L'America

by Martha McPhee

  "For what?" he asked.

  "Because I can't do this," she said.

  "Why?"

  She said nothing and he knew why.

  "You should have come to Wall Street," he said after a bit, sweeping his arm in a grand gesture around the living room to acknowledge her accomplishment. "You don't mind risk and you understand probability. By now you'd be a multimillionaire." And he raised his glass to her.

  Always, she thought of Cesare. And always his calls came, far apart, yes, but like sporadic tracer flames they lit up the darkness.

  ***

  At Carnegie Hall with Hunter one night, there to watch some friends of his from Germany play in a quartet, she became smitten with a small violinist named Hans, and he with her, much to Hunter's disappointment. Beth's infatuation would lead Hunter to a romance of his own that would become quite serious. The girl's name was Dina, and she was a model for Bloomingdale's, who, with her long legs, wore miniskirts easily. Beth would lie in bed at night, imagining them out on the town, spending all of Hunter's money, Dina unappreciative of his exotic excursions to thrift stores and Persian rug marts. At least, though, Beth felt freed from guilt.

  Beth and Hans met after the performance, stayed out all night, walked through Central Park to her apartment at dawn just as the joggers and the businessmen were starting the day. In her kitchen she undressed him. On the side of his jaw where the violin pressed into it, a tough leathery patch had formed. She touched it. It was black and ugly like an enormous mole. He was her size. She did not need to look up to him, rather she could look straight into him. She began to kiss the leather patch, the back of his neck, each eye. She loved that he was her size. She kissed his collarbone, his nipples, his belly button. At his penis she lingered for a while until he lifted her to him and undressed her, throwing off her cute French clothes, pushing back her cute French bob. And they spent the day in this way in her new apartment, her roommates safely at work. They did this whenever he flew in from Germany, in his hotel above Carnegie Hall, in a taxi, in the park. Sometimes he would lie her naked on the bed and play Mozart for her on his violin until she could bear patience no longer. From Germany he wrote her long desperate love letters that made her laugh. She loved being admired, she loved that men were attracted to her. It made her want more men, many men.

  Men appeared from everywhere. She dated all the time. She never slept. She went out with a Brazilian architect who liked to eat tongue and get her stoned and fuck her on his architectural drawings and on the children's furniture he had designed. Through him she met a woman who made a lot of money in Hollywood because she had the unique ability to mimic weird sounds. She could crow like a rooster, howl like a siren, purr like a cat, growl like a hyena. Beth had a fast and delightful affair with that woman's husband, who was elated that she didn't mimic the sounds of beasts upon climaxing. All these men drifted across her life, gliding by as if on a conveyor belt before disappearing. She dated other people's boyfriends; she dated other married men. They took her to fancy restaurants; they picked her up late after work. They offered her fine wines, some drugs, gave her pretty presents, invited her on trips to faraway places they happened to be visiting on business. She had an affair with a man twice her age who had three children, the oldest of whom was only three years younger than she. Her involvement with all of the men was never emotional. She did not care when they left or she left. They were fun, that was all. She enjoyed being adept at letting go.

  With the help of Cosella, who now knew all about Beth's life at Claire, her dead mother, and her Italian love affair, and who as a result had adopted Beth as a sort of daughter, Beth started a small catering company, catering parties for Leo and Cosella at their Fifth Avenue apartment. Leo, when not at work, never wanted to cook. For them, for their parties, Beth liked to cook anything but Italian. She was not afraid to try other cuisines, but often she made her elaborate Indian meals and Persian feasts, encouraging Leo and Cosella to encourage their friends to eat with their fingers. Their friends were important people and it gave Beth a thrill to feed them: politicians, actors, singers, famous writers, a jazz musician or two. (She even cooked for Bill Clinton—before he ran for president.) Beth had either heard of Leo and Cosella's friends or knew that if she hadn't heard of them she should have, simply by the way Cosella said their names. These dinners led to other dinners and before long Beth was able, with the consent and goodwill of Cosella, to quit her job at Lago. By this time she was sous-chef in pastry and this was as far as she would ever get at Lago. She knew it; Cosella knew it. The higher positions would never be vacated, so Cosella gave her a chance in another way. It was the elaborate displays Beth created, the exquisite details, that people loved—those finger bowls and the rose water, the barberries (which they had not known to have existed) and the ambrosial rice noodle sorbet. Beth would always emerge from the kitchen at the end of the meal to drip the rose water on the guests' palms herself, radiant in some splendid outfit with a clean white apron tied around her waist and her hair pulled back with a bandeau or up in the smallest chignon. Cosella would stand at the head of the table, raise her glass to Beth, and make a toast, ask Beth to take a bow. All the famous guests would clap.

  Out on the cold street, wrapping the cashmere coat from her boutique tightly around her waist and neck, knotting her scarf high beneath her chin, pulling her hat down over her ears, feeling the bite of that January air, looking south to the buildings high above the park, seeing her breath, watching a taxi scream down Fifth, admiring a couple strolling home late and a little drunk hand in hand, walking to Madison to catch the bus north, admiring the lit-up windows of the fancy stores, all the pretty prospects they promised, an enormous check for her dinner in her pocket, Beth would get a rush. She could do this, she believed. Whatever this was, she could do it.

  ***

  A childhood friend of Cesare's came to New York. He took her to a famous steak house and ordered a four-pound lobster for them to share and she showed him just how to eat it, just how to get every last little piece from the head, how those pieces are the sweetest and most tender. (She did not tell him that a four-pound lobster was a ridiculous notion and bound to be much tougher than a one-and-a-quarter-pound lobster.) Told him how you kill a lobster, told him that originally lobster had been the food of indentured servants and slaves and in colonial days that they had had an uprising to protest the incessant meals of lobster; they wanted something different; they wanted meat.

  "How in the world do you know so much about lobsters?"

  "I'm a chef," she said with a blue-eyed twinkle. Just saying the words felt like she was cheating a little, like she was stealing something. But she loved saying it anyway, the first time she ever had: I am a chef. Always people were asking you to list your accomplishments, detail your resume to prove yourself. I am a chef. She blushed a little with the confidence. It was easier declaring this to an Italian; she knew an Italian wouldn't care.

  This man, Gianni, was Cesare's oldest friend. They had met as boys ice-skating on a frozen pond on the outskirts of Città. They had been five at the time, and had been good friends ever since. Gianni was a doctor, engaged to be married. Beth had met his fiancee in Città, her name was Grazia and she was tall and slender with lots of hair and a bright toothy smile. She was incredibly sweet, if not too smart. Grazia towered over Gianni and teased him often about his height, but in a nonthreatening way that somehow made her size seem maternal, as if she would mother him well for life because of her height. Her ambition was to be Gianni's wife, mother of him and of his kids—an ambition, Beth surmised, that made Grazia's life simple: all she had to do was remain slender and sexy and soft with Gianni, curl up to him like a cat and make him feel comfortable and safe. Gianni was a small man with a round warm face and sharp eyes. His professional specialty was blood and he had come to New York for a conference at Sloan-Kettering that concerned the relationship between a rare T-cell lymphoma and mononucleosis and something to do with Japan. In Città, Beth had alw
ays had more questions for Gianni than for Grazia, endless queries about his research and the makeup of blood and the cures for the various kinds of leukemia. Blood was a subject that Grazia did not want to hear about. Thus she did not come with him to New York.

  Eating the lobster, pulling the tender bits of meat from the tiny crevices, Gianni asked Beth to feed him the meat. She did. Then he fed her a piece of the tail. He let his index finger linger on her lip, just long enough for her to become curious about his intentions. The candle on the table lit his face. The waiter approached to ask a question, but faded quickly back into the swirl of the restaurant. Beth showed Gianni secret crevices in the tail and fed him those bits, just flecks of meat on her finger, which he sucked off. He poured her another glass of wine. They spoke Italian, which she loved because it had been a long time since she had had a chance to. He reminded her a little of the violinist in his size and confidence. She thought, it flashed across her mind delightfully and painfully, that there was not a person in the world she could sleep with who would wound Cesare more. She wanted to wound Cesare. Gianni ordered a chocolate dessert, a mixture of cake and soufflé, oozy warm interior, a fashionable cake, popular in New York. He fed her spoonfuls of the chocolate, which she ate slowly, pretending to be innocent of her own seduction. Never once was Cesare mentioned. Gianni paid the bill and took her to his hotel and made love to her very gently and very carefully (as if he were handling delicate china that did not belong to him) beneath the cool pressed hotel sheets. Slowly enough, patiently enough, thoroughly enough that she couldn't do anything but explode with pleasure, until it began to dawn on her, horrified and too late to stop the inevitable, the notion itself working like an aphrodisiac, that this was just what Cesare had wanted.

  Afterward, as Gianni's fingers drifted the lengths of her back, her bare arms, she pressed her cheek into the soft cool pillow and allowed herself to feel the burning sensation in her eyes and nose. She lay there, silent, for a long time. Gianni fell asleep. The hotel's thick windows kept all the noise of New York out. But she could see through a gap in the curtains that it was raining outside. She lit one of his cigarettes and smoked it and then another, watching the rain come down. She was not a smoker, never had been.

  "Did this unfold as planned?" she asked Gianni before leaving. She half expected him to take out his wallet and pay her.

  "He loves you," Gianni said.

  "I hate you," she said to Cesare on the phone, glad somewhere for the excuse to call him.

  "No you don't," he said.

  "Why?" she asked. Then she started to cry. No one said a word for a while. She could hear the static in the line hissing and shimmying all the way across the Atlantic, all the way across Spain and the Mediterranean, beneath the Alps to Città.

  Because I'm some part of you. I'm what you didn't have growing up. I'm your dead mother, I'm your father as he would have been, I'm the life you would have had had your mother not died. I'm impossible. I'm the Atlantic Ocean, another world. Because you are some inextricable part of me, my ambition, my possibility, my potential. You embody it, promise it, answer it. Because you refuse and I refuse to believe in the power of history and time.

  Campanilismo, Beth thought. Valeria came to mind, looming above the crowd at the Fiori party, her stricken face reaching desperately for the leg of the artist as he rises inevitably into the cloud as if she were trying to pull back time.

  Benvenuto only lived in Florence. Think of how far we've come, she thought. Cesare can be with a Florentine. In three hundred years perhaps he'll be allowed to be with an American. Then she thought of Benvenuto fleeing love for what he wanted most, for what he wanted more than Valeria. Then Beth thought about herself, her own inability to leave America, her own allegiance, what she wanted most. Campanilismo, she thought again, picturing all the many skyscrapers of Manhattan, their spires shooting into the heavens. Her bell towers.

  "Why do you need to torture me?" she asked. "Why do you need to humiliate me?"

  "Because I want you to stop loving me," he said.

  "I hate you," she said, contempt becoming seduction in their mad dance.

  "Come visit me," he said.

  "Pay for the ticket," she said.

  "Certainly," he said.

  "This feels like an addiction," she said.

  "It's worse," he said. "It's a belief."

  He sent her a plane ticket. They met in France at the Lac d'Annecy. Beth had never seen water that shade, emerald like the jewel. They met in Paris. They met in Milan on her way to visit Hunter (and Dina) in India. Her visits were secret. He never told his family. She did not tell Bea. The trips were fast, a few days, and awkward. At first, hope filled Beth. But she soon realized that distance had transformed them both into strangers and within only a few hours, a day, her hope would vanish. Cesare could not stand what New York had made of Beth, someone inelegantly scrounging for money through a complicated network of shady real estate deals that didn't even involve equity, someone who bought and spent on credit, someone desperate for more, chopping vegetables and believing she was becoming something. For Beth, Cesare had settled, settled into a life as a banker, loaning money to support other people's dreams. He no longer carried a book. Indeed, he never read, never wrote. She felt sad; she did not know him anymore. Even so, for a while they stubbornly believed that somehow they could return to before, make time stop, that they could still save each other from their lives.

  Then his father died. He died late at night in his bed at home. His wife and daughter and son were there. Cesare stood by the bed, holding his father's hand, rubbing it to give comfort, silent tears about his eyes, silent promises about his lips. "Put out the cigarette," the father said to his boy. His boy felt very much like a boy—a reprimanded child—not a man saying good-bye to a man, but a boy who wanted to grow up and be admired by the one person who would not be there to appreciate the transformation. It was his turn to take the mantle, leave folly behind by annihilating Beth once and forever and, in doing so, annihilating himself. For what? "Put out the cigarette," his father had said, and soon thereafter he died.

  Years later, Cesare sits beneath the fresco in the bright dark of that late-September night. For what? For what? He can see nothing but the tenderness of night, the daring of morning trying to push through the part in the thick velvet curtains.

  The next meeting was in Città. Beth stayed four days and then flew home to New York knowing the love affair was finally over. Cesare was now a new and completely unrecognizable man. He detested Beth from the moment he saw her and it seemed he brought her to Italy simply to show her all the ways in which he now could not bear her. He would not kiss her; he feared she could have AIDS. He said he never would have married her, even at the height of their romance, because he knew she would never be able to bear him a son because her mother had only had a daughter and her father had only had daughters. "Leave my mother out of this," she said. He said that she was so disorganized she would lose her children on a street somewhere. He would not take her to Fiori. He would not take a day off from work to spend with her. Rather, he left her in his apartment (he had moved away from the family villa). It was an ugly modern apartment with views of the town and its mocking bell tower. Finally at the airport, as he dropped her off, he took her hands in his and held them warmly and said as if conceding something that he would be here for her as a brother, nothing more, but always as a brother.

  "I don't hate you," she said to him, looking him sharply in the eye. Travelers streamed around them, all the sounds of an airport. A plane took off.

  "You, your eyes, reminded me of your grandmother just then." For an instant he seemed tender. Then, as if trying to cauterize any weakness he said, "Addio."

  Such a cold word, addio, it jabbed her as he intended it to. Looking at Cesare, she could see only his father. But she did not say that. She said again, "I do not hate you," because she would not let him win. Everything inside of her ached, throbbed actually. She turned her back and disappe
ared into the terminal. She would not let him win because she was not talking to Cesare but to some impostor who had possessed the Cesare she had known because of circumstances that were far larger than and deeper than her ability to comprehend.

  She flew home to New York, crying the entire way, banished, exiled, bereft. Suddenly somewhere over the Atlantic, waves way beneath like clouds, the water like sky, she sat upright. She would call her father. She saw him in front of her, holding her hand—her little hand warm in his big hand. She was four years old and he was playing with her; she was riding on his shoulders. "Run, Daddy, run," she used to say as she made him dash across the fields at Claire. She would interrupt him at work, in his office, in the fields, in the orchards, and make him get down and play with her, and he would. He always would. She had never really asked him, asked him with urgency, to come to her. Her requests had always been halfhearted; she'd never expected him to come. Now she would be urgent in her demand. She designed a plan. A fat old man sitting next to her on the plane asked if he could eat her meal. She had not even realized the meal had been sitting in front of her for a long time. Sunlight poured through the window. Her father. She would call her father. Simple as that. She would talk to him about love, about her mother. He would come to New York City and visit her. It became crucial that her father leave Claire for her. She was all hope, a muscle of hope and optimism.