Lost Hearts in Italy by Andrea Lee

Author:Andrea Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588366337
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2007-05-21T16:00:00+00:00

17

NICK

2005 • AN OBITUARY

The usual end-of-August pickup in the news, as if history were actually a trudging wage slave, bound to the convention of a fixed summer holiday. After a few relaxing weeks of paparazzi essays on the great and near great caught in absurd vacation mode—in cowboy hats and bikinis and giant hip-hop shorts; topless; bottomless; bulging; bejeweled; on the wrong beach with the wrong partner—suddenly the less great, the insignificant, are once again in the headlines, dying in their anonymous international swarms. In exploding aircraft, in sudden bursts of suicidal flesh and blood over the dun-colored grit of the petroleum lands, in floods and plagues and pitifully overcrowded trucks and ships of refugees heading toward dubious hope. In the sudden efflorescence of headlines, the small death notice is almost lost. But Nick catches sight of it.

The old girl is dead, he says to his wife.

He and Dhel are home in bed on a Sunday afternoon, alternately making love, reading the papers, and dripping cold sesame noodles on the duvet. A rare, almost unheard of, treat. The closed curtains making the Notting Hill daylight into twilight, the air conditioner providing a bracing chill, and Ben Harper, turned down low on MTV, singing in an annoying reggae whisper about changing the world. The two little girls, Julia and Eliza, are visiting Dhel’s mother in Zurich, leaving the high white rooms of the family flat in Chepstow Villas resounding with their absence. Nick got in last night from Singapore and now revels in what his friend Vakhil has dubbed uxory—the thrill you get when you screw your wife in your own sheets after weeks of hotels. Ulysses knew about it.

What old girl? asks Dhel, tapping at her computer, where she is looking at shoes and also checking an installation proposed for one of her artists at a museum in Japan. The queen, Joan Collins, or your ex-wife?

Nick decides to pass over this last remark. None of the three, he says, tugging gently at her long soft hair. An old woman in Italy. You met Lodovico, the Lehman Brothers guy. Well, it’s his great-aunt, the Princess Caetanae. Famous in politics back in her day. They call her a pope maker, say she was Mussolini’s lover before she switched sides.

And did you get to know her?

Not well, Nick says honestly. But I went to tea with her once or twice. She liked me. She even gave me advice. This was in Rome, a long time ago.

Of course it was in Rome, says his wife, yanking her hair out of his hand. I can always tell, because you get that sound in your voice.

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