L'America (37 page)

"
Babbo?
I'm speaking to you. I want to come to Fiori today,
Babbo.
Please. I don't want to go to school." He hears his wife turn on the faucet in the bathroom. She will be splashing her face with cool water, brushing her teeth. Then he hears her turn the faucet off. He hears her walking down the hall and then down the stairs to them. "Mama says I can come if you approve. I want to come." His voice is whiny in that five-year-old way. And then his wife appears. She looks somehow brand-new, strange and unfamiliar with her big dark eyes and her porcelain skin.

"You didn't sleep last night,
tesoro
?" she asks. Her long black hair is tied in a bun at the back of her head. Her eyes are rested and bright, ready for the day. Her white bathrobe is tied at her thin waist and she wears pink ballet slippers on her feet as she always does in place of ordinary slippers. She always has something on her feet. She never goes barefoot. She does not want her feet to get dirty. She will go into the kitchen now and make herself a coffee, one for Cesare, too, if she is feeling generous. She will choose a few nice pieces of fruit and set to peeling them for herself. Then she will start with the calls: calls to her sisters, calls to her parents, calls to the army of people coming to Fiori to discuss the plans for the pool. Leonardo squirms in Cesare's arms, shouting at his mother about coming to Fiori and having the day off from school. He is electric with possibility for the day: a day away from school, a day with his parents doing grown-up things that have wonderful implications for a child. He imagines next summer splashing in the pool with all his friends. Isabella pulls open the curtains and sunlight floods in, bouncing off the marbled floors, soaking the room with the brilliance of the clear blue day and all of its implicit hope. Cesare's eyes are shot with blood and dark circles weigh down his brown eyes. She notes the cigarettes but says nothing. She does not ask for explanations, only desires to be told what he needs and wants to tell her. She bends down and picks up the piece of paper lying on the floor and gives it a quick scan and says, "
L'America,
" with a little tinge of dismissive impatience, but also an indulgent smile. She knows her husband, has been encouraging him in his interest in doing business with an American from Baltimore. In her elegant hand the white piece of paper flutters delicately like a tissue, nothing more. She leans to kiss him softly on the forehead. The paper rests on his shoulder. She has no idea what it says. She whispers, so that Leonardo cannot hear, asking Cesare if they can spoil the boy, bring him along, he has been so eager and curious about the pool. The boy understands implicitly the great hurdle this pool represents—knows it the way kids can sometimes, wise beyond their small number of years. She moves her face away from Cesare's and cocks her pretty smile and he smiles back agreeing and Leonardo, understanding, leaps out of his father's lap and tears off to get dressed, squealing with delight. Isabella goes off to the kitchen still carrying the paper, unaware of what she holds in her hand, unaware that Cesare has been crying, all business and efficiency, ready to begin the day. And what would this news mean to her? A sudden jolt would shock her. She would feel for a moment her husband's sadness (of course, she knows who Beth is); she would sting with her new proximity to the calamity. But most of all, he knows, she would feel the horror, but only briefly, that it would ripple through her and then just as easily ripple out of her as such emotions always do in people who have escaped someone else's tragedy. So he says nothing.

He hears the coffee being made, hears the selection of the fruit, hears the calls begin. She would have shared the news with her sisters, another piece of gossip to feed upon—and nothing wrong in that. Gossip is just another form of storytelling, another way to understand those things which make no sense, to tease them and pull them and mine them for contrast and comparison to one's own situation. The sunlight blots out the fresco, reflecting off the protective glass, turning the picture into a white void. The day has begun. Soon they will be on the familiar road and this, too, will be incorporated, kneaded into the fold, worked and processed like sea glass found on the beach made smooth with time, by the endless repetition of rolling against sand in the waves.

 

There she was: two moments: the first and the last. A Greek island. A strong, blinding late afternoon sun. He was standing on steps leading to an apartment, talking to an old Greek woman clad in black. He was trying to negotiate with her a price for another room. She spoke no Italian or English so he attempted to speak with her in ancient Greek. She did not understand that, either. Then he began to gesture with his hands. He rubbed his fingers together, shrugged his shoulders. He was a good mime. She understood. They were making progress. He smelled rosemary and lemon blossoms. The strong sun bit into his tanned arms. His friends arrived with their American girls. He turned to greet them, and there she was, small blond American with her cherubic dimpled smile. She blushed, averted her eyes, looked at him again, her determined eyes piercing into him. And he knew he was on the verge of something enormous, something grand. He felt vertigo, feared he would fall down the stairs. For nineteen years he had been remembering her there, dressed in something that did not suit her, something ridiculous belonging to Bea, something orange and awkward, that on someone else might have been stylish, but not on her. She averted those eyes only to cast them back in a way that at once captured her ability to be both shy and confident, that made him want to fall down those stairs and land at her feet, take her hand in his and begin the walk, the echo of which sounded still against his mind, reverberated still with each breath.

And then her back to him, his eyes penetrating her back, the straps of a pink silk slip gracing her slender shoulders. The beauty of her tanned back, the sharp lines of her bones, jutting like wings—were she a bird and could take flight. The conversation in the French hotel, their children gallivanting on the lawn, discovering the small things—a leaping toad, a clover, a cicada, the big worm-eaten leaf. Dancing in the dappled shadows of the plane trees. There was motion in those shoulders. She wanted to turn. She wanted to see him once again, a last time. This small story the myth of their lives, of his life and her life, inflated within them, these words their monument as the fresco was a monument, as Claire was a monument. For a moment they had the ability to defy time and history, to be a story for their children and their children's children and so on and so forth.
I am trusting you,
she said. Her back firm now, unyielding. No Orpheus was she. The afternoon sun illuminated her with haloes of light.
And damned if I look back.

 

He rises from the velvet chair to the day that will carry him on and away from this with nothing and everything changed, carry him through the same patterns of remembering, of working in his bank, coming up with and supporting new ideas for socks and feet, of dreaming another destiny, of reprimanding and adoring his child and being impatient and loving with his wife, of trying to tame fear with a laugh, of drinking his aperitif in town before dinner on the earless cobbled street filled with shoppers buying their bread and their pastries packaged in waxed paper with bows, greeting each other with smiles and stories of their tangled dramas as they have for so many years and generations, same as they do everywhere, ordinary people engaged in ordinary lives that amount to everything.