Calamity and Other Stories (10 page)

Now Jean was listening to the Christian station, nodding along as she macerated a clove of garlic. I watched her pick up the phone and dial a number.

“I wish our fights didn’t always end with you ignoring me,” I said, sweeping the onion into a frying pan. “I wish we could kiss and make up.”

“Hi, I’m calling in response to what Hal from Corvallis said? I think—Jean. Yes, I’ll hold.”

I said, “I’m standing right here, Jean. If you want to talk about it, let’s talk about it.”

“Quiet. They’re putting me on the air.”

“Jean—”

“Hi. Jean. Portland. Hi, I just wanted to say that I agree with Hal, and I have some advice for him. . . . My background? Well, let’s see. I, too, am married—How long? Forever. Ha ha. No, actually I’ve been married, let’s see . . . eleven years. Eleven years. To the most wonderful man, and I’d say we’ve had a very successful marriage, so—Oh, do I? Well, thank you, we got married young. But my husband—His name? Well . . . Eli. Oh, he’s a carpenter. Yeah, he built everything in our house . . . even the twins’ bunk beds. Yes, it is convenient. He chops the wood himself. In fact, he grows the trees. We have a tree farm. He’s something of a Paul Bunyan type. You know, big and muscular, hairy, wears flannel.”

I turned to Jean. “I hope I at least get equal airtime.” She listened into the receiver for a moment. “Well, what I want to tell Hal is, frankly, I was worried by his blind trust of his wife. Yes. I was concerned about his reluctance to discuss with her the problems he mentioned. Communication is everything, Hal. You need to be as open and honest as possible. Because, take it from me, you have no idea what kind of things your wife might be keeping from you.”

I stared at Jean. I allowed myself to wonder—in a brief flicker of thought—about Stefan, and, just as quickly, pushed the idea out of my mind.

Jean listened into the receiver for a moment. “Well, sure, shared faith is important, but that’s just a tiny part of it. And I mean, let’s face it, no marriage is worth it if you don’t have great sex.” Jean turned to me, unfazed. “They cut me off.”

“Look, Jean, just tell me what you want. If it’s the house you hate so much, we’ll move. If it’s the weather, we’ll leave. All right? Will that help?”

She said, “You can’t just run away. It’s like I told Hal from Corvallis. You can’t hide from problems. You have to try to work them out.”

But what was there to work out? Jean refused to believe that things happened from within, that a person could cry for no reason, that people fall out of love. In fact, this happens all the time. People become angry about something that yesterday made them merely shrug. A man looks at a woman he once loved and decides she is incorrigibly ugly.

This was nothing I could accept. If only, I told myself, I could have laughed at her phone call, been in on the joke. But it was her joke, not mine.

They came banging on the door at 2 a.m. I was so tired I didn’t even hear it, but Jean, still half asleep, undid the latch. She didn’t even ask who it was. The next thing I knew she was shaking me. “Geoff, wake up.” Her hair covered her shoulders. I squinted up at her and she asked, “Is Stefan in here?”

“No. Why?”

“The police are wondering.”

I got up to talk to them. Jean was already falling back asleep, crawling back under the covers.

The police wouldn’t tell me why they wanted Stefan, but they assured me that we were in no personal danger. I assumed it had to do with the bounty hunting. I was too tired to explain it to Jean. At any rate, she was asleep. The next morning she said, “I had a dream about people banging on the door. Men in uniform.”

I said, “Oh, really? Tell me about it,” but she claimed she couldn’t remember. I was sure she knew she hadn’t dreamt it. It was just her way of taunting me, seeing how much I dared not to tell her. I played along, saying nothing. She was flaunting secrecy, testing the limits of reticence.

Later, out of the blue, Jean remembered something she’d been meaning to tell me. “I got the knife back from Stefan.”

I’d come home earlier than usual and stopped out front to admire a particularly large slug. Our car was coming from the other direction, Jean driving and someone else in it. I straightened up, my shoes sinking into the soaked grass. The mud smelled ripe.

Jean parked in front of me, and I watched a plump gray-haired woman emerge from the passenger’s side. A baggy silk outfit covered her in dark folds. She held out her hand and said, “Miriam Choi.”

“Hi, I’m—”

The car door slammed, and Jean said, “This is Geoff,” a bit dismissively, I thought. It occurred to me that perhaps she had wanted me out of the picture. Now Miriam would associate her with some guy who hung around on the curb examining slugs.

“How do you do.”

“Come on up, Miriam,” Jean was saying. “There’s a beautiful view of the hills.” Upstairs, she unlocked the door to our apartment. Eli was asleep on the couch.

He sat up when he heard us enter. “Oh,” Jean said calmly. “Miriam, this is Eli.”

Eli looked young for his age—or older than his age, depending on which of his features you focused on. That is, we had no idea how old he really was. His pudgy, square-jawed face could seem so tired and strained you’d think he’d look ten years younger if he just got some rest. But then, if you decided that the lines on his face were from age rather than from fatigue, you might think that he was in relatively good shape, still youthful, his round cheeks still boyish, his hair not entirely gray.

On this particular day he was looking about thirty-five. His painter’s pants were muddy, and he had taken off the security-lens glasses he always wore. He ignored Miriam, rubbed his eyes, and asked, “Is Stefan in here?”

“What is it with Stefan?” I demanded. “The police were asking the same thing a few weeks ago.”

“Yeah,” said Eli. “They told me. They said that they sometimes come in the middle of the night, since there’s a better chance the person will be home. Or did you see them the day they had their little stakeout?”

I recalled the doughnut box and the
Sports Illustrated.
Jean became tense. Not only were we ruining her business meeting, but it was possible her personal safety was in peril. “Is he a wanted criminal or something?” she asked. “Because if he is I think we have a right to know. Our lives could be in danger.”

“No, no, no,” Eli assured us. “I’ve been looking into it, and it seems he’s just not yet a U.S. citizen and his visa is expired or something. Those were immigration guys you saw. He just has to get his papers in order, but I think he’s been avoiding it. You know, hiding from the authorities. That’s what I want to talk with him about.”

Jean shook her head in a way that indicated both sympathy and vexation. “I’m sorry about this, Miriam. Here, let me take your coat.”

“I was wondering what he was up to,” I said to Eli, taking off my jacket and following Jean to the coat closet. She had opened the door and was looking perturbed.

Stefan was huddled in the closet, the least dapper I had ever seen him.

“This is Stefan,” Jean said to Miriam, and handed Stefan both of the coats. She touched Miriam’s elbow. “Why don’t we go out to the studio, and I’ll show you what I’ve been working on.”

Jean walked away with Miriam, who looked only slightly confused. Stefan poked out his head. “Are the police gone?”

“They’re gone. You can come out now.” I turned to Eli for corroboration. Eli said, “There are no immigration officials here, Stefan.”

Trying not to sound flustered, I said, “I understand that you have keys to the apartment, Eli, but, Stefan, how did you get in here?”

Stefan pushed back the bottom of the longer coats to reveal a large hole in the back of our closet. “I carved a tunnel,” he whispered with affected generosity, hoping, I guess, that if Eli heard him he would consider it an improvement and not make him pay for damage.

“Stefan,” Eli said, “we need to straighten this thing out.” I watched Stefan step out from among my coats and Jean’s jackets and wondered at what had happened to my home. It had been transformed into a stakeout for cops, a secret tunnel for fugitives, and, to top it off, the back porch had become a “studio.” But what bothered me more was how Jean had introduced me to Miriam. With that same exasperated tone: This is Geoff, Eli, Stefan. As if I were just one of so many troublesome men in her life. She hadn’t bothered to explain that I was the important one. That I, not Eli or Stefan, lived there. That I had more claim than either of them to this bit of space. And to her.

For hours on end, Jean would sit next to a space heater on the porch, putting the finishing touches on
Happy Family.
The storm windows were permanently fogged. Her completed works sat draped in white sheets around her.
Happy Family
sat in front of her like a king among the plebeians—bigger and brighter, full of ambitious dreams.

Jean was still waiting to hear from the gallery. I was convinced it would be a yes, since Miriam had made such encouraging comments, but Jean had begun to prepare herself for the worst. Whenever the phone rang she jumped. She wouldn’t answer it, because she was afraid of receiving bad news. She listened to the Christian station for hours at a time.

When I came home that day she was in the living room, crying. I assumed it had been a no. “Did Miriam call?” I asked timidly.

“No,” she answered. “Who cares about Miriam.”

I went over to hold her, asked her what was wrong.

“Everything,” she said. Everything was wrong with the house. If she could just get out of it, she said.

She thrust something into my hand. It was a wedding photo, dusty and scratched. Looking closer, I saw that the man was Eli, looking especially boyish, with a shiny-eyed bride at his side. Even with a tux on he wore those thick-lensed security-style glasses. Behind him was the same house we were in now, though in much better shape, still wearing its original coat of paint.

“It was years ago,” Jean said. “They lived together in this house.”

“I didn’t even know Eli was married.”

“Divorced. She took the kids and moved to some other state. Stefan said that’s what Eli told him.”

“Where did you get the photo?”

“I found it in the tunnel. It must have fallen through a crack a long time ago.”

“The tunnel?”

“In the closet.”

“What were you doing in the tunnel?!”

“Nothing. I was curious.”

“Curious? Jean, you could get hurt!”

It was when she grabbed back the photo that I noticed her wrists. The skin was indented, red from friction.

“What are these marks?”

She sighed, bored. “Stefan was showing me his handcuffs.”

I stared at her. “What the hell is going on with you and Stefan?”

“I was spying. He caught me.”

“You’ve been spying on Stefan?”

She started crying again. “I thought he might be a threat to us or something. I wanted to know what he was doing.”

“Why can’t you just sit back and mind your own business? Why are you always looking for something to worry about? Why are you always poking around for something bad?” I took a deep breath. “What did he do to you?”

“He didn’t notice until today. Anyway, he’s harmless. We were just playing. He taught me some self-defense moves. How can you be thinking of Stefan at a time like this?” She cried harder. “Don’t you see?” Jean held out the picture. “A picture can’t preserve anything.”

Angry and confused as I was, I wanted to show understanding. I looked at the snapshot and said, “You’re right. Nothing can bring a photo back to life.”

She said, “Everyone knows that.” She stood up and walked through the kitchen, through the back door, onto the porch. I didn’t realize she had taken the big silver knife from the butcher block.

She slashed the painting in half, then again and again. I found her when it was already too late. When I asked her what she was doing, she just said, “What an ugly picture. I can’t stand how ugly it is.”

I didn’t tell her to stop. I knew how good destruction can feel, like knocking a pile of building blocks to the ground.

“This house is bad luck,” Jean said before she moved out. And I wanted to believe it. It was what we both wanted. We needed to blame ourselves on something. All the pain and meanness within us—blame it on something else.

Difficult Thoughts

I met them in Florence, where a halfhearted research proposal had won me six months to translate the work of some fifteenth-century nuns. I’d been through a rough time and would have gone anywhere, really. Though the grant was meager, I felt grateful and worked hard.

I was taking a break at a café not far from the library, reading through my notes and sipping my habitual herb tea. The only caffeine-free kind there was chamomile, and Italians were always assuming I was sick. It didn’t occur to me that I in fact looked sick. I’d always been skinny and in the past few months had become even more so; an unexpected trauma before leaving for Italy had left me especially drained. I ate one meal a day, stayed up late squinting into dictionaries, and spent far too much time in an unheated stone library. But when Marcello, smoking at the next table, leaned over and said gleefully, “You’re ill?” I blamed the chamomile. I told him and his older brother, Massi, about the dank library, about the poor circulation in my hands, about trying to avoid caffeine. They looked at me with intense interest, the way people do foreigners; in truth it was not my nationality but the notebook, the library, the worrying about caffeine that they found so fascinatingly alien.

We would meet for drinks and outings. Massi and I held hands surreptitiously in the back seat of a Fiat while Marcello drove us on doleful excursions to medieval towns. Marcello’s girlfriend had recently left him, and the brothers’ impromptu vacation, taken even though classes at their university had resumed, was meant to be therapeutic.

Marcello was overweight and usually suffering from some unnoticeable ailment. The slope of his shoulders gave him a look of perpetual surrender. He sat on the hood of the car pouting into a cigarette while Massi and I climbed hilly trails or crooked stone towers together. One afternoon Marcello looked up from a coffee he was limply stirring and announced that he was scheduled to take an exam at his school—two and a half hours away— that evening. “I really should go,” he said, “or this will be the third year in a row I fail the course.” The brothers put the top back on the convertible, invited me to come visit them in La Spezia, and drove away.

It would have been easy to never see them again. But even in their absence I would see them, when I should have been concentrating on things like fifteenth-century nuns. I would be thumbing through a musty book of religious verse and Massi would appear, tall and tired, with a gaunt, unimpressed face. His teeth were stained from coffee and tobacco, and his eyes already had little wrinkles around them that made him look pensive. I decided that was what had attracted me—the idea of him having strained his mind over difficult thoughts. Marcello’s face was round and soft, with dimpled cheeks that, to me, indicated less serious contemplation.

Too many cigarettes and late nights had aged their skin, though really they were both younger than me. As winter overtook Tuscany, I missed their company. The radiator in my apartment began to rattle violently, and the nuns’ poems had taken on a humorous quality that I knew shouldn’t have been there. Then I really did get sick. It was just a cold, but chamomile tea could do nothing more for me. I convinced myself that the weather was warmer and brighter everywhere else. I remembered Massi’s hand on my right thigh in the back seat of the Fiat. When it had rained for eight days straight and my cold showed no sign of waning, I bought a ticket to visit the brothers.

La Spezia turned out to be a naval port, lined by orange trees that bore inedible fruit, and square gray buildings built by fascists. The structures sulked over their chipped paint and cracked cement. Grizzled cats lurked in doorways and sills. The rain spat sideways. On the side of a main roadway, across from the shuddering ocean, sat Massi and Marcello’s apartment, rooted like a grim, oversized Lego piece. The building looked dirty, until I went inside. Its lobby held an elevator as beautiful as anything I’d seen in Florence—velvet carpet, gold-framed mirror, door of gold-plated bars that swirled into vines and nests of flowers. Lifting me to the top floor, its cables heaved with a raspy, incomprehensible whisper.

“Your timing is perfect,” Massi kept saying. We were sitting on a black leather sofa, consciously refraining from showing affection in front of Marcello; he was still (like me, I supposed) in emotional recovery. “This may be my last weekend home. It looks as though I start my military duty on Wednesday.”

“It’s mandatory, you know,” Marcello put in, surprisingly energetic. My fatigue and congestion had brightened his spirits. He was rifling through a cardboard chest, extracting unlabeled pillboxes and little colored vials. “But there are ways out of it,” he said. “Technically, all men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven must do ten months of military or civil service, so I have two years to figure out how to avoid it.”

Massi shook his head like a veteran. “It’s not so easy.”

“I’ve been making some phone calls,” Marcello said mysteriously, and dissolved an aspirin into his bourbon. He propped my legs up on the couch and handed me a bright red lozenge. “One every two hours. I’m going to prepare a hot-water bottle for your feet.” He placed the medicine box on the ebony coffee table, and someone’s forgotten wine rippled in its glass.

Massi took advantage of his brother’s absence to stroke my shoulder for a minute. I held his other hand and noted its smooth, uncallused palm. It was a rich man’s hand. A hand that didn’t know work. Even my own hands had faint signs of toil: paper cuts from research, blisters from the strap of my travel bag, chapped skin thanks to my angry radiator. I waited for Massi to say something forthright or candid, or at least about me. Instead he lit a cigarette. Through the balcony window I could see a thick night sky. “It’s nice here,” I said, for conversation. “Is this where you grew up?”

“We moved to this apartment about ten years ago. My father bought it to please my mother. Then he went off with his girlfriend. They live in Martinique. His company has business there. He sends us a check every month.”

It wasn’t what I’d had in mind, but it was probably the most revealing thing he had said to me. I heard Marcello returning and let go of Massi’s hand, wondering when I would feel it next. Marcello presented me with a hot-water bottle and a blanket, and I lay on the couch like a spoiled invalid. My attendants stood above me smoking cigarettes and telling me how nice it was to see me.

Still on my workingman’s schedule, I awoke early the next morning. I followed sounds coming from the kitchen to find a dark-skinned woman shelling tiny green peas. She looked only slightly surprised to find me standing there in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. “I’m Rhea,” I told her.

In a Portuguese accent she introduced herself as Alba. “I cook for the boys.” She smiled but then turned back to her work in a way that made me suspect I was intruding. I returned to my room and wondered how long I would have to wait for Massi to awake. Through the window I could see the ocean, where slow waves hunched and tumbled. Restless, I opened a notebook full of messily copied religious verse.

Precious and beautiful flowers we are,
virgins solitary for the love of the Savior.

And our celibate brothers, married penitents,
remain saintly in this world, to serve the Creator.

It had sounded much better in Italian. Only two months had gone by since I’d begun the project, and already I was forgetting what had drawn me to it in the first place: poetry based on something as pure—and, for me, elusive—as faith. I tried to recall the misty spires and echoing church bells that I had held in mind back when I wrote my proposal. Raised without religion, I had always romanticized the life of the devout. I couldn’t abandon them now, these nuns who had spent their lives in pursuit of something so intangible and—to me—uncertain. I looked at a scrawled stanza in my notebook:

Let each of us humble her heart at the sight
of high majesty washing the feet of fishermen.

In God’s name, we witness humility:
the most honored one is the most humble of all.

The words lay flat and meaningless on the page. I lifted my head in frustration and saw someone passing my door—a woman with silver hair, clothed in a silk dressing gown. When she turned her face toward me, her eyes stood out like bright chips of blue stone. Taken by surprise, I was unable to speak. Instead I managed a smile, but the woman was already turning away, passing my door slowly but seamlessly, as if propelled by the exhale of a whisper.

It was their mother, I decided, and felt my heart fight between the urge to sink and the will to pound furiously at such insult. How could they not have introduced us, or even mentioned me to her, or her to me? I understood there being no mention of Alba, since she probably didn’t live here, but their mother was different. Was I that unimportant to Massi? I decided that I would ignore it and not say anything. Perhaps Massi meant to introduce us today. I would be patient and wait. I looked back at my notebook and read to myself.

The brothers slept until eleven-forty-five and then acted annoyed that by the time we were dressed, fed, and ready to start on the day’s excursion it was already afternoon and we would have just a few hours before changing for cocktails and then dinner; we were to meet their friends at a restaurant that night. Now the brothers stood in the foyer trying to decide just which sight they had so wanted to show me. Alba, dragging a vacuum cleaner into the living room, asked where we were going.

Marcello said, “We haven’t quite decided,” and lit a cigarette to indicate that it was not a question to be easily resolved.

“It’s so cold out,” Alba said. “Why don’t you just stay in and relax.”

Marcello’s ears seemed to perk at the word “relax.” He said, “We could look at photographs.”

“Don’t be boring,” Massi said, and then seemed at a loss. It was then that I noticed a movement out on the balcony, where a drizzle coated the few plants still living. Their mother, in her silk robe and holding a pair of gardening shears, approached a few drooping leaves. Her movements were as slow and smooth as the clouds that moped across the sky beyond her.

I waited for one of the brothers to say something, to wave at her through the glass balcony door, but they had already headed out to the corridor, where Massi was opening the cage of the antique elevator. I stepped into the ornate cubicle and stood there flanked by Marcello and Massi, who appeared worn out by the morning’s events. In the mirror beside us was a twenty-eight-year-old woman with a runny nose and two bored bodyguards.

We spent the afternoon shivering at a few deserted ports, the brothers pointing out pleasant views and arguing with each other over who had lost more money at the track. I tried to commit to memory the brightly painted shutters against the white, stifled sky and waited patiently for Massi to secretly stroke my hand or rub my back. I waited for some revelation—of touch, of a whisper. Back in town, we walked silently under the arcades, lowering our heads to the cold air.

At the restaurant, it became evident that I was supposed to be with Marcello. Not that anyone actually said as much, but it was silently understood, the way that the people I met glanced at him with smiles, sent him winks of approval, and left room for me next to him at the bar. After all, here I was, a lone
americana
; it was assumed that I had been procured by one of the brothers, and Massi, I discovered, already had Vittoria. She was a big, bronze girl of about twenty, with violet eyes and straight, shiny brown hair she wore in a bandeau. She sat chain-smoking at the bar and tended to glare at Massi, but with Marcello her gaze was soft. They whispered jokes to each other, Marcello’s head falling onto her shoulder, while Vittoria tossed her head back and laughed.

However long Vittoria had been Massi’s partner, it was long enough for him to comfortably ignore her. The resigned silence made their relationship seem all the more permanent. I decided to take the same—silent—approach toward Vittoria, but when we sat down to our meal at the long wooden table, I found myself beside her. Marcello, on my left, kept reaching over my plate to poke her with the cutlery.

At Vittoria’s right, Massi and some friends discussed the walnut sauce and ways to avoid military service. There were wars going on, just a few borders away, but the conversation suggested no relation between this fact and one’s civil duty. Enlistment appeared to be not so much a risk or obligation as an unpleasant waste of time.

I suppose you could say I felt similarly about my abrupt coupledom with Marcello. I remembered Massi’s smooth hands in the back seat of the Fiat. It seemed years ago. Now I watched him, oblivious to me, engaged in conversation. A man named Ivo was recounting how he had escaped the military on grounds of poor health.

“That’s what I’m going to do,” Marcello piped in. “Tell them about my back problem.”

Massi looked only slightly concerned. “You have a back problem?”

“I have a pain.”

“But, Massi,” Ivo cut in, “I don’t understand why they want you in Milan. Can’t you just join the La Spezia marines? We’re practically across the street. You could probably even sleep and eat at home. It would be just the way it always is.”

“Well, of course; that’s what I’ve been trying to do. But I have trouble swimming—heavy bones or something—so they’re sending me to Milan instead. I told them, though, that I don’t need a job where I’m on the water. I have a friend who when he did his military service just washed dishes in the mess hall. I suggested I would be good at that.” Massi squinted his eyes to take a drag on his cigarette. “I’m waiting to hear if they’re able to change my assignment.”

I looked to see if Vittoria’s face might reveal more regarding the situation. Perhaps Massi wanted to get away from her. Or did he truly hope to be posted right here, in town? What was it about Vittoria that could keep him wanting her, besides her violet eyes and prudish hairband? Perhaps I would never know. She reached behind me to pinch Marcello, but he was listening to a joke being told across the table. Dejectedly, Vittoria squeezed a bit of lemon over her fillet. In a moment of solidarity, I turned to her and asked, “What do you think of Massi and Marcello’s mother?”