Good on Paper (22 page)

Esther, meanwhile, cannot sit still: she spills wine, complains of pains in her hip, gives her ragú back to the waiter, insists she’d ordered
carbonara
, though she doesn’t eat pork. She tastes her
penne
, vomits them onto the cobblestones.

Yes, more
penne
, not filled by Esther this time, but voided,
spennar
, like Icarus.

You will live with me, Romei says, as if this is a comfort. She wipes her mouth on the tablecloth, looks at him in horror. He looks back at her in dwindling light as if from a mountain top, imagines words falling from her mouth, heavy and broken—and from these on the tablecloth he fashions poems. A blotch between lines three and four represents a smear of sugo, between six and seven, a drop of wine, or so a sidebar explains.

In the days that follow, Esther’s languor, attractive in a lover, is revealed as pathological passivity: she is by turns depressed, hysterical, withdrawn. The passion that brought them together proves no stronger than a wishbone, snapped in two by Esther’s loss, the rigors and banalities of everyday life. Esther refuses Romei her bed, brings men to the flat—foreigners, thieves, CIA operatives. She acts not out of desire, nor to make Romei jealous, but to give form to her despair. When the men finish their business, she sends them off and crawls onto Romei’s lap, babbling, her words slippery and disconnected. He croons at her—in Italian, Romanian too. Her babbling, his crooning (increasingly insincere), neither understood by the other, is the subject of another poem, a long-limbed Whitmanian knock-off, the wind knocked out of every line. The Song of Me-Me-Me taken to its solipsistic extreme.

Housekeeping is a nightmare. Esther can’t cook, her habits are slovenly. She takes the pittances Romei earns from interpreting, from acting as guide to visiting journalists, and spends them on imported Rice Krispies, fat loaves of American bread. Their phone is disconnected: she’s been calling overseas, calling everyone she knows, trying to find her husband. No one will help: even her mother has disowned her. Romei shouts at her in Italian: get up! get up! Curled on a couch, unmoving, she asks in English if she should take up crochet.
Croce
? Romei wonders.
Croce
? The cross? Does his Jewish wife wish to convert?

They know so little about each other. Esther is allergic to cigarettes; Romei
always
smokes when he writes. Esther is a morning person; Romei likes to sleep in. Romei, despite his slow start, is swollen with ambition; Esther has only her past.

She is difficult, complains of wrist pain, leg pain, she sells her mother’s pearls, forgets to attend job interviews. Awaking with a rash across her nose and cheeks, she stays in bed, pretends she is a child in Connecticut. Romei grows tired of her babbling, her complaints, her wild-eyed wandering. There are circles under her eyes, as if she hasn’t slept, yet she spends whole days in bed. Romei urges her to continue her translation. It’s a lie, she says, the
Song of Songs
, translation, all of it a lie. He agrees but thinks her lazy. One morning she presents him with a handful of her hair—did it fall out or did she pull it?—he finds he doesn’t care: it’s her fault, surely, something she has brought upon herself.

Their bond is a negative one: held together by the drama that brought them together, his guilt and sense of obligation, her inability to imagine anything different, they live a life of crossed purposes, missed opportunities, swallowed outrage and, not incidentally, squalor. But Romei writes. Out of this impossible relationship, out of their perpetual misunderstanding and disappointment, Romei, no longer “blocked,” discovers the anti-vocabulary for his art. He writes, she wanders, falls to the ground, he writes. She is his muse, his anti-muse.

A poem that comes close to announcing Romei’s poetics of distance and incomprehension includes an outrageous scrambling of the Celan line I’d featured in my story, written here not in German but in what I guessed was Yiddish:
Then, when only nothingness stood between us, nothing brought us together
.

To make clear the poet’s identification with this poem, he writes it as an acrostic, each line beginning with a letter from his name: R-O-M-E-I.

A pattern emerges, the couple’s version of normalcy. Esther takes typing lessons from an expatriate Scot, finds work in English-speaking offices, but always she is forced by drowsiness, by ever-shifting aches and pains, whose fluidity and unpredictability torment her more than their effects, to quit these jobs, though Romei suspects it’s the daily
demands—the clothes that must be pressed, the long journeys by tram or bus—that wear her down. A disbarred doctor offers her a diagnosis over wine—hysteria, of the Freudian variety, he says, and suggests sex with a vigorous man.

The couple develops friendships with other marginalized types—a surrealist painter displaced by the Spanish Civil War, a schizophrenic actor, a heroin-addicted banker who leaves gold coins in Esther’s underwear drawer. Homosexual brothers: black dancers from Georgia. An amateur archeologist from Duquesne, in search of an underage wife. Esther types, the two attend parties, drinking fests in public places, Romei writes.

And thus, the years pass: Romei publishes a book of poems, and another. Esther dresses in men’s clothing, wanders late at night. Romei’s work is translated, he travels to consult with translators and publishers, leaving Esther in the custody of a friend, a poverty-stricken academic, a costume designer, an art restorer who can be relied upon to buy toilet paper and make polenta. Daily life is marked less by hysteria, more by courtesies, occasional kindnesses that betray the fullness of their resignation. Their intercourse is defined by what they do not discuss: Esther’s loss, the choice they did not make, which was to be together.

With extraordinary timing, Andi pulled on my sleeve.

Hello, my darling, I said, reaching for her shoulder.

You look funny, Mom.

Moms do that sometimes. You having fun?

Have you been reading my Notebook? she asked, squinting at me.

Never! I would never read your notebook! Your notebook is private!

I’m just asking.

I couldn’t help adding: You could share it with me sometime if you wanted.

Andi rolled her eyes. Good thing we brought Band-Aids, she said, pointing to a scrape I couldn’t see. I kissed her knee, once, twice, thrice, and held her tight.

It’s okay, Mambo! she said, pulling away. No need to go bananas!

I watched her run away,
sans
Band-Aid, watched the glimmering
Hudson, and awaited my share of wisdom. These pages were no gift to Esther. To invert Dante’s poetics of praise, Romei had spared her nothing—he’d stripped her bare, exposed her as an hysterical, nymphomaniacal, cross-dressing hypochondriac. He dug his
penna
into her pain—her tears now the ink that filled his pen—and to what end? So he could play the martyr? What purpose could he have but injury? The modern meaning of
libello
, Dante’s “little book,” was libel. How could she bear to read this defamation? I felt a traitor’s desire to soften the language, to protect Esther from Romei’s vituperation. But I couldn’t. Who was I? The translator. I was no one.

38

ALWAYS WE RETURN TO DANTE

The next morning I awoke late. A note from Ahmad advised me that Andi was upstairs at Pammy’s. Again? Surely it was Pammy’s turn to come here, but I wouldn’t insist. Pammy was what Ahmad liked to call
an expert
: spinach makes you fat, childhood is incomplete without a parrot. My adulthood was complete without Pammy.

I visited the Flying Girl, who was in good form, flying over the head of the artist’s crazy mother. What was Romei doing? I asked. Did he hate his wife? What was his game? Would Ahmad move to Connecticut? What would Andi and I do then?

You’re pondering imponderables, the Flying Girl said. Go get lunch.

I got a hot dog from Cohn’s Cones’ beach menu, decided to take it for a walk—up Broadway, past Abdul’s, past the Eight Bar, then west to Riverside Drive, where I stopped at the Skating Park to watch mad young men turn upside down on their boards. I was heading to Grant’s Tomb, apparently, where Ahmad and I had walked every day when I was pregnant, talking about the future—how the world would begin again when she was born. We didn’t talk about the future these days; we didn’t talk about much of anything.

I was nearly at the Tomb when my phone rang.

Who is the child’s father? Romei asked. He didn’t say hello.

I beg your pardon?

Andray-a
. Nice photograph, but who is the father?

You are unbelievable! I said. My daughter’s father is none of your business!

He is Ahmad from this last story you are writing? I like this story!

He was referring to “Domino,” the story about Jonah as a boy, the story that made Ahmad’s face go white, that made Jeanette stop talking to me.

Oh, I said. Well, thank you. But, no. Ahmad isn’t her father.

I found a bench facing the Hudson and sat down. In front of me, industrious, red-faced people jogged or roller-bladed along the Riverside Park path.

She looks like a good girl, Romei said, writing like her mother.

Yes, I admitted, looking for my
MOM!
handkerchief. She’s writing a story. About a boy at school.

She is loving this boy?

The thought made me laugh: like Dante loving Beatrice at her age. Was it so impossible?

She empathizes with him. He’s had a hard life. She confuses herself with him, maybe.

She is also having the hard life?

She thinks so … But that’s a long story.

I felt a strange urge to share with Romei the story of Connecticut, of Mirabella and Jonah, and all our hurts—he was so avuncular! Except he wasn’t, not really.

You too, maybe, are writing a story?

I am
not
writing a story. I’m working, like I said. Just working.

The muse is not with you? There is no
fidanzato
who inspire you?

I laughed and wiped Indian-summer sweat from my neck and brow.

Men may
amuse
me, I said, but they do not
muse
me.

This I cannot believe!

“Domino” was a bear, I said. The last story I ever wrote. I’ll probably never write again.

A
bare
? You mean you hide nothing?

Bear,
orso!
I mean it was difficult. But, yes, it was also rather bare.

You do hide, if you refuse to be with a man.

You have too little knowledge of my life to make that judgment with, I said, too flustered to take care with my prepositions.

I mean
you
in the impersonal sense of
one
. This is the American way, no?

You don’t mean
you
in the impersonal sense, but I forgive you. Besides, if I hide, it’s no more than Dante does.

Always we return to Dante when we want to understand our life! Romei said.

Is that
we
in the royal we sense, the you-and-me we, or the impersonal we?

Wee, wee, wee! the poet cried. All the way home! This is American, no? A game played with the children’s feet?

Maybe it was Indian summer or the hotdog napkin still in my hand—a memory struck me, of little Shira on the beach, skin roasting, sodas warming nearby, bathing suit sticking like a reassuring second skin. Screaming with glee as someone, her mother, wee-wee-weed up her fat little thigh, little Shira laughing till she wee-wee-weed in reply. And my mother, smiling a sun-kissed smile, calling me babydoll and, caking my legs with sand, picking me up and running me to the sea. I couldn’t have been more than two. Baby Shira laughing with her mother? Was it possible?

Yes, Romei said, after a pause that seemed to respect my silence. Dante is fearful, this is true. But he has a muse. Beatrice motivate him, she inspire him.

He was referring to my fax of that morning.

Beatrice cause Dante to change, he continued. Because of her, he
choose
change.

He changes his aesthetics, I said. First he writes about romantic anguish, then he writes poems of praise. Is that change? At the end of the book he decides to write not just lyric poems but narrative. What kind of change is that? Who cares?

Is still change, Romei said, and he sounded grumpy about it.

We were going to have to agree to disagree.

You’ve written a
bare
tale about your muse, I said. Would you tell me why?

Bear
, meaning
difficult
?

Meaning
not hidden
.

I tell you already, I hold no interest in poetics.

What
are
you interested in? This story is no gift to Esther.

You are wrong. This is the biggest gift I give my Esther. You will see. Send me when you can. Goodbye.

Wait! I have questions!

You were at Trixie’s! You heard me read! Why didn’t you tell me?