The Flamethrowers (33 page)

Sandro didn’t understand why I let this old man go on at length as if I’d never been on skis, but my experience had nothing to do with Chesil Jones. It wouldn’t have interested him one bit. He didn’t bring up skiing to have a conversation, but to lecture and instruct. I’d seen right away he was the type of person who grows deadly bored if disrupted from his plan to talk about himself, and I had no desire to waste my time and energy forcing on him what he would only will away in yawns and distracted looks. And anyhow Chesil Jones probably hadn’t skied in the twenty years since the stem Christie had been a popular technique. What was I to say, we make parallel turns now? The boots have buckles instead of laces? The bindings are quick-release?

After dinner, we retired to the living room. While his mother sneaked off to bed, Sandro put records on the old German phonograph, and more wine was poured. We listened to Stravinsky, harsh but stirring strings, sounds that were like stiff brushes dipped in paint and used to make a geometry of lines in stark black. Signora Valera must have then switched on the television in her room upstairs, because over the strings we heard distortedly loud voices interspersed with a laugh track. Wealthy Italian or Reno pensioner, it didn’t matter, she was like any old person with her TV too loud.

Roberto had gone home. Sandro told me Roberto’s wake time was four thirty a.m. It was one of the reasons his wife stayed in Milan when Roberto came to Bellagio. She couldn’t take his schedule, Sandro said. It was difficult to imagine that Roberto even had a wife, that he would be interested in women, he was so austere and clean and rigid.

There were catalogues of Sandro’s work on the coffee table, and the industrial designer Luigi began flipping through them, looking at Sandro’s spare, aluminum sculptures. Sandro had whispered to me, in a
moment alone in the hall, that Luigi also was a soft-core pornographer with a foot and leg fetish, and sold that work in editions of very limited print runs that cost thousands of dollars.

“I am stumped,” Luigi said when he’d looked at every image in the two thick catalogues. “I just don’t get it.”

Sandro was used to this. Minimalism is a language, and even having gone to art school, I barely spoke it myself. I knew the basic idea, that the objects were not meant to refer to anything but what they were, there in the room. Except that this was not really true, because they referred to a discourse that artists such as Sandro wrote long essays about, and if you didn’t know the discourse, you couldn’t take them for what they were, or were meant to be. You were simply confused.

“I’m going to just come out and ask you, Sandro,” Luigi said, “since I cannot infer from the work alone: Are you an ass man or a leg man? Which is it?”

I could tell from Sandro’s slow, quaking smile that this would be immediately assimilated as a favorite story. There needn’t be an answer. There need only be the story itself, archived in the asking. Although later that night, after the matter of shooing out the moth and diving under the covers, Sandro declared that he was both an ass and a leg man, a breast man, also. Interested in knees, the lower back, the neck, the little place where the collarbones meet. The mouth. “Your mouth,” he said, pressing his fingertips to my lips. Sandro said it was limited to think in terms of such
metonymy
. Didier’s word, plucked like a ghost from our life in New York.

The next day was quiet and serene and unseasonably warm. The groundskeeper had cleaned out the swimming pool at signora Valera’s request, because Sandro loved to swim. He’d heated it to eighty degrees, and with the air about seventy, steam rose from the water’s surface in periodic light drifts, ghostly apparitions veiled in gauze. Chesil Jones was already down at the pool when Sandro and I arrived. He was lying on the stones next to the edge, nude except for a hand towel that was folded into a small square and balanced over his privates, his eyes closed as though he were encased in a tomb of sunlight. Sandro flashed me a
look of amusement and tugged me toward the open pavilion next to the pool, a raised platform with couches. He picked me up and tossed me into a pile of throw pillows on the couch. When I giggled a bit too loudly, the old novelist sat up and glanced at us, squinting against the sun and holding his inadequate hand towel over his crotch like a tiny curtain. He began gathering his things. Leaving the young to their privacy, I felt him think. Although Sandro wasn’t all that young, which made his departure a generosity. The young drive out the old. He was leaving by choice. But before doing so, he stood in front of the pavilion, preparing, I sensed, to deliver one of his minor speeches.

“A splendid aspect,” he said to me, “the swimming pool. Wonderful that you’re getting the opportunity to use it. Notice the patio stones. That was Alba’s idea.
La signora,
I mean, ha-ha. The stones are actually for grinding polenta. They’re the tools of a peasant’s existence, a peasant’s meager fare, bland mush you cook in a copper pot. A few years ago she and I were rambling around the hills above Argegno and she saw a stack of them next to a quarry and asked this fellow if she could buy an entire lot, to make a patio. It’s very original, and quite funny in a way, a patio of stones that give the swimming pool its elegance, place it so beautifully in its wild setting, and yet their rough-hewn softness is from thousands of hours of peasants toiling away. In any case, enjoy.”

“Thank God,” Sandro said, watching him make his way up the path toward the house.

I assumed he and Sandro’s mother were lovers, but sensed this would be a taboo subject with Sandro, who rolled his eyes at Chesil Jones and didn’t say anything more than that he was a blowhard.

When he had disappeared up the path, Sandro pulled me toward him. He wanted to fool around there, in the pool house, but I was nervous about it.

“What about the groundskeeper?” I said. He had been skimming the last few leaves from the pool’s surface when we arrived. Perhaps he was still lurking around.

“Oh, he’s really going to object,” Sandro said. “Maybe he’s watching us right now. Let’s give him a show.”

“No.”

“Well, then we’ll have to be discreet,” he said softly, staring at me, his fingers grazing the back of my knee.

“I’ll just help you out,”
he whispered, and pulled me down onto his lap, working the zipper of my jeans, fitting his hand into my underwear.
“And no one will know. I promise. Not even your groundskeeper.”

Sandro was generous that way, seemed not to tally what he offered against what he got in return. I had chalked this up to his age, as if maturity meant that pleasing others gave back to him in certain ways. But there was power in this, for him, to watch my face with such scrutiny, to observe the effects of his own touch, as I sat over him on that couch, the two of us silent, me trying to hasten things, because I could not shake the feeling that the groundskeeper was somewhere nearby, watching as Sandro had joked he was.

We spent the whole first part of the day there, reading on the couches in the swimming pool pavilion, Sandro’s arm resting lightly around me, stroking my hair absentmindedly. I closed my eyes and heard nothing but wind brushing through the trees and Sandro turning his page.

I could get used to this place, I told myself. If I could just suffer a bit more time with these rude, rich people. Soon they’d all be gone. “We can’t just show up and not see my mother,” Sandro had said when we planned the trip. “I’ve got to give her a week.” After the family meeting at the Valera factory in just a few days, his mother would return to Milan, and Chesil Jones would go with her. Sandro and I would have the villa all to ourselves, and then I’d go to Monza.

Probably they would just roll out the
Spirit of Italy
and have me pose in front of it, the team manager said when I spoke to him on the phone. Giddle had reminded me to ask how much I’d be paid. That way, she said, whatever you do or don’t do with it, you’re still making something: money.

I was in the pool, floating on my back, letting my legs sink into the water, when I heard bare feet on the patio stones. The polenta stones. I opened my eyes to the wavering trees, thinking that whoever it was, I
would just go on floating and sinking, sinking and floating. A gust of wind sprinkled a few leaves into the water. I smelled cigarette smoke.

“Sanndroo!” a huskily familiar voice said.

It seemed a voice out of a dream, but it was real. Talia Valera, walking toward the pavilion.

“You people swim in March? How ridiculous.”

Sandro had not mentioned she was coming. I made my way to the edge of the pool and got out.

“How is it?” she asked me.

“Warm,” I said.

“Hey, maybe I’ll swim, too. Sandro?”

A moment later she had stripped off her clothes and was naked and walking toward the water. As she took heavy steps toward the edge of the pool, extra flesh on her bottom and the backs of her legs went into a kind of systemwide jiggle.

She dove in, moved across the bottom of the pool silently.

Sandro laughed and stubbed out her cigarette, which she’d left perched on the edge of a table.

She lay on her back, taking large lungfuls of breath in the same way I liked to do, to rise, float, and then slowly sink, then rise and float.

A servant brought lunch down to the pool pavilion, and we ate listening to Talia talk about the various men, and women as well, who had recently become obsessed with her, so much so that she’d had to leave New York. “I was getting bored there anyway,” she said. And then she had gone back to London but her old boyfriend had made a habit of standing below the windows of her flat and crying, and the scene there was boring to her, too, so she’d decided to do her mother a favor and attend the Valera Company meeting on her mother’s behalf. Her mother had gone to India and according to Talia was not coming back.

“Have you ever been to India?” she asked me, aiming her chin up in a slightly arch manner. I realized she was looking at herself in the mirror that hung down across from us in the pavilion.

I shook my head.

“Then you can’t understand,” she said, meeting her own gaze, drawing a lock of her hair down along the side of her face, inspecting her reflection with pleasure and satisfaction. “There’s a lot about the world, about humanity, you just can’t
see
. No, you absolutely
must
go to India. Immerse yourself in its colors and smells, in the cycle of life and death . . . you don’t
know
anything about life, Talia. How can you, if you’ve never been to India?” She changed her tone. “My mother thinks wearing silk saris and burning incense will keep her from killing herself.”

I thought of Gloria, when she’d returned from India the winter before, with an air that wasn’t too far from Talia’s parody of her mother. Gloria had gone to Calcutta and came back announcing to everyone that artists needed to start using more bamboo. She was trying to convince Stanley to work in bamboo. “
You
work in bamboo,” he’d said, when Sandro and I went there for dinner, to hear about her trip. “But I dance,” Gloria said. “My body is my material.” “Then shut up about bamboo,” Stanley said.

*  *  *

It came as no surprise that Talia and Sandro’s mother got along famously. Not in a mother-daughter way. More like two warriors taking a bit of time off together from rampaging the enemy. Talia had the right confidence and ease for Sandro’s mother; I could see that. She walked around the villa picking up little treasures and commenting on them, asking the right questions about various tapestries and busts, to the pleasure of her aunt. They were of the same pedigree, which removed the need for snobbery. They sat together, disarmed, and drank large amounts of wine and vodka and made each other laugh. They even made fun of Roberto, Talia walking stiffly across the lawn in her flip-flops as if with a stick up her ass, talking in a German accent, which was a little unfair, given that Roberto was totally and completely Italian, and yet the German accent had a comic logic that I wished I could openly appreciate, but they spoke in low tones and did not address me, and it would have been inappropriate to laugh along with them.

There were more interminable dinners for which we had to “dress,” or rather I did, as we moved slowly through the four long days until their departure. Sandro, as always, wore his one nice jacket, but over his standard uniform of faded black T-shirt, Carhartt pants, and scuffed steel-toed boots. Talia wore various elaborate kimonos and gowns of Sandro’s mother’s, and came to dinner barefoot, and was much complimented by her aunt for looking ravishing in this or that ancient and brightly colored garment, which she would inevitably take off halfway through dinner, revealing that underneath she wore a leotard and jeans, which was what I wished I had on myself, but I wore the things that Sandro had bought for me in Milan, unable to let go of the idea that I could please his mother by following her rules. I understood, as I followed her rules, that this was only causing her to despise me, but she intimidated me, so I smiled nervously and cleaved to politeness as if it were a lifesaver. It wasn’t.

The first night after Talia arrived, I dreamed that Sandro’s mother was friendly and open, a woman who spoke to me in the same soft tone she’d used when she said “there you are” to the Count of Bolzano. In my dream I was the you and she said it to me.
There you are
. Her nose was not black. She was not drunk or confused, as she sometimes seemed at the villa. I don’t know what language she spoke in my dream, but whatever it was, it was crystal clear, a language that she and I both understood perfectly. We smiled in complicity over something, some ciphered knowledge. “You know he really loves you,” she said, and then she conveyed a question to me silently,
What are you going to do about it?
It left a strong residue, that dream, and when I saw her the next morning, her stern gaze was a shock.
Don’t think for a second I’m the woman in your dream,
it said.
There’s no softness for you.

“We are so seldom all together,” signora Valera said one evening. “We should take a photograph,” and she went off to fetch a camera. I offered to take it, to avoid the awkwardness of moving out of the frame. When the photos came back from the developing lab in Bellagio, signora Valera was unhappy. She said she looked old and tired.