The Sixteen Pleasures Page 7

“Oh, that.”

  “Yes, that.”

  “Maybe I won’t go down for dinner. I can’t afford it anyway. I thought I’d be able to stay till Christmas, but now I’ll be lucky to make it to Thanksgiving.”

  “That’s tomorrow.”

  “Thanksgiving’s tomorrow? You’re kidding!”

  She looked at her watch. “Thursday, November twenty-fourth.”

  “Papa will be baking pies tonight,” I said.

  “Don’t change the subject,” she said, “and don’t try to wriggle out of it. You don’t want to do anything foolish.”

  The telephone rang and I answered it. It was Jed.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” he said.

  I covered the phone with my hand.

  “Tell him you wouldn’t be angry,” Margeaux whispered. “You wouldn’t, would you? I mean, you wouldn’t be angry, would you?”

  “No,” I said into the receiver, “I wouldn’t be angry.”

  “Good,” he said. “Don’t say anything more. I’ll see you at dinner.” He hung up.

  “Well,” said Margeaux when I put the receiver down, “that settles that.”

  “That doesn’t settle anything,” I said. “I said I wouldn’t be angry, that’s all. I’m not angry.”

  “But you’re not pleased?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “You’ve done this before, haven’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “You don’t act like it. You’re as nervous as a racehorse. Come and sit down.”

  “I don’t feel like sitting down.” I opened the wardrobe to look for something to wear down to supper.

  “Have you done it a lot?”

  “Enough.”

  “Have you stopped counting yet?”

  “Yes. I mean no.”

  “Yes you have stopped counting or no you haven’t?”

  “No.”

  “How many times?”

  “Oh, a dozen or so.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Seven.”

  “Twenty-nine years old and you’ve only been laid seven times? That’s not even once a year since you turned twenty-one.”

  “It’s not quantity that counts.”

  “Did you come?”

  “With a man?”

  “Of course.”

  “No.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Why are you trying to humiliate me?”

  “I’m not trying to humiliate you, I’m trying to get you to face facts. Remember how Papa always used to say ‘face facts’? Look at you, twenty-nine years old and still living at home with Papa. You’ve got a job that pays peanuts. No prospects; nothing coming up. And now you’ve got a nibble. So why not give it a whirl? Here,” she went on, “give me that skirt. It’s too bulky. Leave tweed skirts to the English.” She started to go through my suitcase. “Look at these clothes! How could you not pack something more appropriate? You might have anticipated something like this.” She tried the other side of the suitcase. “Ah! Here’s something.” She held up a pair of red bikini panties. “You must have had something in mind when you packed these. Right?”

  “I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about it.”

  “Come off it. You might as well be honest with me. Do me a favor and put these on.”

  I took off my jeans and underpants and put on the red panties. Margeaux removed my blouse and bra and looked me over. “You’ve still got the beauty of youth,” she said.

  “The beauty of youth?”

  “Tight skin, pleasant features, flat tummy, firm fanny, good health. But you haven’t got much time left. Now why don’t you take a nice hot bath. Pamper yourself. This is Italy.”

  I went down to dinner in my red panties, a pair of tight jeans, and a man’s shirt, one of Papa’s. No bra. Dinner was served family style: penne with a simple tomato sauce, pork chops, green beans, mixed salad, fruit, red wine. The guests were mostly American conservationists, experts of every sort—on oil paintings, frescoes, furniture, old wood, marble—and everyone talked shop. Jed and I were the only book people, though I knew my boss from the Newberry was in town.

  I was too agitated to enjoy the meal. I filled up on pasta and gave my pork chop to Jed, who was very attentive. He was an attractive man and talked easily, telling amusing stories about famous acquisitions, and even more amusing ones about acquisitions that had gotten away, like the Boswell Papers. His boss had actually seen the crates—tea chests—on the dock in Boston, on their way to Yale.

  My apprehension was turning to excitement. I felt I’d never quite gotten the hang of sex. Certainly it had never been what I’d expected in those early days with Fabio in Sardegna. It had been, in fact, pretty rough and tumble. More rough than tumble. Young men in a hurry, young men with more important things on their minds: the revolution, closing down the University of Chicago, SNCC. They were intense, like little Fidel Castros. I was thinking, on the way up to the room, that this might be different. (Jed had assumed that not being angry was the same as yes, and I guess it was.)

  One thing I hadn’t counted on was Margeaux. She had turned the lights down low; she’d turned the bed down; and she’d left a vase of flowers and a split of spumante, iced, on the table next to the bed, and two glasses; and she’d opened the curtains to give us a view. The lights—the electricity was back on in many parts of the city—were romantic, and we looked at them as we drank the spumante, and then Jed put his arms around me and kissed me. It wasn’t till we’d finished the preliminaries and gotten right down to business that I realized that she was still in the room, curled up in a chair in a dark corner. I waved at her, a kind of sideways swiping to tell her to get the hell out, but she just smiled and came up to the foot of the bed. “Lift your knees up.” She mouthed the words silently. “Wiggle your bottom more.” I did as she said, and she made a circle with her thumb and forefinger. Perfect. But it seemed to me that number eight wasn’t much different from numbers one through seven. It seemed to me that Jed had taken off on a journey all by himself, and that no matter how much I wiggled my bottom, no matter how high I kicked my feet in the air, no matter how tight I squeezed, he was leaving me behind.

  Still, it was nice to hold a man in my arms, and I was relieved, when it was over, that I’d gotten through it without disgracing myself, and Jed seemed pretty pleased with himself. At least he strutted up and down with the condom dangling from his thing, a load of sperm to be flushed down the toilet before he pulled on his underpants, which I noticed now for the first time. They weren’t just any old underpants, they were boxer shorts with the Harvard emblem stamped all over them, a little shield with an open book on it and the Harvard motto written across the pages of the book: VERITAS. Truth. The moment of truth had come and gone, but was I any the wiser?

  “Well,” said Margeaux after he’d gone. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  “No, it wasn’t so bad. It was nice in a way, but I didn’t really feel anything.”

  “Don’t worry about it. You showed him a good time. He’ll be eating out of your hand. He’s taking you out for Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. What more do you want?”

  “When I was with Fabio I had intimations of something different.”

  “You had ‘intimations.’ That’s a nice word. Now go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  The next day was Thanksgiving. In the morning there was a meeting at the Uffizi at which Jed had to report on the various book-treatment operations we had visited. In the afternoon we were going to walk up to the Piazzale Michelangelo and have Thanksgiving dinner together at a fancy restaurant someone had recommended. After dinner we were going to take the bus to Settignano, have a drink at the Casa del Popolo, and walk back to the pensione. Jed said that there was plenty of money around and that I shouldn’t worry, he’d talk to Steckley.
But then Professor Steckley invited Jed, along with all the other visiting American curators, to Thanksgiving dinner at I Tatti. What made me mad wasn’t that Jed felt he had to go, it was that it never occurred to him that there was any reason not to go—that a date with me was no impediment. He gave me a wink and a squeeze. “See you tonight,” he said, giving the “you” two syllables and leaning on “night.” His broad back offered an inviting target for a woman with a gun, but unfortunately I didn’t have one.

  There’s an Italian expression, not an expression, really, just a way of saying something, a useful phrase, probably universal: Non vale la pena, “It’s not worth the trouble.” But in Italian if you get the gender wrong and say Non vale il pene, you’re in trouble. “It’s not worth the penis” is what you’re saying. During my first year at the Liceo Morgagni, when I was still struggling with the language, I used to throw that phrase around recklessly. “Better check with Signor Cipriani to see if the exam’s going to be on Monday or Wednesday.” Non vale il pene. “You want me to pick up some paper for you at the cartoleria?” Non vale il pene. I never quite understood the violent reactions I got, but it didn’t matter. I was speaking Italian; I’d broken out of the prison of English. Finally Signor Cipriani, the English teacher, took me aside and set me straight, but by that time the phrase had become fixed in my head, or in my tongue, just like the fingering of a difficult passage on the piano. It wasn’t easy to change. I always had to stop and think: Not il pene but la pena.

  But you know, sometimes I think it doesn’t make much difference, and sometimes I think my way is better. Every woman will know what I mean. It’s an expression she ought to add to her vocabulary for occasions like this one: Non vale il pene.

  Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

  And sorry I could not travel both

  And be one traveler, long I stood

  And looked down one as far as I could

  To where it bent in the undergrowth;

  Then took the other . . .

  Where was Margeaux, my second self, the traveler who’d followed the road not taken? She was climbing into one of the limousines with Jed, bending over provocatively, waiting for him to pat her fanny. And suddenly I realized something I should have known all along:

  I shall be telling this with a sigh

  Somewhere ages and ages hence:

  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

  I took the one less traveled by,

  And that has made all the difference.

  Mama always maintained that anyone who’d heard Frost read “The Road Not Taken,” as she had, would know that the last line was ironic, a joke, but I’d never understood what she meant till now. There is no “road not taken,” there’s only this road. The road not taken is a fantasy. My mysterious double had never made love to Fabio Fabbriani on the beach in Sardegna; she’d never gone to Harvard; she’d never been near the Library of Congress; she’d never been profiled in a Dewar’s ad: “Latest accomplishment: restoring the Book of Kells.” She’d been right by my side all the time, filling my ear with might-have-beens and if-onlys, encouraging me to feel sorry for myself. And look where it had landed me. In bed with—I didn’t want to think about it. A man who wore Harvard underpants.

  So when I saw the limousine drive off down the Lungarno I was glad. Glad to be rid of her.

  I say I was glad. But it was hard, too. She was my oldest friend, my closest companion. She knew me better than anyone else, better than I knew myself.

  4

  Un uomo mediterraneo

  Standing on the steps of the Loggia dell’Orcagna, his back to Benvenuto Cellini’s Perseus and Medusa, Dottor Alessandro Postiglione surveys the piazza with a proprietorial air, as if the workmen scrubbing the gray stones—caked with mud like the hide of some immense pachyderm—were employees on his own estate, as if the boy walking a German shepherd were his own son or even himself, and the dog his own dog, his childhood friend Ovid. “Sit! Stay! Heel!” the boy shouts, as if the dog were hard of hearing. The dog jumps up and puts its muddy paws on the boy’s shoulders and licks the side of his face. The dottore can almost feel the rough tongue on his own smooth cheek.

  Dottor Postiglione is one of those Italian men in their fifties who only become more handsome as they lose their hair, and for this reason, though he is aware that his vital powers are slightly diminished—but only slightly—and though he visits a barber in the Via Cavour once a week, he does not spend any money on the hair tonics advertised in the back pages of Domenica and Panorama, guaranteed to revitalize the scalp and the hair follicles.

  Something of a rogue scholar, something of a ne’er-do-well artist, a good tavern companion, a corrupter of youth, a charming rascal (always late for appointments) who must be forgiven if he promises you the moon but delivers only a sliver of Parmesan cheese, he is a man sympathetic toward his own shortcomings, and toward the shortcomings of others. He is an older type: a lover of beauty and of nature, Mediterranean man, an endangered species. There is no place for him in the modern world. In the United States the type never existed; in England it has been deliberately exterminated; in France, where to live is to have your papers in order, it is almost extinct. In Spain? The Spanish are too serious. In Greece? Yes, and in Egypt. But the Greeks and Arabs are a perversion of the type, gross caricatures. Italy is the true home of uomo mediterraneo, but even in Italy the pace has become too swift. Even in Italy business demands punctuality. Go to Milan—you might as well be in Switzerland. Specimens like Dottor Postiglione live on, curious relics of an earlier age, like crocodiles or tourist attractions.

  But this is to speak of the inner man. Externally the dottore is a perfectly ordinary citizen, as respectable as the man who stamped your visitor’s permit at the Questura or the priest who blessed you when you sneezed in the Brancacci Chapel. Not un medico, not, as his wife—who now lives in Rome—liked to say, the sort of doctor who can do you any good, but a dottore of arts and letters and philosophy, a distinguished civil servant, the head restorer of works of fine art in the province of Tuscany.

  At eleven o’clock in the morning it’s already too late to go to the Limonaia, which has been turned into a giant conservation center for flood-damaged paintings, and still too early, he thinks, to go to the the Palazzo Davanzati, where temporary conservation headquarters have been set up. The coldness and grayness of the morning does not prevent Dottor Postiglione from enjoying the aftereffects of the unaccustomed physical exertion of the past three weeks. Muscles he hasn’t used in years twitch minutely, as if a friendly dog or a cat were batting him with its tail.

  At the meeting with the Americans and the British and the Germans in the directors’ room of the Uffizi various reports had been given: this was being done, that was being done. These moneys had arrived, those had been spent. What was needed was more money. Everyone had been very animated. And now Professor Steckley is making his way through the small herd of Americans standing outside the door of the Uffizi, separating, like a skillful sheepdog, those who have been invited to Thanksgiving dinner at I Tatti from those who have not. A nod here, a handshake there, an averted glance. The sheep and the goats. Dottor Postiglione comes from the Abruzzi and knows enough about sheep to appreciate Steckley’s skill, though he has himself declined an invitation.

  The chosen are herded into waiting cars. Those who are left behind gather into small knots, stand talking, shoulders hunched, before going off in different directions. Only a few stragglers remain, one of whom is the girl he had spoken to two weeks earlier on the night of the flat tire, as he was returning from an assignation. He’d thought she was French, but now she turns out to be American.

  He can’t understand American men. How is it that this woman has been left behind? What are these men thinking of? What do they have on their minds? Is it a failure of the imagination? An interesting possibility, actually. Take the clever chap who’d enlisted the assistanc
e of the tobacco factory for the drying of books, and who must, therefore, have some imagination. She’d come in with him and had sat next to him at the table, translating for him when someone spoke in Italian, whispering in his ear, leaning over so confidentially that he (Dottor Postiglione) had been unable to catch her eye. He watches her start down toward the Arno and then double back toward the piazza, where the German shepherd has broken loose. The boy shouts angrily, but the dog pretends not to hear. The girl stops to watch. Dottor Postiglione watches her watching. She steps down, then back up again, watching intensely, as if she’s looking for something that will help her make up her mind. A priest walks by, ducking and bobbing his head. He too stops to watch, still ducking and bobbing his head even when he’s standing still.

  “Vieni, vieni, vieni.” Come here to me. The dog, dragging his leash, slides on the mud as he reverses directions. He tears all the way to the other end of the piazza and then tears back, stopping to lift a leg at the rusticated facade of the Palazzo del Ingresso, and to frighten a woman pushing a stroller, sniffing at her crotch, licking her baby’s face. The boy runs after him, but the dog moves on easily, swinging his body like a tiger, looking back now and then but careful to avoid eye contact with the boy, who shouts and shouts, “Down, down, down! Down, Roi. Down, Roi!”

  Suddenly the girl is shouting too: “Roi! Roi, Roi, Roi! Down, Roi! Stai bravo!” Startled by this new development, the dog stands and looks at her, then slowly lowers himself, first his back half and then his front, and waits while the boy comes up to him, grabs his collar, starts to scold, and then bends down and puts his arms around his neck and covers the long, narrow head with kisses. He picks up the muddy leash and, before departing, turns to the girl and blows her a kiss too.

  Dottor Postiglione stands still while she walks by him. He can see that she is crying, not hard, but her eyes are watery. “Excuse me—” he says in English but before he can finish his sentence she jerks her whole body around, giving him a wide berth, as if he were one of those southern types who expose themselves to young women right on the street.