L'America (32 page)

"Please," she said, so quietly the word could barely be heard.

"Don't," he said. Don't make me say no again.

A few days later she searched her apartment for those long-ago lists of what she had and of what she wanted. She updated them and soon thereafter set to work.

 

The 1990s—the steady rise of the stock market, of the dollar, of the Internet, of wealth. Bill Clinton became president. He appeared on late-night talk shows making fun of himself in very unpresidential ways. He could blow a saxophone along with the best of them. Newt Gingrich. The New Republicans. O. J. Simpson. The Unabomber. Oprah. Julia Roberts. Yoga. The self. More and more and more. Princess Diana died. John-John Kennedy died. Chefs became indisputable superstars. Lucent and Cisco and eBay and AOL and Intel and Amazon. The cell phone. Bill Gates. (It was claimed that he earned so much money it wasn't worth his time to bend over and pick up a five-hundred-dollar bill. Some of Hunter's Wall Street friends would take this as a challenge, calculating how much their time was worth, how much they could forgo for the sake of the value of their time. "Gross," Beth said. "Pathetic.") America was on an upward trend, rising, rising to meet the need of more and more.

 

When Beth was a little girl she loved chocolate. Of this Jackson was well aware, Beth knew. Especially, she enjoyed trying to understand the brownie—how to make it moist as if from a box but from scratch. Six, seven, eight years old, standing in the kitchen at Claire, she would practice and practice and get everyone involved, giving her tips, helping her with recipes. Her brownies were awful, hard as rocks. People chipped teeth on them. Some of the kids used them as ammunition for their slingshots. A window was broken with a brownie of hers. But Jackson wanted to encourage the interest. He didn't want her to give up. He loved her curiosity, her drive, her ambition to understand. For her birthday he ordered her a case of Duncan Hines brownie mixes so she could consistently make successful brownies—a compromise, yes, but he wanted her to succeed so that she would gain confidence. "But they're not scratch. They're cheating," she said, looking at him. His daughter was a purist, in search of the authentic. He admired his girl, his proud smile indicated as much. He would tell the story to anyone who would listen, "My daughter's a purist," he would say. "My eight-year-old girl has rejected
the mix.
" His pride propelled her. She wanted him to acknowledge other special things about her. She couldn't get enough.

He tried a new approach to the brownie. He sent away for fine Belgian chocolate and French cookbooks with recipes for flourless chocolate gateaux. He sent away for and gave Beth a double boiler and a rubber spatula and a springform pan and whisks in a variety of sizes and a set of measuring cups and spoons and mixing bowls all for her own. And he helped her negotiate the recipes, helped her learn the essential detail of patience, helped her understand the finicky nature of chocolate, of eggs. By nine she had perfected
Gateau au chocolat:
le Diablo from
Simca's Cuisine
by Simone Beck, partner of Julia Child. He remembered, she remembered a long table of people savoring her chocolate cake by candlelight, looking at the little girl who made it. She had a white apron tied around her waist, a big smile on her lips, for she knew she had succeeded. No doubts or second thoughts, knew it unequivocally. "I am good," she thought. "I've got a talent."

By ten Beth had mastered Julia Child's creamless mousse. She had mastered the soufflé and the truffle. By eleven she was an understudy for Preveena and her curries. She was hooked on food, handled all of the produce at Claire as if she were handling a new baby, remembering the big hands of all those chefs who handled her father's produce. She had a respect for food, an appreciation, an understanding, an empathy that only someone who cared deeply could have. Her father loved to watch her, could watch for hours, sitting in the glass dining room with the
New York Times
spread on the table in front of him, his little girl wrapped in her white apron busy melting and blending and sifting and concocting in the kitchen, bringing him now and again something to taste and to judge. And it was his eyes on her that propelled her forward. As she too rose along with the effervescent decade, as she updated her lists, as she contemplated where she had come from and where she wanted to go, it was her father's eyes on her, his belief in her, that sent her forward. And the obstinate hope that if only she achieved enough, he would someday come to her.

 

In the fall of 1992, a few months after Beth's final return from Italy, Bea arrived. She called a few days before in the middle of the night to say she was leaving her husband, that he didn't know it, that he wouldn't know it until she was gone, that she was coming to live with Beth in New York City, was it all right? They hadn't spoken in a long time. Bea had been mad at Beth for coming to Italy en route to India without letting her know, and as a result she had given Beth the silent treatment for so long that Beth hadn't dared call her when she was in Città. Beth was surprised to hear her friend's voice. "I knew you'd been mad," Beth said to Bea over the phone. "Then I was too embarrassed to call."

"You knew I wouldn't have approved. You knew I would have made you stop wasting your time on him." And, of course, she was right. Sometimes Beth had thought their friendship was over, outgrown or abandoned or simply lost to time and change the way friendships of youth often are. Hearing Bea's voice now, she realized that that would never happen.

Bea arrived with several suitcases and all her bossy enthusiasm, ready to fix her own life and Beth's. She unpacked her bags, hanging her perfectly pressed clothes in Beth's closet, placing her folded shirts and neatly pressed underwear and bras among the things in Beth's bureau. Though all of the details of her wardrobe remained the same, Bea's face and body had changed entirely. Her long nose had been bobbed, her thick black hair, so long she could sit on it, had been streaked blond, her brown eyes had become green, and her full body was as thin as a twig.

"I hardly recognize you," Beth said.

"Imagine. Next he wanted me to fix my boobs." The
he
referred to her husband. "That's when I left."

Bea approved of all of Beth's French clothes. She didn't approve of her hair, which had grown out of its bob, and before long Bea cut it and highlighted it and taught Beth (once and for all) how to style it with a blow dryer.

Since Beth had two roommates, Bea made herself at home in Beth's bed. Late at night she would tell Beth about Giorgio, her awful husband. She had met him in town through a friend and had been attracted to him because he was an artist who designed shopping bags for department stores in Milan, Florence, and Rome—a lucrative job. Initially, Bea had hoped—believed even—that they'd get out of Città to a bigger life in Milan or Rome. They were married for three years, and never left Città, but toward the end of those three years he kept making appointments for her with the plastic surgeon and at the tanning salon. He started buying only diet food for her and gave her special low-carbohydrate diet cookbooks. He did not mind when he discovered that she was bulimic. At the tanning salon she met a married man with whom she fell in love simply because he made her laugh. "He was not attractive, a short little guy with bad teeth, but everything he said made me smile." He promised he would leave his wife. He gave Bea a ring. They ran off to Venice ("which isn't as romantic as they say because the canals smell and it is crowded with tourists") to Florence and Rome and the island of Giglio. "Giorgio never noticed," she said. "I'm sure he had his own affairs." After a year the married man, Marco, still had not left his wife, so Bea called Beth and fled. Her husband had no idea where she was. She wrote him a letter at 37,000 feet and posted it upon arriving in New York.

Listening to Bea, Beth felt as if they were sixteen again, talking about the boyfriends of their teenage years who would soon become irrelevant, like having a sister, an older sister who knew all the answers even if her own life didn't seem to indicate it. When Bea had exhausted the subjects of Giorgio and Marco, the conversation would turn to Beth and her affairs and of course to Cesare. Beth told her about the past five years of breaking up and how cruel he was to her in Città and then all about the one-night stand with Gianni. "Good riddance," Bea said of Cesare. She propped herself up on the pillows and looked at Beth, her eyes chatoyant in the dark, the ceiling fan creaking, stirring up the air. "He was never going to be for you. He was stupid, Beth. A stupid Cittadino who couldn't see beyond the shadow cast by his bell tower."

"Those damn bell towers. It's a surprise, really, that more of them haven't been knocked down."

"It would not be worth the effort," Bea answered. And there late at night in Beth's bed, Bea's own ferocious ambitions, trapped for so long, came bursting forth. And there late at night they began to scheme and concoct and dream of ways to realize their desires. Bea wanted to be a buyer for a big department store, fly all over the world finding irresistible objects and clothing, to adorn women and make them feel new and perfect and pretty.

Bea would, in fact, start looking for work, using her family's connections. She would find a job and live in America for the rest of her life. After Beth's grandmother died, Bea would take over Beth's apartment and Beth would move into her grandmother's. (Grammy died in her sleep of heart failure, ninety years old, in 1995.) Eventually Bea would meet and marry an American and have a thriving career at Lord & Taylor's. She would become Valeria's godmother and adopt her, in spirit, anyway, after Beth was killed, making herself available to Valeria at any time of the day or night. Bea would never have any of her own children but she took care of her friend's children with a fierce devotion. Even Cesare would be in touch with her later on when his son Leonardo came to New York for his PhD in art history at Columbia. Cesare would call Bea and ask her to watch out for him. A call from the blue and a call that would change a certain perception Bea had of him—a perception vivid and clear and strong as she lay in bed with her heartbroken friend.

But that was all later. Now Bea could see her friend needed as much fixing as she herself needed. It was easier to work on her friend than on herself. Beth showed Bea her lists and Bea crumpled them up and threw them in the trash and told her to keep nurturing her catering business and start writing her cookbook, told her it should be more like a memoir of her time in Italy with recipes as ornaments decorating the experiences—
pasta carbonara
made by a beautiful Italian man with whom she would fall permanently in love on a hot Greek night with a full and silver moon, the secret of their love still a mystery even for themselves.

Beth did as she was told and sat at a desk in her bedroom and day in and day out for a year she worked on the book. When she wasn't writing she was catering, sometimes with Bea's help. When she wasn't writing or catering, she was trying to fix Bea up with Hunter, who had left Dina. They all met up for Mozart and wine at the Met and giggled and told stories about the escapades of years ago. Hunter watched the girls with fondness as they described sleeping in the Athenian park, leaving their luggage on the street, or Beth's attempt at waxing her legs—that one hairy leg, Bea begging Beth to finish the job. "It made the waxed leg look prosthetic." Hunter asked questions and the girls spoke with memory and passion and Bea observed Hunter with a careful eye, that discerning eye of hers that would be so good at picking the prettiest shawl out of a stack of shawls one hundred high. She watched Beth as she tilted her head and curled her lips and blushed ever so slightly, as she glanced at Hunter for approval, to see if she made him smile. Then Bea engaged Hunter directly in a conversation first about himself and the hedge fund, then about Beth and her cookbook and her famous dinners and her desire to open a restaurant and he described Beth's parties in detail (the rose water and the petals and the conversation, the dresses she would wear and the music she would play and the people she'd invite). Beth lifted her hand to show Bea the Persian ring he had bought for her long ago. Bea admired it, holding Beth's hand up to the light, turning it around, believing her friend to be a fool. She looked at Hunter, "You bought it because she has romantic ideas about Persian food? Clever." She tightened her lips and nodded her head ever so slightly, understanding perfectly the entire situation. From the ring to the rugs to Sylvia to Claire to Jackson and then back to Beth. Before long she had him helping her figure out the financing for Beth's future. During discussions of finding a silent partner and collateral and loans and all the rest, his conversation became as animated as his face.

Walking home through the park, a full moon in the twilit sky: "He's so clearly in love with you," Bea said to Beth. They strolled arm in arm around the reservoir, over the bridle path, past all the playgrounds with the playing children fading with the day and rollerbladers, bicyclists, and the ubiquitous joggers rushing by. It was fall and warm, a warmth that somehow promised spring.

"I know," Beth said, as if it were a burden.

"Then I suppose what you don't know is that you're in love with him?"

"Don't be silly," she said, but their kiss filled her mind, that kiss in her empty apartment, brand-new to her and like a mansion, that kiss warm and protective if not passionate, like the sheltering sky. "He's like a brother," she added. And then she explained more about his years at Claire.

"He's cute," Bea observed.

"You think so? I can't see that anymore."

"We can renovate him," she said. "Of course, he won't become Italian. He is very American. But we can remove the pennies from his shoes." They both began to giggle at the grandiosity of the silly idea of renovating Hunter.

"Don't underestimate the power and allure of being cherished," Bea said, suddenly serious. She turned her head abruptly as a speeding cyclist rode by. All her hair followed, like a spray of silk tassels, like the dress Hunter had given Beth long ago.