Rachel Cantor - Good on Paper

He knew Romei. No wonder Romei had asked him for my number. He wasn’t just an editor who’d published my stories, he was Romei’s dear friend, without whom who knows!

I have a problem with duplicity. If I’d been Dante’s wife, I’d have kicked him out the minute I got wind of Beatrice. What’s a second chance but license to repeat the offense?

I splashed water on my face, grabbed my purse, and slammed out the door. Real people have it out, they say what they mean! I’d give Benny what-for. I’d been happy to have him in my life again, but I couldn’t imagine what he might say to convince me to stick around.

He didn’t have to: through his window I could see the back of his cherry-red bodysuit, his arms wrapped around Lila-cum-Marie, who sat facing me on the counter like a child, her short legs entwined around Benny’s waist, her flat eyes looking at me over his shoulder. Her expression didn’t change, or maybe she smiled.

What was I to do? Interrupt them? Pretend I didn’t see? Would Marie tell him I’d been there? I didn’t think so. I’d never mention it — what would I say? I chose not to enter your store because I realized you were boffing your salesgirl? So I moved on, in the direction of Cohn’s Cones, as if that had been my destination all along.

So what if Benny wanted the narcoleptic Marie, with her tragically torn fishnet stockings and her Pop Tart art, what concern was that of mine? So what if he wanted to be with someone whose firm, young body helped him forget he was hurtling like a locomotive toward death, what did I care?

Idiot.

I woke up Friday to find more pages from Romei and an email from Benny:

I have the feeling I’ve angered you. I’d like to apologize, but I don’t know what I’ve done. This happens rather a lot: please give me another chance. I’ve enjoyed having you around. Call before sundown if you can .

Yeah right, I thought, and shut off my computer.

That afternoon, we witnessed Andi’s camp graduation. Ahmad gave her a Nancy Drew, wrapped in silver paper, which made me angry — we’d joked about the silliness of camp graduations . He also said he’d cook a special Friday Night Dinner.

To recapture ground, I offered to take Andi to the park. She asked if she could get ice cream, and pointed east across Broadway, between the Love Drugstore and the Dollar Store.

Huh? I said, since Cohn’s Cones was north. This place was new: Nice Cream . Damned if I could remember what had been there before.

Can we, Mom? Can we? Andi tugged my arm.

It was a stinky, sticky end-of-summer day, the kind that insults you with its heat, so Andi may have had a point, had she not had cake and cookies and stevia-sweetened brownies at camp. Knowing that the you-don’t-want-to-spoil-your-dinner argument didn’t cut it with Andi, who always wanted to spoil her dinner, I said, You can’t swing and hold ice cream at the same time, right?

She considered this, then nodded in sage agreement. Then, as I tried to remember whether that particular play on words, Nice Cream , had a name — or Cohn’s Cones , for that matter — she told me about someone named Ovidio. A boy nobody wanted, not his father, not his mother. He lived with an auntie who wouldn’t let him watch TV.

You know, I said, walking her across Riverside Drive, Ovidio is the name of a famous poet, though he’s usually known by his Latin name, Ovid. His full name was Ovidio Nasone, I guess because he was nosy.

Ovidio isn’t nosy, she said. He may have a broken nose, though.

That’s sad! I said. She nodded. You’ll need to be a good friend to him, then, won’t you?

Andi looked at me funny, as if to say, Why do you say such weird things?

When we arrived at the park, I covered her with sunscreen. Then we Eskimo-kissed and she scampered off in her pink Marimekko to join two girls from science camp.

Have fun! I shouted, as if she needed my blessing to enjoy herself, and marveled that she could run in this heat, when I felt brave just for breathing. I sat on my usual bench in the shade in front of the fountain, took off my Birkenstocks, and buried my toes in the sand that drifted from the sandbox. Then rummaged for my MOM! hankie and used it to mop my brow. Andi was already leading the girls in an intricate game that involved running in concentric circles: they could dizzy themselves while tagging each other out — a twofer where everyone got to be “it.”

I picked up the section that had arrived that morning: “Lo Schermo.” Usually translated as screen, schermo in Vita Nuova also means protection or defense . It refers to the practice of using a “pretend,” or “screen,” love to distract attention from a “real” love.

So, “The Call,” followed by a threshold of sorts, and now “Deception.” Romei could only be following the structure I’d proposed in my paper. I ought to have been flattered, but instead I found it odd — troubling, even.

At this point in the book, Dante, smitten, stares at the now-married Beatrice in church. Another lady, standing between them, believes that Dante stares at her. What an opportunity! He decides to use this second lady as a “screen love,” to deflect attention from Beatrice. For years— years ! — he pretends to love this blameless girl; people talk, he writes her poems, a brilliant stratagem! Then she leaves town. What’s a poet to do? Love, disguised as a grubby pilgrim, suggests another who might serve as a substitute “defense.” But when gossip about this new lady reaches Beatrice, Beatrice snubs him.

Dante is devastated — poor Dante! He retires to lament and is again visited by Love, who this time suggests that Dante address Beatrice directly — through the mediation of poetry. Art will thenceforth be his only “screen.”

Critics remind us that screen loves were a convention of the time. Some question the innocence of these affairs, but no one —no one ! — asks if Dante’s screen loves (or his wife) are ill-used as a result. No one asks if he was right to make one lady the object of gossip to save the reputation of another.

In what follows, Romei, to his credit, makes explicit the cruelty and deceit glossed over by Dante. The narrator’s courtship depends on an ever-escalating series of deceptions, practiced with increasingly less concern for consequences. The narrator invites himself to parties where Esther is likely to appear, polyglot affairs evoked through cascades of jumbled language: The Wasteland meets La Dolce Vita . Esther drifts toward Romei, a bit high, highball in hand. He grabs the attention of the crowd, tells raucous stories of an invented past — aristocratic loves, artistic coups, meetings with remarkable men — discovers a garrulousness, a facility for fakery, he hadn’t known he’d had. Esther affects indifference but neglects to introduce him to her husband.

His first poem in this section concerns one of these “performances.” An English sonnet, inverted so the all-important couplet, the rima bacciata (the “kissing rhyme”), appears on top, where all couplets secretly feel they belong. Three quatrains follow, subordinate now, a Babel-ing Greek chorus.

I scanned my memory of Romei’s books and concluded that the sonnet was neither an old poem nor a patchwork of old poems. It was a pastiche, a Romei poem playing at being a Romei poem, a parody of the work Stockholm called the “strangulate cry of a remaindered generation.”