A Writer's Life (64 page)

On the eve of the court date, I flew from New York to Washington's Dulles Airport and was met near the baggage-claim section by Lorena, who hastened toward me with her arms extended, smiled, and kissed me on the cheeks. At twenty-nine, she was as slender, pretty, and carefully groomed and attired as she had been on the day the jury had exonerated her in the penis case. After thanking me for coming, she turned to introduce me to her new boyfriend, who followed a few paces behind her. He was a gangling, heavyset, casually dressed, dark-haired individual in his thirties named David Bellinger. He bent down slightly as we shook hands—he was six-four (Lorena was five-two). The couple seemed to be very comfortable in each other's presence and Bellinger was at once cordial and accommodating toward me, taking the initiative to carry my luggage
out of the airport to the parking lot, where his red sports car awaited us. Bellinger ran an auto accessories business in Woodbridge, Virginia, and his car was replete with such paraphernalia.

As we drove toward my motel—Lorena insisted on sitting in the back—he told me that he and Lorena had started dating during the past year, having first met after they had begun taking night courses at Northern Virginia Community College. He said that even before meeting her in person he had been attracted to her from seeing her on television and in news photos during the media blitz of 1993-1994, and he would sometimes drive past the courthouse while the trials were in progress. He imagined her sitting in the crowded courtroom facing the jury, and at such times he was always sympathetic to her cause and very optimistic that she would win her freedom.

There were questions I wanted to ask David Bellinger, but I resisted. This was neither the time nor the place to pose such questions, certainly not with Lorena in the car. Still I wondered, Did he and Lorena, whom I assumed to be lovers, ever get into arguments? Did he ever think that he was in a precarious position as Lorena's bedmate? Did he sleep on his stomach? I recalled the advice given in 1993 by the maimed John Bobbitt to an investigating police officer in the hospital: “Be careful who you date.”

After registering at my motel, I had a drink in the lobby with David and Lorena and learned a bit more about her quarrel with her mother. Lorena, who following her divorce from John Bobbitt had resumed using her maiden name, Gallo, told me that she and her mother had often argued about money and other matters since the elder Gallos had moved from Venezuela into her home in 1994. Lorena had hoped that her parents would adjust to a new way of life, but instead they held to their old Latin American traditions and measured her by their expectations. They made little effort to understand English, tuned in almost exclusively to Spanish-language radio stations, and tended to treat her as if she were a naïve and dependent daughter, whereas it was
they
who were dependent on
her
. They lived rent-free, relied upon her to drive them around, and, when shopping or otherwise engaged with people unable to communicate in Spanish, expected her to serve as their interpreter. Eventually she helped them to find work outside the home, menial tasks that did not demand fluency in English, and at the same time she saw to it that her teenage brother, Fabrizio, was enrolled in school and that her sister, Vanessa, four years her junior, was hired as a trainee at her nail salon.

Lorena's difficulties with her parents worsened after she had met David
Bellinger and the latter began offering her advice on how she might more effectively manage her finances. It was he who encouraged her to take into strict account the monthly expenses incurred by her and her family and to expect the others to contribute to the payments. There was not much expressed disagreement about this from Lorena's family, but when Bellinger, who was quick with numbers and adept with his computer, printed out the bills with suggestions of appropriate apportionment, Lorena's parents
did
feel resentment. He was an outsider, they reminded her when he was not around, and he was now meddling in their personal affairs. But Lorena, who had experienced bankruptcy during her years as Mrs. Bobbitt, welcomed having David as a buffer, as a responsible and reliable friend who was not only interested in her solvency but in reaffirming her independence within the complicated closeness of her not yet fully assimilated Latin American family. Even though she and David were not living together, he was an imposing presence in her household. She also had a key to his apartment, and it was to him she had fled following the confrontation with her mother and the arrival of the police.

Lorena told me she was confident that the judge would rule in her favor. It was her mother, forty-nine-year-old Elvia Gallo, who had provoked the argument and had struck first, although in the ensuing scuffle Elvia had gotten the worst of it. She had scratches on her neck, facial bruises, and a speck of blood in the corner of her left eye; it was while in this condition that Elvia ran outside the house to complain to a neighbor, a Puerto Rican woman, who in turn telephoned the police and repeated Elvia's assertion that she had been beaten up by her daughter.

When meeting with the police, however, Elvia changed her story, insisting that it was
she
who was at fault. It had perhaps belatedly occurred to her that the interests of the Gallo family would not be well served if Lorena went to jail. The police listened noncommittally as Elvia made her statement through an interpreter, and they also took several photographs of her scratched neck and bruised face. A warrant was immediately issued for Lorena's arrest. Soon the county prosecutor's office released a statement advocating that the case against Lorena be brought before a judge.

On the morning of the court date—April 2, 1998—I sat in the courtroom a few rows behind Lorena and her attorney, listening as her mother took the stand and repeated what she had told the police—
she
had been the attacker, not her daughter. Elvia Gallo's testimony was refuted, however, when her neighbor was on the stand and recalled that on the day of the incident Elvia had come tearfully to her door, beaten and battered,
and had described how Lorena had just attacked her with her fists. At the conclusion of the neighbor's testimony, Judge James B. Robeson said that he, too, believed that Elvia had been brutalized by Lorena.

“If you ask me if I think she is guilty, I'd say yes,” the judge admitted. But still, he went on to say, “I have reasonable doubt … so I'll find her not guilty.”

Lorena showed no reaction to Judge Robeson's verdict; she simply reached over and shook hands with her defense attorney, William Boyce, and whispered, “Thank you.” Then she turned around and thanked me, although I had not been called to testify. Later in the corridor, she embraced her mother and father and then introduced me to them. Elvia and Carlos Gallo were both lean and short, and after forcing a smile and shaking hands with me, they quickly backed away, seeming to be intimidated by the advancing presence of members of the media.

“My mother and I love each other very much,” Lorena declared, stepping forward to face three newspaper reporters, two photographers, and a television camera crew—a tiny fraction of the press coverage she had drawn years earlier. “We live together; we work together,” Lorena said, and, nodding toward her mother, she continued: “… Blood is thicker than water.” Boyce told the press that Lorena was “very happy to have this episode behind her, and she'd like to resume a normal life free of publicity.” He added, “Hope springs eternal.”

Among the small crowd of onlookers stood Lorena's nineteen-year-old brother, Fabrizio, whom I tried, without success, to engage in conversation, and Lorena's twenty-five-year-old sister, Vanessa, who was actually quite friendly and communicative. A bit more petite than Lorena but equally attractive in her physical appearance and attire, Vanessa told me what I had already learned from speaking with Lorena the previous evening: Vanessa had recently gotten married and was no longer residing at the Gallo household—a decision that Lorena said had riled her parents (and particularly her mother) not only because Vanessa seemed to hardly know the young man but because he was Chinese. His immigrant family currently operated a Chinese restaurant in a nearby northern Virginia community. Neither he nor any of his kinsmen had come to the courthouse on this day, but, after mentioning that I would like to meet them, both Lorena and Vanessa agreed that they would try to arrange it when I next came to Virginia.

A
S
I
FLEW BACK TO
N
EW
Y
ORK THAT AFTERNOON THINKING
about the Gallo family, and the fact that Lorena now had a Chinese brother-in-law, I was still not exactly sure what I was writing about, but I nevertheless felt that I was part of it. I was both an observer and an exemplar of the ongoing process of American assimilation and conflict, of newcomers influenced by old traditions and fears and often a misconstrued sense of what was relevant and important. How
American
it was of the Spanish-speaking Gallo parents (recently settled on the outskirts of the nation's capital) to object to their daughter's decision to marry a young neighbor of Chinese origin, and how
American
it was of their daughter to marry him anyway.

I remembered how my convent-educated wife, Nan, had similarly upset
her
parents decades earlier when she had traveled alone to meet me in Rome, and, after having assured them that we would get married within the chapel of the Trinità dei Monti, overlooking the Piazza di Spagna—a site that had been consecrated by a sixteenth-century Pope and that Nan had extolled as the spiritual center of her Sacred Heart education—we got married instead in a civil ceremony overseen by an Italian Communist magistrate within the city's principal municipal hall, in the Piazza del Campidoglio.

It had not been my idea to seek a change of venue for the wedding, nor had I even wanted to be married. Prior to the arrival of my bride-to-be in June 1959, I had been dwelling in solitary bliss in a hotel suite near the Borghese Gardens, luxuriating in the fact that my expenses were being paid by the
New York Times Magazine
after I had persuaded its editor to allow me to write a piece about the city's famous boulevard, the Via Veneto, where the director Federico Fellini was then filming scenes to be included in his forthcoming movie,
La Dolce Vita
. I had briefly interviewed him through an interpreter while visiting the set, and I had spoken as well with one of the stars, Marcello Mastroianni, whose suavity
and nonchalance on the screen projected a romantic style that I someday hoped to emulate in real life.

After working at the desk in my hotel room every day for two weeks, I finally organized and outlined my material and began to type out the opening pages of the article on my Olivetti portable:

I finished the three-thousand-word piece on June 1, and two days later, after the editor had accepted it for publication in an early-summer issue, I taxied to the airport to meet Nan and begin what I thought would be a ten-day vacation together in Rome—and
not
a matrimonial occasion at the altar of the Trinità dei Monti. I later listened with disbelief and anguish as Nan shared her intentions with me, doing so after her luggage had been carried into my suite and while the two of us were having what had begun as a pleasant lunch at Rosati's sidewalk café.

“You
can't
be serious,” I said, or something to that effect—I cannot recall exactly what I said, or what Nan said, other than the fact that, in
the most tactful way possible, it was made clear to me that if I wished to continue my two-year-old relationship with this green-eyed beauty who had the temerity to tell her parents that she was marrying me before telling
me
, my bachelorhood would soon be ending. It also must have occurred to me, though I was then only twenty-seven and relatively inexperienced in
les affaires du coeur
, that in matters most
personally
and
directly
affecting the lives of involved couples—be it the decision to marry, or to have children, or to buy or sell a house, or to sue for divorce—the woman's will invariably prevails.

Still, I believe that Nan was unhappy with my lack of enthusiasm for the potential joys of wedlock (feelings that I traced back to my claustrophobic upbringing in a home where my parents thought that an ideal marriage was one in which one's spouse was never out of sight), and so after Nan had visited the Trinità dei Monti and learned that weddings were no longer held there—the only place that represented special meaning to her as a marital site—she suggested that we might as well be married outside the Church. I got the impression, though she never articulated it, that she was now experiencing doubts about my worthiness as a husband (doubts perhaps previously conveyed to her by her mother), and while Nan did not want to leave Rome unmarried, since marrying me had been the expressed purpose of her trip, I think that she was anticipating, at least subconsciously, a happy day in the not-too-distant future when, after she had met the right man, she would marry him properly in front of a priest and in the presence of her family and friends.