Page Turner Pa (8 page)

"The Pantheon."

"The Pantheon, all kinds of churches. Unfortunately we're only here a week or so. After that we go up to Florence."

"So you're a student of the classical world as well as the piano?" Kennington asked Paul.

"I read up before our trip, if that's what you mean."

"Sweetheart, you really should take Mr. Kennington around this afternoon. Show him the sights. Me, I've got to get my hair done. All day I've been looking at these chic Roman ladies and I feel like a frump. What do you say?"

"Don't you think you ought to ask if he
wants
to be taken around?"

"Actually, I'd love it."

Paul looked surprised, almost resentful.

"Wonderful, then it's settled. You two drop me off at the hairdresser, then go and see everything. And maybe we can meet later—that is, if you're free, Mr. Kennington."

"In fact," Kennington said, "I have nothing scheduled for the rest of my life."

Pamela laughed. "Oh, I doubt that—"

"Please call me Richard."

"Richard." She wiped her lips.

As at the concert, Paul would not meet Kennington's eye.

 

Even though it wasn't far, Kennington took them back to his hotel in a taxi. "I can't vouch for him," he said, "but I'm told the hairdresser here is very good."

"I'm sure. Oh, what a magnificent lobby! The place we're staying is very simple. Characteristic, though. They serve breakfast on the loggia."

"Tell me the name. I may move. I can't bear these stuffy places."

"Albergo Bernini—"

Approaching the concierge, Kennington said something in rapid Italian.

"Good, then everything's all set. The concierge will take you to Mr. Frank."

The concierge, who had a greased gray mustache, inclined his head. "Good-bye!" Pamela called as he led her away. "Thank you! Have fun."

"Bye."

"See you at seven in front of the Trevi Fountain!"

She disappeared around a trompe l'oeil bend.

Kennington turned to Paul. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "I never intended—"

"It's okay. I'm afraid my mother's a bit of a hysteric."

"The thing was—I wanted to give you this." And he handed Paul his fathers letter.

"Oh."

"It must have dropped out of your pocket. I have to admit, I read it, to see what it was. And I just want to say, Paul, if I'd realized the pressure you were under—"

"Am I under pressure? I don't feel like I'm under pressure.

"But taking care of your mother—"

"Oh, I've always taken care of my mother. I'm used to that."

"Well, in any case, if I'd realized, I certainly wouldn't have been quite so aggressive. About the sex, I mean. That isn't my style. Usually I take pride in a certain ... gentlemanly demeanor."

"You really don't need to explain," Paul said, folding up the letter.

"But I do. I lost control of myself, I ... there's no other way to say it, I let lust get the better of me. For which I'm sorry."

Paul hardly knew how to respond. Nothing in his education had prepared him for such a conversation.

"Apology accepted," he said finally—what else could he say?—"but not necessary."

"Thanks." They were silent for a moment. "Anyway, I'm glad I found you again."

"So am I."

"You are?"

"Of course. You can't be surprised."

"No, I ... actually, I am a bit. Surprised and happy." Like a child, he clapped his hands, then threw an arm around Paul's shoulder. "And what would you like to do this afternoon? We could climb up to the Campidoglio, or look at churches, or"—he hesitated—"we could go up to my room..."

Paul shrugged.

They went up to the room.

Just after seven they emerged again. "We're late," Paul said, looking at his watch. "My mother will be worried."

"Relax," Kennington said. "We can take a taxi."

But traffic turned out to be terrible, and they had to abandon the taxi on Piazza Barberini. Kennington's heels tapped loudly against the pavement as he fought the crowds surging down Via Nazionale. He was wearing chinos, a striped shirt, a blue blazer. Whereas Paul still had on the same clothes he'd put on that morning, albeit without underwear, his boxer shorts having remained behind in Kennington's bathroom.

"Let's go this way," Kennington said, and led Paul up a small side street, then into an empty alley, where he kissed him.

"I love you," Paul said for the second time. "Don't worry, you don't have to answer." He sucked the peppermint taste off Kennington's tongue.

"I guess we'd better go," Kennington said eventually.

"Wait. I can't go yet."

"Why not?"

"Just wait."

They waited.

"All right."

They moved on. In the piazza, couples were taking pictures of each other tossing coins over their shoulders into the fountain. Its aquamarine shallows glinted with currency. As for Pamela, she was standing alone at the rail, her arms gripped tightly around her waist, her eyes searching the crowd.

"Mom! Over here!"

She turned and waved. "Hello! Hello! Well, what do you know? I toss a coin into the fountain and wish for two handsome gentlemen to escort me to dinner. And now my wish comes true!"

"I'm sorry we're late," Kennington said. "We just got so caught up in seeing things—"

"Oh, don't worry, I've been fine! Just watching the world go by."

She threw back her new hair, which was cut short, blonder than it had been earlier, molded to bookend her face.

"Gorgeous," Kennington said.

"You like it? I have you to thank for it. And did Paul treat you okay?"

"Paul," Kennington said, "was stunning."

"He's so knowledgeable!" Pamela caressed his cheek. "As for me, I had an absolute ball. After my hair I got a manicure
and
a pedicure. Then I bought this new outfit. At Armani! Cost an arm and a leg, but that's what credit cards are for, right, Pauly?"

"Right," Paul said, as taking a hundred-lire coin from his pocket, he hurled it gamely into the fountain.

 

Across the city, meanwhile, in an elegant, otherwise empty restaurant in Parioli, Signore Giovanni Batisti of the Amici della Música di Roma, his wife, and several prominent local citizens were sitting at a large table, drinking mineral water and eating stale bread.

"It's unusual for Americans to be so late," Signore Batisti said, looking at his watch as the clock struck the half hour.

"The poor man's probably stuck in traffic," his wife answered.

"Traffic! It's the construction on Via Arenula," said another man.

"And the smog!"

Signore Batisti shook his head. "Altogether I fear Rome may be making a very bad impression on Mr. Kennington."

A general murmur of concurrence.

And the waiter brought another bottle of mineral water.

T
HE BOYS
were late again. At her table outside the Bar della Pace, Pamela checked her watch, nibbled a peanut, took a tiny sip from her mineral water. One of the mysteries of travel is that it telescopes ritual; thus, after only a few days, the three of them were already making it their habit to meet "every" afternoon at the Bar della Pace, and "every" afternoon the boys were late. She didn't mind—indeed, it was her intention to encourage the happy rapport that seemed to be blossoming between them—and yet if they could have been on time just once ... well, she had to admit, it would have pleased her. (Not wishing them to find her with an empty glass, she drank another millimeter's worth of water.) For mightn't his efforts to win Paul over be part of a larger strategy? And if they were, what might that strategy be? If only he'd give her a clear signal...(She blushed at the thought of it, the hope of it, which kept her buoyed in the wake of Kelso's betrayal.) Meanwhile a cat leapt down from a parked car to beg for a peanut. Ivy, as well as shadows of ivy, climbed the stone walls. A Vespa pulled up to the bar, and a man in a black double-breasted suit climbed off of it, his thick graying hair closely cropped, his mustache plump. Smiling, he took the table next to hers. The cat ran off. He ordered a coffee, removed from his jacket pockets a cellular telephone, a lighter, and a pack of cigarettes, which he arranged carefully on the tabletop like attributes in a Bronzino portrait. From another pocket he extracted and put on a pair of sunglasses. "
Vuole?
" he asked, waving a cigarette in Pamela's direction.

"Oh, no thanks," she said. "
Grazie.
I don't smoke."

He smiled again, took off his sunglasses, stared at her face, her neck, her breasts. She was scandalized and thrilled. It occurred to her dimly that she was an attractive woman. In her marriage she had never thought of herself as an attractive woman. But now a Roman coin dangled from a thin gold chain between her breasts. She was wearing an ecru linen jacket and slacks from Armani, a white linen blouse with lace trim, Ferragamo shoes. All charged on Kelso's credit card.

Feeling bold, she smiled back. Then the boys arrived. They looked happy, sleepy. "Hello!" Pamela said, giving a backward glance to her admirer and trying to stifle—how odd!—a sense of disappointment.

"Pamela, you look magnificent."

"Thank you, Richard. Sit down, sit down. And tell me, what mischief did you two get up to today?"

"Well, first we went to the Baths of Caracalla," Paul said. (This was a lie. They had spent the entire day in Kennington's bed.)

"How wonderful. And was it everything you hoped?"

"Magnificent."

"After that we went to the archaeological museum, since we couldn't cover everything yesterday."

"That's why we were late."

"Oh, it doesn't matter your being late. As for me, I had a little adventure myself today." And she told a story about an old English lady she'd met at the Bernini. Like most of her stories, it became, in the telling, both longer and more discursive than the actual event that had inspired it. Kennington had trouble following the details, in part because her disheveled narrative technique discouraged linear comprehension, in part because under the table Paul was rubbing the toe of his shoe against Kennington's ankle. From the very labor of having to keep a straight face, he seemed to be deriving a perverse thrill.

After coffee, they did some more walking. It was turning out to be one of those gloriously bright Roman afternoons when the sunshine seems limitless. From a fruit seller's basket, scarlet peppers spilled out in obscene abundance. Two boys played soccer with an onion. A butcher's window displayed folded slabs of tripe and unplucked guinea hens, while next door, in a pasta shop, squat extrusion machines pumped out little tortellini like turds.
Italy,
Paul thought,
the country of which I am not,
while from a nearby bar (in Rome there is always a nearby bar) a waiter stepped out onto the street, bearing a tray on which rested three tiny cups of coffee, over each of which he had tucked a little paper napkin like a bonnet.

"Isn't that wonderful," Pamela said.

"Don't embarrass me by taking a picture," Paul said.

"Oh, Paul," Pamela said, and peered at some Murano glass candies in a window.

 

They had another coffee, standing up, at Caffè Greco ("our caffè," Pamela called it), then split up briefly, Pamela to exchange a blouse at Max Mara, Paul and Kennington to look at CDs at the Ricordi on Via del Corso. In the Piazza di Spagna, masses of tourists were aiming their cameras at the boat fountain. Few of them looked very happy, however, and when they conversed, their dialogue verged inevitably into indigestion, lost luggage, bad exchange rates.

Kennington was thinking that he had never much liked being a tourist. Tourism, in his view, was the apotheosis of an age of too much choice. Its anxiety was decision: where to stay, what to eat, whether to go by train or fly or rent a car. Which was ironic, when you considered that in the old Italy—the dust of which thousands of tourist feet unsettled daily—ordinary life offered a range of options so meager as to seem almost a parody of choice. In such a world, habit, not possibility, sustained human life.

He had often remarked to Joseph that probably he would have been happier living in that old peasant Europe, where amid slow harvests and patient cultivations, he could have worked away at his lot of years, eaten bread with olive oil, and died old: the very opposite of a public life, to which he considered himself temperamentally ill-suited. (In this respect he was the opposite of Joseph.) Music provided something of a solution, in that through music he gained a glimpse of eternity, a different scale of time. Yet music also meant photographers, and hotel rooms, and the
Gramophone
awards: the feedback of fame, Joseph called it; you could not hear your own voice for all the voices. You could not hear your own music for all the music. And so he dreamed of a homeplace to which he might retreat, maybe with a friend, and play for himself and his friend.
A private rapture of the keys...
Now other minds judged (and in these, his middle years, judged harshly).

Of course, he never actually fled to the homeplace. Vanity interfered—vanity, and terror. The furthest he ever got was failing to show up at dinners, and writing letters he never sent, and having affairs with young men he hoped would turn out to be "the friend," the most recent of these young men being Paul, who dreamed only of stages. And why not? Paul was eighteen, and ambitious, and craved
more
of the new: more adventure, more passion, more happiness, which he saw as a positive state, rather than merely the hiatus that comes when every item on a list has been checked off. Sometimes Kennington even sensed that it was all he could do to keep from throwing the affair in his mother's face. Love pushed him toward a boldness, even a recklessness, that only the speed bumps of his own anxiety kept in check.

"What do you think of my mother?" he asked now, as they strolled up Via del Babuino.

Kennington considered the question carefully. The truth was, he hadn't thought much of Paul's mother at all; to him, she was merely an obstacle, a source of trouble he needed to flatter in order to ensure that he and Paul could continue sleeping together. And yet to admit this might sound callous, since no matter how much Paul complained about her, she was still his mother.