The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (18 page)

“How can you smoke and eat ice cream at once?” she asked him.

He stopped, both hands, with spoon and cigarette, in air. He looked from one to the other. “Funny. I didn’t know I was.” He dropped the cigarette at once, smashing it out carefully.

“I’ve been wondering how to tell you this,” he said, still looking down, but straightening as he finished. “It just happens that I seem to know your former husband rather well.”

The bright level surface between them on which she had, in her own way, been enjoying the odd sort of quarrel they had been having,
tilted, and she slid definitely, her heart plunging downward. So another one had arrived.

“Why didn’t you say so before?” she asked him.

“It isn’t so easy to say, especially if—”

“If you have a message,” she filled in.

She sat looking out at the square. It had filled with tourists, mainly Germans, moving in a slow, solemn, counterclockwise procession, ponderous, disorderly, unattractive, as though under tribal orders to see everything. There were the pigeons, more mechanical still, with their wound-up motions, purple feet and jewel-set eyes. And then there was a person, all but visible, right at home in Venice, moving diagonally across the great colonnaded ellipse of the piazza, head down, noticing no one, big shoulders hunched forward under his old tasteless tweed jacket, gray-black hair grizzled at the nape. He was going to the corner drugstore, somewhere near East Seventy-first and Madison. The smell of a late New York summer—just a morning hint of fall—was moving with him, strong enough to dispel the scent of European cigarettes, the summer-creeping reek of the back canals. He would spread books on the counter, stir coffee without looking at it, clumsily allow the bit of lettuce to drop from his sandwich.

“Not so much a message,” Jim Wilbourne said.

“You see, people are always turning up when I least expect them!” She longed now simply not to sound helpless.

“Oh, then,” he said, in a relieved voice, “you must already know about the accident.”

“‘Accident!’” She started like a quiet, lovely insect into which someone has suddenly stabbed a pin; her wings quivered; her eyes were fixed.

“Oh, my God, now I’ve done it!” She tried twice to speak but failed, and the voice below the green mask soon continued, “I think he’s all right now.”

“Oh. … Then nothing serious happened—” She drew a shaky breath.

Jim Wilbourne glanced out across the square. “There was some doubt about his being able to walk, but I think—” He broke off again, tentative, mysteriously cold.

Martha stirred compulsively, as though to shake herself free of whatever net had fallen over her. In doing so, her knee struck the little table, rattling the cups and spoons. She remembered the letter on the table in Rome, and the emptiness of the envelope was now her own. “He was always a completely awful driver,” she was presently able to continue. “Go on, now you’ve started. Tell me the rest.”

Were they reading lines to each other? Nothing, even turning the table completely over, bringing three waiters rushing down upon them with long arguments about paying for the glassware, would have quite restored her bearings, or loosed her from this cold current into which he seemed deliberately to have plunged them both. “Tell me,” she insisted.

His vision seemed, behind the glasses, to pass her own. “Oh, it wasn’t a driving accident. But who should tell you this—it’s not my business to. He was out hunting with one of his patients, up in the Berkshires. I never thought that aspect of it made too much sense—well—to take a mental patient hunting, that is. Almost like an experiment, just to see if he’d do it on purpose. I never meant to get into all this. But since he is okay now, you naturally will be relieved to know—”

The entire piazza, thickening steadily in the closing weather, had become a total wet-gray illusion. “This isn’t Gordon Ingram,” Martha said. “It can’t be.”

“Gordon? No, Donald Ingram. The psychologist, you know. My wife studied with him at Barnard. Well, he does have an ex-wife in Italy. It was just that we were sure—”

Martha was really angry now. “I think you invented the whole thing!” She had not quite lost control. Sparing herself nothing, she had hoped, as though striking off a mask, to find something unequivocal and human facing her, to lose the sensation of conversing with a paper advertisement for shirts and whiskey.

“No, honestly. Quite sincerely, I promise you. It was just a natural mistake.”

If there was a person back of the glasses, she had missed him completely. She was not going to succeed in confronting him with anything, for his voice, with as much sameness as a record, went on, “a natural mistake.”

Well, she supposed it was true. She sat looking down into treacly dregs of espresso in her cup, into which a drop or two of the oppressive mist occasionally distilled and twinkled. She gathered up her bag, lighter, a couple of packages including a glass trinket and a book she had bought for a friend, and got up to leave.

Jim Wilbourne leaped to his feet. He was halted by the waiter, who had arisen from nowhere to demand payment. Now he was running after her. “Wait!” She turned. “If I don’t see you … I may take the train down, to stop off in …”

Just as he reached her, a whole family of German tourists walked straight into him, knocking off his green glasses. Martha had the startling impression that an entirely new face had leaped into place before her, in quick substitution for the one she had been across from at the table. It was even saying different things: his tone now openly challenged her: “So you won’t?” “No.” “Not for even a day?” “Exactly.”

Their faces, contesting, seemed for an instant larger than life. Yet she could remember, recalling the exchange, no further words than that, and the moment must have faded quickly, for in retrospect it seemed telescoped and distant in the vast sweep of San Marco. Jim Wilbourne was backing away as though in retreat, and Martha stood holding her packages while two pigeons at her feet plucked at the smashed bits of his glasses. There was no weakest blot of sun and she wandered out of the square into the narrow labyrinth of Venice, where the lions had mildew on their whiskers and St. George slew the dragon on every passing well.

She had looked back once, in leaving the arcades, thinking she had left a camera on a chair, and had seen Jim Wilbourne with Jean
Coggins, who must have been nearby all along. They were standing near the corner of the arcade, talking. The girl had a white scarf wrapped around her hair. The vision flickered, and was gone.

He would have been angry with me, anyway, she told herself. The story was only an excuse, a pretext. But why should I have angered him?

She walked, moving sometimes with clumps and clots of people, at other times quite alone, beginning to settle and stabilize, to grow gentle once more after the turmoil, the anguish, that his outlandish mental leap at her had, like a depth charge, brought boiling up inside her. She took a certain view of herself: someone, not unusual, who had, with the total and deep sincerity of youth, made a mistake. Now, the mistake paid for, agonizingly paid for, the only question was of finding a workable compromise with life. But now at this point did she have to learn that there was something in life that did not want her to have even that? The threat seemed distinctly to be hanging in the air, as thick as the threat of heavy weather.

I should have talked more with the man with the briefcase, she thought, for, far from being mad, he had got things exactly right.
Perchè in questo mondo c’è stato veramente un terribile errore
. Don’t I really believe that Jim Wilbourne’s
terribile errore
was deliberate? She had accused him of it, certainly, and she did believe it.

She had believed more than that, looking back. She had thought that he was simply stirring up the Jean Coggins romance to question her authority—but that was before she had actually seen the girl standing there.

Martha stopped and almost laughed aloud. She had been about to walk straight into a wall, an architectonic device painted upon it to suggest continuing depth where none existed. The laugh would have bounced back at her, perhaps from the false corridors, the steps and porticos and statuary of that very wall. Laughter was a healthy thought, nonetheless, that said that not so many things pertained to herself as she sometimes seemed determined to believe. And as she
stood there a woman much older than herself, gray, but active, and erect, walking with the easy long stride of Venetians, who are good at walking because they are always doing it, went past and entered a doorway, bearing a net of groceries—
la spesa
—in one hand. Just before she entered, she glanced up, and a cat uncurled itself from the column base near the entrance where it had been waiting, bounded past the woman’s feet and entered the door in one soft flowing motion. The door closed.

Martha recalled her apartment in Rome; how easily and comfortably it closed about her once she had got past the place where the messages waited and, beyond, found the
salotto
empty and free. How quietly then she took out her work and spread it on the table, opened the shutters out to the terrace in summer, or bent in winter to light the fresh fire the maid always left.

A new season lay ahead. Perhaps the messages would begin to dwindle now and not so many couriers would show up; time perhaps had no other result but the dissolution of things that existed, and after this something new came on. Martha, if she never had anything worth calling a new life, would have settled simply for a new silence. It would happen, she believed, when Gordon Ingram finally went back totally to his friends, who would convince him that if his young failure of a second wife ever existed, she had had no right to. (And let it even be true, she thought; if it makes him content, why, I’ll believe it, too.) She thought then of Jim Wilbourne and Jean Coggins, off somewhere together in the city’s rich labyrinth.

Asking the direction of the Grand Canal from a young woman who was eating chocolate, she went off in the way she was told.

4

Sometime after four it began to rain—the city, more than ever like a gray ghost ship, a hypnotic evocation, nodded into the thicker element. The rush and whisper of rain came from every distance.
Inside, the air clung like cloth. The maids at the pensione hastened about closing the shutters; they set the restaurant up indoors and brought candles out to decorate the tables—Martha felt she was viewing a new stage set, a change of scene. Like an opera almost, she thought, and at that moment, sure enough, here came the Cogginses skimming in together hand in hand through the rain. Now they were laughing together at the door and soon, from the desk, were appealing to her. “Have you seen Jean?”

She said she hadn’t, but Jean herself came along not much later, walking alone through the rain. She had been sight-seeing in a palace, she said, and had got lost when she left it. “You go right upstairs and take a hot bath,” Mrs. Coggins said.

Jean went by, making wet tracks and looking curiously at Martha, of whom she was somewhat in awe. Her foreign clothes, her long fair smoothly put-up hair, her intelligence and near absence of makeup made her seem to Jean like a medieval lady in a painting. “I can’t tell what she’s thinking,” she had complained to Jim Wilbourne. And he had said nothing at all.

The Cogginses called Martha aside and confided to her with shining eyes that they had experienced a most curious phenomenon since coming to Venice. They had been able to relive in great detail, vividly, their entire past lives. Martha, who could not think of anything worse, nodded, smiling. “How wonderful,” she said. “Marvelous,” they assured her.

In the heavy air Martha had all but dissolved, and went upstairs to take a nap. She left the two Cogginses murmuring below. Tomorrow they would all be in Rome; there would be the sun.

She slept and dreamed.

In the dream Gordon Ingram was standing along some country road in New England, among heavy summer trees, and saying, “You see, I have been severely injured in a hunting accident. I cannot come there. Please understand that otherwise I would.” He looked very young, like the young man in photographs she had seen of him, taken long before they met, standing in the sort of hiking clothes he
must have worn in walking over Europe in days, vacations, the like of which would never come again. She was reaching out her hand and saying, as in a formal note to someone, “I sincerely regret… I deeply regret. …” It seemed the first thing they had had to talk about in many years; the first time in many years that he had spoken to her in his natural voice. The rain-colored shadows collected and washed over the image and she half woke, then slept again, but could not summon up the dream. She remembered saying to herself, perhaps aloud, “What a strange city this is.” For it lay like a great sleeping ear upon the water, resonant and intricate. All the while the rain poured vastly down and could be heard even while sleeping and dreaming, speaking one continuous voice.

In a half daze she awoke and dressed and went downstairs, and at the desk found a note for herself. Jim Wilbourne had just left; he had probably let in the ragged splash of water near the door. He had written a scribble to say that he would see them all in Rome. She crumpled the paper and dropped it in a wastebasket back of the desk. She tried to ring George Hartwell, but could not reach him; the line seemed muffled and gave her only a vague wavering sound. The operator, after a time, must have shut her off for the day. But she remembered that George had said once, one evening when he had drunk too much, that Americans never lose their experience abroad, they simply magnify it. “It’s the old trick of grandfathers,” he had said. “Before the fire they make little motions and big shadows dance on the wall. Europe is the wall the shadows dance on.” His voice went with her for a step or two.