An Enlarged Heart (2 page)

A
fter a time life became more ordinary. Although my husband had been content on his own to live with a hot plate and a bedroll, he attacked the apartment. The layers of paint and paper came down. The walls were now the smooth color of an eggshell. The tiny kitchen with its leaking icebox vanished. Over the shiny new sink a Rube Goldberg contraption funneled the water from drying dishes directly into the drain. I knew now how to make chocolate mousse. In a space no wider than an arm span, I produced turkey galantine,
ouefs mollets,
a tarte tatin. The pitted floor was painted turquoise blue, and the Dutch door where I had sat absentmindedly chipping paint with my fingernail was replaced with one fretted with iron work, made of tempered glass. Except for the bed, which could only fit in the bedroom sideways, the only place to sit down was a low sofa which had turned up, its walnut frame in pieces, in a friend's barn. I had covered it, impracticably, in ivory silk twill overlaid with green stripes and flowers, the choice of a person who has not yet encountered family life. Much later, when I married again, my second husband conceived an extraordinary disdain for this sofa. It annoys him that it is a late Victorian copy of an early-nineteenth-century design. It sits now in the corner of the dining room of the house, by the long windows, where it was carried four Christmas Eves ago, at my insistence, so there would be a place where we could sit to look at the tree. The upholstery, with the exception of the back, which has held up, is in tatters, made somewhat worse by my attempt to recover it myself in fawn-colored velvet, which is now, in its turn, stained by cats, ground-in Easter candy, and spilled wine, and piled with stacks of tax returns and unread issues of
Maine Antique
Digest,
the pages filled with grainy photographs of Shaker cabinets and old weathervanes. At some point the sofa acquired a confederate in a chair, which some friends gave to us when they left New York for New Mexico, which I meant to cover in matching twill. There was not enough, and the chair back, once a clear strong pink with yellow starbursts from a second leftover bolt, is now the color of a faded strawberry stain and the starbursts have dimmed. Last week I moved it upstairs to the bedroom, where for the time being it sits like a guest, unencumbered, because we have not yet taken its presence enough for granted to drop laundry and newspapers on it as we pass.

W
hen it became clear that my first husband and I could not spend the rest of our days in the tiny apartment, I began, in a desultory way, reading the classified section of the newspaper. I wanted to move at that time because I wanted to have a baby. The apartment was up four narrow flights of stairs, past Marina and the screamers. It was clearly impossible that we would ever find anything that we could afford, but the reading itself was not unpleasant. One advertisement: six rooms on park, French windows, secure building, rent or buy. I went to see it. It was next to a dangerous park. To get there, I walked down a deserted street, a street that is not in the least deserted now. There were many things wrong with this apartment. A lurid mural in the long hallway had been inadequately whitewashed, and loose wires snaked along the baseboard. Plaster from the bathroom ceiling filled the tub, and water was leaking out of the refrigerator onto the kitchen floor. Before the owners, who had lived in the apartment only three years, had taken possession, the apartment had been lived in for forty years by three deaf sisters, and above each door was a light bell, which flashed if the doorbell rang. The owners had punched a hole from the kitchen into the living room, so that, standing in the kitchen, you could see the view, but the work had not been finished and little mounds of crumpled wallboard had settled on the counter. In order to punch this hole, they had destroyed the original kitchen cabinetry and put up plank shelving to replace it. The back bedroom, which received hardly any light, was painted dark blue. The three rooms that faced the park and the view had been painted pink, yellow, and pale green by hand, by the woman who now owned the apartment. She and her husband, M——, had separated. He was a stonemason, and it was to him that the apartment owed its deep green marble counters and the columns in the living room. The casement French doors opened onto the view and the church steeple. Both were the color of oxidized copper. Beyond the door was a wrought-iron balcony, big enough for flower boxes. The doors closed with an old-fashioned latch and the handle had been touched so often that the brass glowed. It was shaped like an egg, and cool in my hand. I fell in love with the latch and the view.

I called my husband and told him I had found an apartment. It turned out that now the apartment could not be rented, the owner wanted only to sell it. I discussed the previous owner's follies with the broker: the whitewash, the cost of stripping the pink, yellow, and green impasto. Secretly I loved the sunset-colored rooms and could not have cared less about the whitewash. I was in love with the brass handle, and the lobby of the building, which had a white-and-black terrazzo floor, and which I associated in my mind with paintings of Dutch interiors. The price came down a little. Her lawyer, it turned out, had gone to high school with a friend. The price came down a little more. On the day we moved, the movers were eight hours late.

When we moved into the new apartment we were childless. If one of us played the radio down the hall the other could not hear it; after the old place this seemed miraculous, but in the years that followed the silence wore off, because after I had a child there was nothing in my house that I did not listen for, and my hearing became like that of a fox in a forest, pricked by every rustle in the leaves. In the decade I lived in the apartment my elder daughter was born, and a little while after that her father no longer lived with us. A very tall college girl who looked like Alice in Wonderland came to take care of her while I worked. That same year a woman who lived on the courtyard of the building went mad and, wearing nothing at all, screamed epithets out the window.

The apartment became crowded. There were now three children—my daughter, and my second husband's son and daughter, my stepchildren—and two cats, who demolished the low sofa. We inherited my grandmother's grand piano. Because I was so often up in the night, even now I could find my way in the dark in that apartment. It had an old parquet floor. One child sleepwalked. At night when it was warm, we kept the French doors wide open until we discovered this. As if nothing had happened, my daughter's father began to come back and occasionally sit at the table. The children ate pasta with tomato sauce and chocolate pudding and cinnamon toast. When the baby was born she slept in our room and then moved into the children's room, and her eldest sister moved out and slept under the piano. There was a tiny television near the piano, and the children sat on the narrow, spoiled sofa and watch films, Fred Astaire in
Top Hat,
or Yul Brynner in
The King and I.
They were mad for these films and would have watched them every night if we had let them. They are still engrossed in films, but later they simply rented any kind of movie imaginable, and watched them on a large screen in the basement of the house where we live now, on a couch we found on the street and lugged home in the rain, and half the time we pretended we didn't know what they are watching, and half the time we swooped down on them and forbade them from watching whatever happened to be on, in the spirit of keeping the upper hand.

Near the end of our tenure in the apartment the brass knob on the French doors started to come off in my hand. At first it was easy to put back on, but after a while it was clear that the doors themselves would have to be replaced. We each knew, secretly, this would not happen. After all, we had fixed nothing in the apartment. From the time I had first moved in, in another life, the apartment had stayed as it was—the plank shelves in the kitchen, the peeling paint, the sunset-colored walls in the living room. When we decided to move it was because one morning there were so many people in the long cramped hall trying to find coats and boots and book bags that it was impossible for anyone to leave, and so it came to us that we would have to leave forever.

When we did, we moved into a house that for years our gaze had fallen on unknowingly, standing below us in the view, a few blocks north of the church. It had been derelict before we bought it, and we lived like vagabonds in its rebuilt rooms and staircases. The puckered surfaces of my grandmother's piano settled next to the stairs. When that night Joan came in her violet coat we sat on the low sofa, whose embroidery had been picked out now entirely by cats and bored children, and she told me what she knew, that her troubles had come from the apartment—she was now going to take down its walls and the long hall, because according to Chinese principles, when you opened the door of the apartment, love flew down the hall and out the window, into the view of the tree and tall green church steeple. She did not hold it against me, or if she did she did not say so, that her husband was the third man named M—— whose marriage had broken up in that apartment in fifteen years, which, we agreed, was peculiar.

When we first acquire what will become our memories, we do not recognize them or know how and when we will go back to them or what they will mean. When we moved to this house we thought for a moment that we would live here forever, but because we are older the years fold and spill. One still morning I was reading at my desk and the door to a closet suddenly shut and then opened again, like a dreamer exhaling. Eventually I will have the despised sofa recovered. By then we will be elsewhere.

Sperlonga

T
he first time we went to Sperlonga it was by accident. We were in Rome. The plan was to stay there for a week or so, and then travel north, by car. We would stop at Siena, see the pictures by Piero della Francesca in Arezzo, Montalcino, and Borgo San Sepolcro, and then drive to Assisi. I had an old friend who was living in the hills above Assisi in an old schoolhouse. I thought we would visit her. I was then just married for the first time. We had been married for five days when we left Rome for Sperlonga.

In Rome, my husband and I had taken a taxi for what then seemed like an obscene amount of money (lira then were a spendthrift's dream; spending millions and millions for a train ride, we were rich as Croesus, or Onassis, as we would have said in those days). The taxi deposited us in a section west of the center, which consisted of tall, flat apartment buildings that had been constructed along Fascist lines in the 1960s, when Rome expanded after the war. The apartment belonged to a woman called Ivetta. Ivetta had been my brother's Italian teacher. She had short gray hair, dressed in black, chain-smoked, and had the face of a Roman senator. One eye was a dreamy blue-green, the other brown. Her eyes were so different that the shadows her lids and brows cast over them were singular—her right blue eye seemed capable of tenderness while the brown was not. In the beginning, when my brother had written to Ivetta to ask whether we might stay in the apartment while she was away, the understanding he received in return was that during the week of our visit to Rome she would be in Sperlonga, where she had a house, and where she spent most of the summer and many weekends in the spring and the fall. She offered us the apartment, and sent us, via my brother, a telephone number in Sperlonga should we need to contact her. She added that she would apprise the concierge, who had a flat on the
seconde storia,
of our arrival and give him a set of keys that he would give to us.

But when we arrived in the taxi, a Fiat, and were deposited on the sidewalk in front of the building, he was not there. I had the envelope from my brother in my pocket and I carefully scrutinized the address and the building number. Traveling has always made me nervous, and until quite recently new places have frightened me: I live in a house which is four blocks from where I was born, and except for some years of my childhood and when I was away at school, I have always lived within a mile of where I am now. It has always been important to me to be able to visualize where I will be. When I had imagined the week my husband and I would spend in Rome I'd pictured a narrow window set in a deep casement, and a tub of geraniums on the sill.

But the building was tall, forbidding, flat faced. The taxi disappeared, snorting. It had smelled of coffee and cigarette smoke and the smell of the smoke lingered in my hair, in the cool morning. I hadn't slept at all on the airplane and I could feel the pockets of sleep in my joints. It was May. Above the flat roofs of the apartment buildings the sky was full of skittering clouds. The building was entered through large plate-glass doors with metal frames, and we carried our bags through the doors and put them on the floor of the lobby. The floor was made of green marble, set in squares. My husband buzzed the concierge's apartment: the label on the mailbox, into which a buzzer was inserted, like a blind eye, said “Testa.” My then-husband's father's family is Italian. His last name is Italian, as is our daughter's. When he is in Italy, although he knows very little of the language and was brought up entirely in a neighborhood of peeling three-story houses in a New England town that has, in the way of so many towns, become and stayed derelict, when he is in Italy, he becomes progressively more Italian. His gestures become broader. While he will not step inside a church when we are home, in Italy he makes excuses to walk into every church in every small town, and when he is there he always dips his fingers in holy water.

But this was our first time together in Italy, and all of this was to come. That morning his response was to hold the buzzer on the concierge's mailbox for longer and longer intervals, until the lobby filled with buzzing. It was like being inside a hive. A few years later, when we were looking for a place to live, we found a house in a field that I loved. There were bees in the walls, and he cupped his hand against the beams and said,
Listen.

I was tired and my feet, which always swell on airplanes, were too large for my shoes. The crumpled airmail envelope in my hand, its blue the color of the sky that scraped the top of the buildings, noted Ivetta's apartment number. I pressed it. Almost immediately, a voice answered: low, made of amber even in the machine's raspy throat. Ivetta was not in Sperlonga, she was in Rome. She did not know when we were coming and so she had waited this morning for us to arrive. We were to come up to the apartment.

The apartment was on the third floor of the building; it was the sort of apartment which takes up one floor, so that the elevator opened directly into the foyer. Later, in New York, I would become acquainted with this kind of apartment, with walking sticks and umbrellas helter-skelter in a stand, mail on the table, and toile wallpaper in the foyer, always an apartment which belonged to the parents of friends, and seemed unobtainable to anyone of our generation, like Studebakers, or pianos with ivory keys, but then I found this exotic—it was like stepping unprepared onto a stage. This room, too, was paved in green marble. In the middle of the floor was a white marble column, with a niche for a vase. The vase held a bouquet of flowers made out of beads on twisted wires. Ivetta, whom I had met a year before, in New Haven at my brother's graduation from college, was much as I remembered her: the two separate eyes, the shock of gray hair with a white forelock, the black clothes; today, a cashmere pullover, the neck stretched out so that it hung like a cowl, black pegged trousers, and black slippers. She wore thick silver hoops in her ears, and she was smoking a kind of unfiltered cigarette I have seen only in Italy, called Stop. The moment we entered the apartment she began speaking. Her English was quick, idiomatic, and Italian, the penultimate word of each sentence emphasized with a dip, a thickening of vowels that ended in a cocked consonant, as if each phrase were itself a word: the effect was of running feet, sliding into third base in a sandlot. She kissed me on each cheek; but she had not met my husband and when I introduced him she smiled and put out her hand. On her index finger she wore a silver ring with a large green stone. Her fourth finger was bare. My husband then—and now, still—has very large hands: he is a painter but he has worked as a commercial fisherman and as a builder, and his hands are muscular and covered with tiny scars. Now, years later, he is missing half of the index finger on his left hand, but then his hands were intact.

His beard, which he kept cropped short, was black then and he had a trick of staying very still and looking at you like a mythical beast, a griffin or a cat who might speak if you stayed very still. He used this look on Ivetta and not surprisingly she was affected by it. She took a step back, glanced at me with a look I can now see was at once affectionate and worried, as well as, for an instant, predatory, then threw up her hands. She was not, as we could see, she explained, in Sperlonga. She was here in Rome, because she did not want to leave the apartment. Indeed she had not left the apartment for a week, except to visit her mother in her villa in Trastevere. Did we want something to drink? We did. It was eleven o'clock in the morning. She left the foyer and emerged moments later with tall glasses filled with limonata and ice. She made the sign of the cross. Her mother was dying in Trastevere. The mint in the limonata was from her garden. In Trastevere, she told us, through the whole house, which was four stories and looked at the river with twelve eyes, all shutters were closed because her mother could no longer stand the light. She went every day and sat with her mother for three hours in the dark. She could not go to Sperlonga because her mother was dying. She crossed herself again. We were still standing in our traveling clothes among our bags, holding the tall sweaty glasses of limonata.

She was very sorry that she was still in Rome when we had expected to have the apartment to ourselves. We shook our heads: it was generous of her to have us in the apartment at all. Standing in the foyer, I could see that the apartment was very large. Two open doors leading away from the marble pillar showed vistas of long halls, in which some doors were open and some shut. At Ivetta's direction, it was down one of these corridors where we put our bags, in a square room painted pale green. The bed had a white coverlet. Two reading lamps were placed on either end of the headboard, which was padded in pale green damask.

We had left New York in a flurry of packing and arguments and at the moment all I wanted in the world was to lie down on the white bed and hone my skull against the green damask. The thought of being married tired me: I wanted to be alone so that I could see what I could make of it. I could feel my bones under my skin. The moment we put our bags by the door Ivetta called from the other end of the apartment. We must have something to eat! There was nothing for it. At the end of the hall Ivetta had laid out plates in the kitchen: cheese, olives, ham. She was paring off slices of bread onto a wooden board. The bread had come from the bakery near her mother's house, the bakery where she had gone as a girl. The olives were from Sperlonga. Had we been to Sperlonga? No? She sighed, wiping her hands free of bread crumbs on her trousers. Now that we were here in Rome, perhaps we should go.

Since we had just arrived in Rome there was no answer to this. I ventured that she had said that she could not go to Sperlonga because her mother was dying in Trastevere. Her mother, she said, had been dying for a long time. She made a sweeping gesture with her hand, and the cigarette ash fell in an arc on the table. Her mother could die forever, that was the truth. The truth was that she had not gone to Sperlonga because she did not want to go alone. Since my brother had written to her, her husband of twenty-five years had left her, she had discovered that he was in love with another woman—here she used an exclamation in Italian that was unfamiliar to me—a woman young enough to be his daughter, and she was in the apartment in Rome because her mother had told her not to leave the apartment because possession was nine tenths of the law and the apartment was in the name of her husband. She could not stand it here in Rome. If she was in Rome it was expected that she would go and see her mother every day, in the dark house.

The kitchen was full of hot white light. Ivetta had drawn the curtains, but they were white, sheer curtains smocked in a honeycomb pattern. Diamonds of light danced on the white walls, and the floor, which was also white pickled wood. I was uninterested in food. When I get off an airplane I usually feel for many hours as if my body were continuing to hurtle through space—a body that should be fed on nitrogen gas, or gasoline. My husband was famished. He made a huge sandwich with the bread, the cheese, and the ham—so it was just as well that I was not very hungry.

The olives tasted of rosemary and smelled of tar. Ivetta was drinking white wine. She asked about my brother and about my parents, whom she had met. She was very fond of my brother, who has a gift for languages. If he is on a train in a new country he can start the journey knowing a few tourist phrases—ticket, hotel, coffee, restaurant—and at his destination he will be discussing geology. My brother was trained as a geologist. I on the other hand have only schoolgirl French, which by now has been reduced to a small stock of endearments and imprecations. My ear for languages, unlike my brother's, is almost nonexistent. At school I was given a deferment from the language requirement, because I was hopeless. This was a sorrow to me. It is clear to me that an educated person speaks and reads four or five languages well; I speak and write only English, and often I find that what I mean to say, even in English, evades me or ends up meaning something I didn't intend to say at all.

My husband ate his sandwich. He had finished his limonata and Ivetta now poured coffee into espresso cups. The cups were white porcelain with gold rims. A great-aunt of mine, who lived in Palm Beach, had an identical set of cups, and for a moment the coincidence startled me. Once a few years later, after our daughter was born, I was sitting on a sofa in an apartment on Pierrepont Street, in Brooklyn, a street that led down to a windy playground from which my friend and I had just returned with our little girls. I noticed that the coffee table on which we had put our mugs and the children's spouted cups was the same table that had been in my grandmother's apartment in Chelsea, a mahogany oblong with gilded moldings and small claw feet.

You have my grandmother's table, I said. No, I do not, said my friend. It was a table she had found in a shop on Atlantic Avenue. The top was dusty and I ran my finger through it. Those were the days when the children were small and there was so little time for things to be clean before they were covered again with juice and spilled milk. I wiped my fingers on my skirt, a patchwork blue cotton wrap skirt whose tie was forever coming undone. It was a twin to a similar skirt that I had lost and then replaced with this one, which then later turned up in a used-clothing store in Cambridge, when I went searching for treasure with the daughter, then on my lap, all grown up, confirming what we already knew: the things we love find us as we find them. That morning in Rome, with the light coming through the windows, Ivetta wiped her hands on her skirt and announced, as we sat sipping our coffee—too strong for me, but not for my husband, who had grown up with a drop of coffee in his milk—that after all, it was hot, she did not want to stay in Rome. So what if her husband was in Sperlonga? She wanted to go to Sperlonga and that was what she would do. We should see Sperlonga, she said, lighting her cigarette.

We would go that afternoon.

My husband and I looked at each other. We had planned to spend a week in Rome. We had no plans to go to Sperlonga. I had been to Rome once before without him, with a college boyfriend. What I remembered most clearly were heated exchanges about the price of pensiones, and walking around in the blazing sun in the Forum with a battered Blue Guide, pretending to be not a character in Henry James, but a character, I think now, in a Merchant Ivory production of a Henry James novel. I had read myself through
The Portrait of a Lady
in school, and pretended to love
What Maisie Knew,
but as Maisie, it was clear, knew more than I did at twenty, I had given up. The first paragraph of
The Golden Bowl
I knew too well; I had not recovered making it known, in a class at school, that I had confused that book with
The Golden Notebook,
which I had read and also misunderstood. We arranged with Ivetta that we would go for three days with her, to Sperlonga, in her car. It would be easy to return to Rome by train, she said. And who knew? She might be happy in Sperlonga and stay for the month as she usually did. It would be impossible, she said, to be more unhappy in Sperlonga than she was now in Rome, slinking around the apartment in her bathrobe, summoned daily to Trastevere to sit with her mother, who demanded items to be brought to her which were unattainable in Rome at that time of year: figs, and chestnuts, as if it were autumn, not the beginning of summer!