by Andrea Lee
And of course she has a wedding ring, a dark band of rose diamonds that belonged to Nick’s grandmother. Four years have passed since their wedding in the Harvard chapel, and she is very married, having arrived, like Nick, at the complacent proselytizing point that holds that all evil springs from conjugal drought. That all the world should be married.
She also carries a book, because she always has a book, joined like a permanent growth to her hands. Mira lives in books and intends to write them. This book is certainly Tolstoy, either War and Peace or Anna Karenina, because those are what she reads and rereads in those days. Mira and Nick even read Anna Karenina aloud to each other as they backpacked through Greece on their honeymoon, beguiling the hours, like so many other incautious lovers, with an old tale of ruin.
So Zenin sees Mira and her book, but she doesn’t see him. Not until they are on the plane together, just the two of them up in the first-class loft. Even then she hardly notices him because he is already settled when she arrives, stretched out in the far corner of the last row, wearing a sleep mask and swathed in blankets like an invalid. She doesn’t recognize the man who circled the waiting room. But she does notice how the staff rein in their movements near him, as if, she laughs to herself, the pope were sleeping in that seat.
Mira doesn’t read a word during her flight. She’s too busy reveling in the unexpected luck that allows her to sit isolated as an empress, with thick white linen spread before her and a glass of champagne in her hand. While below her, packed in steerage, as she was on her two previous student trips to Europe, teem the lumpen tourists. Rattling newspapers, breathing a thick proletarian miasma, flirting, snoring, farting, waiting for their meals in little plastic troughs.
A white-haired steward who looks like an ambassador and a beautiful stewardess with a coiled braid seem to be there to wait on her exclusively. Speaking to her in French and English and complimenting her extravagantly on the few Italian phrases she has learned. Telling her she will love Rome, all Americans do. They are formal and respectfully cosseting, as if she were a royal baby, but there is also a hint of benign amusement in their manner, as if they know it is all a delicious joke, that in another life it could be Mira, the young off-color girl, waiting on them. Indulgently, as if her excitement were infectious, as if it were refreshing to come upon a passenger for whom flying in that expensive aerie is not a bore, they regale her with tastes of every dish on the menu. An epicurian hodgepodge of foie gras and spaghetti all’astice and white truffles and maltagliati alla selvaggina and budino and semifreddo and chocolates and a shot of espresso that doesn’t keep her head from whirling from the red and white wines they keep bringing out and introducing as if they were characters in a play—Brunello and Sauvignon Piere and Malvasia, not to mention the grappa and Calvados they press on her as digestives.
Mira accepts it all, and hardly notices that they have left far behind the frowsy East Coast sunset, through which her mother, no doubt wailing and gnashing her teeth, is driving back to Philadelphia. Drunk and happy, giddy with release from the strain of packing and goodbyes, she forgets completely where she is going. She toasts herself as Dire Straits break into their mock hymn to summer, “Twisting by the Pool.”
An hour or two later, she wakes up sober in the rushing twilit limbo before dawn, between continents, realizing that she is exactly nowhere, high in the air, between worlds. Between lives. Alone, except for a man wrapped up like a mummy, who might actually be a corpse for all she knows. And all at once, as if she is looking down on a map, she sees the life she is leaving: the bosky fieldstone streets of her Mount Airy childhood, the dormitory bricks of Boston where she studied and married, the skyscrapers of New York piercing the glittering sky with bellicose ambition like a bundle of spears. All of it tossed behind her like discarded bedcovers.
And where is she going? To Rome, a city that she has never seen, and to Italy, a country that she has avoided as much as any Harvard English major can, after the obligatory breakneck tours through Shakespeare and the Romantic poets. At senior common-room gatherings she has seen how great academicians worship Florence and Rome; has heard the Ciao, come stai? of Nobel laureates, and their swaggering talk of villas. Has seen it all barely moved. Her foreign language is French, her thesis dissected Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House,” and she has been in Italy exactly one night, sleeping in a cornfield near Trieste when she and Nick hitchhiked back from her honeymoon.
Longing to live abroad, they had hoped to be sent to Paris. Because that is where you live when you are just married and crazy in love.
Rome is almost as good, an adventure, certainly; a great thing for a young man with an eye toward an international future, for an ambitious young couple. But Mira’s thoughts grow dark and jumbled when she thinks of Rome, even when Nick flies off to start work there and calls her twice a day to tell her how marvelous it is; how glowing the summer, how splendid the food, the beaches; how he has found them an apartment with coffered ceilings.
What comes to mind when she thinks of Rome is an old coin her father brings her from a tour of Italy he made with other high school principals. Mira, five or six, mad for tales of treasure, expects a Roman coin to be a disk of gold. Instead, she sees a battered piece of greenish bronze, not even round, with remains of a leering face that her father explains is the Emperor Tiberius. And ever afterward she envisions Rome as a place smudged with age and disappointment. In her student trips, she visits London, Paris, Athens, but never Rome.
Now she sits in the dark plane and resists fear.
Miranda Ward is good at going into new worlds, at being a foreigner. She is one of the generation of black children pushed out of the bourgeois ghetto of their parents to become pioneers in private schools and camps that before the seventies had never admitted a black or a Jew. She’s used to the feeling of being inside, yet not, watching. It suits her inquisitive nature, though at times it can be heartbreaking. When, at Harvard, she falls in love with Nick Reiver, of Little Compton, Rhode Island, and Camden, Maine, and marries him, to the bemusement of both families, she enters yet another new country. And then there is New York, and the magazine world, where she has her first success, ironically enough, with an article describing the restlessness and trials of her early school years.
Now she’s leaving again; but this time with Nick waiting for her. Her husband, who feels sometimes like the brother she never had, who with his blue eyes and old New England family tree is less expert at being an outsider than she is. In fact—except in her family—he has never been an outsider at all, a fact that Mira in disgruntled moments sees as a failing in Nick, a basic lack in his education. But he is as curious as she is, her best friend, and the love of her life. They took on New York together and they will take on Rome. With that thought, Mira relaxes and falls asleep again.
And in the morning, as she’s finishing her breakfast, before they begin their descent to Fiumicino airport, the man in the back walks up to the front of the compartment and sits down across the aisle from her, and in heavily accented English says good morning.
It’s that simple, their meeting. It happens when and how Zenin decides it will.
First the ritual exchange of pleasantries between wayfarers. The same here as it would be sitting on backpacks waiting for a train in Goa. How long will she stay in Rome? Mira explains that she will be living there, that she is joining her husband, who has been transferred.
Mira is a flirt and likes to annoy Nick with tales of men who pursue her. Yet this man doesn’t look like the gorgeous stranger one meets on the voyage out. He doesn’t even look like her idea of an Italian. He is tall and thin and stiff-moving in a way that gives a curious feeling of theatrical rusticity, like a dancing scarecrow in a musical. Odd, but not funny. Later, Mira will play with this idea, imagining a fetish stuck into the ground in a village of Hollywood savages.
His cheekbones are high, carving his lean face into crude angles that look almost Slavic, and his eyes are narrow, dark, and flat, absorbi
ng light. He is deeply tanned and wears his lank ash-brown hair long, like an out-of-date rock star. Old. He looks old to her, somewhere in the range of parents and professors and in-laws. He has on a pair of pale linen trousers, a light sweater, and a pair of slip-on shoes without socks. And a big watch with three faces. His bony hands are large and freckled, and as he sits talking to her, they dance restlessly on his knees like the hands of someone ill at ease. Except that he doesn’t seem to be the slightest bit nervous. Instead, a kind of impatience surrounds him like a force field. She wonders how rich he is. She understands that he must be important because of the genuinely servile way the cabin steward brings him coffee.
You are American, he says. From where?
Philadelphia, she says. And I’ve lived in Boston and New York.
But your parents. What country are they from?
Mira is so used to this pushy question that she doesn’t get annoyed.
My parents and grandparents and great-grandparents are all American, she says evenly, speaking in a clear didactic voice. It would be hard to find a family more American than we are. We are African Americans with other blood mixed in. Irish and American Indian. One of my great-great-grandfathers was a Dane who came first to the Virgin Islands, and then to Virginia. Others were West African slaves.
She waits for the exaggerated astonishment this little soliloquy usually inspires in the United States, where race is always an emotional issue. But Zenin simply nods. Italy is also a mixed country, he says. Arabs, Greeks, Africans, Slavs, they have all arrived and stayed. For hundreds of years. It happened in my province. The Veneto.
He introduces himself. Zenin. Ezio Zenin, from Rovigo, a city near Padua. He says it as if she ought to know who he is. She hears the first name, but she discounts it, is never to use it. For her, he will always be Zenin. That strange, stateless name. When she asks about it, he tells her it’s Venetian, from an old noble clan.
But we are not noble, he adds after a pause. Not so fortunate. My father was a peasant from Istria. From a family of peasants, poor as beasts. Maybe they got the name because they were at one time the property of an aristocrat. He smiles mirthlessly, and his flat eyes meet hers. Slaves, too, perhaps.
All this time the light through the plane windows is growing paler, then redder, then warming into daylight as they pass over Dover and veer toward the coast of France.
Zenin asks her whether she works, what she does, and Miranda announces that she is a journalist, that she writes articles for magazines, that she plans to write a book.
This seems to interest him. An American writer, una scrittrice americana, he says softly to himself, his hands dancing on his knees. I am an industrialist, he tells her.
Oh, I see, says Mira, who has no idea what this means, except that it involves assembly lines. Satanic mills. What do you make? seems to be the required question.
I make all the toys in the world, he says in a tone that sounds to Mira both conceited and rather depressed. Grabbing an airline magazine out of the rack, he shows her an ad featuring a famous brand of chocolates and a parade of garishly colored plastic animals attached to miniature vehicles: cars, bicycles, motorcycles, pickup trucks. Mira, nonplussed, can think of nothing to say.
They make awkward conversation until the plane tilts, revealing far below a panorama of blue waves and a coastline that in the sunlight shines a barbaric brown-gold. Italy. She presses her face against the window, and suddenly a wild excitement seizes her, the excitement of her first student glimpses of the Old World, where myths took on flesh. The Tyrrhenian sea. Islands strewn like gold guineas marking the trail of Ulysses’ love affairs and slippery escapes.
That is where I am going now, says Zenin, gesturing out the window. An island called Ponza. I have a boat docked there. A big boat.
Later, Mira will repeat this childish boast for her husband’s delectation, and they will both laugh. An Italian toy king, with a yacht. A beeg Eurotrashy boat. Only you, you wench, would pick up somebody like that. The young husband and wife laughing gleefully, confidently. One of the strongest bonds between them is their insatiable taste for the ridiculous. Still, Mira, even as she giggles, has a small doubt in the back of her mind, sensing that it is harder than it seems to make fun of Zenin.
As the plane follows the Lazio coastline and begins the descent toward Fiumicino, Zenin hands Mira his card.
Give me your number in Rome and I will call you, he says in a tone that admits no refusal. He is already calling for a pen, and though they are landing, the steward unbuckles his seat belt and, staggering slightly, brings it.
A few years on, when large cracks are running through all the certainties in her life as a result of this moment, Mira is never able to explain to herself why she now digs obediently into her bag, opens her address book, and reads off her new telephone number. With all the familiar expedients open to a pretty girl—changing a digit, coyly refusing—she simply lets Zenin into her life. And studying the moment later, she finds nothing more than a flicker of impulse. No animal attraction, no tempting scent of danger, no discontent with what she already has. Just a flash of idle curiosity, the kind that leads a child to poke a stick into an anthill or lift the lid of a forbidden box. An action that, like the unknown secretary’s gift of a ticket, cannot be undone.
After Zenin takes the number, he finds no further need for conversation. He sits there like a statue, like an accomplished fact.
And Mira looks out at the dunes of Ostia below them: the port, the grass-choked ruins, the tawny red roofs, the marshaled beach umbrellas of the bathing establishments. Until Zenin abruptly asks how old she is.
Twenty-five.
That is very young, is all he says.
Feeling vaguely insulted, she wants to retort that twenty-five isn’t young at all. But the landing announcement is playing and Italy is roaring up to meet them.
So Mira smooths her black dress, takes up her book, and sits quietly, too. Until the plane jolts, comes to a halt, and there she is. Living abroad.
THE FLIGHT ATTENDANT
When I first heard Turi and Sandro going on about the American girl, the colored one, I thought she must be an actress or a model. Or maybe a footballer’s wife—we get all the bella gente up there in the bubble, and you should see my autograph book. Last week it was Christian De Sica, then Ruggero Deodato, and before that, Maradona. But when the girl came upstairs, I thought, This one never paid full fare. She looked too young, like a teenager from the provinces. Not bad-looking, if you like that mulatta type, but badly done up in a black dress with the hem falling down and run-over sandals. Of course you can’t tell with Americans; we’ve had famous models in here and they looked terrible, with flip-flops and dirty jeans. Always throwing up in the toilets. At least this girl had an appetite.
Back in the galley we made a bet that Zenin would try to pick her up, but Zenin the pharaoh just kept on sleeping, wrapped up like a baby. That tears it, said Turi in dialect—he’s Pugliese, too, a village twenty kilometers from mine. If old Zenin had been alone with a nice blonde like you, Manuela darling, he’d wake up and not lie there like a dried codfish. We all know Zenin, rich as a sheikh from Giochi Favolosi. I collect his toys myself, all the cute little animals on a special shelf in my apartment. But Zenin is a peculiar customer, always restless, jumping around on the flight or else flat-out asleep. And there is something about those eyes of his that give me the creeps. He has his own jet, but sometimes we see him on the New York run. Like all these rich men, he’s a womanizer, but not as much of a pig as some I could name.
Anyway, as we’re coming into Fiumicino, Turi whispers, Goal! And I see Zenin, the fast worker, sitting beside the girl, calling for a pen. We hardly get the hatches open when Zenin hops up and runs downstairs to where a transport is waiting to take him over to the private field. And the American girl just sits there looking dazed until I bring her jacket and nudge her out of first class. I notice she has on a wedding ring, and I think, You little tart. Later, Turi s
ees her at Arrivals. She’s with the husband, he says, a good-looking blond boy in jeans who could have been Zenin’s grandson, and he and the girl are kissing and carrying on beside the baggage cart like village kids do along the town walls. That’s what they look like. Solo ragazzi. Just kids.
Well, best of luck to them, I say to Turi. They need it.
2
NICK
2004 • A CHINESE CROWD
He hasn’t called that bitch in years. Not since their daughter, Maddie, got old enough to do it for him, to play the classic role of children of divorce, that of an electrical transformer, where two alien currents briefly meet and communicate with hidden sparks. Through Maddie he sends messages to Mira about tuition and airline tickets. And when Maddie comes to spend weekends and school vacations with him in London, he talks to her sometimes about her mother. Nick does not think he rants. He simply talks away his recognition of the constellation of features emerging with such damnable consistency in his eldest daughter’s teenage face, talks reasonably in a measured, good-humored, paternal way about trust and fairness and the necessity of having moral points of reference, whether or not one chooses to believe in God. Though it makes his second wife, Dhel—a Swiss-Vietnamese art consultant far more beautiful and elegant than Mira ever was—roll her eyes with exasperation and take Maddie’s part, he then goes on to highlight, diplomatically, the many flaws his ex-wife has displayed over the years. Her flightiness and disorganization, even in paying school fees, her immaturity and general disregard for the feelings of others. It’s an advantage to Maddie in the long run to hear these observations, of course. A simple and logical way of putting things in the clear.
