The Apprentice Lover (22 page)

W
hy do we always feel like idiots when talking to our parents, whatever our age? The phone call from my father had stripped away any maturity that may have accrued during the past few months. Like a child, I stood there trembling in the library of the Villa Clio, surrounded by books, fine paintings, and elegant furniture, while my father talked in that plaintive, rough, generous, confused, uneducated, endearing voice. He could hardly imagine the world I'd fallen into, with its peculiar traditions and resonances, its particular values, most of which could not possibly compute in terms he'd ever understand.

It was not that my valley in Pennsylvania didn't have its own traditions, resonances, and values. I knew and even admired them, but I felt the contrast now, and it wasn't merely that I assumed that Capri was more sophisticated than Pennsylvania. It was, perhaps, in its way; but it wasn't this contrast that I found disquieting. I remained an American-style egalitarian, ready to denounce old Europe's autocratic, class-ridden tendencies. Yet I understood that the world of Rupert and Vera Grant, with its ironies and cultural depths, dazzled me nonetheless, making it difficult for me to imagine going home.

It amused me to think of Rupert and Vera transported suddenly to Pennsylvania, and forced to understand, sympathize with, and manipulate the elements of that world. Much would have puzzled and appalled them. The humor would have seemed crude, unfunny. The aesthetic
values would have passed them by. On the other side, my parents would have found Capri just as alien, a corrupt and jaded island full of snobs and dissipated intellectuals. This was definitely
not
the Italy my grandparents recalled and sentimentalized.

My father, on the phone, had seemed unreal, remote, enervated. A dead man talking. I felt sorrow and pity for him, as I always had. Never conscious anger. Unlike many sons in history (if Freud and Norman O. Brown were right), I'd never rebelled against him directly, though I'd experienced the usual urges along these lines. The circumstances of my life had simply not afforded them a place to root, and so my rebellion had become oblique.

Hearing echoes of myself in the plastic receiver, I too had sounded strange and unfamiliar—a thin, disembodied voice. A thing I refused to acknowledge as my own. I had tried to become a different person on Capri, more worldly and independent, and to some extent I'd succeeded. But my father had tapped into and elicited an earlier version of myself—a person I wanted to forget: the dutiful son, a placating and innocent and narrowly selfish creature. Growing up, my goal in life had been to raise no hackles and trample no toes. And especially not my mother's toes or hackles.

The day after my father called, my mother was taken out of the intensive care unit. I was able to phone her in the hospital that next afternoon, and we talked politely, though briefly. (The idea of talking on the phone “long distance” always panicked my parents, with their Depression-era mentality. The idea of talking transatlantic was totally unimaginable, an act of suicidal extravagance.) “Don't even think of coming home, Alex,” my mother said, hoarsely. “If anything happens to me, there's nothing you can do anyway. It's not your concern.”

I never believed these unselfish assertions. They were made only half in earnest, and I could hear a countermanding voice behind them, saying: “If anything happens to me, it's all your fault. My illness was brought on by your departure, your selfishness, and your thoughtlessness. You'd better get your ass on that airplane, pronto!” Then again, she meant what she said on some level. Her better self struggled with her lesser, although it was an unequal contest.

Yet I sympathized with her situation. On the surface, who wouldn't? The woman had recently lost a son in the war, and her feelings of guilt—there are always guilt feelings where the dead are concerned—were probably exacerbated by having failed him as a mother. What children most need, a feeling of parental confidence in their ability to succeed in the world, had been withheld from Nicky. And this was largely her doing. She had chosen me over him.

I put down the phone in a confused state, wiping tears away. Whatever the reality behind my mother's illness, I realized I was not going home. I would attend my mother's funeral, should one arise. But I was not going home.

“Is everything all right?” Vera asked, entering the library with a pot of tea on a tray only moments after I had hung up. Her timing was eerily precise, as if she'd been hovering outside the door.

“I guess so,” I said, wiping my eyes.

“You were able to speak with your mother?”

I nodded. “She seems okay. Out of intensive care. You can't tell with her. It's hard to know.” I decided against giving Vera a detailed medical history of my mother, though I knew it by heart. Everything from the varicose veins to the angina pains and tingling hands. I used to call home from Scranton Prep at lunchtime to get the latest numbers on her blood pressure as though trying to get the score in the World Series.

Vera sat beside me on the leather sofa beneath a large painting by Peter Duncan-Jones: a version of Duchamp's
Nude Descending a Staircase
, only this nude was all man, and very well hung, the penis replicated in various colors and sizes. She put the tray on a marble coffee table, then set to work in her matronly English fashion: pouring the tea through a strainer into china cups, adding milk and sugar, stirring with a Lilliputian spoon. She put a chocolate biscuit in the saucer beside the cup, having noticed that I liked them.

“Here you are, darling,” she said.

I balanced the saucer gingerly on my lap.

“You must be terribly worried,” she said.

“I don't think she's going to die or anything like that,” I replied. “She wants to frighten me, and to make me feel guilty.”

“My mother is a bore, too,” Vera said. “Only I've ceased to listen. One simply turns down the volume at a certain point.”

There was a long pause, during which I gathered myself together. Vera was surprisingly good at dealing with these situations: cool and terribly practical in her approach to problems. The stiff, blue winds of British empiricism blew through the Villa Clio, despite its soft Mediterranean setting.

“How are the children adjusting?” I asked, moving the subject to more comfortable ground. “I'm enjoying their company.”

“What a good liar you are,” she said. “No matter—I appreciate the gesture.”

I shifted nervously, having been caught out. “I like young people,” I said.

She put a hand on my knee. “Nigel, as you know, fancies himself a poet. I was rather wondering if you might take him under your wing a bit.”

“Of course,” I said.

“That would be marvelous, thanks. You might read his poems and comment. Take him for a long walk. Play tennis. That sort of thing. He'd rather Rupert stepped forward, but that's not possible. Rupert has never really liked children.” She lit a cigarette. “Are you writing poems?”

“Not so much,” I said. “A few lines here and there. Nothing seems to stick.”

“It's a difficult game. What I like about cooking is that you never get kitchen block. You can always slice and dice.”

“You've been neglecting my education,” I said. “I was learning a lot from you at one point.”

“Let's have at it,” she said. “I'm doing a cacciucco for dinner.”

I'd never heard of this, and told her.

“A Tuscan soup,” she explained, “filled with monkfish, dogfish, langoustines, shrimp, mussels. Quite easy, really, and it will dazzle them back in Transylvania.”

I agreed, though even locating monkfish and dogfish in Pennsylvania would pose a challenge.

It occurred to me that I might help with Nicola, too. But Vera shook her head.

“She thinks you're a git,” she said, in a low voice.

“And what's a git?”

“You know, someone who doesn't really know what he's about. A bit of a chump.”

“Nicola barely knows me.”

“Quite true. I told her you were just very American.”

I felt queasy inside. Did everyone on this island see through me? Was I really so ridiculous?

“Poor little girl,” Vera continued. “She met this dashing, older chap from Cambridge last summer, at the Marina Piccola. A Trinity man. Rugby blue and so forth. He invited her to May Ball or some such thing, then deflowered her.”

“How do you know this?”

“Nicola suppresses nothing. Her letters are riveting.”

“I'll bet.”

“We don't mind,” she said. “It's nice to know what's going on. As a parent, one can feel helpless.”

“As a child, too,” I said.

“But that's how it's supposed to work. A parent is—in theory—in charge. I have never felt any sense of control over either of my children. It's a bore, really.”

“You'd admire my mother.”

“A commanding presence?”

“General Patton in drag.”

“I can't wait to meet her,” Vera said, lighting a cigarette. “You know, I'm actually quite worried about Marisa. Something has gone terribly wrong.”

“She has been fired,” I said. “This probably annoys the hell out of her.”

“Not true, I suspect. The actual job—if that's what one calls it—means nothing to her. And we haven't exactly run her out the house. Rupert made it clear that she's welcome to stay until she has sorted things out.” She blew smoke away from me. “Perhaps you could help in some way.”

“Me?”

“It's obvious that you've got a connection.” She lifted one insinuating eyebrow.

“For God's sake, I slept with her once!”

“You must be awfully good in bed.”

“I'm pathetic. I swear.”

“I believe that,” Vera said, putting out the cigarette, though it was barely smoked—a sign of anxiety. “I have this eerie feeling about her. She was walking in the garden last night. I saw her from the window and went down. I tried to talk to her, but she didn't even hear me. Then she started chattering, but it wasn't to me. It wasn't to anyone I could see. A bloody ghost or something.”

I sighed, guessing she was right. All was not well in the world of Marisa Lauro, and I'd not helped her in the least.

I
rose before six, as the sea below was just turning a milky silver, and the first bronze depths were only a hint on the horizon. In sneakers and gym shorts, wearing a sleeveless pink T-shirt from a tacky shop in the Camerelle, I went for a run along the Pizzalungo, taking a pine-scented footpath with staggering views of the Punta di Tragara. As always, I passed La Solitaria, a tiny villa on a cliff overlooking the Faraglioni. As Grant had told me on one of our walks, the house had been occupied by Compton Mackenzie, the prolific Scottish novelist, during the Great War, as Grant still called it. It was a pleasant spot, protected from the aggressive northern winds by Mount Tuoro, a prospect that rose behind it.

“I knew Mackenzie,” said Grant, with a memorial sigh. “Met him in Edinburgh. He lived to be very old and mellow, but his fame had slipped away by then. Odd, how one can be among the most popular novelists in the world at forty, then invisible at eighty.
Sinister Street
was the one novel that every student in the twenties could be counted on to have read.”

I sensed his discomfort, and said (the sentence after three decades still makes me cringe), “But you write for posterity.”

“I write for myself, dear boy,” he said. “Posterity isn't listening.”

I often thought about the collection of characters who had made their home on Capri, many of whom were finding their way into the pages of Grant's latest book. Sexual outlaws, revolutionaries, artists, wealthy plea
sure seekers. The population had, according to Mackenzie himself (whose books Grant had put in my hands), become less interesting after the Second World War, when it filled with “French artists who have won traveling scholarships, Dutch intellectuals, Scandinavian eccentrics, central Europeans flushed with self-determination, and of course pederasts and pathics of every nationality.” That was the postwar harvest.

Things had apparently changed even more in the past decade. I had not, as yet, met any Dutch intellectuals or Scandinavian eccentrics, although the “pederasts and pathics” remained in force. The residents were mostly English, it seemed, with a few Germans dotted about the island—mostly in Anacapri. Patrice was the closest thing to a French artist on a traveling scholarship I'd encountered, although he lacked the artistic side as well as the scholarship.

Wealthy Italians from the mainland had also invaded Capri in recent years, building large and ugly villas on the opposite shore of the Marina Piccola from the Tragara. “They are mostly Milanese,” Grant explained, with an air of mild contempt. “Just look at their houses. Their sense of beauty does not extend beyond the notion of a fat woman in bed.” He claimed to have seen them pulling down old, wisteria-covered walls along the via Murlo and putting up iron railings “in the convulsive Munich style.”

Over lunch with Toni in the piazzetta, I had repeated without attribution the remark about the fat woman, and she instantly detected its source. “You've picked up Grant's manner,” she said. “He's always putting down the Milanese.” That was the first I'd been aware of Grant's visible effect on me. It was, perhaps, inevitable that I would respond to such a strong personality, taking on his coloration. But I had fallen too heavily under his spell, and could see how many of his attitudes had become mine, for good or ill.

Now I ran by myself, savoring the isolation. I didn't want to be wholly absorbed by Capri and its crowd of “characters.” Their frequently dismissive attitudes annoyed me, as did much else. Since the phone call from my father, I'd become sleepless and uncertain again—not much better than I'd been during the months after Nicky's death. I lay awake, thinking of my parents and their future without children. Family life, as
they had grown accustomed to its shape and feel, had evaporated. Nicky was dead, and I was gone. For them, this meant a different sort of daily life from a continuation of their life together as just a couple—a phase of their life that my father occasionally referred to as “Life B.C.—Before Children.” Like all children, I regarded this period in my parents' lives as a mythic age, when gods and monsters roamed the earth.

I could not imagine the existence that lay ahead for them, and I knew they couldn't either. My mother had no real work, having devoted herself to me and (less happily) Nicky. It seemed unlikely that she would now find a job: her weight made that impossible. And her bad heart didn't help. My father might give her a part-time desk job in the office of Massolini Construction, but even that seemed unlikely. She couldn't type, and the idea of her answering a phone boggled the mind.

My own future troubled me as well. Death—a subject I had managed to shove out of my head for several months, ever since arriving on Capri—began to loom strangely before me as I ran, a palpable, dark shadow that fell from every bright object on my path. If there was a God, he was surely demented, populating the world with creatures who could so clearly anticipate their own demise. (“The nice thing about death,” my grandfather once said to me, paraphrasing a Neapolitan aphorism, “is that you only do it once.”) With effort, I pushed these thoughts away. I was alive and healthy, strong and young. So be it, I told myself. There would be plenty of time for death.

At the end of my run, I stopped at Father Aurelio's chapel in the eucalyptus grove for early mass. I had done this several times in the past week, arriving in my sweat-drenched T-shirt, my skin glistening. I joined half a dozen prune-faced widows, in their black dresses and head-scarves—the usual crowd. They sat impassively in different pews, hunched forward, fingering their rosaries, crossing themselves at the wrong times, but frequently, in perpetual mourning for Emilio or Ignazio or Luigi. After mass, they would stare at me as I left the chapel, crossing myself on the way out.

“It's not that they don't want you here,” Father Aurelio told me one day. “It's that they've never seen before a young man who would come to mass in his underwear.”

I felt cleansed and free, walking from the chapel's cool darkness into the blinding sun. Something like the grace of God seemed to alter my weight, and I ran home lighter on my feet, a spirit gliding on the world, aware of the vast kingdom of eternity represented, however obliquely, by the myriad forms of nature. By the time I rounded the point again, looking toward the Marina Piccola, the sun was too hot to bear, its brightness multiplied beyond calculation by the sea's million facets. But I turned my face upward, letting my cheeks and forehead burn.

As I ran, I thought of Nicky's words: “Vision is like that, right? I mean, you see something, and it's fucking fantastic—scary, beautiful, damned, whatever—and you don't dare tell anybody else about it. You keep it to yourself, because that's where it lives best. Down and fresh, the dearest thing you know.”

 

When I stepped into my cottage, the room was black and cool. My eyes would need several minutes to adjust, I realized, as I groped my way toward the bed. I would lie there for a while, letting lines of poetry gather in my head. Later, I might take a swim and sit on the beach with my journal. That was as good a place to write as any on Capri.

“Don't be so sweaty!”

“Marisa!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“You have leave your door open, so I come in. You are not so happy that I am come?”

I couldn't believe that, once again, Marisa had found her way into my cottage, uninvited. She stood in a dark corner, almost invisible.

“I wasn't expecting you,” I said.

“Don't be angry with me,” she said, stepping toward me.

“I'm not,” I said. “It's just that you startled me.”

She came close, reaching for my face. “Your head, there is this mark, a scar. What has happened?”

“A long time ago,” I said, “my brother hit me with a rock.”

She seemed pensive, considering.

“I have no brother and no sister,” she said, her eyes losing focus. The subject had touched some buried nerve. She kissed my lips, lightly.

A sexual encounter with Marisa was the last thing on my mind right now. I'd been running on the Pizzalungo, had been to mass, and the beginnings of a poem had begun to push its tendrilous shoulders through the soil of my unconscious. I wanted to water and care for that poem this morning, perhaps all day.

“Would you like a cup of tea?” I asked.

She sat on the bed and unbuttoned her blouse, exposing her breasts. “Forget this tea. Come to me, please, you Lorenzo. I am insisting.”

Despite my disinclination, I could not easily resist the commands of a woman: that pattern had been established in early childhood. I moved beside her, onto the edge of the bed, inwardly determined to ignore her overtures. I must find some middle ground here, get into a genuine conversation. Perhaps we could go to the beach for a swim? Or have coffee in the piazzetta? Anything to ease myself over this hump.

“I don't mind you sweat,” she said, reaching toward me and under my damp T-shirt. Her hand played lightly over the skin of my back, climbing the stairs of my vertebral column. Then she kneaded the soft skin just below my shoulder blades. “How do you like my rub?”

“It feels good,” I said.

“You will make love,” Marisa said. Her voice was husky and complex.

“I was going to write some poetry this morning,” I said halfheartedly.

“I am your muse, then. Let me do this for you.”

I had heard Rupert Grant on the subject of the female muse once too many times to find her suggestion in the least amusing. It was the loudest bee in Grant's bonnet. A crackpot theory of his that Vera lost no opportunity to deride. “He has left no idiotic stone unturned,” she recently said as we washed clams in the kitchen, “and believes in moon goddesses and sun goddesses and God knows what else. Bloody wood nymphs and fuck-fairies. Anything to justify his randy streak, and to make it seem less juvenile.”

Marisa put her tongue into my ear, but I jerked away. “You don't find me beautiful anymore,” she said, rather mournfully. “I'm sorry.”

“It's not that,” I said. “You're as beautiful as ever. Even more so.”

“You don't want me,” she said.

“No, I really do.”

As I said this, I realized it was true. The first time I'd seen Marisa, when she had leaped into Grant's lap and acted like a spoiled little girl, I had found her pretty enough, but her behavior made it difficult to appreciate her real beauty. (Girls who acted like kittens had always turned me off—I remembered such a girl at Columbia, during my freshman year, who would curl into my lap at parties. I ended the relationship before it ever began.) Marisa's style had never appealed to me. In the Italian manner, she used heavy layers of eye makeup and dowsed herself in cologne. Her earrings were too big and bright, and her jeans were excessively tight, as though applied with a spray gun. These superficial aspects of her presentation, though commonplace in Italy, grated on me. I preferred the wholesome simplicity of Holly, who wore neither makeup nor jewelry, not even earrings. She had no scent but her own, which I'd come to crave: a clean womanly smell that mingled with the faint aromas of shampoo. But this morning, Marisa seemed freer of makeup than usual, her hair gleaming. The only scent I could detect was definitely hers—a dark, thrilling odor that I recalled from the single night we'd spent together.

“I will leave you, Lorenzo,” she said, rising, buttoning her blouse. “I have not come to annoy you, as I do. If you don't want me, I understand. I don't prefer this to happen if you are not pleased.”

“It's not that,” I said. “I wasn't expecting you.”

Her face turned toward me, with tears glistening on her cheeks. Her lower lip trembled slightly.

“Don't cry,” I said, reaching toward her.

Her head fell against my shoulder, and she seemed about to sob.

Unable to resist, I touched her chin with my fingertips, and she raised her face to mine. Her lips parted. And soon my tongue found her mouth, and her jaws loosened, and her tongue met mine in the deep waters of her mouth.

“Lie with me,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Her voice was small and hesitant. “I don't want to. Not if you don't.”

“I want to,” I said, stripping off my shirt and lowering my gym shorts and underpants.

“Take off your shoes,” she said, lying on her back to slip off her jeans. “I don't like to make love with the shoes on.”

I obeyed. And within minutes, I was tangled on the bed with her, a swirl of sheets and wetness.