Then Beatrice injures him by not saying hello. Heartbroken, he tells the ladies who surround him that while his joy once lay in her greeting, now he must locate it in something that cannot be withdrawn. His new path? Words of praise! He resolves to write not of romantic anguish but of the perfections of Beatrice.
Like most of us, Dante finds change easy to talk about, but the prospect overwhelms him. He dithers, he’s beset by fear and trembling. Finally, while traveling by a “clear stream,” he receives a first line … The result: a canzone describing Beatrice’s perfections.
So what would Romei do? Esther was his muse, presumably. He’d praise her, right?
Not exactly.
I’d thought that Esther and Romei, once “liberated” from her husband, would be speechless. In fact, their first act is to dine al fresco in Trastevere, Esther’s Samsonite propped against a wall covered with obscene chalk drawings. Romei avoids her eye, tosses crumbs to urchin cats, sketches nonsense syllables onto a paper tablecloth. He imagines himself a poet Picasso, whose scrawled words will one day pay for dinner, for he is down to his last lire.
Esther, meanwhile, cannot sit stilclass="underline" she spills wine, complains of pains in her hip, gives her ragú back to the waiter, insists she’d ordered carbonara, though she doesn’t eat pork. She tastes her penne, vomits them onto the cobblestones.
Yes, more penne, not filled by Esther this time, but voided, spennar, like Icarus.
You will live with me, Romei says, as if this is a comfort. She wipes her mouth on the tablecloth, looks at him in horror. He looks back at her in dwindling light as if from a mountain top, imagines words falling from her mouth, heavy and broken — and from these on the tablecloth he fashions poems. A blotch between lines three and four represents a smear of sugo, between six and seven, a drop of wine, or so a sidebar explains.
In the days that follow, Esther’s languor, attractive in a lover, is revealed as pathological passivity: she is by turns depressed, hysterical, withdrawn. The passion that brought them together proves no stronger than a wishbone, snapped in two by Esther’s loss, the rigors and banalities of everyday life. Esther refuses Romei her bed, brings men to the flat — foreigners, thieves, CIA operatives. She acts not out of desire, nor to make Romei jealous, but to give form to her despair. When the men finish their business, she sends them off and crawls onto Romei’s lap, babbling, her words slippery and disconnected. He croons at her — in Italian, Romanian too. Her babbling, his crooning (increasingly insincere), neither understood by the other, is the subject of another poem, a long-limbed Whitmanian knock-off, the wind knocked out of every line. The Song of Me-Me-Me taken to its solipsistic extreme.
Housekeeping is a nightmare. Esther can’t cook, her habits are slovenly. She takes the pittances Romei earns from interpreting, from acting as guide to visiting journalists, and spends them on imported Rice Krispies, fat loaves of American bread. Their phone is disconnected: she’s been calling overseas, calling everyone she knows, trying to find her husband. No one will help: even her mother has disowned her. Romei shouts at her in Italian: get up! get up! Curled on a couch, unmoving, she asks in English if she should take up crochet. Croce? Romei wonders. Croce? The cross? Does his Jewish wife wish to convert?
They know so little about each other. Esther is allergic to cigarettes; Romei always smokes when he writes. Esther is a morning person; Romei likes to sleep in. Romei, despite his slow start, is swollen with ambition; Esther has only her past.
She is difficult, complains of wrist pain, leg pain, she sells her mother’s pearls, forgets to attend job interviews. Awaking with a rash across her nose and cheeks, she stays in bed, pretends she is a child in Connecticut. Romei grows tired of her babbling, her complaints, her wild-eyed wandering. There are circles under her eyes, as if she hasn’t slept, yet she spends whole days in bed. Romei urges her to continue her translation. It’s a lie, she says, the Song of Songs, translation, all of it a lie. He agrees but thinks her lazy. One morning she presents him with a handful of her hair — did it fall out or did she pull it? — he finds he doesn’t care: it’s her fault, surely, something she has brought upon herself.
Their bond is a negative one: held together by the drama that brought them together, his guilt and sense of obligation, her inability to imagine anything different, they live a life of crossed purposes, missed opportunities, swallowed outrage and, not incidentally, squalor. But Romei writes. Out of this impossible relationship, out of their perpetual misunderstanding and disappointment, Romei, no longer “blocked,” discovers the anti-vocabulary for his art. He writes, she wanders, falls to the ground, he writes. She is his muse, his anti-muse.
A poem that comes close to announcing Romei’s poetics of distance and incomprehension includes an outrageous scrambling of the Celan line I’d featured in my story, written here not in German but in what I guessed was Yiddish: Then, when only nothingness stood between us, nothing brought us together.
To make clear the poet’s identification with this poem, he writes it as an acrostic, each line beginning with a letter from his name: R-O-M-E-I.
A pattern emerges, the couple’s version of normalcy. Esther takes typing lessons from an expatriate Scot, finds work in English-speaking offices, but always she is forced by drowsiness, by ever-shifting aches and pains, whose fluidity and unpredictability torment her more than their effects, to quit these jobs, though Romei suspects it’s the daily demands — the clothes that must be pressed, the long journeys by tram or bus — that wear her down. A disbarred doctor offers her a diagnosis over wine — hysteria, of the Freudian variety, he says, and suggests sex with a vigorous man.
The couple develops friendships with other marginalized types — a surrealist painter displaced by the Spanish Civil War, a schizophrenic actor, a heroin-addicted banker who leaves gold coins in Esther’s underwear drawer. Homosexual brothers: black dancers from Georgia. An amateur archeologist from Duquesne, in search of an underage wife. Esther types, the two attend parties, drinking fests in public places, Romei writes.
And thus, the years pass: Romei publishes a book of poems, and another. Esther dresses in men’s clothing, wanders late at night. Romei’s work is translated, he travels to consult with translators and publishers, leaving Esther in the custody of a friend, a poverty-stricken academic, a costume designer, an art restorer who can be relied upon to buy toilet paper and make polenta. Daily life is marked less by hysteria, more by courtesies, occasional kindnesses that betray the fullness of their resignation. Their intercourse is defined by what they do not discuss: Esther’s loss, the choice they did not make, which was to be together.
With extraordinary timing, Andi pulled on my sleeve.
Hello, my darling, I said, reaching for her shoulder.
You look funny, Mom.
Moms do that sometimes. You having fun?
Have you been reading my Notebook? she asked, squinting at me.
Never! I would never read your notebook! Your notebook is private!
I’m just asking.
I couldn’t help adding: You could share it with me sometime if you wanted.
Andi rolled her eyes. Good thing we brought Band-Aids, she said, pointing to a scrape I couldn’t see. I kissed her knee, once, twice, thrice, and held her tight.