“You should write it without any vowels at all,” Xavi suggested. “Without any letters even. Just numbers.”
“You idiot. You’re totally missing the point,” Emerson said.
Noeline had the capacity to shut down this silliness within seconds. What she lacked was the floor: each time she spoke, Emerson talked over her. Only when the conversation drifted to politics did she sit up straighter, lean forward, make her voice heard. “You don’t really believe that,” she told Xavi.
“Of course I do,” he confirmed, smiling. “I love this mayor.”
“You’re not allowed,” Emerson said. “Giuliani is a fascist. Amadou Diallo could’ve been you, mon frère. I’m sorry, but a black man cannot be a Republican. You know what those guys stand for?” He pushed on, lecturing Xavi about right-wing isolationism and racist indifference to the developing world.
“So I should go crazy for your big buddy Bill Clinton?” Xavi responded.
“At least he believes in humane globalization,” Noeline said. “Say what you like, but we’re living under the most principled leader this country has known in ages.”
“So principled,” Duncan quipped, “that you can pay cash to sleep in the Lincoln bedroom.”
“Once you put aside the right-wing smear campaigns, what is there?” Noeline continued. “This administration is presiding over the biggest boom in the postwar period. Clinton has evolved the United States from a fundamentally self-interested state to one that intervenes morally around the world. No one in history has promoted the human right to democracy like he has.”
“President Clinton bombed countries to distract people from impeachment,” Xavi rejoined. “If he is such a humanitarian, why do nothing to stop the genocide in Rwanda?”
“Hey,” Emerson interjected, “Clinton apologized to Africa for that.”
“He was honest enough to act in Kosovo despite impeachment,” Noeline argued.
“Got so boring in the end,” Duncan said. “Lewinsky and her beret — please don’t make me watch that clip again.”
“I’m on your side; that was insanely cruel,” Noeline said, though this wasn’t quite his point. “The Republicans obsess over tawdry bullshit because they’ve got nothing. They actually want stuff to get bad for the country. Seriously, you cannot support these people.”
“What do you think?” Duncan asked Tooly.
Events of the present day felt so distant to her. She’d been taught (by Humphrey, though she never mentioned him here) that the truth about humanity had been revealed in the rise of the Nazis, in the Holocaust, Soviet totalitarianism, the mindlessness of groupthink. Only outsiders had a chance at decency. The nature of any group was to annihilate the integrity of its members. “I always wonder what it’d be like if we were in wartime,” she said. “I mean, if we’d been living back then. Like you guys were students at a university and you were teaching at one, Noeline. Except that this was Nazi Germany, and I didn’t tell you anything about who I was because—”
“You already don’t tell us anything about who you are,” Xavi said, causing the others to laugh, since she had a deserved reputation for secrecy, evading questions about where in Brooklyn she lived, whom she lived with, what she did beyond hanging around here.
But Noeline wanted to hear this out. “Let her finish. So the scenario is Nazi Germany?”
“Right. And imagine that I was secretly Jewish. But during the meal you found out. That’s the sort of thing I wonder: Who would turn me in? I ask myself that about practically everyone I meet.”
“So,” Xavi asked, “would we?”
They all looked at her.
Tooly sat higher in her chair, flattered by the attention. “Okay, I’ll tell you.” She turned first to Emerson.
“I am one of the righteous Gentiles,” he said.
“You, I think, would not save me. Actually, you’d turn people in.”
“Fucking cow!”
Xavi clapped and laughed. “Me next. Come on.”
“I think that … you would protect me if it wasn’t too dangerous. If it was really risky, then no.”
“That’s fair. I can accept that.”
Noeline said, “Afraid to hear what you think of me.”
“Yes, you’d help me,” Tooly said. “You’d stand up for me. I’m pretty sure.”
“Hope so; I think so.”
“Me?” Duncan asked.
Her mouth went dry. Tooly had been so vain about their interest that she’d failed to know her answers beforehand. She realized what the next would be, and couldn’t stop it. “No,” she told Duncan. “In honesty, I don’t know that you would.”
He gave a short fake laugh.
She added, “But I don’t know.”
It was too late. She had wounded him, and knew it by the smile he tried to raise.
The conversation continued. Emerson took the floor again, droning on about kairos and chronos, Nietzsche and Bergson’s fonction fabulatrice. “Eschatological fictions of modernism require action. Just as — speaking of the Nazis again — Hitler’s myths required the purging of the Jews.”
“Required the purging?” Tooly said. “That’s a casually unpleasant thing to say.”
“You’re not Jewish for real, are you?”
“That’s not the point.”
“Have I offended you?”
“You have.”
“So,” he concluded, “you are Jewish.”
Noeline, avoiding eye contact, stood. “I’m doing the cleaning-up tonight.” She carried their plates into the kitchen, failing to upbraid Emerson, which she could have done so effectively. It was true — when you joined a group, even a couple, you lost integrity.
The room altered before Tooly, its occupants assuming the forms they exhibited when first she’d encountered them: young, cocky, vulnerable. They were drunk tonight, capable of viewing only themselves in blurred magnification. Listening, nodding, laughing, she had two epiphanies, and couldn’t decide if they were contradictory: that she could never belong to this milieu, which was beyond her understanding and experience; and that she could master all these people.
2011
GRAFFITI BLOTTED OUT the train window, so she had to peer through scrawl to view the outskirts of Rome gliding past. The express to the coast picked up pace through the sun-bleached Lazio countryside, past thirsty vineyards, camper vans in empty fields, ragged horses in minuscule paddocks. Every few minutes, litter increased on the tracks, climaxing at the next station.
At Anzio, she lugged her bag off the train and crossed an empty boulevard, following a cobbled lane that descended toward the sea. The vacation apartments were shuttered, summer high season yet to arrive. She strode through a ghost town.
The building lobby was cool marble. A breeze wafted through open windows in the stairwell. In a week, there would be the cacophony of family chatter here, stairs gritty from beach sand, slapped with wet sandals. At a third-floor door, she knocked. From the other side, a voice responded in English—“Yes, yes, coming! Don’t leave!”—as if Tooly might otherwise spin on her heels and run.
Merely opening the door, Sarah burst forth in a gush of personality, posing three questions and hearing none of the answers. Her warmth was evident, as were the physical changes since their last encounter, her features assuming an increasingly manly configuration as she neared her mid-fifties, despite evident attempts to cling to earlier decades, with dyed strawberry-blond hair down to her waist, a Mickey Mouse halter top, and pendulous earrings that stretched her lobes, like two hands waiting to drop their luggage.
“Let me give you a kiss,” Sarah said.