Pilgrims (3 page)

“What if our rooms aren't ready?” said Carl.

“Then we'll walk around and look at the sights,” she said.

“Won't they be ready?” said Lyle in a pained voice. “Did we request for them to be ready?”

Mr. Columbo hit the brakes and took an exit off the freeway—
lento, adagio
, thought Margie. “Scenic route, very historic,” he said—and now they were speeding through vineyards, the slender gnarled trunks and canopy of intertwined vines webbed above. “Best wine in Italy comes from here. Ghirlandaio. Only two hundred barrels a year and they leave it in the wooden casks for five years and it costs a hundred euros a bottle and it is said to have special powers”—he glanced around, decorously—“to restore the
lib
-i-do.” He pronounced it in a whisper.

“What about lipids?” said Daryl.

“Sign me up for a case,” said Margie.

They came along a street of houses in pastel shades, coral, pink, pale yellow. A golden house with green shutters. He pulled over in front of a mud-colored building with pockmarked walls. “Artillery shells,” he said. “Americans thought there were Germans inside and they blasted it with mortars and couldn't knock it down and then a child came running out waving a white bedsheet and they held their fire and then fifty or sixty more kids came out. And then two clowns in whiteface with big floppy shoes and little
ooga-ooga
horns on their belts. Luigi and Carlo. They were from a circus whose wagons had been destroyed by bombs and their trained dogs had run away and also a llama and an old spotted horse. The two of them got caught in the Allied tank assault and ran for shelter in the castle and found the cellar full of terrified schoolchildren. So they painted themselves up and got into costume and put on a show, whacking each other with the slapsticks. When they heard an incoming shell, Luigi bent over as if to let a great fart and when the shell hit, Carlo fell down and waved his arms to disperse the smell. It was very funny. They did some of their act for the Americans who suspected
the clowns might be booby-trapped. They made them drop their trousers right there in front of the schoolchildren, which the clowns did, clowning around, their hands clasped over their privates, eyes rolling, heads bowed. And then a shot rang out. A German sniper on the roof. An American raised his rifle and blasted away and the sniper fell four stories to the pavement and landed with a big crunch and that was the end of the comedy and the war resumed.”

The van drove on.

Mr. Columbo slowed down coming through a piazza and pointed off to the left—“There's the balcony Mussolini came out on when he spoke to the crowds”—and they looked up at the little balcony. “After the war, they went around and shot people they called collaborators, but hell, almost everybody collaborated. If you wanted a nice life, you went along with the Nazis. There weren't many heroes.”

“Well, we came here to celebrate a hero,” said Margie. “An American by the name of Gussie Norlander. He was from our town. He died in the liberation of Rome.”

Mr. Columbo shrugged. “All dead men are heroes, and the rest of us are cowards.”

They drove on across the Tiber, a shallow snot-green river, with stone walls and broad footpaths on either side, the dome of St. Peter's looming up.

“Will we have the opportunity to see the Vatican?” said Father Wilmer, changing the subject.

“I am at your service,” said Mr. Columbo. “I am here for you. Whatever you want, I am here to provide.”

“Assuming that is acceptable to Mr. Keillor,” added Father. “I
don't wish to dictate where we go. Probably he has seen it all many times.” He turned to the author. “I heard you had been given a VIP tour of the Vatican once.”

The author shifted uncomfortably in his seat. His legs were numb and his bladder was about to let go. He told Father Wilmer that at the Vatican, VIP stood for “Vastly Ignorant Protestants” and that his tour guide, Father Reginaldo, had an aversion to crowds and so the tour skipped the Sistine Chapel and the Michelangelo
Pietà
in favor of the Vatican kitchen and a warehouse where shards of statuary were glued back together.

“What's that I smell? Chicken?” said Daryl, and some of the pilgrims snickered.

In Minneapolis, Irene had read a story about chicken flu in Europe that caused nausea, loud whirring sounds in the eardrums, hallucinations, vomiting and diarrhea—as much as four gallons in one outburst—followed by shame and depression. She had passed the story around to the others, and while they pooh-poohed it—still, the thought of four gallons of poop suddenly blowing out of you was hard to get out of your mind. “What if it's true?” said Irene. “Better go easy on the chicken until we can test it out.” And she and a few of the others agreed that Mr. Keillor could be the guinea pig. The man had a strong constitution. Let him chow down on some chicken and then keep an eye on him.

Irene had purchased what she believed to be a chicken sandwich at a food stand in the Rome airport and then noticed the label,
cervello
, brain. It was fried like an egg, between slices of bread. She unwrapped the tinfoil and looked at Mr. Keillor who was resting his eyes. “How about some breakfast?” she said. He looked at the sandwich. It was the first kind gesture anyone in
the group had made toward him, it had been one insult after another—Clint Bunsen saying, “People keep telling me to read your books and somehow I never find the time.” Lyle suggesting he see a doctor about nasal blockage. In the Minneapolis airport, Marilyn Tollerud going on and on and on about Mr. Keillor's radio rival Ira Glass, Ira Glass, Ira Glass, idol of urbane young women from coast-to-coast, and how much she enjoyed his writing, his mumbly style, and how she listened to podcasts of Ira over and over and over and over. Even Evelyn had let him have it: she said, “I heard you stopped drinking and I thought, Thank God.” (This, from a woman who had tended bar at the Sidetrack Tap and seen men plastered, loaded, bombed, stewed, fried to the gills, falling down shit-faced. He had gotten drunk in the classic WASP style, quietly, alone, at home, late at night, straight whiskey in a glass, listening to Bach organ chorales, weepy, no trouble to anyone … How did he come to be the goat here?)

The chicken sandwich looked good. “Thank you,” he said to Irene. “That's very sweet of you.” And he ate it, all of it, aware that everyone in the van was watching him. “Delicious,” he said. “My grandma raised chickens and I used to catch them when she needed to slaughter a few. I don't know if I ever told you this story—I used a wire clothes hanger to catch them by the ankles—they could run really fast—it was a wire hanger that you unwind to make a long straight wire with a hook at the end—they'd run into the lilac bushes and I chased them—I was probably seven or eight at the time—my dad cut their heads off—anyway, this one time I remember …”

Margie listened to his convoluted tale as the van slowed in rush-hour traffic. How did this man ever come to be telling stories
on the radio? Finally, thank goodness, the van pulled up in front of the Hotel Giorgina and she disembarked. Stood on the sidewalk.
Rome
. Sunny and warm. A brick-paved street, little Fiats and scooters parked. A broad yellowish concrete walk with marble curbs. Two women approached, arm in arm, in dark heavy coats, one of them walking a little brown dog in a red plaid sweater. Handsome well-put-together women who strode past, paying her no mind, inviting no comment from anybody.

Rome
. And she thought back to January, when the idea of the trip to Rome sprang into her mind.

T
he night Carl stopped sleeping with her was a Sunday night, very cold, a pinkish purplish golden sunset, and she was on the phone with Mom in Tampa who was fussed-up about Dad. Next door, the slow grind of a frozen engine that did not want to start. Carl was watching Gophers basketball on TV, then switched to a documentary about the Inuit, then a show in which people yelled at each other and the audience laughed uproariously, meanwhile Mother said Daddy was losing his grip on reality. He was 86 and had bought a new Buick and gotten the extended warranty. He was entering sweepstakes and contests left and right. He complained whenever the temperature dropped to the fifties. And he had got his undies in a bunch over Barack Obama who would be inaugurated in a couple weeks and then would legalize gay marriage and tax the pants off people—Daddy, who had never been exercised about politics before, jumping up from reading the newspaper and yelling, “When are people in this country going to wake up?” “Is he taking his lithium?” said Margie. Carl switched to a silver-maned preacher prowling in front of a blue-robed choir with Bible in hand and
then a woman deep-frying a turkey and Margie told Mom to fix supper earlier and get Daddy to take a walk in the evening and work some of that anger off. “He won't listen to me,” said Mother. On the TV a boy with a serious overbite and dead fish eyes sang “Sweet Dreams, Baby” to recorded accompaniment a half-step flat. And Carl said, “Well—I guess I'll cash in my chips,” and rose from the sofa, switched off the TV, padded into the kitchen, ran a glass of water and took his Mycidol, his Lucatran, hawked and spat in the sink, and rummaged around in the kitchen for something and then on the credenza in the dining room. “Where are my reading glasses?” he said. She said, “On the hutch.”

“It isn't a hutch,” he said. “It's a buffet. Or a sideboard.”

“Call it whatever you like, that's where your reading glasses are.”

She could hear him get his glasses off the hutch and then go upstairs and down the hall to what used to be Carla's bedroom. She thought he'd gone in to check the radiator. She finished up with Mom, told her to hang in there, and let Boo and Mr. Mittens out to poop in the snow and turned on WLT for the forecast (overnight low of minus fourteen, partly cloudy tomorrow, chance of snow), then let the cats back in, turned out the lights, and went upstairs. Carl was in Carla's bed, lights out. She stood in the doorway for a meaningful moment. And said, “It's sort of cold in that bedroom, isn't it?” and he murmured something about, no, it was fine. It was an odd thing for him to do and she thought of pointing this out to him, but oh well, whatever. Maybe he was upset about her referring to a buffet as a hutch. Maybe went in there so she'd ask him what was wrong and then he could say. “Oh, nothing” and she'd say, “Well, it must be
something,” and then he'd tell her. Too much trouble. So she left him there in the four-poster bed with a white muslin canopy over it and a Martina Navratilova poster on the wall and girly things on the dresser (or credenza) and went to bed, dreamed she was in a boat, water lapping on the hull, men's voices on deck, rigging, and someone playing a trombone. Woke at six. Showered. Breakfast with Carl. And nothing was said about the night before and the next night he went down the hall and the next and suddenly it was a week later and he seemed to be camped there for the duration—his Civil War books stacked on the bedside table, his reading glasses, his white-noise machine that made ocean surf.

“Do you want me to clear Carla's stuff out of her room?” she said. No, he said, it was fine.

“Is something wrong?” He shook his head.

“What's on your mind these days?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem worried or upset or something.”

“I'm fine,” he said. The mantra of Midwestern men. He could be fibrillating wildly and half-conscious, blood trickling down his chin, but if you asked him he'd say he was fine.

So every night she said good night—sometimes he responded, sometimes not—and she went off to bed and propped herself up on four pillows and took up
O Paradiso
which her Book Club was reading, Evelyn, Eloise, Irene, Marilyn, Arlene, and Judy, a memoir by a Minnesota farmwife whose dairy farmer husband's heart burst while shoveling manure. He had had a run-in with a cow who'd been switching him in the face with its tail, which it had freshly defecated on. Hit him,
splort
, and he just plain lost it.
Pure barn rage. A 1,500-pound Holstein and he took a swing at her. Didn't hurt the cow but it had a different attitude about milking after that and seemed to be sowing discord in the herd. It took a lot of the pleasure out of dairy farming, walking into the barn and feeling the resentment and those eyes following him as he walked down the narrow path between the rows of rumps and the tails lifting and great bursts of cowflop excreted his way. It gradually wore him down and one morning he collapsed. “I lifted up his head and held it on my lap as I called 911 on my cell phone and as I did, I was thinking, ‘Earl is gone and you've got to get out of here, Joanne, and find your life.'” Two weeks after the funeral, she sold the farm, moved to Italy, and found the meaning of life. “I never knew what unabashed happiness was until I got to Rome and learned to live with gusto and express joy and grief, to dance with my arms in the air, to throw my head back and laugh, to frankly explore my own passions and desires. The me who lived on the prairie was not the real me inside, she was a woman wrapped in cellophane, an unopened Christmas gift.”

Joanne had raised three children, shoveled snow, vaccinated hogs, explained algebra to her offspring, made Christmas, baked cakes, and stuck her right arm into a cow's hinder to straighten out her uterus. She had plowed and disked and cultivated, she had slaughtered chickens. Suddenly she's on the Via Veneto drinking espresso at midnight and talking about reincarnation to Francesca, a woman she met in art class, sketching naked men in charcoal, telling her about Minnesotans and how locked-up they are. How they find it useful to be pessimistic, knowing that eventually they'll be proven correct. How she, Joanne, has decided to live in
the blessed present. Seize the moment. People back in Lundeen were scandalized that she had buried Earl and taken off like that. They expected her to mourn for a year at least, preferably two.

The book club was sharply divided over
O Paradiso
. Margie and Marilyn and Eloise thought that it was Joanne's life and good for her to show some spunk and go her own way. The older women thought, “What if everyone just did as they pleased? What about the children?” Reading
O Paradiso
, Margie felt like slipping across the hall with a glass of red wine and dropping her nightie on the floor, diving into bed, saying “Hi, isn't this what you were hoping for?”

What was his thinking there? Why had he chosen celibacy?
And Eve said unto Adam, “Why are you ignoring me? I am the
only woman around.” And Adam said, “Am I ignoring you?”
Eve said, “You haven't made love to me in a long time.” And he
said, “If that's what you want, fine. It's up to you. You tell me.
I'm not a mind reader. If you want to, that's okay by me.” But
he made no move in her direction
.

“It takes two to tango,” she said. “We can make love or not,
either way is fine. I am only pointing out that we haven't. I
don't want you to make love out of a sense of obligation or
pity.”

He said, “Well, as long as you don't care, then let's not. I
don't want you to do it on my account.”

“Well, it's up to you,” she said. “If you want it, fine. But if
not, that's okay too. No pressure.” So they didn't do it. And so
Eve died childless, and Adam lay in his old age and had a vision
of great cities that would never come to be, grand inventions
never to see the light of day, unwritten books, the vast unfulfill
ment
of God's promise, and he wished he had made love to his
wife but it was too late
.

Oh but it wasn't about sex, not really. It was about touch and proximity and the way she could ask him, if she wanted, to please rub her back and he would. She lay on her side, back to him, and he lay on his side facing her and with his good right hand kneaded her shoulders and neck and made gentle circular sweeps down her back to the base of her spine and caressed her buttocks and then back up and then, if she were lucky, he would scootch up close and fit his frame to hers, the whole length of her, spooned in tight, and she'd lift her head and he'd slip his left arm under it and his right arm around her belly and his face in her hair, breathing into it, and sometimes they fell asleep that way and woke up still commingled in the morning. That was what she missed. The spooning, the comminglement.

For one week, two weeks, it was a curiosity, and after two weeks it was a sorrowful situation, and she went to work trying to solve it. She wore a red blouse and red lipstick. (Which he didn't notice, she had to point it out to him. “I like it,” he said.) She spritzed perfume on her neck, the bottle he gave her for Christmas,
Mystique
. She bought him a box of chocolates (it triggers seratonin in the brain) and she stood behind him caressing his shoulders (to stimulate oxytocin). She wore skimpy black underwear. She put on a Lulu Walls CD.

(Lulu Walls was glamorous so it was hardly credible that anyone would walk past her door. That woman had to lock her door, she had men taptaptapping on her door morning, noon, and night.)

“Why are you sleeping in the guest room?” she asked him in early February. “I like to read late at night, I didn't want to disturb you,” he said. Which was crazy, of course. He always had read in bed, sometimes until two or three, so engrossed in a book that he didn't hear when she talked to him. She'd say, “I am moving to Nepal and switching to Buddhism. I don't know—I've felt something missing in my life and Buddhism seems like the thing for me so I am changing my name to Serene Wisdom, but you can just call me Whiz. Okay, pal?” And Carl says, “Okay,” and his eyes do not leave the page.

“Did you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, and I'm going to Nepal with a man I met at a Buddhist web site. His name is Joyful Anticipation.”

One morning she followed Julie's advice on the
Rise and Shine
show on WLT and she locked the door and took off all her clothes and stood in bright light studying herself in the mirror, her creased belly, her bulbous breasts, her sloped shoulders and big hips, and felt bad. What a nothing she was. She wasn't fat, she wasn't a string bean, she was just sort of incredibly ordinary. One
of the world's four billion brunettes. Five foot four, 122 pounds, glasses, big feet, big hands. No wonder he didn't care to undress her. Midwestern men go gaga over Asian girls or lanky Swedish models or freckle-faced Irish girls or dark Latinas with the swing in the hips, but the butcher's daughter, mother of three, teacher of English—not high on a guy's list. Every day a man sees hundreds of lovely young mammals peddling soda pop, automobiles, underwear, power tools, one tasty morsel after another and he comes home and finds a lumpish lady scrubbing the bathroom floor. Who wants to seduce the cleaning lady?

She sat down one morning and wrote him a note—
Sweetheart,
you've left our bed without a word of explanation. Are
you mad at me? Having an affair? Am I suddenly repellent to
you? Do I snort and toss in my sleep? I love you. I miss you at
night. You are a wonderful lover and the only man I ever loved
and I can't bear sleeping without you and not knowing why.
Please talk to me. Please. Your loving wife, Margie
—but it sounded so needy and pitiful. So she tore it up and wrote him another.
Did you ever lust after me? Did you ever feast your
eyes on me? Did you ever feel an uncontrollable urge to rip my
clothes off and throw me down and Have Me Right Then And
There? And if so, how did you control that uncontrollable urge?
And she tore that one up. And that morning she wrote the first poem she'd written in years.