Darling? Read online

  “What became of the flute?”

  “Oh, she doesn’t have time for music. But I was thinking you could get her started as an artist, introduce her to some of your people … no end of picturesque scenes over there … main thing is she’s happy, that’s all.”

  I called her up: “I’m glad to hear you’re so happy!”

  “Who said that?” she asked, in an astringent tone I hadn’t heard her use in years. “The last time I talked to Ma I couldn’t stop crying, and she said I don’t know how lucky I am to live here.” She sighed. “She’s right, I suppose.”

  “Why would you suppose that?” I asked, laughing—it felt like our old conversations, where the parents were objects of hilarity and we’d sing a phrase from the radio in the middle of a sentence to underscore a point.

  But now her voice went cold: “I know it wouldn’t be your choice, Francine, but I don’t always have to feel just what you do, you know. I’m happy here, whether you thought I would be or not.”

  All of which is to say I had to take the train. A sister who refuses to help her poor (but happy) sibling get a foothold as an artist (a job that can hardly be very difficult if I’m doing it, after all) must be ever conscious of the magic of Italy, and willing if necessary to travel by mule. By the time we arrived in Villa Padesi it was late afternoon, and we shouldered our packs and stepped into the street only to see a horde of Vespas coming at us like winged chain saws. We jumped back, Garrett glaring at me as if he couldn’t believe all the trouble marrying me had got him into. I set off doggedly down the narrow street; he can’t read a map, he has no choice but to follow.

  It was hardly a town, really, just a random postwar sprawl creeping outward into the farmlands through a valley laced over by power lines. At the main crossroad a tobacconist faced a newsstand where huge headlines proclaimed NICO SERA E MORTE! LA NAZIONE LAMENTA. “Who’s Nico Sera?” Garrett asked, but I’d never heard of him. “He must have been important here.” I heard his name pass like a foreboding among the old men at the caffè tables next door. It was October—immense rosemaries bushed out between the iron fences along Via Ponte de Soto, and persimmons glowed in the trees. Women leaning from their windows, airing bed linens, watched us with frank suspicion. We might have been the first tourists Villa Padesi had ever seen.

  Every yard was fenced, though, against the threat of intruders. The Basso compound, Gino’s parents’ house and the block of stuccoed flats for the three brothers, was enclosed by a high brick wall. Inside it was quiet except for the cooing in the dovecote and the scritch of a hoe, though I couldn’t see through the gate who was working. I rang the bell and after a long time Etta came out with the baby on her hip. Her dark dress blew back against her bones, and she brushed her hair out of her face and looked at me hard, to decide whether I was friend or foe.

  “I thought you’d be here an hour ago,” she said.

  “There’s a strike…,” I explained, but she didn’t accept it—after all, we have the money; if we’d really wanted to see her we could have taken a cab. “I’ve got to pick Franco up at school, right now or the sisters … Would you mind—?” and she handed me the baby, who started to wail immediately as she stalked away down the road.

  “We should have stayed in Venice. We could have slept there and come here to visit just as easily,” Garrett said.

  “Are you kidding? She’d be furious. She’s been cooking for us for a week.”

  “How do we get out of here?” he asked as the gate latch clicked behind us, with the baby still crying, reaching for Etta over my shoulder.

  “Bus, I guess,” I said, feeling pretty well trapped myself. When my parents visit they hardly leave the compound. “I go to see Etta,” my mother said, when I asked if she’d seen the Giottos in Padua, fifteen minutes away.

  * * *

  “A pretty sister,” Gino said that evening, toasting me. Latin flattery, of course; he was the exact Italian my mother imagined, his magnificent hair springing from a magnificent head, a head full of good humor and hospitable impulses, including a lordly consideration for women and a Talmudic knowledge of cuisine. Beyond that he was inscrutable, and I wondered whether, if Freud had been born here a few hundred miles south of Vienna, we’d study our souls as we do or reflect only on the olive and the grape. I was grateful to be called pretty, though, whatever the reason, and looked over to see if Garrett had taken it in.

  “To Italy,” he was saying, raising his glass high, even gladder of the compliment than I.

  Franco came to the kitchen door, a small serious child with his father’s face and his mother’s resigned expression—he flung his arms out and announced: “Entrata la pasta!” and Etta came behind, flushed and smiling, carrying a huge steaming bowl.

  “Con funghi,” Gino said. “Bellissima!”

  “I picked them!” Franco said, taking a mushroom off the top for himself and twisting his finger at his cheek as he ate. “Buono!” he said.

  I supposed that if Etta intended to poison me she wouldn’t feed her kids from the same bowl. She’d tried to be warm, thanking me for the skirt, though it had a ruffle and I could see she’d never wear anything like that now. My own coolness I’d hoped to cover with confessions, telling her all about Garrett’s and my troubles, while she looked embarrassed and changed the subject to tomato sauce, of which she had put up forty jars with and without oregano. Now her mood had acidified: she bustled in and out of the kitchen on mysterious but apparently very important errands, looking away from us so we grew nervous and guilty. What had we done? What were we supposed to do? Finally something dropped or slammed in the kitchen, and she yelled, “Gino, where is the pasta fork?”

  “I don’t know,” Gino called with humor, as if the question were metaphysical.

  “Well, it’s got to be somewhere,” she responded angrily.

  Gino picked up his fork and mine and began to serve. “Imagine,” he said, “there was a time before pasta forks…”

  “It goes in the drawer next to the stove,” she replied, coming to sit down, and we began piling up compliments like sandbags against a flood: How beautiful was the house, the dinner, how charming the children … And the flowers—Etta was so creative, she could make something beautiful out of whatever fell to hand! A dahlia on a dry, gnarled stem, with two fat buds like eyeballs on either side, lolled out of a vase on the mantel; her old music stand cast its scrolled shadow into the corner; and the dinner—the pasta, roast chicken stuffed with whole lemons, fresh rough bread and green olive oil—surely anyone who ate would be changed …

  “This cookbook, you sent it,” Gino said to me, “It is our … Bible! Etta, she cook like she’s lived all her life in Italy.”

  She fed Giorgio a spoonful of pasta in brodo. “Which is lucky,” she said finally, “because otherwise they’d really despise me.”

  Franco had rooted through the toy box to find a doll with the red pout and bouffant hair of a Hollywood starlet, and the body—the uncircumsized penis, that is—of a little boy.

  “Etta, what is that?”

  “A baby transvestite!” Garrett said with a wicked gleam.

  “It’s their favorite toy,” Etta said sheepishly, and Giorgio reached out of his high chair and grabbed it by the hair, with Franco snatching it back so the brodo went over and he slipped in it and hit his head on the tile floor. Etta jumped up, crying, “For heaven’s sake, Franco, let the baby have it. You’re old enough to share. Look what comes when you don’t!” And threw her napkin at Gino: “And you, you couldn’t watch them even though you see I’ve got my hands full.…”

  Gino’s shrug was almost imperceptible but all of history was in it. Should a man turn his attention from the civilized consideration of the mushroom harvest toward a speculative endeavor such as the divination of the sources of a woman’s fury? No. A man resigns himself to the indecipherability of things. He shrugs, he swings the baby up onto his shoulders. Giorgio bubbled over with joy, and Etta turned to me, undeciphered, hands open in some
kind of appeal, but burst into tears before she could speak—why wouldn’t I save her?

  “Here, let’s take a walk, you and I,” I said, wanting to get her life figured out for her, so it wouldn’t weigh on me so, and to have her admit that I had been a good mother to her, I’d been right all along.

  “I’ve got two kids, I can’t just go out for a walk,” she said.

  “Take a walk, no problem,” said Gino, but she dismissed it and he shrugged again and turned on RaiUno, national television, where a serious-looking woman in thick glasses was reporting on Bosnia’s day.

  “The news is really news over here,” Garrett said. “In the U.S. it’s just more entertainment.” In a moment came Colpo Grosso, a kind of strip-Jeopardy where the players ran up from the audience and, failing to answer a few questions, found themselves dancing in the ludicrous nude. The contestants looked mostly British—thin, blond, and awkward, striking exaggeratedly casual poses in their wish to seem at ease. “It takes the pleasure out of it somehow,” Garrett said in perplexity. The ads showed men striding through woodland, though I’d seen nothing wilder yet than the double row of poplars at the edge of town where Etta had been frightened by some Gypsies.

  “Prosecco? Grappa?” Gino was asking. He peeled and quartered an apple with a few strokes, handing the wedges around. Etta was clearing the table—“She get tired, that’s all,” Gino said when she returned to the kitchen. “You got two kids … you got everything! But she gets tired.”

  I followed her into the kitchen, but finding her at the sink went stubborn and couldn’t bring myself to help her. She was determined to despise me, let her have a reason.

  “He doesn’t listen, he doesn’t care at all,” she said. “Yesterday I told him I didn’t think he’d even mind if I died, and you know what he said? He’d rather lose me than the boys.”

  “Well, he’s no diplomat,” I laughed, and she turned away. “But, I mean, don’t you think he loves you all, his family?”

  She shrugged. “I hardly feel like a woman,” she said under her breath, and to me: “They hate me; they all do, and the boys, they’re mezzo-Americano, they’ll never amount to anything. In the States we talk about respecting differences and all that; here they’re like … clans, or something, It’s like … the people of Vicenza eat cats.”

  “What?”

  “They say, ‘Don’t go to Vicenza. They eat cats there,’ and Vicenza’s only twenty miles away! No one from up here would ever go south of Florence, they think all southerners are thieves, and Americans are—well, you can guess. Nothing I do is right, not the way I sneeze, not the way I hang the clothes on the line. They insist Thanksgiving is in honor of Columbus, and when the Gypsies stole my wallet down on Via il Gruppo, Gino’s mother just sniffed that it wouldn’t have happened if I’d stayed in the house where I belong!”

  “Who are your friends?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Christiana and Marbella, I guess, they try to be nice. But they’re busy with the church.”

  “Ah, yes, the church,” I said. I’d been wondering.

  “They’re Scientologists.”

  “Etta, those people are crazy!”

  “I don’t know,” she balked—not knowing is a point of pride with her. She’d told me how she explained to Franco that some people believed the Bible and some believed Darwin—the great lesson being not about science or faith, but a righteousness inherent in ignorance. And when I said, “But one of them is right,” her eyes narrowed and she said she wouldn’t presume to judge such a question. “It’s a different way, that’s all,” she said now. “They gave me that Dianetics book, but I don’t have time to read.”

  I felt so sleepy I worried about carbon monoxide and went to open the window, but she asked me not to—these fogs came in from Venice, she said, they get into your lungs. Her laundry was strung on lines over our head, to get the heat from the stove—things took days to dry in the winter, but they didn’t believe in electric dryers. I thought how my mother had laughed when I asked what Etta and Gino would have to talk about, saying, “Live a little, Francine. Marriages aren’t about conversation, you know!”

  “Bianco, come, how you say, latte? Like milk!” Gino was saying, telling Garrett about the mushrooms. He loved his boys, accepted his life and its lack of expectation with a grace you’d never have seen in the States. National health, maybe, or some mineral in the Italian water. The copy of Where Angels Fear to Tread I’d sent to Etta years ago was sitting on her bedside table.

  “I mean to get to it, really,” she said. “I just don’t have the time.”

  * * *

  She’d hung my portrait of her over the guest-room bed—where she was least likely to see it, I supposed—and as I unpacked I decided she’d been right to be offended. I’d given up on it too soon, left it while her face still fit convention and missed some idiosyncracy I thought she wouldn’t like to see. Without this, her beauty was missing, too. Then, catching sight of myself in the mirror, I had to sympathize with Garrett. Everyone knows men are judged by their wives’ attractiveness. Who could blame his embarrassment? I, too, wished I were sleek and lithe; I regretted this tuberous feminine mass—had dressed to disguise it, to look more like a man, but it persisted, seal-like under the very chic suit—formless but for the two large, disappointed eyes.

  Undressing though, I wondered what lunatic would quibble—seeing it (me, that is: pink and white, breasts swelling, nipples the lightest touch would awaken), I felt a pull of desire myself. What’s more erotic than one’s own darling self? When I first knew Garrett he’d once asked me to stand at the window so he could see me in the streetlight, and looking into his face I knew the riches womanhood had conferred on me: it was like coming into a great tract of land, with a swift river running through it and rich soil turned up for the heat—who knew what might grow there? I’d always felt a glad conspiracy with any statue of Venus, knowing she’d certainly wink at me if she only had a head.

  Now I looked quickly away from myself, afraid that in the next glance I’d see something hideous, too. Garrett’s read more than me, lived longer—he’s been there in loco parentis since I was twenty-five. No one is better fitted to see all that’s wrong with me. And if he was hallucinating, seeing a swan for a sow, what of it? He’s my husband; if I’m ugly in his eyes, ugly I might as well be. As for the portrait—I’d tried to do Etta a favor by giving her face an ordinary, recognizable prettiness, the gold standard women trade on every day.

  * * *

  It was thrilling to wake up the next morning and find everything strange—the thick bedsheets smelling of incense in the perfect dark of the shuttered room. A thoughtful cooing came from the dovecote, but I didn’t hear the boys, so it must still have been early. Garrett was heavily asleep beside me, so I tortured myself for him, thinking that my face in the mirror had looked like a worn-out shoe, wondering whether he’d rather have Etta than me.

  He’s going crazy, I told myself. Don’t accompany him. He stirred and reached for me—for all of it he still wanted to make love all the time, though instead of pleasure I imagined he looked at me with curiosity and revulsion. I jumped up to avoid him, pushed the heavy shutters open to see the early sunlight deep red in the fig trees, on the tiled roofs and the cornfields behind them and the brick factory buildings across the canal.

  “Venice today?” he said, stretching, smiling; we were in Italy, what could be wrong?

  “Etta’ll be hurt,” I said.

  “It’s deadly here,” he said angrily. “What are we going to do all day, watch her cook?”

  So an hour later I heard myself explaining that we were taking the bus into Venice for the day, we wanted to see the Miracoli. Etta winced. Was I on a first-name basis with the buildings of Venice, then? The people I know now drop names of buildings and paintings as if they were celebrities. Men approach me with lines like “Have you ever been sculpted?” and I’ve been called “a slave to an antiquated aesthetic where beauty is the only standard,”
in Art News. It all sounds pompous to me, too.

  “Come with us,” I said. “You can bring Giorgio, and Christiana or Marbella can pick Franco up at school.”

  “What would they think?” she asked, and I remembered they feared the Venetian air.

  “What would they think about you taking your houseguests on a daytrip?”

  She shook her head. “No, I’m making osso buco. Gino comes home for lunch.”

  “It’s just one day,” I said. “Or, we could go to Padua—we’d be back by lunchtime.”

  “Padova,” Etta corrected, giving the English pronunciation of the Italian spelling. “Osso buco takes hours.… I can’t. You go, have a good time,” she said, meaning: Abandon me, so that I in my generosity can forgive you.

  * * *

  Garrett was happy; we were in a vaporetto. The man smoking in its doorway looked urbane as Nabokov, and when he disembarked at the Accademia, we decided with a glance to follow him. We always pick someone like this, in a foreign city—we’re sure there must be ancient quarters; lush, exotic places no Baedeker admits to, places we can slip into by following a stranger through a secret door. A few weeks ago I’d have named this and the sexual undertow as our strongest bonds, the things that held us together in ways past our understanding. Now … but Nabokov had a quick, long stride we could hardly keep up with, and my heart began to beat as if my life depended on staying close behind him; everything else fell away. He was wearing crepe soles, so for a long time we heard only the canal sloshing against the fondamenta and our own footsteps. I imagined Garrett had picked him to father my child; they’d make some transaction by which I’d find myself alone with him, and this idea so pleased me that I was stunned when he turned off, into a small, fountained courtyard, and I realized he was home and our adventure had come to an end. He stopped to suck the last out of his cigarette in front of the arched door, and we had to go on or he’d know we’d been following. Within ten steps, though, the canal dipped underground and the pavement ended at a wall. We walked back to see Nabokov flick his cigarette into the water, put his key to the lock, and, turning, look over his shoulder at us as if he was used to having strangers dog his steps. “Quite marvelous, isn’t it?” he said. His English was exact, almost British. So he was Venice’s best representative: he came from somewhere else.