The Apprentice Lover (13 page)

I
sat one evening with Peter Duncan-ones on the terrace of his villa, Casa di Fiori—a damp, narrow house that hid behind an artfully arranged garden. (“It's a tedious little place,” Vera had confided to me, “but the terrace is charming. Peter often paints on the terrace.”) Peter and I had just finished a cool bottle of Lacrimae Christi (“the tears of Christ”). A fan of light swept over the terrace, with the sun slipping into the sea below, setting the water ablaze.

“You mustn't mind Rupie,” said Peter, in response to my account of a conversation with Grant that had particularly upset me. “It's got nothing to do with you. He's a haunted house.”

“He had a very bad war,” said Jeremy, his companion.

“Nonsense,” said Peter. “He had no war at all. He had a commission of sorts, but worked for the information office in London. One of those lucky bloody sods who was too young for the first war and too old for the second.”

“I was referring to his first marriage,” said Jeremy.

The villa perched just above the Belvedere Cannone, overlooking the via Krupp and the Marina Piccola. It was, as Peter admitted, a “poky little villa,” but he had no money to speak of. His paintings rarely sold, “except to tourists from Arkansas or Nebraska,” who bought them for decoration, not for art's sake. Jeremy, on the other hand, had made some money in London real estate, so they lived in modest comfort. (Jeremy spent most of his time cooking, showing all the signs of having mastered
the art: a bloated stomach and a series of receding chins. Even the fat around his knees jiggled.)

I visited Peter now and then, mostly for consolation. He was unfailingly kind and willing to listen and advise. He could seem facetious and facile—the perfect model of the English dilettante—but that was only a mask he wore in public. I found him more subtle and pleasant than he wanted to appear. He was not his own best advocate.

His relationship to the Villa Clio was complex. Grant genuinely respected him as a person (not as a painter), and Vera genuinely respected him as a painter (not as a person). Between them, they formed a coherent, and humane, response to a man who gained a good deal of self-respect from his association, as he put it, “with the Grant circle.”

“Rupert doesn't actually realize how famous he is,” I said.

“Oh, darling, he does,” Peter replied, taking a long drag from his cigarette, holding the pinkie finger with his family's signet ring apart from the rest of his hand. He often wore a paisley smoking jacket around the house, as if expecting Noel Coward for drinks. “Rupie likes being famous, but he doesn't like people recognizing him or fawning. It's a quandary, you see. Fame without any of the benefits of fame.”

Jeremy brought us each a little plate of what looked like green-speckled dumplings.

“Rabaton alessandrini,” he said. “Ask Vera about them. It's her recipe.”

As I later discovered, they were easy to make: you churned stale bread and Swiss chard through a food mill, added some herbs, eggs, ricotta, and parmesan, then shaped the rabaton into palm-size balls and dropped them into boiling vegetable broth. When they rose to the surface (as with tortellini), they were done, so you rescued them, sprinkled them with grated cheese, glazed them with butter, then served them warm.

“You're an angry young man, Alex,” Peter said, seizing the wheel of our conversation rather abruptly and steering into a thicket.

“Me?”

“I'm only saying this because I've taken a liking to you. Otherwise, I'd never be so honest. Usually, it doesn't pay, does it? I mean, who needs it?”

“I never thought of myself as angry.”

Jeremy, his mouth obscenely full, leaped in: “I'm to blame, dear,” he confessed. “Just the other night I said to Peter, something is wrong with the boy. I think he's depressed. And Peter mentioned that Vera had noticed it, too.”

“That's true,” said Peter. “Vera has seen you sulking and brooding. Young Hamlet, she calls you.”

I wondered to what degree this was true. Did I sulk and brood? In my own sense of things, my mood had dramatically improved since setting foot on Capri. Before leaving the U.S., I had felt lethally unhappy. In any case, it irked me to think that others were speculating on my mental health. As far as I could tell, I was calm, even-tempered, accommodating. I reminded myself less of Hamlet than Polonius, as described in Eliot's
Prufrock
: “Deferential, glad to be of use, / Politic, cautious, and meticulous.” The quotation now filled me with self-loathing.

“Is it the girl?” Peter asked. “Girls will do this to red-blooded boys like yourself.”

“Holly?”

“Marisa, actually,” he answered, surprised. “I gather you fancy Marisa.”

“I do, but I prefer Holly.”

“Or Patrice?” Jeremy smiled coyly. “Now he's my type—those hard buns.”

“Alex is not musical,” Peter said. “Are you musical, Alex? I don't think so.”

They both looked at me intently.

“It's an old-fashioned term for queer,” Peter explained.

“Not really,” I said.

“I see, you're not sure.” It was not a question from Peter but a statement. “Nobody is ever sure. But at your age, they are especially unsure.”

“I'm sure,” Jeremy said. “I've never really understood the
point
of women.”

The fact was I didn't want to discuss any of this. “Why are you both grilling me?” I asked, putting down my plate of rabaton. “This place is fucking insane.”

“Our little casa?” Jeremy asked, with mock horror.

“This island,” I said, rising to my feet. “Nobody seems to realize there's a war going on. A fucking war!”

Peter and Jeremy looked at me as if I were mad.

“Vietnam!” I shouted.

After an awkward moment of silence, Peter said, tentatively, “You're a liberal, is that it?” His detached manner, which implied superiority rooted in self-control, infuriated me. It was as though he were discussing a specimen in a museum, holding my heart in sterile pincers to examine its slimy workings.

I would not let go. “Don't either of you read the papers? This is a goddamn brutal and idiotic war. We're killing people every day, including women and children. American men are dying as we speak.”

“Dying for what?” Jeremy asked, raising a supercilious eyebrow.

I hurled my glass at the terra-cotta floor.

“Do be calm,” Peter said to me, though glaring at Jeremy.

“Maybe I don't want be calm when people are dying.”

“It's been going on for a long time,” Peter said. “Wars, rumors of wars. It's a by-product of empire. When I was a child, the British did this sort of thing. Now it's your turn.”

“This war is no rumor.”

“We're not on opposite sides or anything,” Peter said. “I consider Richard Nixon a piggie-wiggie.”

“We liked LBJ even less,” added Jeremy. “That accent. Appalling. He apparently would interview reporters while sitting on the loo.”

I could see there was no point in extending this particular conversation. Both Peter and Jeremy meant well, but they had not come crashing up against the Vietnam War as I had. They had not lost a brother, a home, a whole imagined future. They didn't know that everything had changed for me. That I could hardly write to my parents, they were so bitter about my leaving. That I dreamed about Nicky night after night and fought to keep him from dominating my waking thoughts. Nicky my friend and enemy, my adviser, my sounding board, the butt of my jokes, and the only one who would ever actually
get
most of them. We had, between us, formed a kind of whole, as in Plato's parable; it occurred to me now that I might spend a lifetime searching for the other part.

A
s Nicky's tour of duty lengthened, his letters from Vietnam became more reflective, even philosophical. This was, for me, an unfamiliar aspect of my brother, who had never seemed terribly inward or prone to self-scrutiny. At home, he was too busy defending himself against all comers, on guard most of the time, striking attitudes, ready to parry each blow that came with an equally strong countermeasure. That I had dismissed him as dumb or crude, even to his face, upset me. I should have realized that brothers, as the old Neapolitan saying goes, are versions of each other.

But I had reasons for behaving badly. Nicky could resort, when threatened, to violence as a way of showing me who was in control. From an early age, he knocked me around, often “accidentally” inflicting a bruise. (I still bore a scar above my right eye, just below the hairline, where a rock opened a slice that required several stitches. Nicky, of course, swore he'd aimed well over my head, but similar incidents happened again and again.) By posing a physical threat, he attempted to control me, and it worked fairly well for most of our years together. If he wanted something, he took it, and all I could do was call him names, complain to my parents, or take subversive, retaliatory measures. By my early teens, I'd become practiced in the terrible art of passive aggression.

Apart from occasional attacks, Nicky was not typically mean or selfish;
his generosity was even surprising, given the position he'd been stuffed into by my mother. I suspect he considered himself unwanted, except by the unwashed, pimpled, foul-mouthed creeps from Wilkes-Barre and Nanticoke whom he considered his friends. What held them together was devotion to six-packs of beer and harsh, unfiltered cigarettes, which they often wore in the sleeves of their T-shirts. If the rest of us wore scented aftershaves, Nicky and Company, as I called them, appeared to bathe in the mechanical fluids that kept their various engines purring.

“That son of mine, Nicky, he can't do anything right,” my mother was often overheard to say on the telephone. (She spent a good portion of each day on the phone with her friends from the St. Ann's Circle, a group of parish women who met once a month for bingo and traveled in a group to Scranton every summer to make a Novena.)

“Nicky's gonna be fine,” my father would counter, flashing a shy smile that revealed a gold tooth in front—a peculiar deformity that always embarrassed me in public. (Why did no one else have a father with a gold tooth? Where, I used to wonder, did one even get a gold tooth?)

Around our house, it had been Cain and Abel to the hilt. I only began to view Nicky in a different light when, in his letters from Vietnam, I heard an unexpected note of clarity and grace, a kind of hip articulateness that must have been buried there all the time, waiting to emerge. In the moral forcing house of war, my brother matured at breakneck speed, and could hardly contain himself in writing to me, putting on a self-performance that surprised and dazzled me. There was still the edge of superiority that all older brothers have, although in Nicky's case he felt so inferior to me, intellectually, that it dulled that edge. I found in those letters a brother I hadn't known, a friend and confidant, and looked forward to his return from the war, believing we could repair the damage done before; I felt sure that a long and fruitful brotherhood lay before us.

One letter, in particular, changed my sense of him definitively. It was written from a camp near Quang Tri, the area where he spent the last three months of his life, mostly on recognizance missions, although he
was also involved in Search and Destroy—a tactic peculiarly suited to the madness of Vietnam. “You just walk through the jungle looking for trouble, waiting to be ambushed,” as Nicky said. “It's maybe the scariest damn thing that any human being can do. Every snap, crackle, and pop in the jungle drives you nutty. And what is a jungle except snap, crackle, and pop?” The wonder is that anyone came back alive from those excursions.