Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

came that told of shock, a sudden wild flight to America. You were almost instantly back on your feet, but then came the usual stunningly sordid debris of wrecked vows. Bits of them floated downstream through my life.

Hurt and furious, R wanted to cancel you from the record. You weren’t supposed to exist anymore. But Theodora missed you and, to my surprise, at the outset of a new marriage, I missed you, too. So with Theo as an excuse, the first feelers went out, the telephone calls, the letters. Little nearly imperceptible stirrings, the movements of a breaking cocoon. This visit is the outcome, the emergence of a new form of life. And I haven’t got a clue as to what kind of animal it will turn out to be.

Over on the far edge of the bed, my sleeping husband mumbles gibberish that sounds like tag ends of Latin. Veni, vidi, vici. He, too, has indissoluble links with extinct partnerships. I picture an endless mazurka of former wives, husbands, lovers, children, and assorted hangers-on, not excepting au pairs, cleaning women, and pets, and suddenly the whole thing makes me sick. I lie awake another half hour, furious at myself for inviting you, and at you for using up the air in my guest room.

You said you wanted to go along when I drive Theo to school in the morning, and when I knock on your door at seven, you emerge dressed, with the groomed, cold-shower flush that professional people have in the early morning. And you are carrying your black overnight bag.

I just remembered that I promised to have drinks with friends at the Principe di Savoia tonight, you say, as you and I and Theo clump down the freezing cold stone steps to the kitchen. It’s all done correctly, discreetly, with impeccable regard for dignity, yours and mine. And with a slight implied rebuke for something overbearing and yet insincere in my insistence on your staying a second night. I am put in my place, and though it irks me I have to admire you for it. You don’t take even the subtlest shit from anybody.

The American School is ten minutes away in a nearby suburb, a beautiful medieval town with a sixteenth-century Savoy castle looming over it. I had hoped for clear weather, but the November fog is so thick this morning that we can see only the silhouette of a tower and a soaring brick parapet. The car winds slowly through the labyrinth of slick cobblestone streets, as trees and pedestrians loom and vanish, and the fog lights of other cars shine in cone-shaped beams around us. Signs of provincial commerce—frutteria, trattoria, bar, supermercato—slide in and out of sight. We drop Theo off at the school gate, and you get out and hug her and tell her you’ll write to her. I know you will, says Theo, in a serene voice that makes me want to cover her with kisses. She stands clutching her book bag, smiling and waving sleepily at us through the fog.

And at last we are on our own. We drive into the center of Turin, and I take you first for breakfast to one of my favorite bars, an Art Nouveau place frequented by opera fans, set under the arcades near the Teatro Regio. Then we cross the bridge over the Po on foot, and poke around the fashionable shops near the Gran Madre church; and end up lunching on roast kid and potatoes at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant in Via Mazzini. The whole time, in fits and starts, we have the conversation that is the occult reason this whole visit occurred.

It is not nearly as much fun as similar conversations have been in the past. Once at college, when I had been battling a roommate of mine for the affections of a scoundrelly med student, we both came to our senses over a bottle of tequila and in one epic night probably talked the wretch into a premature grave. Ah, those are the ribald confidences between unbuttoned ex-consorts that rightfully strike terror into the heart of every male. Incantatory insults to every gasp of his sexual performance, shrieks of witchy laughter over each stitch of his wardrobe and every pimple on his poor vulnerable ass.

But what you and I have to say about the man in the matter has a surprisingly wan quality. There is no blood, no tears, no sweat, no sperm in any of it. With a great many words, we compare a few notes, settle a few minor questions, chuckle with a curious sound of mortification. Out of some bizarre sense of etiquette, that has to do with your being the guest, we talk more about you than about me. We keep coming close then veering away from a central mystery that seems in my imagination to shine like a big incandescent globe between us. The question in its bare simplicity is whether or not we were really married to the same man.

Not whether or not we fucked him, because that, as we have seen, creates a farcical camaraderie between two women. Not whether we were both in love with him, because that shifts things into the banal rose-colored light of the eternal triangle. Not even whether we both lived with him, since that is simply within the classic tradition of ex-girlfriends swapping complaints about his farts, his blissful indifference both to laundry and to the historical grief and pain of female existence, his annoying party trick of dancing the boogaloo with a bottle of Dos Equis balanced on his head.

No; whether or not we were both married to him, feeling the weight that is marriage. The extra dimension, whatever it is, that gives simple lovemaking an affiliation with eternity; that makes one able to view a mole on the back of a strong young male neck—a reddish mole we both are familiar with—with a feeling of investment, an instinct that a great deal of knowledge still