Italy, 2000
From the shore, the sea in three pieces like an abstract painting in gentle motion. Closest to the sand, liquid the pale green of a fertile lake. Then a swath of aquamarine, the color you imagine reading the word: aqua as in water, marine as in sea. Finally, a deep blue, the color of pigment, paint squirting fresh from a tin tube. Sylvia Plath, writing in her journal the month she met Ted Hughes, the day, no, the day before: “What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches?” No matter the snow, the black trees. The sea was that color, the color of what word blue.
I was reading Plath’s journals that summer because I was twenty-one and daffy with sensation, drunk with it. And for the kind of person who goes straight from a major in English to a graduate program for study of same—that is, for me—The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962, republished that year, unabridged, counts as pleasure reading. They met, Sylvia and Ted did, in February, and were married in June, on the sixteenth, Bloomsday. That was on purpose. On purpose and a dead giveaway—that they shouldn’t have done it I mean, get married. The youthful symbolism of it. Or one of, anyway. One of the dead giveaways. This was, I was, in Otranto, in August. The sea was three shades of what might have been called blue and I was both on vacation and not.
Camila’s parents were Argentinian psychoanalysts and I was on vacation in that they had paid for my flight from New York to London and from London to Rome and from Rome to Brindisi and for the train from Brindisi to Otranto and also for the resort at which we were staying, which was tiered and terraced, smooth-walled and all-inclusive and so theoretically I could order, from the lounge chairs, whitewashed and wooden-slatted, as many drinks as I wanted. Though practically I couldn’t because the reason the flights and the train and the room had been paid for, the reason I was with Camila and her parents at all, was that Camila had twin brothers, seven years old, and it was my job to mind them. Matteo and Tomás, Tomás smaller and fairer and Matteo, his torso tanned, his hair dark and curly, always getting mistaken for a local. Because of the name, too—Artemisia’s father was Italian, hence the spelling. They lived on the Upper West Side, Artemisia and the boys and her husband, Pablo, they were of Argentinian extraction. Camila and I were friends, was another point in the vacation column.
The first two weeks were the hardest. The boys had a nanny back in New York, also Argentinian, but August was her month off, too, and with me at first they had mutinied, as children will do when surrendered to new authority. They couldn’t have known precisely why I was reluctant to run from their room to their parents’ room, double-checking what it was they were and weren’t supposed to be eating and watching, how late they were or weren’t supposed to stay up, but they must have sensed it, my reluctance. My all-encompassing apprehension. Artemisia had given me only parameters—not too many sweets; keep an eye on your wine, they’ll try to tip it into their Coca-Cola—and a different woman would have understood this as license, a different woman would have known, from Artemisia’s eye makeup, from the long shift dresses she wore, sleeveless, from the bracelets that busied her arm, slender and golden, from her sunglasses and scarves, from the fact that Pablo had only ever spoken to me directly three times and never about the children, that the rules were mine to make. But I was an uncertain girl, weak of will and ego, and I wanted Artemisia and Pablo to like me, Artemisia in particular because it was immediately obvious, from her shift dresses and her bracelets and also from the way Pablo angled his head when he spoke to me, so that his eyes, and he was already short, were looking not quite at my face, that her approval would be the harder won. I lived in fear, those first few weeks, that Tomás and Matteo, Teo we called him, so that they were Tom and Teo, the o in Tom narrow, closed, so that it sounded not at all like an abbreviation for the American Thomas, would run to their parents and tell them their new nanny was just awful and couldn’t they send her away. Like I was in some knockoff Henry James novel, some knockoff Merchant Ivory adaptation of same.
And so that was the first week, me trying to deny them this treat or that privilege and them complaining and me giving in immediately, buying them bomboloni in the morning and cornetti in the afternoon and them having no appetite for dinner at eight and demanding to stay up for the eleven-fifteen movie on Retequattro, the boys whining, So what that it’s rated red, which is how Tom and Teo fell asleep watching Basic Instinct, me thinking, Well surely it’s been edited for broadcast and certainly it’s been dubbed and really how much Italian can they actually understand, even with the fluent grandfather, the cognates. Like the language was the problem. I did keep my eye on my wine.
The second week was worse because they’d tired, already, of getting what they wanted, the desire, in these cases, being not merely to get what one wants but to feel as if one is getting away with getting what one wants, and so they began to create actual trouble, trouble of the damaging-the-hotel variety, which is how I found myself, on the evening of the tenth night, yelling, for the first time really shouting at Teo to stop using the serrated dinner knife to try to liberate the feathers from a pillow. He responded wonderfully, stopped right away and only cried a little, ate his frutti di mare quietly, didn’t ask after a gelato or a chocolate profiterole. And the whole time: his eyes wide, a small smile on his lips, pink and wet, hoping for a smile in return, a nod of approval. It’s true what they say, children really do crave boundaries. By they I mean Artemisia.
The day before the serrated-knife incident, early afternoon, the boys, sun-drunk from a morning at the beach, asleep, small Speedos sandy, limbs splayed, breathing deeply, drooling, I’d knocked on Artemisia’s door. Come in, she said, and I opened the door and found Artemisia in her bathing suit. Come in, she said again, because I had not yet crossed the door’s threshold. I stepped into the room and Artemisia turned away from me, bent to untie the knots of fabric at her neck and at her spine that were holding the top of her bikini in place. Close the door, she said. I did and when I turned back around she was facing me. Her breasts were heavy and low, freckled, her nipples the color of walnuts, roasted, wrinkled, too, in a way that suggested they might have a similar texture. I mean none of this critically. Her nipples pointed not down but ahead. All of this I absorbed in a second, half, my eyes flying up to meet hers. I’m wondering, I said, about discipline. How you usually discipline the boys. The boys, Artemisia said, crave boundaries. All children do. The precise boundaries matter less than the fact of their existence. Tell them, Artemisia continued, what it is they must not do and when they do it anyway, she shrugged, punish them. As she shrugged, her breasts perked and then flattened. Her hands were on her hips and her fingers framed a gentle fullness, not a proper roundedness but a kind of visible exhalation, evidence, the only visible on her body, that she’d twice been pregnant, given birth. Her feet were shoulder width apart and her thighs, also freckled, did not quite touch. Punish them? I asked. I was looking only at her face. Yes, she said, a time-out, no dessert, penalties of that sort. She shrugged again. Though I suspect you will not need to go even that far. If you raise your voice. She smiled. They are timid boys. They are very eager to please. She bent down and I saw she was beginning to remove the bottom of her bikini as well so I nodded quickly and turned and left, closing the door behind me, forgetting to thank her for the advice she had given me, forgetting even to acknowledge it.