Aaron leaned on the stone wall and looked
across the Arno to where the Ponte Santa
Trinita met the Lungarno on the
other side. On the corner there was
Henry’s, a tavern in the British style, one of the very few taverns of any size
in the old City. Its green Venetian
blinds were always drawn half way up so passers by could look in. It was their favorite place to go in the old
city. But after a month, it came to be
more than a place to go in the late afternoon.
It came to be a problem.
He pitched his cigarette. Looking across the river, he could see the
heads and shoulders of pedestrians bobbing over the wall on that side, the
heads of motorcyclists in the street smoothly zipping along, and the tops of
cars in the usual jerking motion of rush and stop that characterizes traffic in
the city. The day was bright and
cold. The old people wore coats, the old
ladies especially wore furs or cloth coats with fur stoles. But the young people wore slick sport coats
with sweaters under them and silk ascots, tailored trousers, and expensive
shoes, and the women glided along with that seductive Italian femaleness that
suggested the air about them should be grateful they deign to walk in it, so
that one felt, sitting outside in the
Piazza della Reppublica, sipping
espresso, like one was living within a glossy photo meant for travel
magazines.
They had been all over Europe. The summer was hot everywhere, and the large
crowds of tourists always took the pleasure away whenever they tried to go for
walks or to find a place to eat. They
learned to stay away from the cities and found towns and villages where they
could walk around freely and make easy trips to sightsee. At first, being in Europe was good. They had become closer than ever and learned
how to relax with each other. But it
didn’t last. The drinking got worse and
worse. And it was always an ordeal to
get her to eat. They came to Florence by
way of the small mountain village of San Gimignano, where they had spent a week
in relative peace and made several trips to Siena. But by their third day in Florence, Les said
this is where she wanted to stay.
He saw her, then, step out of the bar into
the street. He knew it was her, even
across the distance, because she had become thin as a rail again, because she
stepped when she walked with that carefulness of the invalid, and because she
wore jeans and Nikes and her black blazer--advertising her Americanness. It was barely two in the afternoon, and he
had been up for only a little while, his head pounding and his mouth dry and
foul. When he saw she was gone, he
showered and dressed and came out to the little courtyard of their hotel, lit a
cigarette, and kept his eye on Henry’s.
How long she had been there he had no idea, but he knew she was
there. She made her way slowly and
deliberately, not toward the Ponte Santa
Trinita, which would have been the fastest way back to their hotel, but in
the other direction, toward the Piazza
Goldoni, and he knew she was going to the stazione. He knew that as
surely as he knew she was drunk.
Well, he’d be on his own today. He doubted he’d see her again till morning,
if then. Well, let her, he thought. But he couldn’t help wondering where she had
taken it in her head to go. She got
herself fortified for it. Where was she
going? Why did he care? It was a beautiful day. They had met many people at Henry’s, and he
could go there himself, in an hour or so, when most of the people he and Les
met there regularly would start coming in, and get himself invited somewhere
for the evening--out to dinner at the least, or to a concert, it was the
Christmas season now, at the very best.
He didn’t worry about what to do.
They had let things come always in an unplanned way and took up with
whomever seemed to please them at the moment, and they were never without
something to do or someplace to go.
People were different here. Almost everyone spoke more than one language,
dressed carefully and expensively, and had extravagant tastes and an appetite
for conversation that sometimes exhilarated him and sometimes embarrassed him,
too--he often found himself ignorant of the very things that most interested
them. He didn’t belong among these
people, the kind who frequented Henry’s, but that sense of fitting in never
troubled Les. He couldn’t imagine her
being an object of any man’s lusts, here.
She looked like she’d crack into pieces if you tried to touch her. But she was a wit. She picked up Italian so fast it scared him,
speaking conversationally almost from the first day, and the people they met
were delighted with her. He struggled
with all that, and never could make others laugh or even get very much
interested in anything he had on his mind, like Les could and did, all the
time. He envied her. He was frightened of her, too, mostly because
of her obsessions and her recklessness, but also because she seemed to live on
a different plane from him and knew things he never even guessed at.
He jammed his hands in his pockets and
stood there, erect, undecided, feeling abandoned and lonely. There was no one in the hotel, this being the
wrong season for tourists and the time of day when the few people who were
there were out, anyway. A pang of hunger
then made him restless. So he decided to
find that little shop where he and Les bought wine and cheese one day and buy
himself a fruit along the way and carry what he got back to the room. He was sure only of the general direction and
would have to hunt and peck around the narrow streets on this side of the
river. He liked the idea of doing that
because he loved the little shops, poking his head in to see what there was
inside, and the smells were always fine, distinctive and pleasant and
unfamiliar. Eventually he came across a
little piazza in front of the Chiesa
Santo Spirito, an old church that Les told him something about but which he
had forgotten now. There was a kind of
bazaar set up in the square, a flea market type of thing, where people
displayed their wares on folding tables and sat in rickety chairs beside them.
Across the square there was a little
restaurant and he forgot the wine and cheese and bought himself a sandwich and
a beer and sat at a little table in front, and watched the comings and goings
of housewives and kids and old men, and their hagglings with the vendors, and
enjoyed the sunshine and the cool air, and the many colored polyester scarves
that one vendor had fastened to a cord stretched over her table and which
flapped in the breeze like flags, and ate his sandwich with a sense of
satisfaction and with an unaccustomed forgetfulness.
There was one other person, a dark young
man in work clothes, eating at the tables on the sidewalk, the area being blocked
to the general traffic by a hedge on one side, and by a row of big flower pots
along the curb, and a rope slung between posts on the third side. He ignored the other man as he ate and sipped
his beer, and the other ignored him, in a kind of mutual recognition of
non-existence. But soon he heard some
familiar sounds, words and laughter, and without realizing it, he looked up in
anticipation. Entering from the door of
the restaurant came two women, about the same age, speaking American and
looking American--like Les, wearing sneakers and blue jeans but covered on top
by bulky sweaters. He took them at first
for students, but they weren’t. He
greeted them and asked them to join him, and they were glad he did and were
very friendly. After the first burst of
introductions and where-are-you-froms, they settled in to their sandwiches.
They were not staying at a hotel, they
said, because they wanted to spend a couple weeks and had found out about an
old convent where the nuns rented rooms to tourists at favorable rates and
provided breakfasts and evening meals.
He thought of himself and Les living in a convent and couldn’t help but
to smile. The convent was only a short
walk from where they were and shared the piazza with a very lovely church,
where they heard the Ave Maria
performed during a regular service the evening before.
“Don’t you love the way the churches all
over the city ring their bells in the evening?
The sound vibrates right through you,” one of them said.
“I guess I noticed,” he said, “but haven’t
really paid much attention.”
“Well, pay attention at exactly five
fifteen, and listen to them. How can you
have been here a month and not noticed them?”
“At five fifteen I’m usually at Henry’s
having a drink and deep into conversation with someone I’ve met for the first
time, who is telling me something I don’t want to know, but so earnestly I have
to listen.”
He didn’t say anything about Les, not
wanting to turn them away. They were
falling all the time now into acrimonious bickering, like they used to, and he
was finding talking with these girls pleasant.
They were evidently taking in what he said, for they were looking at him
curiously and then exchanged a glance.
“What is this Henry’s?” the other one said.
“Oh, it’s a British style pub on the
Lungarno across the river.”
“Do you go there a lot?” she said.
“Yes, I do.
Almost every day, late afternoons.
A lot of the people who go there are foreigners who live in the city,
and Italians, too, of course. Men and
women. It’s a nice place, comfortable,
good drinks, friendly.”
“Is it expensive?”
“Yes.
If you’re living on a budget, you shouldn’t go there,” he said, feeling
guilty for what he was about to do, because he hated living off his
father-in-law as it was, but using the old man’s money like this stirred his
conscience.
“But why not come with me? Drinks are on me, so it won’t bust your
budget.”
Their names were Abby and Lucy, and they
were look-alikes. Both were blond, about
the same height and weight, and both were twenty-five. They both worked for JP Morgan’s in Manhattan New York Florence
He was especially attracted to the one
named Abby. She had a full face that was
pretty, open and alert eyes, and a shy manner that gave way as soon as her
interest was aroused. He could see
himself with her, and the thought stirred both his conscience and his
feelings. When he took Les home from the
hospital she looked like hell. There was
a time when he wasn’t sure she was going to make it. And it certainly wasn’t her will that brought
her round. More likely, he thought to
himself, it was his own.
He
had wheeled the little red Honda around the corner and rolled slowly up the
street and turned again into the narrow drive between the two houses. He didn’t go all the way down the drive to
the double garage at the very end, behind the houses. Instead, he stopped just beyond the sidewalk,
and opened his door with a loud creak and stepped out wearing jeans, a sweat
shirt, and a light green windbreaker. He
straightened out his back when he stood, as though he had been driving a long time,
a gesture that made him seem fatigued, though it was still morning, and he had
only driven a few miles, taking Les from the hospital. He slammed the door, which made another loud
creaking sound and then, as it thudded, a rattle of glass in the door channels,
which had lost their rubber weather stripping.
Les, on the passenger side, threw her door
open, gently laid her right foot out, and waited for him to come round and help
her. There was still snow on the ground,
heaped here and there where it had been shoveled into mounds during the winter,
and it was covered with soot and dirt and deep yellow streaks and blotches that
came from leaves caught up in the storms of late fall. She was impatient, as invalids are when they
feel that their needs are not being tended to promptly. She waited, though, without yelling at him to
hurry. But he was taking his time, too
much time, so that she couldn’t help but to know that he was communicating.
He had shoved his keys into his jeans
pocket, then stuffed his hands into the pockets of the windbreaker, and then
just stood there. First he looked up to
the porch of the house, where the front door was, assessing the steps, the
depth of the snow along the walk going straight down to the sidewalk, and the
narrow opening in it he had shoveled during the winter to get to the drive from
the front of the house. The snow had
remained only along the side of the walk and along the side of the drive. The porch was run down, its paint peeling
off, sloping to one side like it was falling in, and was barely covered by the
leafless bushes that grew unshaped and wild in front of it. He seemed in no hurry to move to Les’ aid,
and she finally called to him. He came
back to himself and to what he had to do.
“Finally,” she said, in a burst of
irritation, as he neared her and reached in to take her hand.
“Come on,” he said, flatly and without
feeling, “don’t be bitchy. Let’s just
get it done.”
She pulled herself and was half pulled by
him into a standing position. As she
unsteadily got her two feet under her, with her left hand on the top of the
Honda’s door, she steadied herself for the walk to the house. He moved her gently away from the car and
slammed the door.
She was half the person she was only a
month before, and she walked like an old woman suffering all the pains of
age. She was emaciated and her face had
that look of bony fleshlessness that one sees in the faces of the
famished. Her almost orange hair had
thinned and now it bushed from her head and hung at the ends so that it made
her look apparition-like mad, like a witch.
She was also uncommonly white and bloodless. It was with some considerable effort that he
got her up the stairs, and with a sigh of relief, into the house and nestled
upright into the big chair in the living room beside the door.
The house was a mess. Dirty trousers, underwear, dinner plates,
forks and knives, glasses, cups, used napkins, socks, shirts, and all sorts of
debris from eating were chaotically scattered across the room, up the long hall
to the kitchen, and into the bedroom, whose door was half open just in front of
her. Empty, crushed beer cans, an empty
vodka bottle, and two cigarette-filled ash trays wafted their aromas, with all
the rest, in welcome to her.
“I hope to hell my parents didn’t come in
when they came for the baby,” she said, resting her head back on the chair.
“Why?” he asked, looking around. “When the hell has it been any
different? You never clean the damn
place, why should I?” He was sensitive
to being criticized on that score, having more than once been slammed by her
for complaining about her housekeeping.
But he was unprepared for the vehemence in her voice when she responded.
“At least I don’t see any strange bras
lying around, though how the hell could I tell if there were.” Then, without changing tone, “Fix me a drink,
I can’t get up. Make me a screwdriver,
and make it strong.”
He made them both one and sat on the couch
next to her, handing her up the glass just as he fell to the cushion.
“Your parents were here,” he said. “But I had the place straightened up when
they came and the baby’s things all packed.”
“Good.
Keeping up appearances! That will
at least keep the money coming. We need
daddy’s money.” She took a long drink
and closed her eyes. “I suppose we
should call them and tell them to keep the baby for a while, a long while if we
can get them to do it.”
He didn’t say anything. They never called it by name, it was always
“the baby.” He had a bad conscience over
the baby, because it was the reason they got married and then it interfered in
their lives. It was expensive, and one
of them always had to tend to it. She
bitched about it all the time, and it crawled around and got into his things. It screamed at night sometimes when they
wanted to sleep, and sometimes the only way to shut it up was to take it to bed
with them, and there it lay sleeping between them, blissful as only sleeping
babies can be. And he would look at it
and feel stirrings in himself that he supposed were love. And this was what made for the bad conscience.
“How do you feel,” he said. “Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking.”
“Oh, the drink is for me, not for my
body. I don’t give a damn about my body,
anyway. It’s just about shot. There’s not much left, is there? What do you think when you look at me? I can’t look at myself. I hate to.”
“You’re going to be all right, Les. Don’t get in a mood. But maybe you should have some food. Want a sandwich? You should eat, really, you should.”
“Let me finish the drink first. Then you can make me a sandwich. I don’t feel hungry, though. I don’t feel hungry hardly ever. I have to force myself to eat. And the hospital stuff, ugh.”
They were college students when she got
pregnant and on graduation she already showed, even beneath her black
robe. They had only known each other
casually, going out together drinking and partying only a few times before it
happened. But she pretended to be in
love with him and that the pregnancy was her sign of that. She was the youngest in a family of four
children, and the only girl. Her parents
were not only wealthy but politically active, her father being the mayor of the
town where she grew up for two terms, but now they lived in another, larger
town, a virtual city, Grand Island, where her mother owned and ran a restaurant
and her father managed a very large shopping mall. They lived in a big house, and she had always
had clothes and cars and everything that mattered to a girl growing up. They sent her to the university at Lincoln
She pretended to be in love because to have
told her parents that it was all the result of partying and drinking and
emotionless sex, and that he was just the one who happened to do it that time,
rather than any one of half a dozen others, was just beyond her. He was good looking. He was making his way through college on his
own, coming from a family who could not afford to help him. And he seemed to be ambitious. She thought of their marriage as a solution
to a problem, nothing more.
But nothing worked out for her. She applied for job after job, after
researching them and making calls and visits and introducing herself, and doing
everything she could think of to make herself an attractive hire, and nothing
came of what she did except now and then a terse note saying the company would
keep her resume on file and would be in touch at a later time. Her father used what influence he had to put
her in touch with people in Washington, a good friend there knowing someone in
the State Department, but nothing came of that either. Her father offered them both jobs, but
neither wanted to live in Grand Island and start out in jobs they didn’t want
and might get trapped in for who knew how long.
So they stayed in Lincoln, in a rented apartment in an old run-down
house, where she ignored the baby, translated from the classics, and went out
in the evenings drinking and partying with friends and prowling, while he
worked in video production for an advertising company and was gradually setting
himself up to go independent, working weekends and nights on his own shooting
videos for weddings and baptisms, birthday and anniversary parties. He earned just enough to pay their bills, and
she found herself living on the edge for the first time in her life.
But it was worse than that for her. She had always been the one round whom her
parents planned their lives. And she
prospered so easily in college that she was always a favorite of her
professors. To be suddenly cut out of
everything, to be ignored, unvalued, and treated like a nonentity, seemed like
a betrayal to her. She had no choice,
finally, but to cling to her husband, whom she never loved and didn’t even like
anymore, and who was a loser, a grown man who wanted to play with his toys to
make a living. And then the sickness
came, and the long debilitation, and the visits to the doctors, and finally the
hospitalization. Now the doctors said it would be a long recovery, maybe a
year, maybe more. And she didn’t
care. She sipped her screwdriver down
till the ice rested on the bottom of the glass, and instead of the sandwich,
asked him to make another.
“If you want to kill yourself, I guess I
won’t stand in your way,” he said, and went to the kitchen and fixed them both
drinks.
When he came back, she said, “Would that
please you?”
“What?
Your killing yourself? You’re the
mother of my son. Why would it please
me?”
She laughed at that, weakly; her pale
cheeks flushed, and he noticed.
“I know you don’t give a damn about me, and
I know why you married me. Getting
married wasn’t my idea, if you remember.
But we are married, we do have a child.
I guess I shouldn’t let you drink like that.”
“Dear Aaron, do you feel like I’ve trapped
you? That you’re stuck with a
broomstick, now, a baby, and a lousy place to live? Good.
Good for you. That’s the way I
want you to feel. Because that’s the way
I feel.”
“Do you want to get better or...”
“Do I want to waste away and die? How dramatic!
But why not? Yes, I think it
wouldn’t be a bad thing. For both of
us.”
“You’re crazy, Les. What the hell! You make me sick. You drank yourself sick every night before
this came on. You blocked me out and the
baby, too, with that damn translating.
It’s self pity plain and simple.
It’s disgusting.”
“Do I disgust you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.
That’s what I want. Disgust is
such a powerful feeling. Enjoy it. I can’t feel a damn thing! Except the alcohol. That’s starting to do its job now, what I pay
it for.”
And she drank off the second drink,
swallowing like she was taking a glass of cold water on a hot day. He got up, then, and started to clean the
apartment, which was the downstairs of a house that had been converted into two
living quarters. They had what was
originally the living room of the house, together with a dining room that was
converted into a bedroom, a kitchen, and a small room for the baby. He set to work methodically. First clearing away the things that went in
the kitchen, then the clothes, then the ash trays and beer cans, the bottle,
and the debris from eating. Then he took
out a duster and wiped down all the surfaces, threw open the door for clean
air, and brought out the vacuum.
While he was doing all this, she sat
mutely, watching him, at first with a look of amusement, then with a look of
concern, and finally with a mingled look of contempt and fear.
But he didn’t look at her, trying
deliberately to keep his back to her or his face turned from her. Over the sound of the vacuum cleaner she
shouted to him to bring her a blanket because the open door made her cold. So he shut off the machine, went into the
bedroom, and came out with a blanket.
This he placed over her knees and lifted to her shoulders and tucked in
behind her back to keep it up when she leaned back again. And as he was wrapping her up, she looked in
his face and saw that he was feeling something, and she could only guess at
what it was. She was glad when he
finished and asked if that was better.
She looked at him standing over her and felt indebted, a feeling she
wasn’t used to. And he noticed that
look, too. She noticed that he did that,
noticed things about her. She could see
him taking things in about her, and it always made her uneasy.
When he finished vacuuming, he went to the
kitchen, and she could hear him at the sink, could hear the water running and
the dishes and cups and glasses clinking as he set them in the strainer. After a while, she smelled coffee brewing and
heard the refrigerator door open and close two or three times, and she knew he
was making them a meal. She wanted to
get up and go in the kitchen, so she tried to rise and found that she didn’t
have the strength to, and all those feelings of abandonment and worthlessness
came over her again, and the bitterness became a taste in her mouth. She was struggling with the bitterness when
he returned.
He shut the door first, then took away her
blanket, and reached down behind her with his arm and gently lifted her to her
feet. Then with his arm still around her
back, he led her to the kitchen. She
didn’t protest or speak at all. She just let him lead her. She found the kitchen clean and everything
put away, the table set for two, sandwiches on the plates, and coffee poured
for both of them. He led her to a chair
and helped her sit.
“Thank you,” she said, under her breath.
But he heard it and didn’t reply. He just looked at her, taking in the
expression on her face. He kept his own
expressionless.
“Try to eat, now,” he said. “Doctor Massey told me to make sure you eat
regularly and take those vitamins everyday.
And everyday a little exercise.”
She looked at him. She felt ashamed at the care he took lifting
her from the chair, his gentleness walking her to the kitchen, and the careful
way he helped her to sit. She kept
looking at him, and he tried to not notice, looking at his sandwich, away from
her as he bit into it, then sipping coffee.
“You know, don’t you, that I might never
get better, that I might get worse,” she said, wanting to get this said before
what she was beginning to feel could come on her all the way. “Some people recover from this kind of polio,
some don’t. We don’t know which I will
be, yet.”
“I know all about it.”
“Do you.
I don’t think you know all about it.”
“Of course, I don’t know what you feel,
physically, but don’t think that I can’t feel what you’re going through.”
“I know.
You are good. I’m sorry that
sometimes I seem to resent you. I don’t,
really. I’m glad you’re with me. I feel like I can count on you. You must not let me say nasty things, you
should shut me up.”
“You’re going to get better.”
“Oh, because it’s just too terrible to
think I’m not! What if I’m not? What if I don’t get better? What will you do?”
“I’ll do what I will have to do. Why think about it?”
“I want to think about it. If we pull through this, our lives will be
different, better, we’ll really be husband and wife.”
“And mother and father? Don’t forget that. The baby isn’t going to go away.”
“And mother and father. Oh, what the hell. You make it sound like playing house when we
were kids. Do boys ever do that? Oh, forget it.
Yes, mother and father. God
damn! You do have a way of killing the
feeling in me,” she cried, almost shouted.
He winced at her outburst. Bringing up the baby was a mistake. She wasn’t ever going to adjust to him. He knew that.
His bad conscience came on him, because sometimes he felt the same way,
and whenever he did, he remembered those stirrings he felt when the baby slept
between them, blissfully unaware of their drunkenness, their mutual coldness,
the resentment they both could express, that was sometimes so strong it froze
their hearts.
She had finished the sandwich and her
coffee. That was a big thing, he
felt. They were making progress. He got up and cleared the table and put the
things in the sink and washed them. Then
he lifted her up and walked her back to the living room and set her in the
chair again. He asked if she wanted to
try for a short walk outside, just a quick turn to the corner and back, maybe
five minutes.
“The air will be good for you, and you need
to walk. The doctor told me that it was
critical that I make you walk.”
“Oh, all right,” she said. “Just let me rest a bit from the meal.”
After a while they put their coats on, and
he led her out to the sidewalk, and, his arm supporting her at her back, they
walked to the corner. She was very tired
when they returned, dropping into his arms, so that he had to carry her up the
steps. At the door, he had to let her
stand so he could reach for the knob and push it in. She leaned on him with all her empty weight,
and he stood, looking into her face. He
moved in closer and kissed her on the cheek, and she let him do it and didn’t
flinch like she used to before he stopped kissing her altogether.
While
he was eating, he had been looking at the Italian woman with the polyester
scarves. She was young, too. And also attractive. But she had none of the air about her that
the women did whom he saw in the piazzas, women on display, with or without
men. Women like that didn’t interest
him. One time he mentioned their
seductiveness to Les, and she had said the two women he had pointed to, who
strolled by them like they were in front of an audience, had just been talking
about how to make cinnamon rolls for breakfast.
Then she told him to relax. But
he could never get used to Italian women.
This woman in the flea market, though, was plainly dressed and sat by or
stood around her table looking dejected, for no one came to buy her scarves, or
even to look at them, and he felt bad for her and wanted to buy something from
her. So he told Abby and Lucy to go over
there and pick out a couple of scarves each and he would pay for them. They were astonished and laughed. But he said, “Do it as a favor, please!”
And so they walked over chatting together
and laughing, and picked out a couple of scarves--Abby a yellow and a purple
one, and Lucy a green and a black one.
He paid for them after getting the woman to tell him in English how much
they were. He understood the Italian,
but he wanted to keep her talking. He
tried then, half in Italian and half in English, to say something flattering to
her, which she finally understood, and she smiled and said thank you. Her response made him feel good, and the
girls laughed as they walked away, Lucy saying, “What are we going to do with
these hideous things?”
“Put them in your suitcases and when you
get home, tie them to the antennas of your cars.”
“But we don’t have cars. You can’t live in Manhattan and own a
car! Nobody does.”
“Then send them as peace flags to your
parents. Tell them to hang them from
their front porches on the Fourth of July.”
They laughed and headed for Henry’s.
The girls were not big drinkers, and after
one cocktail declined a second. They
liked Henry’s, though, and were almost immediately being flirted with by men
who came for introductions. They came to
Aaron, knowing he was married and that he must, therefore, have just made the
acquaintance of the blondes, asking to be introduced, offering to buy drinks,
starting conversations, and slipping away with them. Aaron made the introductions, and in a very
short while was sitting alone, like the victim of a conspiracy. He sipped his drink and thought about Les and
where she had gone. And after a long
while, when Abby returned, she passed her hand in front of his eyes and said,
“Hello!”
“That guy, the Spaniard with the
consulate? He put his hand on my butt
and squeezed me. What a nerve!”
“What did he say?”
“What do you mean?”
“What did he say while he was squeezing
you?”
“What?”
“I’m always curious how they keep
conversation going while they do things like that.”
She laughed. “I don’t remember,” she said. “I think he was telling me about Madrid,
something about the Prado. He was saying
that Florence was a museum but that Madrid was a city that had a museum. And then he was caressing my butt.”
“Did you like it?”
“I did not!”
And they laughed again. He was beginning to enjoy himself as he never
really did when he was here with Les.
She had a way of turning conversation into serious business, and he
could see that the men admired her as well as liked her. But he never saw the Spaniard fondle
Les. It just never happened. Not because she was his wife and he respected
that, but because he, the Spaniard, was as afraid of her as he was. Les still looked like an invalid, getting
worse since they came to Florence, which she attributed to the change in diet,
and assured him it would pass after a while.
So she still had the boniness and weightlessness of the sick, and it
killed her sex appeal. But he knew it
wasn’t for that that the men didn’t play with her. It was who she was that kept them from
it. Her hard drinking. Her never appearing drunk. The way she judged people. Her shifting from Italian to German without
skipping a beat, and then to Spanish.
Her hard drinking. That,
mostly. Plain and simple.
The Spaniard, whose name was Jorge--Les
called him George, which he didn’t seem to mind--once remarked that she
shouldn’t drink so much because her health wasn’t so good, and she responded, “Thanks
for your concern, George, but the drink is for me, not for my body.” She always said that when Aaron complained,
and he smiled and glanced at Jorge to see how he took it, and was surprised to
see a grim expression of respect. He
certainly didn’t feel that way, because he knew it was the body, and the body
alone, that drove her. Being drunk was
for her a bodily experience. Like sex
used to be. She tottered when she
walked, and he tried to stay near her just in case. When he got drunk, there was no Aaron. All there was was body, and he knew it was
the same for her.
Abby touched his hand and said, “Come back,
Aaron, from wherever you are.”
And he smiled up at her and decided he
really liked her. “Have you been to the
San Lorenzo?” he asked.
“We were there this morning. Why?”
“They restored the old organ there,” he
said, “and tonight they’re going to have a concert of music composed especially
for it--I mean music from its own time.
I’d like to go. Those things are
open to the public, no tickets or anything.
Just walk in.”
“I’m going!” she said. “When?”
It’ll start in about an hour, so we should
leave now.”
“Lucy’s having a fine time. If she doesn’t want to go, we’ll leave her
here.”
But Lucy wanted to go, so he paid the bill
and, taking leave of everyone, they walked out.
The evening was calm and cooler, and the streets were decorated for
Christmas. There were many people out,
and the old city was cheerful and festive.
They walked vigorously, Aaron between the girls, touching their elbows
to steer them. He felt fine. Sober and in possession.
He half expected to find Les at the San
Lorenzo, and dreaded that he might. They
had talked about the concert yesterday afternoon, the last time they were
together and still sober. It was really
her idea that they go. He didn’t know
where or when she would show up and hoped that it wouldn’t be here. He wanted to have this evening with Abby and
Lucy, with Abby, mostly. He wanted her
to get to know him, he wanted to reach an understanding with her, to leave her
when she left Florence with the idea that he would see her again, that he
wanted to. But that was a lot to happen
in one night, and he was afraid she would think him pushy if he became too
familiar too fast.
But Les didn’t show up. The concert was all that he had hoped it
would be, and they got there early enough to get seats. The organ was installed in San Lorenzo in
1503. The music they performed on it was not all devotional, but it was all beautiful,
varied and prolonged. And when it was
over, the girls were effusive in their gratitude. He walked them back to the convent, but
wouldn’t make any definite plans for the next day. They wanted to meet him, but he was evasive,
saying that there weren’t that many places to go in the old city and that they
would probably run into one another. “Be
on the lookout,” he said, and, “Try Henry’s after four.” He shook their hands and left. When he got back to the hotel, there was a
note on his door saying there was a message for him at the desk in the lobby.
The letter was in a strange hand, telling
him that his wife was in the hospital, the Nuovo
San Giovanni di Dio, on the Via
Torregalli, and that he should come there as soon as possible. He called for a taxi and left when it
arrived. On the way, he thought how much
like an aimless stork Les looked when she walked, and wondered if that wasn’t a
sign of drunkenness so much as a return of the polio. Was it to the hospital she was going when he
saw her leave Henry’s? He was sure she
was drunk. But now he wasn’t sure of
anything. Except that he was dreading
what he would find when he got there.
It was worse than he expected. He had no difficulty explaining who he was,
since they had been waiting for him.
When he saw her, his stomach fell.
She had oxygen tubes in her nose and an IV in the top of her hand lying
limply on the bed beside her. She was
colorless and asleep, but she sensed him and opened her eyes. He pulled a chair to the bedside and took her
hand as he sat. She could speak only in
a whisper and he couldn’t make out what she said, so he leaned over and put his
ear to her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, paused a
moment, and then, “feel like hell.”
A doctor came in with someone who spoke
English, an older woman who introduced herself and the doctor. She explained that his wife was very ill and
that he needed to sign some papers so they could treat her. They had already been in touch with her father
and he was coming to Florence and should be here tomorrow or the next day. It was too bad that he couldn’t be found
until now. It was his wife who told them
to call her father. She was too weak to
call herself, even to speak on the phone.
She, the woman, hopes everything will be all right. The doctor says his wife has experienced a
relapse of the Guilliame Barré, but
that they will do plasma treatment tomorrow and after that she should be fine,
but that she needs to rest and recover her strength. He thanked them both, said it couldn’t be
helped, and that he was sure everything would be fine. They left him alone with her, finally.
He sat beside her again and took her
hand. It was limp and motionless. She looked at him and whispered, “I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK, don’t be. We’ve been through this before. We know the routine. You’re going to get better, you’ll see.”
But she was worse now than before. She never seemed so listless then, even at
its worst. Now she could hardly speak
and didn’t move at all. She was like a
rag doll with its eyes closed. He sat
for a long time looking at her and holding her hand, and then, more to himself
than to her, he said, “You’re going to get better, you’ll see.”
“I don’t know if I want to,” she said,
looking at him out of the side of her eyes.
And then they closed and she seemed to slip off. But she opened them again and said, “I’ve
done this to myself and to you, too. I’m
really sorry.” And this time she did
slip off.
He felt badly, very badly. His conscience was pricking him, and his ill
will towards her was turning into pity, in spite of his efforts not to let
himself feel that. He sat looking at
her. Asleep, drugged no doubt, she
looked almost like a newborn, her face pale and thin and her eyes bulging. What a strange woman, he thought. And he gradually began to rehearse their
reasons for coming to Europe, the marriage, the life they lived in Nebraska,
his resolve to break with her, and the evening they spent walking around the
pond near her parents’ home.
They
quarreled all the time. As the weather
improved he wanted to walk her more often, but she didn’t want to be seen in
the neighborhood. So he took her to the
park, but after a while the park bored her.
Everything bored her. He bored
her. She would sit at her table in the
bedroom, working on The Meditations,
and he would interrupt, saying, “You’ve been sitting for hours,” and she’d say,
“So?” and he’d say “Put those damn things away and let’s go out and get some
air,” and she’d say, “I have enough air, thank you.” And they’d quarrel, ending up shouting at
each other.
She’d put on some weight, mostly because he
insisted she eat, and sometimes he’d actually feed her. She drank too much when he was away, and he’d
always ride her about the drinking. But
it didn’t make any difference.
Gradually, however, after the first month since her return from the
hospital, she had improved enough to be able to walk on her own, her color had
returned, and her hair began to look lustrous again. They still did not take the baby back,
however. Whenever her parents asked
about it, she told them she wasn’t ready, she couldn’t cope yet. Actually, she didn’t want it back. She was getting used to living without its
interferences and dreaded having to take it back. Her parents didn’t seem to care, though,
being content to keep him for as long as she wanted them to. Aaron, on the other hand, pestered her about
the baby. He wanted to take it back,
feeling that its presence might pry her away from the alcohol and the
books. They quarreled bitterly over the
baby. On the matter of taking it back
she held firm. No! and No!
One day he said, “We can’t go on like
this.”
“Like what?
What’s wrong? Aren’t I getting
better? Isn’t that what you want?”
“Yes,” he said, “You’re getting better, and
that’s what we both want, isn’t it? But
that’s not what I mean, and you know it.”
He sat on the edge of the bed, and she turned her chair from the desk to
see him better.
“What, then?”
“I go to work, and you sit here. I come home from work, and you sit here. Half the time you’re barely sober. I’d like to move. Get away.
We just need to do something. I
mean, I feel like we’re in a tunnel between two places we want to get to and we
can’t move. You don’t want to do
anything. I have to scream at you to go
out for a walk. You sit and drink and that’s
just not good. Les, look at
yourself. C’mon. You sit in the half-light of this room like a
troglodyte.”
“Ha!” she yelled. “Where can we go? You earn enough to pay our rent and put some
jelly on the table.”
“That’s a cheap shot, Les, and you know
it. We can go wherever we want. We just have to want to.”
On this matter of leaving Lincoln, Aaron
became obsessive. He pushed and pushed,
and she resisted and they quarreled. The
quarrels became serious, and she became vicious in her attacks against him,
calling him a loser, a minimum wage man, a sod savage who should go home to the
farm and let his mother care for him. He
took these blows in the spirit in which they were flung at him, as attempts to
hurt and nothing more. He gave his share
in these fights.
But it wore him out and finally he decided
to make a break. He worked the entire
weekend, videotaping a baptism, a wedding, a birthday party, and an
anniversary, and he actually had hired help to get the work done, someone he
knew from the ad agency, who also helped with the editing. Work from the week before had piled up, so he
brought Les to her parents to be free to concentrate in the evenings as
well. She was gone for almost five days,
and he felt a calm and peacefulness that he hadn’t known before. He realized how much energy she drained from
him just being around her, and how much she drove his life, and he came to
blame himself not her for the daily sapping.
She is what she is and is not going to change, but he is always what she
wants to make him. He realized how
little will he had where she was concerned, and how much he felt free during
these last few days.
At first he thought he would just pack his
things and throw them in the car and take off, stay in a motel until he got
paid for his last jobs, and then just leave town. He didn’t know where he’d go, just that he’d
go. But after a while he realized he
couldn’t do that. So he called Les and
told her he was coming for her that night.
It was late when he arrived in Grand Island,
after nine. He never liked her parents’
house, it was too big and pretentious, and they lived in it alone, just the two
of them. The garage had space for five
cars and a parking apron like a supermarket’s.
The rear entrance to the house had a big foyer with an antique light
fixture hanging from its ceiling and a slate tile floor that ran into a
bathroom on one side and the kitchen on the other and straight ahead up the
hallway to the front foyer, off of which were doorways to a dining room and a
living room--both with huge fireplaces--and a stairwell that was wide enough
for four people to go up side by side.
He stood at the bottom of the staircase and yelled up for Les, and after
a minute she appeared at the turn, holding onto the banister, looking down at
him.
He waited, and she waited. And after what seemed like an unendurable
stand off, neither giving in to make the first move or to say anything, her
mother appeared. She was getting
heavy. She also had orange hair and was
always heavily made up. She was that
kind of self-conscious woman that Aaron intensely disliked, always looking you
over, always aware of the impact she had on you, always over-bedecked in
jewelry, smelling like she spilled a bottle of perfume on herself. She called down to him, “Aren’t you coming
up, Aaron?”
And Les said, “No, mother, Aaron’s being a
pain again. He wants me to go down.”
“Aaron,” his mother-in-law called, “come up
and see the baby. You haven’t been here
in so long, don’t you want to see him?”
“No, mother, I think Aaron has a problem
with the baby.”
That really angered him. So he turned and went into the living room
and sat down and waited for her. He knew
she felt something was up. He could see
it in her face and the way she stood, the way she looked down the stairs. He lit a cigarette, mostly because they
didn’t like him to smoke in the house, intending to flick his ashes in the
fireplace, but Les came in and said, “Do we need to go for a walk?”
“Yes.
Maybe we should.”
It was still cool in the evenings, so she
put on a coat, and he had not taken off his own, so they left through the front
door. They walked in silence for a
while, until they got out of sight of the big old house, making their way to a
little park that had a pond with benches around it and lampposts beside the
benches.
“I’m taking off, Les.” he said. “These past few days...” and he paused,
taking a long time to start again. “I’ve
been thinking. Neither of us is
happy. Our ‘arrangement’ isn’t
working. You’ve got what you needed from
me. There’s no purpose to be served in
our going on. I’ve got nothing. Really.
I have nothing to stay for.”
“What am I supposed to do? Stay with my parents? That would be the end for me,” she said, in a
whisper, as they reached the pond and turned into the path that circled
it. They walked close to each other, and
anybody who saw them might have mistaken them for lovers. She took his hand, and he let her, and they
walked hand in hand.
“Les, don’t play this game with me. That’s why I’m leaving. You can do what you want. Don’t threaten.”
She sighed and was silent and didn’t
quarrel. They walked slowly, into the
gleam of the lamps and out again, fading into the darkness and appearing again
up ahead, close to each other.
They completed a circuit and she had been
silent all the time. “You’re taking this
pretty well,” he said.
“I knew it was coming,” she said,
calmly. Then she said, “I don’t want you
to go. Not for any but selfish
reasons. I know we act like we hate each
other, but I don’t hate you, and you don’t hate me.”
“So?
What are you saying? We should
stay together because we don’t hate each other?
That’s what’s wrong, Les. You
think like that.”
He turned toward the pond and they walked
to the bank together and stood looking down into the brown water. Something touched the surface, an insect from
above or a fish from below, and the ripples widened and gradually
disappeared. They were silent the while,
looking at the spreading ripples, neither starting to move.
“You know,” she said, “since I’ve been home
I’ve had nothing to drink. Mother has
been like you, stuffing my face. I
haven’t been near the books. Mostly,
I’ve played with the baby. You would
have liked me.” She took his hand again
and swung it cheerfully, and by this means turned him away from the pond, and
then she stepped into a brisk pace and walked him a complete circuit and came
back to where they were, out of breath but feeling heated and energetic. Her face was flushed and her eyes were
gleaming. And she looked like she did
when they first met.
He was losing his resolve. She took his arm and held it close to her and
leaned into him. He didn’t fight the
move but let her stay that way. They
were in the glare of the lamp and he could smell her hair, and he put his chin
on her head. He hadn’t made love to her
since she was pregnant. Their
relationship was strange, more like partners who couldn’t get along in some
business, except they slept in the same bed at night. He never had the impulse to touch her and she
never attempted to waken it. Their talk
almost always ended in acrimony. Once,
he tried to videotape her on a walk, when the day was warm and bright and she
looked good and seemed cheerful. Her
anger was so swift and severe that he was dismayed. When he played the little he had recorded, he
was so upset to see her livid face that he had thrown the tape away. He thought about that now, as she leaned on
him, and tried to harden himself against her.
“We last only a day,” she said, dreamily,
staring over the pond, “both we who remember and those of us who are
remembered.”
“And who is that,” he said, knowing the
mood she was in.
“Marcus Aurelius,” she said. “I get a lot of comfort from him
sometimes. He can be grim. But then he helps you to see something that
comforts. He also says we are little
souls bearing around our corpses.”
“Great.
That’s a comfort to know. What
else does he say? Does he say anything
that makes our lives, I mean yours and mine, more intelligible than I can make
them out? When I think about us, Les,
all I get is darkness and confusion.”
“He says everything that happens is
familiar. The rose in spring and the
fruit in the summer. Disease, death,
slander, treachery, all that delights and vexes us.”
And they were silent again and near and
touching. He still had his chin on her
head, and she still hugged his arm. He
tried to imagine the emperor who thought such things, things which didn’t please
him at all, but made him afraid. He
moved to release his arm, and she hugged it tighter, but he told her to let go,
and when she did, he put his arm around her shoulders, and she leaned into him
again. He felt comforted by her, and
needed to feel that way, and he seldom did.
But she was being warm and pleasant, and he wanted her to continue.
Finally, she said, “Aaron, I don’t want us
to part. I need you, I think I love
you. I know that’s not what you want to
hear and that you don’t believe it.
Sometimes I don’t know what I feel, and I make you hate me. Why haven’t you gone before now? That’s what I don’t understand. Don’t leave me now. Don’t leave me.”
“I came here to tell you I was
leaving. I’m not changing my mind. Though you are trying pretty hard to make
me. Why, Les? Why do you want to keep up the lie that we have
anything like a marriage, a relationship?
That’s all it is, a lie.”
She was alarmed by this admission. She had tensed up under his arm, and she
looked up into his face and saw that he was feeling something very
intensely. She hugged him and held to him. She was afraid, and she turned again to her
Greek.
“We quarrel with what we most commune. Consider, we ought not to act and speak as if
we were asleep; and we ought not to act and speak simply as we have been
taught.”
“What does that mean?” he said, this time
not seeing any relevance in the thought.
“It means we must try to be original and to
accept ourselves, to be ourselves, and not try to be like others. Aaron, if we can do that, we can be
fine. We can make it work.”
“C’mon, let’s go back to the house. I’m tired.
I’d like to go to bed, I haven’t been sleeping, hardly at all.”
“I think, Aaron, we will do what you
want. I’ll agree to leave Lincoln. We can go wherever you like. Would you like to go to Europe? I mean, like, live there for a
while--Madrid? Rome? Paris?
London? Anywhere!”
They were walking briskly, still holding
hands, leaving the pond behind and entering the dark of the sidewalk. They had been out over an hour, and it was
getting colder as the night wore on.
“Money, Les. Money.
Wherever we go, I need to find work.”
“Daddy has money, dear. Lots of money. And you have your pride. I know.
I know. You couldn’t rest until
we stopped taking money from him after I came out of the hospital. But why not let him finance a year in Europe
for us? We’ll consider it convalescence
time. Besides, maybe I can make some
contacts, meet people who can be helpful when I go back to job hunting.”
He thought about it. He really wasn’t enthused about going to
Europe, and he was less enthused about letting her father pay for it. He didn’t know. Les was being helpful, and he should let her,
because she had never since they were married actually tried to make things
work. He should let her. Maybe it would help. Maybe it would change her. It’s been a long time since she has mentioned
looking for work again. He could sell
his equipment and raise perhaps five thousand dollars, and he could borrow that
much from his own father, he was sure, because his father had told him when he
married that if he needed that kind of help, he shouldn’t hesitate to come to
him. It would be a onetime gift of that
little sum of money to help him out after college, money that he and his mother
had put aside for that purpose because they couldn’t afford to pay for his
college tuition and other expenses. So
he could come up with about ten thousand altogether. If her father gave her maybe twice that, they
could do it. Why not, he thought. Why not?
It was all so bizarre, all so much her own doing, that he was like a leaf flowing on the current of her will. He didn’t know what he felt towards her. He didn’t love her. He didn’t want to let himself pity her. He was often afraid of her. As he meditated, he almost unconsciously withdrew his hand from hers, and he felt hers tighten around his and hold on, so he sat there with his hand clasped into hers.
He felt her stir and leaned over again to
hear better.
“Forgive,” she said.
That was all he heard from her. She slipped off again and this time remained
asleep. “Forgive.” Was it possible she said that? It wasn’t like her to say that. He left for the hotel after sitting with her
for another half hour. When he was sure
she wouldn’t come to again, he left. He
wondered if that last word meant that she thought she was going to die. He was sure she wouldn’t have said it if she
felt she were going to recover. No. Not Les.
He knew her. He felt very
bad. He got back to the hotel feeling as
bad as he had ever felt. No, that wasn’t
Les. He went to bed feeling, “Poor Les,
poor, poor Les.”
The next morning he got up early and
remembered that Les’ father might be arriving that day, so he called down to
the desk and asked if there was a message for him, and there was. It said that he would arrive at the station
in Florence on the Al’Italia express from the Rome airport at seven in the
evening. He went to the hotel restaurant
and had breakfast, then took a taxi to the hospital.
Les looked about the same, sleepy and
limp. He sat beside her and took her
hand and stroked it, careful not to bother the needle where the IV was
inserted. She felt him and opened her
eyes. Her look was one of pity. He felt it, too. She wasn’t going to make it. It was very bad this time. He couldn’t find anything to say to her, and
she didn’t try to speak either. But she
did press his hand in her own, and they sat like that until the nurses came to
take her away. They were going to do the
plasma replacement. So he sat in the
waiting room and thumbed through magazines for as long as he could stand
it. She was gone a long time. It was afternoon before he saw her
again. He told her that her father would
be there in the evening, and she responded by pressing his hand and blinking
her eyes. Then she slept.
When it was time he went to the
station. Her father was a big man who
was decisive and energetic. He had broad
shoulders, a great paunch, short gray hair, and his tie always looked a few inches
too short for him. He said that he was
taking Les home, tomorrow if she could stand it, the next day for sure. He could come with them or stay. That was his own decision to make. That’s all he said when they met. He had eaten on the plane and wanted to go to
the hospital right away. So they got a
cab in front of the station and, ten minutes after arriving in Florence, he was
sitting beside his daughter. Aaron found
the old woman who spoke English and introduced her to his father-in-law. He said, gruffly, “When can I take her
home?” She said he would have to talk to
the doctor. He said, “Where is he?”
That’s the kind of man he was. The next morning, he had Les fully dressed in
a wheel chair and wheeled her himself to the cab in front of the hospital,
picked her up and placed her in, and took off.
That was the last time he saw either of them.
The old man never even said, “Are you
coming?” He guessed that Aaron felt he’d
be in the way, Aaron thought. And that
was really what he would be. He was
relieved that she was gone, but already he felt purposeless. She had been his reason for being for so long
that the habit of it lingered and made him feel adrift.
Later in the day he went to Henry’s and had
a scotch and soda. But he didn’t stay
long. Abby and Lucy had not come in, and
he didn’t feel like conversation. So he
left. He had crossed the river on the
Ponte Vecchio this time, and by the statue of Cellini he stopped and leaned on
the rail and watched a guy slide a shell into the water and begin to punt up
the river. The water was green as the
Chicago river on St. Patty’s day. And
that’s when he saw Abby and Lucy. They
had already seen him and were coming his way when he noticed them. Abby came up and said, “We were at Henry’s
yesterday and people were talking about you.
They said that your wife was very sick. Why didn’t you say you were married?”
“She wasn’t around,” he said, “and I didn’t
know what had happened to her. She’s
gone, now, back to Nebraska. Her father
came and took her home.”
“Why didn’t you go, too,” she said. Lucy had ambled away and was looking at
jewelry in the showcases of the shops on the bridge.
“Look,” he said, “Les and I were husband
and wife in name only. There never was
anything between us.”
“Oh?” she questioned, “One of the men at
Henry’s said that you had a child, and they all felt very bad for you, for both
of you.”
“Yes.
We had a child.” He couldn’t tell
her that its own mother didn’t want it and that’s why he is himself estranged
from it. He knew he couldn’t tell her
anything. For the knowledge that Les was
very sick would probably soon become that she was dying. How does a man say that he never loved his
wife, while she is dying? He was glad
now that he didn’t go as far as he wanted the other night and that the night
ended with them shaking hands and his being evasive about whether they’d meet
again. At least he would part from her
with some honor in her eyes.
It began to grow dark, and Abby said that
she and Lucy were leaving for Rome in the morning.
“I thought you wanted to spend another full
week here?” he said.
“We’ve seen what we came for and we have
plenty of money left, so why not go to Rome?
We’d be there in time for Christmas day at St. Peter’s. And then we would have another five days to
explore.”
He was sure she was making an excuse. He could feel her embarrassment. They were leaving Florence because they
didn’t want to risk snubbing him. He
knew how he looked in their eyes. He
couldn’t blame them. He wished them
farewell, shook their hands, turned on his heels, and crossed over the river.
It was all screwed up. For better or worse, in sickness and in
health. All screwed up. Those virtues of fortitude, loyalty, care,
that make any relationship last and make any relationship worthwhile, he had
them and she didn’t. In their screwy
matrimonial unmarriage, he was loyal and she mocked him. He cared and she didn’t. He had the fortitude to stick by her and help
her and share in her craziness and suffer her abuse, and she strove to kill
herself almost everyday. And yet, to
Abby and Lucy he was the reverse. While
his wife was fading in the hospital--and everybody at Henry’s knew this, it
seemed--he was sniffing around those girls.
No wonder they were leaving. He
couldn’t go back to Henry’s anymore either.
It was time, now, for him to go.
But he didn’t want to. Not
yet. He knew that Nebraska would not be
good for him. At least there were other
things besides his own worries to occupy his mind in this city. He was staying. He had enough money to stay at the hotel
through March if he wanted to. If he
economized he could make it last much longer--he thought of the convent where
Abby and Lucy were staying. If he went
there he could probably stay till summer.
Next day, after he was sure the girls had
left, he went to the convent, got a room, and checked out of the hotel. Even with meals it was cheaper than he
expected. But he was alone, now. Really alone.
And the convent was like a maze, always dark, except at the
entrance. And the nuns who lived there
were all elderly, and in the afternoons they gave bread from their big doors to
the needy who came and lined up for it.
It was depressing and made more so when the few people he met in those
long, dark corridors who were not nuns turned out to be Albanian refugees and
couldn’t speak Italian. And then the
weather began to mimic his mood, settling a dense fog over the city and
chilling the air.
The one time he and Les had been happiest
during the whole of their marriage was the week they spent in San
Gimignano. He had a profound itch to go
back there. It wasn’t because he wanted
to retrace his steps with Les. That
wasn’t it. It was because he wanted
comforting, and Florence had too many too recent associations with her, and
thoughts of her disturbed him and made him anxious. Suppose she is dying? Shouldn’t he be there? What must her parents be thinking about his
not returning? What might she say to
them about him? He got angry with
himself when he thought these things.
Even her dying was turned inside out.
He resented her. He felt guilty
about her. He hated her. No, he didn’t love her. Love was never a part of their relationship,
and she, he believed, was not capable of it.
He wandered aimlessly around the cobbled
streets and found himself walking out of the city and passing an old Roman gate
that sat in a great puddle beside the new road where cars zipped by, their
occupants oblivious to the fact they once would have to have passed through the
arch of this ancient structure to enter the city. Her father wouldn’t let her die. He knew that.
Unless she did, of course. He
knew that, too. He saw a taxi
approaching which looked empty of passengers and flagged it down, and it
stopped, and he asked the driver to take him to the stazione.
Almost without thinking he bought a ticket
to Poggibonzi. The train was already in
the station and left only seconds after he boarded. For an hour, he closed his eyes and tried to
sleep. At Poggibonzi he found the bus
that climbed the steep hillsides and lifted him through the clouds to the
mountain top where the city lay.
Immediately on arriving, he went to the old decrepit hotel where he had
stayed with Les and got a room for the night.
Then he went into the deeply misted atmosphere that had settled onto the
mountain, which made the old stone towers look like deep shadows in the sky,
and began to wander the streets. The
walls of the city, its facades, castles, churches, palaces, were all made from
the same stone, but the streets were paved with a red cobblestone. It was the day before Christmas eve, and the
streets were almost all empty, and only a lone little truck had puttered up and
down once in a while. He felt free and
happy, and a kind of deep obscurity came over him which made him feel
unattached to anything human.
He came upon the museo that exhibited medieval instruments of torture and
punishment. It was closed, as it was the
whole time he was here with Les. She
wanted to visit this museum in the worst way, and insisted they return over and
over again, but it was never open. She
asked everyone they met in the city to explain how the museum’s hours were
arranged so that she could visit it, but it never mattered, because the place
was always closed. The intensity of her
desire to see these instruments of torture and punishment made him uneasy, and
he asked her why she cared so much, but all she ever said was, “Why not? Don’t you want to get in?” But he really didn’t want to.
He stood there now, looking in the window,
staring at the sign that said, “chiusi.” It didn’t take long to walk from one end of
the city to the other. He had traversed
it many times, and he and Les had made friends with some of the shop keepers,
and they loved especially to go to this little restaurant for coffee in the middle
afternoon, where Les talked so fluently in Italian with the waitress. He went there and took a seat behind a table
so small that it could barely support two cups.
A waitress came and he didn’t recognize her, but he asked in Italian for
an espresso and a grappa. His Italian
was limping along, but without Les, who always did the talking when they were
in public, he expected his Italian to improve rapidly. He knocked the grappa back immediately and
asked the waitress for another. He took
his time, though, sipping the coffee, which he loved the taste of.
The waitress placed another grappa on the
small round table, and just then a very young girl walked in. She wore a navy blue sailor’s pea coat and
blue jeans and carried on one shoulder a black backpack. She looked like a middle teen, and she smiled
immediately when she caught his eye. But
he didn’t return the smile. He sensed
that she wanted to talk and that in a moment she would get up and come over,
and he wanted to be alone, so he gulped the second grappa, took another sip of
the espresso, got up and paid the waitress who was standing at the cash
register, said good-bye, and left.
Later, he was standing on a rampart beside
a great tower to which he had climbed from a long steep stone stairway and was
looking out over the mist-clung valley below.
He felt that he was himself wrapped in the mist and was one with it when
he saw that pea coat like a silent shade slip onto the rampart. Annoyed, he slipped himself along the wall
and descended as quickly as he could. He
made his way toward the Duomo, which rested upon a hill and had many steps
going up to it. He really didn’t want to
go in, for he had been in it before, with Les, who had read about its frescos
and wanted to see them. So he sat on the
steps, pulling his jacket collar up and shoving his hands into the jacket
pockets.
In Florence he and Les had gone to see a
church called the San Miniato off of the Piazzali Michelangelo. They had found a stairway that descended to a
dark vaulted chamber deep below the church.
It was lit very dimly by two burning candles that sat on what seemed to
be an altar almost in the center of the room.
Off to one side, almost out of the gleam of the candles, was a great
glass case that contained an open coffin with the skeletal remains of what they
assumed was the saint himself. It was
dressed in a monk’s robe and was so placed in the coffin as to seem to be
rising, with one boney hand holding onto the coffin’s edge while the other was
lifting the body up from the bottom. Les
was dead silent, looking at it almost in a trance. He had noticed how struck she was and tried
to edge her away, but she was immovable, and he was becoming frightened. Then they heard behind them a loud clap of
hands and a shout, and a priest was rushing towards them. He had taken their arms and turned them
around, and said in English, “You are not supposed to be here. This place is not open to the public. Go,go,go, now. Go,go.”
And Les walked up that steep stairway still in her trance.
He was thinking about this when he saw the
pea coat come up the stairs. He groaned
to himself, figuring he could not escape this time. She sat beside him and was silent for a long
time. He felt bad, because he had been
trying to evade her. She was uncertain
and insecure and obviously didn’t know how to begin. He admired her persistence.
“So,” he began, after a while. “You’re alone.”
“Yes,” she said, “and so are you. I noticed that you’re just ahead of me
everywhere we go.”
She had a British accent, so he asked her
where she was from, and she said she was from Australia, and he felt like a
fool, knowing that Les would not have made that mistake. She was a high school exchange student in
Siena and was just touring on her own, because if she didn’t get around while
she had the chance she never would.
“What about you?” she said. “You’re American, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” he said, and left it at that.
“Well,” she said, “I’m not spending the
night here. I’m taking the bus back to
Siena. It’ll be leaving in about an
hour. How about you?”
“I’m spending the night,” he said, “and
going back to Florence tomorrow. I’m
living there now.”
Again, he fell silent, and he could see
that he made her uncomfortable. After a
few moments she got up and apologized for intruding and went into the church.
He was still there when she came out,
sitting with his elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands. She had passed him going down the steps but
paused and turned to look back.
“If you want to talk, I’ll be over there
waiting for the bus,” she said, and pointed across the piazza where buses
pulled in and stopped to take on passengers or let them off. She continued to the area and stood there
alone, since there were so few tourists in San Gimignano that day. He still sat on the steps in front of the
church, and when the bus came and she got on, she looked at him a long time,
and was still looking when the bus pulled away.
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