L'America

by Martha McPhee

  Bear held court at the mahogany bar, imported from Italy, and ate his dinners—Tonnarelli con la Belga e la Pancetta Affumicata, Risotto con Carciofi, Filetto di Bue alla Moda di Como and the like—with his Wall Street pals during their late night schmoozing sessions. He brought them all here. Bear would offer Beth suggestions in front of his friends to show them just how involved he was, ideas concerning the lighting, the seasoning in certain dishes, the wine list, and even ridiculous suggestions like importing fruit from Rome. She'd smile indulgently and pat him on the shoulder, give him a kiss, telling him in this way that she was the one in charge. Even so, "I made it happen," Bear would shout above the din of all the happy diners.

  This was as close as he would ever get to his own restaurant. He had two children, would have two more, the wife, high overhead with his multimillion-dollar apartment, his kitchen, his wines, tuitions, college, retirement—funny how fast six million a year will go. He couldn't take the risk himself. Instead, he traded mortgage bonds high up in the North Tower where eventually he would die, with Beth—an act more intimate, when done with someone else, than making love.

  In the summer of 1996, after two years of dating, thanks to Bea, the matchmaker, who understood perfectly the entire situation, Beth married Hunter—easy all-knowing Hunter standing right in front of her on the vast lawn at Claire. Beth wore her mother's wedding gown, a big white dress with one hundred buttons running down the back to meet a bustle. It was silk satin with a full organza slip. The silk had turned cream-colored with age, even so, the dress remained beautiful with its puffy capped sleeves and lace about the bodice, and it fit Beth perfectly. She was exactly her mother's size. Wearing the dress, Beth felt close to her mother in a way she had never experienced before, as if Claire were standing there with her, a real woman—not an abstraction or a dream or a farm. Her mother had been ten years younger than Beth when she wore the dress before two hundred people in New York City (at the Pierre), with Grammy secretly apologizing to her friends for the obesity of her son-in-law's mother. Beth thought as well about her grandmother, how she had helped Claire select the dress at Bergdorf Goodman's, insisting on formal and traditional as if the dress alone could have changed Claire's choice of groom.

  Beth wished her grandmother had lived to see her marry Hunter because Grammy had approved of him: he was charming, he came from the right family (crazy as they were), he earned a fabulous living, and he had quietly paid her bills so she could have the best medical care as she got old, even arranging for a maid to care for the details of her life that she could no longer handle (when Beth discovered the checks she felt a little more of her heart give way to him). "He comes from good stock," Grammy was fond of saying. "Don't let this one slip through your fingers." She said that the day before she died. Standing in her mother's dress Beth imagined she would have become Claire for Grammy, starting out anew all over again. The dress had remained vacuum-packed and stored in a gold-colored box on a high shelf in a deep closet in the grandmother's rent-controlled apartment. The box had a clear plastic window so that a portion of the dress could be admired, which of course Beth had done many times—first at her grandmother's instigation and then on her own, as if she were admiring some part of her mother, peering in at her through the small plastic window, watching her change shade and character with time. After the wedding Beth returned the dress to the gold box to save it for the daughter she knew she would have someday.

  Life rolled on swiftly, moving like the river that it is. Hunter would never be the love that Cesare had been, the desperate, suffocating, addictive, gorgeous, impossible love—a torrential love that stopped time. Rather, it was a quiet love that flowed steadily, growing with and through time like morning glories or some other beautiful unstoppable vine. Nothing fragile about it, as solid as that sky.

  The hedge fund Hunter worked for collapsed when a disgruntled employee told stories that got the SEC involved and the company lost 80 percent of their investors. The man whose company it was, once worth billions, was left with (relatively) little, and Hunter was let go. Instead of finding a new job he decided to help Beth with her second cookbook, another memoir, this one all about Claire (her mother and the farm) with recipes like ornaments, from India and Iran and all over the world (including one for camel stew, ingredients: one large camel; ten medium lambs; thirty medium chickens; etc); some of the recipes were Preveena's or Nasim's or her own, others were left behind by the various residents of Claire. This book did better than the first and helped fund (along with Bear) the initial investment for Matera, Beth's southern Italian answer to Como, inspired by a photograph she had seen of Matera's Sassi, the rock-cut settlement sculpted out of the tufa hills upon which the town lies. Her design now would be the same as it had been with Como: find the chef, start the restaurant—she preferred being a businesswoman (a nice Cosella) rather than a chef—and once successful, sell it. She planned to sell Como too now.

  The year after Beth and Hunter married, Valeria was born, named for a woman of strength whose face captured the essence and passion of life in its fine mixture of exquisite pain and her desire to steal time, grab it from the sky. Valeria's newborn eyes were ferocious in their passion, claiming Beth immediately and entirely, infusing her with love that swelled to enormous proportions, that obliterated all other love for a while and in so doing infused her with more than a bit of fear. "I am yours," the eyes said, "I am yours for life," staking claim to Beth's heart as no man ever could. Looking at Valeria, perfect in her newborn beauty, Beth knew that every choice she had made that had led her to this moment had been the right choice.

  By the summer of 2001 Beth was working on the business plan for her third restaurant—Preveena—trying to persuade Bear, who was not as fond of Indian food, to help her once again. There was more risk involved now. Though the first two restaurants had been very well received and well reviewed and even won a prize or two, they had sadly not been financial successes and Beth had not been able to sell them. A third restaurant, Indian-inspired no less, and started by an American, a woman no less, was not an easy venture to embrace. But Beth did not care. She wanted to open Preveena. She believed in Preveena, the menu, the food, its ability to be popular; she envisioned a salon of sorts in a townhouse where people could come to a grand bar and eat whatever was being served that evening. She was determined. She was all will. No one was going to stop her. Bear would, help her. (This was when, all these years later, she imagined Georgia Lazar, the woman who sublet Beth her first apartment, clinging to her piece of New York, hands fisted, face fierce and angular, pushing through the crowds.) On a six-week trip to Italy planned by Hunter (Beth had not been there since 1992), they spent a week in the south of France to help persuade Bear, following him and his family to the small town of Saint Rimy where he had a chateau in the hills of Les Alpilles, not far from Les Baux, in the weird and wild desert landscape of Provence, so scrappy and beautiful in its nakedness. Beneath a sky of shooting stars (2001 was a good year for them in Provence), sipping cool whites from Bellet, from Mas de Daumas, Gassac, the children running around in their noisy way, Beth would seduce Bear with her plans for Preveena. It would happen. The desire gripped her; it went beyond the idea. It was a need. She was hungry with ambition. She was determined and fierce and bold. She wanted more: another restaurant, another book, a food store, another baby. It didn't matter that the other two restaurants had not been financially successful. This one would be. She knew it, like you just know some things. She was potential. She was possibility with the ability to reinvent, become something, something better. She was more. She was gain on an American scale. She was America.

  Seven

  Lachesis

  The accordion nature of time—it bellows. The present pushes up against history to kiss it and all that is in between lies flattened. The air rushes out so that all that is now meets memory, undiluted by the clutter of the intervening years. A friend of Beth's from Claire, a Seattle fireman who came to live there for a year or so
, once told her of being on a navy ship during the Vietnam War. The ship ported in Japan and he got off and took a bus back to the air force base he had lived on as a child. It was dark as the bus made its way to the base, a black that revealed nothing, but even so the fireman knew exactly where he was; he knew each turn, each bend, each curve, each bump, each straight stretch of road. He was a seven-year-old boy again riding the familiar route at the end of which stood his dead parents, waiting for him to return. He was trying to grab something back, hanging on to escape the undertow.

  She always knew that she would see him again. She knew the moment would come when she expected it least. For a long while she imagined the moment, on an exotic trip somewhere, riding camels in the hot desert of Jaisalmer, riding elephants on a beach in Puket, imagined what they would say to each other, imagined nothing would have changed: whether they were in their thirties, forties, fifties, or sixties even, they would fall into the familiar embrace. She would dream of that embrace—see it vividly in a flash, an instant, a nanosecond. He sitting there, somewhere, holding her. She could not see his head or hers. She could not see his legs or hers. Simply, she saw her torso inclining to meet his, felt his arms wrap around her, a study in surrender and in power, out of time and space and body, in perpetuity. The image would shoot across her dreams like a slide out of sequence, flash by as she recognized it, then disappear. Awake again, she would feel hope. She would not tell Hunter, of course. She loved him too much, but it was a different love: a practical love, an arranged love, solid and steady and capable of duration, void of fizz and passion. Other times, she imagined she would see Cesare and they would simply talk and in that moment all the explanations for why they were not together would finally make sense, defining how a love not finished can even thus be over.

  She saw him again in Provence in the hot summer of 2001. She saw him sitting in a cast iron chair at a table beneath a canopy of plane trees reading a newspaper and drinking an espresso. She saw him sitting there by himself. On the table in front of him rested a green notebook, which she imagined was a journal, and she imagined he had started to write again and that made her happy. He was wearing khaki military shorts, the kind that she and Bea bought in the markets in Milan, where there were stacks and stacks and stacks of them, cast away by boys whose service had been completed. (Beth remembered being surprised that there was a man so small that his shorts fit her.) He wore a white T-shirt and docksiders and his black hair was just as black, receding just as faintly at his temples. A summer tan gilded him with an aura of health. He had not changed. So powerful was the jolt, knifelike, it caused her to flee his line of vision, darting into the dark hotel lobby. She had been walking back from the pool across the vast lawn of the hotel, carrying her daughter's doll. The limp doll had a smile on its cloth face that seemed to represent all that was now. He, sitting over there beneath the shade of the canopy, a chorus of crickets humming white noise, was all that had been. Time flattened. She needed to breathe. This was not as she had ever imagined it.

  The lobby had high ceilings, a dilapidated grandeur, peeling paint and plaster, regal portraits of long-forgotten royalty, gold paint flickering in the dull light, a marble staircase with a red velvet runner. She stood there, small, hoping he had seen her, too, hoping he would follow her inside, swoop her up in his arms, and all the clutter of the past nine years would vanish, turning the moment into what she had always imagined. She waited for what seemed to be a long time but may well have been only a minute or two. Though it was hot outside she shivered in the cool lobby. When she walked back to the pool he was gone and she wondered had he seen her, too?

  A year like every other: George W. Bush had become president of the United States of America in one way or another. He was speaking about tax cuts and Star Wars and Iraq. The economy was in a slump. An earthquake in Gujarat, India, had killed nearly twenty thousand people. The FBI agent Robert Hanssen had been arrested for spying for the Russians; Slobodan Milosevic surrendered to police to be tried for crimes of war; Tony Blair was reelected; for the first time a blind man reached the summit of Mount Everest; in China, Zhonghua Sun was put to death by the People's Republic because she refused to be sterilized. In June there was a total eclipse of the sun. In July, Hunter, Beth, and little Valeria, four and a half years old, flew off to Italy.

  The trip was a present to Beth from Hunter and her first return to Italy since 1992—the year of her final break with Cesare. They stayed for six weeks, traveling in a rented car to a fifteenth-century castle converted into a hotel in Spongano, Puglia, surrounded with orchards of lemon trees and bordered by a pool the size of a small lake. The owner, a friendly man, loved Americans and made Beth and Hunter and Valeria elaborate dinners of local fish every evening. They ate beneath the stars, the table lit with citronella candles to keep away mosquitoes. There were carafes of local wine, vino bianco un po frizzante. They spoke of politics and Bush and Berlusconi and of the American taste for large bathrooms. "I had to design the rooms with big bathrooms in mind, all first-class comforts, if I wanted to attract Americans," the owner told them.

  They were alone at the castle, but Beth wondered what kind of Americans these guests would be, marveling at that defining characteristic. Later she asked Hunter if he cared about the big bathroom. "It's better than a small dirty bathroom," he had said, lounging in a tub with a whirlpool. He patted the water. His smile invited her to join him. The memory of sleeping in the Athenian park flitted in front of her, of the bordello in Barcelona, of the dirty, small bathroom located down the hall shared with all the other guests. How long ago was that? Nineteen years? It was hard to accept that she could be of an age where she could talk about nineteen years ago.

  The castle at Spongano, the owner told them, had been owned by his great-grandfather, a man with twelve grandchildren. It was bequeathed to his eldest son, as was the custom. The son died childless and so it went to the next eldest son (two daughters lay between the sons). This man, too, remained childless, but he had a dog that he loved more than any child he could have had. He would have left the castle to the dog, but of course that was not possible. Instead, one of his younger brothers had a son who had a special affection for the dog, fed the dog prime cuts of meat and prepared risottos for him in a way the dog liked, with fresh butter and sage and parmigiano. Upon his death, the man left the castle and all its land to this nephew. This boy (a teenager when he inherited the property) was the father of the man telling the story.

  "No wonder you love Italy," Hunter said, walking through the groves of lemon trees, the castle glowing in the moon's light.

  Having been told that Puglia's coast was among the most beautiful in Italy if seen from a boat, they hired one to ferry them along it, and admired the black rocky shores glistening in the strong sun. "The Amalfi Coast without the Amalfi," one friend had said of a particularly hilly and scenic drive skirting the coast. And Beth remembered Cesare, knew she would not see him here. Remembered the giant ferry moving away from the Brindisi docks, remembered that she had commented on the beauty of the coast they were leaving in their wake as the ferry moved toward Greece on one of their many trips there. "Terroni vacation there," he had said. Terroni: a pejorative term describing those from the south of Italy, those of the land, who worked the land, ate from the land, were the land. It was a moment, she remembered, when Cesare had defined himself, a small part of him, in a way she found unflattering. His comment revealed the truth beyond his seeming graciousness, revealed his belief in hierarchy, and it had made her suspicious of him for a moment—if this was his attitude toward an Italian, what about an American? A clue, she could see in retrospect, to their future. The rocky coast had big grotti the boat could enter, dark caves that echoed their voices and the slap of the swells that smashed against the caves' walls, rocking the boat violently.

  From Puglia they traveled inland to the Sassi of Matera, where from their bedroom window they watched the sunset lighting up the small canyon of caves. It was Beth's first trip there
even though it was the name of her restaurant. Lying in bed with Valeria asleep and a full moon lighting up the night, Hunter said, "I had to bring you here." That was Hunter, always thinking of what ignited her imagination. So in love with making her happy was he that she could take his love for granted and long for the impossible, protected by the slow and steady creep of that beautiful vine.

  From Matera they drove to the medieval town of Castellabate, where they stayed in a hotel a thousand feet directly above the Tyrrhenian Sea. From their patio the panorama included a vast expanse of sea, the islands of Ischia and of Capri, and the Amalfi Coast shrouded in mist, in the thick summer haze. The view made Beth think of Sylvia, still in California but working for a start-up in Silicon Valley, ultimately too practical to rely on an income from writing. The islands floated off shore like myths. After Castellabate came Herculaneum with its well-preserved Roman ruins, temples looming magnificently in the heat, drenched in sun and creeping oleander, and then the Amalfi Coast with, indeed, too much Amalfi. "It's a shopping mall," Beth declared, though a part of her wouldn't have minded drifting the streets to admire the shops. But Hunter would have none of it, so they pushed on to Pompeii, from Pompeii to Maremma, from Maremma to Giglio—a small island just north of Sardegna and just south of Elba.