Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived_Stories Read online

  During our last meal together, after the four of us—Francine, Didier, Charles, and I—have finished off all the wine in the two large plastic bonbonnes, Didier brings out an old bottle of marc and we drink that. It is then—a little drunk—that I tell Francine that I went to bed with our tour guide in Egypt. “I only did it once,” I tell her, and Francine laughs and says she had guessed it. She, too, sounds a little drunk—all four of us, probably, have drunk too much of the marc which is much stronger than the wine. And anyway, Francine continues, she slept with him as well. When I ask Francine how many times—once, twice, three times?—she only shakes her head so that the long braid down her back swings from side to side. Then I say to Didier who is sitting next to me, that now it is his turn to tell us something that he is ashamed of or that he regrets. Winking at me, Didier says: Nothing, nothing at all—rien du tout. In his entire life, Didier says again, there is nothing that he feels ashamed of or that he would not do over again if he had the chance, and Francine breaks in and says something sharp like: “Tu te fous du monde, quoi!” She sounds angry. To change the mood, Charles says that one of the things he feels most ashamed about happened a long time ago when he was a young boy, and it has nothing to do with sex. Quite the contrary, Charles says, it was while he was at boarding school and his mother used to write him a letter once a week and Charles never read those letters. In fact, Charles tells us, he never even bothered to open those letters, so that one time when he went home for the holidays and his mother unpacked for him she found all her letters there at the bottom of his suitcase, a whole packet of them, unopened.

  The day we are to leave, Francine tells me that she thinks she is pregnant. “I haven’t told anyone yet. Not even Didier, until I am sure. Naturally, this time, I hope it is a boy. But if it is another girl,” she says, “I will name her after you.”

  Charles has packed the car and our boys’ bicycles again are tied precariously upside down on the roof rack. I shake my head in disapproval. “This time, for sure, the bicycles are going to fall off,” I tell Charles. Annoyed, he does not answer me. “We have so much more stuff than we came with,” I complain. The older boy appears, carrying a large stack of French comic books—a parting gift, I suppose, from the little girls. “Can’t you get rid of some of that?” I ask him. Exasperated, I go back inside La Mayonette for one last look and to see what we have forgotten. I find a hairbrush in the boys’ bathroom, a few centimes on a bureau, one of Charles’ ties hanging from the doorknob of our bedroom.

  I would like to do something before we leave; I am not sure what. I stand irresolute in the middle of our bedroom. I hear Charles calling—they are waiting for me. Just before I walk out the door, I touch the wallpaper profile nearest me and I kiss the woman on the lips.

  L’ Esprit de L’ Escalier

  In the photograph, my mouth is slightly open. I am talking to the man sitting next to me. The man is the writer Alberto Moravia. Next to him, there is a woman. She is smiling at the camera, I can’t think of her name. The fourth person in the photograph is Massimo. Massimo is looking off, looking away somewhere, looking elsewhere. This means that Massimo’s face is seen in profile—you cannot see how good-looking he is. He is so good-looking, in fact, that Alberto Moravia said that he had made one of the characters in his book look just like Massimo, only this same character, Alberto Moravia said, had met a bad end.

  Moravia gave me this book of his to read, but I left it in the car on the way home to Rome from Fregene. Fregene was where the photograph was taken. Fregene was where we had lunch the day I had to get into the car and drive back to Rome with Alberto Moravia instead of with Massimo.

  His car, I remember, was custom built, special—something to do with the pedal you depressed to disengage the clutch. Alberto Moravia, you see, had a bad leg. He could not reach and push down on the clutch properly. The way Alberto Moravia drove was also, you might say, special. He drove very fast with one hand on my leg—high up on my leg.

  When finally I arrived home, my father said he had been waiting for me. He wanted to know where I had been. “The beach,” I said. “I was at the beach with Massimo.” My father said, “No, no, Massimo has been killed.”

  I could hear my father snore every night that summer. Loud shuddering snores. Sometimes, the snores would wake him. Then my father would make another sound. A peevish sound. A sound of distress, also.

  Most nights, I did not get home until three or four in the morning. One time, I did not get home until seven o’clock in the morning. It was light already and I could hear my father in the bathroom. The door to my room was shut and I just made it inside when the toilet flushed.

  My boyfriend lived in Trastevere. I don’t have a photograph of him but if I think of him, of us, I think of us eating spaghetti at a trattoria that stayed open all night that was right around the corner from where he lived. I remember I liked that part the best of everything, better than the making love—the eating spaghetti part. I liked sitting at the tables, the tablecloths stained with old tomato sauce, and I liked sitting next to him, our shoulders touching, and playing with the bread crumbs while we waited for the food to arrive. I liked sitting under the harsh unflattering late-night lights, the men who were there starting their day looking at me. Their look seemed to say that they knew we had just gotten through making love, which was the reason we were so hungry.

  My father’s office was on the fifth floor and the elevator was so old, to run it you still had to put a coin in it. The coin too, was hard to find, a ten-lire piece that nearly no longer existed. My father had to go all the way to a bank on the Piazza di Spagna to buy the ten-lire pieces he needed to use the elevator. But the elevator was how I met Massimo. Massimo was an architect and his office was right across the hall from my father’s.

  You could tell right away by the way Massimo said his Rs that Massimo was not from Rome. Massimo was from the north, from Turin. Massimo knew a lot of people. He knew people like Silvana Mangano and like Lucia Bosé who married the bullfighter Dominguin, he knew Vittorio De Sica and Vittorio Gassman. Massimo even said he knew Anna Magnani. Massimo said he had had dinner with Anna Magnani once, and to prove it, Massimo said Anna Magnani spoke with her mouth full.

  I don’t remember how Massimo said he got to know Alberto Moravia or why Moravia asked Massimo to have lunch with him or, in turn, why Massimo asked me to go with him, but the one thing I do remember was how, in those days, Rome was like a small town. Everyone knew everyone and everyone knew what everyone was doing and whom he was sleeping with, and you always ran into someone somewhere—at one of the two or three good restaurants the tourists did not know about yet or at the outdoor nightclub off the Via Cassia where, at the very last possible moment, the stripper in the show turned out to be a man.

  Massimo said that Moravia had also said not to forget to bring his bathing suit. The house, Moravia said, was next to the beach and Massimo, if he wanted to, could go swimming before lunch. In the car, on the way to Fregene, Massimo said he just remembered he had forgotten to bring his. But anyway, the day was hazy and overcast, he said. I told Massimo I would not go in the water alone, by myself. I would only go in if there was someone else. Or, if Massimo borrowed a bathing suit. I said to Massimo, too, then, that there was an undertow.

  There was a lot of traffic that day and when Massimo and I arrived at Alberto Moravia’s house we were late. Moravia said, “Hurry up, if you want to go in swimming. We’re waiting for you to eat lunch.” And Massimo—I’ll never forget this—said, “No, no. I don’t want to go in swimming, she does.”

  They watched me. I saw Alberto Moravia, Massimo, and the woman who was smiling in the photograph standing on the porch of the house holding bright red drinks watch me walk across the beach to the sea. A gray choppy sea, an end-of-the-summer sea, and I remember thinking: If I drown now it will be Massimo’s fault. I also remember hearing Alberto Moravia say something about Americans—something about how only Americans would swim on a day like this. American
s, Moravia said, always had to prove things. But I did not look back at them. I put down my towel and I adjusted the straps on my bathing suit and I ran into the sea.

  Massimo, as it turned out, also knew the woman who was smiling in the photograph. Massimo said she was a friend of his ex-wife, Ivy. Massimo had been married to Ivy for exactly four months. Instead of getting a divorce, he said, the marriage, thank God, had been annulled. Ivy was a model but Ivy, Massimo said, wanted to be an actress—she wanted to be discovered—and the only trouble with Ivy was that Ivy could only talk about shoes, about clothes. But he still saw her—Ivy. Massimo said he saw Ivy at those cafés on the Via Veneto, the Café de Paris and the other one across the street from it, the one next to the Hotel Excelsior. As a matter of fact, the last time he saw Ivy, Massimo said, was on the same day he had seen Vittorio Gassman and Massimo said he had told Ivy then how she had just missed him.

  But to go back—back to the day Massimo’s Lancia all of a sudden on the way back to Rome got a blowout and Massimo lost control of the car, the same day we had lunch with Alberto Moravia, the day I went in swimming, the day Alberto Moravia took the photograph with the camera he had showed us. The camera, Moravia said, had a special feature. If you set it, you would then have ten seconds to run back to your chair and to where you were sitting, which was exactly what Alberto Moravia did. He ran back with his bad leg and he bumped into the table and the wine glasses jiggled and some of my wine spilled.

  But earlier and, as I was starting to say, when I came out of the water from swimming, everyone had left, everyone had gone back inside the house already. Alberto Moravia, Massimo, the woman who was smiling, all of them were sitting around the dining-room table eating as if they had forgotten about me completely. They were eating the antipasto and Moravia, without looking up at me, said, “Sit down, sit here,” and I said to Massimo, “But I’m in my wet bathing suit still.”

  The woman who was smiling in the photograph stood up and took me into a bedroom—Alberto Moravia’s bedroom. There, I took off my wet bathing suit and as I was standing with one foot in the air about to step into my underpants, the door opened and Moravia walked in. Alberto Moravia said he just wanted to look for a book—his book, the same book he gave to me.

  When I was dressed again and when I went back to the dining room, they were all twirling spaghetti on their forks—the second course. Moravia looked up at me and laughed. “You’re a natural blond, after all,” he said. I looked over at Massimo, but Massimo’s face was bent over his plate. For a moment, I wasn’t even sure I knew what Moravia was talking about and it was not until much later and until I was back in Rome that I thought of saying: No, you’re wrong. I dye it blond.

  There is a phrase for this, a French idiom exactly for when you only think of something to say afterward, after the event, for the apt phrase, for the perfect answer, but too late—l’ésprit de l’éscalier. As for what happened after lunch when Alberto Moravia told Massimo that Massimo should drive the woman who was smiling in the photograph back to Rome, and he, Alberto Moravia, would drive me in, and I wanted to say something—I wanted to object to this—this was not the same thing. For no matter how long or how hard I racked my brain for what to say to him—to this day even—I, for one, could never have come up with the right answer and I don’t know if there is an expression for this.

  In the car, with Moravia, I remember how, under my breath, I cursed Massimo. Massimo, I thought, should have stepped in. Massimo should have said something to Moravia like: No, I brought her here, and, you see, I know her father. Her father and I work on the same floor of the same office building. I promised to get her back safe and sound to him.

  Also, on the way back to Rome from Fregene, I was thinking of how, the next time I saw him, I would not mince words with Massimo and of how, among other things, I would say to him: Not only was Alberto Moravia driving his custom-built car with the special clutch you depressed at a hundred miles an hour, and the whole time he had his hand on my leg, and I don’t care how famous he is or that I can tell people later that I met him, I could have been killed. But also, I went in swimming, and it is a miracle that I did not drown and that I did not get pulled out to sea by the undertow, either.

  Verdi

  While Penny was staying on at the Donner Trail Ranch in Nevada—where she had gone to get a divorce—Penny’s ex-husband, Mason, took his new wife, Sabrina, to Lourdes, France, on their honeymoon. Penny could never picture them there. Penny could not picture Mason standing in line to take the waters behind the sick—people who were carried there, people who arrived in wheelchairs, people who were covered with hideous running sores. Mason was too healthy, too sanguine, too big. As for Sabrina, Penny did not know what Sabrina looked like, but she pictured Sabrina pale, blond, with wrists the size of bird bones which Mason had to hold on to carefully.

  The ranch was in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas in a place called Verdi, named after the composer—only the name was pronounced Verdie, as Penny did eventually, despite her sense of how things ought to be. Had Giuseppe Verdi actually come over to America? Penny had asked a ranch hand named Mike on her first day—this was the sort of thing Mason would have known. And was this where Giuseppe Verdi—Penny was still pronouncing the name right, only she had the composer wrong—got the idea for what was it called, La fanciulla del West? Mike said no, he did not know; Mike said he had forgotten most of his Spanish, anyway. Mike was busy tightening the cinch on the saddle of the horse she was going to ride that day. A horse named Thunderbolt. Penny was about to say something more about Giuseppe Verdi, instead she said: Is he gentle? I haven’t been on a horse in years.

  To her surprise, Penny liked Verdi. She liked the Donner Trail Ranch, she liked the horseback riding, the people who, like her, were waiting to get their divorces; Penny even said she liked the look of the tumbleweed on the road. Also, Penny liked Mike, and after the requisite six weeks were up, after all the papers were signed and sealed, even after she had thrown her gold wedding band into the Truckee River, Penny—it was June—was still lounging around the ranch pool with Inge.

  Penny and Inge had got into the habit of driving to Reno together to do their wash. After loading the machines with their dirty clothes, they would run across the street from the laundromat to Harrah’s Casino. Penny liked to play the slot machines while Inge sat at a table and played baccarat or chemin de fer. Usually Inge would lose and Penny would win, usually, too, Penny would end up treating Inge to the dimes she needed to dry her jeans.

  Inge was Danish, she spoke with a slight accent; Inge had been in one film. She told Penny how she took pills to stay thin, pills to get brown, pills to make her sleep. Inge also told Penny that she had been married three times—twice to the same man whom she was divorcing again, and once to the film maker. Penny told Inge about Mike.

  Yes, Mike with his battered hat worn at an angle was handsome; yes, Mike with his long booted legs could stick to a horse like a burr; but had Mike finished high school? Penny wondered. The subject never came up. At night, after she finished her dinner, Penny went to meet Mike in the only bar in Verdi—a roadhouse situated on the highway. Penny would walk there from the Donner Trail Ranch, the headlights from the big semis heading west toward the Bay Area lighting up her way.

  Penny and Mike drank Coors and played pool—that was how it started—Mike leaning into her teaching her how to hold the cue stick. Also, Mike telling Penny how, at home in Wyoming, he and his girlfriend used to play not for money, not for beers, but for going down on each other—the loser had to. Penny did not know what to answer. I bet I’ve grossed you out, Mike guessed, watching her. Penny laughed, denied it.

  In the mornings while it was still cool, Penny and—the number varied—two or three people from the ranch, usually—usually, Inge never got out of bed before noon—went horseback riding. Either Mike or Ron, the other ranch hand, who claimed that he had broken every bone in his body at least once bronco-busting, would take them up the mountains. Thun
derbolt was part quarter horse and after Penny got used to how fast he could turn—the first time Thunderbolt went through a gate, Penny found herself nearly on the ground clinging to the pommel—she always asked for him. Thunderbolt had a soft mouth, changed leads easily, did not spook or get winded. Suddenly, all the horse-talk Penny had not talked since she was a young girl or married to Mason came back to her—hocks, withers, snaffle, and curb bits—and, on an impulse on one of the trips to Reno with Inge, Penny bought herself a pair of leather chaps just like the ones Mike always wore.

  In the clothing store, Inge had tried on a pair of green lizard cowboy boots that cost four hundred and fifty dollars. Hand-stitched, and anywhere else, those boots, the salesman told Inge, would cost her double, while Inge who was walking up and down the length of the store admiring her feet said she was feeling lucky that day. Inge also told Penny that anyway, during the night when she could not sleep, she had had second thoughts—Denmark was boring. She was going back to Los Angeles, her second husband, the film maker owned a big house, and Penny had said: Oh, no, you’ll marry him again!

  One of the things Penny told Mike she wanted to do while she was staying at the ranch was ride the Donner Trail—at least, the part where the party had started to cross the Sierra Nevadas and was surprised by an early snowstorm. And although Penny had read about it in school years ago, she could, to this day, she said, remember all the gory details: how many of the party had died, and, of course, how the others had survived.

  Mike said he would take Penny on his day off, only it was too far for them to ride horseback. The Donner Pass was in California—not in Nevada, and the Donner Trail Ranch was just a name—and Mike would take Penny there in his truck. They would make a day of it, go on to Grass Valley or to dinner in Sacramento. They could spend the night somewhere, Mike also said, in a big king-size bed with real cotton sheets for a change, and Penny told Mike that Inge was the only person who knew, the only person she had told anything to.