An Enlarged Heart (4 page)

The mozzarella, in its milky water, was sublime nursery food, tasting of grass and clouds. We ate it on the spot, with ends of bread we saved from breakfast. The third morning, after our coffee, we went for a swim. When we came for our cheese the girl behind the counter shrugged. The cheese was no good now. It was done. Finished. It was too hot in the middle of the day to swim or walk; at one in the afternoon all the shops closed, the pottery shop and the kiosk that sold postcards, the
latteria
and the
salumaria,
and we went back to the house and ate lunch with Ivetta. On one day, two of her cousins joined us, a man who owned a vineyard a little ways away, and who brought wine that tasted to me like leather, and his wife, who was also a cousin. They both had Ivetta's high brow and staccato way of speaking. To these cousins, in Italian, Ivetta lambasted her husband; the cousins agreed in vociferous voices, eating crespelle and tiny bits of soprassata, and shrimp marinated in hot pepper oil. Ivetta had one daughter and two sons, grown-up children, nevertheless, the cousins agreed, the marriage had been a mistake! She should have it annulled! Her cousin the vintner knew just the person. He would call him immediately! No, no, no—Ivetta waved her hands helplessly above her head. Perhaps he would see reason. Like Chiara's husband, the one who had the house that Tante Melina left?—her cousins nodded—maybe it's phase? Ridiculous, running around like that!

I understood only a little of this. The leathery wine coated my throat. After lunch, we napped in the room under the eaves. When I could not sleep I picked at the stitching of the satin blanket cover, which I rolled up into a second pillow—it was too hot for a blanket. The room smelled of the straw which was used for insulation under the roof. I read, in a desultory way,
The Golden Bowl,
often just the opening lines, “The Prince had always liked his London, when it had come to him; he was one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.” My copy, a paperback, had a detail from John Singer Sargent's
Repose
on the cover, a girl with a cloud of black hair, her head resting on a green sofa under a gold picture rail. Sometimes when I did sleep I would wake up and find my husband drawing me: I found this irritating—the pictures with my mouth open, and my hair in knots. Sometimes it was his gaze that woke me. In the afternoon, we went down the road to the beach.

Sperlonga is built on a promontory that faces the sea. Sometimes when we walked down the gravel drive to the beach from Ivetta's house—she never came with us, but worked on her translation of Pavese, in the afternoons—thin stripes of distant thunderstorms, deep purple, banded the horizon. The beach was unlike the beaches I knew, with high dunes and deserted strips of sand, where in May we walked fully dressed, in long pants and anoraks, backing up against the wind. Here it was hot and still. There were occasional small dogs on short leashes. The beach was narrow and backed up instead to kiosks that sold the inevitable orangiata, tiny glasses of wine, and stale paninis. To the west of our beach was the Grotto of Tiberius, built by the Emperor Tiberius, who loved the story of Odysseus, and commissioned huge statues to commemorate his voyage, including his ship heaved into the waves by Scylla and the blinding of the Cyclops. On the beach I read on a raffia blanket and my husband drew: the sea, the distant grottos, the sentinel stone towers that ring the harbor. We brought
acqua minerale
and bought the orangiata, whose bitter pulp stuck in my teeth. Sometimes we bought small hard biscuits that reminded my husband of the biscuits his Aunt Jenny baked in Rhode Island when he was a child, which he sucked on like stones.

We stayed five days. We did not meet Ivetta's husband; by the third day, she said, he had returned to Rome. From the Sperlonga house, she told us, he had taken a beautiful mohair blanket that her aunt had given them as a present: “What do I need with a blanket?” she said, spitting. It did not occur to me or to my husband at the time, that to listen to Ivetta's tale was odd, perhaps even dangerous, given that we were so recently married, nor did it seem to occur to her. In the evenings we sat with her in the little piazza where there were only small children kicking a ball but no boy with a Vespa mysteriously exiting at full speed, and people she had known all her life would come and speak to her, and commiserate, until the hour in the evening when she would seem to forget all about her calamity, and smoke her OKs.

Then it was time to leave. We wanted, after all, to be back in Rome, and from there to go to see our friend above Assisi, and to see if the waitress in Borgo San Sepolcro, who looked as if she herself stepped out of a Piero, was still there, with her blond hair pulled back and plaited into a sheaf of corn, in her grey turtleneck. On our last morning we had coffee with Ivetta in the piazza, and ate our milky cheese,
bocconcini
like small opals in a cup lined with leaves, and as I went to buy postcards I knew I wouldn't send, I realized I wanted a souvenir. Since it was still the beginning of the season many of the cubbyhole emporia that catered to tourists were closed, but there was one shop I had seen, down one of the bleached crab legs that led off from the high white shell of the Piazza della Repubblica. To its door, a little bell was attached. We rang it: Ivetta knew the owner; we went in. It was a treasure shop. There was some Murano glass, a tray of rings, a few pieces of dark heavy furniture, and a pair of earrings displayed on a piece of black velvet. The earrings were gold and shaped like shields, and in the center of each shield was a hummingbird's egg of coral. The shape of the earrings was perhaps fateful; Sperlonga, I knew, was famous for defending its treasures. In l957, after Roman relics were found in the Grotto of Tiberius, the Sperlongani blocked the road to Rome to prevent them from being taken away. The earrings were eighteenth century, said the proprietor, who was quick to tell us that the shop was open because he was a true Sperlongani; he lived above the shop year-round, in the
centro storico.

When I tried the earrings on, it was immediately clear to us all that in another life I had lost them and they were now being returned to me. I had come to Sperlonga, in this convoluted way, with the man I had just married, hoping I was carrying a baby, with a woman whose husband had disappeared as neatly as the boy on the Vespa had vanished night after night in another piazza into a house whose doorway was topped with an arch holding a madonna. My husband turned my face to the light. In that moment I wanted the earrings more than I had wanted anything before. But it was early in our trip. What if our money ran out? What if I found something else? The price came down; then it came down a little more. Anyway, it was never
occhio della testa,
as the Italians say, an eye out of the head. Still, the next morning when we drove north in our rented car I was without them.

I
n Sperlonga they paint the evil eye on doors and ceilings to ward off misfortune. Perhaps that day in the almost empty town I was afraid of attracting its gaze by taking such an easy pleasure. But really, I think it was a zest for miserliness, for hedging bets, that accounted for my not buying the earrings, and for that I am ashamed. In his preface to
The Golden Bowl
James writes, “The whole conduct of life consists of things done, which do other things in turn.” When we next heard from Ivetta, she wrote that the earrings were still in the shop; her mother was better; she had decided to stay, for a while, in Sperlonga; her husband had rented a different apartment in Rome, near San Giovanni—how he had the money she didn't know. When she next wrote, she mentioned neither the earrings nor her husband.

Some say the name Sperlonga means long hope. Later, I would have a brown-eyed daughter, and then quarrel irretrievably with her father, with whom I had sat in the green boat and who had smoked cheroots in the Piazza della Repubblica in Sperlonga, and much later, a blue-eyed one. They are both capable of tenderness and judgment. When I straighten out my jewelry, which I keep helter-skelter in an old shoe box, the girls say, Can I have this when you die? and laugh: I am their mother, I will never die. No one, yet, whom they love, has died. Often, dressing to go out, I have found myself searching for those earrings, as if I had bought them, so many years ago, and misplaced them.

Curious Yellow

T
wice this week I've seen women wearing yellow stockings, each time at the wide intersection in my neighborhood across from the Columbia University gates, a crossing that like a piazza in an Umbrian painting is a headland, dropping as it does precipitously to the river. One woman was buying papers from the Indian news dealer, the other was going down the steps to the subway, and in each instance I thought of the first time I saw a pair of yellow stockings.

It was in the seventies, in Ken Russell's film
Women in Love.
Gudrun, played by Glenda Jackson, and her sister, Ursula (Jennie Linden), are walking away from the camera, down a lane bordered by green fields. Ursula's clothes are careless, ordinary, except for her marigold stockings. They are talking animatedly. Gudrun's love affair with Gerald, who later freezes to death in the snow, is doomed. The second feature that day was
Sunday Bloody Sunday
written by Penelope Gilliatt and directed by John Schlesinger. Again Glenda Jackson appeared, now as a woman in love with a boy who is loved with implacable yearning by an older man.

The films became one in my mind, and for some time after this when I thought of what the future held I saw Glenda Jackson in
Sunday Bloody Sunday,
magically wearing Ursula's yellow stockings, saying
damn,
and making coffee by running the hot water tap over the grounds.

In the middle of the years when I carried around this ridiculous image I acquired a shabby office in a big building down the hall from the woman who had written
Sunday Bloody Sunday,
and became a rapt audience for her stiletto humor and her elliptical charm. Once in a while during the winter an ancient, beautifully made mustard wool suit would make an appearance. Sometimes she wore it with yellow stockings, and this costume—far better than the pair of stockings I'd long ago bought and sometimes even wore—kept alive for me the green lane and the two women walking and talking, and the flash of color.

In the way of premonitions, this image turned out not to be so ridiculous. I was often rushing, running late, and if not running hot water over the grounds, even worse, gulping yesterday's cold coffee as I clattered out the door. In the middle of those same years, I also kept in my mind, like a watch fob—my grandfather had owned a watch like that, and my mother kept it on a stand in a small glass case—the opening sentence of a book by Doris Lessing,
The Golden Notebook, “The two women were alone in the London flat,”
and, from a few pages later in that book, a paragraph about strawberries, which I wished I had written. Anna Wulf buys strawberries from a man selling them in the street; the man, like a truculent antihero in a novel by E. M. Forster, is angry at Anna that she is buying his strawberries: that is, that it is he who is selling them, and she who is buying them.

“With strawberries, wine, obviously,” said Anna greedily; and moved the spoon about among the fruit, feeling its soft sliding resistance, and the slipperiness of the cream under a gritty crust of sugar. Molly swiftly filled glasses with wine and set them on the white sill. The sunlight crystallized beside each glass on the white paint in quivering lozenges of crimson and yellow light, and the two women sat in the sunlight, sighing with pleasure and stretching their legs in the thin warmth, looking at the colours of the fruit in the bright bowls and at the red wine.

For a long time, until I retrieved this passage, I thought that the berries that Anna is so greedily eating were in blue bowls. But the blue bowls, it turns out, are a figment. Why blue bowls? Why not white, or brown earthenware? Even now, rereading, I am looking for the blue bowls—the blue bowls that are missing from the paragraph, as if, having read it so long ago, so many times, it was not a page in a book but a page of my own life, the way I conflate the yellow stockings worn by Glenda Jackson in a movie about women in love, with a movie in which she starred which is also about men in love, with the author of the first movie who wrote, sometimes, and then less frequently, and then not at all, in the office next door to mine on a floor in an office building where people sat in offices either writing or not writing.

The office was located near Bryant Park, which then did not look anything the way it looks now. Now it looks like Paris. There are iron benches and places to buy coffee and tasty sandwiches, and in the winter there is a skating rink. Then, it was littered with crumpled newspapers and sad pigeons which no one fed. Like many parks in the city then it was frequented mainly by drug addicts; the parks were fens where it wasn't usual for ordinary people to go except at great risk, because they wanted something badly that they couldn't get somewhere else. Now the parks are clean and bright: Let's meet in the park! we say to each other when the weather is fine. Now there are other dark places instead, and sometimes those dark places have been eradicated by other kinds of drugs whose job it is to make ordinary people lose their sense of menace and sorrow.

One feature of that office building was that it was possible to walk from one street to another by crossing the long lobby. If you entered on Forty-third Street you could exit on Forty-fourth Street without going outside. I was fascinated by this. I wasn't alone in my fascination: it was a kind of urban sleight of hand, in which the way out could always be other than the way in, in which nothing was a dead end; where there was always light at the end of the tunnel. Upstairs, on the eighteenth and nineteenth floors, where we had our warren of offices, this glint was a matter of fact: a mirror had been placed at the corner where the corridors intersected at right angles. The actual purpose of this was to enable the editor of the magazine to evade writers who might want to speak to him, but the result was that as you walked down the hall you encountered yourself, and often bumped into your own reflection. That this was a metaphor was not lost on anyone.

I alternately spent my days staring out the window and writing about garbage scows in the river and new-fangled pocket knives and the Irish Troubles and frocks that cost more than cars, and one day an exasperated colleague, a few years older than I, a man who wrote about race riots and the fall of governments, said to me, “Write what happened, not how it happened to you,” and I had no idea what he was talking about, and I stopped, for months, writing anything at all: I stopped seeing from one end of the corridor to the other. Around me in offices identical to mine women who were a decade or two older were teetering in lives whose common denominators were quick wit, cigarettes, divorce, suicide, and the kind of burnishing despair that takes an edge off gloss. When I walked down the hall I saw my reflection coming at me in the mirror. What was true about what they wrote about their lives, and what was not? I was too young to ask, or to know, or to know how to ask, or even to form that question. What mattered was not what was said, but how: the what was incurable, anyhow. After a time I began to write, instead, about other people, and one of those people was an artist who was interested in light: in one piece, a lantern projected the image of a window filled with yellow light on the wall. It looked as if the image were cast by a real window when it was not, and since then, whenever I see the light cast by a window on a nearby wall, I think of his image of imaginary yellow light. He was from Iceland, where it is cold and dark, and where people can freeze to death, in the snow.

In time the magazine for which I worked no longer had its offices in that building, and before we left, I retrieved the clock that had ticked in the eighteenth-floor hall, and hung it in my kitchen. Soon afterward I left the magazine, and then returned, and then left again, which is another story. But when I first started there—it was my first real job—within weeks it seemed inconceivable that I could ever work anywhere else, nor did I think I would, or could. This premise failed, as most do love affairs which are based on fate and ardor: I was not aware then that I was on the brink of a world that was about to end, as the writer in the mustard suit told me, when it did, “Not with a banger, but with a wimpy,” deflecting as she knew how to do, grief with wit.

In all the years that followed I did not return to that building, until recently. It was now filled with other tenants. I had a meeting there, to discuss finances, at which I have never been very adept. That lack of dexterity had resulted in the meeting, in which it was made clear to me that drastic measures needed to be taken, measures that would mean breaking up the house where I had lived where the clock ticked merrily in the kitchen over the blue pantry door. But although I had been given the address twice over the phone, I'd lost it. On the way there I had had to call and be told the address for a third time; even then, I transposed the numbers until I was under the awning, where almost every day more than two decades ago, the man I was in love with waited for me at lunchtime, cupping his hands to keep the yellow feather of the match he was lighting out of the wind that snaked off Sixth Avenue. We would go, later that evening, to see
I Am Curious (Yellow),
or
Badlands,
or
Les enfants du paradis,
fifty blocks uptown, on Ninety-fourth Street, at the Thalia. The filthy seats in the theater tilted backward, so that the images on the screen threatened to topple and smother you.

I was very young when I began to come every day to that building. To return was to dive into a sea from which I had never emerged; a body of water in which I had barely sprouted limbs. The elevator was a bathysphere. It was a grand joke: to arrive there for a meeting whose subject was fecklessness, in the very place where I had learned and tried to resist the pull of that particular cataract—a life in which an angular woman nearing middle age, invented by a woman who kept a mustard suit for thirty years, would try to divest herself of longing in a London flat by grinding her foot into cigarette ash that had fallen onto her carpet. The kind of woman who would herself keep a mustard suit for thirty years, because it was a very good suit and she didn't have the money to replace it. A woman wearing yellow stockings the color of candlelight whose lover would freeze death.

A view from one street into another. A ridiculous image that, because I carried it with me, became true. When I began to keep house myself, I bought blue bowls because I thought that the strawberries eaten so greedily by Anna Wulf had been eaten from blue bowls, encrusted with sugar.

When I reread the passage I also knew that the two women talking animatedly in
Women in Love,
for me, had also become the two women alone in the London flat, and that Anna Wulf, who is waiting for Richard, the father of her child, to whom she is no longer married, had become Glenda Jackson in
Sunday Bloody Sunday,
who, when she takes care of five children for friends on the weekend, narrowly escapes losing one of those children—the eldest child, the officious one—when the dog, for which she is also responsible, runs into the street and is killed. And it was lost on me, then, that the real image I would take away from that film wasn't the woman grinding out her cigarette in the carpet, but the mayhem of years spent with children, that would influence what I made of my life.

What does it mean to conflate? Is it to tell lies? Much later, when I read Antonia Byatt's novel
Babel Tower,
in a chapter toward the middle of the book it is brought home to the protagonist, Frederica, by her lawyer that she is in danger of losing custody of her child if she continues to insist on living with a man with whom she is in love, whose name is Richard. In a previous novel,
Still Life,
Frederica's sister, Stephanie, who is more loveable than she, less wiry, less intensely preoccupied, not inclined, as is Frederica, to calling old friends from pay telephones in the middle of the night, is electrocuted when she looks under her refrigerator, which is not grounded, for a wedding ring which has slipped off her finger. When in our old apartment we finally bought a new refrigerator, after years of bailing out the vegetable bin with a measuring cup, we found among the lost things underneath, barrettes tiny enough to hold baby hair, a silver cake spoon, a bank card belonging to my daughter's father, pencils embossed with the names of schools the children hadn't attended in years, and the skeleton of a baby bat. Was it a bat? Or was it a mouse? Or was that a mouse found elsewhere? And all the while I thought, sweeping it up, deciding what to save,
Be careful.

Frederica, like Glenda Jackson in
Sunday Bloody Sunday,
has red hair. Does she, in the novel, as I think she does, wear yellow stockings? Am I misremembering? Thinking about this, I go down to the kitchen to look for the blue bowls, which are not there. When I watched the movie with two of my daughters, who between them have two mothers and two fathers, in the bottom of the house where they grew up, they were bewildered: Why does she stay with him if he is so awful to her? they asked, and marveled at the telephone wires connecting London, and the old-fashioned answering service. That two men loved each other was not interesting to them.

In the house where I live now, east of the windy intersection and the park, the blue bowls I bought years ago quiver in lozenges of yellow light, a fiction born of a fiction. What was it, after all, that happened? One day in the office building I heard a thud next door, and went to check. She was wearing a brown suit, not the yellow one. Her red hair was the color of autumn leaves. I was very young, and it was the first time I had seen someone unconscious. I picked up the telephone. Twenty-five years later, a doppelganger of that yellow suit turned up in a mail-order catalog, as the “Sulfur Notre Dame Suit,” and I folded down the corner of the page. Outside the door in the house where I am now, two thousand miles away, in the San Juan Mountains, where I am because—because I am away from home, it is summer, and the children have scattered—hummingbirds dive at a feeder filled with sugar water. The yellow one is the avenger; his whir is the deepest. Greedy, he wants the sugar water the most. “If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction,” says Fabian, to Malvolio, who has been tricked into wearing yellow stockings. Yellow the color of old nicotine stains, yellow as a condiment, saffron, lemon, honey, turmeric, nothing substantial, not something to make a meal on, but no less for that a mark of Helios, the sharp and sustaining sun.