by Bella Pollen
One fall afternoon, with the London sky mellow and lamplit, I was walking down New Bond Street when behind me I heard the guttural sound of “Ciao!” followed swiftly by “Dimmi!” I spun around. Coming towards me in a wondrously soft overcoat was Nonno—talking on two mobiles at once, flanked by an entourage of guardie del corpo, a new wife on his arm.
“Cara.” His face broke into a smile, while I nearly wept to hear that familiar, if now barely audible, cheese-grater voice. He was once again living in the Plaza Hotel in Rome, he told me, but this time in the penthouse suite. Italy was going to the dogs, but business was good. He embraced me, though made no move on either of my breasts. This relationship with Nonno, never fully understood, forever tinged with sorrow.
“Enjoy life,” he rasped. “Is the only thing that matters.” Then he pinched my cheek and was gone. It was the last time I ever saw him.
Years later, long after I’d had a daughter of my own and Giacomo had become her adored godfather, Nonno died. I hadn’t been sure whether I’d be welcome, but Jesse and Sam attended the funeral. In a vast, marble-columned church somewhere outside Rome, in an unholy and unusual alliance, they watched their grandfather’s body washed and prepared by the rabbis before being handed over to the priests. The flesh had belonged to the Jews, but his soul to the Catholics.
In the cemetery, a tight circle of people stood around the coffin, discreetly chain-smoking, as it was lowered into the earth. Nonno’s four wives, ranked from oldest down to youngest, stood in the fore-front holding hands and passing a single damp tissue backwards and forwards between them. At least twenty of the mourners, men in glossy dark suits, were unknown to them or indeed anyone else in the family.
Nonno had been eighty and active to the last. He died intestate. No one knew where his money or assets were kept. There was nothing to pass on, nothing to inherit, and thus in some ways the madness died with him.
Noting the look on Sam’s face as concrete was poured into the open grave instead of soil, one of Nonno’s nine children put a hand on his shoulder and, half tearful, half laughing, said, “Sammy, come on. You remember what my father was like alive? Imagine how he would be as the undead! The cement is to make sure he never comes back.”
But, oh how I wished Nonno would come back, just as I wished to still belong inside his magic circle. Nevertheless, I liked to think of his soul leaving his body, those watchful eyes hidden behind shades, his stocky frame encased in his camel coat, and a phone to each ear, growling “Ciao” as he hung up on one life and “Dimmi!” as he embraced the next.
DRY CLEANING
In London, in the spirit of single parenting, I decided to save on the electrician’s fee and mend my own leaky washer-dryer. Maybe my mind wasn’t on the task, maybe I was far from being safely grounded during that period; either way, the shock of the current passing through my fingertips short-circuited what was left of my snap, crackle, and pop. After that, I took the family washing to the launderette, where the thump of the machines beat in sync with the refrain in my head: goddamnit, goddamnit, goddamnit. At first schlepping clothes around the corner felt like a chore, but I began to look forward to the nothingness of those coin-operated hours. The launderette became a refuge of sorts, an egalitarian hideout where there was no need to wear a face for anyone.
Zoned out on the slatted bench, high on the perchloroethylene fumes, lulled by the slap of cotton against glass, I was struck by the thought that I had made a living out of these oddities known as clothes for well over a decade now. I’d pieced together my company during the Thatcher era. Boom time for women. I was a confused feminist, the kind who secretly loved being whistled at by men on building sites. But even as a surly teenager I’d understood the transforming power of fashion—how it could make you feel brave. And here was something I could do for the cause. Empower the fellow shy; dress them up to take down inequality. That idea alone had been enough to make my accidental career feel like it had purpose, and I’d been good at it, too. But now my marriage was gone, my company was being crushed between the hydraulic hands of big business, and my beloved managing director, Gerry, was dead.
Gerry hadn’t been just my managing director; he’d been my managing everything. I tried to cry for him on those laundry evenings, but it was as though I’d lost the skill. I’d always been an excellent crier—at least when no one was looking. I cried after Giacomo told me he wanted me to have his baby. I cried too the first time he lost his temper—turned away from him and, leaning out the window of his Curzon Street office, watched my tears drip onto the turbaned head of the doorman at the entrance to the Persian restaurant below.
But I was exposed, on a street corner, the time our two neighbourhood Puerto Rican prostitutes cruised by in their car, tossing their perms and calling out to me as they passed. “Hey girl, how is your chico malo? Your bad boy? Hey, preciosa, I hear you have a new bebé! You need help with anything you let us know!”
And they’d grinned and waved, oblivious to how close I was to taking them up on their offer. Please tell me, oh dazzling putas with neon teeth and steel-wool hair, how should I move through life when my chico malo is so angry all the time, because sometimes I feel like even the air might sting me.
Now as the wash cycle cycled and the spin dryer spun, my thoughts ricocheted between these two men that I’d loved. One so solid and protective, the other, who’d gambled with everything, even his family. I suddenly remembered the inaugural board meeting with the executives who’d bought my company. A secretary was moving along the table, laying out pads and pencils.
“Shall we begin?” our new chief executive officer suggested, and Gerry caught my eye. A month earlier Giacomo had put all the money we’d had on the roulette table and bought a horse with the winnings.
“Stupida.” He kissed me when I complained. “The horse will win.”
The horse had been a beauty, with a buffed conker hide and a single white sock. It romped home last in its first race and failed to make it out of the starting gate in its second.
The day of the board meeting, it had been slated to run in its third race. The prize money was huge, as was the risk—the losers eligible to be sold for next to nothing at auction afterwards. Nevertheless, I’d promised to put down a bet, and now it was too late. Caught between being labelled a bad time manager or a shitty wife, I stared unseeingly at the lined paper in front of me as the CEO began to spout projections and goals.
“Wait!” Gerry said, holding up his hand and embarking on some shamelessly revisionist version of my quandary. “So our first order of business,” he concluded, “should be to bet on this horse. Think of it as an act of faith, a good luck omen for our future.”
The CEO looked incredulous, then laughed and led the seven of us—most mismatched group of punters ever—down Oxford Circus to the nearest betting shop, directing us back into our boardroom chairs just in time to catch the horse streaking first past the post on the big wall screen. That was the day I thought all our money troubles were over, and they would have been, too, had the poor horse not gone lame twenty-four hours later.
Not only did Gerry have my back; he was a proxy father to a diaspora of painters, dancers, and singers. Lost boys, all of them, turned out by hostile families into a society increasingly hysterical about AIDS. The time would come when we would watch Gerry’s boyfriend die, a malevolent wreck of his former self. Gerry made me swear that if he ever got sick, I would not let him go as horribly.
“I mean it,” Gerry said, as his boyfriend railed at the nurses, at Gerry, at God. “Pills, poison, stake through the heart. Promise me you won’t let me lose my humanity. Promise me.”
I promised. The idea of my despotic commander-in-chief being anything but in control was so preposterous that I agreed as carelessly as if he were asking me to lend him a tenner. Besides, he’d been tested, he assured me. He was fine.
Shortly afterwards, our CEO, wielding his controlling interest like an axe, fired half my employees and merged our business i
nto his company’s French subsidiary—rivals of ours. While Gerry stayed in London to sweep up our splintered remains, I began a long year of commuting to Paris.
A standard issue bedbugsit, my rented apartment was balanced on top of a rickety external staircase deep in the red-light district of Rue Saint-Denis. Dotting the pavement below, hookers in fur coats and red stilettos roamed the streets like cartoon foxes, sniffing out custom and blowing smoke rings into the night air. I was miserable without my team. I missed the brilliant collaborative insanity that was fashion. All those late nights, pale faces, and terrible jokes. It was business, not personal, the CEO had assured Gerry and me, with his trademark concerned indifference. But alone in Paris, I felt as though I’d pricked my finger on the spindle of corporate nastiness and fallen into a hundred-year sleep.
After Gerry finally broke down and confessed he’d been HIV positive all along, our mutual if baseless guilt—his for lying, mine for not being there for him—made us both furious. His sickness devastated me, first because I knew his lies had been meant to protect me and second because I knew the size of the boulders that lay on the road ahead of him. Lesions, blindness, madness. So many beautiful boys dying on so many hospital wards.
A year later he was confined to bed, attached to pipes and valves, unable to speak. He was a bony head on a stick, no longer able to embrace life but a dry shell into which life was being dripped bag by bag. No one knew whether he had days or weeks left, but by then we were nursing him in shifts. I was alone in the room when I noticed he was signaling with his eyes. For a while I’d been feeling pinned under the weight of my promise. It’s not like you can watch someone die slowly without going crazy yourself, and in warped solidarity I’d developed all his symptoms: night sweats, insomnia, weight loss. At night my bones felt hot and flinty, as if they might spontaneously combust and send fire flickering through my joints. I ticked burial choices in my will and wrote my children long letters, which I hid in a drawer.
That day in the hospital, I looked down to find I’d picked up a cushion off the chair. I stood at the foot of his bed, stunned by the enormity of what I was considering. Gerry’s eyes were fastened on mine, beseeching. I squeezed the cushion between my hands, squeezed and released, not knowing whether he was giving me the go-ahead or pleading for more time. Where were the rules for this? I had never needed anyone in that moment as much as I needed my mother. Tell me what to do, Mum, just tell me what to do.
Humans are breathtakingly adaptable. Illness shrinks our world down to improper fractions, yet still we manage to find happiness. Quality of life is a complex arithmetic, and a braver person than me might have done the sums for him, but I dropped the cushion back onto the chair. Marriage, my company, Gerry. I hadn’t been able to fix any of them, and failure of that magnitude leaves a person stripped naked.
After Gerry died, the flesh-and-bone me went about its business as normal, but my spirit hit the streets, drinking liquor out of a brown paper bag while a violin screeched out self-pity in the background. Breaking down is a dangerous thing to do in public. I was raised on superhero pop culture and everyone knows you don’t risk dropping a bomb on a crowded city—you fly it out over the bay and detonate it somewhere safe.
And finally I figured out where that one safe place might be.
East to the West Coast of America. It’s the iconic road trip. Three thousand miles of car fever, candy wrappers, and Corn Belt USA set to the rose tint of nostalgia. At least that’s what the songs tell you it’s going to be. But the only thing playing on the radio that month was Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Achy Breaky Heart,” a good companion piece, I suppose, for the Humpty-Dumpty one I was trying to put back together again.
I’d been looking forward to the trip, but from the start there were tensions. One of my travelling companions, AK, who I thought I knew well, turned out to be an avid yo-yo dieter. The other, her friend KC, who I’d met for the first time at the airport, introduced herself as a devotee of the macrobiotic religion. Slimcea and Evangelista, I nicknamed them privately. I had my own issues to deal with, no use pretending otherwise, but as far as eating was concerned, this was America, and I intended to barricade myself into every rib shack we passed and lay siege to its specials.
Mum had taken the boys for three weeks of brisk country walks, pie of the cottage, and bedtime readings of Orlando, the Marmalade Cat. I was twenty-nine, newly single, and coming home—back to the eleven-year-old who had stood on the deck of an ocean liner while a hurricane turned her world upside down. Somewhere in my head was the thought that I could reverse that voyage. Sail back to the girl from the woman I’d become. Shed a skin that suddenly felt too old and emerge with new wings, soft and folded tight against my body.
In his will Gerry left me a postcard. “The best thing for being sad,” he’d written, quoting Merlin in The Once and Future King, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. Learn why the world wags and what wags it.” On that journey I was learning that you don’t pass along the road—the road passes through you, and its rumblings stir up all those feelings you’ve tried to bury deep. It was my internal landscape, not the view from the car window, that was desolate, full of torn billboards and freight trains going nowhere.
Still, ever since my mother told me she’d done it herself in the late 1950s on a dollar-a-day Greyhound bus, driving across America has been synonymous in my mind with freedom and new beginnings. Whenever we spotted that familiar dog logo parked up on the freeway, I imagined her, shoulders freckled in a cotton dress, stretching her legs by the side of the road—my mother, already so much wiser at twenty than I would ever be. Tell me what to do, I longed to ask her again, tell me how to steer through this. But how could she possibly have heard me, ghost of her future? Back then she’d had her own journey to go on, her own questions to ask. I knew that and so we kept driving.
In the smoky haze of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains we overtook a patrol car, hooting and catcalling into the wind. It wasn’t our fault. At the speed we were going, no one could have seen those flashing lights until it was too late. The sheriff drove behind our rental for a while, toying with us like a prize marlin before throwing on his siren and reeling us in. We watched him climb out of his manly four by four and perform a little authority shuffle: Twist the hat! Snap the shades! Hitch up the gun belt! As if these law-and-order clichés were government protocol designed to enchant the tourists. After he’d finished, he stiff-legged on over, expression on his face suggesting he planned on sending us straight to Riker’s Island. The truth is he never stood a chance. We were three English girls in a pink Cadillac, all of us pretty.
“Y’all were goin’ mighty fast back there,” he drawled, but then his eyes passed over KC’s legs, sweetly anaemic in her shorts. “But since I’ve been behind you,” he amended, “you done real good.” We thanked him and admired his royal blue campaign hat. “Best-dressed law enforcement in North America,” he agreed, returning our compliment with a pack of Wrigley’s and an unconvincing lecture about civil obedience. It was the first of many lectures from bashful sheriffs. We could have broken the sound barrier that spring and not got a ticket.
Somewhere in the Carolinas we came across a diver, serious-minded and intense, who described how he searched for sharks’ teeth in the silt and murk of the Atlantic. When he climbed off his bar stool, I saw that his legs were so short compared with his upper body that they would only make sense elongated by flippers. I pictured him down in the abyssal depths, lonely and disoriented, fumbling blindly for something he might never find, and I thought that as a metaphor for life, there wasn’t a person to whom this image didn’t apply. But then I guess when you’re hungry enough for answers you can find them just about anywhere.
“What does the Bible say about divorce?” an old Baptist minister was shouting in a church we wandered into in Mississippi. He was black and fierce, with a rubbery face and eyes as blue as bird shells. He placed his hands flat on the pulpit and leaned forwards. �
�Let me tell you what I say, brothers, sisters. You gotta git off that Juicy Fruit train! You can’t just chew all the flavour out of marriage then spit it out!”
And I thought, Holy fuck, is that what I did?
Later in a bar we flirted with boys whose pickup skills amounted to dropping their lighters on the floor so they could gawp up our skirts. These were exactly the kind of boys the Baptist minister had warned against: “Daughters, don’t show him your package, lest there’ll be nothing else for him to buy!” But what did he know? Since Giacomo, since Gerry, I’d used boys and men as prescription meds—sleeping pills, antidepressants—effective for eight hours with few lasting side effects.
AK had inherited money and was generous with it, so every third night we slept in style, but KC and I were each on a penny-pinching budget that took us to motels with cot beds that smelled of toes and mildew. There were times when I’d lie awake, listening to our synchronised breathing, sideswiped by longing for my two babes back at home.
In New Orleans I dreamt that Jesse was a roast chicken and Sam a cricket trapped in a lidless jam jar. My task was to carry them across the sandy waves of the Sahara, the one hot and slippery with grease, the other scrambling up the glass sides, bent on escape. I woke, feverish with anxiety, and scooping the girls’ washing off the motel floor, took it to the nearest Laundromat. Somewhere during the spin-dry cycle, I began to think how easy it had been to pin everything bad on Giacomo’s temper. But what if a darker truth lurked beneath the surface? Blame it on the cat had been my childhood refrain. What if I was the one with creature blood running through my veins? I’d had plenty of funny, nice boyfriends before getting married, but I tended to hurt men who made life too easy for me. Perhaps Giacomo had been exactly what I needed—a boy with enough wild in him to keep my own in check.
