The Italian Lover

  She remembered the address, which she’d had to pry out of Esther, but there were two sets of numbers, blue numbers and red numbers, that didn’t seem to be related to each other. She started with the red numbers and worked her way around the piazza. No Margot Harrington. There was a Postiglione, however—the name of Margot’s lover. It had been his apartment. His wife’s, actually.

  She pushed the button and then pushed it again. She waited and waited some more. There was a bit of static. And then a man’s voice.

  “Chi é?”

  And again: “Chi é?”

  Miranda could tell it was a question. “Margot Harrington,” she said.

  A pause. “Margot Harrington? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Who?”

  “Margot Harrington,” she said again.

  More static was followed by a heavy click.

  Miranda didn’t know what to do.

  The voice said, “You have to push on the door when you hear the click.”

  She heard the heavy click again, more of a thunk than a click, and pushed the door. It opened.

  The corridor was gray, dark, not what she’d imagined. She was in the right place. But who was the man? There were two sets of stairs. She was halfway up one when she heard a door open. A dog started to growl, and she closed her eyes.

  “Wrong stairs,” the man’s voice said. She opened her eyes, but she couldn’t see him. He was up too high. She banged the heavy suitcase down one set of stairs and up the other. The man was standing in an open doorway buttoning his shirt. He looked like someone from her hometown.

  “We were just taking a nap.”

  “You live here?”

  “Yes.”

  The dog, a black Lab, kept looking up at the man’s face, as if waiting for the signal to attack.

  A woman came out of another room and looked at her. Miranda didn’t recognize her. She had a just-fucked look, a look that was hard to imitate: face glowing, hair tousled, feet bare, eyes unfocused. The woman shook her head back and forth and held a robe closed around her. She was about Miranda’s mother’s age—the age her mother would have been if she hadn’t died—but Miranda’s mother would never have come to the door in just a robe.

  “Who are you?” the woman said, “and why did you say you were me?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt.” Miranda was embarrassed.

  “Oh, it’s all right. We were just taking a little Sunday afternoon nap.”

  Miranda shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “You’re Margot Harrington, aren’t you? I can’t believe this. I mean, that I’m here, that you’re here. Just like the book. I figured out where your apartment had to be, but the statue of Dante. Did they move it? In the book it’s in the center of the piazza . . .”

  “I suppose it was in the center of my imagination,” Margot said. “It was always scolding me for something. But you still haven’t told me who you are.”

  “I’m Miranda Clark. I’m going to play you in the movie.”

  “Ah. I see. Do you need to use the bathroom?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yes. You might as well come in. Let me get dressed. Don’t mind the dog.”

  The dog had settled down on its haunches. The man patted its head. “Come on, Biscotti, out of the way.”

  The bathroom, which opened off the entrance hall, was long and narrow. It had two sinks and a tub and shower at the far end. And some kind of foot bath. Sitting on the toilet, Miranda was flooded with emotion, but it was unfocused.

  She looked at herself in the mirror over one of the sinks. She’d slept in her clothes because there hadn’t been room to open her suitcase in the railway compartment, not that she would have undressed in front of everyone anyway. She tried to smooth out her mascara with her fingers. She poked at her hair as if she were getting ready to go on camera. Lights, camera, action. Ready for Take One. Roll ’em. But she wasn’t ready to go on. She’d forgotten her lines and had no idea what her objective was. She wasn’t even sure who she was, but she thought she was about to find out.

  Standing inside the bathroom door, her hand on the knob, she slowed down her breathing, she took her time, she reminded herself that everything she needed was already within her. But she couldn’t set her objective, couldn’t bring her energies into focus, couldn’t muster enough positive energy to make a dent in the universe.

  “Miranda Clark. What a lovely name,” Margot said. “I was so pleased when I first heard it. ‘Clark’ gives it a nice strong finish.”

  “O brave new world, that hath such people in it,” the man said. “I’m Woody.”

  Miranda thought that Woody might spell trouble. She couldn’t place the quotation. There ought to be a law against quoting like this.

  “End of The Tempest,” he said.

  “No, sorry,” Miranda said. “Not Shakespeare. I was arrested for shoplifting when I was twelve and my uncle got a lawyer. The judge dismissed the case because the officer forgot to read me the Miranda warning. It was pretty new then—the Miranda warning—and they weren’t used to it. I started calling myself Miranda when I went out to L.A., but when I go home I’m still Mary. Mary Clark.” She tried to judge the impression she was making. Did they believe her? They should. It was true.

  “Have I seen you in anything?” Margot asked.

  “Not yet. But you will.” She was trying to hit a confident note.

  “That’s all right. I’ve hardly seen any films anyway. Is this your first?”

  “No, but it’s the first time I’ll be the lead.”

  “The star. I can’t tell you how excited I am about this film. I try to tell myself it’s nothing, but it’s come as such a surprise after all these years. It’s been optioned so many times . . . But how did you get here?”

  Miranda tried to give her adventures a light touch—the station, the cabbie, the gypsies. When she described the gypsies she twisted and turned her body as if she were brushing away the little hands. “And my suitcase. Well, you can see. It was like dragging a big dog around. Bigger than you.” She reached down to pat the dog on the head. “What did you say his name was?”

  “Her name. Biscotti.”

  “Anyway, the suitcase kept flopping down, the way a dog flops itself down. It was like a scene from a bad movie. Or maybe a good movie.” She laughed.

  “You don’t speak Italian?”

  “I started Italian at Smith, right after I read The Sixteen Pleasures, but then I dropped out and went to L.A. I took Latin in high school. Everyone said it would help you understand English better, but it’s a dead language.”

  “Vera incessu patuit dea,” Woody said.

  Miranda thought she was going to cry.

  “Don’t tease her, Woody.”

  “I wasn’t teasing her,” Woody said. “I was telling her that she walks like a goddess.”

  “Let me get dressed,” Margot said, giving Woody a pointed look, “and we’ll have some coffee.”

  Miranda stood at the window while Margot got dressed. She could hear Woody in the kitchen, making coffee. There was a dining table in the middle of the living room, covered with books and papers. There was a funny-looking fireplace with a grill and little vents at the bottom. Passages opened off the room in different directions. It was disorienting. She closed her eyes and imagined herself looking out at the piazza: she was Margot again, waiting for her Italian lover.

  Her objective was starting to clarify itself: she wanted to stay in here; she didn’t want to go back out there. An image was coming into focus: a kitchen table, a glass of wine, a pot of water on the stove. She could feel the positive energy building up inside her, like the water coming to a boil. She let it go, sent it out into the universe. When she opened her eyes, she was looking out at the piazza, and Margot was standing beside her, pointing out how high the water had come in the flood. All the way up to the second-story windows. It was hard to believe.

  “How will
they do the flood in the movie?” Margot asked.

  Miranda believed that acting was a way of telling the truth, but the moment of the lie came and went so quickly that she hardly noticed it. It was like a split-second driving decision: Take the Washington Boulevard exit or stay on the expressway. You aren’t ready. You’re talking about something else or listening to the radio. And all of a sudden it’s too late.

  Or maybe she simply lied instinctively.

  “Oh, I don’t know how they’ll handle that.” She didn’t want to tell Margot that there was no flood in the movie. And that that wasn’t the worst of it. She’d find out soon enough. Let Esther explain.

  “But you must have some idea.”

  “Stock footage,” she said. “Sometimes they make a model. To tell you the truth, I’m more worried about the gold-tooling scene. I’ve done a little bookbinding myself. Let me show you something.”

  Miranda opened her huge suitcase, which was still in the entryway, and got out the copy of The Sixteen Pleasures that she’d bound at her kitchen table. She could see now that the fake leather bands weren’t quite parallel and that the gold lettering on the label was uneven. It was embarrassing. But it was better than talking about the flood.

  Woody came in with coffee. Little cups, little spoons. Like a doll’s tea party.

  Miranda blurted out the speech she’d been rehearsing off and on over the past few days. “I want to know everything about you,” she said to Margot. “For the movie. Is that all right? I want to follow you around for a couple of weeks.”

  “I’m afraid I already told the whole world everything about me. There wasn’t anything left to tell. At the time, anyway.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I love your book. I read it after my mother died. I’ve always thought if I could talk to you, you could set me on the right path.”

  “I used to feel that way about Tolstoy,” Woody said. “Till I read his wife’s journal. He was a bad man. When you read the novels, you think Dostoyevsky was crazy and Tolstoy was the sane one, the wise one. But if you read their wives’ journals, you’ll see it was the other way around.”

  “I loved Anna Karenina,” Miranda said. “Did you know that Basil Rathbone asked Greta Garbo for an autograph on the set, and she refused! Can you believe it!”

  “They left out the main story in that movie,” Woody complained. “Have you read the novel?”

  “No, but I’ve always wanted to.”

  “You could get a copy at the Paperback Exchange,” Margot said. “Or you could borrow Woody’s. He’s always talking about Tolstoy and Homer.”

  “Oh, no thanks. I don’t think I’ll have time now. I’ll be too busy being you.”

  “If you were Margot,” Woody said, “you’d have read Anna Karenina already, or you’d find time to read it. But never mind.”

  “All right, I’ll read it.”

  “You won’t be sorry. How about The Iliad?”

  But Margot intervened. “Woody, leave her alone. You can see she was badly frightened. She’s got a lot on her plate.” Turning to Miranda: “Why don’t you stay and have supper with us. Woody’s a good cook.” She put her arm around Woody. “You might as well spend the night too,” she said to Miranda. “We can call the credit card companies right now, and then tomorrow we’ll go to the Questura and report the theft; you may get the purse back, but not the money. And to the American Express office to sort out your traveler’s checks and to the American Consulate—I know the Consul General—and apply for a new passport.”

  Miranda was so relieved she burst into tears, and she was so tired from the flight and the long train trip she went to bed right after supper, but before she went to sleep she started Anna Karenina. While she was reading about Oblonsky’s affair with the governess, she could hear Woody playing a guitar, and later she could hear Woody and Margot talking, could hear suppressed laughter. She sank down into the warm mattress under the warm covers. She was in a safe place, a safe place where she could just be herself. Little Mary Clark. At least for tonight.

  Anna Karenina

  The thing about Miranda, who was staying with Margot and Woody for three weeks, until rehearsals began, was that she was always right there with you, asking questions: your favorite color (forest green), your favorite food (spaghetti alle vongole), your favorite sexual position (none of your business). But Miranda made everything her business. She wanted to know more about Margot than Margot knew about herself. Margot felt like a witness to a serious accident or a crime who has to go over what she saw again and again, or like a patient in Freudian analysis who’s unwilling to disclose her secrets even to herself, or like a hostile witness being cross-examined by a hard-nosed prosecutor: “How did you really feel when you learned about your mother’s affair with Bruno Bruni? Did your father ever find out? What were you really feeling when Sandro undressed you in front of the cheval glass? Did you really try all the positions in the Aretino book?”

  “What are you looking for, Miranda?”

  “I want to be in harmony with the natural principles that govern the universe.”

  “And you think I can help?”

  Miranda nodded. “It’s like Woody’s feelings about Tolstoy.”

  What Margot thought was that what Miranda’s quest to be in harmony with the principles that govern the universe boiled down to was this: should she sleep with her co-star, Giovanni Cipriani—Zanni—or not? She was afraid of the man, but excited too, and couldn’t stop talking about him. And Margot couldn’t blame her. Margot didn’t remember any sex scenes in L’accalappiacani, which she’d seen years ago, with Francesca— just Zanni and a dozen or so dogs—but the way he’d put his hands on the stray dogs made you think that this was the way a man ought to touch a woman. Miranda was full of questions: How old was Zanni, really? Had he been married? Had he really had an affair with Ingrid Bergman, and that Scottish actress, Morag something-or-other? Why had he been denied a visa to return to the United States? Why had he been denounced by the Vatican? and banned from Italian television?

  What Margot said was, “Well, if you’re looking for the principles that govern the universe, I suppose this is as good a place as any.”

  They were eating breakfast in Bar Badia on Via del Proconsolo, just down the street from the Badia Fiorentina. On the other side of the street tourists were queuing up, even in January, to get into the Bargello.

  “This was my mother’s favorite place in the whole city,” Margot said. “Every time we had hot chocolate here she’d say you could feel the tension between the old medieval view of the universe as a meaningfully ordered cosmic hierarchy—that’s the Badia—and the new Renaissance worldview, the discovery of the world, this world, and of man—that’s the Bargello, the new civic authority. But maybe it was just that she liked the hot chocolate at this bar. They thicken it with potato starch.”

  “I can feel it,” Miranda said. “It’s like when I was thinking of joining a convent. Did I tell you that? When I read those chapters at Smith after my mom’s death. I mean, the convent in the book, it was such a wonderful place. I’m not even Catholic, but I could feel something pulling me, and it was either that or go to L.A. You almost joined, didn’t you? I mean, you thought about it . . .”

  “I was pretty upset at the time,” Margot said.

  “That was right after Sandro dumped you, right? But you thought about it?”

  “I suppose I did.”

  “Have you ever been sorry you didn’t join?”

  “Not sorry enough to keep me awake at night.”

  “Do you think Zanni will dump me the way Sandro dumped you?”

  “You haven’t even met the man yet.”

  “No, but he’s the kind of man I want to attract into my life.”

  “I don’t get it. Zanni’s a notorious womanizer, and he’s old enough to be your father.”

  Miranda nodded. “It’s in the nude scenes that things get serious. I think Michael’s planning to get quite a few of the sixteen pleasu
res into the film, you know. The different positions.”

  “How on earth are you going to do that? What about the script? That’s not what Woody and I wrote. Some of those positions are not even possible. La Gondola. It can’t be done.” Margot was starting to worry seriously about the final version of the script. She’d tried to get a copy from Esther, but Esther had put her off with vague promises, and she’d been trying to get straight answers from Miranda, but Miranda was evasive.

  “Everyone says nude scenes are just boring hard work,” she said. “You’ve got your body propped up with two-by-fours, and there are twenty guys running around trying to keep out of the sight lines, and the camera’s in your face, and the director’s telling you to lift up your knee or run your fingers through your hair, and you can’t look your partner in the eyes because if you do, you’ll look cross-eyed on the screen. But that’s just what they say because they don’t want to admit how exciting it is. But it is exciting.”

  “You’ve done it before?”

  “Not exactly, but it’s got to be exciting. You want the audience to feel that you’re telling them a secret about yourself, and you can’t fake that. You really have to tell them a secret. I’ll wear a crotch patch, of course, but even so . . .”

  Margot made a lemon face.

  “It’s no big deal,” Miranda said. “You use wig glue to hold it in place.”

  “I guess there are some things I don’t really want to know about,” Margot said.

  “I’m a little worried about the cunnilingus scene, though.”

  Margot looked around the bar to see if anyone had picked up on the word, which is the same in Italian as it is in English. She thought the barista was smiling. “Oral sex,” she said, “is known as l’arte bolognese. But what is it that worries you? It seems to me that cunnilingus is the last thing you’ve got to worry about. Once you get past the initial absurdity of it . . . It’s—what do they say about works of mercy?—supererogatory. It’s a supererogatory pleasure. It’s not necessary, but it’s so delicious.”