L'America (23 page)

"Beth knows her Americana, too."

"She can tell you all about your national anthem," Cesare said.

"We've heard it many times," Sissy said. Grammy started singing the song. Rada joined her. Cesare knew that Grammy had a low opinion of Rada. ("She's so dark and odd with that blond hair. A half-breed. Neither here nor there.") But together they got the whole table singing. Beth smiled, a youthful smile—a smile he had seen often on Laura, a younger-sister smile, one that surrendered age and any wisdom. At Claire, Beth became a child in a way Cesare had not seen before. Yet at the same time she was also responsible and in charge: organizing the cooking and the table setting, negotiating deals for land use and apple sales and beef butchering—doing it all fast and effortlessly. Clearly she had been doing this for a long time and clearly Jackson depended on her, but somehow the need and the reliance were an unspoken given that she smiled off (in that smile to Sissy Three) in the guise of innocence. Looking at Beth, Cesare had a strong urge to protect her.

The meal began with a moment of silence (also a funny tradition) and a prayer (though none of these people seemed very religious) and ended, after dessert (smaller plates heaped with strange concoctions of pecans and pumpkins and chocolate and all very delicious, if unfamiliar, all melding together) with Sissy Three standing before the table and lifting her glass, her cheeks flushed with wine and champagne, for a toast to Claire. "Not the house Claire, but the dreamer Claire. Thanks for dreaming your dream."

In between Alibaba (Albarbar) argued with Jackson about the impracticality of hydrogen for fuel: "Natural gas is in short supply. Coal will be used perforce and it will do more damage to the ozone than oil." They all knew about the evils of coal. Snyder County was on the border of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region. Albarbar was a small overweight man, stooped over and bearded with his rumpled tweed jacket, always short of breath—the sort of American intellectual Cesare had imagined when he read about New York intellectuals. He could imagine Albarbar's book-lined apartment, stacks of old newspapers he was afraid to throw away because he might want to refer back to an article on something or other. Albarbar liked to argue. Jackson didn't. He simply listened, lit a cigarette that was a joint, passed it to Albarbar, and told him not to get so excited. The conversation, though, grew heated. Mash and Hunter joined in, Hunter standing up now and again to pour everyone champagne, and the grandmother repeating her mantra about Claire failing. But Jackson remained steady. In fact, Cesare sensed a remoteness, as if only a part of him were truly there. As Cesare grew to know Jackson, that characteristic would define him most of all, and though Jackson was an ambitious dreamer, loving and kind, Cesare would wonder how good he could really be as a father at such a distance. As distanced as Cesare's father was from his son, that distance did not preclude Giovanni Paolo from having a well-defined vision for his son's future and thus his well-being. "He's with my mother," Beth would explain simply—something she had been saying for years and which she had come to understand as making sense.

After dinner Cesare cleared the table, did the dishes, swept the floor. His helpfulness was remarked upon. But lying in bed that night, having been in America just about six weeks, he felt for the first time just the slightest confusion ripple through him—a confusion he couldn't articulate, but the answer to which seemed buried in the image of Sissy Three (what kind of name is that?) standing before the table, flushed cheeks, flowing hair, lover of Jackson, toasting Claire, "the woman." Everyone had raised their glasses, nothing odd, as if they were toasting the president or God or Sarah Hale or the cook who made the fabulous meal. It rippled through him, a slow burn.

"Are you awake?" Beth asked, turning to him in the dark. He wanted to ask her about her mother, have her say something that would dissipate the confusion.

He said nothing.

"Do you like it here?" she asked, a question she was fond of asking, as if the question could take his temperature. Though she had a sense she knew the answer: He loved it here. He loved New York. He loved Claire. They loved him. She felt very happy as if everything were as it should be in the world. He pulled her against him and into him. He thought of Fiori, of the house standing there, occupied by his family for five hundred years. "You're so soft," he whispered. Outside the moon was full, glistening on the frosted grass, and the confusion continued its slow creep, baffling his desire to conquer America and the new and the unfamiliar until the confusion was erased by sleep.

 

Cesare would be in America for nearly a year, time enough to understand the confusion, which would recede and return like a tide. Each time it returned, however, the source of his confusion became clearer and clearer, like an image emerging from a Polaroid. He came in October of 1985. His year would cross into 1986. The America he found was quite different from the America Claire left behind in 1968. Cesare's time in America was part of a historic period oddly marked by eruptions and explosions that rocked the world. The list is long: the Greenpeace vessel, the
Rainbow Warrior,
was bombed and sank in Auckland Harbor; the volcano Nevado del Ruiz erupted in Colombia, killing over 23,000 people; the spaceshuttle
Challenger
exploded with the teacher, Christa McAuliffe, aboard. (As she and six others met their deaths, Beth and Cesare were skating at Rockefeller Center, trying out loops and figure eights). The Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down killing thirty people and spewing radiation into the atmosphere. Across this canvas Madonna skyrocketed into the stratosphere, simulating masturbation as she toured the world promoting
Like a Virgin.

Ironically, this time is remembered by most Americans as a peaceful one, one of prosperity. The dollar was strong. Reagan was president. Gorbachev became the Soviet leader. Ivan Boesky published
Merger Mania;
Michael Milken was the undisputed junk bond king, and the stock market soared—bubbling, erupting, ballooning. Studio 54 was the place to be; cocaine was the drug of the moment (best spot in the city to buy: 106th Street and Amsterdam). "Holiday" played endlessly; "Like a Virgin" played endlessly; "Material Girl" played endlessly. All Madonna, all the time. She posed for
Playboy. Desperately Seeking Susan
was released. And Cesare came to America—a handsome Italian boy filled with grand notions of possibility, following his American girl to New York City across which he loved most to drive late at night in the grandmother's Lincoln, cruising the avenues and the canyons of Wall Street, making himself believe in the impossible.

 

In New York, Cesare lived with Grammy (none of that monkey business). Beth lived with two of her friends from NYU, downtown on Sixth Avenue in an apartment crowded with furniture harvested from the street, a notion that took Cesare a while to adjust to. The idea of sitting on a couch, eating at a table, sleeping on a mattress (here he drew the line) that had been used in unknown ways by unknown others was grotesque at first. But before long he, too, was helping Beth haul home a chair or two for the dining table. "It's perfect," she said, finding a red velvet chair on the street. One of the legs was cracked and a tear cut across the velvet on the seat. Otherwise, it was fine.
L'America,
he thought. He thought that all the time with an amused smile. For curtains, Beth hung old sheets, tying them back during the day with ribbons from last Christmas's packages. The arrangement of other people's things implied forethought, even effort. Unusually shaped wine bottles were used as vases to hold flowers bought at Korean groceries, which were open twenty-four hours a day on all corners of all streets. The flowers wilted immediately in the heat of the apartment. Even so, they remained in the vases for days. "I like them dead," one of Beth's roommates would say. "That way they last longer." Beth would cook elaborate Italian meals for dinner parties on a dirty and very old stove, inside of which it was not uncommon to find a cockroach or two or three scurrying out to escape the sudden heat. She made her own gnocchi and her own
gnochetti alia romana
and her own tortellini and her own ravioli and her own lasagna. Lasagna noodles hung on the backs of chairs, from towel racks, from hangers. By candlelight a table of friends would talk and argue about Reagan and Koch and then move on to music and then philosophy—Nietzsche and nihilism and Hegel and tragedy. "Hegel said that genuine tragedy is a case not of right against wrong but of right against right." Heady thoughts picked up that afternoon from their philosophy classes that along with the wine and endless cigarettes made them feel grown-up. (On weekends that parents visited, all evidence of such parties was deeply hidden and more bows were tied around more curtains.) Watching all this, Cesare would remember Beth in Italy, how their dinner parties were the times in which Beth felt most to belong. Always Beth's friends would turn to Cesare and ask him about Italian politics. "How many prime ministers since World War Two?" Always, in the beginning, they'd mispronounce his name—
Say-zar-hey, Say-zar, Cheese-ar-a
—until finally, giving up, they called him Caesar, a name that Cesare found both ugly and endearing, endearing in that hearing himself called by it he imagined that he had really become an American boy: Italy and his life there as neatly hidden as the cigarettes and the wine bottles on parents' weekends. On parents' weekends, of course, Jackson never came to town. "You know he can't," Beth said to Cesare, though somewhere he wanted her to fight her father on this, to break him. Jackson's refusal to come to Beth angered Cesare: Jackson was acting like the child that Beth was born to mother. "Your father is no different," Beth would say. "I don't see him or your mother racing over here to visit you."

"Oh come, Bet. You know it is not part of Italian tradition."

"What?" she would ask, screwing up her face to indicate that his logic made no sense. A little fight would be ignited, a little fight hinting at the deepest fissure. Americans were vagabonds. Italians were not.

"My father takes an interest in what will become of me."

"My father wants me to become what I want to be," Beth snapped back. And then they were really fighting. Oh, she could fight. "Your father just wants you to spend your life preserving the past. He doesn't care about your future, only that you uphold something dead."

Cesare insisted that she did not understand. "Bet, be reasonable. Bet, be reasonable." But Cesare knew that Beth was right, that if he lived permanently in America, his father would never visit him.

***

Cesare watched Beth's roommates move about her apartment, as if he were watching a show, studying a new species. One of them was a girl into leather with a whip; the other was heavyset, with pink hair and a penchant for lots of jewelry and ripped tights. Both wore severe black makeup. Yet they were nice girls who liked Cesare because he teased them playfully and made them laugh at their own eccentricities. They would take him out to clubs when Beth was too busy with school or waitressing, guarding him protectively though somewhere both girls had wild crushes on him. Their names were Veronica (the leather girl) and Jane (with pink hair). The three of them went odd places—a church turned into a disco, a gay club on many floors with transvestites dancing on podiums before an oblivious crowd, a bank vault turned disco, too. All Madonna, all the time. In the bathrooms people snorted-up ravenously, nostrils white with the stuff—Jane and Veronica, too. They offered it to Cesare. He demurred. Then they talked fast and endlessly to him about their families and his: "What's it like to be five hundred years old? Beth says you're five hundred years old." Or, "Is everyone fat in Italy?" asked by the pudgy Jane (who didn't think of herself as pudgy), shouting above the music, partying masses crushing against them. "Enormous," Cesare answered, with a wink. And he learned that Veronica's family was very wealthy—her grandfather invented the ball bearing or something like it. Jane was, in her words, "an army brat," a term that needed defining for Cesare. They, too, called him Caesar. Late at night he would see them home, sneak into bed next to Beth, and watch her sleep, imagining her life before he arrived in New York City, envious of all the boys whom he believed admired her.

It had taken him nearly two months to come to America after their late-afternoon conversation in the long summer grasses at Fiori. For those two months they had written their letters, declared their love—he more than she, afraid as he was of all these college boys and of the things they would do with and to Beth. Cesare would wait impatiently for the mail each day, dreadfully morose when a letter did not come. He would think of her brushing her teeth, her hair, think of her being watched in this casual ritual by a boy, a college boy into the music that she liked—the Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Police. He would imagine her resisting the boy at first, putting him off with stories about her Italian boyfriend. Then he would imagine the boy's persistence, her inevitable surrender to the delights of desire—fingers delicately tracing secret spots, working her into a lather of confusion until she could do nothing but plead, but beg, but ask for more. He could see it, as if he were sitting there, in one of those armchairs found on the street, watching for himself. Her letters said little, the distance like a yeast, a culture that caused his love to swell until it hurt, until it ripped him up inside. Then her voice on the phone—sweet American voice—asking simply: "
Vieni?
" Are you coming?

When he could stand it no more, he told his parents he was leaving and, putting all school and career obligations aside, he bought his ticket, packed his bags, and flew off to New York. As the plane landed at JFK in the late afternoon, the sun a scarlet disk sinking behind the buildings, all he could see in all those buildings was promise and its relief.

When he first arrived, it seemed she made love in a new way, a way he imagined she learned from those college boys. The notion intoxicated him with its pain. She was somehow sexier, more free, more eager. And he would wonder, realize, then believe this change was a result of a confidence he had not understood so clearly in her before.