The Sad Truth About Happiness Page 5

  Lucy was left with a superficial gash below her lowest rib, a sprained thumb, a yellow-and-purple eye, and a bruised shoulder, but her stash of money and her pride were intact. Her colleagues at the bureau had an impromptu party for her when she got back to the office after a detour to the hospital to be bandaged and stitched in the company of two gallant carabinieri. (It is safer, she told me, not to stay in an Italian hospital for any length of time, but to get in and out as fast as possible.) Plastic cups of wine were served, and someone’s commandeered lunch of provalone sandwiches cut into thin strips. Cups of bitter espresso, rattling on their saucers, were fetched on a tray from the caffè down the street, and a few of the pastries left over from a meeting earlier in the day were cut into quarters and arranged on the lid of a cardboard box, with sparklers stuck in them in a festive blaze of fervent, fleeting glory.

  Lucy told Janet and me about her adventure that evening on the telephone, taking pains not to minimize the drama and danger, although she had the sense not to tell our parents. The part of the story I liked best didn’t take place until a few days later. When Lucy next parked her moped near the bank on another run for funds, a proprietor of one of the businesses on the stretch of road where the attack had taken place caught sight of her, and he came out with all of his neighbors to inspect her bandage and her fading bruises. They stood in an animated group at the curbside and recounted their versions of the assault, including gestured reenactments, and they all praised Lucy’s spirit and valor in fending off the attacker. One of the shopkeepers, a butcher, waved his cleaver about to demonstrate to the others what he would have done to the mugger if his store had been nearer to the attack, and if he had not been quite so occupied with selecting a morsel of veal for a particularly demanding customer, although a woman who managed a housewares store next door to his shop whispered to Lucy that the butcher was in fact milder than a mouse and could barely bring himself to carve the carcasses that came to his store with the life already drained out of them.

  Lucy’s apartment in Rome was so small that the shower was a corner of the blue-tiled kitchen, with a clear plastic curtain hung above it and a drain in the floor. The toilet was in an alcove concealed by a louvered screen.

  Lucy picked up Italian like that, and acquired the hand gestures too, that steeple shape she makes, joining her fingertips at the top like a tent, and moving her hands back and forth at the wrist to show disbelief or frustration. She learned that in Rome from Gian Luigi, her next boyfriend, or whatever he was. And that rotating motion with her right hand, flicking upward, thumb arching outward, as a kind of dismissive insult—she got that from Gian Luigi too. He is a very impatient man.

  Lucy loved Rome. She loved her job, which took her to all the troubled spots in Europe and Africa, the places where things were happening or were about to happen. She loved Gian Luigi, who was hairy and large and completely equal to her rages. But, this being Lucy, there were problems. The main ones were, first, Gian Luigi was married, and, second, shortly after she got back to Rome from a visit to Vancouver, Lucy discovered that she was pregnant.

  Lucy had come home for two weeks at the end of March. She sent me an e-mail to say that she was coming to see Janet’s new baby, but I was certain that she was coming home to try to give herself some distance and time to think things over. It had only begun to become clear to her, she told me one evening when we went for a walk after an early dinner, that Gian Luigi might never ever actually leave his wife. We were walking the steep blocks from Janet and John’s house downhill toward the beach. In Vancouver, by late March the spring season grows daily more rooted and vigorous, and the sun is already able to hold off the nighttime hours until eight o’clock, so we walked under a chilly and weakly shining sun.

  Under our feet, the sidewalk was narrow and uneven, the concrete slabs pushed up, shifted, and displaced by spreading tree roots—mountain ash, cherry, copper beech, and plum—and the few short-lived freezes of the winter. The small painted houses and brick corner stores that we passed had been built on a snug, human scale; they were one and a half stories high and no wider than a few stout paces. They seemed to lean forward intimately as we proceeded, eager to eavesdrop on the discussions of passersby.

  Lucy was wearing black high-heeled shoes that pitched her forward, and a finely knit black sweater. She walked with her arms crossed over her chest and her head bent. The lazy early-evening breeze was starting to pick up its pace, and the temperature was dropping steadily. The air was already colder by a degree or two than it had been when we had left the house a half-hour earlier. The sky gleamed soft blue on our left, toward the west, shading to a darker hue, almost purple, over the roofs of the more densely spaced buildings to the east. The sun, pink-streaked where a haze brushed across it, was fattening and turning blush red as it approached the horizon. The sun’s rays were being pulled down toward the water, lower and lower. They looked solid, physical, like brilliant metallic threads strung along a loom under the mackerel evening clouds. The dove- and pearl- and abalone-colored clouds gave the sunlight an opalescent sheen, and the slanted, lustrous strands of light caught paint and grass and concrete and fabric at an odd, flat angle, brightening the colors of the houses and the vivid jackets and shopping bags of the people we passed; their faces gleamed yellow-gold in the oblique light like the gilded faces of saints in medieval paintings.

  “Gian Luigi doesn’t get it. He acts as if he doesn’t understand when I tell him what I need. He just can’t believe there will ever be any need to change anything,” Lucy was telling me. I glanced toward her and saw shards of tears standing brilliant as diamonds in the inside corners of her eyes. She would have been furious if I had said or done anything to suggest I was aware of them. I turned my gaze instead toward the approaching beach and ocean.

  “He’s completely content for all of us to stay as we are,” Lucy went on. Her voice was uneven, her words cautious, as if she were still working out what she thought as she spoke.

  “He seems to believe that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with staying with his wife and continuing to have me at his beck and call. All his friends do it, he says. And they all think it is some sort of point of honor to stay with their wives, however cowlike and boring and fat and stupid and useless they’ve become. They think that staying somehow means they haven’t done anything wrong, even though they all have someone to fuck on the side. Gian Luigi says that he and his wife and both their families would lose too much face if he were to leave her. She could never marry again. She has got fat, apparently, as big as a house, and she’s emotionally dependent on him. And divorce would ruin his career—her father got him his place with the bank. Then there are the three children. The oldest isn’t twelve yet and the youngest still wets his bed. He made it clear a few weeks ago that he’s in no position to leave. He’d lose everything. Wife, children, family, job, la bella fucking figura, all of it.”

  “Is that what you want him to do?” I asked her. “Leave his wife and children?”

  “Most of the time, yes.”

  “But not all the time?”

  “I don’t want to feel like I was responsible for breaking up his marriage.”

  “Wouldn’t that be his decision?”

  “No, it would be mine. He’s made it clear that if he left, if, it would only be to make me happy.”

  “Would that make you happy?”

  “Yes. I’m tired of getting slices of his time, as if he was a damn pizza. I deserve more. I want a wedding. I want to have a man full-time, a husband. I want to have a child of my own.”

  “Does he want to have another child?”

  “He says he does. That’s one of the things that you’d love about him, Maggie. He adores children. In fact—can you believe it?—I found out last month, by accident, he’d left some papers lying around, that he and his wife are still trying to have a fourth. He even admitted that they’d been to see a fertility specialist in Milano, for god’s sake. He’s such an asshole, Maggie. I’m so fucke
d up about him.”

  Lucy ran into Ryan the next day when she was standing on a downtown corner waiting to meet a friend for lunch. She’d known him forever, since they were teenagers and had gone for several summers to the same music camp on Galliano Island. Lucy was a more than adequate flute player, although in the end her talent didn’t carry her very far compared to other players who actually practiced. Lucy was wearing her red lipstick, an intense and glistening shade, almost purple, her skinny Italian jeans, a white linen blouse ironed to within an inch of its life, and her high black leather boots. Her fine black sweater was draped around her narrow shoulders.

  She saw Ryan through her enormous sunglasses. He was guiding a group of students across the street toward the lobby of an office building. The students were carrying musical instruments in battered cases that were stencilled with the name of their high school. Ryan was dressed like a student too, in baggy jeans, a black T-shirt with a picture of the rock group Marilyn Manson on it, and a red cloth jacket with a broken zipper. Some of the students had broken away from the main group and were crowding around a hot dog stand on the opposite corner. Photocopied pages of sheet music had escaped from their grasp and were dancing along the sidewalk and rushing out into the street, where they were being swept along under the wheels of passing cars.

  Lucy helped to round up the papers and students, and then bought sandwiches in a café and sat on a folding chair to watch while the students performed a free jazz concert. Afterward, Lucy went for coffee with Ryan. He had become a professor at the university, teaching in the music department, and he played bass clarinet in the city symphony. He was in charge of the school band only for this one concert, to help out a friend who taught at his old high school who had caught the flu. Ryan and Lucy agreed to meet for dinner that night, and they were together all the time after that until the day came for Lucy to go back to Rome. Ryan drove her to the airport. I have no idea what was said. A few days after Lucy left, Ryan called me to ask for her address in Rome. Lucy had left her sunglasses behind, he said, and he wanted to mail them to her. I could read nothing in his voice.

  One morning, a few weeks later, when Lucy was back in Rome, the cappuccino that was thrust across the counter toward her at the narrow bar across the street from her fifth-floor apartment made her stomach clench. Bile filled her mouth, sharp, metallic and sour. Her period should have started, but it had not.

  “At first I was pleased,” she told me in August after she had moved back to Vancouver to stay. “You know how I suffer, for three weeks out of four at least. I thought things might have slowed down because of the heat, or because I was so busy, or because I had lost a few pounds. You know how easily I lose weight. I have a far better metabolism than you or Janet. Finally, I went into a farmacia to buy a pregnancy test. Of course they weren’t out on the shelves, like they would be here. That would be too convenient for the customers. They haven’t figured out customer service there. Everything has to be this big dramatic transaction, drawn out and awkward and filled with many layers of meaning and possibilities for misunderstanding. So that meant that I had to join the long line of people waiting to talk to the pharmacist. I was concentrating on trying not to throw up—I still thought that I probably just had flu—so it wasn’t until I got to the counter that I realized that, although I knew the word for test—una prova—I couldn’t think of the word for pregnant or pregnancy. I didn’t have the strength to go and look it up and then come back again, so I leaned across the counter and said, as quietly as I could, ‘Vorrei una prova per . . . ,’ which means ‘I want a test for . . . ,’ and then I mimed with my hands having a big belly. ‘Ah,’ the woman behind the counter cried out, and she smiled and held her hands out in front of her as if she had a bulging stomach. ‘La gravidanza!’ Everybody behind me in the line laughed and smiled too, and, after I had my test in a paper bag and had paid, they all wished me buona fortuna. One of the women told me that she hoped I would have ‘un maschio’—a boy. That’s what it’s like there. Life is more of a spectacle. It’s such a backwater here. This isn’t even a proper city, when you look at it. It’s more like an overgrown small town.”

  “Did you ever consider not having the baby?” I asked her.

  “No. Not even once. It feels rooted inside me, like a tree. And I am happy to be having it. Thrilled. With or without Ryan.”

  When Lucy told Ryan on the telephone from Rome that she was pregnant, he asked if she would come back and marry him, and she agreed. She couldn’t imagine how she could manage otherwise, how the baby could live with her in her apartment—in truth it was no more than two rooms, including the kitchen-slash-bathroom—how she would work, who would take care of it. And she didn’t even want to think about what the effect of the news would be on Gian Luigi. So Lucy told Gian Luigi that she was moving back to Canada without mentioning the baby. He was, she said, very upset, and came as close as he had ever done to suggesting a permanent relationship. He would buy her an apartment in Trastevere, he said, and he promised to spend every second weekend there with her, if only she would wait for him until his children were out of their teens. Lucy calculated what this meant. Since his youngest child was four, what Gian Luigi was asking meant at least a sixteen-year wait. Instead, she gave notice at work, re-sublet her sublet, left the job and city and people she loved, and moved into Janet and John’s basement for the few months before the wedding, which was set for December 30. Philip was due to be born on December 31.

  It seemed to me to be a very bad sign that Lucy hadn’t taken any steps to plan the wedding, aside from a single meeting with a priest at Our Lady of Sorrows, the church that Ryan’s parents attended, and where he had gone as a child. Our parents, of course, had taken great pains to ensure that we were raised in absolutely no religion at all. I was in my midteens before I realized that pictures of Madonna and Child referred to a specific mother and a specific child, rather than to motherhood in general. It seemed to me possible that Lucy had set the wedding so far in the future because she wanted to allow enough time for Ryan to change his mind. Lucy didn’t make any effort to conceal from anyone, Ryan included, that she was still in love with Gian Luigi, and was marrying Ryan only because it was the sensible, practical thing to do. She implied with every sigh and roll of her eyes that her decision to marry Ryan was evidence of her moral superiority and advanced state of maturity, which should inspire admiration in her family and friends.

  Given the inescapable fact of Lucy’s pregnancy, Ryan’s family priest agreed to marry them even though Lucy wasn’t Catholic. “There is still hope for the child, so we must overlook the failings of the parents,” was how Lucy reported the interview, acting out his pursed lips, his reproving manner, his hands judiciously knitted over the mound of his stomach. The priest encouraged Ryan and Lucy to move the date forward, in light of the circumstances, but Lucy refused.

  She wasn’t working. Nothing, she insisted, could match the excitement and thrill of her last, lost job. She was living on her savings, which were substantial, although she had been badly paid—it seems that Gian Luigi had met most of her expenses in Rome—and helping with the twins while Janet spent time with the new baby. She and Janet continued to bicker in a half-spirited way, although now that Janet was so strangely calm all the time, she didn’t take or set the bait as often as she used to. Even Lucy didn’t seem to have the energy for their old all-out battles. She spent more and more time in the hammock on Janet’s porch, reading paperback bestsellers, drinking iced tea, and stroking her expanding stomach.

  I would have worried less if Lucy and Ryan had been living together, because that would have given them a chance to find out whether they were what I, no doubt quaintly, thought of as compatible. I would have been reassured even to see them spending more time together. But Ryan was devoting all his spare hours to working on the house they would be moving into immediately after the wedding. They did not plan to have a honeymoon. We’ll do something later maybe, Lucy had said vaguely when I asked her one
evening what they were thinking. She was reading a fat, blue book called Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, and she seemed annoyed by my questions. She kept her thumb stuck in the place where she had been interrupted while I waited to see if she would pick up the conversation. She exhaled deeply and dragged her fingers through her hair. “I can’t be bothered about all that right now,” she murmured. I allowed myself a small responsive sigh and left her alone.

  The house they would be moving into was Ryan’s, a small, white, one-and-a-half-storey Cape Cod near Trimble Park, several blocks north and west of my parents’ house on West 16th Avenue. Ryan had bought it soon after he graduated from university, when the smaller, more rundown houses in that area were still affordable, using as a down payment the money he had earned traveling with a blues band between terms. The band broke up, amicably, in Portland at the end of August before the start of his fourth year, when two of the members decided to hitch up with another band that was headed south to New Orleans, as backup to a women’s group that would later achieve a small but not insignificant measure of fame as the Brawling Broads.

  Ryan lived in the Trimble house in the provisional, haphazard manner of a bachelor. He had attended to only the most necessary upkeep until wife and child were suddenly imminent. Now he was working hastily to repair the negligence of many years, his and the owners’ before him, sanding and scraping paint, patching plaster walls, removing and replacing crumbling insulation. The paint was saturated with lead, and the insulation was friable and laden with dust, ancient cobwebs, and mouse droppings. Ryan and Lucy decided that it would be safer for the baby if she stayed away from the house until the work was done. They were together the few evenings Ryan wasn’t working on the house, or performing with the orchestra, or teaching night classes, but all they seemed to do on those rare nights was watch TV on the small set in the corner of Lucy’s bedroom in Janet and John’s basement.