This Crumbling Pageant Page 15

  “Marlboro rosso,” he said in the tobacco shop.

  The woman at the register turned around heavily and scanned for the pack. She looked over her shoulder and continued speaking with the person next to Scott.

  “My son,” she said in Bolognese, “is a good, simple soul. But he has never been very shrewd. It may be fine for him to drop all his responsibilities and fly off to China to live like a monk, but that does not give him the right to give away all his things. That boy has cost me too much money over the years with his painting. Who do you think paid for his first art lessons?” She gave a gruff laugh. “I, that’s who. And all for nothing now.” She went back to the counter with the cigarettes. “Five euros.”

  “Signora,” replied Luca Gallo, “I happen to know you were asking your son for permission to throw away his art supplies. And now that you see somebody wants them, you become greedy and think they must be valuable. But let me assure you they are only worth something to someone like me, a struggling artist. I can’t easily afford them, and therefore I can’t afford to pay you anything.”

  “I take offense,” the woman said, “when you call me greedy, my child.” She counted out Scott’s change. “I am not asking for much. Just a taste. Let’s say… twenty euros.”

  Luca laughed. “This is not some racket I am running. I am not going to take your son’s linen canvas and rabbit-skin glue and redistribute them in the black market. Salvatore said I could have them, and so I must insist you give them to me. I have no money for you.”

  She polished her fingernails on her shoulder. “I am not able to help you.”

  “Your son has very honorably decided to lead a spiritual life, free of worldly possessions. Can’t you take from his example and perform this one act of generosity?”

  “I am not able to help you.”

  “I could kill you dead, you pig.”

  The woman looked up at him in a sudden daze. “What did you say?”

  Luca dimpled. “Good evening, Signora.”

  As he turned to leave, Scott stepped in front of him.

  “Ciao, Luca,” he said with an angry smile.

  “Ciao,” Luca muttered, about to move around him. “Ah!” he said. “It’s you.” He seemed amused to see Scott there.

  “What’s the big hurry?”

  “Please,” he prayed, in English. “Say it again. My English is not very good.”

  “Where are you running off to?”

  “Ah.” He gestured vaguely to the woman behind the counter, stocking the shelves with shaking hands. “It’s difficult to explain.” Then he shouted something at her in rural Italian.

  Scott ignored the outburst. He folded his arms. “So how’s Arpi?”

  “Who?”

  “Arpi. Your girlfriend.”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “That one. She is not my girlfriend.”

  “She’s not?”

  “No. We are only friends.”

  “Since when?”

  He shrugged. “We are always like this.”

  Scott opened his mouth to speak, and closed it again. Then he said, “I’m surprised to hear that.”

  The Italian smiled the smile of the cognoscenti. He leaned in.

  “I like to go slow with the women,” he said, with a glint in his eye. “You understand? So slow, they do not see me move.”

  Is he taunting me? All at once Scott ran out of patience and decided to ask point-blank if he was the one with Holly last night.

  Their interview was cut short, though, when a man appeared from nowhere and tried to forcibly remove Luca from the store. He was an older gentleman, pink-faced with indignation. He wrapped Luca up from behind and made a couple futile Greco-Roman wrestling moves. Luca stood immovable, but in a moment his massive shoulders gave the slightest shrug, and the man sprang off of him and fell to the floor, crashing into a wire rack. Condom packets were raining down on his face. The woman behind the counter was calling out to God. By the time Scott, seriously bewildered, helped the old man up, Luca Gallo was gone.

  &

  The confusion and opera buffa continued into Janet’s apartment.

  “What the hell!” Scott called out from the door. “Why wasn’t anyone buzzing me in?”

  It was then that his mind registered the screams, coming from the kitchen. Janet ran out looking flustered and said to him, “I don’t know what her problem is.” Then she ran away down the hall.

  In the kitchen, Scott had a hard time placing those screams he’d heard with the petite thing weeping by the copper sink.

  “Gemma? Are you okay? What happened here?”

  There were dish fragments around her like rubble. When she heard Scott, the maid removed the apron from her face, shiny with tears. Her dark eyes flared.

  “It is finished! I am no able to support it anymore!”

  “Support what anymore?”

  “To work for that horrible woman!”

  “What did she do?”

  Gemma threw her hands up in the air. “All the time she insult me! All the time! She make me work so hard, and it is never good enough. I no mind to work so hard, but she is never satisfied. She make me clean the floor with a toothbrush. Good! I like to clean. But she stand over me while I stay on the floor, and criticize, and criticize, and criticize.” Gemma bent over crooked, twisted her features, and danced in place like a rabid leprechaun. “‘Stupid idiot! You no do it right!’”

  Scott had to smile. It was a pretty good impersonation.

  “Or now,” she continued. “I break a dish. Okay, I pay for it, with my money. I apologize. And what she say?” The maid hunched over again. “‘Retard!’” she said, remembering not to roll her rs. “‘What is wrong with you, you freaking retard! What is wrong with you, you cloots!’”

  Scott had to think a moment. “Oh! Klutz! Aw, don’t worry, Gemma. It’s not worth getting upset about.”

  She stared at him, fuming, and then marched up and thrust a finger in his chest.

  “You know what it is like,” she asked, “when someone make like this to you all the time?” She poked Scott repeatedly with her finger. He could see what she meant. By the third poke, he was ready to explode. “Soon, you explode! Many times, I go into the bathroom because I know she is no able to follow me.”

  That’s a pretty smart move, Scott thought, impressed. He gave a compassionate smile. “You shouldn’t take it personally, Gemma. It’s just her way. She does the same thing to me, and I don’t take it personally.”

  The girl was sniffling and trying to catch her breath. Then her expression became disdainful. “Maybe for you it is okay. But I,” she said, “have pride! I refuse to work one day more for that awful woman—for that miserable, horrible, antipatica, brutta—”

  Janet made a noise from the doorway. There were a few uncomfortable seconds of silence as Scott and Gemma waited to see what she would do. She was looking at the floor askance, lip curled—but curled somehow unconvincingly. Finally she spoke:

  “Insubordinate.”

  Then she turned to leave.

  “Janet, wait.” Scott pulled her into the kitchen. “Come on. Let’s everybody calm down. We don’t have to make a federal case out of this. Gemma is obviously very upset.” He took a moment. What would it have been like if he had cried at work? Who knows? It might have been enormously therapeutic. But, you know. There’s no crying in baseball. “I’m sure she just feels bad about breaking the dish.”

  The maid stuck her nose in the air. “I no feel bad.” Then to Janet: “I hate you!”

  “You’re fired,” Janet told her, with relish.

  “Grazie a dio!” the girl cried out. “I quit anyway.”

  “Fine! Go ahead!” Janet cackled. “Go back home. Go back to your dirt poor family in Sicily or wherever the fuck you’re from.” She turned to Scott. “Without me, she couldn’t survive here. The money she gets from me practically pays her rent.”

  “Let me tell you something
,” Gemma said to her. She stood upright and delivered her next line in such perfect English it was a little eerie, as if her noble rage had channeled the spirit of Edwin Markham. “I would rather be poor than be your servant.”

  After hearing these words, Scott felt something stir inside him. He would attend to it later.

  “Ladies, please. We can work this out, without any yelling or anyone getting fired. I think Gemma is just feeling bad for blowing up on the job. Am I right? You don’t really want to quit, do you? I bet when you cool down you’ll feel differently and want to apologize for losing your temper. And you, Janet.” He tried to level with her. “Sometimes the way you talk… People can take it the wrong way. Maybe from now on you can try showing Gemma a little more respect. I think in general you’ll find that people respond better to that.”

  “Oh what do you know,” Janet said irritably. Offhand, she added, “No offense, but you’re kind of a loser.”

  Scott blinked and shook his head as if mildly concussed. He could tell by the crazed smirk on Janet’s face and by the way she was looking away guiltily that even she knew a line had been crossed. Nevertheless, she had spoken the truth, and her eyes kept sneaking over to see how he was taking it.

  Loser. It tolled in his head.

  Let that be our last word, he thought.

  And it was.

  17

  Scott made it to Hoffmann’s, the city’s famous toy store, before it closed. From the trippy parade of stuffed animals, all hand-stitched, he picked out a dodo bird in a diaper. He swiped a pink blanket from the clutches of a baby doll and a wicker basket from the artful window display. As the female clerk rang him up, agreeably improvising the prices, he wrote a note on a slip of the store’s stationery. Please take care of my poor baby. He signed it: Its mother. He wrote with his left hand, in order to better reproduce the script of a semi-literate mama bird. Once outside the shop, he swaddled the dodo in the blanket and tucked it into the basket. Then he hurried across town and left the bundle at the apartment door with the note. He permitted himself one moment to smile upon his work, then stole off into the night to go back to his room at the pensione and wait. He didn’t know if Holly was home or not, or when she would see the gift.

  At midnight, she called.

  “Hello?” he said.

  “Honey I love it.”

  His shoulders relaxed. “Really?”

  “Yes.” The old tenderness was in her voice. “Where are you?”

  “At some hotel,” he said, with a little laugh at his own folly.

  “Why don’t you come home?”

  “I have a nice idea,” he told her. “Since I already paid for the room, why don’t you spend the night here?”

  “What about the dog?”

  “Bring him. You can be my little stowaways.”

  &

  “Ti amo. Ti amo con tutto il cuore.” I love you. I love you with all my heart. “Listen. I think I figured out what’s wrong with me. After I got cut last season, I lost everything. I lost my identity since peewee league. I lost whatever status I felt I had. I lost my future prospects and retirement plan. Basically, there’s not a dimension of time that I feel secure in. And sometimes I feel like women can tolerate almost anything in a man except insecurity, especially professional insecurity. It’s weakness, and as a sex, you have no patience for weakness.”

  They were sitting on the edge of the twin bed. The dog was investigating the little room with its spare furnishings.

  “Scott,” Holly said, still wrapped up in her purple Burberry coat. “I don’t know where you’re getting this from. I never said I would stop loving you if you didn’t ‘make it’ as a baseball player.”

  “But you never tried particularly hard to reassure me, either. That’s what I need. I need to hear that you love me no matter what. And I need to hear it again and again. I’m sorry. I’m apologizing in advance for it. I’m sure it’s dreadful for you, but that’s what I require from my wife at this moment in my life. My professional failure is the engine. Everything else is powered by it. My obsession with the painting, for instance. Or my jealousy of Luca and Luca. But then what happens is Luca and Luca add fuel to the engine, and the whole apparatus goes into perpetual motion.”

  “I understand,” said Holly. “But I simply have no tolerance for jealousy. You know that.”

  “I do know that. That’s why I try to hide it from you—”

  “You do?”

  “Inconsistently, yes. But you don’t indulge me even a little! And instead of giving me what I need the most—reassurance—I feel like you turn around and punish me for it.”

  “Punish you how?”

  “By cheating on me,” he said wretchedly.

  Holly lowered her eyes. “I haven’t done anything, Scott. But…” She hesitated. “I admit that when you get suspicious of me, and when you show you don’t trust me… I think about things.”

  “I understand,” he said, his mind racing.

  “I can’t take that kind of behavior. Especially when you criticize how I look at somebody, or what clothes I wear—”

  “I haven’t criticized your clothes.”

  “That’s because it’s winter. You do when the weather is nice.”

  “My problem is this,” Scott said, cutting the Gordian knot. “Remember when we used to ask each other ‘Why do you love me?’ Do you remember what your answer always was? ‘Because you make me feel safe.’ I used to think that was funny, as if we lived in a war-torn United States, or I was made of steel or something, but that was back when you had a lot of anxiety about your future and about dropping out of school. You saw me as your rock. I’m not a rock anymore. You’re the rock. So now what I want to know is this.” He turned on the bed to face her. “Why do you love me?”

  “Well—” she gladly began.

  “Actually I changed my mind,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. “I don’t want to hear it. Okay, back to my jealousy…” He nodded to himself. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’ve always been jealous. I will work on that. I swear. But you have to try to be aware that even if you don’t think you’re being flirtatious, somebody else might.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll try. Of course, you can only do so much to control what other people think.”

  “Of course. Point taken,” he said.

  Point gained, he thought.

  Holly sighed. “It’s not just that, though. Lately, I feel like we’re not a good match. I like to go out and be with people. You, on the other hand, could be perfectly content staying in the apartment for days at a stretch, just holing yourself up and never going out and ordering in. I think I didn’t notice the problem at home because you were gone so much of the year.”

  “I like to be with people, too,” he argued—even as he questioned if this was true. He did have a superior capacity for hiding out. He wondered if this was a trait inherited from his ancestors, back when it may have served a purpose. From cave-dwellers, perhaps. Or gangsters. “But you know me: I have to complain a lot beforehand.” He cut Holly off before she could respond. “But I promise I’ll stop doing that, too.”

  “Also,” she continued, “I feel like you don’t support me enough. I know I’m going a little crazy with work right now, but unfortunately that’s just the way it is, and what I need from my husband right now is patience and support.”

  “I just said the same thing to you.”

  “Anyway, I’m going to start taking it a little easier now. I decided I need to learn to say no to people when they invite me places.” She gazed into his eyes affectionately. “I do miss spending time with you.”

  They held each other and kissed. Then they took off each other’s clothes and began making love. Scott gave himself over to it completely. He pressed her to him and rolled around on the little brass bed and every time he opened his eyes he saw Holly’s staring into his, doting, creaturely, almost petrified. He would do anything to take care of her.

 
; Afterward, they remembered about the dog and found him sleeping on a wooden chair in a corner of the room. Scott sank back into the pillow. “I’m done with the painting, by the way. I don’t care anymore. As far as I’m concerned, I was the person next in line for the winning lottery ticket. But I may as well have been in another line in another state altogether.”

  “That’s the way I feel, too,” Holly said. She put her arms around him. “Come on. Let’s go to sleep.”

  “It’s going to be difficult in this tiny bed,” he apologized.

  “I like it.” She smiled and squeezed him so hard her arms trembled and the bed jangled. “It forces you to cuddle with me.”

  &

  The room faced the street, and Scott woke up to the early morning song of church bells and mopeds. Holly had already left for work. She had risen before sunrise so she and the dog could slip out of the pensione undetected. The light outside the room’s window was arctic. The room was arctic. Scott listened to the bells. He could never make any sense out of them, out of their various calls. The ones clanging now sounded more melodic than melodious. They seemed to prelude a great reckoning.

  He burst out of bed. Down the hall, the shower consisted of a showerhead and a grate on the floor next to the sink. He splashed around in the lukewarm water, then toweled off briskly and danced back to his room to squat over the one floor spot where it was warm. In the lobby, he checked out and retrieved his passport.

  Outside, a tall vendor stooped to give his pan of roasting chestnuts a clangorous shake. He scooped them up, poured them piping hot into a paper bag, twisted it closed, and passed it to a little girl on her way to school. Scott bought himself a bag. Dandling one smoking chestnut in his hand, he started for home.

  That week reminded him irresistibly of Mr. Mom. He shaved off his beard! He threw out his flannel shirt! He went jogging! Without the beard he could see how fat his face had become, and so there he was, wind in his fat face, jogging! Not sleeping. Not eating. Not minding the looks he got from the fit Italians, who seemed never to have to resort to exercise. And how easy it was to make the whole city quake! He threw away a pack of cigarettes, too. And it wasn’t even empty! Everything was all so unheard of.