The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (15 page)

“Let’s go up in the sun,” she urged. “Don’t you know it’s warm? You just sit in here and work so much I bet you don’t even know it’s spring!”

“Not true. Somebody told me yesterday that it was spring. I’m not so helpless as you think.”

“I always think you’re going to get pneumonia in this place. I see myself carrying hot minestrone up through the wall in February.”

“Oh, it can get warm enough. It’s just that the traffic is so bad. That’s the real reason I never entertain. At first, I felt I was on an island, with everything in Rome streaming past all day, and that at night I went under with it. The streetcars poured across my face, all iron wheels and clanging. Lambrettas snorted into my dreams. Now I sleep and work mainly on the park side, where there’s less noise, but anyway I hardly hear it any more. Some part of your brain blocks out, I think. Here.” He poured out coffee in tiny cups. “Let’s go upstairs.”

Above, they sat between the blunt teeth of masonry on a pair of rickety chairs and warmed their faces in the sun, sipping coffee.

“Who told you yesterday that it was spring?” She smiled, gently inquisitive.

“Francesca, of course. She drove by in the afternoon.”

“Oh dear, maybe she’s coming up today, too.”

“Today she’s in Viterbo, guiding an art photographer around.”

“Our Italian career girl.”

“She’s doing well. Of course, she doesn’t have to, with three villas and a palazzo.”

It sounds like the perfect setup for you, Sara restrained herself from saying. For once started—a drink or two would have done the trick—she might have continued, It would be a world better for your money—or should we just say your backing?—to come from a source like Francesca’s family, who will never talk about it, than for you to go on borrowing from any number of people. You realize that this reputation you have gotten for living so lamely is setting people against you. In addition, Francesca’s uncle is after all Mario Negalesco, who has certainly written enough art criticism to write something about you. He might just give you the one boost you need. Your whole life, as we see it, your career and all, is hanging on the brink of being what it ought to be, just what you’ve deserved all along. Can’t you see it? And of course everyone, including Francesca, thinks you’ve every reason to make a serious relationship with her. There’s even love to be thrown in, along with all the rest—even love!

“She laughs at all that
prepotente
stuff,” he said. “One of the villas has cows in it, and all the furniture in the place is tied together with string.
La splendida famiglia, la principessa Negalesco.”

But Sara noted that he broke into a smile he couldn’t help—a good sign. “Have you met her uncle?” she asked.

“The critic? Oh, he’s been by a couple of times. We got on O.K. He’s a bit too Milanese for me.”

There was a snarl of traffic below, intensifying to a wrangle of indecipherable noise from which, it seemed, no vehicle, however
two-wheeled and tiny, could escape. They looked over the wall. He laughed out loud at the jam, which seemed to have gathered around two children who had wandered unescorted into the middle of the street, where they were both still standing, unhurt, one wailing, the other bewildered and pale. Now they were being liberated, handed out over the heads of Vespa riders, swung high by smiling strangers. An elderly Mercedes backed, having caught its bumper in the fender of a shiny new Fiat, which, in the silence that had inexplicably fallen, tore slowly open like a tin can. About fifty people had gathered on the sidewalk, forming a willing audience, from which there now ascended a chorus of groans. The driver came boiling up out of the Fiat, signaling the start of Act II.

“I often sit here and watch the show,” said Gowan, leaning near her in the sun. He was wearing a blue blazer, his shirt open at the neck. She thought he must have grown his beard just for warmth; it was short and flat, like the pelt of a neat animal. He was the one bearded artist she could abide.

“The trouble is we can’t talk here,” he remarked.

They presently went for a walk in the park and, gravitating always downward, came to the jumping ring where horses could be seen daily, exercising. They were good horses, privately owned, and stabled in another part of the park. Today a groom was jumping a lively young chestnut gelding, richly maned and needing a workout. He flung his head repeatedly against the bit. A scarlet ribbon had been plaited into his forelock. The spring warmth came up out of the ground at them, and it was quiet here; they could hear the soft thudding of the hoofs on the ground, the cry of the rider (“Hup!”) when the horse took the jumps, the occasional whack and ring of wood as a rail came down. Almost beyond the range of their hearing the city rumbled and echoed.

“Magnificent horse,” said Gowan.
“Un cavallo magnifico.”

Indeed, the horse—his nervousness, his beauty, the swing of his neck, the red ribbon between his narrow, sensitive ears, the glint and
powerful setting of his brightly shod hoofs—had almost succeeded in mesmerizing them both.

“You came down here because you wanted to talk,” she reminded him. “Why don’t we walk over that way?”

“Oh, I didn’t want to talk
about
anything. Do you?”

“Well,” she said, hesitating with a little laugh. “Why not?”

“Look here, Sara,” he said, picking up a stone and hurling it out across the road, just the way he might have done, she suddenly thought, when he was a boy back at that school. “Look, Sara. Something’s on your mind.”

“Yes, you’re right. It’s just that Paul and I—well, we’ve been a little worried about you.”

“Worried
about me?” He came to a full stop.

“Well, we think—I don’t know how to put it—that maybe you don’t see yourself quite in perspective here in Rome, that maybe you don’t see—many people don’t; I know from time to time / don’t—quite what’s going on with you, the way friends at a little distance may be able to.”

“You mean I don’t hear the gossip,” he said, short-circuiting her. “What a good thing I’ve got in Francesca, if only I knew how to take advantage of it.”

She felt the rug pulled out from under her. “Something like that—only I wouldn’t put it that way. It just seemed to us that maybe you were at more of a crossroads than you realized. I know that this has happened to Paul, in industry, and people speaking up, saying a word, has meant all the difference to him.”

“And of course
he
never owed anybody any money,” said Gowan.

She felt herself getting angry. “We’ve always, always, told you, let you know—”

“I know, I know. O.K., someday I’ll fool you, close in on your kindness. …” He came to a halt, occasioned by a drop in the road and a line of shadow from a rise of hill, which they would in another moment have entered. “For God’s sake, let’s stay in the sun.” He turned her around and walked them back to the horse ring. As they
reached the rail, the horse swiftly cleared a low jump, front hoofs matched and proud, and, galloping straight at them, swerved off when almost dangerously near, flinging dirt (hard as a bullet, she thought, startled) against her cheek.

“God, I could stand here all day,” said Gowan, glancing at his watch. “Lunch appointment; too bad. I’ll tell you who it’s with,” he said, teasing her, making up, or trying to, for their near quarrel. “It’s with a man who wants to arrange for me to take some of his English students during the summer. He has quite a list of them and is going back to London for a couple of months.”

“Oh.” Again she broke off saying what she wanted to. Obviously, if he started doing things like this, he was now destined to drift down into that indeterminate sediment of people who simply hung on in Rome, trying any and everything, living barely, living some way, year in and year out, until not even they could remember quite why they had come here in the first place. But it’s none of my business, she said to herself. And she must have walked like that and held her head like that and kept silent like that, for he said with an amused air, “It’s really none of your business, is it?”

She would have left him right then, except they had almost regained the wall and she remembered that she had left her gloves and scarf in his studio above. She was angry enough to wonder if she would ever really want to see him again at all, she and Paul having been, all this time, friends, true friends, forbearing friends, to Gowan Palmer.

“Oh, I’ll get them for you,” he offered when she mentioned going up, and ran up the stairs, leaving her on the narrow flight in the very middle of the wall—like something in a Poe story, she thought, sealed up in the masonry. He soon returned, laid the scarf and gloves in her hand, and in the close quarters of the stair turned her face abruptly up to his and gave her a long, staggering kiss, which was so unexpected and worked so well she even got swept into wondering for a moment if their shadow had not stamped itself against the wall.

Then he let her go. Her hands for a moment lay trembling against his blazer, and, turning upward, she got an uncertain final glimpse of his face and heard his voice ascending: “… not quite deteriorated, you must admit.”

The door above her closed, and she went out into the street.

Wisteria

Charles Webley rather liked his hostess, though he imagined a lot of people didn’t. She talked too much, for one thing, but then you didn’t have to listen. Her voice was pleasing and made a soothing ripple of sound which broke in occasional laughter. At the moment she didn’t mean to be taken seriously. She was hefty, to put it mildly, way too big by English standards. But, he thought, lazily tolerant, she was not overbearing, no Brünnehilde she, and one could always be reminded of the jolly Dutch women, in popular conception at least, with their butter-colored hair cut short and their rotund, softly elephantine, white limbs. But Evaline’s hair, in the years since they had met, must have gone from blond to gray, or why would she have got it stiffly done up in what she probably thought of as silver gilt, but which looked to him like new aluminum? How, charitably, was he to picture her in Dutch clogs and a peaked cap now that her waistline had vanished? She was at present all baled up in Roman silks. He gave a short explosive laugh.

“Thought you’d like that, Charles.” She had just wound up a little story, no word of which had reached him.

He wandered out into the garden. The apartment was on the ground floor, unusual in Rome, with a wisteria vine thickly roofing
the terrace. Blooms like bunches of pale grapes hung down and grazed his tall head. One cluster, so disturbed, suddenly shed all its blossoms upon him. Lavender flowers fell from his head to his shoulders and scattered on the paving about his feet; and one final petal, letting go like the rest, landed in his martini. He stood regarding it, trying to grasp, hold on to, the surprising moment, generous and fragrant, which had created a sharp start in his breast, resembling love. He looked up for someone to share it with.

“Do you prefer flowers to lemon peel?”

The woman—not young, not old, thin, rather sallow, with large brown eyes, nondescript dark hair, a plain navy dress—was not the right one for that moment, nor had she said the right thing. She did not in any way amplify that tender instant, the heart of it, when the wisteria petal had actually touched the chill surface of the gin.

“I don’t think that ever happened to me before,” he said.

“I never saw it happen to anybody before.”

“At my age you have to be careful about saying what’s never happened. At your age you don’t have to.”

Her eyes acknowledged his compliment. “How long have you known Evaline?”

Wrong again, he thought, but saw the reason: she was shy, and knowing that, he had to answer, no matter how much questions like this bored him.

“Ages. I knew her first husband; the only one, I mean. We were in school together, kept crossing paths.”

“What’s he like?”

“Good sort. Pleasant.” He got impatient. “Hell, what’s anyone like?”

One of the doors opening out on the garden filled up to two thirds of its height and all its breadth, as Evaline herself emerged upon them.

“So glad you met Dorothy, Charles. She paints, you know. Would never tell you, so how could you know? I’ve one of her things in the guest room. You’ve got to see it before you go.”

“Indeed I must.”

The girl averted her face. There was a kind of subdued distaste in it, an aversion to being patronized, he supposed. If the painting had been put in the salon, instead of stuck away out of sight… As it was, why mention it at all? He experienced a sudden, genuine feeling for this girl after all. He could read her, as clear as anything. The maid was elsewhere, so Evaline herself was taking their glasses.

“So grand to see Charles again. Such a surprise when you rang. It really did give me a lift; you’ve no idea.”

He agreed, and in a way really meant it. Whatever mix-ups and misunderstandings there had been in the past, back when she lived in London, why remember them now? Why give any importance, at this late date, to the ins and outs of it all? Old friends were best because they didn’t matter so much any more; it was all coasting from now on out, and there was downright comfort in the thought.