“Do you mind if I finish my drink?” I said.
“No,” said Boris, now self-conscious. “Take your time.”
I was still weak, recovering from a flu that I’d picked up in Italy the weeks before my return to the States. I’d been in Rimini, which was on the east coast, just a short hop from Ravenna. Rimini, at the end of tourist season, had been moving into hibernation. Everything was disappearing: the noisy children, the bare-breasted grandmothers, the frutti di mare, and—most importantly—the vacationing men. I had struck up a relationship with a huge and handsome construction worker named Pietro, who was staying in a cheap room above the bar I frequented. Pietro returned from visiting his wife, who lived in the suburbs of Florence, to find that I had moved in. He was patient with my illness, even when I broke out in a patchy rash. I thought my skin was splitting and that some new me—although it looked remarkably like the old me—was emerging. I spent ten days in his room above the bar eating soft pasta with eggs and chicken soup, which Pietro made himself in the rooming house kitchen.
“What will you do when you are not sick?” he asked me.
“I don’t know, Pietro. Maybe I can move in with you and your wife. I could be your housekeeper.”
“You are not clean,” he said smiling. “Your clothes on the floor, hair in the sink.”
“I could be your cook,” I said.
Pietro shrugged. “My wife makes good food. You don’t. You don’t even eat.”
“You want me to leave.”
“I,” said Pietro, “want you to be happy, not small happy,” he gestured around the room—the cot, the sink in the corner, the overflowing ashtray—“but big happy.”
“Like you and your wife?”
“Yes.”
I can’t say that Boris made me feel “big happy,” but I did feel safe. I had terrible nightmares—blood and bone dreams, where faces torn out of the walls were coming at me—but Boris’s snoring always woke me up before I had to see my nightmare through to its conclusion. I slept less than I ever had, maybe four hours a night. My mother had the same sleeping habits, a result of her illness. When she’d married my father she was still all right—he said normal, although I doubted that—but once she got sick, her sleeping patterns became erratic. I remember her, in the time before the pills, always being awake. If I got up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom I’d see the light on in the living room and hear the television—sitcom laughter, muffled narration” or she’d be reading. Maybe now my mother was willing me to have the education that I’d somehow failed at or that had somehow failed me. Boris had a lot of books and I sat in the living room waiting for the sun to rise, reading and reading. Bleak House. The Gulag Archipelago. Birth of the Modern.
I had never been a good student, although I’d shown enough intelligence to frustrate my teachers. In literature, my papers lacked focus and I had a bad habit of referring to characters—what on earth does Anna Sergeyevna see in Gurov?—as if they were my acquaintances. In art history I was determined to pursue the course of study with no attention to dates, although a complex chronological scheme was clear to me. In history, I remembered anecdotes and family trees with surprising precision; in class I often found myself telling stories of this monarch’s sexual dalliances and the odd, three-toed offspring that somehow resulted. The sciences all seemed to be scheduled in the early morning. Philosophy was populated by abstract, sincere, unattractive boys and equally unattractive, aggressive girls. I displayed great enthusiasm for the visual arts, equaled only by an absence of talent. I tried drama. People said I had a flair for the dramatic and I thought I could bring my G.P.A. up to the 2.0 necessary to continue, but I hated all the other students. I spent entire class periods in the costume room brushing the wigs affectionately. I failed and failed and failed. Packed up my things, tried elsewhere, helped a boyfriend sell coke at parties, and was asked to leave.
After all this, I still tried to nurture the fantasy that college had been wonderful for me, that I’d been part of a super group of girls, but when I tried to remember them, my imagination replaced the Bryn and Erica and Jasmine, who I had actually known, with a group of giggling, cigarette-pants-wearing coeds, who all looked like Sandra Dee. I really had no friends to speak of and I’m sure it was my fault.
My mother always told me that friends were overrated. I had never known her to have one, other than me, and despite the fact that she had a befuddled mind (diagnosed) and a slew of drugs in her blood (prescribed) I still trusted her. In fact, my mother was the only person I trusted and after a year in Italy, although I’d been safe from her illness and her slow retreat from life, I missed her. But now, back in the States, I found myself unwilling to see her. She was still in the hospital, unless some miracle of well-being had happened in my absence. In a way I liked that. I could find her. I would go and see her soon. As soon as I figured out how to get to her without involving Boris, as soon as I could make peace with seeing my father or, more likely, find a way to my mother that did not involve going through him. I hadn’t really made a success of my time in Italy and although I personally felt that success was overrated, my father did not. I was his one failed investment and I bothered him.
Italy had ostensibly been a chance for me to pursue my interest in art. I was one of those people who made up for what she lacked in talent with her father’s money. And my father liked the idea of my studying art in Italy far more than my working at a local restaurant while trying to get credit at South Shore Community College. So he anted up. And I took off after the first humiliating day of life drawing, spent sketching a nude Florentine named Davido, who I managed to master in other ways.
I tried to call my mother a couple of times, struggling with pounds of gittoni at public phones, but had never been able to get through. The first time, the nurse had tried to put my father on, and I’d hung up. Another time the nurse didn’t know who my mother was and when she was trying to figure out where she’d been moved, my stack of phone tokens ran out. Things like that will wear you down, make a country lose its charm. Also, being American was a full-time occupation, exhausting and false. America was named for an Italian, so shouldn’t there have been some sort of easy sisterhood between the two countries? There was not. I wondered how Vespucci would have felt if he knew that his name would be attached not only to the wondrous new continent, but also to hamburgers, blue jeans, rock-and-roll, and loud men who videotaped themselves while walking backward up the steps of the Uffizi. I constantly found myself playing Jean Seberg to a host of unlikely Jean-Paul Belmondos and this had made me want to go home. But here, with Boris, wasn’t I doing the same thing?
“Boris,” I asked, “do you like Faulkner?”
“Liking is irrelevant,” he said. “I know Faulkner.”