of scattered toys and toy parts and single shoes and old dried bits of half-eaten toast that my kids have scattered about in each room. He laughs at me as I am bent over picking up little pieces of a miniature Italian soccer team.
“Why do you bother?” He smiles. “Fifteen minutes after they get back from the pool, it will be exactly like this again.”
I stand up.
“Yeah, Giovanni. That’s right. But I also brushed my teeth this morning even though I know perfectly well that I will have to brush them again tonight.”
Michele is getting ready for a day at the pool with the kids, loading up his insulated bag with iced tea and frozen water and prosciutto for lunch while I am sitting here with wormy beans, a craving for arugula, radishes, scallions, well-marbled beef, cilantro, avocados, and other more spiritual impossibilities, and somehow, I don’t even remember how, our fifteen-day frost heaves. In a flash we are yelling at each other in the kitchen, our first real conversation with each other since the taxicab to the airport—if you can count that as a conversation—and we’re having it in my preferred, if vulgar, style, at full pitch, with his mother and two brothers sitting at the kitchen table. In English—our only form of privacy, if language can be considered that way—he yells, “Why didn’t you just say so?”
Then he lectures, as if educating me: “Eeet’s so eeeezy,” he says. “Eeet’s so eeezy to just say: Eennuffa with theeee new iPhone. We could have avoided this fifteen-day war!”
And in that moment I find it impossible to explain to him that it’s not about the iPhone. Eeeeezy for somebody, but impossibile for me.
ALDA WANTS TO SEE THE SEA. The rest is a pity to her—the badly repaired front wall, the fallen dead branches, the dry dead garden, the leaves crowding out the driveway, the electricity that fails, the doorknobs that fall off, the burners on the stove worn away to nothing—but the rest is not as imperative as sitting on the front terrace overlooking the sea and actually being able to see the sea. The oleander trees in front have grown so tall over so many years, that, while beautiful, they nonetheless suffocate the house and obscure the incredible wide-open vista of the sea. I, like Alda, have been wanting to sit on that terrace and see the sea since we’ve been coming here. It’s silly. You can stand on the terrace and look out at the sea, but as soon as you sit down with your negroni, you look straight ahead into a thicket of branches and pink-and-white flowers. Like the mealy-moths in the cabinet, I’ve been quietly noting the fact that Michele has a villa, an actual giant villa by the actual sea in Italy Italy, from which you cannot see the sea because the oleander trees have grown over so thickly and tall. You feel stupid, sitting on the old splintered patio furniture, looking straight ahead into an encroaching jungle of soft branches, beyond which we can hear, smell, and feel the sea, the gentle breeze tinkling the mast cables and rings of all the boats in the marina, but we can never see the sea when we sit on the terrace.
Unexpectedly, I find myself offended by this. This casual nonchalance at the demise of great wealth. This effortless letting go of the last of what’s left. Giovanni’s quiet and easy submission to the force of entropy. Michele’s willingness to let me go. The trees fall, the walls crumble, the doorknobs fall off; easy come, easy go. The way I’m wired, with my Protestant dishwasher’s mentality, I bristle at the passivity, the way they just roll over and let defeat pat them on the head.
If I had this incredible asset, this wealth just handed to me, I would take obsessive scrupulous care of it. I would mend the fence myself. Prune back the trees. Oil the locks. Take a second job. Set aside forty dollars a week for a garden rake and seed packets and some soil. The property sags and crumbles each year, subject to weather and vandals, and no one puts up a fight. Michele warns me it would be offensive to his mother, who is legally and bodily the owner until she passes, to display any proprietary care for the place. The art and furniture and “objets” have been robbed and burgled so thoroughly over the years that the villa feels empty enough to rent.