Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg Page B

pot roasts. They don’t know what hit them. You know, all those years, when Baker and I were having so much trouble and neither of us quite understood what was happening and the kids were frantic and the house was pandemonium all the time—just as we’d all start screaming at each other, the phone would ring and there she’d be, saying, ‘So, how is everyone enjoying this beautiful Sunday afternoon?’ Now the phone rings and she says, ‘Kate! What are you doing at home on a Saturday night?’”
    “Ah, well.” Giovanna lit a cigarette, kindling its forbidden fragrance. “She’s having an adventure. And what about you?”
    “Me!” Kate said. “Me?”

    “What about that guy you wrote me about a year or two ago—Rover, Rower …”
    “Rowan. Oh, lord. Blair was very enthusiastic about that one. One day she said to me, ‘Mother, where’s this going, this thing with Rowan?’ I said, ‘ Going? I’m almost fifty!’”
    Giovanna exhaled a curtain of smoke. From behind it, her steady gaze rested on Kate. “You broke it off?”
    “Give me a drag, please. Of course not. Though to tell you the truth, I just don’t feel the need to put myself through all that again. I really don’t. Anyhow, the day came, naturally, when he said he wasn’t, guess what, ready for commitment —he actually used the word—so soon after his divorce. And then naturally the next day came, when I heard he’d married a twenty-three-year-old.”
    “You should live here.” Giovanna yawned. “Here in Europe, you still have the chance to lose your lovers to someone your own age.”
    Much nicer, they’d agreed, clinking glasses.
     
     
    There was no stone, arch, column, pediment, square inch of painting in the vicinity that Harry couldn’t expound upon. He knew what pirates had lived in which of the caves below them, the Latin names of the trees, all twisted by wind, the composition of the rocks … Did Kate see the dome way off there? They didn’t have time to stop, unfortunately, but it was a very important church, as no doubt she knew, built by X in the twelfth century, rebuilt by Y in the thirteenth, then built again on the orders of the Archbishop of Z … Inside there was a wonderful Annunciation by A, a wonderful pietà by B, and of course she’d seen reproductions, hadn’t she, of the altarpiece …

    It wasn’t fair. He expected everyone to be as yielding to beautiful objects as he was, as easily transported. Her expression, she hoped, as the avalanche of information—art gossip—rained down, was not the one she saw daily on the faces of her students. Her poor, exasperating students, so resentful, so uncomprehending … The truth was that most of them had so many problems in their lives that each precious, clarifying fragment Kate struggled to hand over to them was just one more intrusion. Yet there she stood, day after day, talking, talking, talking … And every once in a while—she could see it—it was as if a door opened in a high stone wall.
    “ … but I’m boring you,” Harry was saying. “You’re a serious person! And my life, I’m afraid, has been devoted, frivolously, to beauty.”
    True, true, she was a grunting barbarian, he was a rarified esthete. She was a high-school biology teacher, he was a—well, he was a what, exactly? As far as she could gather, whatever it was he did seemed to involve finding art or rarities, oddities, for collectors and billionaires and grotesquely expensive hotels. He’d traveled all over, there’d been a wife or two, his family had come from everywhere—Central Asia, all around the Mediterranean …
    “Mendelssohn or salsa?” He waved a handful of CD’s “To—what is it? To soothe our savage—Ack!” He honked and swerved as a giant tour bus in front of them braked shudderingly on the precipitous incline. “They have no idea how to drive! Simply not a clue!”
    For miles before and behind them, caravans of tour buses clogged the road, winding along the cliffs.