L'America

by Martha McPhee

  He hears the coffee being made, hears the selection of the fruit, hears the calls begin. She would have shared the news with her sisters, another piece of gossip to feed upon—and nothing wrong in that. Gossip is just another form of storytelling, another way to understand those things which make no sense, to tease them and pull them and mine them for contrast and comparison to one's own situation. The sunlight blots out the fresco, reflecting off the protective glass, turning the picture into a white void. The day has begun. Soon they will be on the familiar road and this, too, will be incorporated, kneaded into the fold, worked and processed like sea glass found on the beach made smooth with time, by the endless repetition of rolling against sand in the waves.

  There she was: two moments: the first and the last. A Greek island. A strong, blinding late afternoon sun. He was standing on steps leading to an apartment, talking to an old Greek woman clad in black. He was trying to negotiate with her a price for another room. She spoke no Italian or English so he attempted to speak with her in ancient Greek. She did not understand that, either. Then he began to gesture with his hands. He rubbed his fingers together, shrugged his shoulders. He was a good mime. She understood. They were making progress. He smelled rosemary and lemon blossoms. The strong sun bit into his tanned arms. His friends arrived with their American girls. He turned to greet them, and there she was, small blond American with her cherubic dimpled smile. She blushed, averted her eyes, looked at him again, her determined eyes piercing into him. And he knew he was on the verge of something enormous, something grand. He felt vertigo, feared he would fall down the stairs. For nineteen years he had been remembering her there, dressed in something that did not suit her, something ridiculous belonging to Bea, something orange and awkward, that on someone else might have been stylish, but not on her. She averted those eyes only to cast them back in a way that at once captured her ability to be both shy and confident, that made him want to fall down those stairs and land at her feet, take her hand in his and begin the walk, the echo of which sounded still against his mind, reverberated still with each breath.

  And then her back to him, his eyes penetrating her back, the straps of a pink silk slip gracing her slender shoulders. The beauty of her tanned back, the sharp lines of her bones, jutting like wings—were she a bird and could take flight. The conversation in the French hotel, their children gallivanting on the lawn, discovering the small things—a leaping toad, a clover, a cicada, the big worm-eaten leaf. Dancing in the dappled shadows of the plane trees. There was motion in those shoulders. She wanted to turn. She wanted to see him once again, a last time. This small story the myth of their lives, of his life and her life, inflated within them, these words their monument as the fresco was a monument, as Claire was a monument. For a moment they had the ability to defy time and history, to be a story for their children and their children's children and so on and so forth. I am trusting you, she said. Her back firm now, unyielding. No Orpheus was she. The afternoon sun illuminated her with haloes of light. And damned if I look back.

  He rises from the velvet chair to the day that will carry him on and away from this with nothing and everything changed, carry him through the same patterns of remembering, of working in his bank, coming up with and supporting new ideas for socks and feet, of dreaming another destiny, of reprimanding and adoring his child and being impatient and loving with his wife, of trying to tame fear with a laugh, of drinking his aperitif in town before dinner on the earless cobbled street filled with shoppers buying their bread and their pastries packaged in waxed paper with bows, greeting each other with smiles and stories of their tangled dramas as they have for so many years and generations, same as they do everywhere, ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives that amount to everything.