Another Insane Devotion (25 page)

Being a husband is also about action, which is why the husband's ideal literary form is narrative.
The Odyssey,
which is sometimes reckoned the first novel, is the story of a husband who's trying to get back to his wife. Most husbands don't have to do as much as Odysseus does to accomplish this, or for as long, and they don't get to do it with cute nymphs and a princess. They go out on the day's errands, buy some things for the missus, and stop at the fitness center for a sauna. There's a funeral where they have to pay respects. They make some business calls, have a little lunch. At a fund-raising event, a mean drunk tries to pick a fight with them; they leave shaken. Later, around the time they ought to be going home, they run into another drunk. It's the son of an old friend, grown up since they last saw him but he hasn't learned how to hold his liquor yet, and knowing the kinds of grief a drunk kid can get into, they tag along with him as he weaves in and out of every dive and blind pig in the city, even a whorehouse. God knows what would happen to the little dipshit if they weren't around to keep an eye on him. It's late, and the kid's still shwacked, so they take him home to crash on the sofa. The wife's asleep in the bedroom, or maybe pretending to be. No way of telling if she's mad at them for coming home so late or. So they lie down beside her, and in a while they fall asleep too. Change a few particulars and you have
Ulysses.

In narrative, order is crucial, chronological order especially. Consider how that story would read if the husband stopped by the house before the unpleasantness with the drunk. Consider an
Odyssey
in which the hero comes home in the first twenty
pages, kills the suitors, then leaves again to make time with Calypso. Sequencing is also essential to husbandry. A husband plows before he sows. He pays the rent before the premium cable. He buys heating oil before he buys a snowblower, though it would be nice to have one, especially after pulling his back like he did shoveling out the driveway last winter and getting a case of sciatica that his wife charmingly kept calling “ass-leg.” He doesn't book an Italian vacation before he finds a job or collects an advance from his publisher, and certainly not a month before he and his wife are supposed to move to another house. Before leaving the underground parking garage in a scenic village famed for its museum of Etruscan artifacts (and, he later learns, for its appearance in Stendhal's
On Love
), he makes sure he knows where the ticket is so that later he doesn't have to spend a quarter of an hour futilely slapping his pockets while behind him a queue of Italian cars grows longer and longer and their drivers honk at him in mounting, polyphonic fury. Before changing his return flight so that he can escort his wife and her new kitten from Florence to Milan, he demands more than a customer service representative's assurance over the phone that the airline will book his baggage straight through to New York, knowing that citing such assurance later to a desk clerk at the Milan airport, where his baggage has
not
been checked through, will have about as much weight as it did to insist, when as a child he was made the victim of grown-ups' peremptory rule changes, “But you
said
. . . ”

 

This was after I'd spent a half hour waiting for my bags to thump onto the carousel and then wrestled them upstairs to
the gate for New York, where a line of passengers shuffled forward beneath the high ceilings, crisscrossing other lines bound for Prague or Cairo or Miami. Incomprehensible announcements in many languages buffeted us. I tried cutting ahead; a guard yelled at me. “I'm supposed to be on that flight,” I told him. He shrugged. The shrug was a way of distancing himself from his own authority, of disguising “I don't want to help you” as “It can't be helped.” In that way, it was very Italian. F. had already boarded. An attendant let me call her from the counter. We exchanged despairing good-byes. Who knew how long I'd be stranded here? Abruptly, her tone lightened. “Gattino's doing really well,” she told me. “He hasn't made a peep.” I may have asked her if he missed me, and she may have sworn, in a voice rich with theatrical insincerity, that he did. I remember laughing, and I remember the attendant looking at me with what, given the circumstances, was probably surprise.

I spent the next hour or two waiting in front of various counters, wobbling between abjection and fury. (Under similar conditions, Italians went straight to fury: F. told me that on the flight over, she and her fellow passengers had been marooned for hours at this same airport, where the Italian men had expressed their displeasure by racing up and down the stairs, shouting oaths, and tearing off their suit jackets and flinging them to the floor.) Getting home less than three days later cost me another $800. Actually, if you count the price of the charmless airport hotel where I spent the night and ate the only bad meal I ever had in Italy, it cost me more.

 

A limitation of the lyric mode is that it typically enacts only one big feeling at a time, or sometimes a sequence of feelings like the rooms in a museum through which the visitor passes, looking first at the Cimabues, then the Giottos, the Botticellis, the Ghirlandaios, a Michelangelo displayed behind bulletproof glass. Somewhere there may be some early Masaccios. This limitation may be a natural consequence of the immense, transfixing energy those feelings possess, whether in themselves or through the amplification of poetic language. And it's true that looking back, the lover is likely to remember his feelings the same way. Each filled him so completely that to add even a dropperful of another emotion would have burst his heart. For this reason, even the most despairing lyric conveys a kind of joy. Few joys are greater than the joy of feeling one thing completely, to the utter exclusion of anything else. It's probably not too different from what the angels feel as they sing beneath the dome of heaven, only the angels feel it for eternity.

A husband rarely has the luxury of feeling one thing completely. He's too busy checking the entries in the Michelin guide and copying road directions from his laptop onto a piece of paper so his wife can read them to him as he drives instead of fumbling with his stupid BlackBerry. Much of the time, he doesn't know what he feels at all. And some of the feelings that impinge on his consciousness are so devoid of lyricism, so tepid and dishwater gray, that no poem could be written about them unless it were by Philip Larkin. The shame of hearing a
dozen drivers backed up at the exit of a parking garage sound their horns at him—of
feeling
the horns' blast like a blow between his shoulder blades—as he walks over to the
cassa
to purchase a new ticket, a shame compounded by the peevish thought that they could get out of here quicker if his wife would at least offer to pay the cashier so he could move the car as soon as the gate was raised. But she says her Italian isn't good enough, and wouldn't it be cowardly to subject her to the brays of the fuming motorists behind them, though maybe they wouldn't honk like that at a woman? No, they would.

The impatience that mars his pity as he watches her weeping over what is, after all, just a cat. Even as he feels this, he understands that “after all” and “just a cat” are phrases he will have to keep secret from her until the day he dies.

The white-knuckled anger of circling endlessly around the Aventine in his flimsy Lancia, crossing and recrossing the Ponte Sublicio or is it the Ponte Testaccio? Impossible to tell, since the traffic moves quickly and the streets don't have proper signs with their names on them, only stone plaques on the sides of buildings that might be legible to somebody on horseback, if the streets were better lit, which they aren't. With each circuit, he becomes more angry—
who built this fucking city?—
but also more afraid, because it seems they'll never find the street they're looking for, just keep whipping around and around until they run out of gas or get rear-ended by one of the cars behind them: by Italian standards, he's driving like somebody's
nonno
.

But his wife wants him to slow down. In the glow of the headlights, her skin is ashen, and the small vein above one eye
is throbbing. “Don't you know where we are?” she pleads. Through clenched teeth, he says, “In principle.” Her voice gets higher. She's tired; she's hungry; she's dehydrated. They should never have driven into Rome. He says she's right and imagines wrenching open the passenger door and kicking her into the street. She begins to whimper, a horrible sound. It's this that makes him pull over to a curb. “Okay,” he says, “we'll stop. Look, look, I'm stopping.” There is a space—he doesn't know if it's legal, but fuck it, let the fucking
polizia
give him a fucking ticket. He tells her to get out. She looks at him in fright. Can she have guessed what was in his mind a few moments ago? He makes his voice softer. “Let's get out and find something to drink.” He takes her by the hand and leads her to a little grocery store whose lights cast a bluish-white trapezoid onto the sidewalk. Stepping inside, he has the momentary illusion that they've entered a bodega in his old neighborhood in the city, a place where you could buy a bag of plantain chips and a Diet Coke: the Diet Coke in Italy is terrible. He asks for a bottle of water and hands it to her. “Drink,” he says. She protests. They don't know where they are. “Shut up,” he says, but he says it gently. “Just drink.” It's only watching her tilt her head back and take long, grateful swallows from the upended bottle—a creaturely gratitude that isn't directed at him but at the water itself—that he remembers he loves her.

 

We don't think of cats as beings that feel two things at once, but this is one explanation—as far as I know, only an anecdotal one—for why they sometimes lash their tails. And when Bitey was dying, F. noticed that Suki, who usually was just cranky,
seemed both angry and sad. For most of the night, she remained in the narrow hallway outside the bathroom where my cat sat listlessly in the tub. Her expression was unmistakably a glare. But once F. pointed out that her eyes were filled with liquid. The liquid was clear and bright, and it ran down the gray tabby's cheeks, and I don't think it's too great a stretch to call it tears. They may or may not have been tears of grief.

By the time New York appeared below us, it was dark. Most of my memories of landing there take place at night, though when I'd come back from Italy the year before, it was afternoon. That may be part of why it felt so anticlimactic. On October 2, 2008, my plane landed at night, the voluptuous night of New York in autumn, violet as ink and lit from beneath by the radiance of its traffic, not just the vehicular kind but the traffic of money and its shape-shifting surrogates—collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps—the traffic of power, the traffic of beauty, the traffic of appetite, of talent, of sex. Everything was moving; every lighted window signaled others. And in darkened offices, machines spoke to other machines thousands of miles away in a language of pulses, clicks, and blinking lights. An immense conversation was taking place below, and the aircraft circled it the way a newcomer circles the fringes of a party, a party where his welcome is uncertain; he sees nobody there he knows.

A wing dipped, then sliced across the face of the moon. Slowly, we dropped.

We didn't get a parking ticket that evening in Rome, but ironically, I got one later, in Arezzo. I'm speaking figuratively. There was no physical ticket, and I had no idea I'd done anything wrong until some months after my return to the United States, when I received a citation from the Polizia Autostradale of the Region of Tuscany charging me with illegal parking and demanding €100. I tore it up. A while later, I got a second citation in which the fine was raised to €150. This time I wrote back, asking (in English) for some evidence of the violation. None was given me. Instead, the citations kept coming and the fine kept rising until it reached €250. At that point, I took down my Italian dictionary and wrote back: