Lost Hearts in Italy

by Andrea Lee

  The two women wrap up and head into the changing room, a sea of naked women whose chatter is overlaid by the usual world-music tape.

  Wait, I know this tune, says Mira, stripping off her bathing suit. It’s “Greensleeves.”

  The two friends fall silent, scrub their bodies, peer into the mirror for signs of damage and age, check out other women’s breasts and asses. Listening to the music and the eternal web of conversation, the same in Italian as in English, as universal as birdsong. About weight and chiropractors and boyfriends and what another man likes for dinner and somebody else who can’t move out and live her own life because of the children.

  Would an e-mail do? asks Mira suddenly.

  A letter, darling. Foy pauses, combing oil through her hair. No, on second thought, any words will do.

  1987 • A PREVIOUS LECTURE

  The only thing Zenin can give you is money, says Madame S. Don’t be a little fool and don’t whine about dignity. You gave all that up, first when you started running around with him, and second when you managed things so stupidly as to leave that poor boy, your husband.

  Madame S. refuses to read the tarot for Mira this afternoon.

  The two women sit at her dining table under the chipped Capodimonte chandelier, and Madame S. wears her normal indoor attire, a slightly grubby peacock-colored zipped dressing gown. Her pink-and-white face glistens with homemade beauty cream, and her belladonna eyes are neither visionary nor languishing, but fixed pitilessly on Mira. Who is crying.

  Non piagnucolare. Non sei più una bambina. Don’t snivel. You’re not a little girl. I don’t know why I have to talk to you like this. It seems to me it should be your mother helping you to see things clearly. But you don’t seem to have a mother, at least not the proper kind, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this disorder. So you must listen to me.

  First, I think Zenin cares about you. Not love, because a vampire like that is incapable of love for a woman. But there is something about you he values. Also, because he’s a Veneto peasant—she spits the words—he feels guilt about breaking up a family. If it weren’t for those two things, he would have thrown you away. You have no idea, my girl, how a man that rich can scare you into letting him alone. It can be terrible!

  Second, because he is a peasant, he worships his son. A male child means his country, his past, his future. And that gives the other woman, the mother of that child, power over him, and it means he won’t marry you, or even let you live with him. At least not now. If you are smart and patient, it might happen in the future. So what you must do now is settle down calmly and request a proper sistemazione. Any Italian girl would do the same thing, and I am sure that that son of a whore is expecting it from you. He should buy you a house and set aside money for you to live properly. After all, you have a child yourself, and you can’t live decorously just by writing little stories.

  Mira mops her eyes and starts to say something, but Madame S. forestalls her, raising one slender arthritic hand. No, I don’t want to hear anything about love. You don’t love Zenin—it’s a kind of possession. You broke a sacrament, and now you have to pick up the pieces, and those pieces are called money and safety. Or—the older woman glances around the room with its splintered rugless floors, the outlines of vanished pictures on the bare walls, the jungle of plants on the terrace, the two lit bulbs in the chandelier above—forse ti piacerebbe finire come me? Perhaps you’d like to end up like me?

  FOY

  She has to do it.

  MADAME S.

  She has to do it.

  29

  NICK

  2005 • INCENSE

  Go ahead, take one, says his old friend Poppy, holding out two lit sticks of incense.

  Nick takes a stick and pushes it into the sand of a blue-and-white vase so that the strand of smoke drifts up toward a portrait of some of Poppy’s grandancestors, stiff in Qing Dynasty brocades, as flat and anonymous and ornate as Elizabethan portraits. Then, with a certain contained pride, Nick kowtows.

  Not bad for a white boy, says Poppy, but I’ll beat you, gweilo, even in Manolos. It’s genetic.

  She places the incense carefully, and with amazing grace in three-inch purple stilettos almost brushes the ground with her forehead. Demonstrating what he first noticed almost thirty years ago when they were classmates at St. George’s, that Poppy is one of the few Chinese girls he knows with a great ass. Twice married, Poppy is running the vast family textile business out of Hong Kong and she still looks gorgeous. Probably for that reason, Nick’s wife, Dhel, is unenthusiastic about her, though when Dhel’s in Hong Kong they go to dinner together and hit the designer handbag outlets in Shenzhen. Mira, who met her once or twice when Poppy was at Yale, disliked her too. That old morale boost, a female friend your wife can’t stand.

  Nick plays squash with her at the Mandarin when he’s in town, and occasionally calls her if he needs a number—every big shot in southeast China seems to be her uncle.

  Your ass is still up there with the great ones, says Nick.

  Thanks. Ballroom and Pilates, and a trainer four times a week, or else it would be dragging on the ground. Dhel should know—she’s seen me buck-naked at the gym. Poppy winks and gives the rowdy one-of-the-boys laugh that was her trademark as an investment banker in New York.

  She and Nick met up this morning in Soochow, where Poppy showed Nick a spinning factory in one of the new special industrial zones that might interest a client of his. Now she’s brought him to see her family’s ancestral hall in the historic garden area of the city, a house the clan bought from the government and is now restoring.

  So, salute great-grandfather Chen Li-Xiang, says Poppy, gesturing at the painting. He was the one who won the title for the family by defending a group of imperial messengers during the Boxer Rebellion. And built the house. Through here is the apartment of wife number one, and through here is the lion-stone garden. Roomy, isn’t it? They say eighteen families were living here at the time of the Cultural Revolution.

  She takes him through a maze of graceful white-walled rooms lined with dark wood, a set of nesting boxes, chambers within chambers, giving onto big and little courtyards filled with the tawny contorted stone from Lake Tai that is a specialty of Soochow gardens. Except for the shrine, the rooms are empty and smell of fresh paint.

  It’s magnificent, says Nick. Are you moving in?

  Poppy grins. Of course not. We’re working to make it into a semi-museum, on the Soochow garden and canal tour. I’d never leave Hong Kong, except for maybe Shanghai or New York. Or maybe Hanoi—we have some interesting work going on there, and you can buy a whole colonial block for the price of a room on the Peak. The thing is that this is our family house, our city, our land. My father dreamed of buying it back his whole life. It was in the back of his mind when he had to flee through Shanghai to Hong Kong with just the clothes on his back. And it was always his motivation when he was a trader in Kowloon working fifteen hours a day. In May we’re having a family reunion here—two hundred Chens from four continents.

  It makes me feel guilty for a whole four seconds that we sold our family place in Maine.

  The Froggy House, says Poppy. Where we from St. Geo’s had a few historical stoned weekends. I thought you were crazy when I heard. Didn’t anybody in your family care?

  We’re all scattered, and nobody had the time to look after it. So I guess nobody cared.

  Poppy looks at him, standing in the humid sunlight, with his expensive suit, his London City pallor, and his graying blond hair limp over the blue eyes that to her always seem just a bit too wide open.

  Uncharacteristically, she persists. But don’t you feel like you need something—fixed? A reference point?

  Fixed? he jokes. But nothing’s broken, Poppy. We have the place in London. I think I am just turning out to be that not very unusual thing, a lifetime expat. Dhel’s the same way. Anyway, we may be coming this way next. To Shanghai.

  Never thought I’d see you turn into an old China hand.


  I’m not an old China hand, says Nick in Mandarin.

  That’s true—your accent’s still terrible. And you certainly didn’t become a bloody Brit.

  My theory, says Nick, is that the more foreign places you live in, the less you absorb. There’s only one time, the first time, when your pores are open.

  That was the U.S. for me, Italy for you, wasn’t it? says Poppy softly.

  Yep.

  Both of them are silent for a minute, wondering why it is that in all the years they’ve known each other, they’ve never slept together. Then Poppy adds, Anyway, you should think about your daughters. They need a piece of America.

  They have to find their own way. If they want to buy back Froggy House, they’re welcome to it.

  Poppy is profoundly shocked, but smart enough to turn it into a joke. That is exactly why I didn’t stick around Goldman Sachs and marry one of my preppie swains. You white boys have no respect for roots. She links her arm in his. Come on, F. Scott. We just have time for a bowl of noodles before we hit the airport.

  1987 • WHAT YOU DO

  Hey Romeo

  What are ya gonna do?

  Hey Romeo

  Now that she’s leaving you.

  Well. Night after night you go running. Trying to shake the slimy black rag of shame and rage and despair twisting like a serpent tighter and tighter around your guts until you think you might suffocate or explode. Down the Corso at three A.M., speeding across Piazza Venezia where the all-night porchetta vendors call out, A fanatico! Footsteps echoing alongside the Forum, the Colosseum, the temples and public buildings that in the streetlit darkness look like heaps of dirty Styrofoam. Through the pine scent of the Aventino, uphill past the junkies and Moroccan dealers outside the sleek walls of the Food and Agriculture Organization. Running in the middle of the road, imagining truck brakes screeching, being tossed like a crash dummy across the Styx. Getting as far as the Appia Antica, turning off onto gravel, into the smell of gardens. The Nigerian whores and Brazilian transvestites standing beside their oddly cozy fires, which they feed with crumpled tissues and used condoms so that they’re surrounded by the stink of burned latex. Some in cars, flashing headlights so that you feel like some kind of sicko celebrity, calling out, Dai, bellissimo, come on, biondino, Blondie, I’ll do you for free.

  And you lie on the telephone to family and friends in the States. Both you and Mira are still lying, so that your marriage still exists in a different time zone, just like daylight does when it’s night in Europe.

  Like any other cuckolded businessman, you work, harder and better than ever before. Though you don’t know it, all three of you, Zenin and Mira included, throughout your constellation, have always worked with miraculous concentration.

  You watch cartoons with your small daughter: Thundercats, Mystic Knights, Scooby-Doo, Masters of the Universe. And then you play elaborate games of pretend with Maddie, based on composites of these characters, creating whole imaginary countries and civilizations, filled with your characters like the high plains were once filled with bison. Worlds with unique languages and complex destinies that can take over your attention for hours. There aren’t many princesses or queens in the worlds you create, and in fact, to your secret satisfaction, Maddie chooses to be a prince with a magic longbow. When Mira comments on this, you tell her it’s none of her fucking business.

  You start to go to parties on your own, and such is the lightning speed of expatriate gossip in Rome that you quickly rediscover something: women. Beautiful, sympathetic, and infinitely available. Women, and the intense toxic pleasure, forgotten since high school and college breakups, of fucking your brains out with people you don’t even need to pretend to like.

  You get drunk, you get high, with friends, without friends. Italian wine and grappa don’t do it anymore. Stoli, nose candy, a little Tunisian kif, Dr. Tedward’s sovereign remedy, as your little brother calls it: drunk and skunk.

  You don’t talk about the bitch, and what she has done. Not yet. She hasn’t even become “the bitch” yet.

  You just look at the spaces in the closet, the half-used creams and boxes of tampons in the bathroom cabinet that she says she is going to pick up once she gets settled in the residence hotel. She says this in a pleasant, considerate voice, as a roommate in a student apartment might say to another roommate when she moves out. The same tone, give or take a bit of tender maternal brightness, in which she talks about friendly separation, and in telling Maddie that Mommy and Daddy will have two houses now but will always be her loving family. The exquisite thoughtful courtesy that sluts use once they’ve been found out.

  And the sleaziness of all this stiffens your spine, gives you the power to look at her as she moves, damn her, around what used to be her home, with a martyred St. Cecilia smile that seems to hint that she is suffering as much as you are. As she makes arrangements, actual plans for a mysterious future separate from yours. You can look at her through a sort of lens, colder than the ice on Mercury, harder than a diamond. To see the face that once meant all riches, the Indias of spice and mine, and realize that it is quite an ordinary face—prettier than some, less pretty than a lot of others.

  Last but not least, you watch Italian men on the street, in airports, and think with a racing heart and a kind of blankness, Is this him? Rich businessmen with tans and silk suits, getting out of armored cars, trailing their jackets on their shoulders the way only Italians can. Is this what the fucker looks like? Without realizing that Zenin can never have a real face for you because he is too powerful an image, a presence, a fear. Zenin is money, age, foreignness, as enormous and potent an enigma in your life as in Mira’s. He has been there in the background since the beginning of your time in Europe, like Old Testament God on the mountaintop. You would never dream of protesting, of trying to fight for your wife the way you might with some ordinary jerk. And it will never dawn on you, not even years later, that Zenin is in some ways the most ordinary jerk of all.

  BRIDGET

  Nick Reiver? Oh yes, definitely a hottie. I met him at around the second party I ever went to in Rome. It was given by these two gay guys who are friends of the art teacher at Marymount, which is where I’m a preschool intern. Anyway, it was in this incredible penthouse apartment right smack overlooking Piazza Navona where tourists were milling in this human carpet down below and the fountain was, oh my God, your basic private backyard Bernini. So I’m drinking caipirinhas and feeling very Roman Holiday when everybody starts teasing me about my twin brother, and it turned out to be Nick, who does look a lot like me, and who managed to say something not too lame about incest. And it turned out that one of his freshman roommates at Harvard married a girl who went to Portsmouth Abbey with my roommate from Georgetown. So we got together. What you do—went out for pizza and Giolitti’s ice cream, drove up to Castelgandolfo. But he was going through a divorce and was kind of—um—bitter, though I’ve got to admit he didn’t obsess about his ex the way some guys do. The thing is, though, that if you come to Rome, you don’t want to end up with an American guy. If you’re blond, Roman men make you feel like a goddess just for walking down the street. So now I have adorable Enzo, love of my life, and I’m taking intensive language lessons. And Nick the cutie got snapped up by that group of Spanish and Italian girls from USIS, the ones I call Europussy Central. Well, it’s appropriate, because he’s blond after all, and they’ll definitely help him heal his broken heart.

  30

  ZENIN

  2005 • OUT OF THE BLUE

  Zenin’s second youngest sister beckons to him from across the cathedral but Zenin doesn’t move, packed as he is in a sea of industrialists and lawyers who all seem to be wearing the same loden coat, and whose cologne seems to blend with the incense in a single lugubrious perfume. If a bomb went off in this corner, he calculates, at least nine companies would be left without chairmen.

  The city has turned out to mourn the deaths of five of its own. Two young women and a young man in their earl
y twenties, friends of Zenin’s son and nephews. The parents of the young man, a famous newspaper editor and his wife, a center-left politician. It was planned as a dream trip, a celebration of harmony between generations—the kids celebrating their new university degrees, and the married couple, their thirty-year anniversary. They’d been traveling together across the stark beauty of the trackless desert of Mali when their small plane fell out of the sky with an impact that so thoroughly pulverized everything that, the whisper fills the church, there is hardly more than a handful of sand in each coffin.

  A gray late-fall morning and Zenin has raced over from his office so fast that he lost two points on his license.

  The rustle of packed humanity rising up to the seventeenth-century apotheosis of saints and apostles in tender faded colors framed by gilt and Verona marble on the famous Duomo ceiling. The unexpected feeling of being part of a popular movement, like a demonstration. The small social pockets in the congregation: the sobbing university students in the front, where Zenin can just see his son’s cropped head among his cousins’; the journalists from all over Italy; the politicians who will be photographed later coming out of the church.

  The voice of Cardinal Pnin, who speaks of the mysterious significance of tragedy. The good lives taken, and the need to look beyond the taking.

  Zenin thinks that it could have been himself and his son. He and Daniele have talked for years about a trip together to some remote place, perhaps with Zenin’s girlfriend, perhaps with a group of his and Daniele’s friends. Daniele is an avid mountaineer and has gone trekking in the Andes and in Nepal. They’ve talked about riding motorcycles through the desert in Libya. Daniele likes harsh climates, challenges, things that Zenin privately admits that he is too old and lazy to undertake.

  Still, he muses, not a bad way to go—in good health and happiness, in a minute’s fall. The worst thing would be to know that your child, your future, was falling too. There is, he thinks, a legend about that, isn’t there.