Fin & Lady: A Novel (27 page)

“I’m out of a job,” he said.

“No more lemon sorting?”

“Well, anyway, I approve. Except for his bathing suits. Aren’t you supposed to be vomiting or something?”

He smiled and tried to joke around. But he remembered Mrs. Holbright at the dinner table a few years ago.
She really does like to bat them around a bit
. Like a cat with mice, bat them around while they’re alive. “It’s so easy for you,” he said.

“What is?”

“To cut people off.”

Lady didn’t say anything.

“Just like that. To leave them. Leave them behind. When you can’t walk, run, right? Run away and leave the mess you made behind.”

“Oh,” she said quietly. Then: “I’m sorry, Fin. I told you I was a lousy guardian.”

“Thanks for the breaking-news bulletin.”

“But things will be different now.”

“I’ll say.”

“We’ll have a real home. You and me and Michelangelo and the baby. We’ll be a family.”

“We are a family,” Fin said. “At least we were.”

“You’re not happy for me?”

Fin picked at a stone embedded in the hard, wet sand.

“Yeah, I am.”

He was. He was angry, he was worried, he was horribly, stabbingly jealous. And he was happy for her. She would have a baby, a bald, big-headed, screeching, lumpy, gluey baby. And she would have a husband. A taciturn Italian husband. Everything she wanted. Everything she had secretly wanted all this time.

He realized that Lady had never asked him to call Michelangelo “Uncle Michelangelo.”

“So no Uncle Michelangelo, I guess,” he said as they walked back up toward Capri town.

“Just Uncle Fin. You’re the only uncle now.”

“Yeah. I guess I am,” he said. “Uncle Fin. Weird.”

“And Papa Michelangelo.”

It turned out, however, that Michelangelo did not really want to be Papa Michelangelo. It also turned out that Michelangelo already was Papa Michelangelo to several boys and girls who lived with their mother, his wife, in Milan.

“You’re married?”

“Separated. For many years.”

“But then…”

“We can’t get a divorce, Lady. This is Italy. Not New York.”

“I don’t care,” Lady told him. “As long as I have you.”

Uncomfortable silence.

“I
forgive
you,” she said.

“I did not ask forgiveness, Lady.”

“I just want to live here for the rest of my life with you and our child.”

“But I don’t live here, Lady. I live in Milan. I can’t just move to this island, this fantasy place.”

Then Lady would move to Milan with him.

“You can’t do that.”

“I don’t mind. I do mind, actually, but we can come here for part of the year, can’t we? The rest of the time we’ll squeeze in with you in your bachelor pad.”

“Lady, I live with my mother. I have children almost grown. It is all wrong.”

“Well,” she said, mimicking Joe E. Brown in
Some Like It Hot
, “nobody’s perfect.”

Fin did not hear this discussion. It was relayed to him by Lady. She sat on the tile floor of her bedroom, crying. At first, Fin thought she was retching, vomiting, the sound was so coarse and so pained. But it was sobbing, a kind of sobbing he had never heard from Lady. Or from anyone else, for that matter.

Lady had never eaten much. Now she stopped eating altogether. She was queasy from the pregnancy, and she seemed to be in a kind of shock.

“Let’s go home, Lady,” Fin said.

“This is home.”

“We’ll go home, and Mabel will cook us fried chicken.”

Lady ran out of the room. He heard her throwing up.

“Okay,” he yelled. “We’ll go home, and we’ll fast.”

She came back into the little living room looking pale and haggard. She lay down on the old couch, a hard, high-backed thing upholstered in faded blue brocade, her feet in Fin’s lap. He massaged them, first the left, then the right. Her feet were swollen. Her hands were swollen. Her eyes were swollen from crying. Fin leaned toward her belly, put his ear to it.

“The baby says it wants to go home to be born in New York.”

Lady gave a feeble laugh.

“The baby says the doctors here are all Italian and don’t know how to say anything it understands. The baby says you should try to stop crying. It gives the baby a big headache. And the baby says it’s hungry and wants a piece of bread, at least. And the baby says…”

“Okay, okay.”

They sat in the garden at a wrought-iron table. Lady took a small bite of bread.

“The baby says, It’s about time, it’s famished.”

“Tell the baby to lay off for a bit.”

“The baby says to tell you, What, are you crazy? Babies never lay off.”

*   *   *

Michelangelo came and sat with Lady for hours, holding her hand.

“Come with me to New York,” she said.

“I am already a father. I have already children. I live my life in Milan.”

“And me?”

“I will never desert you, Lady. But I cannot give up everything of my life for you, either.”

Their conversations were repeated every day, throughout the day; their words looped around, tangled up, knotted themselves, came out the same every time.

“I’m sorry,” Michelangelo said to Fin each time he arrived at the house.

“I know,” Fin said.

“It does no good.”

“No.”

*   *   *

Fin never mentioned the baby Lady had never had. Neither did Lady. But that information was there, unspoken, unacknowledged, between them.

“Will you write to Tyler?” Lady said.

“Me?”

“And Jack. And Biffi, of course.”

“Don’t you think it would be better coming from you, Lady?”

Lady shook her head. No.

Fin nodded his head. Yes.

They stared at each other through the bright humidity of late morning.

“The baby says, Pull yourself together. The baby says, How the hell are you going to take care of it? You’re a basket case.”

“The baby said I was a basket case?”

“Direct quotation.”

Lady began to cry again, this time quietly. “Smart baby,” she said.

*   *   *

That was the day Fin sent a telegram to Biffi.
Lady pregnant. Complete mess
, he wrote.
Doesn’t eat. Even drink. Don’t know what to do.

Michelangelo had gone to Morocco on a shoot.

“He’ll be back in a week,” said Lady. “But it doesn’t really matter anymore. It’s duty, his duty. I don’t believe in duty. I believe in love.”

It all made sense, if you were Lady. You believed in love, so you toyed with those who loved you, trying it out, trying out their love to see if it turned into your own. Then you fell in love at last, except the one you loved was not the one who loved you; you left the ones who loved you behind, moaning and beating their breasts, and now the one you loved was going to leave behind the one who loved him. You believed in love the way others believed in a god, an all-powerful god, a god who was destructive, indiscriminate. The god of war.

Lady had waited all her life to fall in love. And now the god of love made her suffer for his sins.

“No more than I deserve, I suppose,” she said.

Fin was sympathetic and exasperated. And, when Biffi showed up, relieved.

“I’ll give you a tour”

Fin saw Biffi in the piazzetta. He just appeared there one morning. No letter, no telegram, no warning, just Biffi sitting at a table by himself, sitting there smoking his pipe. His hair was short, but he was not in uniform. Was that legal? When he caught sight of Fin, he gave a desultory wave. “You look surprised,” he said.

“Well, yeah.”

“But relieved.”

“God, yeah.”

Fin sat down in the chair next to Biffi. They both faced the square, both with their legs stretched out in front of them, crossed at the ankles.

“You’re taller,” Biffi said.

“You’re not.”

Biffi gave a short laugh. “No. Not taller. Just the same. Same old Biffi Deutsch.”

“Biffi Spumoni Deutsch.”

Another short laugh.

“Thank you for coming,” Fin said.

“I told them someone died. I’m at the funeral. Do you know what service life is like? It is softball games. That is a form of baseball with a bigger ball. Softball games and basketball games. That is another form of baseball with an even bigger ball.”

“Better than killing people in a jungle. Or being killed. So you translate stuff? From what language to what language? What stuff?”

“It is confidential.”

“Yeah? Hey, you’re a spy.”

Biffi modestly nodded in agreement. “For now.”

Fin took Biffi out on the boat. They motored past the Faraglioni, the three rocky stacks poking up dramatically from the calm blue water. “I’ll give you a tour,” Fin said with some pride. “But also, you never know where she’ll turn up. She stalks around. She’s so erratic. I guess she’s always been erratic, but in ways you kind of expected. But now she’s like, I don’t know, like someone else.” He had turned the boat around and sailed along the coast until they reached Monte Tiberio. “She stopped smoking. She stopped drinking. Because of the baby. But she also stopped eating. She’s spooky. She wears a big straw hat.”

Fin cut the motor and dropped the little anchor. He pointed up to the top of the cliffs. “Villa Jovis. Tiberius built it. He built twelve palaces.”

Biffi closed his eyes. Leaned forward, his head on his bent knees. “It seems so long ago.”

“What does?”

“Lady.”

“It’s been a month. Two months.”

“A long time ago and a long way away.” He sat up and put his arm around Fin’s shoulders. “Tell me,” he said.

So Fin told him, told him about Michelangelo, about his photographs and his darkroom and Lady’s plans to get a gallery show for him in New York and how that plan dimmed the longer Lady stayed on the island and then vanished completely when she started to take her own pictures. He paused. Should he tell Biffi how happy she had been? How serene? How she had danced with Michelangelo, spinning and spinning, when there was no music but their laughter?

“What?” Biffi asked. “Tell me.”

“She was different. From New York, I mean.”

Then, dancing around, Lady and Michelangelo tripped over the champagne bottle on the ground and it rattled along the tiles and a cat howled somewhere and Fin started laughing and Lady reached down and pulled off a sandal and threw it at Fin. He could tell that part. That was recognizable. But the other? The sleepy, enchanted romantic face turned to Michelangelo?

“You’re worried for me?” Biffi said when he paused again. “No, no, I must know what is the situation. Say, go on, say what you mean.”

“Well, she was kind of happy, I guess.”

“In what way happy?”

“Quiet happy. Not insisting on being happy. Just softly happy.”

Biffi let his hand fall into the water. Little splashes. It reminded Fin of Suetonius and the little fishes.

“Did you ever read Suetonius?” he asked Biffi.

“Naturally.”

“Remember the little fishes? Tiberius? In Capri?”

Biffi colored. “Has this man bothered you, Fin?”

“No. Gross. Just, do you think it’s true? Little boys underwater? Swimming between his legs? Doing that to Tiberius? And then he threw people from a cliff. That cliff.” He pointed. “Michelangelo said it’s not true. That Tiberius was a great warrior and ruler.”

“Why did you read Suetonius? You read Latin now?”

“No. Lady gave me a translation.”

Biffi said a few things in Hungarian. Unless it was Greek. Fin had no idea.

“Your mother is nice,” Fin said when the diatribe had finished. “Except she thinks the
Odyssey
and the
Iliad
were written by a Hungarian.”

“Talk to me more about Lady. No more diversions. My mother is peculiar. Suetonius is outrageous. Talk to me about Lady.”

Fin told him then. Told him how Lady had sent for him, how he had found his way from Rome to Capri, how delicious the sandwich was, the greasy salami sandwich he’d bought through the train window. He told Biffi about Donatella, too. He said, “I know I’m only fifteen,” and Biffi said, “Pah! Old enough to love and old enough to suffer.” Fin told Biffi about the walk to the cave and Lady’s announcement. “She was so happy,” he said. “She was so happy for a week, happy to sit still and just look at the sky. It was weird. Really weird.” Biffi did not look angry the way Fin expected him to. He looked wistful. A little smile, his fingers flicking the water. “Go on,” he said. And Fin told him about Lady crumpled on the floor sobbing. It went on for over a week, the sobbing, then she put on her enormous straw hat and enormous sunglasses and began haunting the island like a spook.

“She is angry at this man?”

“No. She’s just sad.”

“She knows? That you wired to me?”

“Good grief, no.”

Biffi smiled. “Good grief,” he said.

“She told me to write to you and Tyler and Jack and tell you all what happened, but when she finds out I asked you to come rescue her, and me, she’ll kill me. She’ll throw me off Monte Tiberio. And you.”

They went back to the house, walked beneath the lemons hanging in heavy dignity, up the worn steps into the living room. Fin called Lady’s name. No answer. He kicked off his sneakers, flopped onto the stiff-backed sofa. The tiles were cool under his feet.

“Who knows,” he said. “She could be anywhere.”

He poured Biffi some wine and himself some water. “I only drink wine at dinner,” he said.

“Do you?” Biffi asked. “In Iraklion it is all beer or ouzo. And hamburgers,” he added brightly.

It was then that Lady entered. “Entered” is perhaps too strong a word. Fin told me that she would just appear in that period, an apparition. She would not be in the room, and then, with no transition, she was there.

She stood and stared at Biffi in obvious confusion. “Biffi!” she said, her voice warm. “Did you desert? You poor man. But you’re safe here. Everyone is safe here.”

He stood up and walked toward her. “Lady,” he said, “Jesus.” He put his hand on her cheek. Her face in the shadows of the straw hat was gaunt, haunted. There were dark circles under her eyes. Biffi had not been prepared. She was still beautiful, but in a fevered way, her eyes too large, her cheekbones too sharp, her smile a grimace.