L'America (24 page)

And now here she lay, exhausted by work and school. He could look at her all night long, marvel at the depth of her sleep, at the peace in her lips. He didn't wake her; just being here, gazing at her could be erotic enough. In the morning he would deflect Grammy's queries concerning where he had spent the night. He knew. She knew. But queries and lies, nonetheless, were obligatory.

 

Cesare made friends easily. He had met the Texan boys at the dining hall one evening while Beth was at work and he was using her meal card, pretending to be a student. They took him in, taught him to play football and to guzzle beer. Cesare even developed a little beer belly of which he was strangely proud. He embraced everything, including junk food. He gorged on heroes and hoagies and pizza and meatball sandwiches and sloppy joes with the Texans. Beth enjoyed observing these friendships, friendships with boys she had hardly noticed before. They taught him to pump iron, develop well-defined biceps. Cesare wanted to become big like the football players. The boys invited him to Texas for the Christmas holidays. (Beth put her foot down.) They arranged for him to audit a creative writing class with a sweet young writer who had let the Texas boys do anything they wanted as long as they turned in their work. He wrote a short story for the sweet teacher with the crooked smile and crooked teeth (probably younger than himself) all about a town in northern Italy famous for its relationship to feet and the money it made off of them. The story was a parable about greed in the manner of Italo Calvino. The teacher, unfamiliar with Calvino, thought the story of feet and greed brilliant. Cesare loved it in America.

Solo, or with Beth, he went to hear jazz at the Village Vanguard, at Sweet Basil, and at Birdland all the way uptown. He walked the streets. Beth's schedule was busy. She wasn't free the way she seemed to be in Italy. She had four classes and the waitressing job at the pizzeria. She had grand designs for this pizzeria,
AMALFI PIZZERIA
blazing in neon, and her passion for it threatened Victor, the Albanian pizza maker, who preferred the status quo. She wanted to make thinner crusts, wanted the owner to invest in a wood oven, wanted to use sauce made from fresh tomatoes, make smaller single pies, charge more for better quality. She made test pizzas for the owner, Bruno, a short man from Naples. Cesare came in to help. "You're my sous-chef," she said. He donned an apron and a white chef's hat and for a while loved the idea of making something from nothing. Never in his life would he have imagined himself baking pizzas in New York City, much less making an Albanian immigrant mad at him for his efforts. This would be a good story back home, a good story as long as it remained just that.

Bruno loved the new pizzas. "Like in Italy," he said—
Eee-tal-lee.
And he kissed his fingertips. Beth used the best mozzarella hunted down in the Bronx, the finest olive oil, and basil brought from the hothouse at Claire. First, she and Cesare made pizza Margherita—named for Queen Margherita because she desired to eat pizza like the common folk and one was invented just for her, using the colors of the flag. Then Beth wanted to put complicated things on top of her pizzas and Cesare convinced her to keep them simple.

"That's another difference between us, between Italy and America: you like abundance, too much; we like spare, too little," he said.

"Stop noting the differences," she replied.

Beth's efforts were a resounding success: these pizzas sold. People couldn't get enough of them. Bruno was thrilled. (He even installed the wood oven after a while.) Victor was not. Jealous and angry, he tried to make Beth's job harder, tormented her because she was terrible at remembering people's orders.

She took it all so seriously, crying on Cesare's shoulder, feeling humiliated and exhausted from too much work and school.

"Bet," he would say soothingly, and he would pat her head and rub her toes and then hold her away from him in order to look at her with levels and layers of feeling. First love, love for her determination and ambition, her fearlessness, her willingness to do anything. Then the lurking confusion. He had had fun with the pizzas certainly, but in the end, what did they really amount to? And why in the world did she care about an Albanian? Then he would think of Sissy Three toasting Claire, "the woman," and her dream. He could see something, some vague scrap, a clue: Beth was at the beginning of her dream. She was just beginning to put the yarn on the needle, didn't even realize she was doing so. What were his dreams? Was he even, really, allowed to dream?

"I'm still your Bet," she would say to Cesare. Somewhere she wondered, but she never stopped believing: he was in love; she was in love. The vast divide didn't seem so vast. He was her Cesare, her Caesar, her emperor. A pause, then she was seized again. She wanted to make and to do and to create. A part of him wanted to take her away from all this and that same part of him couldn't get around the notion of her having to waitress and of her having ambitions that revolved around food, pizza no less. How proud she looked when Bruno savored her pizza, her face lit with meaning and purpose and consequence. Ambition.

Cesare, though he didn't admit it to Beth, hardly acknowledged it to himself, felt humiliated for Beth when she proudly counted her tips, more than a hundred dollars in cash and coins made from waiting tables. "We're rich," she had said. All he could think about was how dirty the money looked, how dirty it was making her hands. That part of Cesare wanted to take her back to Italy and buy her things and keep her safe and protected and give her everything she had never had: together they would make a simple family—two children, a dog.

It was easy, though, to be caught up in the ecstatic energy and pace of Manhattan, the electricity, the lights. Peep shows; girly shows; Men Only; XXX; prostitutes on the West Side Highway; Broadway; a man showering, naked, in front of a full-length window, full-length erection; everyone seemed to have some kind of leather accoutrement, funny hair—colored or spiked or shaved. Cesare's letters home were endless, so much to describe.

Eventually Dario visited him. Skinny Dario with his exquisite inability with the English language—he made no sense in America. He wanted his espresso, "
Corto corto, come in Italia.
" He wanted his pasta, "
Al dente, come in Italia.
" He wanted his big meal at midday, "
Come in Italia
." He wanted everything to be as it was in Italy. Catching the football nearly knocked him over. At Claire, where Cesare took him for a week, he complained about all the odd people. He didn't so much complain as continually comment on the fact that there was an Indian and a black woman and a Chinese guy, commenting by way of not-so-subtle jokes. In Città only the maids came from other countries. Then he started complaining in earnest about constipation and blamed it on all the strange foods he was eating at Claire—all those curries Preveena made them eat. He didn't want to do any work there because his stomach hurt. (There was nothing people disliked more at Claire than someone who didn't help out.) Mostly, however, he wanted to see Sylvia. He had been thinking about her ever since she left Greece. He asked until finally Beth begged her to come for a visit from Boston where she went to college. She blew in with her flirty smile and all her plans but absolutely no romantic interest in Dario. "What was I thinking?" were her exact words to Beth. Beth turned her own impatience on Cesare. "Why do Italians think so much about their bowel movements?" she demanded. Even she had not been spared detailed accounts of Dario's incessant intestinal antics and it had made her remember that more than one dinner conversation in Italy had revolved around people's bowel movements. Bea's sister had constant constipation and ate sticks of licorice, administered by her father, with the hope that it would release her bowels. When Dario left, Beth and Cesare were both relieved. "Let me know if I ever become like that," he said to her.

 

Then he would step out of Beth's world and into the grandmother's, with Beth putting on a pretty chiffon calf-length dress, black pumps, a strand of pearls around her neck, studs in her ears. Before him she transformed into a prim girl almost unrecognizable: a girl made for an expensive life that should be handed to her and not sought. Suddenly Beth was not the ambitious girl he knew. Seeing her this way he understood the role the grandmother wanted him to play, even if Beth did not. As they rode uptown in the cab, Cesare left the one reality for the other, knowing which one he preferred and which one he would choose if only he could.

The grandmother's reality was marked by crystal chandeliers and benefits at the Met (the Museum) or "hearing" an opera at the other Met. "My local theater," she was fond of saying. The big event of the season was the production of Wagner's
Lohengrin,
"From which the Wedding March originates," the grandmother informed him. For this event and for the party she would host "to introduce him," he needed a tuxedo, which she bought for him herself at Paul Stuart, "Where my husband bought all his clothes. Just feel this material," she said, fingering the fine wool of the tuxedo pants, inadvertently tickling Cesare's leg as he stood before her in full black tie. She sat before the many mirrors in the upstairs lounge of the formal-wear department, her image reflected for Cesare to infinity. In Italy there were not such big stores as this. An Indian salesman who had been at the store for years, and who had been the personal shopper of Grammy's husband, helped them find the right suit. Grammy knew everything about the salesman (wife in India, three daughters, no sons, tremendous regret, sends money home, family won't consider coming to America), but she did not know his name. She told him Cesare was an Italian prince. "Betrothed to my granddaughter. A big wedding as soon as she finishes college. Of course, we'll buy an even better tuxedo for that occasion—which will be celebrated at the Pierre, nothing less. Unless, of course you'd like to marry in Italy?" she asked, suddenly looking at Cesare, catching the Indian up in the drama of expensive matrimonial decisions, making him, Cesare noted, nearly pant with expectation for financial gain.

At her party to "introduce" him, he was the prince as well, and he obliged, indulging the grandmother. "Made in Italy," he said, making all the ladies laugh, and he spoke to each one of them, answering their numerous questions about banking and socks and shoes and the subject of his dissertation, which concerned the history of dyes, how the commodity became bankable. They were privately suspicious of his Italian origins and had discussed it with the grandmother previously. "He's a Catholic after all," one woman had warned. They associated Italians with the Mafia or with the gondoliers who rowed them peacefully over the canals of Venice or with their daughters' stories of being pinched while strolling through the Forum. At all this the grandmother had laughed and declared him a prince from a noble northern Italian family. "I've seen the villa," the grandmother had said. Verification. Proof. "Do you realize his family owns the only existing fresco painted by Benvenuto Cellini, perhaps the only painting ever made by his hand?" The ladies were well cultured. Culture was their currency. This detail inflated Cesare in their eyes as Grammy knew it would. They were fluent in the language of money and so was Cesare, though his ability with it was far more subtle and discreet.

At the party, elegant matrons swirled around Cesare, vying to impress him. One, with a blemished apricot complexion and auburn hair piled atop her head, attempted to engage him on his dissertation topic. She wore a particularly lovely dress with a brocade bodice in gold, and though she was not young, she was youthful. Her name was Gimbel, her husband was, "in retail" as she explained, but the detail of who she was was lost on Cesare, just as a Bianchi would have been lost on her. She sipped a flute of champagne and ate hors d'oeuvres continuously, plucking them from passing trays proffered by young waiters in white with gloved hands and bow ties. "Did you know that one of our presidents, William Howard Taft, had a son who died because dye from his blue sock got into a cut on his left foot? As a result there was a revolution in the sock dyeing industry here." Cesare had heard something like that, but he wasn't certain it was Taft's son or if a revolution had occurred. "Progress," Cesare said. "And penicillin."

Other ladies asked him other questions, telling him about their grand tours to Venice and the Amalfi Coast, about Positano honeymoons, trips to Cinque Terre ("Cinque" mispronounced with a soft
c
), Florence (one said
Firenze
with a flourish), and Pisa.

Grammy's apartment had big picture windows overlooking the Hudson, upon which floated one enormous and heavy barge. Cesare watched the barge and briefly wondered how it was that some of the richest people in America lived in rent-controlled apartments in New York City. Beth had explained to him the complicated system of rent control, which had been designed to benefit low-income families but was enjoyed by the rich. It reminded him of the complicated infrastructure of Naples that allowed the wealthy to flourish and the poor to remain poor.

Beth snuck up behind Cesare and kissed him. Throughout the party, he had watched her floating among the ladies, making small talk, graceful like a swan. He wished his mother could see her. She was elegant. He remembered his mother trying to tell him without being insulting, but being insulting just the same, that Beth's manners were atrocious. There was nothing atrocious about her. She was pleasing her grandmother by pleasing her grandmother's friends. At a party for
Carnivale
hosted by his parents at the Città villa, he recalled how she had tried to talk to his parents' friends but then seemed to give up and hardly spoke to anyone. At the time he had imagined it was because she was shy around the older more formal people. Now he suspected that his parents' guests had made no effort, having no idea what to say to her. So much interest was shown to him here, but in America they were more familiar with the foreign, infatuated even, eager to impress. "My childhood," Beth said. "One half of it anyway." Schizophrenic, he imagined, thinking of the other half, of Claire.