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So then it was the third week and the boys had gotten used to me and I to them, opposing armies on Christmas morning agreeing to an armistice, trading presents, one cono alla vaniglia in exchange for forty-five minutes of playing in the sand, no swimming, Nanny wants to read for a bit. I was watching them from my lounge chair, this was a day or two later, when a shadow fell across my legs. Boundaries, no? The voice belonged to Artemisia. You tell them that they can play in the water but that they must not swim and indeed, that is precisely what they do. I nodded. Teo was splashing Tom and Tom was turning to run. Keep your feet on the sand, I’d said. Stay where I can see you. Artemisia bent and her shadow moved up my body. Sylvia Plath, she said, reading the spine of the book I’d placed facedown on my knees. Not a very good poet, she said. But yes, an interesting person.
It was that night, or maybe the night after, after I’d fed the boys and put them down and had dinner with the family and Camila had left to meet friends she’d made on the beach and Pablo had left to see if he could use the resort’s telephone to make an international call, that Artemisia again approached me. I was sitting on the terrace, onto which both my room and the suite’s living room opened, a glass of white wine on the table in front of me and also a few sheets of paper. In my right hand a pen, blue, my second and third fingers stained with its ink. Artemisia was wearing a white linen shift and she was carrying a bottle of white and also a glass and she asked if she could sit and when I said yes I could feel the vein in my neck begin to throb, just slightly. I’m not, she said, disturbing you? And when I said no she asked what I was writing and I said, A letter to my boyfriend, and then, Or, not my boyfriend, we broke up, before the summer. This was not quite accurate. I’m going to graduate school, I added. He didn’t want to follow you? Artemisia asked. I laughed and she frowned and I said, quickly, It’s just that I’m young and he’s got a job in New York and it didn’t, a helpless hand gesture, come up. If we’d been, and here I paused because I hadn’t yet lied outright and didn’t want to, didn’t want to lie to her, and yet explaining the situation also seemed impossible, but then Artemisia smiled and I stopped talking, relieved. Ready, she said. You were going to say, If we’d been ready. Ready to get married, yes? This was not what I had been going to say. Of course it was true that I wasn’t ready to get married, but this wasn’t the problem, the problem was that my boyfriend, who was also my former professor, already was. Nevertheless I nodded. No one is ever really ready, she said. She removed, from a pocket in her shift dress, a pack of cigarettes, a brand I’d never seen in the States, Diana, the package white, trimmed in pale blue, and asked, Do you mind? She was already lighting the cigarette, even as I was shaking my head no, no, of course I didn’t.
My first husband, she said, exhaling. I met him at university, in Buenos Aires, while I was completing my bachelor’s. I, too, had decided to go to graduate school, for psychology. I had been accepted at Columbia. Very prestigious. Especially for a foreigner. Someone not fluent in the language. She poured herself a glass of wine from the bottle she’d brought, took a sip. I suspect, she said, that Camila’s admission was due in part to my own. Given her more limited powers, intellectually. Her lack of extracurricular interests. Though I do not know how heavily a parent’s graduate attendance weighs on a child’s undergraduate application. And of course Pablo was once a professor there as well. This may have counted more. She took another sip.
It was late, almost midnight. We ate late because of the heat and even now it was still warm enough that neither of us had sweaters on. Artemisia’s shift was sleeveless and I was wearing a tank top, spaghetti-strapped, and olive-green shorts with small cargo pockets just above the hem. As she spoke I nudged my tank top down so that no skin was exposed between its bottom and the top of my shorts. My legs had been perched on the seat of the table’s third chair, but now, feeling the weight of her gaze on the expanse of my too-pale flesh, I crossed my right leg over my left, hooked my right foot behind my left ankle, tucked my feet beneath my chair. As she spoke I watched her lips move, watched her neck. I wished, despite the heat, for a blanket to drape over my lap so that the contours of my lower body might disappear entirely beneath it.
Artemisia’s judgment, what she had said about her daughter, it was harsh but I did not dispute it, both because I believed it to be true and also because I was familiar with the Pérez family policy, which was honesty in all things. If she was telling me this she had certainly told her daughter as well, in the same spirit in which Camila had told me, during our first week in Otranto, that she would rather spend her time with the six young Greek tourists she had met on the beach than with me and her brothers; the same spirit in which she had, during the first months of our acquaintance, informed me that I should never wear heels with straps, even T-straps, because the place on my ankle where the circular strap hit shortened my calf and made it appear not only pudgy but meatlike, not a calf but a shank being served on a platter of shoe. It wasn’t that Camila and I weren’t friends, it was, precisely, that we were. And if both of us had imagined my taking care of her brothers as a way, the only way, to spend this last summer together, given her money and my relative lack thereof, it was Camila who had first realized that to preserve the friendship she would have to abandon me. Or not to preserve it, for the friendship was lost anyway, in the fall I would go to graduate school and Camila would remain in New York, but to honor its memory. So yes, it’s true that when I think of Camila that summer, what I see are the backs of her thighs as she walks away from me, down the beach, toward the Greeks, or maybe they were Germans. But at least I don’t see her treating me like the help. This I now consider a kindness. Anyway I didn’t dispute Artemisia’s judgment, instead I nodded and sipped my wine and Artemisia continued. My boyfriend at the time. I met him at university. He was not a fellow student. He was a professor. My professor. Perhaps now the situation would be seen differently. But at the time I was not at a disadvantage. Or I did not see myself as at a disadvantage. We did not begin our relationship until after I had completed his course. And in any case the problems that developed were not related to this initial power imbalance. She shook her head. Not in my opinion. They would have developed no matter. In any case. But I was saying. When I moved to New York, he followed me. He would not admit to this. He was not the kind of man who would follow a woman to a different town. Much less to a different country. But it so happened that he was offered a fellowship for one year to teach not at Columbia but at Sarah Lawrence. The university gave him a leave of absence. We married. For reasons of a bureaucratic nature. Perhaps visas were easier to obtain. Possibly the taxes were lower. In any case. When I left Buenos Aires, it was with him.
We didn’t live together, in New York. Sarah Lawrence had already set aside for him an apartment and I refused to commute. And this separation, it—it brought something out of him. A kind of jealousy. The difference between jealousy and envy, do you know it? She did not wait to see if I would shake or nod my head. Envy is wanting to acquire the thing you do not have. Jealousy is wanting to keep the thing you do. It was a side of him I had not seen before. He had been, during our relationship up to that point, Artemisia paused. I was going to say kind. And that, too, is true. But the more accurate term is fatherly. I did not see it immediately. Did not see that I was looking for a father figure. You see I had an excellent relationship with my father. I still do. And it is usually those who have bad relationships with the parent of the opposite sex who seek a romantic partner to fill that role. Usually, but not always. Because it can also happen this way; it can also happen that one becomes stuck. This is what happened to me. It was my father who had loved me most tenderly, who had shown me the most affection, and so it was he, when I began to separate from my parents, that I sought to replace. And Virgilio was that replacement. Virgilio. Artemisia smiled. Even the name signifies.