Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(54)

The longest trips I took prior to meeting Max were delayed rides on the subway, the El, the ferry.

My mother had given me a book called You Meet the Nicest People on Vacations: The Traveler’s Fun Book—to express her joy, I think, that I was finally taking time to relax. Normally such persistent insistence on a socially circumscribed definition of fun-fun-fun! would have annoyed me. But the title was right: We really were meeting nice people.

*

When we arrived, we found the land as grand as the sea. The churches and domes, the streets and the railroads, the food and museums, the ruins and the expanse of the sun-drenched countryside.

Every cathedral we saw, every aqueduct and amphitheater, every great work of art delivered a shock: popping up where you’d least expect it, bigger and brighter than life—as if done up in an advertising style they always taught us to avoid at R.H. Macy’s, a style that would come to be known as hellzapoppin’.

Crude but effective, these ads grabbed for attention in an atmosphere of vertiginous zaniness, presenting their wares in odd settings, absurdly out of scale. A standard example might show a gargantuan package of the product dwarfing a surrounding crowd of customers evincing their bug-eyed, spasmodic approval—exactly how Max and I felt standing in the shadow of, say, the Cathedral of Milan, or Michelangelo’s David. Everything in Italy was hellzapoppin’.

*

If someone had asked him, years later, what my tragedy was, Max might have answered that I was a workaholic.

I might have answered that that was not my tragedy, actually, but rather was what kept me from tragedy for so long.

Even on our honeymoon I was working, if only a little. I brought books along—mostly for entertainment, but also for continuing education, because that, to me, was entertaining also. It was light stuff—one called Women in Cosmetic Advertising, for instance—and no more taxing than the women’s magazines I frequently wrote for. The book even had a quiz, which of course I took, writing directly in the margins, because it was my book, and because I liked writing in my books.

Max and I were sitting on the terrace of our hotel in Milan, hometown of his parents. We had been traveling by rail all over the interior of the country.

I pulled the book out of my bag and set it on the table with our caffellatte and rolls with jam.

“Come on, Max,” I said. “Let’s play a game.”

“All right, Lils,” he said, used, by now, to my penchant for this type of fun; I was equally avid about comment cards and reader surveys.

“Try answering this list of questions about yourself, sincerely ‘Yes’ or ‘No,’” I read aloud.

“I can’t be anything but sincere when I’m around you, Lils,” he said.

And then I read:

“One. Have you changed your hairstyle at least once in the last five years?”

Yes for me. No for Max.

“Two. When you were feeling very ‘down’ did you ever buy a new hat just to cheer yourself up? (Did it?)”

Yes for me. Yes for Max. Our hat collections were quite formidable.

“Three. In a train, bus, or streetcar, would you rather study the people around you than read even the most exciting new book?”

Yes for me. Yes for Max. We’d make up stories about them together.

“Four. Did you ever speculate—just once—on how false eyelashes would look on you?”

Yes for me. No for Max. Though he never thought I needed them, and I agreed.

“Five. Do you read ‘Advice to the Lovelorn’ in your daily paper?”

Yes for me. Yes for Max. Especially now that we’d found each other. There was something gratifying in reading about the lovelorn when one had reason to believe, however mistakenly, that one would never again be lovelorn.

“Six. Do you like women—at least as well as you do men?”

Yes for me. Yes for Max.

“Seven. Can you think of at least one way to improve the appearance of each of your five best friends?”

Yes for me, excepting Helen, who looked fantastic, always. Yes for Max. He appreciated stylishness as much as I did. In Milan for one day, we’d already had him fitted for three bespoke suits. One just couldn’t find as high a quality, even in Manhattan.

“Eight. Are you interested in why people do things? (Are you also interested in what they do?)”

Yes for me. No for Max, unfortunately.

“Nine. Do you think requited love should be the most important aim of most women?”

No for me. Yes for Max.

“Ten. Have you ever, that you remember, spoken to a stranger in an emergency, a shared emotion, a sudden excess of friendliness—and enjoyed it?”

Yes for me, a hundred times on this trip already. Yes for Max, to a considerably lesser extent.

“It’s a ten-question quiz, right?” he said.

“Correct,” I said. “That’s it. Now let’s score it up.”

And then I read: “Give yourself ten points for each of these questions you’ve answered with a ‘Yes.’ If you’ve scored a sixty, stay with us—you can earn a living at cosmetics writing; seventy, you should go up in the world if you enter the profession; eighty or above means that you have the makings of a good advertising woman!”

“Tell me, professor,” Max said, “how’d we stack up?”