Earthquake I.D. (22 page)

The statues on the first floor were incomplete, one way or another. Most lacked an arm or a nose, but the male figures were the worst off. None of them had a penis. The castration looked deliberate, in fact, as if someone had lopped off the cock with a chisel. The scar beneath their bronze or marble pubic curls, to Barbara's way of thinking, made these men more alive. She could imagine them hurting. But then again, when it came to hurting, nobody could match the woman under the Farnese Bull. A tragedy depicted in full, big enough for a monument at Gettysburg, the Farnese piece erupted in crosscut spirals. Two nude wranglers fought with the maddened animal, men who appeared all the more reckless because they still had their male equipment, and five or six inches beneath the bull's raised hooves there coiled a woman: bare-breasted, soft-bellied, shriek-wracked, raising an arm still pudgy with baby fat.

Eventually the family climbed to the next story. The clutter of kitchen shelves and bedside vanities, up there, was laid out in racks arranged by size. At one end you had an ear-stud for a girl, at the other a serving platter to go under a boar, so from a distance the display suggested open scrolls covered with writing that grew larger, louder, more demanding. Come closer and you might see the blunt end of a pin fashioned into the pouting face of a nymph head. There was copper, silver, jade, gold.

Barbara heard Romy check something with Chris.
Most of the things here, they're things for a woman, right?

The boy concurred, with a gesture that took in combs, jewels, vials of perfume.

Okay, for sure. Naples is a woman
.

Naples was a metaphor, sure, an extrapolation—all the more diverting because the choice of comparison made no difference. Barbara could waste the whole day on such stuff; she could lose herself in another fairy tale. For wasn't today the old story of her first descent into the city? Into the speaking grid, where the mother was forever rediscovering herself? Today the downtown had a more formal layout, the scroll effect, compared to which she and the children looked doughy and amorphous, like a lower order of being. The most exquisite of the household items was a blue wine jug embroidered with white coral. An amphora brought out for good company, its cameo decoration hugged the darker glass like vines of bone. Indeed many of the scrimshaw-style carvings were vines, grapevines, among which nuzzled goats and birds and babies. Human or beast, they went happily for the fruit, in a never-ending snack time that sprouted in coils from the plump drunk head of Dionysius. The god had a sloppy smile and greedy eyes, and he was antenna'd with the vineyard's rootstock.

Compared to a thing like that, what did her squabbling amount to? The people who'd used the jug had been gone since Christ was a carpenter.

Barbara straightened up. “We need to talk,” she said.

The announcement came out with surprising firmness. She saw that the two girls remained close by, and she got a hand on each.

“I'm saying, just me and the kids.” With a glance she took in John Junior and Romy, facing her, plus Chris putting a word in Paul's ear. “Me and the kids and nobody else. Guys, listen. There's something I've been meaning to tell you.”

The first to take her seriously was Kahlberg's Umberto. The museum guide pouted beneath his mustache, sizing the mother up. She claimed that after all they'd been through, her and the kids, they needed to take stock right here and now in the middle of the daytrip. They needed time alone to make sure that the morning's excitement wasn't too much for anyone. When the Lieutenant Major touched his lapel and reminded Barbara that she'd just had almost a week of “family-style R&R,” she responded that Nazionale visit had come too soon. She hadn't realized how badly it might shake up her and the children to get back out into something resembling real life.
Downstairs we had that awful Bull business
, the mother declared,
the worlds in collision, and up here we've got this impossible House Beautiful stuff
.

“Mom,” Chris put in, “this is nothing. You should see what they've got—”

“Chris, this is our life, not a museum. I'm telling you, we've got to
talk.”

A few of the strangers in the gallery stared openly at the give and take, and others checked their waist-packs or watches in order to avoid staring. John Junior made a wisecrack, don't mess with Mother Nature, and Barb fixed him with the same glare as she'd given Chris. In the process she noticed that the blue of the spectacular amphora, beneath the bleached coral, recalled the color of the sea in Jay's wide and complicated map. The city in that map had been going upside her head with its tufa-stone verities for weeks now, and still she hadn't torn through the paper, she hadn't revealed what was really going on between her and Jay. Any longer and she would de-evolve further, she'd become nothing but talk. Already she was trapped in a kind of test pattern, wasn't she? Hadn't she already grappled for a moral advantage on her husband, a couple of times, only to fall back exhausted once she achieved it? Now, here and now, she needed to let the kids know. She needed privacy, a room at the end of the world.

The Lieutenant Major handled Barbara's outburst with his usual affability, but he didn't fool her. After last week's cloak and dagger, she knew he had to worry about what she might say. Sorry, S.K., but she wasn't going to hold anything back. The children needed the whole truth, the divorce and its reasons. Barb shook her head at the officer's reminder that he'd have the Lulucitas back home in no time, a couple of hours. She tugged at a seam of her dress and, noticing Umberto's wormy pout, scowled with still greater determination. Kahlberg made what sounded like a joke, something about the Stendhal syndrome, but he turned from the mother. He fell into a triangular staring contest with Romy and the loose-hipped Umberto. The bad blood between the gypsy and the other two was obvious, and the museum guide, or whoever he was, let his Neapolitan mask slip enough to show her the same in return. Smoke and mirrors—Mary, mother of God—Barbara had gotten sick of it.

The NATO man turned to her again. “It's got to be blood relatives only, one. Anything like that, that's how it has to be. You and the kids only.”

Umberto had his mask back in place. He mentioned a storage area nearby.

“All I need,” she said, “is a place where a person can let her hair down.”

The Italian pinched his mustache, unfamiliar with the expression, and Kahlberg took him aside. The two men stepped into a corner, no end to their smoke and mirrors, and Barbara got her hands out for Dora and Syl. They deserved a last good squeeze from the Mom they thought they knew.

“Mrs. Lulucita?”

Kahlberg, a hand on her arm, had colder fingers than she'd expected. The man was a Georgia peach after all, thin-blooded and quick to burn in the sun.

“They've got a secure space,” the PR man said, “at the back of the gallery.” He wore a smirk, trying to keep things light. “Umberto says, they've got a surprise for you in there. Says you won't believe what they're keeping in there.”

He even winked. But Barbara wouldn't soften, and after a moment the liaison showed her something new. New and startling, a face she'd never imagined on Lieutenant Major Kahlberg, one without pretense or stagecraft. For a long moment, in the museum hush, the liaison kept his hand on the mother and let her see something close to honesty.

“Let me ask you something,” he said.

She wouldn't avert her eyes.

“Let me ask you, do you know what all this museum shit, this upstairs and downstairs—do you know what it's about, this shit?”

Barbara wished Chris could hear; he'd have an answer. But the fifteen-year-old was reading to Paul out of the Blue Guide, over a display of tomb jewelry. JJ of course had ducked into a conference with his girl.

“This shit has accumulated for thousands of years. So what's it all about?”

She'd seen worse, she told herself Fond the recovered hunger striker, for instance, on the news. That man could stare.

“It's about, nothing matters except coming out on top. That's today, and that's everyday.
Si, signora.”

The authentic Silky. Barb wondered if even Romy had gotten this close, a week ago outside of San Lorenzo.

“All this shit in here, that's all it's ever about, come out on top. Win today, one. Then win the next day and the next. Anything else is shit.”

The liaison toughened of his jaw-line, nothing like a smile, then turned his back. He turned his white twill back, bisected slantwise by the strap of his bag of papers, and as the mother gestured for her children to come along she believed she understood. Not that she felt sympathy for the man—no way—but she'd gotten a handle on the Lieutenant Major, maybe as old as thirty-five, and unmarried. His search was for some challenge equal to his God-given talent for the Corporate Shuck' n' Jive. The young tyro had a genuine flair in that arena, and it had allowed him to ace the entire treacherous repertoire of the military-industrial decision-makers. Yet all that must've seemed like nothing special. It was nothing more than he'd expected, going back perhaps to his freshman days at Virginia Tech or wherever, when he'd first come to know how easy it was for him to pick up the language of power. So more recently, locally, Silky must've enjoyed a deeper satisfaction. Working through the tangle of old hegemonies around the Bay, he'd at last found a place to go native. He'd mastered the Dance of the Sirens and a whole new selection of partners (didn't he even refer to the region as a “theater of operations?”). It must've felt wonderful, as if the city was his to manipulate any way that he liked, now Pompeiian, now Borbon. And he was maybe as young as thirty. Unmarried.

Umberto had to unlock the storage space. The officer stood close, finger-combing his long hair, chin lifted, genteel.

The space held shelves and stacking chairs, a porthole window and also a trunk. The trunk looked impressive, squat and thick-ribbed, but the mother went for the chairs. As she set these up, the twins pitched in.

“What good girls,” she singsonged, “my good girls.”

She had the chairs in a circle before she noticed the boys weren't helping. They'd gathered over the trunk, of all things. Umberto held open the lid and JJ, Chris, and Paul all crowded in beside his skinny frame, sniggering. Sniggering. Indeed the guide wore a leer, and Barbara got a hand on JJ, nudging in for a look while the big boy made a quip she didn't catch. At first glance the stash seemed nothing special, more carbonized vegetables. The Nazionale had a lot of that, dinners baked and preserved by volcanic ash, another variety of domestic items. But why would the museum keep a big box of cucumbers? The mother blinked, she looked again, she got the picture. These little blimps and sausages were the parts lopped off the statues downstairs. In gray marble, in green bronze—they were the gathered cocks of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

“Oh,
boys.”
She grabbed the trunk-lid and slammed it. “Little, little boys.”

Before the sound of the slam died—the slam and the rattle—Umberto was rushing away.

“Disgrazia!”
Barb shouted after him. She got a last glimpse of Kahlberg out in the gallery, grinning, before his sidekick yanked the door shut.

“Boys,” she repeated, growling at the door. “All my life, nothing but boys.”

“Mom, hey.” JJ didn't like the suggestion that he was less than adult. “You've got to admit that was pretty cool—”

“Oh, don't.
Don't!
We've had enough, more than enough.”

But Barb noticed she was frightening the girls. Her two youngest had slid far back into their chairs, their legs flat on the seats. The mother closed her eyes and got a breath, never mind that the dark behind her lids had been imprinted by the box of penises, a netlike pattern of oblongs. Worse, their space was little more than a closet, already close with sweat. When Barbara reopened her eyes she saw, in the porthole's sun-shaft, that their arrival had kicked up months of dust.

Talk, Mom. Another five minutes and they'll either start whining or sneezing.

John Junior and Chris perched on the trunk top, frowning, puzzled. Paul found a chair and dropped his head into his hands, massaging his face. Barb had to blink at that, too, her fey
miracolino
looking so much like the burly Jaybird. Anyway the boy appeared in better shape than the girls, almost an illustration out of the literature back at Samaritan Center: typical postures of abused children. When the mother took a seat the plastic made a lot of noise. Every creak seemed another stab at where she might start. Years needs…Grandma unhappy… Silky Papa lying deal-making…

“Why did we come to Naples?” she blurted out. “What are we doing here?”

John Junior snorted, crossing his muscular legs. “Come on, Mom. You feeling guilty, hey?”

“Guilty? What? Are you saying…?”

“Come on. You know it was you.”

Barbara had thought she'd get further than this before things got difficult.

“Mom, I mean. You didn't bring us in here to lie to us. Even the girls know what's been going on.”

“What? They know?”

“Hey Dora, Syl.” JJ lowered his head into the shaft of sun. “Didn't Pop take this job in order to make Mama happy?”

Dora's lips hardly seemed to move, in the dimness. “Mama was unhappy,” she said, “because Papa wasn't doing good like her.”

“You used to yell at him.” The other twin's face seemed larger, her eyes on her mother. “You used to say, ‘Don't you care about suh, about suffering—”‘

“Guys, guys.” Chris gestured open-handed. “I mean, everybody knows there's another side here, right? Right? Everybody knows, Mom, this isn't all on you.”

Barbara managed half a smile.

“Sure, you've got Pop jumping through hoops,” continued the second-oldest, smiling back. “Like, for months now. Maybe a little longer, come to think of it. Pop's been jumping through hoops, and that means all the rest of us too.”