Arkansas (15 page)

“I told you, there's no point. None of the recipes are mine.”

“Does that matter?”

“It's just the old tradition. I'd be lying if I made any claim to It.”

“You wouldn't be the first,” Nathan said.

“Originality is a joke where cooking is concerned,” Seth agreed.

He had cleaned his plate, as had Nathan. (How fast men eat!) Now Celia got up to clear, and I followed her.

“Are you all right?” I asked in the kitchen.

“I'll be all right,” she said. “I just wasn't expecting him.”

“I know.”

“It's not bad,” she amplified. “Don't think I think it's bad. Just ... something to adjust to.”

She scraped her portion of the pasta, largely uneaten, into the garbage.

“Well, at least he didn't forget your anniversary,” I said for stupid comfort.

“No, he didn't do that.”

“Wood, right?”

“Traditionally. The modern equivalent is silverware.” Taking Mauro's salad out of the refrigerator—that salad most of which (it seemed eons ago) he had picked near the Olivone—she carried it back to the table.

 

We all went to our rooms fairly soon after that miserable dinner had ended—all of us, that is, except for Seth, who announced he was going to sit a little while in the garden.

In the bathroom, I performed my ritual ablutions. To be truthful, everything about the evening—Seth's arrival, Celia's unhappiness at Seth's arrival, Mauro's rather abrupt departure—bewildered me. It was as if Seth's mere presence had thrown off some delicate balance in the
podere;
yet why was that? He didn't seem to me to be such a bad fellow. A bit arrogant, yes; still, well-meaning, enthusiastic. Nonetheless Mauro clearly despised him, while Celia, in his presence, changed completely, became awkward, inept. And why should that be? Why should this husband to whom she professed indifference, this husband she barely ever saw, still hold such power over her? I didn't know the answer, though I suspected that if Bill had walked in while we were cooking, his unexpected arrival might have reduced me, too, to a state of anxious incompetence. Love's poison, I've noticed, has a way of lingering in the body even years after love itself has withdrawn its fangs.

In bed, tired out from the expedition to the Olivone (not to mention all that Spumante), I fell asleep at once. Then I was in the middle of having a complicated dream about Bill when a loud crashing sounded, and I leapt up in bed. What I'd experienced is known technically as a myoclonic jerk, and in my dream it had taken the form of a leap off a mountain into an abyss from which the arms of waking seemed to trapeze me upward. I looked around myself, saw the crystal diodes of the alarm clock glowing. One forty-four
A.M.
Then the noise—more like furniture moving than a crash, my refining mind noted—sounded again.

I listened. I heard a voice, deep-throated. Like the furniture-moving noise, it came from downstairs.

“Si, cost. Cosi.”

Well, I'll be damned, I thought. Maybe Nathan's managed to get him after all.

A door slammed. From the hallway voices broke out.

“Celia, stop!” (This in a whisper-scream.)

“Let go of me!”

“It's none of your business, Celia!”

“I said let go of me!”

Scrapings and thumpings. Alarmed, I switched on the light, pulled on a bathrobe, and stepped into the hall, where as expected, I found Seth in his pajamas, struggling to restrain a maniacal Celia in a Lanz nightgown patterned with little lambs. Their futile efforts to keep their voices down only made the battle seem more surreal, as if it were taking place in slow motion.

“What's going on?”

“Lizzie, will you please try to talk some sense into her? She's going nuts.”

“Celia, what's the matter?”

She kicked Seth and fled. “Shit!” he said, “I give up,” and returned to their bedroom. Meanwhile I followed Celia down the stairs, through the living room, and to the bottom floor, where she rapped loudly on Nathan's door.

“Get out!” she shouted. “Both of you! Get out! Seth thought it was you,” she added to me, “if you can believe it. I knew better.”

The door opened. Nathan, pulling on his pants, stepped into the hall.

“Just what in the hell do you think you're doing?”

“I could ask you the same question. Now get out of my house. You too, Mauro!”

“Quiet!” Nathan pulled the door shut. “Anyway, he won't hear you. He's out.”

“Don't lie to me.”

“No, I mean drunk.”

“Then wake him! Throw water on him!”

“Celia, please!” Nathan grabbed her by the arm. “What's gotten into you?”

Kicking
him
hard, she ran into the kitchen.

“Christ!” Nathan said. “That bi-” He made a fist. “This is really the last straw, Lizzie. What, does she have to spoil the best night in my life because seventeen years ago I wouldn't fuck her—”

“Were you and Mauro—”

“So what if we were? Is there something wrong with that?”

“I'm only asking so I can figure out—”

We stepped through the kitchen door.

“I said get out!” Celia screamed, throwing a plate at Nathan.

“Stop!”

She threw another plate. “You moron! You prick!”

“Don't throw things!”

“You don't care about anything except your goddamn dick, do you? You'd sell your sister to a bunch of rapists if you thought one of them would let you suck his cock—”

“Celia—”

“You'd betray anyone, you'd sell your mother into white slavery—”

“Shut up about my mother!”

“I hate you! I despise you! Get out of my house!”

Once again she stormed away, out into the garden.

“Then at least tell me
why
you despise me,” Nathan said, giving chase under the stars. (And me giving chase to Nathan.) “I mean, what's happened between Mauro and me—I'm sorry, but it's none of your business. Maybe Angela's—”

“You idiot! There is no Angela! I'm Angela!”

He stopped. “Oh, Jesus...”

“I'm
Angela.
Me. I'm
the girlfriend.” She was crying now. “Lizzie, didn't you see it?”

“No,” I said.

“Are you blind? Are you both blind? I love him more than—”

“Oh shit,” Nathan said. “But I didn't know! He just said, he kept repeating, ‘She's gone back to him,' and so I assumed—”

“It's too late.”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

“Celia!” Seth's voice this time.

“I can't face him,” she said, then started away, out into the fields. In the distance, I could hear the echo-music of cowbells. “Celia!”

“Don't,” I said, and held out my arm to block Nathan.

“But—”

“Let her go.”

“What on earth is going on?” Seth asked, bursting into the garden.

“She needs time alone. She's upset.”

“Why?”

“Can't you guess?”

Seth stepped back, taking it for granted in his egotism (and perhaps even gratified) that he himself had caused the rupture. Then he went into the house.

“As if it isn't enough—” Nathan said.

“Oh, it's not enough,” I said. “For her it's never been enough.” And returning to the kitchen, I started sweeping up the broken plates.

 

All that night I swept. First the kitchen floor, then the living room. Then I cleaned out the refrigerator. Then I wiped off all the kitchen counters, my eyes perpetually watching for some movement of the doorknob that never occurred. And though I can't pretend my suspicions about what had happened to Celia forged themselves over the course of that single long night, nor even over the course of the long days that followed—days during which Nathan and I guarded the fort and cooked and made coffee while Mauro and Seth, thrown into uneasy allegiance by disaster, scoured the countryside for their disappeared lover and bride—nonetheless it was that night that the questions started to accrete. Why
had
Celia, from the very beginning, not only not discouraged Nathan's friendship with Mauro, but actively thrown them at each other? Put Nathan in the room next to Mauro's, when she could have put him in my room? Urged them to drive to that
enoteca
in Siena, and smiled blithely as they played soccer together, and at that last dinner allowed Seth, literally, to eclipse Mauro's place so that when Nathan prepared for him that bower wherein the waters of comfort coax carnality into bud, his resistance level was low? Too low.

We talked about it. Nathan suggested that perhaps Celia was a masochist, attending with loving concentration to the decoration of that coffin in which her own short-lived happiness would be interred. As for me, I remembered something I'd forgotten, a last snippet of one of our conversations. (Or did Celia tell me this in a dream, waving a flashlight onto the past, onto the one bit of broken china I hadn't swept away?) As you recall I'd suggested that Nathan's treatment of her over the years might have resulted from her wearing the psychological equivalent of a kick-me sign. What I'd forgotten was this response: “Well, what of it, Lizzie? I mean, isn't that the proof of love, when in spite of the kick-me sign, someone doesn't kick you?”

 

About eight o'clock on the morning of our departure, grimy from days of panic, Nathan and I walked into Montesepolcro to get some coffee. Mauro had driven off already on his morning sweep of the countryside, while Seth, having taken three Valium, was still in bed.

We only stopped when just outside the village wall a cow walked into the road and blocked our path.

Nathan moved to the right. The cow followed.

He moved to the left. The cow followed.

“What?”

The cow looked at him.

Suddenly a cluster of flies maddened the sky.

“Not ... possible,” Nathan said, driving his hands through his hair. And the cow moved her hard, implacable jaw.

I
N
L
OS
A
NGELES, IN THE EARLY
1990s, I spent a couple of months delivering lunches to homebound people with AIDS under the auspices of a group of men and women who called themselves the Angels. I did this neither to make myself look virtuous, nor to alleviate some deep-seated guilt: the usual motives for volunteerism. Instead I viewed the matter pragmatically. I had a car, and nowhere to go in the mornings. So I brought food.

The Angels operated out of a Methodist rectory on Formosa Avenue. A mood of unrelenting cheerfulness always prevailed in that place. In the kitchen women whose sons had died or were dying stirred sauces and baked pies under the supervision of fussy West Hollywood chefs, while near the door three ex-actors—two Keiths and a Wayne—handed out client manifests and route maps to the drivers. Having been assigned a route, I'd pack the meals I was to deliver that morning in brown paper bags, like school lunches, then haul them out to the car. Some of the clients got soft meals, some liquid meals. For those who needed it, food was supplemented by a canned drink called Sustical, a sort of calorie-packed milk shake (the client's preferred flavor, strawberry or chocolate, was always specified on the manifest); or by a clear emulsion, mostly rice syrup solids, that promised quick rehydration after diarrhea. As for the regular lunches, they were by design very fattening, since the best way to keep the body from consuming itself is to lard it with rich foods. At a moment in our history notorious for its devotion to dishes described as “light,” “low-fat” or “nonfat,” the Angels drenched their vegetables in butter, dolloped slices of pecan pie with whipped cream, sopped chicken thighs in yolky batters.

The routes I followed varied. Some days I'd travel east, to Normandie Avenue and Western Avenue, where most of the clients were drug users living in squalid residential hotels. Or I'd drive up into the Hollywood Hills to bring lunches to movie producers and soap opera actors. Or I'd deliver along that flat net of geometric streets that stretches southwest from Santa Monica toward Olympic Boulevard, streets in which one block of cheap apartments blurs randomly into another. (Only a few stand out in memory: the Killarney, painted a lurid shade of Irish green; the Mikado, with its dilapidated pagoda turrets, its windows
à la japonaise.)

Most of my clients didn't talk to me. They were embarrassed faces, mouths muttering “thank you” even as the deadbolt turned. But a few invited me in. A woman called Wilma Rodriguez always had a glass of iced papaya tea waiting when I arrived. She lived in one room in a building called the Caribou Arms on San Marino Street. “I don't know how I got it,” she told me once. “Maybe it was from shooting heroin. Or maybe it was my gay ex-husband. Or maybe it was the blood transfusions after the car accident.” She had that kind of gallant gallows humor—what I can only call AIDS humor—that the healthy find so astounding. A few weeks after I met her, Wilma came down with a brain fever and died in a matter of hours.

No doubt the strangest of my clients was a young man called Robert Franklin. He lived on Beverly Glen Boulevard, that tortured helix of a road that twists upward from Pico in Rancho Park, crosses Mulholland Drive, then winds down into the oppressive flatness of Sherman Oaks. A phrase from a book I had just read about Italy during the Second World War—“cloud-cuckoo land”—sticks in my mind whenever I remember the series of staggered, rickety wooden staircases I had to climb to get to Robert's little house, which sat perched on stilts at the top of a weed-choked incline, and on the splintery porch of which he always waited for me, naked except for orange tennis shoes and an IV that he dragged around like some ill-behaved terrier.

“You're late,” he snapped the first time I delivered to him. “You were supposed to be here an hour ago.”