by Andrea Lee
And Zenin, sitting on the Fiumicino runway, puts the thought of her aside as he makes phone call after phone call, waiting for the all clear for takeoff to Venice, staring at the sudden gusting sirocco rain that leaves windows in the plane coated with splashes of red sand.
THE HEADWAITER
Ammazzalo, these two-bit industrialists think their balls are made of twenty-four-carat gold, strutting around with their whores. But they’re nothing. I remember nights right here when Pignatelli was trying to get a leg over Ava Gardner, when there was Rossellini, whom we boys all called Tino, who was already fucking around on Bergman, there was Gianni of Capri, there was that juicy piece of ass Marisa Allasio, there was Niarchos, Kirk Douglas, Lollobrigida, the lot. Those were people who knew what fucking was. People with style. Those were the days.
16
MIRA
2005 • X-FILES
Mira holds her breath as she opens a small mahogany drawer. Her husband, Vanni, is away helping his politician chums cobble a new leftist alliance in Bologna, and she’s downtown in his office after their home computer crashed. His cheerful secretary promptly went to lunch after ensconcing Mira behind Vanni’s desk, where she sits observed only by the burnished leather-bound volumes of L’Encyclopedia legale malintoppi, an ugly but valuable Casorati watercolor, and a series of exotic vacation photographs featuring Mira and the kids; boats; palm trees; Vanni and his fishing cronies with a gargantuan blood-daubed tuna. So in the stillness of this summer afternoon, Mira has license to pry, which she indulges with the same gut-clenching thrill she used to have as a teenager snooping through her best friend’s brother’s stash of porn and grass. She’s not searching for anything in particular. She doesn’t suspect Vanni of fooling around, nor does she not suspect him. But she’s lived in Italy long enough to know that men here require occasional supervision.
The drawer holds the rubbish he collects on his travels: airline cosmetics, bits of jade, counterfeit wristwatches, business cards with Japanese names. She rummages further, realizing that she’s holding her breath with a treasure hunter’s anticipation. And in the very back, she finds two snapshots. One shows a reclining woman with thin lips and a tanned skeptical face. She is wearing an orange head scarf, the bottom half of a bikini, and two lobsters—uncooked, freshly caught, the mottled brown of the Mediterranean rock lobster—are carefully arranged over her large, flaccid bare breasts. The second photo is of Vanni grinning merrily, lounging on the trampoline of a catamaran, flanked by the woman in the orange scarf and a pretty black girl with hair in a pixie cut. Her husband looks paunchy and sunburned in his bathing trunks, and is wearing a piratical bandanna. The two women are topless and decked in lobsters as in the earlier picture, and Vanni holds up a fifth lobster as if toasting with a champagne glass. The snapshots are very poor quality, and Mira at first thinks that they record antics from before she met Vanni, but the date on the back is early last July. Exactly when she and the boys were in San Francisco.
She puts the photos in her bag and leaves the office. She drives across the river at the Gran Madre bridge, stops her car beside a yellow glass recycling bin, tears up the snapshots, and throws them away among the broken bottles. The street is deserted, magpies circling overhead.
The next day, she tells her friend Rachel about it as they are drinking coffee outside near the Madama Cristina street market. Rachel, who is English and has a loud, posh voice, laughs so hard about the lobsters that all the other coffee drinkers—market vendors and Senegalese trinket sellers and old Piedmontese housewives with bulging plastic bags—turn around and stare.
I know, says Mira.
The most ludicrous, the most pathetic, gasps Rachel. She ruffles her spiky hair. How could you possibly confront him about anything so silly?
I can’t, says Mira. I thought about it all last night and I don’t think I can let on that I was snooping for such a ridiculous result. Maybe I’ve just lived in Italy too long, but I find it hard to take it seriously. Poor Vanni, anyway. He loves me, and he’s feeling old. This could be his red Porsche.
He is devoted, Rachel agrees. Obviously still fancies the hell out of you. As well he should, because you’re a beautiful woman. How long have you two been married again?
Nine years.
Are you faithful to him?
Rachel! You’d be the first one to know if I weren’t. I love Vanni, and frankly the idea of sneaking around again is kind of nauseating.
Is he jealous?
Yeah, he sulks at the mention of Nick or any ex-sweethearts. Makes rude noises when Zenin’s ads come on TV.
How very touching. Do you think he fucked those two tarts?
Maybe a bump in the night. I don’t think there was much else. I remember now he was in Riccione spearfishing on his cousin’s boat—that asshole Michele. Michele always has slutty girls hanging around. He’s got a harem of students and research assistants. So Vanni might have let himself go. But a serious affair has a different feeling about it. We all know that.
Oh, we certainly do. I’ve been through it all with sodding Gianfi-lippo.
My God, those girls’ faces were pained. Can you imagine—lobsters on your tits. Crustacean porn, like a bad dream out of a Dalí painting. Only a man—an obsessive fisherman—would come up with that idea! Here Mira breaks down, and the two women explode into giggles.
Stop, there’s coffee coming out of my nose, chokes Rachel. Did you put the pictures back?
No, I stole them and threw them into a street bin. He won’t dare ask for them, and it serves him right. I tore them up—do you know how hard it is to shred photos by hand? A face or a lobster kept coming out whole.
Stop it, you’re making me hysterical.
And the funny thing is, says Mira, the whole time I was sitting there beside that disgusting trash bin, ripping them to shreds, the radio was playing “Sexual Healing.” Rachel, do you think I’m crazy laughing my head off like this?
No, sweetie. Just grown up. I must say that as I get older, life does tend to look less like romance and more like a farce. But let me ask you something, Mira. Wouldn’t you have been disappointed to poke around in his desk and find nothing?
Probably, yes.
Aren’t you pleased that it was something so astoundingly, so cosmically foolish?
Definitely yes.
Well, there you are, then.
Where? asks Mira. But she’s laughing again, and she knows what her friend means.
1986 • GOBLIN FRUIT
It’s like a drug. You can handle it.
After she’s been seeing Zenin for about six months, Mira starts to spend a lot of her time telling herself that a person can be two people. She takes dawn runs up to Villa Borghese and repeats it to herself like a mantra.
This is life. This is what people do.
Down the deserted Corso, past steel-shuttered shop fronts, in streets where damp stone exudes a bridal freshness that by eight o’clock will be the teeming traffic-scented miasma of the Centro Storico. Across Piazza di Spagna, where airport buses stand idling as parties of Japanese file silently aboard. Past the graffiti-covered stone fountain, up the slippery cascade of steps, feeling muscles straining in her legs as she passes Keats’s house, Villa Farnese; the shaggy palms and giant golden walls glowing in the daybreak, breaking a sweat as she pauses for a heartbeat to view the carpet of the city spread out in the pink-and-brown dawn while swallows cut through the pale air loosing their frail whistles. Then the cool air of the Borghese pines, where mosquitoes, Coke cans, and condoms linger from the night before, and she joins other runners flitting like spirits in the rising damp.
You can handle it. This is what people do: This is what women do in books.
Like so many others, she has discovered how fatally easy it is to divide a life. Two hearts, two souls in one body. A little like being pregnant.
It’s like a drug. You always handle drugs well. You can stop this when you like. A few more times and then enough. You’ll go back to having on
e life, and no one will be hurt.
And later in the day, when she’s finished work and takes Maddie to play under the chestnut trees of the Quirinale Gardens, she leafs through books she has brought in her backpack along with her daughter’s apple juice and crackers. As she watches the children run like colorful sparks of life in the dusty unkempt little playground and the carabinieri trucks stationed in front of the smog-blackened presidential palace, she searches for company in literature.
“Natasha…was only aware of being borne irrevocably away again into that strange and senseless world so remote from her old one, a world in which there was no knowing what was good and what was bad, what was sensible and what was folly.
“Stefania R. had been married for a couple of years and had never thought of being unfaithful to her husband. To be sure, in her life as a married woman there was a kind of expectation, the awareness that something was still lacking for her. It was like a continuation of her expectations as a girl, as if for her the complete emergence from her minority had not yet occurred…. Was it adultery she had been awaiting?”
Meanwhile, Maddie, in overalls and a blouse with an embroidered collar, might be squatting with a friend in the dust near the battered sliding board, her curly brown head bent over some horse chestnuts they are arranging in a circle. Repeating in a bossy voice, Così, mettilo così! At almost two years old her face is cherubic, and in museums she reaches out to stone putti as if toward a mirror. From time to time she darts back to Mira to demand a drink or show a treasure or climb up on her mother’s knees. The shape of her face is Nick’s.
When Mira feels her daughter’s soft resilient flesh she feels a lurch of adoration in her stomach, an ache in her breasts as if they were still full of milk. It brings up the image of Nick, freshly showered with his hair in wet spikes, dancing her and Maddie around the big Victorian bathroom as he did just the night before. Clowning around to Rick James’s “Super Freak.” The bathroom steamed up, the gorgeous little girl screeching with glee, flushed with her bath, her head swathed in a towel. Mira herself, bare to the waist, tits jiggling. Shrieks, giggles, the smell of diapers, shampoo, freshly scrubbed skin. Gilt mist of evening lamps, the pure essence of family passion.
Yet then the scene changes and she sees herself as she was with Zenin that first time, exhibiting herself naked in high heels as he sits fully clothed on the bed, looking at her as if judging a piece of horseflesh. The foreign man who observes her, has somehow acquired her. If she thinks of Zenin—which she has begun to do unwillingly many times a day—she shivers and her cunt throbs as if her heart had tumbled down there. Yet she knows this terrible power she is beginning to sense is not in the sex, not in the fucking they do in the red suite, with the footsteps and voices of Rome echoing around them.
She knows this because she can still make love to Nick, squeezing images of Zenin into a tiny white dot on the surface of her mind that almost disappears like the last molecules of light on a television screen. That’s depraved, she thinks. A whore’s trick.
No, depraved is what she does with Zenin. The lover who does not try to please her, but who wants something badly from her. Making love to that lanky body that seems so much older than any she has ever touched before. In the blackout, the intense shameful pleasure of kisses that seem to drain her. The weary weight of his long limbs, a weight she somehow associates with his money. The foreign smell of him, a popular aftershave Mira has smelled in airports and along shopping streets in Rome. The scent makes her imagine a village of colorless houses in the early morning beside a flat sea. Worst of all is listening to him talk as they sit at lunch at restaurants around Rome: his clumsy jokes, his bragging about car or boat races he sponsors, about flying planes to places full of sand or snow, where other rich people gather. A tiny rational part of her notes sardonically how impressed she is, how she is unfaithful not just to Nick but to herself.
Afterward she always swears to herself that it’s the last time. And then in a week or two he calls and she meets him at the d’Inghilterra. Dressing and arriving with that shiver of desire, like a bad child who likes her punishment.
She’s appalled by her own behavior but not enough to stop. Because if she’s honest she realizes that there is something there made to measure for her, Mira. Something Nick, with his open blue gaze, can’t see.
So she sits scanning her books at the playground. As shafts of dusty light strike down through the club-shaped leaves of the old chestnuts and children shriek and au pairs gossip and young Roman mothers come and go in tight skirts and high heels.
“Perhaps there was a world where people could act on whims, where deeds could detach themselves cleanly from all notion of consequences.”
“For as the Freynshhe booke sayth, the quene and sir Lancelot were togydirs. And whether they were abed oother at other manner of disportis, me lyst not thereof make no mention, for love that tyme was nat as loveys nowadayes.”
It’s like a drug, you can handle it, Mira tells herself. You can do this and then stop it and nothing will get lost.
RACHEL
It’s a bit of a religion being a foreign woman in Italy. I should know because I’ve been in this bloody country for eighteen years. Perhaps a better word is a cult, like Scientology. There are distinct stages. Girls arrive and they go slightly mad—think they’ve died and gone to a heaven of real men. Because I think Italians do the Latin courtship thing better than Spaniards or anybody else—all spumante and roses and making you feel like you’re a natural woman Aretha-style. And the meridionali especially are spunky little fuckers. The nice politically correct English or American blokes you went to university with look a bit contralto by contrast. And then you settle down and find out that Romeo is fucking everybody—but everybody—else, and that his family is a pain in the arse besides. There’s always some large disillusionment, and perhaps you get bitter and leave. But if you get through that phase, you settle down and start making a life. You start having a laugh at things. Italian women don’t because they’re genetically programmed to know what we have to learn. Mira’s at the laughing stage because she knows she’s all right. Vanni’s a lovely man, though a bit short and intello-leftist for my taste. What the hell does it matter if he likes a bit of lobster on the side?
17
NICK
2005 • AN OBITUARY
The usual end-of-August pickup in the news, as if history were actually a trudging wage slave, bound to the convention of a fixed summer holiday. After a few relaxing weeks of paparazzi essays on the great and near great caught in absurd vacation mode—in cowboy hats and bikinis and giant hip-hop shorts; topless; bottomless; bulging; bejeweled; on the wrong beach with the wrong partner—suddenly the less great, the insignificant, are once again in the headlines, dying in their anonymous international swarms. In exploding aircraft, in sudden bursts of suicidal flesh and blood over the dun-colored grit of the petroleum lands, in floods and plagues and pitifully overcrowded trucks and ships of refugees heading toward dubious hope. In the sudden efflorescence of headlines, the small death notice is almost lost. But Nick catches sight of it.
The old girl is dead, he says to his wife.
He and Dhel are home in bed on a Sunday afternoon, alternately making love, reading the papers, and dripping cold sesame noodles on the duvet. A rare, almost unheard of, treat. The closed curtains making the Notting Hill daylight into twilight, the air conditioner providing a bracing chill, and Ben Harper, turned down low on MTV, singing in an annoying reggae whisper about changing the world. The two little girls, Julia and Eliza, are visiting Dhel’s mother in Zurich, leaving the high white rooms of the family flat in Chepstow Villas resounding with their absence. Nick got in last night from Singapore and now revels in what his friend Vakhil has dubbed uxory—the thrill you get when you screw your wife in your own sheets after weeks of hotels. Ulysses knew about it.
What old girl? asks Dhel, tapping at her computer, where she is looking at shoes and also checking an installation prop
osed for one of her artists at a museum in Japan. The queen, Joan Collins, or your ex-wife?
Nick decides to pass over this last remark. None of the three, he says, tugging gently at her long soft hair. An old woman in Italy. You met Lodovico, the Lehman Brothers guy. Well, it’s his great-aunt, the Princess Caetanae. Famous in politics back in her day. They call her a pope maker, say she was Mussolini’s lover before she switched sides.
And did you get to know her?
Not well, Nick says honestly. But I went to tea with her once or twice. She liked me. She even gave me advice. This was in Rome, a long time ago.
Of course it was in Rome, says his wife, yanking her hair out of his hand. I can always tell, because you get that sound in your voice.
1986 • THE BLACK PRINCESS
Che bel giovanotto. What a beautiful young man.
This old woman, wheelchair bound, whose series of names—one of them is Medici—rolls out like a pageant of Roman and Florentine history, makes a compliment sound like a knighthood. Wrapped in a cashmere shawl, she sparkles at Nick with a hard flirtatious topaz gaze as he sits at tea with her and her grandnephew Lodovico, the most aristocratic and dimmest of his colleagues at the bank. The room around them is full of floral chintz and potted azaleas like Nan Reiver’s sitting room back in Newport, but here the windows look out with a proprietorial air upon the crowds and autumn colors of Campo de’ Fiori, which since Guelph and Ghibelline days has been the property of the princess’s family. And on the ceiling above the chintz, frescoed giants struggle, as they do throughout the vast marble gloom of the palace.
Inferior nineteenth-century copy, says the princess, nodding at the ceiling. We’re in the attic here. I thought it was more amusing, cozier, to leave it unrestored.
Nick can tell that she has never needed to be beautiful. A leathery tanned chinless face with a nose like a griffin’s beak and an exquisitely styled crest of silver hair. She wears gold earrings that look the size of bucklers, a huge signet ring on her mannish hands, and is famous among the famous in Italy. La principessa nera, they call her, last of the old papal black aristocracy, a bipartisan political string puller, a chivier of financiers and heads of state, leader of the old guard who scorned the upstart Savoy monarchy, a maverick who once defied her Fascist family to support the partisans. Lover, depending on whom you talk to, of everyone from Mussolini to Fidel Castro. She is also, Lodovico tells him, money mad, slippery as an eel. Poor brainless Lodovico sits through an hour of teasing and cross-examination every week to safeguard his inheritance.
