Ruth’s eyes were asking accusingly, Where were you? Césare was simultaneously exclaiming about the brutto tempo and asking how I was and demanding to know how I found myself out here on the West Coast. I got myself a drink and offered to refill Ms. McElvenny. “I’m gonna drive,” she said with a grin. The lights came on. Ruth breathed an excuse and darted for the kitchen. In the door she hung a moment. “Give me fifteen minutes?” she said, and vanished. There we were.
I inspected Ms. McElvenny. She was just the kind of pussycat that Césare collects. In fact, she too put me in mind of the last time we were in Rome, when an American girl came to me wanting me to get her an advance on her manuscript and be a reference in her application for a Guggenheim. She said she worked so well in Rome that she simply must stay another year. She intimated two or three times that she would do anything for the chance. I found myself unable to assist her as much as she wanted me to. Three days later I saw her at a table on the Via Veneto, smiling as any pussycat smiles who has just swallowed a bumblebee, while Italy’s Greatest Novelist poured out to her, leaning head to head across the cloth, his best D’Annunzio monologue.
A version of which he was now giving me. Beside Césare Rulli, Ben Alexander would seem taciturn. He has an interest in everything that moves; only quiet things elude him. He cannot sit still. Sitting, he hitches a chair around like a milking stool. Standing, he hops and strides around with his impetuous limp, gained, he says, from a German bullet when he was with the partisans during the war. I make no judgment on where he spent the war or how he got his limp. Maybe he borrowed it from Lord Byron and liked it so well he forgot to return it. He is a fly in a bottle, a June bug against a screen. Where anyone else would simmer, he boils; where others boil, he erupts.
He didn’t dwell long on the brutto tempo or the view that is like Umbria. He was instantly off on San Francisco, which he has of course fallen in love with: a world city, a city more of Europe than America, a place full of life, excitement, color, motion, a city that knows how to play. Apparently he and his pussycat had seen it all, including two or three topless-bottomless joints in North Beach that they took in after the consul’s party.
“This that you live in is beautiful,” he says with a sweeping gesture that makes Ms. McElvenny protect her sherry glass with both hands. “Bella, bella. Really, it is like Umbria. With cypresses it might be Tuscany. But I am curious, Giuseppe. Why do you live in the country? Why not in San Francisco?”
I said we were close enough. When we needed the City, which was no oftener than once a month, we could be there in less than an hour. Mostly we went for nothing more spectacular than to see an exhibition at one of the galleries or museums, or to walk in Golden Gate Park.
“Golden Gate Park?” says Césare to Ms. McElvenny. “Did we see that?”
“I didn’t think it would be very high on your must list,” says Ms. McElvenny.
The glance he gave her was of such melting warmth and promise and adoration that I expected I might out of pure discretion have to leave the room for a few minutes. “Avevi ragione,” Césare said. “You were right.”
He tipped his glass to drink, and I saw his eyes fix on something across the room. There were the breadpans I had set out on top of the bookcase wall. Below, overlooked in the rush, were the collected works of Oates, O‘Connor, O’Neill, and Katherine Anne. He limped across to inspect them, and after a moment of contemptuous scrutiny limped back.
“I didn’t set them out to impress you with the competition,” I said. “I set them out because the rain had leaked in and got them wet. Your own are farther along the shelf, nice and dry.”
He grunted, regarding me across his raised glass. “So you like it better in the country. What do you do besides put pans under leaks and dig in the mud?”
“Lavoriamo in giardino,” I said. “Leggiamo. Meditiamo. Di quando in quando facciamo una passeggiata.”
“Sei filosofo,” Césare said. He studied me, tasting his drink with pursed lips, with the wincing, pleased, thoughtful expression of a horse drinking ice water. I half expected him to bob his nose in it. “Who are the literary people here? Who is there to talk to?”
I said there were writers up and down the Peninsula, but no literary life as he knew it, no taverns or pubs or sidewalk cafes where they gathered to talk shop and subvert each other’s wives and girl friends. Publishers and agents were all in New York. The local writers operated by mail, a fine economical system.
Squinting in amusement, he called the pussycat’s attention to me with a jerk of shoulder and eyebrow. “Look at him. He was once a man of the world, he had juice in him, he liked conversation, excitement, people, crowds, pretty women, literary discussion. Now he sits on a cow pad and consults the grass. He pretends to be on the shelf. Look, right over there is proof that on the shelf you can get all wet You are not fair to your wife. She is an angel, I adore her, she should be out where things go on. She will look at you and grow dull, dull, dull! Listen. I wish you had been with us in San Francisco. Come back with us tonight, I’ll stay over, we’ll see something besides Golden Gate Park. You don’t want to sit in this imitation Umbria and dig in the mud and struggle against uncivilized nature. That is the way to grow old.”
It was “Up at a Villa—Down in the City” all over again. Bang-whang-whang went his drum, and tootle-de-tootle his fife. After I came in, he didn’t once look outside again, though what was going on out there was spectacular and even frightening. Until Ruth announced lunch—she had lighted candles on the table, anticipating further trouble from Pacific Gas and Electric—he proselytized me on life in the city square. As if I were a high school student, and not a bright one at that, he literally construed me the word “civilization,” and how it came from civis, and the word “urbanity,” and how it came from urbs, and he suggested that, being the man I was, I could not rusticate myself without doing harm to the civilized world.
Since we were on that subject, one on which I have pondered, I reminded him of some other words: “arcadian,” which had its own pleasant connotations, and “civility,” which might once have characterized the civis but which seemed now to be forgotten there. I said if I had my choice I preferred to be suburbane. I said there were enough people around without my going hunting them. I preferred books. And as for pretty girls and amore, I quoted him Aldous Huxley to the effect that sooner or later everybody arrived at the point where he could not take yes for an answer. Miss Pussycat, sipping her barely touched sherry and keeping track of things behind her camel eyelashes, just about broke up over that one.
But Césare could not be diverted from his basic subject, women. He brought them to the table with him and developed them role by role: civilizers, comforters, handmaidens, houris, goddesses, objects of worship, homemakers, matriarchs. He made a speech worthy of an oil sheikh. Miss Pussycat watched and was fascinated, and likewise Minnie, stumbling around the table in her wiped-off but still wet shoes, bulging her white nylon as she thrust platters and bowls before people, her eyes on Césare’s animated face and her thumb comfortably in the sauce.
But after he had run through his set pieces, Césare rather tapered off. The plate that Minnie carried away from his place was only half cleaned. He drank his Green Hungarian without comment, almost impatiently. I had the distinct impression that he was more and more astonished that we had asked him down en famille. Why were there no other people, why had no one been invited in to meet him? Why, when we obviously were well enough off to choose, did we choose to eat like peasants in a kitchen, without the stimulation of guests? Why had we not understood that a famous novelist appreciated a larger audience? His eye once or twice wandered to Ms. McElvenny’s. He yearned to be gone.
At two-thirty she took her cue, stood up from the coffee tray in the living room, and said they ought to leave. It was such a terrible day, bad for driving, and they had appointments. How lovely of us to let her come down and kibitz on our reunion. On departure, Césare embraced Ruth and then me, clapping my sh
oulders as if he were Anthony and I Enobarbas. When were we next coming to Rome? We must absolutely let him know. We must be pulled out of our retirement and restored to civilization. And for today, and the chance to see us even so briefly, mille grazie. And rrivederci. And venga, venga a Roma.
I held an umbrella over the two of them as we all ran for their car, and got myself wet all over again. As they grimaced and waved from behind their streaming windows and swashing wipers, I stood there like Little Boy Blue’s tin soldier, waving them off. When I came in, I was depressed and irritable, and I have been that way ever since.
By working our heads off, we managed to give Césare the dullest two and a half hours he has had since arriving in America. Any lunch in the City, anything from fog cutters and Indonesian saté at Trader Vic’s to a beer and a Polish sausage down at the Eagle, among the longshoremen by Pier 37, would have pleased him more. It did not occur to him, so busy was he talking up women and civilization, to comment on Ruth’s food, which was better than anything he would have got in the City. He was not moved by the Green Hungarian, though it is so much better than the sulphurous Frascati he is used to that he should never know peace in Rome again. Nothing we provided him, including the company, was anything but a bore. His monologues were wasted on an empty house. He pities me, I saw it in his face.
One thing he did do—he impressed Minnie. “Ain’t he a sky-rocket, though?” she said as we gathered to clean up. “What is he, Eyetalian?”
“He’s a famous Italian novelist,” Ruth said tightly. She was squeezing a headache between her brows. “Some people, including himself, have mentioned him for the Nobel Prize.”
“Is that so?” Minnie said. “He talks like a writer, don’t he? And don’t he like the ladies! He never took his eye off his girl friend the whole time. Who’s she? She don’t sound Eyetalian.”
“Ms. McElvenny is a San Francisco girl who will go far, and undoubtedly has,” I said.
“Joe,” said my weary wife, “you don’t know a thing about it.”
The hell I don’t. I know Césare.
Now here I sit looking out into the dripping live oak, with somber afternoon fading to gloomy dusk outside, the study chilly because I haven’t had the ambition to build a fire in my little Norwegian stove, and my spirits as gloomy as the evening and as chilly as the room. God damn that Roman cricket with his non-stop monologue and his pussycat and his civis and his urbs. He has managed to make me feel ten years older than I was yesterday —out of it, self-exiled, and without the courage of my convictions, without the grace to be content with what I chose.
Tonight, unless Ruth’s headache alters the plan, I suppose I will have to read another installment of the journals of Joseph Allston, 1954. I am not sure I like Ruth’s prescription any better than I like Césare’s, and I find that I resent the assumption both of them make, that I have stopped, and am in need of repair. It irritates me to have people blowing out my gas line and testing my sparkplugs and feeling all over me for loose wires. I suppose Ruth thinks of me as that melancholy Half-Dane in need of comforting and mothering; maybe she also thinks of my life, which is also hers, as a sort of in-house soap opera. But mainly she yearns over me and knows things that I should do to become her old nice funny Joe again.
I can’t see that Danish episode as an adventure, or a crisis survived, or a serious quest for anything definable. It was just another happening like today’s luncheon, something I got into and got out of. And it reminds me too much of how little life changes: how, without dramatic events or high resolves, without tragedy, without even pathos, a reasonably endowed, reasonably well-intentioned man can walk through the world’s great kitchen from end to end and arrive at the back door hungry.
2
April 7, Havnegade 13:
What am I after? Lost health? Lost content? Misplaced identity? Am I punishing myself? As a form of suicide, Denmark doesn’t seem unpleasant, as a health resort it leaves room for improvement Or maybe the Bertelsons were right in thinking me an ally, Maybe I do have this notion that the old country is simpler and better. But also, I knew before we came that it would probably be dull. Would I go back to live in the Middle West that I’m always defending against New York snobbery? Not for money. Yet here we are in Denmark, which you couldn’t tell from Indiana at fifty paces, and the puritan in me keeps wanting to rub my nose in it, and every now and then shivers with the exquisite pleasure of the hair shirt.
Whether I’m after simplicity or after punishment, observe the irony of the place we’ve found to live in. The desk I am writing at is Empire, the drawing room I sit in is Louis Quinze. The steel engravings on the walls, all portraits of wigged gentlemen with swords, are either German barons related to the landlady’s family, or Kings of France—Louis the Bald and Charles the Fat or vice versa—also related but by the sinister route. They go with the apartment, rented ancestors.
The whole situation is ridiculous. We have always been private people, but here we are sharing the apartment of an indigent countess, and I didn’t even put up a fight. One thing, it’s convenient: you can walk to any part of the old city in ten minutes. Another, it’s more attractive, by a factor of ten, than anything else we looked at. Another, it’s on the water—Havnegade means Harbor Street—and interesting things go on outside our windows. Three stories below, there is the street, then a cobbled quay, then a narrow dead-end canal, then a long warehouse island, then the main canal linking the free port with the south harbor. Seagoing ships whistle for the Knippelsbro, and as the bridge yawns open and a ship slides through, bicycles and cars back up both sides. The ship’s funnels move with dignity behind a frieze of chimney pots and disappear beyond the Exchange building, above which twists up the green dragon’s-tail spire that the Danes looted from the Swedes in some forgotten war.
The cobbles shine in the wet like pewter, the moving cars shine, the slickered backs of pedestrians and bicyclists shine. Girls in belted raincoats pedal along with their rain-stung faces turned sideward, and boys on bicycles shoot the traffic as if they were canoeists in a rapid.
Nevertheless, we must have been still doped with Dramamine to move in here. The countess retains the front studio-bedroom, we take the drawing room, dining room, and back bedroom. We share the kitchen and the one bath. At my time of life, bathroom lines! Hurry up, Countess, I’m in extremis. And one telephone for the two of us, in her room, naturally.
Are we sorry for her because her husband ran out on her? Do we pity a woman who once had everything and now has to share the little she has left with strangers? Maybe. Though she made her proposition with style. You’d have thought she was suggesting a fascinating social experiment instead of making the best of her humiliation.
Apart from the drawing room, the place is not even well furnished. The kitchen and bathroom primitive by American standards, the bedroom furnished in Early Goodwill. Bed I slept in last night a backbreaker, hollowed out by somebody with a most steatopygous behind. If it was once the bed of the countess’ husband, then he must be a man of very peculiar proportions.
There will be more than backaches, I tell Ruth, but she thinks it will work. She and the countess liked each other on sight. “Isn’t she lovely!” the countess said to me when Ruth was looking out the window with the agent. “I love people to look like that!” She says we will get along fine because we will be nice against one another. She will be nice against us, and she knows we will be nice against her. Well, Barkis is willin’. I have seen harder people to be nice against. The agent told us she was once one of the great beauties of Denmark, and so far as I can see, she still is, at forty or so. A husband who would run away from that should have his head carefully examined. But I don’t need a share of her troubles, which seem considerable and a little mysterious, and neither do I want every move we make to be complicated by the feeling that she must be asked along. Nor do I want her around the apartment all the time. I feel too lousy, and she doesn’t have a very good silencer.
Right now she a
nd Ruth are out getting acquainted with the neighborhood greengrocers and bakers and butchers. I ducked, partly because I’m not feeling too well but also because I’m holding back from getting too chummy. Like this morning, when I went out to get tickets for Friday night’s opera. What do I do? I buy three. What does the countess do? After a moment of surprise, almost of consternation, she accepts with pleasure. I have to learn to keep impulses like that under control.
Now here they come down the quay under their umbrellas, each with a bulging string shopping bag. Jabber jabber jabber. A woman’s tongue, said the first American writer of any consequence, is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use. Their wet umbrellas lean together, their bags bump, they are so blinded by talk that they stumble on the paving stones. For Ruth’s sake I’m glad. I made no preparations for Denmark; I intend to look up no writers or publishers, even for social reasons. She can’t have any great expectation of fun. A friend will help.
Ruth is small, the countess five nine or ten, with a vivid face and fine clear skin. She would be statuesque except that she is so animated. An almost feverish eagerness possesses her in conversation, she lights up even before you say anything. Everything is so funny, or so wonderful, or so nice. Maybe the strain of speaking English, in which she is fluent but not always correct, keeps her hyped up. Whatever it is, she couldn’t be more cordial if we had just come ashore on the desert island from which she had been sending up hopeless smoke signals for ten years.
I have a good look at her from up here. She wears a kerchief on her head, but her heavy, smooth, dull gold hair is uncovered in front and gathered behind in a bun that looks as if it might weigh a kilo. Something in the way she moves. Is it breeding, or do they train them? American women who have what is called “bearing” look as if they’d learned it in model school and need a mirror for its constant reassurance. This one, in her tweed suit and sensible walking shoes and utilitarian raincoat, throws it away and still has it.