Good on Paper (8 page)

What do you mean by this? Romei asked.

Dante believes we choose new life: if we’re ready to walk the straight and narrow, we can leave our old life behind and achieve salvation. I don’t think so. Stuff happens. People get sick, they win the lottery. But they don’t change.

You think Dante believe that people change?

Of course! Why else would he switch to story-telling? Lyric poems are about the moment, but stories are about change. Dante changes as a result of his encounters with Beatrice, he becomes a better man, a
salvageable
man, or so he would have us believe.

Look, Mambo, my baby said, bringing her face to mine. I think a tooth is loose. A molar!

GO!
I whisper-shouted.
Back to your room!

Beatrice isn’t real, I added, so she doesn’t have to change. An idea can be perfect forever.

Andi stomped out of the room.

Very good, Romei said. Thank you. I send tomorrow.

11

SLEEPING WITH NANCY DREW

I had been talking rather a lot about
Vita Nuova
, but it had been sixteen years since I’d read it. My copies were all in Ahmad’s storage locker, together with other reminders of times past. It wasn’t a place I liked to visit.

I returned to Andi’s room. She was lying on top of her bed, reading Nancy Drew.

We’ll finish this later, I said, gesturing at the pile of clothes on the floor. In the meantime, pajamas.

Mmm, she replied.

I’m going to the basement, I said. Ahmad’s home from dinner; he’s in his studio. When I get back, bedtime.

Mmm, my daughter said, so I took a deep breath and the elevator down to the basement, where I found
Vita Nuova
and my translation together with three binders of notes from a box underneath six others. Which meant I had to open the other boxes and leaf through them—college papers so full of critical jargon I couldn’t understand them, mementos from a trip to Greece, matchbooks from my wedding. Divorce decree, receipt from the Delhi hotel where Andi had been conceived, baby clothes too precious to part with, early drafts of stories, a topographical map of northern India, the latter a reminder
of the road not taken: Dharamsala, my destination
interruptus
when I found myself with child.

In another box: mementos from my freshman year of high school, which I spent in Rome, during my father’s second sabbatical. My yearbook, for example, which contained the only photos I had left of T. In his senior picture, he sits, smugly, in a rattan chair, his girlfriend of four years on his lap, even though she didn’t go to our school—that’s how inseparable they were considered to be. In Lavinia’s ears, glinting in the black and white sun, fat diamond earrings, gift of her movie producer papa. In the second shot, candid this time, T. leans against a Roman column smoking a cigarette. You can’t see what he looks at through his Ray-Bans—it’s off-camera, and away from the ruin that entrances the rest of the class. For years, I hoped it was me he looked at so possessively; I was in that art history class, I was on that field trip, wherever it was. I’ll never know, nor will I ever be sure that the boy in the semi-distance, with the floodwater pants and Indian mirrored manbag, is Ahmad, giving T. the evil eye. Ahmad knew about us, somehow; I never knew how.

Also, photos of Ahmad and me that same year. The dynamic duo doing all the great poses: cross-dressing American Gothic, Shira pursing her lips, Ahmad holding a devil’s trident. Sistine Chapel redux—our fingers almost touching, Ahmad wearing rubber gloves, Shira’s nails painted dark against a bright white sky. Impossibly young, and happy. We didn’t know yet how it would be: fighting that spring over T., reconciling after my divorce, words spoken when he blamed me for Jonah’s death, reconciling again over Andi. And there she was, our red-faced baby, sleeping in my exhausted arms. Dribbling carrot in her high chair, smiling a demented orange smile, Ahmad behind her, brandishing a spoon. Aunt Emma trying to smile over Andi’s stroller, managing only to look disapproving, Andi raising her hands and face to the sky as if blessing the host.

Also, photos I discovered when my father died, too small, their edges white and scalloped, from our first sabbatical—of my father, complacent, Eleanor, my mother, laughing, Shira, seven, wearing an orange Danskin shirt-and-shorts set, distracted always by something
outside the frame. My mother, her eyes shaded by cat glasses, wearing a broad-brimmed hat, pointing at the Pantheon; I, crouching at her feet, conversing with pigeons, in the background reading a book, smiling fiercely above a decapitated statue. My father, the photographer, Eleanor his object, I there only incidentally: because her arm encircles me (I seem uncomfortable, suspicious), because I squat in her shadow, privately playing.

There were no photos after that year, no photos after she left us.

Feeling too tender, I carted the volumes, notes, and binders to my study, where I found Tinky Winky sitting on a stack of Italian dictionaries.

Had he been there before?

Are you in exile again? Just like Dante! Look! and I showed him an Italian edition of
Vita Nuova
, a rumpled Garzanti with its outdated bibliography and puzzling snippet of Giotto’s
Life of Maria and Life of Christ
on the cover. Inside, an engraving of the Poet in Profile, his arrogant, heavy-lidded expression, his laurel wreath, his ever-present snood.

I know!
I said. He’s insufferable!

I doodled on Dante’s face, gave him bloodshot eyes and pimples. Then tucked him under some secondary sources.

Tink looked at me funny. Not a word from you, I said, and chose a photocopied article, settled back onto the loveseat, a tape recorder balanced on my chest like a kitten. “Dante and the Schoolmen,” I dictated.
Domenico da Firenze sees the influence of the Scholastics in Dante’s use of
 … etc.

I read prefaces, afterwords, footnotes, marginalia. I reacquainted myself with debates that raged in the ’70s. I read about Dante’s politics, his theology and fondness for numbers; I lost myself in criticism structural, post-structural, post-non-denominational. I read everything, in short, but
Vita Nuova
itself.

When I finally thought to look at the time, it was after midnight.

Andi!
Oh, no! Was she still awake? I tiptoed into her room, found her sleeping with Nancy Drew. I carefully removed the book from her hand, found her Brooklyn Zoo crocodile bookmark, put the book
under her pillow next to her flashlight, in case she woke up and had to read some more.

My dear, my dearest, my sweetest sweetest heart! How could I have forgotten you? Next morning I’d have to pretend I’d done it on purpose, so she could feel her late night was a gift and not evidence of maternal neglect. Gently, I maneuvered her under the covers.

Why is that man my uncle? she said, slipping her thumb into her mouth.

I stifled a laugh, unable to imagine what she must be dreaming.

You have no uncles, I whispered. Good night, precious pumpkin.

I hate pumpkin, my beautiful baby said. I kissed her angel cheek. The bad man did it.

What? Had someone hurt my baby? Then I remembered Nancy Drew.

The perils of late-night reading.

12

SLUMBER PARTY

I returned to the study. Maybe I was ready to try again. I retrieved the book from my pile, this time the English version with the simpering figures on the cover, a Renaissance vision of the supplicant Dante, the celestial Beatrice. My response was visceral: a trembling of the veins, a heaviness of the head.

Life had offered little recompense for the love I’d lost. I was twenty-seven when I learned that T., thief of my heart, had married.

We were in the Village—my father’s apartment, I don’t remember why. I still imagined new life with that old love—a fairy tale that began in Rome when I was fifteen and danced for him in the chem lab, imagining myself his Salomé. It didn’t matter that in high school he was all but engaged to Lavinia, just as, twelve years later, it didn’t matter that he lived in D. C. with Diana: I still believed in happily ever after. It was only with me he could
be himself
, he said. Washington was so full of phonies, and Diana—well, there was a limit to what she could understand. It would happen, I still believed. Feelings as strong as ours didn’t come out of nowhere.

We made love on the couch that day breathlessly: we didn’t make it to a bedroom, we rarely did. After, unclothed, I danced for him, because he asked, because I felt no shame. I was turning a dreamy circle, when I caught a glint of gold.

I stopped short; my hair, which was long then, and innocent, fell into my face.

What’s that? I said.

My
love tool!
he laughed, because he thought I was pointing at his thing (as he called it). But no, I was pointing at something far more potent—that
thing
on his finger. His gaze darted guiltily. I saw that he’d meant to take it off, that he’d always taken it off.

Dante was no help: if I’d had a gun, I’d have shot his
thing
—for all those years of subtext, for making me believe what I wanted to believe, which was that we were meant to be. I didn’t have a gun, so I attacked him: punching his chest and pulling his long Nordic hair, pounding his ribs and scratching his arms. I even bit his cheek—for all the times I’d been careful to never leave a mark, to never ever leave a mark.

Take
that
to your Princess Di!

He used his tennis arms and elbows to hold me off. I realized he had an erection—my anger was turning him on! Defeated, I let him go, found my father’s bathrobe, told him he had to leave.

I didn’t want to hurt you, is what he said as I pushed him out the door.

After, something made me look in the White Pages: if he could lie about his marriage, he could lie about anything, and there it was, his name, his address, not in D. C. but New York, the Village, just blocks from my father’s apartment.

Every few weeks that dreadful season, I pulled my hair back and walked. I told myself I needed to think and I walked—from the Upper West Side to his tawny, tony townhouse, with its black iron banister, its box of geraniums, its garden the size of three loaves of bread. I stood across the street, under a stunted tree, partially hidden by its piebald leaves, looking for T. through the blinds, trying to understand where I’d gone wrong. I imagined Diana, his virgin hunter, wearing gardening gloves and Land’s End chinos, kneeling over that paltry bit of earth;
she
, I knew, could make something grow—why not me?

I was unmoored. The universe, which had seemed benign, ordered, concerned with my future, revealed its indifference. I stopped going to classes, I disconnected my phone, took up smoking, cut my hair with garden shears, stuffed everything that reminded me of him into a garbage bag and, exhausted, allowed it to sit, gaping, on the
living room floor. My dissertation, which included the translation and introductory essay, devolved into a disquisition on the impossibility of love, the impossibility of translation, our shameful,
sham-ful
enterprise. I published the essay, what there was of the translation, and married. And never loved again.

Fifteen years later, the lines of Dante’s little book still wrapped like ivy around my inability to finish my degree, the collapse of my belief in a life made new by love. How could I return to Dante, how could I entwine myself in his lines, his lies, his lying arms?

I put Dante back in his rightful place at the bottom of the pile and went online. A happy voice advised me that
I Had Mail
. From Benny.

Thanks for coming by!

I’d barely replied when I got an instant message from “Jellyroll_Baruch”:
Bartleby?

Ahab!
I typed back.

Late, isn’t it? Don’t mommies get up at the crack of dawn?

Sometimes we worry till the crack of dawn.

Andi okay?

She’s fine. Why’re you up?