The Conversion (10 page)

“Oh,” I say. “Well, that would certainly be enough to make him a target.”

“Of course,” Marina says. “The pity is so far the government hasn’t even considered doing what he asks.” She shakes her finger at me. “And the Muslims know this, too!”

We end up driving back to the villa a different way, on a more main thoroughfare. The road is passing over the
autostrada
that stretches between Florence and coastal Viareggio when Marina says, “Now, about this
carabiniere
who seems to fascinate you so much—”

“How do you know?”

She laughs. “How could you not be fascinated?”

“Okay, okay.” And then I admit that he invited me to his gym.

“Ah, so I was right to bring him up.” She honks at yet another car that veers dangerously in front of us. “These people are mad!” Gripping the steering wheel tightly, she instructs me, “Just beware of him.”

“Beware?”

“Well, for one thing he is most assuredly married. Did you look for the wedding ring?”

I shrug and admit that I didn’t.

“So, it’s wishful thinking all over again. Remember, you’ve already gotten twisted up in a similar situation over a married man.”

I certainly cannot dispute this. “That’s assuming this
carabiniere
is even available. I have absolutely no idea what his sexual story is.”

“If he looks at you the way I noticed and then invites you to his gym so quickly, he probably is a gay who is married. As are a majority of gay
men in Italy. Which means he is not
available
as your Frenchman was not
available
. And probably even less
available
than your Frenchman.”

“Thank you, Marina,” I say with a bit of sarcasm, and then deliberately in English, “I guess I don’t want to spin my wheels again.”

“Spin?” she says. “What is this now?” I explain. “Ah,” she says, “
excellent
, this one.”

“I also want … I know this particular man a little better than some of the others. He has come to the villa on several occasions because the alarm has gone off. We have spoken. I find him a very intelligent fellow. In fact, he told me that he went to university and read philosophy and was even contemplating an advanced degree when he decided to give it all up to join the
carabinieri
.”

“Did he say why he gave it up?”

“No, but I assume because it is hard to get jobs with his sort of
intellectual
training. He probably realized this. And then having a family to support.” Marina pauses reflectively. “A few years ago he asked me to read one of his student articles, which I luckily avoided.”

“Why did you avoid it?”

“Because I felt sure I’d be disappointed. And it would have made my response very awkward.”

“That’s rather arrogant of you to make that assumption.”

She shakes her head and says in a slightly patronizing tone, “It’s
different
here. You must be kind and obliging and fair. But you also know what to expect.”

She seems to be suggesting that the difference between her social standing and Lorenzo’s is intellectually impossible to bridge. Now, here is someone terribly concerned about civic issues and inequities and yet clearly presumptuous about class differences.

“I know what you are thinking,” Marina says, broaching the silence. “But you must believe me. There are rarely any surprises. What you see and perceive here is normally what is. In America there is still this wonderful possibility of cultural paradox. I will give you an example of this, of something that I saw there that would never happen in Italy.

“Once I was invited to speak at Amherst College, and I asked to visit the Emily Dickinson house because she is my favorite American poet. The professor who taught her poetry and had written books about it was kind enough to take me. On the tour were he and I and a very fat man who,
according to this professor, looked like he walked out of one of your trailer parks. He was wearing one of these sun visors that are popular in America, and was carrying a plastic drink container from, I believe, Disneyland that we suspected had a beer in it. He looked very rough and ill-bred.

“Well, the professor, who, mind you, seemed quite kind, whispered to me with very distinct disdain that perhaps this other fellow was drunk and that he might be looking for the Basketball Hall of Fame, which
apparently
is only ten miles away from this place, this poet’s house. The
professor
kept apologizing for this man’s presence on the tour. But I didn’t mind. I found him a curiosity.

“The woman who led us around the Emily Dickinson house was a sylph of a graduate student, one of the professor’s former protégées. As we went along, she addressed everything she said to her former tutor and to myself, of course. She completely ignored this so-called basketball fan, this ‘trailer-park trash,’” Marina says in English. “Is this how you say it?”

I nod, embarrassed by the existence of such a horrible expression.

“Perhaps ten minutes into the tour, this strange man who had been completely silent finally spoke up. And he did it to kindly correct something that the graduate student had misstated. About a certain manuscript of Emily Dickinson being at Harvard rather than at Amherst. ‘He’s absolutely right,’ the professor told his former student. But let me tell you, that professor was stunned. And then this fat man with the beer in his cup started to speak about Emily Dickinson. He knew her life, her poetry, but his knowledge wasn’t pedantic, it was profound. It seemed to me that he understood the woman’s writing. Then the professor, the author of critical studies on Emily Dickinson, attempted to—dared to, I should say—argue about the woman’s life, her motivation, and even about certain lines of her verse, perhaps to assert and prove his dominance in front of a foreign visitor such as myself. But this trailer-park man kept up his end of the discussion with great confidence and, in my opinion, made a complete fool out of the professor.” Marina turns to me and says with great vehemence, “This, my dear friend, could never happen in Italy. And I never loved America more than I did at that very moment. It was perhaps one of the three or four high points of my entire life.”

We have entered the residential road that will lead to the villa, but then Marina surprises me by making a sharp right turn onto a one-way thoroughfare. “You haven’t been this way, have you?” she says.

“Don’t think so.”

“I want to show you.”

We drive down a narrow lane barely wide enough for one car and suddenly, on either side of us, rise stone walls that are at least twenty feet high. The vaulting effect is dramatically Old World. The road narrows to a point where the Renault barely fits. Many vehicles, Marina explains, cannot venture down this thoroughfare; indeed, I can see scrape marks on some of the stones left by cars that were too wide to pass through. It occurs to me that in Europe much more than in America, the prerogatives of the past are constantly intruding upon the present.

The road spits us out directly opposite the entrance to the villa. But instead of heading through the metal grille of its gates, Marina makes a right and we drive along the property wall until we reach another
driveway
that is lined with fig trees and oleander bushes. The fig trees are so laden with black fruit that much of it has fallen off the boughs and is lying squashed and rotting, staining the ground like blood.

We pull up in front of a house built of stones and mortar that looks incredibly old. “This is the
dependence
that the thief broke into,” Marina tells me, and goes on to explain that the building was once an active convent and is just over a thousand years old. Very little was done to it until 1950, when her father had the house updated and modernized and reconfigured into three apartments. She points out the empty pedestal that stands just to the right of the front entrance and then kills the engine. We get out of the car and approach the fallen statue that is alabaster, darkened by a quarter of a millennium of exposure to the elements. The Apollo lies on his stomach, his severed, idealized head with its tamed curls lying next to his narrow waist. His ass is perfectly globed and dimpled at the small of his back. A meter or so away from the breaks in his ankles is a neat pile of his hands and feet, which have been sheared off.

Although seeing the broken statue is disturbing, I actually expected it to be in worse shape, pulverized by the initial concussion and subsequent fall. I mention this to Marina.

“Yes, sure, we are somewhat lucky; however, even with careful
restoration
, he won’t be the same.” Sounding forlorn, she says, “I don’t mind that this man steals things from me. I do mind about this piece of history being ruined.” 

I glance beyond the house, through the orderly-looking rows of the villa’s grapevines that are tended and cultivated by a local farmer. I notice how the road we just followed winds up to an old Romanesque church.

Marina resumes, “In a way, I understand why you attract these married men who are gays.”

“Oh, and why is that?”

She picks up a shard of alabaster and lays it gently on the pile of fractured hands and feet. “You don’t seem so. Your manner is rather ordinary, though of course you have the cultural refinements that many gays have. But I suppose if a married man chooses to spend time with you, then he might be able to delude himself into thinking that he is spending time with a friend rather than a lover.”

Fixing my attention on the statue’s beautiful yet broken limbs, I say, “I think it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

“No doubt it is. These thoughts are new,” Marina admits and falls almost ruefully silent.

She motions me to get back into the car, and we drive the short distance around the villa’s outer walls back toward the front entrance and take the turn down the long driveway. The sienna-colored building looms in the foreground; its green shutters have been opened to air out the enormous frescoed rooms. As we come to a halt, the pack of Marina’s beloved mongrels gambol toward us over the wide emerald lawns.

“
Una francese,
a frenchwoman, called while you were at the
carabinieri
,” Carla announces when Marina and I enter the kitchen. The dogs are burbling and pressing against our legs. “I don’t understand her, so she tries English,” Carla laughs. “And then a miracle: Stefano actually gets on the phone and speaks to her. He never speaks on the phone unless it’s for him,” she explains as she hands me a piece of paper with a message written in European-looking chicken scratch:
Mme Soyer
. However, the number scribbled is not Parisian but rather a two-digit city. She is somewhere else in France, probably Brittany.

“Phone her now,” Marina suggests, and corrals Carla into the library to explain the situation with the thief.

When the phone is answered by a young girl, I imagine I can actually hear waves breaking in the background. Instinct urges me to cling to
English
, not to venture a single word into French, and once I identify myself, I hear her saying,
“Maman, c’est l’americain.”

A moment later Laurence is on the line. “Hello, Russell, give me just a second…. Put that over there, please. And then please go out and close the door behind you.” All of this is in English, as if for my benefit. During my unannounced visit to the avenue Foch, mother and daughter had enacted the same charade, when it was clear to me that their habit of conversation was primarily in French, something I would imagine Michel had insisted upon. “Hang on a bit longer, will you?”

“Sure, but can you just tell me if Michel is okay?”

“He’s fine … as far as I know. I haven’t spoken to him in a few weeks, to be quite honest.”

I have no idea how expensive it is to call France and remind Laurence that I am borrowing the phone. She offers to call me straight back.

When she does, she begins by saying, “I saw the article about your friend in
Le Monde
. I just want to say how sorry I am.”

I merely thank her, waiting to hear the reason why she’s calling me. It cannot be because of Ed’s death. The last time Laurence and I spoke was when I showed up unannounced on the avenue Foch.

“Anyway, I recently got a call from the police in Trouville. In Normandy,” she qualifies.

“I know where it is. My French ain’t the greatest, but I know a little geography.”

“Forgive me,” she says, suddenly docile.

Along a seaside road the police had found an abandoned BMW motorcycle whose license plate they traced back to Michel. They’d wanted to question him about it. When they told Laurence that the motorcycle had been irretrievably damaged, she panicked. But then they reassured her that there had been a thorough investigation of the accident scene with no indication of any kind of personal injury. Michel, or whoever had been riding his motorcycle, seemed to have walked away unharmed, leaving very expensive wreckage.

“And I haven’t heard from him since the police called. I haven’t heard from him in well over a month.”

“And this is unusual?”

She sighs and admits, “Quite unusual, yes.”

“And so why are you calling
me
?”

“Because I really need to locate him and I thought … you might have been in contact with him.”

“You can’t be serious.”

There’s a hesitation on the other end. “Russell … I’m sorry to do this.” There is a noticeable plaint in her voice. “I did give him your message when you came to see me. I told him to call you.”

“That was probably ten months ago. I never heard from him.”

“I just figured that you had.”

“It’s been over a year since we’ve been in contact,” I remind her.

“I didn’t know if you’d stayed out of touch for this long. And I hope you understand….” She pauses for a moment. “When the police asked me if he could’ve been with somebody when the accident occurred, the only person I could think of was you. I gave them the telephone number you left me, but I guess your friend, the poet, had already given up his apartment by then.”

“Oh, no!” I exclaim, momentarily worrying that to the authorities it might appear odd that I could be linked to two mishaps in France: one of them a motorcycle accident, and the other, an attempted armed robbery. I mention this to Laurence.

“But if they thought you could be helpful in either case, they would’ve contacted you by now.”

“But how would they find me?”

“Well,
I
found you.”

She had a point. “I hope you’re right. But now I need to ask you something.” I hesitate for a moment, staring down at a fax, recently printed and waiting to be retrieved, whose address is in Sardinia. “That day I came to see you last fall, you weren’t telling me the whole truth about yourself and Michel, were you?”

A short pause. “No, I wasn’t. And I’m sorry,” she says, going on to explain that Michel had, in fact, already moved out and was living in the other apartment.

“So then when I read that article about the two of you, the
newspaper
’s reporting
was
accurate.”

She audibly winces. “It wasn’t up to me. He didn’t want you to know about it. In fact, he told me that if you ever got in contact, not to give out that information. Obviously I’d go along with this.”

I don’t respond for a moment. Finally, I ask, “But why didn’t he want me to know? I mean, was he that afraid of … the power I might have?”

Laurence forces a laugh. “If that were the case, it would have been … noble of him to ask my help. But, no, it was because he’d been in contact with the poet.”

“What?” I ask, suddenly breathless.

There is a significant pause on the other end. “I thought you knew
this
, at least by now.”

This can’t be happening. I have to be dreaming. I manage to tell Laurence that I never knew. “I think you need to explain—”

“Fine. But, Russell, I honestly don’t know how much or even when they were in contact. You have to understand that once he stopped seeing you, Michel was careful to bring up your name as little as possible. But I do know that early on, even before you came to see me, Michel tried to call you, to see how you were, or so he claimed. The poet answered the phone. Now I realize he just never gave you the message.”

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Whatever the poet said strongly discouraged my husband from contacting you again,” she continues. “As you know, Michel is not easily influenced. So even though I was glad that he listened to your friend, I was actually surprised that he did. And that was when he told me that if you ever called to put you off. And obviously I was happy to do it. I certainly didn’t ask him why.”

“God damn them!” For Michel is also culpable for not having told me anything.

“And so I’ve been worried about Michel because I have no idea where he is.”

“But wait, how can you even know he’s okay after the accident?”

Laurence lets out a sardonic chuckle. “Because a charge came through on our credit card for a new motorcycle.”

“I don’t understand.”

She elaborates: 17,000 euros at a BMW dealer just outside Paris.

“You’re saying he bought the bike but didn’t even tell you?”

“Correct.”

I’m still trying to assimilate the idea of Michel and Ed being in touch about me. “I wish I could help you … get hold of him. But there has been absolutely no contact. I have no idea where Michel might be.”

Laurence now admits that although she felt differently when we’d first discussed the idea all those months ago, she now thinks that perhaps Michel could actually be involved with somebody else.

“Did he tell you?”

“I never asked him this directly. But I plan to when I next speak to him.”

I tell her, “I don’t know if this will help at all, but before he started seeing me, Michel was seeing …” I’m not sure how to elaborate on the fact that this particular person was a beautiful transsexual.

“Yes, I know about this … other person,” Laurence says with crisp authority in her voice. “Somebody who had a sex change, from a male to female, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I wouldn’t even know how to get in touch with her.”

“I don’t either … I never really knew her, although I met her once. She hated me for good reason,” I say.

Laurence’s terse response—“In case you think of something or hear about something, you have my number here”—makes me wonder if perhaps she’s heard more than enough information about another of Michel’s former lovers.

After I take down the telephone number of the avenue Foch
apartment
, I say, “Before you go, I would like to know one thing.”

“Go ahead, ask,” she says, almost as if she knows what the question will be.

“Did you have any idea at all about Michel before you married him?”

She quickly responds, “Of course I knew. I’m not a complete idiot! We even considered breaking off the engagement. Michel likes to joke that we got married because my father had already bought so many cases of excellent champagne,
comme il faut,
as the French say. And as my family has been coming to France every year since we were children, my father knew that you buy the best champagne you can afford for your daughter’s wedding. He spent thousands upon thousands of dollars on it.”

Right after all the champagne was delivered, Michel went to Laurence and made a promise that he’d never let
it
affect their life together, that he would always be discreet. That if he didn’t marry Laurence, because of his family he’d be obliged to marry somebody else. Laurence discussed the situation with a wise Frenchwoman she knew “who was a dear friend of my father’s. And Madame Cremieux pointed out to me that if it were not a man on the side, it could very easily—more easily, in fact—be a woman. Because mistresses are tolerated in French society … more than they are in America.”

Laurence was told that in good families such as Michel’s and Madame Cremieux’s, maintaining a married lifestyle with children was far too important to ever jeopardize, so much so it was guaranteed to prevent him from being openly involved with another man.

“Madame Cremieux kept reassuring me that I was safe with him, safer than if he’d been completely straight.”

This European logic will take a bit of getting used to, I decide after saying good-bye to Laurence.

So Ed’s meddling was the reason why Michel never contacted me. And now that Ed has died, there is no outlet for my fury, no way of crying foul. I’m completely powerless in my rage. In order to calm down, I try to remind myself how unhappy Ed must have been to have tampered with my life. And yet I know that even if I were able to confront him now, Ed would still argue that his meddling had been for my own good. He’d regurgitate his firm belief that if I allowed myself to get involved with Michel once again, the pain of the inevitable second rupture would trump the pain of the first. “This is the kind of thing that can drive people loony,” Ed had warned me on more than one occasion, probably as firm in his conviction as wise Madame Cremieux, whom Laurence had
consulted. He felt there were too many obstacles in Michel’s life that would prevent him from sustaining a relationship with any man.

My anxiety about Michel returns, a tsunami that has been rolling and gathering strength across my mind. I retreat to my bedroom, feeling as foolish as I once felt while waiting for his phone calls when I was
occupying
my dreary flat in the 18th. His calls usually came between four and six in the evening when his office began to wind down, affording him an opportunity to talk privately. But even then, when guaranteed solitude, he would speak in a whisper and relied on English as a precaution. During these late-afternoon phone calls he often told me,
“Je t’aime bien.”
Logically, if
je t’aime
meant you loved somebody, then
je t’aime bien
should mean that you loved someone very well, meaning a lot. However, the literal words do not convey their meaning in this way. For in fact,
je t’aime bien
means you like somebody a lot and don’t quite love them, whereas
Je t’aime
means you do love them. So when Michel would say,
“Je t’aime bien,”
I could never really trust the sentiment. There was the odd occasion when he’d say “I love you” in English, but even then I always suspected that it was easier for him to give lip service to a sentiment in a language that he’d adopted rather than lived in.

And now of course, I have to wonder where Ed and Michel had first met and what was said. I realize that my only source of information would be the memoir. As urgent as the need is to know more, I’m reluctant to delve into further descriptions of Ed’s unrequited love, his frustrated desires.

But at last I grab the manuscript, carefully laying its early sections aside and finding the place where I’d last been reading. I quickly scan
descriptions
of Ed’s ongoing struggle to refine several poems in his Palazzo Barbaro sequence, worrying that they are not up to the standards of “Venice Sinking by Degrees,” the poem about our imbalanced affection he published in
The New Yorker
. Sandwiched between two long
descriptions
of back-to-back literary dinner parties, I find a brief interlude in which the meeting with Michel is related.

They actually met up at the same Left Bank café where Ed and I had met for the first time. Unfortunately, Ed doesn’t give a date. He claims to have told Michel that I was still suffering over him and that he had no business contacting me again unless he knew he was completely prepared to leave Laurence. He then reminded Michel that his upbringing and his
social class would never allow this to happen. Then there is a short
description
of Michel, himself: masculine, apparently well-hung; and that judging by his clothes, he was quite B.C.B.G.—
bon chic, bon genre,
the French expression that is the equivalent of
yuppie
. However, it quickly seemed to become clear to Ed that Michel wasn’t going to listen to him, that he was still intent on contacting me. “And so,” he writes, “I knew then that my only alternative would be at some point to tell Michel that Russell was sero-positive. And that it was I who had actually infected him.”