Fin & Lady: A Novel Read online

  “You can drink wine in Europe,” she said. “They don’t have alcoholics because children drink wine. You have to wear long sleeves in churches. In Italy you say ‘please’ when you mean ‘excuse me.’”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said.

  Helen Keller died. Her father had been a Confederate soldier. He found out about the Perkins School for the Blind in a book by Charles Dickens.

  Robert Kennedy was shot. The world was coming apart.

  * * *

  On the plane, Fin was in the window seat. He looked at the clouds and the sky and was suddenly filled with happiness. He was on his way to see Lady. The world was coming apart, he reminded himself. Lady had abandoned him. Bobby Kennedy was dead. Martin Luther King was dead. His mother had loved John F. Kennedy and he was dead and she was dead. But still the clouds billowed like an infinite sea below and the sky darkened and the stars came out.

  Beside him sat a woman who put on eyeshades and took a pill as soon as she sat down. The stewardess wore a little armylike hat and a pin on her collar with gold letters: TWA. Fin couldn’t remember what he ate, couldn’t remember much about the plane except the hat and the pin and the sleeping passenger in the eyeshades. He remembered climbing over the sleeping woman as quietly as he could to go to the bathroom. He remembered crawling back into his seat, again without waking her. He remembered wondering where she was going after they landed in Rome and if she spoke English. He thought of his first, and only other, flight, with his mother and father. It seemed so long ago. It was so long ago. Almost ten years. And here he was, going to find Lady again. He remembered wondering if she would run away again nine and a half years into the future. He would be twenty-four and a half and he would be flying across the Atlantic Ocean looking for Lady. And then nine and a half years after that. And nine and a half years after that, until he was an old man and Lady was a very old woman, still running away. He remembered thinking those things, he told me, and he wished, so many years later, that they could have been true.

  On the train, Fin clutched his guitar case and sat on his backpack. The train was crowded with people so foreign he could have been in a dream. Kerchiefs and crumpled hats, cardboard suitcases spread on laps, cheese and bread unwrapped from butcher paper, smiles from a wrinkled face, suspicious glances from others. He had walked past each compartment, his guitar bumping into the doors ridiculously, his eyes cast down, until he settled on the floor in the area near the toilet. When the conductor came, Fin’s heart pounded. What if his ticket was wrong? What if the conductor made him sit in a compartment with people who would stare at him? But the conductor smiled, took his ticket, and moved on. Fin bought a sandwich through the open window when they stopped somewhere, he no longer remembers where, only the sandwich itself, fragrant, greasy salami on a round, hard roll. He slept then. When they reached Naples, he checked his money and took a taxi to the ferry, the ancient city slipping past him in a humid, chaotic blur. Soon he would see Lady. What would he say to her? Would he ask her how she could have abandoned him like that, with no warning, no discussion, no explanation? No. He would say nothing about it. He would be happy to see her. They would swim off a boat and visit the Blue Grotto.

  And then they would go home to New York.

  Enchanted

  “Questo è Michelangelo,” Lady said. She presented the man as if he were a Michelangelo, a sublime marble monument in a city, as if he were the city itself, an actual city, a great city. As if he were Rome. As if, like Rome, he had existed for thousands of years, as if, like Rome, he were an empire, as if he straddled the world. “Questo è Michelangelo.”

  Michelangelo was not as obviously good-looking as any of Lady’s usual suitors. Foreign-looking, absolutely. No one could have mistaken him for an American. His nose took up a lot of his face. Large, a little bony, a foreign nose, not sharp, not bulbous, not pug or hooked or aquiline. Not American. His mouth was a little sulky. Sometimes he pushed his lips out, just a little, when he was thinking. When he dismissed an idea, his lips pushed out a little more, a quick puff, a kiss of disdain. He was dark, tanned, with dark wavy hair combed back, away from his face. But it was his eyes that caught your attention. That’s what Lady said, and Fin had to agree. His eyes were as blue as the blue water; Lady was right. His eyes were sad and steady, but most of all, they were blue, each time he looked at you, blue. Blue again. As if they got bluer.

  “Michelangelo! Finino!”

  Fin couldn’t tell which made Lady more excited, more nervous—that Fin was meeting Michelangelo or that Michelangelo was meeting Fin.

  They took the tram up the steep hillside, his guitar case like an extra person, a dwarf squeezed in among the others. Why had he brought it? Lady smiled at him, beamed at him, you’d have to say. He felt as out of place as the guitar case. But taller.

  They emerged in a street lined on one side by shops and cafés, on the other by the Bay of Naples. Fin lowered his backpack.

  “Mommy and Daddy and I took a taxi,” he said. A surrey with the fringe on top, he remembered. Then, suddenly ashamed of the words “Mommy” and “Daddy,” he turned away from Lady and Michelangelo and stared out at the water. The ferry was already making its way back to Naples.

  “This is where Fin and I met,” he heard Lady say to Michelangelo. “This island.”

  “The island is enchanted,” said Michelangelo. His accent was heavy and rather beautiful. “Everything that happens here. Enchanted.”

  What a phony, Fin thought. He turned back, expecting to see Lady rolling her eyes. But she had slipped her arm around Michelangelo’s waist and was looking at him in a manner that Fin, in spite of himself, thought of as indeed enchanted. She seemed womanly, suddenly, to Fin—a woman enchanted. Not the sophisticated New York girl who had run away from home.

  I guess you’re one of the beautiful people now, Fin wrote in a letter. She never answered his letters, not in the sense you usually think of when you say “answer.” There was never a response. There would be, instead, new, unrelated bursts of communication, brief, sporadic: a telegram to Tyler or the copy of the Odyssey or, twice, a postcard. I guess you’re one of the beautiful people now. She hadn’t responded to that conjecture, but looking at her now in the blazing light, looking at her bronzed and grinning beside this man in a loose white shirt and sandals, he knew she had changed. She looked somehow ripe. She looked delicious. She looked calm. She looked, it took him a minute to realize this, happy.

  They stopped at a café.

  “It’s the same one,” Lady said.

  The heat and the dirt and the fatigue of his train ride vanished. Lady was sipping a cappuccino. Nothing had changed. The chairs were the same. The tables. The umbrellas. Lady smiled at him and she was just as beautiful. If she had pulled him onto her lap and given him a teaspoonful of milky coffee, he would not have been surprised. He felt again that confused affinity, as if she’d been another species, but one he’d known all his life.

  He smiled back at her.

  She was so pleased with herself, with her café, her island, her new Italian boyfriend; she was so obviously pleased to be sharing it all with Fin, to be sharing this place, to be sharing the past. How could he say, Lady, you ran away like a thief in the night, you left me alone with three morose men and an addled old lady. And Mabel, of course. How could he say, You scared me? How could he not?

  “Mabel says hello,” he said.

  “I asked her to come, you know.”

  “She has a family,” he said.

  “Who is Mabel?” asked Michelangelo.

  “A member of the family,” Lady said.

  Fin looked away. Lady sounded like Scarlett O’Hara. “She has her own family,” he said. “She is our maid,” he said to Michelangelo. “Our Negro maid. I don’t think she would have felt comfortable here, actually. Lady never mentioned Mabel to you? She’s the one who took care of me when Lady vanished.”

  “Okay, Fin. I know it was sudden, I know I was wrong, but can we talk about th
is later?”

  “Also, there were the three boyfriends. They sort of moved in.”

  “Enough, Fin.”

  “Yeah, but then one of them had to go be in the air force, so he moved his old mother in to keep his place warm. A lot happens, I guess, when you disappear to enchanted islands.”

  Michelangelo said, “Families have many complicateds.”

  Lady kicked Fin’s leg. “You’re foul,” she said. Then she kicked Michelangelo. “You, too.”

  Fin kicked her back.

  “Foul!” she said, laughing.

  “I have many complicateds,” Fin said. He felt better now. Unburdened. “Many, many complicateds.”

  “Just as I say,” said Michelangelo.

  Lady opened her bag and pulled a book out. “Here. It’s about lesbians on Capri. That ought to shut you up.”

  * * *

  Walking behind Michelangelo and Lady, Fin tried to ignore his backpack digging into his shoulders. His guitar case weighed three hundred pounds. More. He was so tired and hot that the sun seemed to obscure the world rather than reveal it. He watched Lady slip her hand into Michelangelo’s. Michelangelo’s hand slipped out again as he lifted his Leica and clicked. At what? Fin saw nothing but the glare and the dark shadows.

  “Michelangelo is a photographer,” Lady said. “A professional photographer,” she added. “An artist.”

  “I desired to make films,” Michelangelo said. “But I am not cut up for it.”

  “You’re a terrific photographer. He’s terrific,” she said to Fin.

  “This is our lives,” Michelangelo said in his melancholy Old World voice. “We cannot fight them.” Then he put his arm around Lady and kissed the top of her head, the way Lady sometimes kissed the top of Fin’s head. “Not all the time, eh?”

  Lady, the fighter, said, “Why not?” But she pushed her head closer against him and walked like that, tilted and protected, like a tree growing into a windy hillside, and added, “On the other hand, why?”

  * * *

  Lady Hadley was in love. She had fallen in love for the first time in her life. And it was not lyrical, it was not the familiar refrain of a song. It was, Fin saw at once, desperate and deep. Lady could not be in the room with Michelangelo without looking at him. And she could not look at him without smiling, a small personal smile. On the beach, the miniature beach at the Marina Piccola, she sat on a towel, her knees bent, her arms clasping her legs, and she gazed at Michelangelo’s back as he lay in the sun, facedown. What did she see there on that long, narrow torso? On the smooth tanned skin? Her future? Looking back on those days in the sun, Fin hoped not. He hoped she saw inscribed on Michelangelo’s back only her sunny present, the gentle waves lapping the shore in the background.

  Every radio in every bar and café seemed to play the same crooning singer singing the same songs that summer. L’amore vieni, l’amore va. Love comes and love goes. That was the kind of Italian Fin learned on his stay in Capri: song lyrics. Love comes and love goes. Ascoltami, perdonami, listen to me, forgive me. Con te ogni istante era felicità. With you every instant was happiness.

  A summer language of song lyrics. Perchè no? Fin said, looking back at that summer long ago. Capri was a musical, lyrical island, the island of the Sirens.

  * * *

  Michelangelo carried his cameras with him everywhere. A Leica hanging from his shoulder, a Rolleiflex from a strap around his neck. He was never at rest, not at a party, not sitting in the piazzetta having a coffee, not on the little boat they sometimes took out, Michelangelo and Lady and Fin, beneath the blue-and-white-striped canopy, letting themselves bathe in the shaded heat before bathing in the turquoise sea. As soon as they climbed back aboard the boat, Michelangelo picked up the Leica and was gone. He was right there, dripping wet, but he was gone. He took pictures of Lady, of the salt water beaded on the graceful slope of her shoulder, of her hand on the varnished wood, of her face turned toward the canopy and the sun that filtered through it, but he was not with her, not with her shoulder or her hand or her face or the boat or the sun. He took pictures of Fin, too. From behind, mostly. Fin wore cut-off jeans to swim in. Michelangelo wore a small, tight European bathing suit, almost a bikini bottom, and Fin often found himself looking away in embarrassment.

  “What are your interests?” he asked Michelangelo. It was habit. It was required. But he already knew.

  “What I see,” said Michelangelo.

  Michelangelo was in Capri for the summer, a long two-month holiday interrupted by occasional shoots that took him away for two or three days. For work, he shot models posing against rocks dressed in the kind of flowing Pucci pajamas Lady sometimes wore in Capri. For his vacation, he was more likely to shoot, simply, the rocks.

  Lady was full of praise for him, planning gallery shows in New York.

  When I go back to the city, she would say at first. When she went back to the city, she would speak to Biffi’s friend Leo about a show.

  As soon as I go back to the city, she began to say after a few weeks.

  Someday, she said a few weeks after that. Someday we’ll get you a show in New York.

  Fin wondered if she would ever really go back. Or would she stay here on this fragrant, rocky island?

  So shalt thou, raptur’d, hear the Sirens’ song.

  But if thou supplicate to be released,

  Or give such order, then, with added chords

  Let thy companions bind thee still the more.

  Lady had turned Homer inside out. She was a Siren lured by the Sirens. She was bound not to the mast of a passing ship but to the island itself.

  “Don’t you miss New York?” Fin asked. “New York is an island, too.”

  They sat in the piazzetta at the Caffè Tiberio. They drank Campari and soda, which Fin pretended to like and by the end of the summer did. The sun was low in the sky. The bell on the clock tower rang.

  “Are you serious?” Lady asked him.

  No. He wasn’t, not really. He could see that Lady did not miss New York. He could see that Lady missed nothing, nothing was lacking, she was full, full of life and full of this place. “But…” he said.

  “But nothing.” She lifted a camera from her lap and aimed it at Fin. “But nothing, Finino.” Click. He still has that picture. A sunburned teenage boy in an unbuttoned oxford shirt, his hair in his eyes, his expression imploring.

  * * *

  A few days later, Michelangelo, standing on the terrace with a glass of white wine, in the rosy light of the setting sun, waved Fin over. “Come,” he said. The sunset rested on white walls of the neighboring houses, a soft blush. “Beautiful, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have nostalgia for New York, I think.”

  Fin looked at him in surprise. He had never talked to Michelangelo about being homesick. Lady must have told him. “A little,” he said. “Sure.”

  “It’s difficult to be in another country’s life.”

  Fin liked that: in another country’s life. “And not its real life, either,” he said.

  Michelangelo smiled. “No,” he said. “Nothing here is real. All is dreaming.”

  Then Lady appeared, barefoot in a white cotton shift. She caught the pink light and glowed. Michelangelo held open his arm and Lady nestled against him. “Lady, darling,” he said. He closed his arm around her gently, kissed her head.

  Then they were all three quiet. The sound of laughter from a boat below them. The buzz of a mosquito. A gull. Fin noticed again the stillness, the calm stillness of Lady when she was with this quiet Italian man. That was real. Michelangelo gave her something, his arm around her shoulders gave her something. The gentle color around them faded to slate, and Fin realized that Michelangelo gave Lady what no one had ever thought to give her, what no one realized she needed. Not protection or guidance or lectures or even ardent, worshipful love. But shelter. As passive and unquestioning and miraculous as a blue cave.

  * * *

  Phoebe sent Fin a letter care of
American Express. She was the only girl in the teen tour from New York. The other girls were from the Midwest. How had her parents come up with this trip? On the other hand, they all drank a lot of wine. The bus driver was at least forty years old and had a nose like W. C. Fields, but the counselor was in her twenties and she and Phoebe hung out a lot and talked about Marcuse. Chartres was beautiful. No wonder the masses were opiated. She hoped he was having a good time. Peace and love and pasta, Phoebe.

  Fin wrote back immediately. He told her he was incredibly tan. He told her Lady was in love with an Italian photographer and he would probably have to live on Capri for the rest of his life, which would be like living on Fire Island for your whole life except much prettier and with better food.

  He said nothing about the way he really felt, because he wasn’t sure how he really felt. To see Lady happy—that was something. It was as if there were two suns on Capri, the bright, gaudy one in the sky and the other sun, the joyous one emanating from his sister.

  “Bella,” said the pharmacist, smiling as Lady left his shop with the Italian version of Sea & Ski. “Here,” he said, touching the place where the heart beats. “Bella here. She is bella, your sister.” This was the sentiment of the waiters, the porters, the chefs who came out from their hot kitchens to greet her, the men and women in every shop selling sandals and espadrilles and salami and Pucci pajama pants. At first Fin assumed it was because Lady threw money around. What merchants wouldn’t respond with smiles to such a generous American customer? It was the way of the world, the fate of the American tourist everywhere. But it was more than that. Lady seemed somehow to belong on Capri. The shady narrow streets, the sunny little piazzas, even the chairlift to the top of Mount Solaro—she was so at home. She knew everyone’s name. In back streets, where tourists did not usually venture, she would greet an old woman in a kerchief by name.

  “How do you know her?” Fin asked.

  “I get around.”

  Or she’d wave to a fisherman who told her where he’d brought his catch, which restaurant, what to order. She knew the elderly English botanist. The taxi drivers called out to her as they drove by.