Fin & Lady: A Novel (26 page)

“I’m sorry, Fin,” she said. “I just don’t have time for that right now.”

“From
me
.” She was a beautiful girl from Florence. He’d met her on the beach.

Lady raised an eyebrow.

“She’s sixteen,” he said, as if that could lower the eyebrow.

“An older woman, eh?”

“Her name is Donatella,” he said stolidly. “She’s sixteen,” he said again. “From Florence.”

Fin and Donatella had spoken in English. When Fin tried to think of something in Italian, all he could come up with was
Dobbiamo stare insieme
, we must be together, which he did not say aloud.

At first Fin delivered his lessons on the beach, naming common things around them, a chair, a basket, an apple, a bottle of water. He asked Donatella what music she liked and they spoke haltingly of the Beatles. Her English was very much like his Italian. “It’s so fine,” she said, when he asked her what she thought of the weather. “It’s sunshine.”
It’s the word “love
,
”
they both thought.

“Girl”

Two weeks passed, and Fin saw less and less of Lady. They still had breakfast together, with Michelangelo when he was not on a shoot, but they rarely met for lunch. Fin ate sandwiches with Donatella on the beach or joined her mother and father and two sisters at a restaurant. Lady ate an orange, somewhere on her rambles, then went back to taking pictures. She spent her afternoons in the darkroom; Fin spent his swimming, waiting for Donatella and her family to return from their postprandial naps. He took Donatella out on the boat, too, always with at least one of her sisters, one a little older and happy to look the other way, the other younger and an avid, observant pest. Then he and Donatella would part for dinner, and Fin would join Lady and Michelangelo for white anchovies, octopus, wine, lemon cake, but his mind was not there, and neither was Lady’s or Michelangelo’s, and the dinners were quiet, pleasantly distant. Sometimes Donatella joined them, or they joined Donatella’s family. Fin explained that President Johnson was an evil man. He tried to translate
Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?
He talked about segregation and voting rights. But how do you explain the burning of draft cards in a language you don’t know? Donatella’s parents were Communists who understood a little English, so they nodded their heads complacently no matter how radical Fin tried to be, but when he turned to them to ask for help in making himself clear to their daughter, they lifted their shoulders, held their hands out palms up, jutted their chins out, and made a small noise that sounded like the beginning of a word that started with the letter
b
. Lady was not much help, either.

“Why talk about the war
here
?
Now?
Look—fireworks! Someone must be getting married.”

And, yes, in the deep night sky there were thunderclaps of golden flowers, soaring rockets of green and red that exploded and arced and drifted through dun-colored smoke toward the water, lighting up fishing boats and yachts. Yes, there were fireworks decorating the sky, but still he could not understand how Lady could let politics fall away from her so easily, like a scarf left behind somewhere. There was still bigotry and segregation and poverty. There was still a war.

“There is a war going on,” he said. “There’s still a war going on.”

“There’s always a war going on, Fin. Why did the Greeks have a god of war? Because we need one.”

“You’ve converted? To paganism?”

And Lady laughed and said, “I didn’t have to convert. I just had to look around me. The gods are everywhere on this island.”

“Oh brother,” Fin said.

“You have brother?” Donatella asked proudly. “I have two sister.”

Sometimes during these bumpy attempts at conversation, anger would rise up inside Fin, his ears would ring, his face would turn red.

“When you get mad, you look just like Hugo Hadley,” Lady said lightly.

“Like father like son,” he answered, and Lady looked hurt, as if it were Fin who was being cold and disloyal.

Then his thoughts would turn to Charles Street and the house left behind. Mabel would be going there once, twice a week to check on things, to clean the city grime that crept inexplicably into a shut-up house. He imagined her opening the door to the smell of pipe tobacco and cigarette smoke. He imagined them there, the suitors, even Biffi, still waiting. He imagined them there when Lady and Fin got back, just where she had left them. If Lady and Fin ever got back.

It was hard for Fin to talk to Lady these days, about anything, almost as hard as talking to Donatella, but especially about New York, about going back to New York, where they belonged. Lady never took a hint, for one thing. On principle, she said.
Just come right out and say it
, she would say.
Don’t expect me to do the work for you
. Which he hated. There were times when he hated Lady, period, hated little things about her, the way she smoked, say, with her head thrown back as she exhaled. It was a little phony, anyone could see that. Why couldn’t she be more natural? He even mentioned it once. Lady said, of course, typical Lady, “I’m naturally phony.” She made him laugh when she said things like that, and he would be left wondering why on earth he’d been so mad at her in the first place.

After dinner, the “young people,” Fin and Donatella and her older sister, went to one of the discotheques. Naturally the little sister did not come. She went back to the hotel with her parents. But Lady did not join them, either.

She did not consider herself one of the young people.

When had that happened?

At some level Fin did not care. The air smelled of lavender. The stars were enormous, vibrant, scattered and clustered across the darkness of the sky. All he cared about was dancing to strange corny Italian rock. All he cared about was watching Donatella move. All he cared about was standing so close to her he could feel the sweat of her arm on the sweat of his arm. Outside, in the dark street, he would hold her against him and kiss her, and she would run her hands up his back, inside his shirt, and he would run his hands up her back inside her shirt, and even the Emperor Tiberius, who was supposed to have lived such a licentious and depraved life on the island, could not have experienced anything close to the glorious agony of Fin Hadley.

Donatella learned more and more English.

Lady took more and more photographs.

Michelangelo had a friend on Capri, a fellow photographer with a darkroom, and there he’d taught Lady how to develop pictures. He’d offered to teach Fin, too, but Fin could not imagine spending even one minute in the small stuffy room when he could be swimming or climbing. Lady’s photographs did not impress him, either. They were grainy and sad, shadows of the meticulous pictures Michelangelo took. At first, anyway. But that changed. While Michelangelo was away and Fin was entwined in the arms of his English student as much as possible, that changed.

If you walked to the right of the church, down a steep, narrow street, then turned right at the shrine to the Virgin Mary, you would come to the house Lady and Fin lived in. You would open a green door and walk down a long path. Above, an arcade of trellised lemons hung down, colossal lemons, and the sudden change from the glare of the street to the dappled shade was almost shocking. There was a garden and a terrace and steps to the small, cool white house. And from the windows upstairs, you could see beyond the other cool, shaded white villas to the sea. Fin’s room was not much wider than the window at the end of it that faced the blue sky and the bluer water. Lady’s room, downstairs, was a little bigger. She hung her prints all over the blank white walls. And slowly, as the weeks passed, the photographs seemed to find their feet. That’s what Lady called it: finding their feet.

“They look better,” Fin said. “They really look better. But why?” They were still black-and-white photographs of rocks, of the trunk of a tree, of the shadowy whites of a plaster wall.

“They’ve found their feet,” Lady said.

*   *   *

Fin lay on his back on the little deck that formed the bow of the boat. His hands were behind his head. Donatella was beside him. Behind them, Donatella’s sister listened to a portable radio. “Girl” in Italian. Ahh, gii-irl. He tried to translate the song back to English for Donatella, but instead of
“She’s the kind of girl you want so much / It makes you sorry,”
the Italian seemed to mean something about the sea telling a story. Maybe. He wasn’t at all sure.

“She’s the kind of girl you want so much it makes you sorry,”
he sang, hoping Donatella would not understand. Or hoping that she would. The suitors would understand, and Fin thought that perhaps now at last he understood the suitors. Hopelessness is not the end of desire, it’s not the end of need. And so? Hopelessness is not the end of hope.

“Ahh, gii-irl,” Donatella’s sister sang from the back of the boat.

Donatella rolled over on top of him.

“Tomorrow,” she sang to the tune of “Yesterday.”

“Yesterday,” he corrected.

“No,” she said. She shook her head and her hair flicked across his chest. “Tomorrow we go.”

“Where?”

“Firenze,” she said. She pointed vaguely in the direction of the mainland. “Home.”

*   *   *

Goodbye, Donatella. Fin remembered the last sight of her, a small figure in a yellow dress pulling farther and farther away, away from the enchanted island on a ferry. He could not remember her older sister’s name. He could not remember her younger sister’s name. He could not remember Donatella’s last name. But that vision of a girl shrinking on the wide horizon he always remembered.

He mourned in his room. He tried to read
Extraordinary Women
, the book about lesbians on Capri, though he knew Lady had given it to him just for effect. But it required too much concentration. Some of it was in Latin, some in Greek, and there was, as far as he could tell, absolutely no sex. Just squabbles.

“It does have one of the most satisfying endings in literature,” Lady said. “But, yeah, maybe when you’re older.”

“Not everything is about age.”

“I know, Fin. And I know you’re sad. Even if you’re just fifteen.”

“Gee, thanks.”

Lady sighed. “That didn’t come out right. Nothing I say to you these days comes out right.”

No argument from Fin.

“But you have to get out of the house, Finny. You want to go out on the boat?”

“Not really.”

“Anacapri? Ruins?”

“No thanks.”

“Okay. We could go shopping.”

Fin made a face. How many pairs of sandals could Lady buy? How many scarves and floppy pajama pants?

“Beach?” she said.

He shook his head. No. Of course he couldn’t go to the beach. The beach without Donatella? “I’m fine.”

“Right.” She took hold of his shirtsleeve and gave him a pull. “Then we’ll walk.”

“You’re always pulling me,” he said.

She pushed him instead.

“Great.” But he went with her. She packed two oranges and a bottle of water in his backpack and threw it at him.

“
Andiamo
, Mary Sunshine,” she said.

He led her on a particularly steep path down to the water, an almost invisible path, straight down to a little cave on the stony shore. Fin had discovered it on one of his rambles. If Fin had been little, this would have been his pirate cave. But he was not little. If he hadn’t been so down, it would have been his own nymphaeum, the caves the Romans decorated with statues and tiles, places where they worshipped or swam or cavorted. But he was down. So down.

Lady sat on a damp, flat rock and peeled her orange. The scent of orange mingled with the briny sea smells.

“You didn’t take any pictures,” he said. “Not one.”

And it was unlike Lady to go at someone else’s pace, not to stop to pet every stray dog, every mangy cat, to talk to old men in baggy suits who bent precariously over their canes.

“Not in the mood.” She turned to look at her camera perched on the rock beside her, as if she had never seen a camera before. “Just not in the photography mood.”

What kind of mood was she in? A quiet one, anyway. Fin ate his orange in the shade of the little cave and listened to the gulls, and all the irritation and annoyance and indignity that came along with Lady seemed far away. Even his broken heart, as he secretly described it to himself, lifted. He felt oddly sheltered here, protected. Beyond was the Bay of Naples, an expanse of deep, rich blue, and beyond that Mount Vesuvius. The volcano looked down on them, so far off, so benign when viewed from this spot, cushioned by the water between them; so benign when viewed from this moment, cushioned by the centuries of quiet, a dormant volcano, sleeping.

He looked at Lady. She, too, gazed out at the water and the distant mainland.

They’ve found their feet, Lady said about her photographs. But it was Lady who had found her feet, Fin thought. It was Lady who looked better than she ever had. It was Lady who smiled her smile with a new warmth, who could sit still, for hours, calm and still in the fading evening light.

It was Lady who was pregnant.

“I’m pregnant,” Lady said.

He hadn’t heard her right. “Huh?” he said. “What?”

“Pregnant,” Lady said. “I’m going to have a child.”

But I’m your child, he thought.

I’m your child. Everyone knows that.

I’m your child
, he almost said.

“Oh,” he said. “Wow.”

“I wanted to tell you. To tell you first.”

“Oh,” he said again.

“I haven’t even told Michelangelo.”

“Oh. No? Oh.”

Lady put her hand out, and he took it. There was orange pith in her fingernails. She was perfumed with orange.

He didn’t know what to say. Or think.

“No more Uncle Tylers or Uncle Jacks,” she said.

“No more Biffi?”

She shook her head.

“Oh. Of course not.” But he could see Biffi and Tyler and Jack, could see them camped in the house, the ice in their glasses making a cheery jingle, the low murmur of male voices. He realized he would miss them. He would miss his enemies Tyler and Jack. He would miss his friend Biffi. But she was done with the uncles, done with the suitors, done with them all. And in some way done with Fin.