The Chameleon (30 page)

Claire followed his pace in silence.

“Do you mind walking a little longer?”

“As long as you keep talking.”

He stopped and took her by the shoulders. She knew what was coming and could have prevented it with a word or a gesture. But she didn't. He drew her lips closer to his, her mouth was already open. When he pulled her closer her hands instinctively circled his neck as she leaned into him, their thighs and hips pressed together with no ancillary space. It was a long, hungry kiss.

When she opened her eyes their lips lingered. Well after midnight on the Via Collina in a city resting from war, there was no one to fault or judge their behavior. In America one kiss might have been their limit, but here in the heart of the Roman night with the smells of their clean perspiration mixed with the scents of almonds and orange blossoms filling their nostrils, the kiss only whetted their appetites.

Claire heaved a long sigh, and pushed her arm through his and then cradled it with her other hand. Everything seemed different In this place filled with crowds of ancient ghosts and ringed with hundreds of centuries of monuments and ruins, built by a pantheon of gods who took mistresses, and deities masquerading as swans to seduce virgins, their passion for each other seemed tame; their kiss so small on the moral compass of everything that had happened around them. A warm wind rustled down from the hills, lifting the balmy, moist air. Beads of perspiration glistened on her hopeful face as they approached the hotel.

“Buon giórno, Signóre and Signóra Harrison!”
Alberto the concierge in his gold-braided uniform greeted them as if they were a couple and, in that pink and golden moment before dawn, that is what they became. It had just struck four o'clock in the morning, and in the eternal city they were now “the Harrisons.”

“Shall I bring up to you the coffees?”

“No,
grazie.
”

“Ah.” Alberto nodded. He had often put Mussolini's mistress to bed and consoled homesick Germans.
“Buona notte.”

The sound of their shoes crossing the foyer clicked across the marble floor. The red runners had been taken out to dry-clean away all the Fascists’ footprints. Harrison gently took Claire's hand as they ascended the staircase to his suite. Dawn was blatantly sweeping into his rooms. They met it in one another's arms.

It was as if a stiff mask had dropped from Harrison's face, revealing a warm man given to easy laughter.

“Even foreigners begin to feel different after being in Italy for a short time,” the enterprising Alberto remarked, winking, a few mornings later as he palmed the gratuity Harrison had just given him. He glided the handful of coins fluidly into his pocket as he saw the distinguished American guest into the sedan taking him to the Quirinal Palace for the day's first session.

Claire routinely followed a punctual hour later, after having shampooed the night's ardor out of her hair and scrubbed the look of a radiant lover off her face. While patting the lightest layer of Pond's cold cream onto her face, she saw to the “little details,” as Slim called them: arranging for Harrison's shirts to be properly laundered and hung and stocking the humidor—salvaged by Alberto “from a guest who left in a big hurry in ‘forty-four”—with Harrison's favorite cigars, procured by the resourceful concierge from black-market contacts with whom he had an excellent working relationship.

Occasionally Claire was able to gather up a short stack of day-old English newspapers and week-late
Time
magazines to add to the homey mood she tried to create in the suite. Having lived with Harrison the last few years in their odd arrangement at the Willard Hotel, she knew all his habits. And having grown up at the Windermere Hotel with the Aunties, she knew exactly what was needed to turn these impersonal rooms into their private haven. A saffron-silk scarf from the Via Veneto was draped over the table lamp to cast a warmer glow; an idle ice bucket was commandeered to hold ivory-colored Banks roses, and a silver bowl was kept filled with fragrant olives on the bar table that she had set up to mix Harrison's after-work martini. Claire even persuaded the chambermaid to give them fresh bed linens daily, a luxury not available to the other guests. The knowledge that the fastidious Harrison would sleep more comfortably was well worth the special treatment.

At the Quirinal meetings, briefcase in hand, Claire joined Harrison, taking his notes and telexing his messages, but all at a much more relaxed pace than they had kept up in Washington. The days were filled with presentations by members of the nine European delegations attending, and Claire could feel the excitement build as she began to appreciate just how ambitious the recovery program would be.

But the moment that touched her most deeply came on the first night of the twelve-day conference when she watched the delegates, most of whom hadn't seen each other since the onset of war, embrace and weep with joy to find their friends still alive. She listened as they shared their stories, describing how they and their family members had survived blitzkriegs, buzz bombs, concentration camps, and other, unimaginable hardships. Dinner that night was a true banquet, and afterwards they made Chianti toasts—to one another's survival, to the great Victory, and, poignantly, to those missing friends who had not lived to see it. Then these paler, thinner versions of their old selves raised their filled glasses to the future. Claire watched, not surprised but spellbound as one dignitary after another greeted Harrison—respected, as she already knew, but obviously beloved as well—grabbing his hand, pumping it up and down, hugging his straight-postured shoulders like eager children, thanking him for his exhaustive wartime efforts on their behalf and for keeping the American focus on coming to Europe's rescue. Claire watched Harrison use his handkerchief to wipe away tears from the corners of his eyes. It made her love him even more.

For the first time since she had known him, Harrison was overcome with a surge of feelings; and when she came to him that night, slipping off her robe to press her bare skin next to his, he reached out for her and pulled her close, a man drowning in deep emotions and clinging to a buoyant life raft.

He lifted her hair up off the nape of her slender neck, kissing the little place he had earmarked for his own. She let her head gently lean to one side and then raised her bare arms over her head in a stretch. He brought his hands down the front of her nakedness, coming to rest at the tuft of soft brown velvet below her waist. Feeling him without seeing him, her back to his chest, was an odd sensation, but she liked it and let him know. His elegant hands traveled down her body like a cellist in an unhurried overture to their lovemaking. In response to his caresses she instinctively flowered open, giving him as much awareness of herself as possible.

She could hear her body start to sing as he ran an imaginary bow across the belly of her curved torso. To bring the rhythm of their lovemaking to a different pitch, he paused to stroke other parts of her body that men of less nuance might forget to linger over.

Her very being was by now as tightly strung as a Stradivarius, a responsive instrument so sensitive that even the lightest feathering of his touches caused her to tremble in exquisite pleasure. He turned her over to face him and she showered him with butterfly kisses from her soft, moist lips, parting them as she continued to open herself up to receive his well-orchestrated thrusts.

His brain led his body like a maestro conducting a symphony, holding himself back as he gave her the gift of extra pleasure and she shuddered in a crazed atonal finale with flutes and crashing cymbals over and over again until she fell off a jagged edge, her breath gone, her heartbeat racing. He caught her.

Quietly he cradled her face in his hands to calm her rapid breathing, until she cooled. Coming down, she kissed him back a dozen times and, gathering up her strength, she used every muscle she had newly discovered to please him. The next movement was in her hands, and she took the baton. She stroked him lyrically with her fingers until she grasped him and then unhesitantly brought him to her parted lips.

She could tell by the way his body tensed and swelled within the pink moistness of her mouth that her boldness had rekindled his insatiable desires. She felt the pressure of his arms on her naked body and knew they had crossed all the borders of good taste, leaving Italy, lapping each other up, drunk in one another's juices until, finally exhausted, supper long forgotten, they fell asleep.

Their days moved along like airy cloud puffs speeding across a flawless summer sky. For the first time since the war, an opera was performed at the opera house. Tom joined them as a patched velvet curtain rose over Verdi's
Il Trovatore.
Although they didn't mean to, later, at their after-theater supper of cannelloni and red wine, they somehow shut out Tom's chatter about commission gossip and news from home. Claire teased him that his face was beginning to look as glum as the stone gargoyle spitting a steady stream of water into the fountain of the walled garden restaurant.

The next day Tom was grumpier than ever during the private tour for commission members of the Barberini Gallery, the guide directing his comments to the American delegation in a pitch to solicit funds to restore Italy's art treasures. When he extolled the virtues of Raphael's
Fornarina,
a portrait of the very young, bare-breasted baker's daughter generally believed to be the artist's mistress, Tom turned abruptly on his heel and stormed into another gallery hung with vivid crucifixions. Later that day, Tom announced he was going on ahead to prepare for the round of miniconferences at Interlaken, Brussels, and London, where more data would be collected for the American fact-finding study. He would catch up with “the Harrisons” in London, he said. As far as Tom was concerned, he had uncovered one fact too many.

With their chaperone having called his own curfew, Claire and Harrison were free to roam the city alone after five, when the meetings and relief requests ended for the day. They liked blending invisibly into the crowd. Claire, a scarf over her head, and Harrison, in a linen suit, joined an anonymous line of pilgrims following the Appian Way, one of the routes of St. Paul, walking with flickering candles down into the catacombs where the early Christians had hidden and held their religious services.

Later they attended a moving hilltop ceremony where the remains of American soldiers who had fallen at Anzio were being transferred for interment in the English cemetery outside Florence. Harrison and Claire walked quietly hand in hand, both of them silently mourning the hundreds of young men they had never met but for whom they had worked so hard to arm back in Washington. By the time the open-air car driving them back to Rome finally delivered them to the hotel, Claire and Harrison were smothered with rust-colored dust.

Entering the lobby, Harrison brushed some ancient dirt from his lapel, turned to his companion, who looked as if she had been crop-dusted, and asked, “Did you ever cancel those reservations for the weekend at Lake Como?”

“Oh dear, I forgot. The one I made for you and—”

Neither one of them wanted to say her name. For one crazy, dark second Claire had a vision of Ophelia riding a broomstick over the Colosseum trying to chase Cupid out of the sky. She instinctively took two small steps back to avoid the imagined calamity.

With a touch to the small of her back, Harrison steadied her. “Why don't the two of us go?”

“You mean—?”

“Of course. Weren't the reservations made for Mr. and Mrs. Harrison?”

Claire looked at him as if he had just announced he was going to fight the Christians
and
the lions.

“And if I'm not mistaken, that is the name on your passport.”

“But Harrison, it's… a resort,” she stammered. “I don't even have a swimsuit.”

“Then don't wear one.” Her eyes grew as wide as his grin.

Harrison turned to Alberto, who was never far away from a potential tipper. “Be a good man and have the desk prepare my bill. We're checking out.”

“Certainly, signóre. I also ask the kitchen to pack
del pane
e formaggio.
Right away. And I will see to the cigars. Como is very very beautiful place but has a no good black market” In his eagerness, Rome's best concierge clicked his heels together and shot out his right arm in a reflexive Nazi salute; catching himself just in time, he slammed his hand against his forehead like a good American GI.

“I'll have to shower first.”

“Good. We'll save time and water and shower together.” Alberto bowed away backwards, pleased as punch. He knew a big reward was coming. Sometimes guests paid more to be forgotten than remembered.

Her long, wet hair lay against the salt-and-pepper short hairs on his chest. His lean torso, conveniently hollow in places, made way for her soft curves. Claire lay languidly in Harrison's arms, the muscled limbs of a man who had held the reins of thoroughbreds.

Thrown wide open, the fourteen-foot floor-to-ceiling windows let in the pleasing sounds of Lake Como lapping against its medieval stone walls, the humming motor of a single Riva cutting its sleek way through the cold water, a dark mahogany sports machine with blue and white leather seats carrying groceries to a villa across the way. A mountain breeze blew in the white sheers, shrouding silk-sleeved armchairs in gauzy cover before billowing out again. It reminded her of parachutes.

Claire lifted her head like an alert sentry. She was determined not to let Harry and his arsenal of obligations land on the beach and storm their Italian idyll. The last thing Claire and Harrison needed was reality shrapnel splintering their glass palace and the loveliness of what they had together. So she reinvented her mood, playfully shaking water from her wet head, bringing buoyancy back into the bedroom.

Harrison pushed her away, laughing. “Are you trying to drown me?”

“Only with love.” She leaned over his pillow and kissed the creases around his eyes to coax a twinkle. What had been lines of worry in the not-so-far-away Washington years now fanned out like pinwheels on a child's toy.