L'America

by Martha McPhee

There, they discovered a small hotel with little bungalows perched on the edge of a cliff, each one hidden by eucalyptus trees. A splendid spot you could get to only by boat, and once there you never wanted to leave because the setting was magical—a cliff rising from the sea to a terrace for sunbathing and eating and drinking, rising to a restaurant, rising to a Jacuzzi, rising to a sloping field upon which roamed goats that were the source of the milk used to make the hotel's own fresh goat cheese, served every evening with miele di castagna (chestnut honey). This was an entirely new Italy to Beth. In this Italy she was a tourist. Her old Italy was another country in which she had been called Signorina and in which she was decidedly a member, a citizen. But she still spoke Italian and Hunter adored watching her negotiate everything for them while he understood little of what was being said.

  "I hate that I'm called signora" she told him, looking at herself in a hotel mirror, in one of those American-sized bathrooms. She traced her eyes with a finger, gingerly touching the lines of age. Valeria stood next to her doing the same thing. "My eyes," Beth said to Hunter, holding him in the mirror with her eyes. "My eyes, Daddy," Valeria said, mimicking her mother. But that's all she said to him about the nineteen-year gap, the divide between her Italy and this Italy. She still felt like a girl with possibility lying just in front of her, just within her reach. She bent down and kissed Valeria on the head, "My little monkey," she said. "My little sponge."

  "You're my signorina" Hunter said, and kissed Beth's ear. His breath sneaked into it and she flinched. She loved him, she did, she told herself. She turned around to kiss him.

  "The first time I went to Rome was with Bea and her grandmother," Beth said. "I was sixteen." The memory had just bubbled to the surface, long forgotten. "Bea's grandmother's sister was a very small, very old nun, and she lived in a convent and we went to visit her. It seemed we were there for hours, in a room of old nuns, in their habits speaking in Italian, which I didn't yet understand. The old nuns pinched my cheeks and laughed at me sweetly for understanding nothing and for being American, like I was some sort of rare pet. When they realized I wasn't baptized they weren't exactly scared, actually more curious about how to save me. They were just going to arrange a baptism. They wanted Bea's grandmother to extend their visit so they'd have the time. But that wasn't possible." She thought of Signora Cellini's fright upon learning that she was a heathen.

  "So close yet so far," Hunter said, and kissed her sinful forehead.

  "You've always loved me, haven't you?" she said.

  "Since I first met you."

  "Persistent."

  "I knew you'd love me."

  "Tenacious."

  "I took the long view."

  "Do you miss earning your own money?"

  "So many concerns, my love." He put his hands in her hair and she felt the quality of his that she loved most—his easy adaptability—and how this freed him.

  Swimming from the cliffs of the Giglio hotel, a particularly handsome, though older, Italian man joined Beth. He dove in just after she did and followed her a distance out, far enough so that the people lying on the rocks in the sun seemed small. Beth thought that it was strange that this man chose to follow her. He had not been friendly, though most of the other guests at this small hotel had been, and thus he had stood out. All meals were shared and cocktails were enjoyed together at sunset. His wife, a tall aging blond woman with weathered skin, never offered even the slightest smile, though Beth had seen her reading an American novel and suspected her to be American. In the water, however, her husband was clearly following Beth. Beth smiled, treading water, admiring the beauty of the cliffs. Ombrelloni for shade had been erected here and there, poking up among the rocks like exotic trees. A child with a snorkel swam about close to shore, lifting his head to shout out the names of creatures he had seen below. On the terrace, a hundred feet up, preparations were being made for lunch, Beth could hear the clatter of silver and glassware. "Americanina" the Italian said, and Beth nodded. She imagined, seeing his dark receding hair and his clever eyes, that Cesare would be like this at sixty. "This place is a jewel," he continued in Italian. "It is," Beth agreed, wondering if she had been mistaken about him, if perhaps he was friendly. "I've been coming here for years," he said. "No one knows about this hotel." They bobbed in the water, gentle waves pushing against them. This would have been her life. "A secret," Beth smiled. "Don't tell any Americans about it," he said with a sudden sternness as he swam up quite close to her. For a moment she thought he might try to drown her. "What?" she asked. "Americans, they'll ruin it. Don't go back to New York and tell them all about it. Look what they did to Tuscany after that book, that Tuscan Sun abomination. Destroyed."

  Beth swallowed a gulp of seawater and started coughing. She remembered being in Spain a few years back and an old man had recognized Hunter as American and the old man told Hunter that he hated Americans and then he looked at Beth and said, "You're Italian. Italians are good, they make me laugh." She had been proud to be confused for an Italian, but she wanted to apologize for all Americans, their big-bathroom needs and their loud consumptive mouths. Then she hated the little old man for his categorical hate as she hated the presumptuous swimmer now at her side.

  "What do you do?" he asked, friendly now, as they swam back to shore. It felt as if she were swimming across some great divide, the impossible. She stopped swimming, looked him in the eye, turned on her back and floated beneath the sun. "I'm a writer," she said.

  ***

  In Pisa, she remembered driving fast in the Maserati, kissing Miki on Forte dei Marmi's jetty—his big hands and his big feet and his big penis. All the surprise of Greece floated unknown in front of her. How fun it had been to be eighteen, driving fast to Parma to eat tortellini and fresh parmesan, knowing nothing of the divide.

  Pisa was as far north as she would go this trip. Instead, they turned south again and headed to Florence and a week in a friend's villa in southern Tuscany, in the small town of Cetona: lazy days of eating well and reading and drinking more vino locale un po' frizzante broken up by day trips to local markets, and to Assisi and Orvieto and Montepulciano. She surrendered to her new role of tourist, letting the old signorina go, and before long the present stopped its kiss with the past.

  Then, sitting on the patio of the Cetona villa beneath a grape arbor, looking across a valley to the small hillside town of Città della Pieve, she heard her cell phone ring. It was Bear, calling from Provence. "OK, little darling," he said, upon hearing her voice. "You're in Europe and you're coming up to my little shack in Provence. You're coming just as soon as you can and if you give me any lip I won't help you fund a thing. You're gonna come up here and sell me on Previn or whatever the silly name is, and you're gonna cook me those Indian concoctions and potions and you're gonna seduce me." Bear somehow always reminded her of a Texan even though he was decidedly not a Texan. Rather, he was born and raised in Connecticut and had never set foot in Texas. But he had been a political science major and had studied Lyndon Baines Johnson in particular and, Beth suspected, had adopted some of the president's bravado and swagger. She smiled. Bear knew her too well. "I can just feel you smiling, Beth," he blustered, "and so I know you're coming."

  "It's glorious here," she said. The patio sloped down to meet a terraced vineyard beneath which stood a grove of olive trees that gave way to a rolling field. In the middle of the field glistened a pool where Valeria and Hunter swam.

  "Six weeks is enough time in Italy," Bear said through the static. "Time for a little French influence and time for that daughter of yours to be corrupted by my brood." There was silence for a moment. "C'mon, darlin." With that, she realized her vacation was now officially over and that she would have to go to France or give up on Preveena. Bear had been in Provence for about a week, just long enough to be somewhat bored by Elaine, his wife, and in need of new company to show off in front of so that they could be admired by those who had less—a recreation that Bear's wife loved as well. And Beth understood fu
lly that by playing the role of friend-of-lesser-means, doing all the requisite admiring, she would earn her restaurant.

  "Preveena," Beth said. "It's called Preveena."

  "Oh, OK, sweetheart. Whatever you say. We'll talk about that name." And then he clicked off, his voice sucked up to the satellites.

  "Hunter," she yelled down to the pool, "Valeria." She slipped into her flip-flops and ran down the hill of olive trees with the cell phone in her hand to let them know they would be off to Saint Rémy to see Bear.

  The hotel was a rundown chateau in the center of town surrounded by vast gardens, plane trees, and a big green lawn with a pond in which large goldfish swam about. A little stone putto spurted water from his mouth and tiny frogs leaped here and there while the incessant cicadas sang their endless song. The chateau stood four stories tall. In the direct center on the second floor, like a mouth, was the glassed-in balcony of the master suite, which belonged, of course, to Beth and Hunter—paid for by Bear because he believed they'd be more comfortable in a hotel than at his villa with the kids. "The gesture only seems extravagant, my pet," Bear had said, and then informed them that the rooms were "dirt cheap." "Never forget the importance of illusion," he said to Beth, giving her his dimpled knowing smile. Since the hotel had yet to be renovated, it still had low prices and tiny bathrooms (and, incidentally, no other Americans). At the edge of the grounds was a riding stable and every day Bear's four kids and Valeria took lessons while Bear and his wife and Hunter and Beth went on excursions to L'lsle-sur-la-Sorgue to buy antiques, to Avignon to learn about the popes, to Arles to see the views that van Gogh had painted, to Aix to roam the meandering streets and to shop and to see the views painted by Cézanne. To the Camargue, through fields of lavender and wheat and coquelicots. Wine tastings at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, in Beaumes de Venise, in Mas de Daumas. Saint Rémy they learned was famous for three things: it was home to one of the oldest archeological sites in Europe—the ruins of Comptoir de Glanum, from the third century B.C. before control passed to Rome under Julius Caesar; it was home to the asylum where van Gogh lived the year before he killed himself; and Nostradamus was born in the town in 1503. Through all of this Bear swaggered, shedding dollars and francs and euros with his big smile and his French that did not even attempt to affect the correct pronunciation.

  Valeria loved being with the "big kids" and learned to love to ride even though the lessons were conducted in French, which she didn't know, of course, but somehow understood. At the end of the lessons, Bear's children would swarm around the adults (who always arrived from their own adventures late) and tell them of Valeria's accomplishments. She fell asleep on the pony; she fell off the pony ... and got right back on; she trotted; she cantered; she learned to make her pony stop. Never once did Bear mention Preveena. But Beth knew she was doing her job. She admired all the armoires and chairs and divans that his wife bought in L'lsle-sur-la-Sorgue. ("We filled an entire container last year," Elaine told Beth. Their New York apartment was so big that even fully furnished it still had room for another container's worth of antiques from Provence.) They wandered the roving markets, each day in a new location, purchasing honeys and soaps and bags and hats and fresh cheeses and breads for picnics, and Beth dutifully listened to how cheap everything was: the dollar was strong that summer. Bear's "shack" was a sprawling two-story, seven-bedroom (five bathrooms—all very big, indeed, Hunter pointed out, sneaking Beth into one so that they could laugh) villa in the heart of Les Alpilles. Despite the parched landscape, Bear's garden was green and filled with flowering roses in all shades. His near-Olympic-length swimming pool brimmed with cool water, beneath a grove of cypress. The focal point of the entire downstairs was the kitchen with its thirty-thousand-dollar Le Cornue stove, trimmed in copper to match the pots. Beth wanted to cook on that stove, but Elaine would always say that it was too hot, and she would suggest Oustaù de Beaumanière or some other favorite restaurant for a dinner beneath the stars, and they would find a babysitter for the children and off they would go to dinner and conversations about the antiques purchased that day, the bargains found, the extravagances to be indulged in. Elaine tried to sell Beth on the merits of a ninety-euro straw hat. "It's designed," she said. "You're paying for the design." "But does it last longer than an ordinary straw hat?" Hunter responded, causing her to crack a half smile—an instant in which she could appreciate her own absurdity. Beth much preferred her husband as an entrepreneur, making his way with her, than as a financier, and often counted her blessings that he had been fired. She knew, though, that sometimes Hunter longed for those excessive days when money seemed to fall from the skies like so much rain, knew that making money had made him feel more male even if he never would admit it. She told herself that she never missed the indulgences that money could buy, though of course that was not entirely true.

  Bear and Elaine would ask Beth about her European days, which she loved as it made her feel she had an important past, a past that defined her. They would ask her to repeat a story they had heard before. Beth had been with Bea's family on Favignana. Bea and Beth had eaten dinner by themselves and Signora Nuova wanted to know what Beth had eaten, had she eaten well? "I said I had eaten pompini for dinner," Beth said. She had meant to say polpettine to Signora Nuova—"meatballs." Pompini was something else entirely. "You had blow jobs for dinner," Bear said in his big way, slapping his knee, tickled by the mistake of this woman who seemed to him incapable of such a lapse, imagining her as a suntanned teenager on an Italian island and what she might have done, what experiences she might have had that would cause her to learn such a word.

  They would talk about their next vacation and how old the kids needed to be before they could "do Asia." The biggest topic every night at dinner was Elaine's fortieth birthday. Should it be Moroccan or Persian? "Oh, Beth, you could do the Persian. A Persian theme! Or Indian or Chinese. No, no, not Chinese, can you imagine?" They planned to have all the furniture removed from their apartment for the evening no matter what the theme. Beth thought about the Italian man on Giglio trying to catch her as she swam, trying to stop her from doing any harm, begging her to leave it all alone, to preserve it, untouched. The other thing she had felt, floating on her back in the water, was power—a sudden jolt of it.

  Later that night Beth would ask Hunter if the idea for Preveena was a bad one, "Am I just another tour guide taking people to the exotic, an exotic I don't actually know?" "Is your interest genuine?" he asked, knowing the answer. And she saw Preveena at Claire making a curry powder for chicken, roasting the cumin and mustard and coriander seeds on the stove, remembered how it seemed she was making a magic potion, how she loved the chemistry of it, what the flavors did to the chicken. Beth thought about her father, about how Claire collected people. They had come from everywhere by chance, sharing a desire to do something other with their lives—if only to start fresh and figure out for themselves who they were. Beth had grown up feasting on the differences of people as if that were normal. Didn't they all—Bear, his wife, Hunter—to some degree? She had the strong desire to return to Claire and live with her father and make it work. "Let's do," she said to Hunter later, appreciating, it seemed for the first time, the beauty behind her father's ambition.

  But that was later. At dinner, talk moved back to Asia where Bear's wife had a friend in Bangkok who had "cheap, so cheap" live-in help "twenty-four/seven" who "cooks and cleans and cares for the kids. And she's a fabulous cook. Imagine if we could have Beth twenty-four/seven." Bear gave her a warm, adoring smile, a smile that acknowledged his wife's silliness. But Hunter couldn't help himself: "Imagine if we could have you twenty-four/seven," he said to Elaine, "as our live-in party planner and interior decorator?" Elaine laughed at herself and gave Beth a kiss, all good fun and fantasy. "Bear will fund Preveena," Elaine declared, with her pretty smile shimmering on her face like a star. Elaine was nice looking in the way unattractive women can be if they have money and confidence. Her face was long and horselike, but she had vibrant green e
yes, thick long black hair with tight, elastic curls, and a smile that rounded her long cheeks. With Elaine's support, granted because of her faux pas, Beth knew Preveena would open within the year.

  And then she saw him. A stab. Like the first time she saw him standing on those steps in the sun, negotiating in ancient Greek with the landlady who understood not a word. He was sitting there beneath the plane trees with his espresso, his torso leaning elegantly toward the table. She felt sick to her stomach. In the cool lobby she asked a maid for a glass of water. She asked in her awful French and loudly enough that he might hear and recognize her voice and come to her. He would come to her. He had to come to her. Her voice sounded brash and demanding, impetuously American. Bet, I am Bet, she wanted to scream. As in to gamble everything. She had been right all along. She would see him again at a time she least expected. She had the urge to run back to the pool and tell Hunter and Valeria. She had the urge to walk stealthily up to him, wrap her fingers across his eyes and whisper "Indovina chi sono." "Sei Bet sei," he would answer because there was only one possibility, only one Beth.

  But he was gone when she reemerged from the lobby in the hot July sun. She walked back to the pool and she thought of the fireman and she thought of the past six weeks in Italy and she thought of his journey along the dark road, how he knew every curve and every bend, and she realized now that she, too, had known all along that she was on a familiar route leading her back, just as that train dividing in the Spanish night had brought her to Cesare. She felt sick with anticipation. She walked fast back to the pool, back to her life. She was brimming with hope and longing and promise. Glee curled her face. How ridiculous, how absurd, she thought. How inevitable. Of course.

  He had seen her, too. He had seen her first as she walked across the lawn from the pool to the hotel. She was wearing a bikini with pink flowers. Around her waist she had wrapped a red sarong, which fell to her feet. In her hand she carried a girl's doll. A clip scooped up all her hair. Lipstick darkened her lips. Too dark, he thought. She was more woman now than girl, but otherwise she was the same. Same gait, same determination, same strong body. He could tell she was on a mission. At first he thought she was heading right for him. His heartbeat quickened. He smiled. He made to rise then noticed she was not looking at him. She had not seen him. He turned to his paper and pretended to read. He sat very still, seemingly absorbed. He wanted to know if she would recognize him as she passed, what she would do. He was steady, though he sweat. How long had it been? He felt her through the corner of his eye as she passed. She had come to Italy last and he had been cruel to her in order to drive her away for good. His mission had been successful, but of course he had not stopped remembering her. She vanished into the hotel and again he was alone. He breathed deeply, disappointed. Then he heard her voice asking for a glass of water—her same American accent stumbling over foreign words, stabbing them with American consonants and vowels. He remembered their first kiss in the late night streets of Páros, hiding from the others, how important and urgent it all seemed. "Tu sei perfetta," he had said, and she had repeated the phrase with that accent of hers, that had made her seem at once fragile and innocent and demanding, full of the ambitious drive of one who is taught from birth to dream, that accent that had made him want to protect her and save her from the fragility of dreams and all that was wrong with the world. How he had wanted her to save him, too.