It was sultry and wet, he remembers, and long after midnight. In a town south of Rome, they’d braked near a piazza to consult a map. The streets were devoid of life and traffic, as though they’d time-tripped to a medieval night emptied by a plague. The rain pooled among the cobblestones had mixed with the lamplight and gleamed like warped sequins scattered by an angry tailor. Hungover from the wedding reception, his head fell backwards on the passenger headrest.
He was famished to touch her but his longing, perhaps too demanding in spite of the clues, had turned on itself and braided through the drunken tune he was humming.
Unexpectedly, she stopped his humming with a kiss.
His heart somersaulted its rhythm and came to a stunned awakening. The yearning sluiced out of him. Her kiss lingered, somewhere between a passing fancy and a confession, but he was too dumbstruck to respond.
Not opening his eyes, he let the crinkle of upholstery tell him she’d slid back into the driver’s seat. At once, with his dry, bewildered mouth, he dared to propose, “Kiss me again.”
He felt her shift—oh no, he hadn’t meant to impose, to put her ill at ease, to set himself up for disappointment—and then, as she lowered her lips once more, the softest breath from her nose bathed his cheek.
***
He lies on his back, naked but for his white shorts, under his pear tree in the August dusk. Hands folded on his stomach, he suggests a stone effigy adorning a tomb in a European cathedral. The branches above him are stooped with their load, nearly grazing the lawn he hasn’t cut in weeks. It’s been a tropical, humid summer and the tree has borne fruit with compulsive fertility.
The day is gone. Whether he floats through them or builds events with bustle,
days come and then close. The hours that get away don’t trouble him. Through the screen door, he hears the kitchen phone ringing.
“Noctilucent,” he calls. It’s an endearment his wife won’t recognize and his voice is too fluttery from his remembrance to reach her anyway. His wife. Ah, but for how long?
***
In their childhood, they’d shared their hometown’s hardscrabble quarter, fathers precariously employed, mothers who helped out. Her parents had immigrated to England and his across the Atlantic, all for the better. She’d drifted out of his memories over two decades until her letter arrived out of the blue wanting to re-establish contact. What gumption she flashed in her letter: “I came across some pictures of you in your infanzia. You looked adorable but they also confirmed my recollection of your scowl. It’s there in black and white for posterity.”
After all these years, both families had returned for a holiday on the occasion of a former neighbor’s upcoming marriage. It coincided nicely with his need to scout Rome’s mundane locations for the characters in his first novel.
The wedding reception had been in the Ristorante L’Orione in Monte San Giovanni Campano. He recalls that name as easily as Karl’s, his wife’s lover, and the infidelity he’s pieced together from rare clues and from eavesdropping on her telephone conversations.
Would the restaurant have survived these many years? He’ll write his elderly uncle in Italy and ask. But will the old man’s erratic memory be of any use? The stars peeking behind the pears make him wish he too could forget, at least selectively.
On the invitation, Monte S. Giovanni Campano was printed in gold lettering. It has a hilly lilt as he pronounces it quietly. Beside the restaurant, on a road snaking higher still, was a ruin that a guest declared had once hosted St. Thomas Aquinas. He’d walked to inspect it and found the antiquity ravaged, barred and mute with the setting sun darkening its remaining tower.
As he was wending back to the celebrations, he spied her standing by the retaining wall that overlooked the steep drop to the valley. She was dressed in a blue chiffon so light he fretted the breeze might nudge her over the side. But, as he was to learn, she was hardier beneath that ethereal fabric.
Men are blunt or crude or incapable whereas women reveal their attraction to you subtly. He should’ve seen it coming. They speak to you at close range or find an excuse to touch you. A hand on a forearm or a shoulder. Briefly. Longer if you pretend not to notice. That’s how he could tell at the reception. A kiss, of course, was obvious but a kiss could lie.
***
“Didn’t you hear the phone?” His wife sounds a little annoyed outside the arbor of boughs.
“As in a dream.”
“It was Forson.”
“The relentless Mr. Forson. Fidgety Forson of Nag, Badger and Goad? What did he want now?”
“What he always wants now—a manuscript.”
“There is no manuscript.”
“He doesn’t believe it.”
“Who can blame him? I hardly believe it myself. Look at this tree. If every pear were a chapter, I’d have come up with four novels a year.”
“What are you going to do with those tomatoes?”
“The tomatoes are different. They’re short stories.”
“Last time you told me stories were rivers.”
“So they can be. Some flow, some need engineering and some are dammed. I’m currently working on the salvation of the third.”
“They’re rotting on the vine. Are you going to bottle them, eat them, what?”
“Eat them.”
“You can’t. There must be bushels of them.”
“You think not? Today, the child and I began with tomato soup. Then we followed with a delicious tomato salad. Simple salt and olive oil. No burden to the arteries. Wonderful for dipping in bread. Next, we munched a couple of barbecued hamburgers piled with tomato slices. And, for dessert, we had tomato ice cream. So if she’s looking red, it’s not sunburn.”
“You should take better care of the things you plant. What have you been doing this week?”
“Consoling the peach trees. Here the tomatoes and pears are running riot and from them, nothing. Little undersized fruit. Golf balls. Only the damn squirrels got a taste. They’re definitely male and female, so that’s not the problem. What do you think? They didn’t cross-pollinate because they had a spat? Maybe they got crossed up. Something intended for the other peach ended up on the pear. Can trees be unfaithful?”
He listens intently to her answer. “It’s your garden,” she says. There’s no sign his last remark has disturbed her.
“I love watching it all bloom. At my funeral, I want Katy to say something like, ‘My father was a gardener. Everything he touched grew.’”
“Forson wants you to call him back. For the hundredth time.”
“Tell him the manuscript’s been in the oven. It’s cooling.”
“He’s your agent. I’m not lying for you.”
But to me, he thinks, well, that’s another kettle of fish. “Why don’t you get out of those sticky clothes and sit down.” Though he hasn’t looked up, he knows her garments are crisp and fashionable. He smells her perfume above the soapy cleanliness of skin.
“I’m going out.”
“Seven years ago, you’d have gotten down to your undies.”
“I doubt it. The neighbors would have to be considerably farther.”
“I think you would’ve,” he disagrees but politely. “Just sit down for a minute. Please.”
She briefly debates his offer. The branches have grown so lushly they now barricade the entrance more solidly than the gate. Using her arm, she wards them off like rude requests. The movement dislodges a few of the weaker pears and she hears them plop onto the cushiony grass. She ducks under the boughs and, careful to clear an area of the bumpy, overripe fruit already fertilizing the ground, seats herself behind his head. It is not out of intimacy. The small tree creates a tight circumference and she doesn’t want the branches hooking and messing the hair she’s been styling for half an hour. As it is, pears hang in front of her eyes like Christmas decorations. She raises the back of her dress to keep it from staining.
Her husband seems to be wearing dark sleeves from his biceps to his wrists. It’s the only part of him that has caught any sun. He says he worries about skin cancer. He is so pale under the tree, pale as the moon, pale as though someone had taken a rolling pin and with the dough of the moon rolled him out long and narrow.
“Seven years ago you were Noctilucent.”
“That was your name for me.”
He is pleased it has stuck with her. “No, mine was Not Too Lucid. We laughed over it. It was you who found it in that book on weather patterns for Katy’s school project. And I was?”
“How should I remember?”
“How is it I do?”
“Did you ask me in here to fight? You aren’t who you were seven years ago, either.”
“Oh?”
“You hadn’t retreated into your little spaces. Your writing was a mistress I couldn’t compete with; I liked how it made me jealous. But at least Katy had a father functioning full-time.”
Her speech is unintelligible to him. Only the name registers. “Is Katy in bed?”
“Reading.”
“You afraid she’ll look out and see the old folks starkers in the grass?”
“She’s too book-crazy for that. Who can see anything in this overgrown yard? It’s looking like an Argentine pampa. Why isn’t Katy bug-eyed in front of a music video like her girlfriends? Why isn’t she dizzier about boys?”
“An overdose of literary genes, I suppose. But seven...”
“It was a silly period.”
“It’s important for us to be silly. Come on, last chance.”
“I’ve made a point of forgetting.”
“You’re just saying that to please me.”
“I’m going to be late.”
She can no longer decipher this man who on a windy night goes to bed early just to hear his pear branches soughing in the dark. She’s awakened to see his eyes unfocused, moonlight glinting off them, perhaps thinking, more likely his mind
paralyzed by the lack of thought. He was writing, he was sparking with ideas, and then he was not. For a time, they were aging in tandem, in temperament, and then, picking up speed, he began curving away as trains do, outbound from a multi-track station.
She’s watched him lose his elasticity, become frazzled. When he started writing, he wanted to outdo Shakespeare. It excited her. Later, he scaled it down to winning the Nobel Prize. That too was admirable. Now he’s settled for making a living from his scribblings. She could accept this status if he would. Checks still arrive but no one has sung his praises for some time. Maybe Forson has an offer to adapt a screenplay from the novel for the postponed movie. Maybe they want to finally make the movie without him but that too would be good for morale and sales.
It had begun otherwise, on a spring tour of a maple syrup farm of all places. While the guide was explaining how they collected the sap, she leaned towards him and whispered, “I think I love you.”
He’d replied, “When you’re sure, let me know.” So confident, brash even. Nothing scraggly about his ambitions. There and then, whether she fully did or not, she’d stopped “thinking” about it. But his last pronouncement, in a similar vein, over a year ago at least, had been, “My life feels productive but without resonance. Like a farmer’s.”
She’s felt their days become parched and herself withering with him. She’d like to shield their daughter from repeating the experience.
“I was Vespertine,” he reminds her, almost a scold.
“Brandy’s been fed and walked. I have an early conference call tomorrow. If I’m off before you’re up, don’t forget to take her to the vet. Her left eye is still running. Should I leave you a note?”
“Do you know when life begins, Noctilucent? When the kids move out and the dog dies.” She doesn’t laugh and a bit of malice surfaces. “That was humor, Nocti, something Groucho Marx might say in my mood. How many Marx brothers were there?”
“Four.”
“Called?”
“Groucho, Chico, Harpo... and another one.”
“I’m sure there were five. A German relative who joined them.”
“Never heard of him.”
Yes, he admits, it’s far too vague for her to make the connection. Marx. Karl. He hasn’t winkled out the man’s surname yet. But to specify his name might give away the game. And he hasn’t really built a conclusive case against Karl yet. Best to let sleeping Brandies lie.
He says, “You think I don’t know, but I do.”
“Did you make out the check for Katy’s class trip in October?”
“Why not? Travelling broadens the horizons. Twain says it is fatal to prejudice and narrow-mindedness. She might meet a nice boy. It would make you happy.”
***
In one of her last letters, she’d written, “I’ve just come back from Spain where I’ve been on holiday with two men! One couldn’t walk (arthritis) and the other wouldn’t stop running (exercise freak). It only seemed to reconfirm I’m not a man’s woman. There are naturally a few exceptions (you being one of them except when we argued). You’re the only male I’ve ever contemplated living with and circumstances beat me there.”
He should’ve tried harder to bridge their disparate aspirations. He should’ve made light of the span of ocean that separated them. It’s the Russians who say a chasm can’t be crossed in two jumps. He hadn’t grasped his moment. He thought he could win her in installments.
Or would he only have made himself foolish by pursuing an independent woman impossible to tie down?
But what if his failure to seize the chance had been a preview? What if the boldness of his trip, of his first novel, of asking for a second kiss, was already in decline? What if his readiness to take risks had already slipped from its high-water mark?
***
“I met a nice girl once on a trip,” he reminisces.
“And what happened?”
“Circumstances.”
“You’re joking. I had a pear yesterday when I was sunning myself. They looked good and I picked one. If I’d waited for circumstances, I still wouldn’t have tasted it.”
“Such initiative you have, Noctilucent. What will it bring us?”
Why is she listening to nonsense under a tree? This latest indulgence of his, harmless but dead-end, makes her impatient to be on her way. “Did you leave the credit card in the Toyota? You could’ve gassed it up for a change. And don’t let Katy have any more muffins. She took a handful upstairs with her.”
He hears the rustle of her dress but can’t trump up anything to entice her to stay. He won’t plead again for her company. As she bends forward to rise, her mouth passes above his head—half the gap it had been—and with a distant wistfulness he sighs, “Kiss me, Noctilucent.”