L'America (29 page)

Instead of firing her, which Beth believed Cosella would do, she sent a masseuse to Beth's studio, not once, but four times. Lying beneath the hands of the masseuse, on a table the masseuse had lugged up all four flights, Beth fell in love with Cosella. At the end, when she tried to tip the masseuse, Beth was told that everything had been paid for. The following summer Cosella gave Beth her house on Nantucket for two weeks while she and Leo went to India on vacation. Despite the kindness, the gifts, Cosella remained demanding: ever vigilant for the smallest sign of incompetence, she never hid her anger at Beth's or anyone's mistakes. And Leo always remained an enigma. During the years Beth worked at Lago, he did not speak one word to her. But Beth penetrated Cosella, pried her open like an oyster, forcing Cosella, in all her privilege to see (and admire) raw sloppy ambition at its inception. Cosella's ambition had had a head start; she had always had the plush cushion of wealth.

Eight months into Beth's job at Lago, Bruno fired her from Amalfi Pizzeria for not being on the ball. (The news of Beth being fired delighted Victor, the Albanian
pizzaiolo.)
Beth was not surprised. Rather, she was relieved. She had gone as far as she could go there. It was only a pizzeria, after all. Now her ambition was to someday make the critics see that Italian cuisine was equal to or better than French. Beth found herself wishing that instead of a massage or a haircut Cosella would give her a raise. But the thought of Cosella, entrenched in her dark office behind her vast desk, looking at her subjects by raising her head and sliding her eyes down her long nose, made the asking of a raise all but impossible. And chopping carrots, there was little way for Beth to measure her contribution or make a case for the essential need of having her there. And there—Lago—was definitely one of the best restaurants to be working in if food was your dream. A list a mile long of people who wanted to work at Lago waited on Cosella's desk, a fact that everyone knew well.

Late at night, lying on her bed, Beth would wonder why she wanted this. She would wonder where she would be if somehow she had been able to go to Italy. She would look at the phone, will it to ring. Cesare had written her a letter after their Old Faithful argument, a letter telling her to take responsibility for her part, reminding her that she could have come to Italy, if only just to see: that she had owed that to their relationship. Telling her that Greta meant nothing, a nice woman, sure, but not Beth—not warm like Beth, soft like Beth. Greta was hard and fun, but not serious. He needed Beth. Telling her that this interruption in their relationship was the challenge they had needed to get beyond for their great love to thrive. She would read and reread the letter, wondering if he was being fair or if he was just trying to pass the blame. Exhausted, she would breathe in those sweet fumes, eat take-out Chinese in bed for a splurge, and watch the fat man in his underwear in the apartment across the courtyard scratch his butt and balls before settling down in an armchair to his dinner and the blue glow of the television. She would fall asleep with the lights on, the remnants of the Chinese food on the floor by her bed. She would dream of the apartment growing bigger, doors opening onto rooms she didn't know that she had, rooms that then opened onto more rooms until she had so much space she could waltz endlessly from room to room to room. In the morning the shower would scald her if someone anywhere in the building flushed a toilet. Even so, walking to work she would feel elated by the dream of all those rooms.

 

She did have some fun, too. Hunter moved back to New York from Claire, took a job working for a hedge fund (Beth could never understand what that meant no matter how many times it was explained to her), made tons of money, and took her out to fancy restaurants and the theater on her days off. He took her dancing and to comedy clubs and jazz clubs. At a thrift store, he bought her a dress for these occasions, a black dress with a thousand silk string tassels. When she moved, the dress shimmered with all the elegance of money. Beth thought, How easy it could be to surrender to Hunter, to succumb to his wealth. He enjoyed spending money. "Money is meant to be spent," he would say. But he liked to spend it on objects and situations that could tell a story. At an antique store, he bought her a Persian ring from the fifth century, sold by a wizened man in his upper years with a cane and a bent back who still traveled the world in search of treasure. The stone was red jasper and Hunter placed it himself on the middle finger of Beth's right hand, scaring her as she felt a pang of desire. The muted hammered gold and the sparkling stone were fifteen hundred years old. She loved wearing that history, loved imagining the other women before her admiring the ring on their hands. At ABC Carpet he bought her a Persian rug, a Kerman with a garden design. She learned that Iranians were among the first rug makers twenty-five hundred years ago and that originally the rugs' designs were a form of writing for illiterate tribesmen, a way of setting down their fortunes and their troubles and their joys, dreams and sorrows. The rugs came from places she had never heard of, grand names like Khorassan, Baluch, Quchan, Shirvan, Lilihan—places she would never visit or know but that Hunter talked about bringing her to as if in doing so he could open up the world, make it just a little bigger than Italy. She would pull out the atlas and try to find the towns on the map. About Hunter, there were things, his vast knowledge, that desire to know and to share, that reminded Beth of what her father might have once been.

At the Persian grocery (which James had found) she selected (and Hunter paid for) pomegranates and barberries and rose water and saffron and a spice known as
advieh
and candied orange peels and cartons of rice noodle sorbet. She practiced Persian cooking, making feasts for Hunter, turning her interest in Persian cuisine into a passion. (She had already mastered Indian and Italian.) And sitting in her small apartment with the candles flickering and some Mozart playing quietly (chosen by Hunter), Hunter spoke to Beth about her father, remarking on his ambitions and how he was a grand, if mysterious man, and Hunter praised Jackson for saving him simply by allowing him to be nothing, a blank slate that Hunter alone had the authority to color in. (Hunter, for a long time to come, would serve as an investor for Claire, offering financial advice.) Beth loved it when people admired her father. But somewhere, deep inside, she wished he could be for her what he seemed to be for all these other people.

"What was it like to be his daughter?" Hunter asked. The question startled Beth for an instant. It was an intimate question, in a way. She looked at Hunter. He was a good five years older than she was, heavier than Cesare—a man who had spent too much time drinking beer and at a desk. She could see he had a hairy chest; hair pushed up at his collarbone through the neck of his T-shirt. She could imagine Bea saying, in her charming accent, each word carefully enunciated, "I do not like hairy chests." The mess of their dinner littered the table. She had always thought of Hunter as a privileged, confident man, but looking at him now he seemed vulnerable, and that vulnerability took away from his confidence. At the same time it made her feel she could say anything to him.

"It sucked," she said, surprising even herself because it had not sucked. It didn't start sucking until Cesare described her family as crazy, until she saw her father's weird experiment through Cesare's eyes and felt branded as its primary guinea pig. "Oh, I don't mean that. It's ambivalence, is all." She paused for a moment. "The ambivalence of age." She was thinking of Cesare, wondering if he would still love her if she had come from an ordinary family.

"All your age," Hunter joked. "Your very ancient age." He placed his hand on hers. Little pangs of desire shot through her, but she quickly swatted the feelings away. She was in love with someone else. She did not want to feel this; she was not capable of allowing herself to feel anything for another man. James had proved that to her.

"Everything is on his terms. For god's sake, he's my only parent, and he won't ever come to visit me, see me in my world. Blah, blah, blah. My mother, my father, my mother, my father... I could spend my life on a couch. No thank you. I love him. He's my father." And with that she put to rest, for now, the ambivalence she had just allowed herself to feel.

On weekends sometimes Hunter would drive Beth to Claire for a visit. During the long drive home they would continue the conversation, compare the freedom of her childhood to the structure of his. Hunter was always curious about her. He asked her so many questions, took such an interest. She grew used to having him nearby.

"You left," Beth said, meaning Claire. "Does that mean your parents won in the end?"

"Won?" Hunter asked.

"They wanted you to leave." Beth had met his parents on a few occasions. Her impression was cursory—enthusiastic people who loved adventure as long as it remained in its place. For example, they would have loved Claire if it did not involve their son, if they had known Jackson as a friend who remained safely at Claire, someone to tell stories to their friends about, to enliven dinner-table conversations. They had tons of money and did not work hard, the mother not at all. She didn't even do charity work. As far as Beth could tell, she slept all day and in the evenings organized dinner parties to entertain herself. Indeed, the father prided himself on earning an enormous salary and working very little—he was in something to do with finance, which, like hedge funds, Beth didn't pay enough attention to to fully comprehend. Hunter's father spent his days collecting things. He collected original maps from the eighteenth century and even earlier, maps drawn by Guillaume de l'lsle, say, or Samuel de Champlain or Nicholas de Fer—names Beth had never heard, but Hunter's father spoke with such authority and enthusiasm about them you seemed fairly to be missing out on life's great pleasures if you did not own a few yourself. "Maps freeze time, history," he said. "And owning the map you get to ponder that frozen moment, daily." The maps were indeed beautiful, etchings and engravings and lithographs, watercolor and gouache, pen and ink and aquatint, satin and parchment. Hunter's father, Palmer, was a short man and handsome like his son with a boyish face and a deep-dimpled smile. He prided himself on his vast knowledge and could speak with authority on almost any subject. At Claire he went around admiring the antiques bought by Short, familiar with their origins and market values. He lifted pillows, upturned mattresses, poked his head under tables—just the way Hunter had done when he first admired Claire's antiques. Watching Palmer, Beth suddenly understood Hunter, understood that his great need to know was sparked by competition with his father—to be wiser, know more, so that his father would never doubt his intelligence.

Hunter's mother had had a little too much work done on her face and the result was not a good one. She, like the maps, looked frozen, but instead of perpetual youth, her face revealed a certain fatigue, that of a sixty-year-old woman tired by life and by having borne five children. She appropriated her husband's interests in maps and in collecting as a goal and as a principle. "We can leave a mark if we leave behind a significant collection," she was fond of saying. (As it happened, she was also fond of talking about friends of theirs who had become terminally ill.) Hunter's parents assumed everyone collected something and wanted to know, upon meeting Jackson and Beth, what it was they collected. "People," Beth said. "We collect people."

"And food," Jackson added. "My daughter collects food." Beth looked at her father with warmth, felt a flush of love for him with his long sideburns, his bright eyes. It always surprised her that he understood her interests because the two of them so rarely discussed them. But he knew just when she was devoted to pizzas or pastas or Persian food or Indian. She loved that he watched her so carefully even if from afar. This knowledge added to the complexity of her feelings for him, making her feel that the distance between them was not as great as she often imagined—as did meeting Hunter's parents, who made her realize that there are people out there crazier than her own family. She wondered what Cesare would make of them.

"They wanted me to get back on my feet, thought I was afraid after the Boesky fiasco," Hunter said. The drive along I-80 took them through rolling farmland and then vast stretches of pine, as they rose into the Poconos and slipped down to the Delaware Water Gap. "I certainly didn't leave because I suddenly became unafraid."

"So you were afraid?"

"I fell really hard. You make a lot and then you have nothing and everyone thinks you're a scoundrel when they used to love you. It's hard on the ego."

"Why did you ever leave Claire then? Why did you ever go back to Wall Street?"

"Because I wanted to be near you," he said. She shivered, the truth so blatantly acknowledged.

"Near me?" she said. But I'm in love with Cesare, she thought, though she said nothing.

"I know," he said, reading her mind. And she looked at him, sweet blond man with all that hair pushing out of his shirt and his ferocious need to know all about everything to surpass his father who knew maps deeply and everything else quite well. Somewhere, however, she wanted to know what it was about her that he wanted to be near. "Simple you're not afraid," he would have answered.

In New York, he dropped her off at her apartment, seeing her into the building. Surrounded by the strong scent of cat piss and garbage in the vestibule, she gave him a quick kiss and then disappeared, fast, up the stairs, frightened by what seduced her.

 

American Express gave her a credit card, which made her feel instantly rich and unwise. She promptly used the card at her favorite store, a French boutique on Madison, to buy far more clothes than she could possibly afford. The clothes made her feel like a doll. She bought little cashmere suits and flared pants with matching jackets with enormous buttons in white, sheer shirts she would only wear a lacey bra beneath so that you could just see it shimmering against her chest. She threw out all her old clothes. She didn't care if she went into debt. New York could do this to you. She got a Visa card and transferred the balance from the American Express because it had to be paid off every month whereas the Visa did not. After the breakup of Ma Bell in 1984 telephone companies vying for customers were paying people to switch carriers and Beth quickly learned to profit from it. Before long she was switching between companies on a monthly basis in order to take advantage of the offers—fifty dollars from one, one hundred dollars from another—feeling quite proud of all she was saving, making even. Finally, she got rid of her street furniture, replacing it with castoffs from her grandmother and from Claire. She wanted her world to look beautiful. Always, she bought flowers from her Korean grocer on the corner. The saleswoman there had come to know Beth, loved her smile, and gave her little extras—apples, dried mangoes, bananas. The credit freed Beth and she accepted no more presents from Hunter. She told him that she loved him like a brother and asked him to be just her friend.