L'America (5 page)

 

Sometimes they spoke of the ordinary: of his work, his friends; of his mother's plans for his cousin's wedding; of Fiori; of Valeria and Benvenuto and the azaleas and rhododendrons, flowering perpetually; of his evenings in the piazza; of what she wanted to do with her life; of her desire to be a chef and own restaurants; of how she wanted to turn a little chocolate cake into a massive wedding cake for a woman from Claire who was marrying there. Beth had been born to dream. Her mother was killed on a small Turkish road, dreaming with Beth's father about what their lives would be and mean. He had told this story to Beth countless times. His story of Claire's death (and the moments before it) became Beth's memory of her mother. It was one of his ways, she would later understand, of keeping the three of them, their family, alive. "I feel like dreaming," her mother would often say. "Let's hear them," Beth's father would answer. "What were they?" Beth would always ask even though she knew how he would answer. Claire dreamed of an apple orchard commune in Pennsylvania where anyone could live as long as they contributed, where parents could help with each other's children and no one person had to carry too big a burden. They had seen the property; when they returned from Turkey they had planned to buy it. Claire was twenty-five years old when she died, two years older than Beth was now. Beth could come up with thousands of dreams for her life with Cesare, but in the end he could only come up with one.

 

"Tell me about her," Beth asked, eyes stinging, looking down that road, a road made longer by more road and mirage. The game didn't work that way. This was a rule of her own making. She did not want to know the details of his flirtations. Road. She had never seen the rest of America. She grew up on the apple farm and then went to New York City for part of high school and for college. Her father never left Claire—a strange fidelity to his dead wife. Beth's maternal grandmother, a New Yorker with her own dreams, had wanted to save Beth from the apple farm and her father and had sent her off to Italy on a summer exchange with an Italian girl, Beatrice Nuova (nicknamed Bea), when Beth was sixteen. Beth had gone every summer since, had lived in Italy for two years. Beth had seen far more of Italy than of America. She had been to Sicily in every season, seen it green as emeralds in the spring. She had seen the lava of Mount Etna ooze a brilliant red, Day-Glo in the night, burning through the snow. James wanted to give Beth America, to show her all the beauty.

"You're the only her, Bet."

"I want to be the only her," she said softly. Then, pleading, "Come."

"I love you," he said to Beth as she stood in all those phone booths, semitrailers thundering past, blowing her this way and that. He was just in front of her, within her grasp. He was kissing her for the first time. Her top lip, then her bottom—softly, softly. His hands were on her ribs, as light as silk. His hands pushed back her hair—white oleander, grilled octopus, rosemary, and the Aegean Sea.

"Do you love me still?" he asked.

"Tell me about
her,
" Beth demanded.

"I love you," he said. "I don't love her." Little shocks pricked through her, stabbing her here and everywhere.

"Her?" Beth asked. Of course, she knew there was a her, but she didn't want him to acknowledge the
her
just as he didn't want her to acknowledge the
him
out there on the road. It was hot inside the phone booth with the door dosed. She didn't want James to hear. James was outside pacing back and forth, waiting for her to finish her call home. They were in the parking lot of Old Faithful in Yellowstone, some five thousand miles away from Cesare, five thousand miles away from the
her
who was buzzing around him like a bee, a fly. Beth wanted to swat that fly. The parking lot thickened with cars and tourists carrying their cameras, enthusiastic children racing across the sun-softened asphalt to watch the geyser erupt. "
Ti amo,
" he said again. "Let's not ruin anything. Let's be wise," he said. Goodbye.
Addio
—to God we go.

James pressed his face to the glass of the phone booth, peering inside, his hand making a visor above his eyes to block out the sun. He made a goofy, playful face that made him look ridiculous. She turned away. She didn't want him to see that she was crying. Two small children fought over a rag doll, each pulling at a leg. James knocked on the door. She wanted to tell Cesare everything. She wanted to be lying with him in the grass, smelling the mushrooms after the rains at Fiori.
Andare in camporella,
his lips beginning at her toes. She saw his family, nice ordinary family: mother, father, son, daughter—the family of his intricate drawing so many years before, their faces perplexed and funny as they greeted her family. She had wanted to be part of his family, as if it could make her ordinary. She wanted to be sitting next to him at the piano as he made up ridiculous lyrics to accompany a Mozart sonata, entertaining an entire party with the lark.

"Can you call your father back?" James pantomimed with his hands, an elaborate dance that she found somewhat endearing though she wanted to tell him that he was a fool for not seeing how desperately she loved someone else. She wanted to be brave (a different kind of brave) and get on the plane and fly to Italy and have this all be over with. "Call him back," James persisted, hopping on one foot, throwing her smiles, jutting his hands to the sky to mime an eruption. He did a lot of wrist tapping to indicate the time and then he swept his arm around the parking lot and then he crossed his arms to indicate they'd be waiting in this god-awful spot for another ninety minutes if she didn't hurry up. He would have been adorable if she hadn't been in love with someone else. Instead she wondered why he cared so much about a geyser? There was so much she wanted to say. She wanted to save her future. The two small children tugging on the doll managed to rip its legs off. And now the little boy was crying. The little girl held a severed limb in her hand triumphantly. "Let's be grown-up about this," Cesare was saying. He was speaking wisdom though it seemed he was speaking in tongues. She lashed out. She did not want to hear this talk; this talk was all wrong.

"Bet, be reasonable," Cesare said.

"
Non posso
" she whispered. "Her."

"How do we fix this?"

"Come."

"Bet," he said. Bet. Bet. It echoed throughout the hot blue day. The way he said her name. I can't, it said. You know I can't, it said. Understand, it said. "Greta," he said. Said the name with tenderness and warmth and as an explanation.

"Greta?" Beth said, the girl becoming real, taking on a form, a shape pressing into his shape. This was all wrong. Get rid of Greta, she wanted to say. Change the
a
and the
t
and you've got
great.
"Great," Beth said, as if Cesare would understand. Once he would have understood everything in her mind. Blame, wicked poisonous blame. It was Greta's fault. Tears pricked her eyes, burned down her cheeks. "I don't want to hear anything about Greta," Beth said. "Greta is irrelevant."

Then there was a silence, a long silence. Later, much later, for the rest of her life, she would think about this instant. Should she have allowed him to speak about Greta? Should she have spoken about James? Would the truth have been their ally? Outside, sweltering. The parking lot of Old Faithful. A gorgeous blue day. A geyser about to erupt. James impatient at the phone booth door. She a twenty-three-year-old college graduate in cut-off shorts that James had hemmed for her himself somewhere in the Rockies. Her hair in braids. Poindexter and Ollie North and Caspar Weinberger acting like cowboys, taking the law into their own hands. The stock market advancing crazily, stirring up a frenzy. Cesare sitting in his chair across from a stupendous fresco painted on a whim by a wild young man. Beth was waiting for him to say something that would resolve all this, waiting for him to make them whole again. She waited. She waited. She would be waiting there still. He could hear her tears, feel them on her cheeks. He could feel her fracturing, shattering like glass into a thousand different pieces. He knew everything about her. He loved her madly and inexplicably. Greta was nothing, an interference. He would love Beth for the rest of his life.

Then, "Tell me about him," Cesare said, bitter now—cool and distant, watching her not from a perspective of love. "How does he fuck you?"

"What?" she said. She was not sure she had heard him correctly.

"Does he come in your mouth?" he asked, dead serious, a solemnity to his tone, as if in that moment of silence he had truly transformed: her lover no more—a stranger. He was playing some sort of game. She began to shiver. It was ninety-eight degrees outside, hotter inside the booth.

"I don't want to play this game," she said.

"What does your face look like," he asked.

"I'll become Italian," she said. He laughed, almost sarcastically. "I'm coming to Italy," she said.

"Beth," James said, opening the door to the booth wide, seeing now her red face smeared with tears and drool. She tried to gulp back the tears. He pronounced the name well with his strong American accent. James was a Midwesterner who wore clogs and jeans. He had fine, almost delicate features, long fingers and big hands and a shock of thick blond hair. When they were in Kansas he wouldn't wear his clogs, afraid that people would get the wrong idea about him and give him trouble. He was aware of how far he could push. "Love, what's wrong," he whispered gently, concern spreading over his face like a stain. Looking at him, she saw hope dissipate. She knew James knew now where she was and had been.

"He's with you?" Cesare said. Then, as if it meant nothing, "The details," he said flatly. "I want to know what it feels like when he touches you." The truth now fueled and encouraged his change, made him more confident in his hatred of her. He hated her now not because she had betrayed him but because she represented defeat—the defeat of one part of himself by another: kind and cruel, ambitious and passive, willful and will-less.

No good way to end love, is there?

She covered the receiver and began lying to James, the filigree lies, so finely spun.

"Does he make you scream, do you beg?" Cesare asked. James stood in the doorway. The sun shone strong behind him, causing him to appear faceless. He put his hand on her head softly, gently. He loved her. She wanted to talk to him, to hang up the phone and explain it all, to have him excise all the hurt with his gentleness. Protect him, love him. He was a warm, good man. He would understand.

"He does," she said slowly, calmly. Cesare listened. James shut the door. She wanted to tell Cesare she was torturing James. She wanted him to help her figure out why, to dissolve the lie. "In the car," she said. Figure out that she wasn't such a mean, bad person, that she was still good and loveable—the sweet blond American Cesare had fallen in love with. "In the woods. I beg him. I take my clothes off for him and lie there so that anyone can see me and I wait for him." She watched James walk toward the geyser, shoulders slumped, in resignation, not defeat. He was a confident boy.

"What do you do when he touches you? What does your body do?" And she explained in explicit detail, describing the scene in Colorado when the father and child hiked by, describing the arching ache of her body rising to meet James. She was not injured, but her body felt pain just now, as if she were being cut, stabbed. She bled. She gave elaborate details, until she begged him to stop, but he wanted more. "He humiliates me," she said. "Is that what you want to hear?" She didn't mind now that he knew she was crying. What more could she say? Then, softly, "I'll come to Italy," she said. "Please let me come," she said.

"
Putana,
" he said. Whore.

"I love you," she said. Her nose twitched. Her eyes twitched. A girl in a phone booth with braids.

"A lie?" Cesare said, as if that were the key, the justification.

"No," she said. "Her," she said quietly. "You knew he was here." There was another long silence. The booth was hot now, suddenly it seemed. A fly landed on her hand and stayed there patiently. The day was hazy with the heat; her foot could leave a print in the asphalt. The fly took off, finding the way outside through a crack in the door. Her mother flashed across her mind. Her mother's young smiling face, black hair windswept, was replaced by Cesare's, and then both were gone. Cesare was Beth's salvation. The booth was hot. Old Faithful began to erupt, hissing and steaming and spraying. She wanted to grab those faces back. Tourists not near enough yet began to run. The parking lot cleared, like water swirling into the vortex of a drain. The whole world empty. Do you want me to be a whore? she wanted to ask. I'll be a whore, she wanted to say. Italy vanished before her—swept into her past.

"Is this what you want, to hate me now?" she said, but even as she said it she knew he loved her still. She thought she could hear him crying, see him in the velvet armchair stifling tears, see him sitting there across from the brilliant fresco that seemed to spell their story, that had spelled it to them all along, as it had spelled the stories of lovers everywhere in their struggle against time. She saw the beautiful young man rising toward the cloud, the girl reaching in anguish, with determination, as if she could pull him back. Beth was in the middle of America. All around her were cars, a sea of cars leading to dozens upon dozens of places. Jets streaked across the sky. She saw his parents trying to stop the corrosive bite of time so that that party could carry indelibly on.

Love is a victory over time. Love steals from death. The illusion of immortality for an instant blooms, a beautiful flower, and everything that is here is here and all that is, truly is. Beth went back to her story; for a long time she went back, held it like an object to the light, told it to friends. She would live it, dream it, breathe it. She would return to it again and again. She had heard that criminals return to crime scenes in order to gaze upon their deed, to make certain that it had occurred, to make it vivid, real, alive—to own it. She would return just as Valeria had returned simply by gazing at the fresco, as Valeria's family was able to return for twenty generations—return and relive and recall and remember—that instant frozen, stopped. Love is a victory over time.