions—dizzying and grand and simple—of Claire. All these worlds coexisting, integral and not, overlapping really, yet independent and aloof, the world in microcosm, all here to find linearity, to escape the past.

  In Italy, men do not wear tuxedos. But Cesare enjoyed how American the fancy suit made him feel. Months later, a late summer evening, he wore it out, not for any occasion, just to drive those avenues and through those canyons, his arm draped effortlessly over the back of the front seat as if he were some grand character—a Gary Cooper, say, or a Cary Grant—in some romantic comedy from the 1940s
. In New York he had the sense that even if one made one's self, one would still remain anonymous and there was something a little sad, a little terrifying in that: each person his own country held together by private, rather than collective, ambition. By this summer evening Cesare had been in America well over nine months, and though he had pursued many things, really, he realized, he had pursued nothing. He had spent his time stepping out with Veronica and Jane, playing with the Texans, drifting off to Claire to help on the farm, dabbling at one short story, writing those long letters home, roaming the Strand, reading, and receiving money wired from Città, courtesy of the Cellini bank. There was little that he had accomplished in terms of trying to understand if he could make a life here. He did not discuss this with Beth. But she knew. Italy, the predictability of his small town, the soccer game on a Saturday afternoon, windsurfing on the lake, a job held for him for centuries seemed very far away but completely possible.

  Somewhere, somehow, for no understandable reason, he wished that Beth were the sort of girl who would dye her hair pink and cause trouble, that he were that sort of man, that together they could throw everything to the wind. Right now, cruising the heart of Wall Street, dark and late and no one about, he wanted to leave—wanted to pick up Beth and drive across America, drive to Las Vegas and get married, drive into a story, a novel, something bigger than both of them.

  He drove to her apartment. She was asleep. He sat and watched her as he liked to do. The sirens of Sixth Avenue hollered. Lights swirled through the window. Her roommates were out. He thought of Grammy and her parlor games with her ladies, trying at once to be European while disparaging Europe with the notion of all Italians as carefree bottom pinchers, all Swiss as on time, all French as mean, all Germans as officious. He remembered stopping at the gas station on his last drive home from Claire, a massive truck stop somewhere in New Jersey. The gas station attendants all in a row pumping gas came from a dozen different countries. They had come for the Promise. Now their children spoke unaccented English. Now their children dressed in Levi's and ate fried chicken and Hamburger Helper. Now their children disparaged the countries of their origin as dirty and poor and filled with disease. Now their children were well educated, ambitious. Now their parents' pasts were absorbed neatly into the fabric of this culture—the fabric that permitted all and everyone to celebrate the Chinese New Year, Hindu Holi, Kwanzaa, Yom Kippur, and whatever else there is. Cesare thought of Fiori. He thought of socks and shoes and feet and of how flat the prospect of that work made him feel; he thought of Beth's pizzas and the delight on her face at their success. He wanted to feel in himself Beth's passion and ambition—the ambition she had once made him feel.