Darling? Read online

  We’d thought we were pushing outward, but really we were heading into the center: I looked down an alley and saw the sign for Harry’s Bar. And San Marco opened before us, flooded, the herds of off-season tourists keeping to the wooden walkways while above them the gilded stallions pranced, the great figures emerged from the medieval clock to beat the hours, the fairy-tale bridges crossed into the torture cells. “La Serenissima,” Garrett said rhapsodically, as if he knew something.

  “Shall we go through the palazzo?” he asked, and I thought, he wishes I was some odd lot he’d met on a bus, an Experience, like Venice, or the woman who peed in her shoes. There was no escaping our question: suddenly we were in a ballroom which was painted with hundreds of women, round breasted, rose-nippled—I wanted to touch them myself—but when Garrett looked up at them the sight turned bitter and I remembered I had been cast out of this pantheon. In the next room was a painting of Saint Agatha, proffering her severed breasts like custards on a tray. Garrett took umbrage at a crucifixion—Christ’s belly looked soft. “He looks like a woman!” he said in anger. “He was a carpenter, he would have been solid!”

  “No one looks his best during crucifixion,” I tried to explain, but he wouldn’t have it, so I pulled him on to the Miracoli, the only place in that city of unholy fascinations where one could imagine praying. Across the square was a little restaurant, low and dark, with some kind of party roaring—we took the last seats, in a corner so the waitress had to squeeze behind the celebrants to reach us and for a long time we were left alone. We looked past each other, down at the table, up into the rafters.… Then the waitress passed a carafe of wine through the party to us. As I poured it our eyes met, by chance; we both looked quickly away.

  “Garrett,” I said. “I’m sure you don’t mean to hurt me.…”

  “I hate having to hurt you,” he agreed angrily, as if it were essential that he hurt me, and unseemly of me to upset him by mentioning it. After a while he added, with contempt, “What happens between us isn’t important. Look beyond yourself. Accept. Did you read the paper this morning?” No, and I’d thought him a fool to do so, while the train passed over the long causeway into the city, which hovered over its own shimmering reflection in the lagoon. “Well, if you want to know about suffering…”

  And he began to talk about American foreign policy, in Nicaragua, Haiti, Macedonia, Iraq—all the complexities, mistakes, and hypocrisies—he’s at work all the time, worrying the rage among nations as if the world were a Chinese puzzle he might solve. He talked and talked until the waitress brought him a plate of tiny calamari fried whole: tasting one he lost his train of thought.

  “I thought I ordered the pesto,” he said after he’d eaten half of them.

  “It’s so loud, I don’t think she could really hear us,” I said. The spirit of the party broke over us like a wave, a joyful shock that stood everything on its head so my little tragedy looked entirely amusing all of a sudden. “I mean, that’s why one travels, isn’t it?” I said, “So as to order the pesto and get the calamari, and have it all to remember.”

  “That’s not why I travel,” he said grimly, and I thought No, he travels in the hope of becoming someone like our Nabokov, so sophisticated life can’t get a firm grip on him. And here he found himself with a mouth full of tentacles—of course it was disappointing.

  “If people like us didn’t love each other, need each other, then we could die like ants under a shoe—so what?”

  His face softened, and I remembered that for all he reads, and knows, still he sees me as wise—an endearing thing in a man.

  “When you were lost, in Frankfurt—,” he said, taking my hands across the table, his face full of feeling.

  “You were the one who was lost in Frankfurt!”

  “Let’s stay the night here,” he said. His hands were shaking, it reminded me of our first meetings when I was so young and everything was so wrong between us that loving him seemed a great bold act of idiotic faith and I wanted only to open myself up to him and say “Come, come inside,” and when we went out to dinner he couldn’t stand up afterward lest the whole world see his erection.

  “Avete camere libre?” I asked, at the Locanda Garibaldi, “con un letto matrimoniale?” The innkeeper burst into Italian—did Garrett see how I slipped into the language?—by instinctive affinity. We were given a small chamber whose window opened onto a balcony, which looked down a shaft from which a fetid, watery odor arose: the canal. When I washed my face the water from the sink ran out and dripped over the edge. I called Etta from the desk phone.

  “The strike’s still on. I think we’d better stay here tonight,” I said.

  “But, dinner…”

  “You know how long that train takes—we’d never get there in time,” I said. “And I know Gino can’t take time to come get us. So, we’ll be back tomorrow and—and we’ll take you all out for dinner, how about that?”

  “Gino likes to eat at home.”

  As we went down the hallway Garrett slid his hand around to squeeze my breast like a teenager. He was resigned to me with all my failings—could I not reconcile myself to him? In the room he pulled my sweater over my head and I kissed him as if I were playing his lover in a movie. I wondered if my torment was some kind of penance: hadn’t I loved sex mostly out of pleasure in the munificence of my body, the tender amazement it would raise in a man’s eyes, the way one little arch of my back could incite …

  “You’re so beautiful,” Garrett said, in mourning for the thing that no longer moved him. He’ll destroy me out of curiosity, I thought—he wants to know what I look like in pain. When he touched me I expected his hands to burn me, but I wanted the child and I put the rest out of my mind, knelt on the bed beside him and let my breasts fall into his hands. He seemed bewitched, overcome—he didn’t know my actions were satirical, the motions of the dream woman he wanted me to be. In the end he nestled in against me, feeling, I guessed, forgiven, saying “Giudecca tomorrow,” so sleepily. I dreamed my milk wouldn’t come and I was trying to cut off my nipple with a pair of scissors, so the baby would have something at least to drink.

  * * *

  “We’ve started trying … for a baby, I mean,” I told Etta the next night, thinking that if I could hit on a subject she had feeling for I’d bring some color to her cheeks.

  “That’s wonderful,” she said, without turning from the sink. “I didn’t know you wanted children.” Then, to herself really, as if she could speak freely since no one ever heard her: “You wanted me to kill mine.”

  “What?”

  A terrible look crossed her face, but then a spark jumped and she turned to look me in the eye. “You told me to have an abortion,” she said. “You killed my art, you’d have killed my marriage, you told me to kill my baby, and you painted that portrait that looks as if I’m dead already, because you wish I was. You gave me a cookbook … out of all you have to give.”

  “I … Etta, I…,” I said, thinking: Yes, I wanted to be free of you, I didn’t have the strength to drag you any further. At least I’m sick with guilt about it, isn’t that enough? “I didn’t want you condemned to an unhappy marriage,” I heard myself saying, and was surprised to remember this was true—I wasn’t entirely a gorgon. With that a geyser of bile erupted, and I wanted to ask her how she’d liked lying around cozy at home while I banged my head on the doors of the world so she could float through them in my wake. Not to mention my coloring book that she’d filled up every page of thirty years ago, insisting she was entitled to every single thing I owned—

  She saved me, snapping, “I don’t want to talk about it,” and calling angrily for Gino.

  Garrett came instead—“He took the kids to Marco’s,” he said. “Can I do something?”

  “No, no, it’s just that we’re having a special dinner,” she said. “Polenta, and … Well, it’s a surprise, really—Gino’s favorite … real Italian … We almost never have them, but they were in the market this morning … You’ll s
ee.”

  “The suspense, the intrigue!” I said, pushing away from the argument, and she laughed. There, I thought, she’s got out the venom, and there’s something left, something real. Here we were in the kitchen together like when we young, the only difference being that we weren’t lip-synching to the Supremes. She turned on the broiler and handed me the dripping chicory head to tear up for salad. There was the smell of onions in olive oil and Etta sifted the cornmeal over the pot with one hand, stirring with the other in a quiet, consoling rhythm. The boys came back with Gino and pulled me out with them to see the lizards dart along the outside wall.

  Then, “Come, come, don’t let it cool!” she was calling, and we sat down around a platter heaped with polenta, strewn with …

  “Songbirds!” Etta said. Charred corpses, sparrows or finches once, scattered as over a battlefield, their little beaks open, feet splayed upward, curled by the flames.

  Gino laughed. “Something different, eh? We used to have songbirds all the time when I was a boy. My father caught them and put them in the cage and when we had enough…”

  “Songbirds!” Garrett said with a smile playing at the corners of his mouth and a quick glance at me—here it was, history on toast. And here were we, appalled and amused together, as always, in absolute communication without saying a word. Gino plucked the last feathers from one of the birds and popped it into his mouth whole.

  “Good,” he said thoughtfully, chewing. “She’s a good cook, Etta.”

  “A wonderful cook,” I agreed, thinking that if only I’d encouraged her painting I’d see this vision on canvas instead of having to eat it.

  “Italia!” we toasted.

  When in Rome…, I thought, though I was not practicing diplomacy but bitter sisterhood: Etta must never get the better of me. Any hesitation would be taken as an insult, so I lifted a bird between fork and spoon, trying not to damage it further. Garrett, who can’t back away from a challenge, had taken five, and I heard a skull crack as he bit down.

  “Very good, delicious!” said he, who can’t bear to drop a lobster into a pot. I bit a bird in two at the belly so as to avoid its little beak—it tasted mostly of ashes.

  Gino cocked a brow and moved as if to give Garrett another helping.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t, I’ve had four already.”

  Gino leaned across the table and counted with his fork. “No, two,” he said.

  Etta fed Giorgio a spoonful of polenta. “They made me a little nervous, when I first came,” she said with some condescension, “but now I really like them. I mean, it’s no different than beef, really.” She still sounded ready for a fight. Had I imagined I could fall so easily into the flow of Italy, with no understanding of all she had to swallow? Well, then, more songbirds! Wasn’t she the gentle sister, the one who deserved all the babies and love? See the tender care she took, twisting off each little foot, adding it to the neat pile at the side of her plate. “I’m surprised ’Nardo had them this time of year,” she said.

  “They come in from China,” Gino said. “No Italian birdies left.”

  Garrett poured more wine, and I drank it, wondering if I ought to, but really it seemed impossible that I could be nourishing, or poisoning, some new being inside myself, a child who would inherit a legacy of love and rage like the one passed so long ago to Etta and me. I took a little scorched head in my mouth and snapped its neck with ease.

  “You didn’t need to go to so much trouble just for us, Etta,” I said. “We’re family.”

  Darling?

  Waiting at Karp’s office door, Daisy thought of Freud’s admission that women were still a dark continent to him, and so very nearly said “Dr. Livingstone!” when he appeared. She had insisted on a man, someone honest and exact whose tenderness would be hidden, of course, but vast. Seeing Karp she felt she was safe: he was stooped as under some ancient weight, his nervous fingers raked thin hair.… He extended a damp hand, and she relaxed: there would be no accidents of magnetism here. Daisy knew how to fall in love, how to let a man fall in love with her, but now that she was married, settled in life, this attribute had become a liability. It was like having an old gun around; you might lock it away in the attic, put it out of your mind, but sooner or later some rage or despair would remind you that just a few steps up the back staircase and into the dark, you’ll find the means to blow a big hole in the world.

  She had her rages and despairs listed on a notecard, and rattled them off for Karp: Hugh, her husband, was too gloomy. He had refused her a child, and out with the baby had gone the whole marriage. He touched her now as if she were an unexploded bomb. Not that she couldn’t manage, she was an excellent manager—all lives are compromised after all, God knew she was lucky, living in an old whaling port where the feel of history (dark, cold, and fear, transmuted by nostalgia and electricity into a sense of mysterious comfort and intrigue) was still resident in the narrow streets so that vacationers yearned for a keepsake of that time. Daisy kept an antique shop. She had been saved from an anxious, threadbare life: she ought to have been grateful. A marriage requires sacrifice.…

  She glanced over at Karp: he’d slid down in his chair and was absently rubbing his neck, craning it, absorbed in some sensual agony, while she went on in a dull querulous voice—“I’m sorry,” she said, “I need to be less dependent, I expect so much.…”

  “You feel there are people who make do with less love and encouragement than you, and you’d like to be more like them, so you wouldn’t be lonely and sad.”

  “I didn’t say lonely and sad.”

  “Maybe not. Next week then?”

  It was a disappointment—nothing had happened. But then, what was he supposed to do, turn into Fred Astaire and dance her up the wall? One is ridiculous, she thought, driving the hundred miles home from Boston, and seeing a bumper sticker that read PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS AND SENSELESS BEAUTY, considered ramming the car it was affixed to and putting its sentimental occupants out of their bathetic misery. Courage, that’s what was needed, courage in the face of the smallness of life. Hers had come to this—a shop full of teacups and candlesticks, and a husband who skulked around the edges, hoping to avoid her notice—she spent her days staring into the past, while the present flowed around her, away. She turned up the radio; she needed to hear Mick Jagger.

  Her very admirable lack of concupiscence toward Karp lasted for some weeks, but the dreams wore away at her: Hugh’s twin, a man with a woman’s full breasts, was trying to seduce her. At first she resisted, then let him kiss her though she recovered herself before the erotic waters closed absolutely over, but he returned the next night and the next, until she gave in … upon which he evaporated, and she fell through the floor—

  “It was a long, narrow room.… Like this room, actually,” she reported dutifully to Karp. “Like an apartment I was thinking of moving into.”

  One of his eyebrows lifted a magnificent centimeter: “Thinking of a move?…”

  Of course, she had been thinking of moving in here, with him. The inner creature was measuring, calculating, deciding where to put up the paintings, which side of the bed she preferred … The outer creature blushed to blazing. She was the one who would have to walk past him as she left, holding tight to the doorframe lest a rip tide pull her into his arms.

  One is entirely absurd.

  “Immerse me, my sweet immersible you…” She sang all the time now; she was bursting with Morris S. Karp. How had she failed to recognize his beauty? He was all black and white—a sketch by a ferocious master. His speech was quick and full of thought, and he gestured with open hands like a conductor bringing his orchestra along. True, he was strangely recumbent—she had thought the patient reclined … instead he was spread before her like a banquet—his shoes with their soles flapping, his hips lush as a mermaid’s, the thin shirt touching him the way she wished to … His neckties were the key to it—each patterned with its own abstract expressionist galaxy, to show he welcomed the asymmetrical, the di
sharmonious, the peculiar. His air filter hummed in the corner—he was allergic to every germ and seed. Of course! He was a genius of susceptibility: everything affected him, Daisy’s thoughts and feelings no less than the motes rising in the stream of sunlight beside the blind.

  Men are made of longing; if you keep still long enough their souls will creep out and take a little nourishment from your cupped hand. So Daisy waited, she knew exactly how Karp would want her once he knew she wanted him; she could feel the print of his first kiss on her lips already. But the etiquette of the consulting room was so horribly restraining! No gifts, no savory dishes to set before him, no gorgeous dress, no letting her hand brush his, smiling into his eyes, taking his worries to her heart, laughing at his jokes, funny or otherwise.

  He wanted only the odd, awkward fragments that she usually pushed to the edge of her mind. Things she’d been ashamed of began to look like treasures because Karp would want to know them. It was true she was a snoop—she’d never been alone in a room without ransacking the drawers. And it seemed she was cruel by nature; her conversation was made of faux pas. Talking to an orphan she was bound to mention ancestry, people in wheelchairs heard how she loved to run, and once she’d found herself laying out her plans for a happy old age to a man on his deathbed; it was appalling.

  So, Karp said, she was searching for the secrets her benighted parents had missed, the wisdoms that might have kept them from harm—she dared not leave a stone unturned. She smiled miserably, a little cry ripped in her throat—those poor parents, two drowning people pulling each other down—they were long dead; there was no point in thinking about it all again—the main thing was to keep from going under herself. Yes, Karp said: She had all she could do to keep her head above water, while others, crippled, adopted, even dying, seemed blessed with the grace that she, with no one to learn from, had angrily, jealously lacked! Of course, she stayed away from humans, busied herself with their things—antiques are things passed down from generation to generation, no? Furnishing her doll’s house, he said, keeping the candle in the window in case her mother returned to earth and needed to find her. A sad thing, wasn’t it, a dollhouse with no child?