Today in a café on the river I saw a young woman of extraordinary beauty. She appeared to be studying mathematics — she had what looked like a textbook with her, and was shaking her head while writing out long strings of numbers on a pad of paper. The standard sheet of paper here is longer than ours, almost what we call “legal size.” It occurred to me that that extra amount of paper might make her computations that much more overwhelming, a page filled with even more numbers. Would she, mostly likely unfamiliar with our smaller American-sized paper, still somehow feel that difference? That tiny additional bit of overwhelmingness? But perhaps she enjoys mathematics, many people do — I myself feel generally comfortable with numbers, though I never liked those higher math classes where I couldn’t see any possible application for the concepts we learned.
I have kept up my running here. Each day I manage greater and greater distances, and feel swelling within me a sense of accomplishment. Once while running in a piazza filled with birds I nearly crashed into a man selling dried corn to tourists. He ran after me for several blocks, attempting to convince me that he should be recompensed for the corn that spilled when I nearly ran into him. I argued back, as best as I could while continuing to run, and made signs of my innocence. I do not believe, to be honest, that he had spilled much corn; it was merely that he had taken me for a tourist…
The Italian people in general, as portrayed in films and television, are of a warm and open disposition. Many of them want to discuss American politics with me, a subject about which I am I think reasonably hesitant. I have ventured far out into the Tuscan countryside. My high-school Italian, though rusty, has served me well. My rather more proficient Latin less so, ha ha.
The world is so big. Even the tiny part of it that we see in a single lifetime is so big.
Your Robert.
PS. I love you and I believe you when you tell me that you care about me. What other choice do I have?
II
~ ~ ~
“I don’t want you to kiss me,” Viola says to the FBI agent. “That is a hard boundary for me, I think.”
“No kissing,” the FBI agent says. “Anything else?”
“Could you turn that light down a little bit? Just for right now, anyway.”
“The light has only two settings,” the FBI agent explains. “On or off.”
“Well could you turn it away, at least? It’s making my head hurt.”
Viola is sitting in a straightbacked chair in a motel room in Danville, a town maybe twenty minutes outside of Indianapolis. The FBI agent has moved the motel-room desk so that it faces Viola’s chair, and he sits on the other side of it. He adjusts the light.
Viola crosses her legs and tugs down at her skirt.
“Do you like being humiliated?” the FBI agent asks. Viola gives it some thought.
“In certain controlled situations.”
“What was the time that you were most sexually aroused, that you can remember?”
Viola tells him.
“So not with your husband.”
“I don’t want to talk about my husband with you.”
“You don’t feel comfortable talking about your husband with me.”
“I just don’t see why he has to be a subject of conversation is all.”
The FBI agent handcuffs Viola’s hands behind the back of the chair. “Do you remember your safeword?” the FBI agent asks. Viola nods. The FBI agent slaps her. She cannot tell if he has an erection. She can barely see him, in fact, except as a shadowy figure just beyond the light.
“Do you love your husband?” the FBI agent asks.
Viola’s safeword is the word “safeword,” which she chose because it seemed kind of funny, or noncommittal, maybe. She works the edges of the handcuffs with her fingers.
“I care for him very deeply,” Viola says.
The FBI agent slaps her. “Please answer the question as it is asked. Do you love your husband?”
“I think sometimes that I love him very much. At other times I am sure that I do not. The sureness of my not-loving him, at those times, seems to retroactively negate whatever love I once believed myself to hold, and I think to myself: I have never loved him, that was a mistake, I was only wanting to love him.”
“Have you loved other men?”
“I had a series of relationships before Robert, some of which felt at the time as though they constituted love. Looking back, I find it hard to believe that love was involved. Many of them, retrospectively, feel like they consisted of a certain mutual neediness.”
The FBI agent holds Viola down on the mattress by the throat. There is some fumbling with his fly. Viola thinks: I am not supposed to help him with his fly, I am being held down, I am “at his mercy.” The FBI agent spits on Viola and Viola closes her eyes in anticipation of being spat on again.
~ ~ ~
The FBI agent is living out of a suitcase in the motel room in Danville. The motel room has a bed with pale green sheets and a cheap-looking desk and chair. It’s all clean and a little sad. Viola tries to imagine what his actual home is like, but she can’t. Maybe he just moves from motel room to motel room, forever.
~ ~ ~
There is an air of menace to the FBI agent. It is not exactly in the things that he does — or rather, if it is, it is hard to pin down exactly what those things are. Menace seems to adhere to him, as a quality.
It is cultivated, he tells Viola. The air of menace is a part of the job.
“That doesn’t make it any less menacing,” Viola says.
“Is it a problem?”
“No, I think I like it,” Viola says. “In a lover. I don’t think that I would want to live with it.”
“I see,” the FBI agent says, then begins to sulk. He sulks greatly, while for example tying Viola to the motel room bed. He even sulks while having sex with her. At first it is funny, but then after a while it’s too much. He is temperamental, Viola thinks, not for the first time. He has a sensitive soul. The soul, perhaps, of an artist.
“How do you cultivate it? The air of menace,” Viola asks, intending this as a sort of peace offering.
There are ten basic methods, the FBI agent tells her, though of course individual agents are free to come up with their own variations. “Method number one: The scowl. It should not be a simple, straightforward, or otherwise thuggish scowl. It should contain elements of both disappointment and resolution. One should look as though one is scowling in spite of one’s own inclinations, that one would rather not be scowling but that one recognizes the necessity of the scowl. It should be clear, in other words, that the necessity of the scowl arises from circumstances outside of oneself.
“Method number two: The question of what to do with one’s arms. This is a difficult one; fidgeting of any sort betrays weakness. Many people, in attempting to portray an air of menace, will cross the arms in front of the torso. That is incorrect. It telegraphs to the target one’s own insecurity, that one must so forcefully project confidence. Much better to keep one’s arms at one’s sides, loose and ready. Rather than mask fidgeting, one demonstrates thereby that one simply isn’t going to fidget.
“Method number three: Cleanliness. Method number three-b: Clean-shavenness. Methods number four through eight, classified. Method number nine: Righteousness. One should never give the appearance of so much as a moment of self-doubt. It should be clear that any violence that one is to visit upon the other, no matter how distasteful personally (see method one), is absolutely necessary from a grander perspective. Method number ten: Dark, freshly-pressed suits.”