She was studying me, her shrewd eyes, the little nugget of her face. She sighed, closed the magazine and rose from her seat. “It is not a problem,” she said finally. “If I do not like them I will not sleep with them.”
And what about me? I wanted to say. What about Disneyland and Zuma Beach and all the rest of it? Instead I turned on her. “You’re crazy,” I spat. “Nuts. Don’t you know what you’re getting into?”
Her eyes hadn’t left mine, not for a second. She was a foot away from me. I could smell her perfume — French, four hundred dollars the ounce. She shrugged and then stretched her arms so that her breasts rose tight against her chest. “What am I to do,” she said in her smallest voice, so languid and sad. “I have nothing, and you will not marry me.”
That was the end for us, and we both knew it.
I took her out to dinner that night, but it was a requiem, an interment. She stared off into vacancy. Neither of us had much to say. When we got home I saw her face illuminated for an instant as she bent to switch on the lamp, and I felt something stir in me, but I killed it. We went to our separate rooms and to our separate beds.
In the morning, I sat over a cup of lukewarm coffee and watched her pack. She looked sweet and sad, and she moved as if she were fighting an invisible current, her hair streaming, imaginary fish hanging in the rafters. I didn’t know if the escort-service business was a bluff or not, didn’t know how naive — or how calculating — she was, but I felt that a burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Now that it was over, I began to see her in a different light, a softer light, and a sliver of guilt began to stab at me. “Look, Irina,” I said as she struggled to force her suitcase shut, “I’m sorry. I really am.”
She threw her hair back with a jerk of her chin, shrugged into the baby-blue patent-leather jacket.
“Irina, look at me—”
She wouldn’t look. She leaned over to snap the latches on her suitcase.
“This is no poem, Irina,” I said. “This is life.”
She swung round so suddenly I flinched. “I am the one, Casey,” she said, and her eyes leapt at me. “I am the one who can die for love.”
All the bitterness came back to me in that instant, all the hurt and guilt. Zhenya, Japan, the mysterious benefactor in Moscow, Rob Peterman and how many others? This was free enterprise, this was trade and barter and buying and selling — and where was the love in that? Worse yet: where was the love in me?
I was hard, a rock, granite. “Then die for it,” I said.
The phrase hung between us like a curtain. A car moved up the street. I could hear the steady drip-drip-drip of the kitchen tap. And then she bowed her head, as if accepting a blow, and bent for her suitcases. I was paralyzed. I was dead. I watched her struggle with her things, watched her fight the door, and then, as the sudden light gave way to darkness, I watched the door swing shut.
RESPECT
WHEN SANTO R. STEPPED into my little office in Partinico last fall, I barely recognized him. He’d been a corpulent boy, one of the few in this dry-as-bones country, and a very heavyset young man. I remembered his parents — peasants, and poor as church mice — and how I’d treated him for the usual childhood ailments — rubella, chicken pox, mumps — and how even then the gentlest pressure of my fingers would leave marks on the distended flesh of his upper arms and legs. But if he’d been heavy then, now, at the age of twenty-nine, he was like a pregnant mule, so big around the middle he hardly fit through the door. He was breathing hard, half-choked on the dust of the streets, and he was wet through to the skin with sweat. “Doctor,” he wheezed, sinking a thumb into the morass of his left pectoral, just above the heart, “it hurts here.” An insuck of breath, a dab at the brow, a wince. I watched his bloated pale hand sink to cradle the great tub of his abdomen. “And here,” he whispered.
Behind him, through the open door, the waiting room full of shopkeepers, widows and hypochondriacs looked on in awe as I motioned Crocifissa, my nurse, to pull the door closed and leave us. My patients might have been impressed — here was a man of respect, who in the company of his two endomorphic bodyguards had waddled up the stairs and through the waiting room without waiting for anyone or anything — but for my part, I was only alarmed at the state he was in. The physician and his patient, after all, have a bond that goes far deeper than the world of getting and keeping, of violence and honor and all the mess that goes with them — and from the patient’s point of view, self-importance can take you only so far when you come face to face with the man who inserts the rectal thermometer.
“Don R.,” I said, getting up from the desk and simultaneously fitting the stethoscope to my ears, “I can see that you’re suffering — but have no fear, you’ve come to the right man. Now, let’s have a look….”
Well, I examined him, and he was as complete and utter a physical wreck as any man under seventy who has ever set foot in my office. The chest pain, extending below the breastbone and down the left arm to the wrist and little finger, was symptomatic of angina, a sign of premature atherosclerosis; his liver and spleen were enlarged; he suffered from hypertension and ulcers; and if he didn’t yet have a full-blown case of emphysema, he was well on his way to developing it. At least, this was my preliminary diagnosis — we would know more when the test results came back from the lab.
Crocifissa returned to inform me that Signora Malatesta seemed to be having some sort of attack in the waiting room, and as the door swung shut behind her, I could see one of Santo’s bodyguards bent over the old woman, gently patting her on the back. “Momento,” I called out, and turned to Santo with my gravest expression. “You are a very unwell man, Don R.,” I told him, “and I can’t help but suspect that your style of living has been a contributing factor. You do smoke, do you not?”
A grunt. The blocky fingers patted down the breast pocket of his jacket and he produced an engraved cigarette case. He offered me a Lucky Strike with a gallant sweep of his arm and, when I refused, lit one up for himself. For a long moment he sat meditating over my question with a lungful of tobacco smoke. Finally, he shrugged his shoulders. “Two or three packs a day,” he rasped, and appended a little cough.
“And alcohol?”
“What is this, Doctor, the confessional?” he growled, fixing me with a pair of dangerous black eyes. But then he subsided, shrugging again. “A liter of Chianti or Valpolicella with my meals — at breakfast, lunch, evening snack and dinner — and maybe two or three fiaschi of brandy a day to keep my throat open.”
“Coffee?”
“A pot or two in the morning. And in the evening, when I can’t sleep. And that’s another problem, Doctor — these pills that Bernardi gave me for sleeping? Well, they have no effect on me, nothing, I might as well be swallowing little blue capsules of cat piss. I toss, I turn. My stomach is on fire. And this at four and five in the morning.”
“I see, yes,” I said, and I pulled at the little Vandyke I’ve worn for nearly forty years now to inspire confidence in my patients. “And do you — how shall I put it? Do you exercise regularly?”
Santo looked away. His swollen features seemed to close in on themselves and in that moment he was the pudgy boy again, ready to burst into tears at some real or imagined slight. When he spoke, his voice had sunk to a whisper. “You mean with the women then, eh?” And before I could answer he went on, his voice so reduced I could barely hear him: “I–I just don’t seem to feel the urge anymore. And not only when it comes to my wife, as you might expect after ten years of marriage, but with the young girls too.”