This might be the subject about which Barb had learned the most, during the afternoon’s private screening. The mother had no more than half a notion of just what she would say to her seventeen-year-old, once she got him back into the apartment, but she understood, through and through, the dynamics between him and Romy. She saw how the crush suffered strains beyond the obvious, the skin color and the socio-economico what-have-you. Also Barbara’s big American wasn’t so stupid after all. He hadn’t failed to notice the way the gypsy’s hands were forever double-checking something or other, compulsively, and he hadn’t failed to make the connection to his youngest brother. The manhandling that Romy had suffered must’ve saddled her with the same sort of unease, and JJ had been smart enough to realize coming too close might leave him likewise bruised. Then there was the girl’s end of the dynamics: she’d never had a John like John Junior. She’d never had to deal tender for tender. The gypsy too, Barbara would bet, had gotten skittish whenever the hugging and kissing went on too long.
As her driver poked through the gathering afternoon traffic, Barbara could extrapolate. She could apply the teenagers’ problems to a far older pair, Aurora and Cesare. Barb could practically pick up of the vibrations of Merry Widow and Gloomy Cleric, two rhythms woefully out of synch. Yet she doubted Aurora would prove as smart as her oldest grandson, should she and the priest ever share that first kiss.
Barbara could hear, as well, how Cesare would speak of such differences. The guerilla Jesuit would sound a little like Romy, calling for revolution in the streets, raging about skin color and the socioeconomic. And Barbara knew what she’d say in reply, too. She’d say that Franz Fanon and Karl Marx didn’t know JJ and Romy. Fanon and Marx couldn’t tear their eyes from their own pet projects, worked to death on their private screens, but if they did, they’d make out the new freedoms available at this cracked and upended moment in history. Border-crossing hooking up, Barbara would say, was the inevitable future. Border-crossing, skin-blurring, bank-account-tangling — all of that was coming on at digital speed, a message texted to the entire phone book, wireless and instantaneous. Plus this was Naples, where it wasn’t just the Twenty-first Century of Our Lord, but something like the thirty-first century of multi-culti barter. In this theater of operations, more than in most, the young and hormonal were free to try on any role they felt like. When Barbara’s priest started dithering over which lover had the fatter wallet or the kinkier hair, he sounded as if he still thinking Montagues and Capulets.
Now if a person wanted to talk about relationships as business, as politics, the case in point was Silky Kahlberg. The late Lieutenant Major, too, had a place in Barbara’s meditations on her way back into the city. According to today’s news flash, the White Shadow had preferred his sex man-on-man, and Barb had figured out already that he must’ve been just the opposite of someone like Whitman. Kahlberg would’ve preferred the kind of dynamics you found in prison, where every man’s forehead was stamped either Boss or Bitch. After all, even when he’d been dealing with Jay, a quintessential Kinsey Zero, the NATO officer had manipulated the situation in order to achieve all the additional clout he could. Therefore whenever the liaison man had found a more ambivalent business partner, he must’ve gleefully gone for every advantage, private as well as public. He must’ve run roughshod over the guy.
Now Barbara was into some roughness herself, as the Fiat jostled onto the stones of downtown. They swung around the San Carlo opera house, where the backstage wall used to open onto the Royal Gardens. The singers had performed love songs by Mozart out among the birds and the bees.
Barbara didn’t want to think about it. Love songs, basta—because she still lacked a strategy, a way to begin, once the family got back to the apartment. All things considered, she’d prefer it if Aurora weren’t home. After picking up Jay, it was easy enough to fill him in, though with the driver in mind the wife stripped her explanation down to shorthand. Still, it wasn’t difficult to share the information, thanks to the code of the long-married. In words of one syllable, Jay had agreed they needed the meeting, and in the Vomero gelateria there was no sign of Aurora.
Better yet, the kids were behaving themselves. Nobody appeared all sugared up, though Dora and Sylvia had each gotten a free scoop, the usual treat for the “American dolls.” So Jay and the boys went into the palazzo before Barb and the girls, best to leave any gelato mess out on the stoop, and the mother could use a stretch anyway. In the elevator Barbara laid her hands on her girls’ heads, with a silent prayer for help.
But as soon as she reached her landing, even before the cage clanked open, Chris showed her worse trouble.
His look showed something more childish than could be blamed on his nerd’s glasses, and he took the girls’ hands. He might’ve said that his sisters should wait with him outside the apartment, or Barb might’ve inferred it, picking up yet another code, reading it first in his gaze and posture and then in the spasmodic moaning and gulping that came from the apartment. The mother got the same message from the wide middle-aged back of her husband, in the doorway.
Keep the little ones away, was the message. Keep Dora and Syl from seeing Mama’s priest stretched out naked and fighting a heart attack.
Cesare lay on the couch, his arms and legs splayed up along the wall and down onto the floor, splayed and flailing, as if trying with all four limbs to grab some fat and invisible balloon lifting away from his midsection. Never mind if he exposed his distended cock and iron-gray pubic hair. Never mind if he fell off the couch, though Aurora held him in place, kneeling with one kimono-clad arm across his chest. Nothing mattered except to get hold of that escaping balloon, that ghost of a parade blimp, and the skinny old man pawed after the swollen impalpable thing even with the foot that was still in its black nylon sock. Indeed his drowning reach, his cold feet, all appeared more human than his face: a mottle of brick and chalk, with wrinkles like seismic fissures.
Here was another first morning in midtown, a cityscape so vivid as to suggest that her husband had melted out of Barbara’s way. Here again she needed to sort out the hard surfaces on which she’d stubbed her bones earlier from those against which she was banging for the first time. Banging, to see her priest in cardiac arrest and her mother-in-law beside him, an old couple discovered in the act — and yet Barbara also thought of the Latin, the dead language: in flagrante delicto. Banging and up-to-the-minute, the undone belt on Aurora’s kimono, the small nipples a brighter pink than Barb’s own — and yet what could be more basic, more timeless, than nakedness? What language was simpler than the Braille of the erogenous zones? Barbara could see that she sent the priest into worse convulsions, his eyes leaking tears and his gasps growing louder. His arms and legs trembled, all but losing hold of whatever it was they clung to, his nails scratching the wall and floor. But she couldn’t move, neither to spare Cesare the sight of her nor to help John Junior, on the phone in the corner, gabbling away like a frightened tourist: Aiuto! Aiuto! Barb couldn’t budge from between old hurts and new, like what she’d seen on Whitman’s computer, a boy’s heart and nerves tucked into a file. Only Paul could defeat the paralysis, getting round his mom, his outstretched hands electric. Only Paul could keep on surprising them, laying one of his hands across the priest’s spasmodic chest, above the grandmother’s, while with the other going to the cracked wall of a face, to the mouth already open around a wordless but fluttering language-muscle…