This Crumbling Pageant Page 13

  “That was mean.”

  “I’m sorry. It just seems like you don’t ever want to make any friends of your own here.”

  “Why can’t we share the same friends?”

  “I’ve asked you a billion times to come out with me—”

  “Ha!” he objected.

  “—and you never want to.”

  “That’s a lie.”

  “Then come out today.”

  “Oh, no. No thanks. I tried that already, remember?”

  Indeed, one night he went with her and her co-workers to a gallery opening in the city’s sole modern enclave, the exhibition center north of the railroad tracks, and all he remembered from the affair was a lot of stemmed glasses and stiletto heels and asking himself why oh why he had thought it would be okay to wear his old flannel shirt, and why Holly had done nothing to stop him.

  “See?” she said. “Like I said, you never want to go out anywhere with them.”

  “Why would I? I have nothing in common with those people. I don’t speak English, everyone feels obligated to speak Italian because of me—”

  She was smiling at him. “You don’t speak English, Scott?”

  He stared into space, then shook his head. “My brain’s not working right, lately. It’s almost like the more I sleep, the tireder I become. But look, how do you think I feel at these things when I can’t understand a word around me?”

  Holly was transferring the items in her purse into another purse. “I thought you said you liked that one man you were talking to.”

  “Who? That Scottish guy? I understood him least of all. And really, Holly, you’ve only asked me to come out maybe two or three times, not a billion.”

  “Okay, so two or three times.”

  “And they were always more or less symbolic gestures.”

  “That’s ridiculous. When I invite you somewhere, it’s because I want you to come.”

  “In that case, I wish you’d show it more. Because right now all I see is what an effort it is for you to try and incorporate me into your sexy new lifestyle.”

  She stood there blinking at him. Then she said, “Seriously, honey, you should come out tonight.” Smoothing her hair, she added, “Luca’s gonna be there.”

  “Which Luca!” Scott roared to the gods above.

  She thought about it. “Both of them, actually. Nobody wants to miss this. Umberto Eco is the pride of Bologna, even though I hear he’s a little senile now.”

  “How could you think either Luca is a selling point? I don’t think I’ve said two words to Luca Gallo, and I can’t say anything to the other one without him telling me he’s going to put it in his memoirs.”

  She had gone over to the full-length mirror in the bedroom door for a final inspection. Scott watched her for half a minute, and then asked, leadingly, “What’s the point of making friends, anyway? It’s not like we’re going to be here that long.”

  Holly turned this way and that in front of the mirror.

  “Holly? Are we?”

  “Are we what?”

  “Planning on staying here long.”

  “Um… I’m hoping we can.”

  “Isn’t that something we should discuss?”

  She took off her shoes and vanished inside the closet.

  “It’s a talk on semiotics,” he called out. “Just wear sneakers.”

  “I thought,” she called back, “you were happy because now you have more time to work on getting the painting.”

  “No, seriously. Talk to me. Are we Italian now? Should I start following soccer and liking new Woody Allen movies?”

  “Sure!” She emerged from the closet dangling an exotic pair of pumps. “But you can start by learning Italian.”

  “I’m trying!” he complained. “But it’s hard, and I suck at it. And I keep begging you to practice with me.”

  “Va bene! Comminciamo a parlare solo in italiano!”

  “But not now,” Scott said, greatly startled.

  Holly laughed. “And what’s the big hurry to go back home? Let’s just sit tight and see how things unfold before making any snap decisions.”

  Of course Scott already knew Holly had every intention of staying through her contract. He just wanted her to come on out and scream it. And he also knew there was another, shrewder motive behind her desire to mingle with the museum people and their friends and colleagues. Already she was preparing for the year’s end and jockeying for her next post. It seemed that whenever she came back from one of her days out or nights on the town, she was bringing up new people she’d met—“important” people. Contacts. More and more, Scott was seeing himself as glum company for his enterprising wife.

  Glum, and increasingly suspicious. There had to be more to her behavior than sheer careerism. Something else had to explain this bottomless thirst she had for aperitifs or for visiting yet another church.

  As for the latter, he tried one time to give her his view: “You don’t understand, sweetheart. In Italy, the sightseeing can go on forever if you let it.”

  She thought that was so grand she put it on a postcard and sent it to her family.

  A month earlier, he had come across another postcard she had written. It was addressed to her youngest sister, in New Haven. It showed a crowded beach resort on a dazzling summer day, the photo taken partly behind a flowering rose bush on an overlook. Holly had written:

  This isn’t the best time of year

  to be in Italy. Everything is bare and

  drab. The trees don’t have any leaves.

  The tables don’t have any

  umbrellas.

  &

  With the wife now out of the house, Scott kept coming face to face with the uselessness of his existence. Those hours not spent following Janet around the shopping district and laden with bundles like a packhorse, he filled with reading. At the bookstore around the corner, he had found a second-hand copy of Finnegans Wake. The English-language section there was small, and he figured why not. He didn’t want to read any of the novels Holly had brought, which were all about people who mysteriously vanish, or people with fascinating brain disorders, or people with fascinating brain disorders who mysteriously vanish. He was fed up with laboring over his Mickey Mouse comic books, so he bought the Joyce.

  Now, Scott liked to flatter himself that he wasn’t an illiterate. He had read Ulysses and liked it a lot. But from the very start this undertaking was grueling, the footing reliably treacherous. He found himself, as he read, actually straining every nerve. One difficult passage succeeded another, but he kept at it until, at about the halfway point, he came across a bookmark, and it was like coming across the skeleton of some fellow climber halfway up a mountain. Crestfallen, Scott closed the book for good, and took out his phone to play a game of Othello.

  He continued once a week to babysit the schoolchildren for three hours. That was all their parents expected anyway. The class was merely a posh form of daycare. He had speedily settled into a laissez faire style of teaching. The children would play with their smartphones, while he and Damon would sit around talking, about sports mainly. He was a Lions fan, poverino.

  “What about professional wrestling, Damon? Do you like professional wrestling?”

  “No!” the boy said, drawing the word out.

  “Why not? What’s wrong with professional wrestling?”

  “It’s fake!”

  “Oh, sure, sure,” Scott said sarcastically. “And I suppose basketball is real.” He loved messing with the kid like this.

  &

  His Italian tutor, a nerdy girl with a buoyant mop of black hair and glasses that could turn a bullet, asked him to say it in Italian. Instead, Scott said something in faulty Spanish. This was their usual routine.

  “Daniela,” he said to her, across the small breakfast table in his kitchen. “I think I’d like to make this our last lesson.”

  “What!” she cried, wounded to the quick. “Why?” />
  “You are fantastic,” he put in hurriedly, “but right now I need to start saving a little money.”

  Though it could always be said that he needed to start saving a little money, this wasn’t the real reason he wanted to end his lessons. He was just tired of getting lectured every week for not doing his homework.

  Salt tears had gathered in the girl’s eyes, but when she heard his explanation she fought them back and tried to sound casual. “Oh, if that’s all, then I’m sure we can work something out. I guess it would be okay if you paid me a leetle less.”

  Scott smacked his lips delicately. “I’m afraid I can’t afford to spend any money right now. But I’m hoping it’s just temporary and we can pick up where we left off soon.” He gave her a confidential smile. “I really would like to learn this damn language one day.”

  Back came the tears, and also a look of rejection not easy to attribute to the loss of a teaching gig that was only one hour per week. Yet she covered it up with a frivolous laugh. “Okay, I understand. How about this? How about we make an exchange? You practice Italian with me for half an hour, and I practice my English with you for half an hour. Problem solved!”

  Scott looked for a way to get out of this, and came up with: “Ah, but your English is perfect! You don’t need to practice with me. That would not be an even exchange.”

  “No!” Her ferocity was jarring. “What I mean is, that is very kind, but it is not the case. My English… She is not so good. There is too much I do not understand.”

  Scott pretended to stand firm on grounds of fairness. “It would not be an even exchange.”

  Behind the thick lenses, her eyes seemed as big as those from an animated Disney movie. “But,” she said, “but what if I pay you some money? I wouldn’t mind, since you have been so generous with me.”

  This was getting intolerable. Worse, the needier she became, the more Scott longed to break footloose and fancy-free. “Absolutely not,” he told her. “I could never accept any money from you. You are a poor college student. You need to save your money for pizza, or for…” He looked away, trying to think. “For getting high.”

  Daniela collected her materials, the meticulously kept notebooks and folders, then clutched them to her chest and rose from her seat.

  “Va beh,” she said, snippily.

  She started off in a huff, but stopped when she stepped out into the entryway. Softly, she began to weep.

  “No,” Scott said, sprinting over. He patted her on the shoulder. “No, no, no, no.”

  “You are my only student,” she said, sobbing quietly. “You are the only one who responded to my fliers!” The word “fliers” sent her over the edge.

  “No, no, no, no.”

  “All I want,” the girl choked, “is to be a teacher.”

  “That doesn’t sound like such a crazy dream,” he said, encouragingly.

  “I think…” she went on, “I would be… a good one.”

  “You are!”

  “But in Italy, it is impossible! It is impossible to find a teaching job, unless you know somebody.”

  “Jesus. Is it that bad here?”

  “I pass the test with a perfect score, but the waiting list is so long!”

  Scott took it all back. “Forget it, Daniela. Forget I said anything. Come on. Sit down, and we’ll finish our lesson.”

  “No. You do not want me.”

  “I do want you! Now please, stop crying and let’s go back to the imperfect subjunctive.”

  In the end, he succeeded in cajoling her back inside the kitchen, where she sat at the table sniffling happily. She reiterated her idea for an exchange, but Scott gave in even further. They would continue their lessons as previously arranged. He wouldn’t hear of anything else.

  &

  In a last ditch effort to reclaim a life he felt was swirling out of control, one day Scott showed up earlier than usual at Janet’s door, with a big cardboard box and a pocketful of cash.

  “Let’s do this thing.”

  He grabbed her by the arm, like a hostage. Item by item, he took her around the room, telling her to name a price. It was classic misdirection. He would buy up every terracotta oil jar and fig harvesting basket in that place if it helped him to smuggle the painting away.

  Wooden shutters dimmed the morning sun. The walls rang with birdsong.

  “Oh this is nice!” Scott shouted. He bent down for a zinc wash tub and held it aloft. “I’ve always liked this a lot.”

  And then: “Ooh, and these would be perfect above my desk! What are they, sconces?”

  And still more: “Okay, stop everything. Now this I absolutely have to have.”

  “I can’t sell you that!” Janet erupted. “That ties the whole room together.”

  Ten minutes in, she put a stop to all transactions.

  “I don’t have time for this,” she said, running away. “I gotta bake some stuffed breads for later today. Good-bye.” She hid in the kitchen and yelled out like a coward, “And I’m not selling anything else!”

  Scott looked across the distance toward the fireplace. Then he peered inside his cardboard box and gave it a shake. It rattled with one solitary object—a packet of screws he’d left there one time. She hadn’t actually sold him anything at all. She couldn’t bear to part with a single thing, this woman. She had lied to him that day about wanting to redecorate, the liar.

  The box dropped to the floor. Blankly, Scott shuffled forward a few paces and then collapsed onto a fusty-looking armchair over by the bookcase. His last engine had sputtered out. For the first time, he had no idea what to do next. He sat there, slumped under the malevolent wings of the buttoned, leather chair-back, with his arm hanging out over the side and his hand playing with some leaves trailing down from the plants sitting on top of the bookcase. He had been mistaken about that glimmer of hope. It had been a dying glimmer, a meteorite extinguishing itself in the atmosphere.

  He ground the withered tip of a leaf into powder, then looked up at the others foaming over the bookcase in green profusions. But this wasn’t a bookcase so much as an entertainment center. In fact, if he parted the leaves a little, he could see something he’d never noticed before: a black, reflecting pool.

  He stood up and began removing the plant stems. Like vines in a sunless jungle they clung to the strange object. The cockatiels became agitated in their cage. Then Scott’s hands stopped and his mouth opened in extraterrestrial awe. He faded back a step.

  What he had uncovered was the 46” screen of an ultra-thin plasma HDTV. Brand-new, without a blemish. His hand found the remote. He hit the power button, and up popped the glorious image of a Middle Eastern country in flames. CNN International. He flipped through the channels, and a whole world of digital satellite television opened before him. He came across Comedy Central and almost wept to see the familiar face of Jon Stewart, doing a spit-take. There was his beloved History Channel, showing color footage of Hitler. It was gorgeous. Next, on ESPN, his eyes feasted on a snowy football field and a day game between the Jets, in their handsome forest-green uniforms, and the Patriots, with Tom Brady, the man himself, in shotgun formation. There was even Lifetime, Television for Women, airing that poignant episode of The Golden Girls where Sophia tearfully asserts to her suicidal friend, “We’re not in this life for peace!” The list of riches went on. The pleasure centers of Scott’s brain flooded. It was TV, his old narcotic.

  He cleared a space around him, moving an end table aside, shoving a love seat back, and repositioned his chair so it faced the wall. Then he sank into it, and continued to sink.

  15

  It had taken half an afternoon simply to rearrange the furniture in that small quarter of Janet’s living room. But now, anytime they pleased, they could snuggle up on the same reclining love seat, with popcorn sprinkled over their knit blanket, and sit back in the dark and watch The Smurfs.

  Janet put the movie on pause. “You wanna go out for another cigare
tte?”

  “I only have one left,” he said possessively, then clammed up. An opening in Janet’s bathrobe was affording him an eyeful of one of her boobs. With his 3-D glasses on, he could ogle all he wanted.

  Their faces were inches apart. He was right up against the great gaping mouth of the woman. Her breath was hot and suffocating. It played with his hair like the steady, malarial air of the sirocco. He couldn’t tell where she was looking behind her 3-D glasses, and this, for some reason, was arousing. It seemed for a moment they were both thinking the same perverted thing. It seemed she might be leering at his lap. Scott felt his penis swell, like a man swelling into a monster.

  “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He looked away and took a swig of his beer. Then he wiped his chin with the collar of his favorite flannel shirt. These days he was wearing the shirt exclusively, along with his pair of jeans with the fringed crotch hole, though sometimes he wore sweatpants, with a fringed crotch hole. (What was he doing wrong to cause this exact same hole?) Scott knew that Italians thought it was unconscionable to wear sweatpants in public, and so he paraded around in them as rebelliously as if he were draped in an American flag. “Why don’t you ask the maid to go out and pick us up a pack.”

  Gemma, the maid, was in the kitchen washing dishes.

  “Go out and get it yourself! She’s my girl, not yours. I’m not paying her to run your errands for you.”

  “Alright,” Scott said, yawning. He stretched, and continued to lie there.

  Fifteen minutes later, Gemma came in to do a quick dusting before going home. Like a bat in the dark, she flitted around the enormous room. Inevitably, her work with the feather duster brought her before the TV, during the film’s most affecting scene.

  “Yo!” Janet bellowed. “Get outta the way!”

  The girl froze for an instant, then leapt aside. Penitently, she began dusting the shelf of Blu-ray discs.