John Domini - Earthquake I.D.

“In a, in another life,” he said, “you must’ve been Qu-Qu-Queen of Naples.”

John Junior looked at him sharply, mock-sharply, cutting off the girls’ laughter. “What do you mean,” he asked, “another life?”

He took Romy’s chin and, right there in front of his Mom and siblings and their official escort, he kissed her.

The two kept their mouths shut, meno male . The girl’s lipstick, though thick and showy, didn’t leave a mark. Barbara noted every detail, even as she was astonished again at her lack of response. Things would never have gone this far between Romy and her oldest if the mother had been anything like her old self. These daytrips themselves would never have gone so far, even with the pressure from her seventeen-year-old. JJ appeared to be the child who’d gotten the most out of these five or six days since Romy’s healing. The boy’s internal repairs might seem small, on the one hand an easy-going acceptance of his younger brother’s lectures, and on the other a kiss with a PG rating. Indeed, Barbara felt confident that a peck on the lips remained the extent of John Junior’s sex life, in Naples at least. In Naples, her sense of the big teen didn’t depend on snooping around his desk or listening outside his door; on top of that, she had NATO surveillance.

No, JJ and the former paraplegic didn’t appear to have much going on. Yet it was he, the oldest, who’d announced one evening over salad with lemon and pastaron vongole that it would be “better for everything” if the family stayed in Naples.

“Hey.” His face set, JJ looked every inch the co-captain of varsity soccer. “I’m with doctor DiPio. DiPio and your priest there, Mom.”

What kind of Christians were they, he went on, what kind of good works did they have in mind, if they turned tail and ran as soon as things got a little strange?

Then the second-oldest fell in behind his brother, quick to take advantage of the parents’ silence. That’s the pattern here, you know. The rich and powerful, they like, jet in and jet out. Make a mess and goodbye .

“The rich and powerful,” Barbara repeated now for Cesare, alone with him in the still-locked church. “My Chris, he believes that’s us.”

“But the boy has a good point, don’t you know. So far as the history’s concerned, I admire his thinking.”

Barbara gave her head another ambiguous shake. She might’ve had no answer for the Father, just now, no more than for her two oldest that night at dinner, but she knew the person in her house who came closest to rich and powerful. She’d kept up her scrutiny of the American Boss. She’d made sure to let Jay know what she thought of his act out at the Center—”act” was just the word. She’d chosen a time to tell him when the news packed a wallop, just after they’d finished their latest roughhouse. She and the Jaybird had shared kisses a lot hotter than JJ’s and Romy’s, and afterwards, as her climax cooled, Barbara had realized: now was the time. Their skin and hormones could confuse them; she had to clarify. She’d removed his hand from her breast and declared she didn’t trust him. She believed he was some kind of liar, she’d said, a bad person.

“Which leaves me with no choice,” she concluded. “It’s got to be divorce, starting as soon as Aurora gets here.”

Actually, this conversation had taken place the night before. Hardly fifteen hours before Barbara’s mid-siesta visit with the priest, she’d left her Jaybird grumbling and rubbing his face.

“I got to point out,” the husband had said, “we don’t even know when Mom’s going to arrive. She’ll just drop in without warning like always.”

“A man on her arm, too. That’s Aurora.”

“Maybe, maybe. But think about this, hey. You’re going to let my mother take over the kids? My mother who you’ve never trusted?”

“What are you saying, take over the kids? Aurora’s only going to do the kind of thing she’s done before. Short-term care.”

“Jesus, Owl. You’ve got it all worked out.”

“Well, would you be available? Won’t Kahlberg need you on the job?”

“Hey, whatever I’m doing, whatever I’m — I mean, it’s for the family. Jesus, Barbara! You want to leave just when things get tough?”

“So you admit you’re doing something for Kahlberg?”

Jay had exhaled slowly and fingered her hipline. But the private gesture didn’t work; they were already naked.

“Jay, you say you’re doing it for the family. But don’t you see, when you’re hooked up with a man like that you’re bound to put the family in harm’s way?”

The husband had taken his hands off her and returned to his fallback argument. “Hey, I’m doing a lot of good.” He’d brought up his visit to the hunger strikers, “Down there with the strikers, I mean, there was your priest there. Your priest, Barb.” But Barbara was tired of hearing about it, the Jaybird as angel of mercy. Not only had the story dragged on throughout kids’ time and dinnertime, that evening, but also the visit had been on the news and then, the following day inside the NATO caravan, the liaison officer had taken time to buff up the husband’s saintliness further.

Through it all, the wife couldn’t help but see her husband’s dell’Ovo visit as a deliberate counterpoint to her own earlier visit out to the Refugee Center. After the Refugee Center, the struggle in the Jaybird’s heart had needed to breach the surface in the same way, with a big whoop-de-doo. He’d needed to send his wife a message by way of the Church and the TV In the process Jay again proved that his spiffy new friend, the officer in charge of PR, had taught him something. The care unit for the hunger strikers had been set up as maximum security, but the Jaybird had wangled the clearance for a pair of camera crews. The Capo Americano had even brought mail for the strikers, and in one case a couple of handicrafts from a tribesman back at the center.

“Your priest,” he’d repeated finally, last night as he’d climbed back into bed. “The old man, he was there. You think he’s in on Silky’s scam too?”

“Jay, what kind of a question is that? Is that going to get us anywhere?”

“Get us anywhere,” Jay said.

“Jaybird, there’s got to be something going on. Just this place — how could the UN afford a place in the Vomero?”

“Hey. You think I ever in a million years expected something like this?” With the heel of his hand he’d massaged his forehead. “Accommodations like this?”

As Barbara watched, her sympathies had unclenched within her. She’d suffered for the man again, as she had on and off since she’d first become the apostle knocked from her horse, blasted by her vision of a new and marriage-free heaven and earth. Some of her husband’s motives for visiting the downtown castle, after all, had been genuine. Some part of the Jaybird, separate from NATO influence, had nurtured a good-faith wish to turn the Africans in dell’Ovo away from their slow suicide.

If only he’d gone down there alone, as Cesare did, without TV or NATO. If only it hadn’t looked, as he pawed at his big head, as if he were trying to hide his eyes.

Jay didn’t much snore, last night no more than any other during the week, and so after he dropped off Barbara she could hear, two floors below their balcony, the NATO guardsmen practicing their English. Excuse me please, please could you tell me where to find the cathedral of this city? In Europe too the foot soldiers tended to be the boys without better options, the working poor. The mother also enjoyed the grind and bleat of the traffic beneath these Vomero heights, a hundred thousand machines probing the alleys or shaving the Bay, a vast ecosystem crackling with tenor horns and basso transmissions, the turbulence widening her perspective until Barbara would shed the anxiety that had mounted during the day, and come to understand that she wasn’t so confused. She wasn’t a mad housewife. She was only exercising a quality control, like the experts that even now might be running a forth or fifth scan on her new I.D. Sooner or later Jay or his liaison would expose their dirty dealings, and she would have the glaring betrayal she needed in order to dump the man. The certainty of it buoyed her up, and she spun slowly on a chuckling surface tension, all foreign voices and invisible travelers. As she drifted towards sleep, Barbara even felt comfortable about the puppy love that had sprung up between her oldest boy and gypsy Romy.