Lorrie Moore: Birds of America

“In a general way. You have to take the whole deck and interpret.”

“What does this card say?” asked Adrienne, pointing to one with some naked corpses leaping from coffins.

“Any one card doesn’t say anything. It’s the whole feeling of them.” She quickly dealt out the remainder of the deck on top of the other cards. “You are looking for a guide, some kind of guide, because the man you are with does not make you happy. Am I right?”

“Maybe,” said Adrienne, who was already reaching for her purse to pay the ten thousand lire so that she could leave.

“I am right,” said the woman, taking the money and handing Adrienne a small smudged business card. “Stop by tomorrow. Come to my shop. I have a powder.”

Adrienne wandered back out of the park, past a group of tourists climbing out of a bus, back toward the Villa Hirschborn — through the gate, which she opened with her key, and up the long stone staircase to the top of the promontory. Instead of going back to the villa, she headed out through the woods toward her studio, toward the dead tufts of spiders she had memorialized in her grief. She decided to take a different path, not the one toward the studio, but one that led farther up the hill, a steeper grade, toward an open meadow at the top, with a small Roman ruin at its edge — a corner of the hill’s original fortress still stood there. But in the middle of the meadow, something came over her — a balmy wind, or the heat from the uphill hike, and she took off all her clothes, lay down in the grass, and stared around at the dusky sky. To either side of her, the spokes of tree branches crisscrossed upward in a kind of cat’s cradle. More directly overhead she studied the silver speck of a jet, the metallic head of its white stream like the tip of a thermometer. There were a hundred people inside this head of a pin, thought Adrienne. Or was it, perhaps, just the head of a pin? When was something truly small, and when was it a matter of distance? The branches of the trees seemed to encroach inward and rotate a little to the left, a little to the right, like something mechanical, and as she began to drift off, she saw the beautiful Spearson baby, cooing in a clown hat; she saw Martin furiously swimming in a pool; she saw the strewn beads of her own fertility, all the eggs within her, leap away like a box of tapioca off a cliff. It seemed to her that everything she had ever needed to know in her life she had known at one time or another, but she just hadn’t known all those things at once, at the same time, at a single moment. They were scattered through and she had had to leave and forget one in order to get to another. A shadow fell across her, inside her, and she could feel herself retreat to that place in her bones where death was and you greeted it like an acquaintance in a room; you said hello and were then ready for whatever was next — which might be a guide, the guide that might be sent to you, the guide to lead you back out into your life again.

Someone was shaking her gently. She flickered slightly awake, to see the pale, ethereal face of a strange older woman peering down at her as if Adrienne were something odd in the bottom of a teacup. The woman was dressed all in white — white shorts, white cardigan, white scarf around her head. The guide.

“Are you … the guide ?” whispered Adrienne.

“Yes, my dear,” the woman said in a faintly English voice that sounded like the Good Witch of the North.

“You are?” Adrienne asked.

“Yes,” said the woman. “And I’ve brought the group up here to view the old fort, but I was a little worried that you might not like all of us traipsing past here while you were, well — are you all right?”

Adrienne was more awake now and sat up, to see at the end of the meadow the group of tourists she’d previously seen below in the town, getting off the bus.

“Yes, thank you,” mumbled Adrienne. She lay back down to think about this, hiding herself in the walls of grass, like a child hoping to trick the facts. “Oh my God,” she finally said, and groped about to her left to find her clothes and clutch them, panicked, to her belly. She breathed deeply, then put them on, lying as flat to the ground as she could, hard to glimpse, a snake getting back inside its skin, a change, perhaps, of reptilian heart. Then she stood, zipped her pants, secured her belt buckle, and waved, squaring her shoulders and walking bravely past the bus and the tourists, who, though they tried not to stare at her, did stare.

By this time, everyone at the villa was privately doing imitations of everyone else. “Martin, you should announce who you’re doing before you do it,” said Adrienne, dressing for dinner. “I can’t really tell.”

“Cube-steak Yuppies!” Martin ranted at the ceiling. “Legends in their own mind! Rumors in their own room!”

“Yourself. You’re doing yourself.” She straightened his collar and tried to be wifely.

For dinner, there was cioppino and insalata mista and pesce con pignoli , a thin piece of fish like a leaf. From everywhere around the dining room, scraps of dialogue — rhetorical barbed wire, indignant and arcane — floated over toward her. “As an aesthetician, you can’t not be interested in the sublime!” Or “Why, that’s the most facile thing I’ve ever heard!” Or “Good grief, tell him about the Peasants’ Revolt, would you?” But no one spoke to her directly. She had no subject, not really, not one she liked, except perhaps movies and movie stars. Martin was at a far table, his back toward her, listening to the monk man. At times like these, she thought, it was probably a good idea to carry a small hand puppet.

She made her fingers flap in her lap.

Finally, one of the people next to her turned and introduced himself. His face was poppy-seeded with whiskers, and he seemed to be looking down, watching his own mouth move. When she asked him how he liked it here so far, she received a fairly brief history of the Ottoman Empire. She nodded and smiled, and at the end, he rubbed his dark beard, looked at her compassionately, and said, “We are not good advertisements for this life. Are we?”

“There are a lot of dingdongs here,” she admitted. He looked a little hurt, so she added, “But I like that about a place. I do.”

When after dinner she went for an evening walk with Martin, she tried to strike up a conversation about celebrities and movie stars. “I keep thinking about Princess Caroline’s husband being killed,” she said.

Martin was silent.

“That poor family,” said Adrienne. “There’s been so much tragedy.”

Martin glared at her. “Yes,” he said facetiously. “That poor, cursed family. I keep thinking, What can I do to help? What can I do? And I think and I think, and I think so much, I’m helpless. I throw up my hands and end up doing nothing. I’m helpless!” He began to walk faster, ahead of her, down into the village. Adrienne began to run to keep up. She felt insane. Marriage, she thought, it’s an institution all right.

Near the main piazza, under a streetlamp, the woman had set up her table again under the CHIROMANTE: TAROT E FACCIA sign. When she saw Adrienne, she called out, “Give me your birthday, signora, and your husband’s birthday, and I will do your charts to tell you whether the two of you are compatible! Or—” She paused to study Martin skeptically as he rushed past. “Or I can just tell you right now.”

“Have you been to this woman before?” Martin asked, slowing down. Adrienne grabbed his arm and started to lead him away.

“I needed a change of scenery.”

Now he stopped. “Well,” he said sympathetically, calmer after some exercise, “who could blame you.” Adrienne took his hand, feeling a grateful, marital love — alone, in Italy, at night, in May. Was there any love that wasn’t at bottom a grateful one? The moonlight glittered off the lake like electric fish, like a school of ice.