Spirit of the Place (9781101617021) (33 page)

“Hey,” Henry said, stopping him. “I never said any of this.”

“Any of what?” Henry's dark eyes seemed shallow, brackish.

“Any of what I said. If it leaks, I deny. I never said what I said.”

“Not even that?” Henry looked stupefied. “And you never did what you did?” Orville asked. Henry still looked stupefied. Orville left for the hospital.

Later that night, at home again, he discovered another postcard, with a photo of some kind of savage—an aborigine.

Howdy, Doc,

Thanks for the cash. Trip not fun but great. Food terrible, Aussies worse. Babs bowels bad. Wolfy and Kenni stole her ruby too. Starbusol not working too good in Outback. Headed for the Amazon and points south. Say hi to Our Little Miracle Amy.

Yr frnd, Bill

No word of his coming back, Orville thought, going up to bed. In the bathroom he stared at himself naked in the mirror and was appalled. His hair seemed thinner, his face fatter. He was wearing thick glasses because the contacts hurt his eyes. But for his sunburnt arms, head, and neck, he was a fish-belly white. Because of his lack of exercise, and his compulsive eating and drinking like a native Columbian, he was fattening. Yes, there's a definite beer belly down there, if not a paunch. This, despite his upping his smoking. Camels, like Bill.

With alarm he realized that in eleven months he had gone a significant way down the road to looking Starbuckian—somewhere in the two-ten range already and unfit.

Staring at his image he tried to conjure up a vision of himself finally free of Columbia.
Yes, make a mental picture, a life raft to get you through the next five weeks.

Nothing came.

Even more alarmed, he realized he had no vision of the future. Just this fat guy, almost forty, in the mirror. That's all.

Shouts outside. He went to the window. The shouts were coming from the Schooners'. The porch light and the lamp in the study were still on. A fierce argument filled with curses. One voice was Henry's, the other was younger. Neither was giving in. Orville glanced at his watch. Almost two. Junior must have come home way past his curfew. He and Henry were really going at it, screaming at each other. And then, as if a knife blade had severed the rage between the fighters, there was silence.

The front door slammed shut and the lights went out. Whatever had been happening was back in the realm of never having happened once again. Schoonerland.

· 26 ·

“Buon compleanno!”

“Celestina?”

“Orvillo!”

“Orvillo?”

“Celestina!
Buon compleanno e tanti auguri!
Happy birthday and best wishes!”

“
Grazie,
” he said, trying to wake up, checking the clock: 5:10
A.M
. “
Grazie,
but it's not my birthday.”

“July 24 is your birthday. We celebrated it last year, remember?”

“How could I forget. I mean, the toes.”

“I am fainting with the memory.”

He yawned. “It's not my birthday. She lied to me, my mother. Had the birth certificate changed. I was born thirteen days later, on August the 6th. Exactly a year before they dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, she dropped me.”

Silence.

“Don't hang up, please!”

“No, no,” she said. “No. And is she still flying around?”

“More than ever. Big, fat, and floaty—like an overfed hummingbird.”

“
Magnifico!
And you have benefited by this gift now for sure,
caro?
”

“‘
Caro
'?” He was stunned.

“
Sì, sì.
You are my love. I love you crazy!”

“Well . . . um . . . what about the Swiss banker with the elephant?”

“
Half
the elephant. It was a tax thing.
Non sincero.
Swiss cheese.” She fell silent. He heard her breathing. Somehow it was sexy. “Orvillo, I am sorry.” Her voice was sad, calm. “So sorry for what I did to you.”

“You hurt me terribly.”

“I know. I was a fool. I did not realize what I had until I destroyed it.” He heard her get choked up. Tearfully, she went on, “I hate myself for what I did.”

He was touched. She seemed sincere. “You sound different.”

“I am,
caro.
I am changed by my mistakes. In this year I have grown up. Jesus, what I have done?” She broke down, crying into the phone.

“Wait, hold on,” he said, amazed at all this. Had she really changed?

“Can you ever forgive me?”

He hesitated. “If you're for real, maybe.
Barely
maybe.”

“I am, I am, but it will take time to heal the past, no?”

Again he considered this. Finally he said, “If at all, a
lot
of time.”

“
Bene.
And for now, we have only the now. There is only the present moment. Like with your dead and flying mother. Are you healing with her in the now? Is she turning out to be your greatest gift?”

“Gift? It's been hell. A horrible year. A lot of pain.”

“I am so sorry for the part of the pain I caused, my love.”

This is astonishing, he thought. She sounds for real. Grown-up, almost. “You really have changed.”

“
Sì, sì.
No longer the New Age lightweight, searching for a spiritual shortcut. Now I am focused, on rock-solid Buddhism. This—your pain, our pain—this is the First Noble Truth.”

“Yeah, but it hurts! What do I do?”

“Do nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“As much nothing as possible, dear one. Sit in silence and follow your breath and when the pain comes? Do not lift a finger—not even the pinkie finger. Do so much nothing that the pain shifts to sorrow.”

“You don't understand—I
am
in sorrow and I can't stand it.”

“You are in pain. Psychological suffering. Sit there in silence,
caro,
and breathe. Sit there in the present, sit there in a ruthless encounter with the self, the past, the facts.”

“And then?”

“And then the pain and suffering will turn to sorrow.”

“And?”

“The sorrow moves. Sorrow always moves.”

“And what happens when the sorrow moves?”

“Healing. The healing
essenza
of the movement of sorrow. You find what you have never lost.”

She said this all quite matter-of-factly, as something she merely understood, without any of the flightiness he'd heard from her before. It now sounded grounded, truth lived. Almost despite himself he found himself focusing intensely on her, on it, tightening his grip on the phone, like a man going under tightens his grip on a lifeline. Whether she was still wacky or not, here was information that might help.

“But what if I can't face it,” he said, “and the healing
essenza
doesn't happen?”

“I will love you no matter what.”

He was startled to find that for the first time in weeks he felt calm. The sunlight streaming in through his turret window seemed both still and moving—moving faster than any other thing, moving so fast it seemed static. Light is matter, matter is energy. It was, again, a touch of her maybe magic. He thought back to her predicting the two bad things that had happened the last day they'd been together on Lake Orta and he'd gotten the telegram of his mother's death. He asked, “Where are you?”

“Roma. Like always. Your photo by my bed. I am now a banker.”

“A banker!”

“Chase Manhattan, Rome office. I teach courses part-time—Yoga For Bankers. The very payment of the rent. So much has happened. I missed you so!”

“And I you,” he said cautiously, trying it out, surprised at how much he meant it.

“When are you coming?” she asked.

“Who said I was coming?”

“You did. In one year and thirteen days.”

“Yeah, but a lot has happened. A lot of water under the bridge. And anyway I can't leave for four weeks. I get the money on August 27th.”

“
Eccolo!
”

“
Eccolo?
”

“‘There it is.'”

“Wait.”

“I am waiting with my very heart in my throat. Breathing in, breathing out. Speak.”

He did not. He was thinking of her and the money.

“
Pronto, pronto.
I am listening,” she said, “but you are not speaking.”

“You assume that after all this, I'll just forget how you treated me and come to you as if nothing has happened?”

“No, no, as if everything has happened and we have learned. We are more sensible now, both of us. Ready to really love each other, sensibly, walking down the street arm in the very arm. We have our whole future together.”

“I thought you said there is only the present.”

“Not for lovers like us.”

“I've got to think about this.”

“Think?” She sighed. “Each day we think maybe 60,000 thoughts. Maybe 59,995 are about what happened in the past or what will happen in the future. Memory or imagination. We fear being in the now. Now,
caro,
come!”

Orville was silent.

“You have someone else?” she asked.

“I had, but no, not now.”

“And I do not either. Come. I expect you on the 27th. We will holiday again on Lago d'Orta.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“No, but I can feel your heart saying
sì, sì.
Wait, I am thinking.”

Orville thought to say, But what did you just say about thinking?

“
Sì,”
she went on, “I am getting it. We must not talk again until we see each other face-to-face and quickly then toe-to-toe. I will not call you again. Send a telegram with the details.”

“But you
have
to . . . we have to work this out!”

“Too much thinking,
caro,
thinking and talking. No more phone calls.”

“I'll call you.”

“I am screening the calls and not answering you though my heart is breaking at your very voice. No more talk. Telegram me your flight number. Until the 27th in Roma!”

“The plane won't get into Da Vinci until the morning of the 28th.”

“Until then,
mio grandioso amore.
I will never leave you again.
Ciao!
”

“Wait!”

Click.

Weird, Orville thought, several times throughout the day as he prodded and patched and cut and sewed and listened to and berated and held back his contempt for and tried to reach out to the sick and wounded Columbians or at least act human toward them. Deliciously weird. As abnormal as the Buddha, as Jesus. She
did
seem different. More sensible, yes. Wanting me. Italy. How can I refuse her? How can I trust her? But Italy! I was happy with her in Italy! Maybe it was good that she never came here. Hard to imagine her and me happy, here.

Like booze and cigarettes and Fritos and golf, this contact with Celestina Polo eased his pain for a while. Now he had an option. He still felt like a total failure as a son, a lover, a stand-in father, an uncle, a brother, a brother-in-law, a bird keeper, a friend, and a Columbian, but now these failures were playing out on a backdrop of the affliction of possibility, once again in Europe.

You know something, Mom, he thought, you're right. I'm wrong and sick and abnormal. So abnormal I can't even make it in Columbia, not to mention America. The hell with it. I'm history. The only thing I'm fit for in this world is to love a strange maybe enlightened Italian Boddhisattva who at least can intertwine her toes with prehensile diligence, and who, at best, is made up wholly of non-Columbian elements.

Penny was the only person except Miranda to know the truth about July 24th not being Orville's real birthday. She had told no one. She had suggested that it would be “cleaner,” especially with his leaving so soon, to just go ahead and celebrate the day that everyone thought his birthday was.

She organized a dinner party for that night, with Milt and Amy and Henry and Nelda Jo. Amy had come in from her all-girls' overnight camp out at Copake Lake for his birthday. To him, she seemed down. She'd taken Miranda and Cray's leaving hard, and was at loose ends at camp, not wanting to turn into a “girly-girl” and “act silly for boys.” Penny and Milt again had sent her to him for advice, which he, like Starbuck, hadn't given, but rather had taken her on a few house calls whenever she could get away. She was losing altitude. Something else was on her mind. He needed to talk with her alone.

The birthday dinner was at an Italian place, Rosie Ahern's Restaurant and Taxidermy. A fixture in town ever since Orville could recall, it was now owned by his childhood friend Marco Tarantelli. Marco also ran the Sports Apparel Shop next door. The shop had had the same pair of shorts, shirt, sneakers, and tennis racket in the window for about fifteen years. Not everyone knew what the shop sold, but everyone knew that the one thing it did not sell was sports apparel. Rumors of slot machines, prostitutes, drugs, and loan sharking were rife.

Since the New Yorkers had come, the restaurant—with its camp taxidermy—had become one of the “in” places to see and be seen. Here the antiquers could safely mix with the real Columbians. Ahern's signature take-out pizza had been written up in an antique journal not so much for its content as for its delivery: on the back of a Vespa, strapped with bungee cords over the motor so that it arrived piping hot even on the coldest nights. With a distinct bouquet of
benzina.

At six that night the birthday party sat at the primo table in the front window, sometimes staring up at the stuffed fox and moose and mink with their frightened eyes, sometimes staring at the New Yorkers, who were loud and current and having a frantic, hilarious time, and sometimes staring out across the intersection of Fourth and Washington at the old jail building that was now home to
The Columbia Crier.

The narcotic of hope and denial from his conversation with Celestina had worn off. He was again down in the dumps. Orville had spent the day before with a young doctor who had answered an ad for the sale of Bill's practice, to take effect when Orville left town. This was the fifth doctor who'd come through in the last two months looking to settle in Columbia. His name was Patrick O'Lima and he was from Dublin. Trinity, not
UCD
. When he'd opened the
IN
door, Orville was surprised to find a man with ebony skin. It turned out that O'Lima had been born Olima, a Nigerian who adopted the apostrophe to make it in Ireland. O'Lima spent the day with Orville, looked around Columbia, and, saying “Are you
serious?
” strolled on out the
OUT
.

They were finishing their birthday cake, and Schooner was ending his short but heartfelt tribute to Selma Rose. “My only wish is that she could have been here, sitting right here under the mink like she did a lot, to see this great moment for her favorite son.” Orville heard this as not just saccharine bullshit but as a put-down, for he had come to see that Schooner, not he, was in a lot of ways his mother's favorite son.

But there was something about the way Henry spoke—the Voice again—that made it sound not only sincere but profound. By the time he finished, there was an expectant hush in Ahern's. The tableful of antiquers were listening in rapt attention, as were the dazed Columbian barflies. When Henry stopped and raised his glass for a toast, so did they all.