The Conversion (19 page)

“Nobody’s going to care about my memoir, much less my love affairs. I’m not anybody of note.”

“It’s all in the doing,” Marina instructs. “Ordinary lives can often be the most beautifully rendered.”

Conflicted, I fall silent, listening to the crackling fire. Maybe I should.

She gets up from her chair, comes over, and sits down next to me. “You know, Russell, this afternoon I was resting with my dogs and thinking about our conversation earlier in the day. And I actually began to wonder if Stefano’s novels really aren’t as good as I want to believe, and so perhaps should not be translated into English but rather left in Italian, merely footnotes to the literature of this time. And maybe I should stop trying to justify his work to feel worthy of him. Perhaps the same goes with your fascination with married men,” she exclaims at last. “If you’d only choose a more distinct path for your personal life, then you more easily might make the choice to continue with your writing career.”

Suddenly I make a decision. “Wait here. I’ll be right back,” I tell her.

I hurry into my bedroom and reach into one of Stefano’s bookshelves, where, behind Italo Svevo’s
La Coscienza di Zeno
, I’ve concealed the manuscript, whose first and last pages are now dusty with old plaster. I carry it back into the library, the ninety-page excerpt on the top. I hand everything to Marina, who dutifully reads the first page of the excerpt. She smiles, bemused, and hands it back to me. “Why are you showing me this? I told you before I don’t want to read it.”

“I just want you to take a look, a last look at it.” I glance at the fire and then stare back at her.

“You’re not going to do anything so stupid?”

“You told me that I’m holding on to it, that I’m afraid to give it up. Maybe I just need to be rid of it altogether.”

“Absolutely not! Surrender it to his editors and let them do what they want with it. Let it spur you to write your own version. But no matter what, you cannot destroy another author’s work.”

“Even if I knew he’d want me to?”

“In his life he wanted you to!” Marina exclaims.

“Well, you don’t believe in life after death,” I remind her.

Looking flustered, she says, “Whatever is published about you, you can bear, Russell. You’ll have to think of it as the price you pay for becoming involved with a famous author.”

Marina and I stare at each other. “Unless I do this, just like you say, it
is
going to get in the way of my life.”

With a resigned shrug, Marina ceases trying to persuade me. I take the manuscript and go and stand by the fireplace. She watches me with curious horror.

Hesitating, I say, “Perhaps Stefano would have even approved.”

“Don’t bring him into it,” Marina warns me. “He’s dead.”

“And so is Ed.”

“I think you’re making a mistake, Russell,” she says one last time.

“I think I have to do this,” I say.

“Well, then, I wash my hands of it!”

“I take full responsibility.” I divide the manuscript into approximately ten sections and begin slipping it five or ten leaves at a time into the flames.

The pages buckle immediately from the heat, turn the caramel color of toasted coconut, and then pop into conflagration. For a few moments I can understand the orgiastic glee of pyromania. But soon the sense of my purpose grows heavy, even somewhat remoreful. And when I realize there is no going back, I have a sudden aversion to what I’m doing and actually stop to agonize: What have I wrought here? But soon I’m lulled back into watching the words burning, lovely nouns and adjectives such as
lapidary, remote, binoculars, tension, recluse, steam, June, tempest;
and the delicious gerunds:
charring, blistering, pondering, demonizing, scumbling, shambling, professing, edging
.

Marina, transfixed, watches the manuscript burn and finally says, “This reminds me of once when I was on an ocean liner and threw flowers into the sea.”

“Watching them disappear,” I murmur.

“Yes.”

And when the last of the pages have finally burned down to ashes, Marina says to me, “Well, now, I guess, there’s nothing stopping you. The brace has been removed. You have no choice but to go forward on your own.”

“I would never contradict the
signora
.” Lorenzo speaks over his shoulder as the motorcycle wends its way down the Villa Guidi’s driveway and begins following the curving backroad that eventually leads into the city. He drives slowly to make sure I can hear him. “Even if I was certain that she was misleading this official from America. Out of respect I would never do such a thing.” When we arrive at a stop sign, he brakes and balances the bike with one leg, allowing the engine to fall into chattering idle. “And besides, you forgot to tell me
she
knew you had this manuscript. Which, by the way, you easily could have hidden the moment you arrived so that even her housekeeper would never find it. They could have been the innocent hosts of a literary thief, after all.” He grins. “Now don’t forget I did promise to help you in this.”

Lorenzo faces forward again, but still not engaging the gears. Softly speaking into his ear, I tell him I’d actually worried that during the meeting with the American attaché, he’d publicly unmask my deception as a perverse way of denying his attraction to me.

“What?” He raises his helmet shield, turns completely around so that his lips are inches from mine, his startling eyes boring into me. “Are you mad?” He kisses me belligerently. “Don’t make me out to be so crazy/complicated. Why can’t I tell you that I am unhappy because I know that there is nothing I can do, no other choice for a life other than the one I have? Don’t you want honesty? Isn’t this what you Americans always look for?”

Without waiting for an answer, Lorenzo faces forward again, revs the motor, and we take off toward the ramparts of the walled city. He makes a right turn at a gelateria named Gelatone. I happen to remember Marina explaining this ice cream store once was called
Benito
, a name that had to be changed to conform to the democratic climate of post World War II, when her father was helping Italy write itself a new constitution. We follow the ring road halfway around the city, passing a barrackslike train station built during Il Duce’s reign, then a curving row of discount computer stores, and head diagonally down a street called Castracani. I take the name for its literal meaning, “to castrate dogs.” When we pause at
a traffic light, I ask Lorenzo if this name has any significance, and instead of just responding that the street actually honors a local fifteenth-century aristocrat, he asserts (as Marina had) that in Italy male dogs are seldom castrated. “Why do you ask this, anyway?”

“Because where are we headed?” I prompt, reminding him that our final destination is the apartment of his colleague, Paolo, who sometimes has sex with the transsexual we spotted out in Torre del Lago.

“Ah, of course.” He picks up on the reference. “Well, the sex change isn’t a castration per se. In fact they find a way to keep the nerves of the penis head and fold them into the fig, so that they still have sensation.”

“How do you know all this anatomy?”

“It’s common.”

Squeezing the arm of his jacket: “You seem to know a lot about sex changes!”

“I said before, I have no interest in trans!” he insists. “You know, you’re beginning to sound like a woman … for once!” which stings me momentarily into silence. And then I realize that this is perhaps the way a woman might feel when a man she’s sleeping with unconvincingly denies an interest in other men. Or perhaps when a man that a man is sleeping with unconvincingly denies an interest in women. I cringe.

The light changes, curtailing any further conversation. We drive along a seemingly endless commercial thoroughfare that in its way reminds me of a generic commercial zone of hair salons and hardware stores and nurseries that one might see on the outskirts of any American urban center, although a somewhat more quaint—to my eyes anyway—equivalent of American mini-mall sprawl. But then we pass under the arch of an old Roman aqueduct, proving that we could be nowhere else but Italy. Lorenzo eventually veers off onto a side street and follows a small canal filled with oily-looking water that, in the early evening, gives off a rainbow sheen. At last we arrive at the Mediterranean-style two-level apartment complex where Paolo and his family live, but who are now on vacation in Sardinia.

I’ve always felt that our sex life is cheapened by the fact that Lorenzo and I have to keep borrowing different venues, that neither of us has a regular place to go. Why did I even agree to this? I wonder dispiritedly after Lorenzo and I have finished making perfunctory love. We are lying in Paolo’s bed, facing a dresser that features framed photographs of the
round-faced man with his wife and two small children, in a room redolent of lily-of-the-valley perfume. I feel cheap, unworthy even of myself. I suddenly think of Ed’s manuscript twisting and charring in the fire, his words melting into black, reliving the sense of compulsion and regret, compulsion to break free of an obviously unhealthy pattern, but regret because, when it was all over, when I could see the ghostly outline of Ed’s pages in the pile of ashes, I began to lament my impulse to destroy the writings of someone with whom I was once intimate.

Naked in his colleague’s bedroom, arms cocked behind his head, Lorenzo finally breaks the silence. “You said you were afraid that I might go back on what I promised, tell that official you had the manuscript. It makes me wonder: Did you ever love somebody who betrayed you like this?”

I hesitate a moment, ever reluctant to speak of Ed’s betrayal vis-à-vis Michel, or how Michel callously broke off our affair. And so instead I tell Lorenzo the story of the relationship that drove me to leave America, the Argentinean priest at Trinity Church in Manhattan’s Financial District, the man whose ex-lover claimed he lied about his sero-conversion.

Lorenzo is perplexed. “But what did you do?”

“Of course I confronted him. But he denied it and said his ex-lover was delusional. He assured me I had nothing to worry about.”

“But you couldn’t believe him, could you?”

One Sunday morning after James left to serve mass, I searched through his drawers and cabinets. Underneath the sink I found a cache of orange pill containers lumped together in a plastic bag; they seemed hastily stashed away. The dates were recent, however, and the address of the dispensing pharmacy was located in another part of Manhattan. I
remember
holding the bottles and recognizing the names of antiviral and antifungal medications I’d read about, gently shaking the contents and hearing the report of dozens of pills. It was like listening to a distant death rattle, like the clatter of rats swarming the streets below me, the streets that had been broken and fractured in the wake of a terrorist attack.

Lorenzo lies there nearly inert, listening to my story, his silence
transmitting
that now he’s wary of me. At last he says, “I can understand how you might have gone that far with somebody, wanting to believe what you knew wasn’t true. But when you finally knew … he was still doing something so wrong! Why didn’t you get out of it?”

I didn’t have to. By the time I confronted him, James had quit his job, packed his things, and left town.

Scissoring his legs free of the bed sheets, Lorenzo sits up and says, “Did you tell the church what he did to you?”

“I called them to find out where he went, but they wouldn’t say. I figured he’d already told them that a crazy man might call them with accusations, just like his former lover did.”

“So we can assume that he’s probably out there infecting people.”

“I hope he isn’t.”

“You hope he
isn’t?
” Lorenzo repeats. And in that moment, a thought chills me: Now this man is probably done with me.

Telling the story has once again brought me to the fire, and this time it’s as if I’m throwing myself in. I admit to Lorenzo, “I knew what I was getting into. There were warning signs. But I didn’t listen to them.”

“Why not?”

I suddenly remember the way Ed described it to me:
I just wanted him to fuck me as he was. As I was. And what I actually think I realized then, the burning truth was that getting caught up in the power of that kind of sex makes everything that goes against the grain diluted. You see, Russell, in my life I’ve always chased pure experience. And so I took my moment of raw passion and it was absolutely divine
.

Now I wish I had told Ed the story of my own recklessness, that back in NewYork, by those huge windows overlooking a devastated neighborhood, fully aware of what I was doing, I gave in to the priest and fell under the momentary fantasy of believing that everything this man had to offer me was sacred rather than contaminated. I remember how he used to whisper to me, “I’m charging you up, Russell, I’m charging you up,” eventually deciphering that he wanted to pass the virus onto me, like a jolt of new life to a dying cell. And what I’ve been unable to admit to myself until now is that, under the delusional spell of lust that I foolishly mistook for destiny, I wanted it as much as he wanted to give it. I wanted the conversion.

Lorenzo is looking at me in horror.

“It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m fine. I’ve been tested twice since then.”

Shaking his head, he says, “But how could you make love to anyone like that … in such a way?”

Knowing there was no explanation that would satisfy him, I end up saying, “Sometimes death, or the idea of it, can be seductive.”

Lorenzo shakes his head. “Now, this I do not understand. To me, this sounds like insanity.”

Of course he’s right, I think in the midst of my shame.

Tonight Marina has invited me to be her escort at one of the villa’s weddings that is celebrating the second marriage of somebody very high up in the prime minister’s cabinet. Many guests from as far as Rome and the Amalfi coast are in attendance; it’s even rumored that the prime minister himself is slated to arrive. When Lorenzo drops me off, the villa is swarming with people, and he claims to recognize several James Bondian–looking men wearing form-fitting suits and wraparound sunglasses standing with checklists at the various entrances or milling among the well-heeled guests. “I work with these
ragazzi
,” he tells me. “They must be moonlighting.”

Just as I am climbing off the motorcycle, Lorenzo turns to me. “Look, I need to tell you something … because I may not be seeing you for some time.” And of course I immediately think of how Michel so
effortlessly
broke off the relationship after our trip to the south of France.

“What is it?” I say without much life in my voice. I try to assure myself that this time around I will feel more relieved than rejected.

He goes on to say that the
carabinieri
have continued to interrogate the thief who broke into the villa’s
dependence
. Earlier in the day they managed to extract a vital confession: that in fact, he had come to the villa not to rob it, but rather to do away with Stefano.

“What are you saying?” I cry.

“I was there when he told them,” Lorenzo explains gravely. “It seems that somebody by reading one of the
signora
’s books learned about a passageway into the villa that is accessible from that old building the thief broke into; that old building, I happen to know, has no alarm system.”

I stare at him, flabbergasted.

“Remember, we found the big knife in his truck.” Lorenzo pauses, adjusting his helmet. “Anyhow, he finally told us that he was planning to come in at night, cut the
signore
’s throat very quietly, and leave without being detected. But then he heard somebody, got confused, not scared—because they don’t get scared, these people—and went back to his car, drove into the statue, and hit his head.”

I stand there for a moment, trying to digest the news. Finally, I ask, “Has Marina been told?”

Lorenzo shakes his head. “As far as I know, not yet.”

“When are you going to tell her?”

Lorenzo turns up his gloved palms. “It’s certainly not for me to tell her. I assume my superior is calling her. Although probably tomorrow so as not to upset her during the party. But you must see, Russell, that if the target of the assassination is now dead, the matter is no longer urgent after all, is it?”

“I don’t know, Lorenzo. I don’t know what to say.”

Hesitating a moment, staring at me from behind his Ray-Bans, with a glance toward some of his colleagues, Lorenzo opts to shake my hand rather than kiss me—as any two male friends in Italy would do without provoking suspicion—a clear sign that he is no longer comfortable with our “arrangement.” I realize I set myself up and perhaps even curried this rejection but still feel sad, knowing that I probably won’t be seeing him again. I watch Lorenzo motoring off down the driveway and, with a wave to a man in wraparound sunglasses standing by the gates, he disappears into the windy lane.

Marina is standing near the kitchen dressed in a turquoise ball gown that ruffles into two gossamer tiers near her ankles. “You’re late!” she accuses as I slink in the door. She looks stern yet somehow unconcerned, and so I assume she has not learned the latest bit of news. I find her face a bit overly made up, her natural beauty masked by foundation powder and eyeliner. “You were supposed to be ready and on my arm a quarter of an hour ago.”

I apologize and hurry to my bedroom to put on a navy-blue linen suit that Ed had bought me in a moment of largesse a week before he died. I’m not at leisure to ponder Lorenzo’s strange news of the prisoner’s confession; nor does his sudden loss of interest in me have a chance to sink in.

I’ve witnessed several of the hired weddings by now, and this one seems immediately more upscale than the rest. A man with a manicured beard in a starched white jacket is shucking fresh oysters, there are four huge wheels of aged parmigiano equipped with small spadelike utensils with which the guests are elegantly breaking off shards of cheese. Out on the loggia, linen-covered tables that normally are stocked with bottles of good Venetian prosecco are now chock full of Dom Pérignon. There are hors d’oeuvre–sized puffed pastries, platters of pâté and crudité arranged in the semblance of sunflowers. The wedding cake is on display: six feet high,
ivory-colored, and studded with bright globes of fruit so thickly glazed with sugar it looks encased in ice. Marina whispers to me that the caterers are among the best of the Milanese companies; and because Milan is close to the Piedmont, we could expect at the sit-down dinner a fresh
fettuccine
prepared with shavings of prized white truffles from Alba. And the villa’s proximity to the fish markets of Viareggio will guarantee an
elaborate
seafood antipasto.