The Year We Left Home (38 page)

At Peggy Guggenheim’s museum they were certain they saw a figure from a long-ago American scandal, a man whom in other circumstances they might have approached and wished well. But he was so clearly on vacation and off duty that they decided to leave him be. A small and thrilling miracle from the god of coincidence.

They discovered that Spaghetti Caruso, a particular dish, was prepared with chicken livers and so was rightly and passionately rejected by Sam. When he was older they’d remind him of this. It would attach itself to him, the story would become part of him.

For their last five days in Italy they rented a hillside villa in Umbria with a view of olive and cypress and lemon trees, its own swimming pool, maid service, and satellite TV. There were a number of other such vacation villas occupied by tourists, although they were all designed and sited so that they each felt entirely private. There was a fully equipped kitchen and a modern supermarket to serve the villas. And, in the pretty town at the top of the next mild hill, some excellent
restaurants. It was a chance to relax, their reward for having been so many places and dutifully seen so many sights.

Ellen was worn-out and complained of headaches and spent a lot of time napping under the ceiling fan in their bedroom with the curtains drawn. The kids liked the pool, but it seemed that once the momentum of the trip slowed, much of the fun was over for them. “When are we going home?” Anna demanded on their first day.

“On Sunday,” Ryan told her, glad to have an answer for her, even if it wasn’t the answer she wanted. He was close to being vacationed-out himself. He was ready to sleep in his own bed, turn the trip into pictures and souvenirs, put a bow on it. But first there would be this interlude.

The villa had a shelf of books and magazines left behind by other, mostly English-speaking guests. While Ellen slept, he supervised the kids in the pool and leafed through the old copies of
Time
and
Der Spiegel,
a couple of glossy and forbidding literary journals, the detective novels and thrillers that were considered ideal for vacationing. None of them engaged him. He was always saying he wished he had more time to read, but either that was untrue, or else none of these materials were what he thought of as reading.

He and the children piled into the tiny rented Fiat and made a trip to the supermarket, where Ryan allowed them to select American breakfast cereal, processed cheese, and hot dogs. He made fried chicken for their dinner, and for himself and Ellen, pasta with lemon and artichokes and shrimp. She was still pale and puffy-faced, but felt well enough to come to the table for dinner, eating a little and smiling fragilely at the children. Later she sat with Ryan on the terrace.

The kids were inside in front of the television. Of course. “What are they watching?” Ellen asked. The colored smear of the television screen was behind them in the living room.

Ryan went inside to check.
“Baywatch,”
he reported back. “David Hasselhoff, dubbed in Italian.”

“I guess that’s OK. I worry about the commercials. They always seem to be showing bare breasts or some such thing.”

“Well then, Italian kids must see that stuff too.” He wasn’t sure what sort of point he was making.

“I guess so,” Ellen said, seeming to lose interest. Ryan stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. “Mm,” she said. It wasn’t really that hard to be nice to her.

“How’s the headache?”

“Better. Kind of a dull roar. Background noise.”

“You can just take it easy tomorrow. There’s nothing we really have to do.” They had considered taking some excursions into the countryside, tours of wineries, tours of olive-oil factories, but nothing they’d planned out.

“It’s boring for you here,” she said in a regretful tone.

“I can go into town if I get antsy.” He hadn’t been aware of feeling bored until she’d spoken. Now he felt it weighing him down as if he were underwater.

At some point in their life together he had assumed the burden of making her happy. Her most familiar mood, what he thought of as her default position, was one of exasperated suffering. Which he must attend, coax, tease, and try to reason away. He would never be entirely successful; at best she would only be not unhappy. But he would always be obliged to try.

Was that the worst thing he could say about her? If he was looking for excuses, was that the best he could do? He shamed himself with these thoughts, but not enough to keep him from dishonesty.

He’d had two affairs, one of them brief, one of them lengthy. He believed that Ellen had suspicions, but no actual proof or knowledge. It had sobered him, how easy it was to get away with such things, also how little effort it would take to deal a marriage, his or any other, a fatal and rupturing blow. And that he had not been willing to do.

Both had been women he knew at work or through work. One, the first, had been younger than he was by fifteen years, a reckless, adventuring girl who alarmed him with her highs and lows, her crying jags, her cocaine, her theatrics, which, although deliberate and calculated, she thought of as impetuous charm. She was exactly the kind of girl
you worried might show up to a rendezvous naked underneath a coat. It had only lasted a few weeks, then she’d moved to Toronto to be with an old boyfriend. Even now, if his phone rang at odd or unexpected hours, Ryan’s first sweating thought was that she was calling.

The next woman had been his age, divorced, and lonely enough to accept what he had to offer without wanting more, or at least, so it had been in the beginning. But over the year and a half of their time together, she’d made more and more space in her life for him, become more and more wifelike, fussing over his health, his clothes, stocking her kitchen with the brand of coffee he liked, even aquiring a bathrobe for his use. He began to back away. He’d hoped to let things die a natural death and avoid a scene but there had been one.

They’d been in her car, she was driving him to Union Station for what would be the last time. Ryan said, “I thought we were just going to enjoy it until it was over.” It was at that point in the argument: anything more generous and less craven had already been offered and dismissed.

“Fuck you,” she said. “I don’t remember signing that piece of paper. I don’t exist solely for your convenience.”

“We could still keep in touch,” Ryan said. Another remark he would be ashamed of later.

“You mean, Dial-A-Geisha. You mean, you call me whenever it fits into your fucking
schedule,
and I will soothe and entertain you and listen with great interest to all the tiny events of your tiny life. No thanks.”

He didn’t answer. She was driving too fast then hitting the brakes heavy, and he concentrated on just being able to get out of the car alive.

“You know what the hell of it is? You probably love me, in some chickenshit way. It’s just not important enough for you to do anything about it.”

“Would you Jesus Christ watch where you’re going,” Ryan said. Brake lights were flaring red in front of them, and she was looking straight at him.

The hell of it was she was probably right. Chickenshitedness. An
important component of screwing around. He wished she would become a good memory, not someone who came to mind, as she did now, only when he felt irritable and guilty.

Well, if he felt guilty, it’s because he was guilty. He’d tried to reclaim some notion of himself as he had been: not just younger, but certain that his journey through the world would be a blazed trail, not one stupid foot in front of the other.

From the terrace at night you could see the lights of other villas through the weaving, waving trees. A scent of eucalyptus mixed with the residue of the day’s baking heat. At a little distance was the walled town that dated back to before the Etruscans.

Ellen said, “I just wish we’d met more Italians. Besides hotelkeepers and tour guides, I mean. I wish the kids had. Everybody we ran into was from Dallas, or Los Angeles.”

Ryan said that was the way it was set up, these trips. Parts of the country were just big holding pens for tourists. Walking with Anna and Sam on a sidewalk in Florence, they’d seen two little Chinese boys, dressed in shorts and kneesocks and jackets, walking alongside each other, one’s arm thrown over the other’s shoulder as they looked at a book. Miniature Italians, in almost every respect. “Who are they?” Anna had asked, and Ryan said he didn’t know, just some boys. There would be a story there, but he wouldn’t be able to guess it. All over the world, people ended up in the damnedest places.

He said, “I think I will run into town for a bit.”

“What, right now?”

“Just to get a drink. Blow the stink off.” He spoke lightly so as to disguise his sudden and irresistible urge to be alone and free in a strange country, if only for an hour. “It’s not even eight o’clock. If you think you can manage with the kids . . .”

“I always have,” she said levelly. She was appraising him in a way that seemed unfriendly.

“I don’t have to go out. If you still aren’t feeling—”

“No, go.” She waved her fingers at him. “Scoot.”

He was careful driving in the dark in the tiny, unfamiliar Fiat, but
the road was well marked, and other pairs of headlights were winding their way down from the hills, like marbles on a slope, other tourists on the way to their own gratifying evenings. Couples, people with their kids. For a moment Ryan considered turning around and going back. The idea of being alone, so welcome to him earlier, now seemed like a miserable punishment. But cars hemmed him in ahead and behind and anyway, if he didn’t want to be alone, it was one of those times when he wanted even less to be with anyone he knew.

As it was impossible to drive very far into the town itself, there was a car park just outside the old gated entryway. Ryan joined the others passing in under the arches, the dressed-up women picking their way carefully along the uneven cobblestones, the men in the sports jackets they’d been made to pack for just such occasions. Strings of colored lights decorated the streetlamps and crossed overhead. Small shops were open, selling postcards, papier-mâché puppets, key chains, ashtrays, guidebooks. He slowed to look into the shop windows to demonstrate the normality and harmlessness of his presence. Without his family he felt conspicuous, even a little sinister.

Ryan followed the stream of people uphill, where most of the bars and trattorias and restaurants were. He passed columned entrances, windows with elaborate plasterwork cornices, looking as if figures from a different century might appear there at any moment. Yellow roses grew from urns made of soft pink clay. Small, starlike red and white flowers cascaded out of window boxes. The stream of tourists was emptying into a larger current of townspeople out for their own entertainment, sleek young men in polo shirts and jeans, ornamental young women, older people on stately promenades. Here were cafés with tables set outside beneath their awnings, placards advertising their different specials. A large window, its shutters open and lined with tiny white lights, gave him a view of linen-covered tables, ranks of candles, people attending to their dinners with apparant delight. And this he stood and watched also, until someone inside noticed him, and he hurried away, brushing aside the ghost of a memory he couldn’t quite place.

A little farther up the same street he found a small bar that looked to be something other than a nightclub, that is, he didn’t hear any of the hectic, brassy music that might indicate dancing. He entered, peering around him—the light was dim, yellow as candlelight, although it was in fact electric. He took a place at the bar and ordered an Americano. Vermouth, Campari, soda, and an orange slice. The barmaid, who had a broad, businesslike face, repeated it, “Americano,” and set to work. Ryan reached into his pocket for some of the pretty, confusing Italian bills and held them up. The barmaid extracted a bill and brought his change, which he left on the bar.

The drink was sweeter than he remembered, disappointing, almost perfumey. Maybe it was supposed to be this way. He decided to drink it rather than complain.

“German,” someone next to him said, and it took Ryan a moment to realize the word was being applied to him.

“American,” he said to the man. The bar had no seats and they were both standing. The man was shorter than Ryan, as were most people, but heavy in the chest and shoulders. Italian, certainly. Graying hair worn pushed away from his forehead in a pompadour. Jowls that gave him the look of a prosperous bulldog. He wore a white shirt open at the throat and a summer jacket of some light material, only a shade darker. In the dim light he glowed like a photographic negative.

“Apology,” he said.

“Not a problem,” Ryan told him.

“So many are Germanys.” The man nodded and said something to the barmaid, who took Ryan’s nearly empty glass and refilled it with another of the treacherous sweet drinks.

“Thanks very much.
Salute.
”

“
Salute.
First time here?” His English was strongly accented and Ryan had to pick his way through it over the noise of the bar.

“Yes, my family and I.”

“Benvenuto in Italia.”
The man finished his own drink and motioned for another. Ryan wondered if it was his turn to buy, but he was too slow. “Everybody in the world is here,” the man announced.
“The American, the German, the Englishman. We are the big world playground.” He smiled. The notion seemed to make him happy.

“Yes, it’s a very beautiful place,” Ryan said politely. From what he could see of the rest of the room, he was the only foreigner. There were some small metal tables, unoccupied except for an old couple occupied with not talking to each other. At the back of the room was another door, and waiters were passing in and out with plates and silverware. He hadn’t noticed this when he’d come in and he wondered if he’d mistaken the nature of the place. More people were crowding in at the front entrance, apparently for some occasion. He began to think about leaving the watery end of his drink on the bar and slipping away.