by Andrea Lee
1985 • WHAT THE CARDS SAY
Ma hai due uomini. You have two men, ma petite.
The fortune-teller, like many Italian ladies of a certain age, likes to interlard her conversation with genteel tag ends of French. But her voice as she studies the Tarot cards on the table is level, diagnostic, pitiless as that of a headmistress or hospital matron. She is Mira’s neighbor and friend, an agoraphobic Bolognese gentlewoman of sixty, divorced and abandoned, who ekes out a living giving Italian lessons in her shadowy flat whose gold-flocked wallpaper is peeling in the corners, and what furniture remains unsold swathed in ghostly flowered sheets. Her face is that of a saint hooked on morphine: penciled eyebrows on a high waxen brow, thin gray hair pulled up into a grisette’s knot, a huge pair of black eyes with a rim of white between the pupil and the lower lid that give them a deliquescent languor, an erotic victimized spirituality. She is rarely seen in the palazzo courtyard or the neighborhood, only as a shadowy figure in a dressing gown late in the sultry Roman summer afternoons, moving with a hose among her jungle of oversize balcony plants.
Nick calls her Madame S., for Eliot’s Madame Sosostris, and gives her a wide berth as every sensible man does with his wife’s loony friends. But Mira looks forward to the twice-a-week conversation sessions where she trades English for Italian, and readings of Leopardi and Manzoni have been swiftly abandoned for an exchange of life stories, and, of course, the cards. The Tarot pack has back designs that are almost obliterated and yellowed dirty edges so worn that they remind Mira of the hollowed marble steps of the old churches she has taken to visiting daily in the center of Rome. Her friend’s hands, long-fingered, spotted with cooking burns over arthritic knuckles, are the color of church candles; they move over the cards with a gambler’s ease, but also with a kind of wincing delicacy.
Twice, the cards have revealed small true things about Mira’s life, before the older woman chuckles and sweeps them away to pour out the weak Ceylon tea that Mira suspects she lives on.
But today she pauses and says it. Two men. I saw it in the cards twice before, but I thought there was a mistake. But it is here again. Gli Amanti, La Torre, e Il Diavolo. The Lovers, the Tower and The Devil. With one swollen finger she taps the cards that, in the green gloom of the plants covering the windows, have the crude faded colors of the Sunday comics Mira read as a child.
If you mean a man who’s my friend, besides Nick, I have several, Mira says slowly. Everybody my age does. In America.
You know what I mean, petite. There is a man sniffing around you, besides your husband, who is not a friend. Oh no, not friendly at all. In fact, he is a demon.
Mira doesn’t scoff or laugh. In fact she feels a chill, though it is a hot May day. Feels the hair on her arms stand up like it does before a storm. There’s nobody like that, she says. Only a man who calls me once in a while. Very rarely, once every few weeks. A man I met on a plane.
Italian?
Italian.
Mira says his name, and the older woman slowly folds her hands in a small arch over the cards and looks at her appraisingly. On the wall behind her hangs her one remaining painting: a vile portrait of Madame S. as a young wife, a showy Mediterranean beauty with rosebud lips, a huge cantilevered bosom in aqua satin, vulgarly abundant falling curls, and the same drugged martyr’s eyes. The painted young face and the ruined sixty-year-old face both regard Mira, as different as life and death. He’s very rich, says Madame S. A moneybags. I see his commercials on television. Did you sleep with him?
Of course not! Another prickle goes through Mira as she recalls like a shameful dream her mad behavior on the boat, her madness in going there.
That is your good fortune. You must never have anything more to do with him. He is very dangerous for you. It is not a harmless flirtation.
Awkwardly and defiantly, Mira says there’s no problem, that she only had lunch with him once, that she never expects to hear from him again, that she never thinks about him—a fib, this, because she does think about Zenin, wonders about him, when she sees Italian men on the street—that she loves Nick, which is true.
Madame S. smiles, as women always smile when they talk about Nick, then looks serious. Your husband is a boy, she says. You are both too young for your ages, but he is a boy. If you get involved with this man, it will kill him. Don’t make that face—I don’t mean kill literally. I mean destroy something important.
If Mira were older, she would tell Madame S. not to be ridiculous. But she sits staring down at the spotty linen tablecloth the color of aloes and knows it is all true. And she blurts out: È troppo buono. He’s too good, Nick. Sometimes I feel like I was put on earth to hurt him. I even wrote it in my diary. Isn’t that terrible?
Worse than thinking it is doing it. But you can choose not to. You must never see this man again, never talk to him. What does he say to you?
Mira giggles with a touch of schoolgirl conceit. He teases me and asks me to come away with him. To a different place each time. To the Aeolian Islands. To the Seychelles.
Balle, says the older woman, with a crispness that belies her portentous expression. Do you know that expression? It’s a vulgar word for nonsense. He must be very weak to have to impress you like that. Weak but ruthless. I see it in the cards. And you are a silly girl for listening. What do you do all day?
I write, I study Italian, and I explore the city. And at night we go out. It’s enough.
It’s idleness—dangerous idleness. You are young, pretty, married with no children, no problems of money, nothing to tie you to the earth. Madame S.’s voice is clear of envy, but suddenly a shade fainter. And you will hear from that man again, I can guarantee that. He is the kind who never lets go of anything he wants, not even after years. And there is something in you that he wants.
He can have any woman he likes—models—
He can have prostitutes of various kinds, but a girl like you is harder than you think for a man like that to find. And the more I warn you, the more the idea interests you. I can tell. What a pity you’re not a Catholic! But you can still pray to the Virgin for protection. And it may be that you will have a child soon, and that will put a stop to it. She gathers up the Tarot cards in one snap. Perhaps.
Later, when they exchange kisses and Mira is about to dart across the courtyard to her own apartment, the older woman adds, Don’t ignore what I said. There is only one word for falling into the hands of that man: l’abisso. You can’t guess what that means? She adds with a surprisingly mischievous flash of her black eyes. It’s part of your lesson. Go find your dictionary!
And Mira, at home in her own beautiful apartment, where the evening sunlight is falling in dusty rays on the carved and gilded furniture that isn’t hers, obediently goes to the dictionary. Abisso, she finds: abyss.
MADAME S.
When I was eighteen back in Bologna, my parents married me off to a notary nearly three times my age, so I know all about hell in marriage. My husband was social-climbing Roman scum, a pig who could only have marital relations in perverted ways. À chacun son goût! He set me up in this apartment, filled it with Luigi Seidici and Napoleonic furniture got from God knows what black-market thievery and made me entertain his thuggish political friends, dressing me in Sorelle Fontana designs, when all the time I was bruised and scabbed underneath from where he used to pinch and burn me with cigarettes. He said if I told the priest I’d have to show evidence, and that would prove I was a whore. He left me with nothing and while I was waiting the seven years for the divorce to come through, the monster tried to have me charged not just with prostitution but with witchcraft as well. Because of the cards, of course, which is a family gift my mother and grandmother had, too. Even Padre Iacinto, the Jesuit missionary who sends me foreign students for lessons, tells me the cards are a mortal sin, so I put them away. But I had to bring them out again for the little American girl because I could feel something bad around her—a familiar stink of brimstone. Well, God punishes you through the cards by letting
you see too much, and in these last months, I’ve watched those two young Americans the way you do when you know the end of a book or a television show. And of course she was already pregnant when I told her—that you don’t need cards to see! But the child, poor little thing, makes no difference. I can see the outcome, and it turns my stomach.
11
NICK
2005 • DEATH IN THE MORNING
Don’t you ever answer the bloody fucking phone?
One of the hideous talents of middle age, thinks Nick in the very instant of answering his mobile and hearing his wife, Dhel, yelling at the other end, is that you can instantly classify hysterical phone calls. It has to do with the times, as well—when he first got to London, in the halcyon boring days of John Major’s administration, before the World Trade Center attacks made cellphones messengers of mass disasters, such calls were almost exclusively personal. At some point one has gotten monstrously used to the call at two A.M., or in this case to the call in the black London cab stalled in morning traffic beside St. Paul’s. This tone means death, catastrophe—but not, he can hear, of his family, his flesh and blood. And with a mixture of shock, pain, and shameful relief, he hears of the death in a car crash of Samuel Tsembani, one of his best friends in London. Samuel, Nigerian American, six years younger than Nick, Stanford MBA, going places at Goldman Sachs. The only person Nick knows in London who shares his passion for following mainland Chinese soccer leagues. Devoted family man and, as only Nick knew, tireless traveling fornicator. His older kids, a boy and a girl, were the age of Nick’s younger girls, and Dhel and Sammy’s gorgeous foul-mouthed Scottish wife, Mo, spent a lot of time talking math tutors and international versus British schools. The families dated each other as families with matching kids do, going to shows at the Natural History Museum and the V&A, buying junk at the Notting Hill and Camden Town markets, eating overpriced hot dogs and watching cartoons at the Electric. At a certain point early this morning, Sammy had kissed his beautiful brown kids and pregnant wife goodbye, and sped away from Holland Park in the testosterone-fueled E-Type Jag that they all teased him was too early acquired for a midlife crisis. Left as always at seven just to get in those Asian calls and before eight was dead against a sycamore amid the Turneresque February mists and ice of the Embankment.
Nick comforts Dhel, who is headed over to Holland Park to help out, cancels a nonessential appointment, fields the inquisitive All right, mate? of the cab driver, all the while feeling his nose stinging, tears leaking painlessly from the corner of his eyes like they do when sulfur levels are high in polluted air. Thinking that he parted with his friend in a mood of condemnation. Nine days ago when they’d met for lunch in a huge noisy City restaurant where public school boys lob bread rolls and howl for their meat, Sammy had told him about yet another Eastern European girl, this one a Czech he’d met at a German techno club, Tresor. And Nick had told him in essence that he was behaving like a jerk. Then Sammy looked at him over the table with those big seed-shaped Nigerian eyes and said, But I see these girls, and I melt. Melt, Nick, do you understand, man? Nick had gone away from the lunch with his mind, not his face, set in a prissy grimace. But now he thinks, Would it have been so hard to tell him you understood? You haven’t been a saint your whole life, Nick Reiver. You’ve even been dumb enough to fool around once or twice on Dhel.
I melt. The words seem to him heartbreaking, precious evidence of live, flawed humanity. An epitaph for a man—a father and lover and friend and fucker who was and isn’t anymore.
1985–86 • GOLDEN AGE
When happiness comes, observes the Australian writer Helen Garner, it is so thick and smooth and uneventful that it is like nothing at all. Virginia Woolf describes it as a child hypnotized by a mirrored ball. G. K. Chesterton calls it a mystery. Tolstoy says, in essence, that it makes families boring. Whatever it is, it is the opposite of what the Chinese call “interesting times.” History is shaped by war and pestilence and troublesome ideas, thinks Nick. Peace shapes nothing at all.
Still, there are scenes that remain from this time when Nick and Mira have learned the idiom, have learned how to live with each other in Rome. The time that lasts for two years at most but could be a thousand years, or just an hour. The untranscribable history of contentment.
Some examples:
The tail end of a Halloween party in their apartment, four A.M., the beautiful old rooms a battlefield strewn with plastic cups and empty bottles, everybody gone except for a few drunken diehards, a Scottish friend passed out on a couch. Music still playing: Fine Young Cannibals’ “Johnny Come Home.” And Nick and Mira are still dancing, because they can’t stop. Nick is dressed as the Invisible Man, in an old tuxedo, with an Ace bandage wrapped around his face. Mira, six months pregnant, wears a moth-eaten black velvet evening dress from the Porta Portese flea market and a rubber gangster’s mask. Nick, drunk, lurches over to grab his wife, as she squeals, Ow, careful!, and as he squeezes her against him he feels, for the first time, the strong kick of his child inside her. He almost shoves her away in his shock, and hears her laughing through her mask.
Nick’s boss sends him to meet with a famous financier in Milan, a youngish man with white hair who in a few years will kill himself in a scandal but who now sits at lunch with Nick in a cinquecento palazzo with four smog-stained giants grappling on the façade. And talks slippery condescending nonsense until Nick says something quiet but accurate, and then the man turns his empty silver eyes on him, except they’re no longer empty, but direct, like a key turning in a lock, and says, È vero, sono tutte cazzate—you’re right, it’s all bullshit—and Nick realizes that he is doing this, he is speaking this language, and he will never be outside again.
In the Parioli clinic, when he first holds his daughter Madeleine Rose and sees the Asian calm of the tiny round face, as mottled as a seashell, miniature fingers withered with their long immersion like the claws of a newly hatched prehistoric creature, he understands that this is bigger than anything. Not a miracle—as the nursing sisters whisper, in a rustling aura of starch and bleach—but a secret simultaneously perpetuated and resolved. How two can make a completely separate third. The fierce, almost electric independence that emanates from the slight weight he holds gingerly in his arms touches him even more than the expected weight of responsibility and the bonds of love. He looks over at Mira, who is sleeping, and sees that her face, worn beyond exhaustion, is identical to the one in his arms. Both of them with the anonymous dignity of statues around the city, minor ones, whose faces are almost obliterated by time.
But the scene that remains with Nick as a symbol of the improvised quality of these years when they were happy is from one hot June night when he takes Mira’s mother on a tour of Rome in her nightgown. His mother-in-law has come over from Philadelphia to help with the baby, alternating comforting expertise with extreme aggression, as only a new grandmother can, when Nick declares that she has to see the city by moonlight. He overrides protests by Mira, by the lady herself, who is already in her nightgown—a voluminous cotton-polyester garment with printed rosebuds that Nick has already seen far too much of—and sweeps her off in the little open car.
He does this out of a lazy impulse of pity and a real fondness for the old girl, who’s done nothing but change diapers since her arrival. But it quickly becomes an adventure for him as well. He is amazed by how fast—as fast as her daughter—this stout little olive-skinned gray-permed sixty-year-old widow lets her modesty go, leaning back cheerful and alert in her seat as if she always rides around foreign capitals in her sleepwear. Her excitement transforms for him the tourist route he’s shown a dozen visiting relatives. Uniting into a single vision the yellow evening sky cut by veering swallows, the pines like thunderclouds on their trunks, the shattered monuments, the tight streets of shops and apartments, the hordes of nightwalkers, the piazzas overflowing with the roar and frying smells of outdoor restaurants, the flood tide of traffic and profanity in the big avenues. A waking dream that he sees
through her eyes.
Rome, in her nightgown. Like an ad in a fifties magazine or the title of a paperback romance. In a sports car, with a white boy, the blond hair blowing on his forehead a forbidden desire since her Philadelphia girlhood. He takes her everywhere you can drive in Rome: the Appia Antica, where the tombs bite at the air like broken teeth; swirling along the huge arc passing the Forum, the Colosseum, the Baths of Caracalla, the Pyramid of Sestius, the pine-shrouded darkness where Keats lies guarded by the bones of other foreigners. They make quick illegal forays into Piazza Navona and Piazza del Popolo, Nick showing off his talent for wheedling carabinieri. They stop in Trastevere for ice cream and watermelon and porchetta sandwiches.
It gets late, but Nick is in no hurry. For a few minutes he feels that he is riding down Via Veneto with the most beautiful woman in the world beside him, laughing in her nightgown. Not even on the morning when his daughter was born, and he raced beside the Tiber before dawn with Mira groaning beside him, has he felt such a sense of his fate linked to his surroundings. And rarely has he felt so close to his wife as driving now with her mother beside him. An act of love? he wonders. Not really. An act of dream.
MIRA’S MOTHER
I always knew that Miranda would never keep him. Even in Rome with the baby, I knew. The wind in my hair, that golden boy. I should have been the one! And that foolish, undeserving, ungrateful girl, throwing the whole world away.
12
ZENIN
2005 • WISDOM OF THE EAST
I’m getting too old for this, thinks Zenin, as he summons up a treble laugh, droops his wrist like a pansy, and blows a kiss in the direction of his Chinese associate, Brandon Hsu.
