guilty and proud, all at once, for having made the Mormon boy suffer.
Nelson was moody, given to brooding silences in which I knew he was grieving over Marianna. He didn’t like to talk about her or about his time in the jungle. I’d never met a man with a past he didn’t like to discuss, or for that matter a man with any past at all. Nothing had ever happened to the boys I knew in college, but they were so touchingly eager to tell you all about it. I was young enough to be enthralled by what a man wouldn’t say, and I believed the glitter dust of romance and adventure would sprinkle on me like confetti if I stood close enough to Nelson.
Marianna had gone with Nelson to the Amazon, but she was demonically restless, she’d left and flown back every few months. Nelson said he always knew the night before she arrived. She used to hitchhike in with the bush pilots who invited her along because she was so beautiful — beautiful and doomed.
“If those pilots knew her,” Nelson said, “they wouldn’t have taken her up in an elevator. Every time a plane took off, she was praying it would crash. She had a death wish instead of a conscience, she was born suicidal, it was a miracle she lasted long enough to meet me. Her suicide attempts got more and more serious until I couldn’t do anything to…” His voice trailed off and he took a deep breath that ended the conversation.
I don’t know why I assumed from this that Marianna was dead. It helped, I suppose, that I was never able to ask the obvious questions: when and where Marianna died, and how exactly she did it. Instead, I went through Nelson’s possessions. I found his journal from the Amazon, and nowhere — nowhere — in it was one word about Marianna. Stupidly, this cheered me; it made her seem less important. I thought I’d learned something new about her, not something new about Nelson.
He told me I made him happy. He said we should get married. He said we shouldn’t tell anyone, not even our parents or friends. I agreed, though it bothered me, not being able to boast that I’d been chosen by a handsome older man, the most popular lab instructor. In City Hall, we ducked behind a door when Nelson saw a judge who knew his father; and that was the last time he touched me, yanking me out of the judge’s way.
For a week after the wedding he paced our hot cramped Cambridge apartment, staying up all night, listening to music: Bill Evans, Otis Redding, Bach — only the slow second movements. I couldn’t ask him what was wrong, if he thought we’d made a mistake. It didn’t take a genius to draw the logical conclusion when someone seemed so much happier before getting married — to you. I was not supposed to notice that I was sleeping alone in the bed that had changed unrecognizably, grown colder and less welcoming since when we used to spend all day there.
One morning Nelson brought me coffee. He said he knew he’d been rotten and he was mightily sorry. He said he’d eaten some things in the jungle that he shouldn’t have eaten, and now he had these episodes, he was gone for days at a time.
“Episodes?” I said. “Gone?” Why hadn’t he ever had one in all the months we’d lived together?
Nelson said we needed to get away: an impromptu honeymoon in Vermont. That morning we threw our knapsacks into his VW Bug. We drove with the windows open, my long hair streaming back, and for a time I felt like we’d left our problems in Cambridge, along with my toothbrush and contact-lens fluid and everything else I needed. I kept wondering about Nelson’s episodes. Did he have them when he was driving?
Early in the afternoon we turned into Lucia’s long, tree-lined driveway, which, Nelson said, always reminded him of the stately avenues of lime trees leading to Tolstoy’s estate.
“How do you know Lucia?” I asked.
“Mutual friends,” he said.
Lucia ran out of the rambling spotless white farmhouse and kissed Nelson three times, alternating cheeks, then grabbed his shoulders and gave him a smacky kiss on the mouth. She eyed me coolly, then smiled flirtatiously at Nelson, as if he’d come to amuse her by showing off his very large new pet.
“What’s this?” she said.
“Polly. My new wife,” he said. “Polly, this is Lucia.”
“Your new what?” Lucia asked, only slightly dimming my pleasure in his finally having told someone. “Welcome.” She embraced me swiftly, kissing my sweaty forehead.
“Guess what?” she asked Nelson. “Just yesterday I got a postcard from Marianna. She is in India at an ashram, fucking hundreds of people a day. She writes she is finding enlightenment through nonstop tantric fucking.”
Nelson touched the top of his car. His hand came away black with grime, and for a moment the three of us stood there staring at his hand. “I’m sorry,” Lucia said. “But if I can’t tell you, who can I tell? All alone I am going crazy.”
“Marianna?” I said.
“My daughter,” said Lucia. “Nelson’s friend.”
I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “But I thought she was dead!”
“My daughter is very much alive, thank you. Nelson, what have you been telling this child? Anyway, it is perfect you come. Marianna sends me a phone number where I can call her in India this weekend, we can go into town where is the nearest phone.”
“There’s no phone here?” I said.
“Of course not,” Lucia said. “Now come to my studio and see my new piece. I call it Cosi fan tutte, starring me and my cat.”
Nelson said he’d see it later, he needed to walk, he’d been in the car all morning; Lucia tried not to look disappointed at being left with me. Nelson headed off toward a horse barn and Lucia led me across a field on a path tunneled between high grasses. I didn’t know what to say. I felt I should praise everything I could — nice house, nice land, nice view, nice sky — without sounding truly psychotic. Finally I said, “What beautiful blue flowers!” The field was completely blue.
“Bachelor’s buttons.” Lucia sighed. “In Europe they are weeds. For years I never grow them. Then I learn they keep their color forever, Etruscan tombs are full of them, Etruscans bury them with their dead to stay blue in the afterlife.”
For an instant the waves of heat shimmering over the field resolved into a miniature phantom funeral procession, Etruscans in white, bearing scythes and armloads of blue flowers; and in that instant I wondered if Nelson’s episodes might be catching.
Then we went to Lucia’s studio and looked at the photos of her and her cat, and she played the Mozart that we listened to over and over. I could have listened forever and never gotten tired and been grateful for every minute by which it shortened the weekend. But after four or five times I said, “Okay! Enough!” It seemed required, like my admiring the field of blue flowers.
Lucia switched off the stereo and said, “I am right, am I not? Now go find Nelson, and I will do another five minutes of work.”
But it was five hours before Lucia emerged from her studio and found us on the lawn, bouncing grumpily in our metal armchairs. We had been arguing about Lucia, furiously but without speaking, so perhaps only I was arguing and Nelson was thinking about something else.
Finally — after a walk through the scratchy fields matted with treacherous berry canes, and a long nap that Nelson took and I wasn’t invited to join — I’d mentioned the photos of Lucia and her cat. I suppose I expected some conspiratorial expression of normal distaste.
Instead, Nelson said, “I love her. She’s absolutely bananas.” I recalled the lab partner I’d nearly dissected for Nelson’s benefit, and now I needed Nelson, and he was taking Lucia’s side. But there was no comparison. Lucia wasn’t some squeamish kid who made you do all his experiments for him. Lucia was Nelson’s very good friend and former mother-in-law.
I had spent Nelson’s nap time in the airless library with its motley collection of books, tattered and reeking of mildew. These were mostly in Italian, but there were also some volumes in English on folklore, magic, and witchcraft. It was no accident that I was drawn to a volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, nor was it accidental that I turned to “Hansel and Gretel” and read it for survival tips as much as for entertainment. This was the version in which the witch is fattening up the children and feeling the chicken bones Gretel holds out to deceive the witch into thinking the children are still thin.
After I mentioned the cat photos and Nelson defended Lucia, I thought how different the story would be if Hansel were in collusion with the witch. So when at last Lucia appeared from her studio and said, “You children
