The Uncertain Hour (11 page)

Petronius felt Martialis shifting uncomfortably at his shoulder. It was only natural that the boy should be uneasy. Growing up in his little Spanish mountain village, he’d been weaned on stories of his famous countryman Seneca, a distant cousin from Cordoba who’d gone off to Rome and become an illustrious playwright, a renowned philosopher, tutor to the emperor! When Martialis first arrived in Rome, a wide-eyed provincial with ringlets in his hair, he’d been deeply impressed by Seneca, who was still playing the elder statesman and sage mentor, even though he was in his final decline and could barely show himself in the streets in the daylight hours. How warmly Seneca had welcomed him! Martialis was the last man in Italy who still thought Seneca a great and powerful politician, and believed the promises he’d made about introductions, shamelessly, in front of people who knew only too well the sad truth of his reduced circumstances. No one who had come to love Martialis had had the heart to disabuse him, so that again he was probably the only man in Italy to be shocked and dismayed by Seneca’s arrest and suicide six months later, lumped in like a common criminal with Piso’s conspirators. And even afterward, when Seneca’s widow Paulina survived her own suicide attempt and began spreading the unlikely tale of her husband’s heroic, So-cratic last moments, only Martialis was taken in. So now it can’t have been pleasant to hear those who knew his cousin far better than he discuss Seneca’s foibles so casually, barely a year after his death. Petronius felt a feeble wave of sympathy pulse through him, but it was not strong enough to move him to a word of compassion. After all, he had already seen a vision of Martialis’s future—the one in which, after a dignified pause for mourning, he found a new patron with better political prospects, composed appropriately flattering verses for future emperors, and achieved the fame and notoriety he’d dreamed of since boyhood—and it did not involve any sacrifices to the memory of dead, disgraced mentors.

The moon had finally disentangled itself from the pergola and, its jaundice purged by the high winds, hung silver in an empty sky the color of raw sinew. Petronius judged by the echoes from the cove that the tide had turned and was advancing. It would soon overtake and lift the bow of the stranded yacht down on the beach. In another hour, the boat would be free to sail, if there were anyone needing to sail her. Petronius considered the unpleasant irony that, in his final hours, all of nature had been transformed into an exquisitely accurate timepiece.

The night had grown colder, the warmth of the braziers intermittent and barely adequate, the breeze steady against the screens, bowing them like sails. Petronius realized with a mild start that some of the guests had been issued blankets of reddish Canusium wool. When had this happened? Had he fallen asleep? It would not be long before he would need to return for another round of bloodletting, and he feared that it would affect him more severely than anticipated, perhaps incapacitate or render him unconscious, and thus put a premature end to the dinner and inconvenience his guests. He resolved to keep his wits sharp while he still had them. He leaned into the water table abruptly and stuck his head beneath the frigid water. He opened his eyes, and the shadows cast on the granite floor of the basin by the wavering lamplight across the floating platters looked like the shadows of clouds migrating across the face of a mountain. He thought of Mysian Olympus, above Prusa, on a crisp day in early May, before the saffron had been planted and the slopes were still a chalky gray.

PETRONIUS HAD BEEN
determined to pursue his acquaintance with the centurion’s wife, though official duties kept him in Nicomedia longer than he would have wished. Ultimately, it took him almost two full months to redeem his promise to himself. Once there, he made a halfhearted pretense of furthering his investigation into the city finances, but in fact spent much of his time wandering the streets in search of the woman. He sought her several times in the ruined house where they had met, varying the time of day in the hope that she kept a regular appointment there, but to no avail. Now, the
kouros
seemed to mock him even more cruelly for his obtuse fantasies—a grown man, with the full power of the empire behind him, skulking through the byways of an obscure provincial town for a woman he barely knew—but he had a purpose that counterbalanced his frustration and shame. Naturally, he could not seek her out in the barracks, the one place he could be sure of finding her, and his face was too well known by now for him to spend much time in any one place where he would attract unwanted attention. The town fathers resented him venomously; the merest whiff of scandal would be enough to prompt a letter of complaint to the Senate that would immeasurably complicate his life and pursuit. Even so, he grew desperate enough to throw caution to the wind, and found himself, but poorly disguised in a Canusian cloak, loitering for hours by the gates of the barracks. It took almost two days of waiting until she finally emerged, wearing a long-sleeved tunic and rough woolen shawl and carrying an empty reed basket on her arm. Having had only the most cursory glimpse of her face at their first meeting, he could not even be perfectly certain that it was her until he studied her gait, the way she walked like a senior magistrate in measured strides, shoulders thrown back. The plaza was almost deserted; he could not follow her directly without drawing the scrutiny of the picket at the gate. Waiting until she rounded the corner, he turned up a parallel alleyway and made for the marketplace, where he found her dawdling among the stalls, halfheartedly picking over the meager selection of fruit and vegetables. It was there, ridiculously posing as a fellow shopper, that he closed on her.

He stood at her side, not knowing how to reintroduce himself. It was not that he was afraid of scaring her off—there was nothing of the skittish or the shy about her—but that he wanted to make a powerful impression upon her and had little experience of such matters. As nothing came to mind, and as he was anxious not to squander the opportunity, he simply leaned to his right and bumped shoulders with her. When she looked up in irritation, all he could do was smile foolishly back at her, at a loss for words. She was very beautiful, more beautiful even than he had thought she would be, and her beauty was enhanced rather than mitigated by a suggestion of hardness, or perhaps it was sadness, around her eyes. Her eyebrows were thick and darker than her hair, and there was a hint of silky down above her upper lip. Her lower lip was somewhat swollen, pouty, as if she had spent her entire lifetime drinking milk from the spout of a pitcher. Her skin was pale and matte. Her hair was indeed light brown, the color of ripe wheat, straight and fine, pulled back in a simple braid that ended between her shoulder blades.

It took a moment or two for her to place him, and when she did her expression changed in only the subtlest of ways, registering neither shock nor triumph nor delight, but simply acknowledgment of his presence, the way one might look at a pair of scissors that one had misplaced and found again. It was an extremely gratifying way to be looked at, at least for Petronius, and it was all he could do to keep from blushing.

“Well,” she said at last. “Have you come for me?”

He nodded stupidly and followed her, not altogether discreetly, as she led the way from the market, up the steep cobbled streets, and out the eastern gate of the city that opened onto the lower slopes of Mount Olympus, planted with flowering cherry trees in walled orchards and, higher still, with dark groves of filbert, heavy with pale yellow catkins. Beyond were the saffron slopes, fallow until the summer planting. At last she stopped where the path took a sharp turn to the north, and turned to him, her hands folded demurely in front of her.

“Here I am, Governor,” she said. “What is it that you want with me?”

He did not know what to do, or what to say to her, so he had her right there, in the shadow of an overgrown embankment. With her left hand she stroked the hair at the back of his head, smiling indulgently as one might at a child who had just said something clever and poignant, while with her right she pushed at his shoulder, preventing him from kissing her. Although he gave no thought to anything but his own pleasure, or to prolonging the encounter beyond his own satisfaction, she maneuvered herself beneath him with practiced self-interest, as if she were alone with her hand, and climaxed before he did, shuddering throughout her entire body yet exhaling the very barest whimper, and maintaining an enigmatic smile throughout. That smile, tender and superior at the same time, as though she were gratifying the whim of a sensitive boy, was both shocking and intensely, almost painfully, arousing.

Afterward, he watched her as she lay on a bed of moss absorbing the sun, deep in thought. He was captivated beyond words, and, despite his earlier promise to himself, he struggled to find something to say about his nascent feelings that would not sound trite or precipitous.

“What it is that you’re about to tell me,” she said without turning her head, “I urge you not to say it.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything.”

“I’ve been married since I was sixteen, Governor, and my husband still tells me he loves me. It doesn’t help.”

“You don’t believe in love?”

“I don’t believe in talking about it. Whenever I hear a man say the word ‘love,’ I check my ankles for leg irons.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve done this, then?”

“No.”

“And you suppose all men are the same, do you, Melissa?”

“Oh, I’ll admit you have more money and power than Junius. You’re better looking, more educated, and infinitely more sophisticated than he is. You are certainly more intelligent, and you do make love better than he does. Perhaps you’re even a little more subtle. But in everything that’s truly important, I dare say you are just the same.”

“And yet you gave yourself to me.”

“And yet I gave myself to you. Just please don’t talk to me about love.”

He remained in Prusa for another week, delaying his return to the capital and his official duties on the feeblest of pretexts. They met every day, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for an entire afternoon, always in the same deserted spot below the saffron fields. It was she who made the appointments, she who determined the amount of time they spent together, she who wordlessly dictated every variation in their lovemaking. Identified from the very outset as a supplicant, he had no say in the matter, instantly relinquished all his authority, so that when she continued to address him as “Governor,” the title assumed an aura of gentle, ironic contempt that he relished. When he had exhausted every possible excuse to the town fathers, whom he nominally continued to consult as his reason for remaining in Prusa, he simply stopped attending their meetings altogether. It must have aroused their suspicions; they could easily have had him followed, but he didn’t care. He would have met her in the central forum, had her straddle him on the steps of the temple of Isis if she had asked him to. Who knew what she told her husband? Petronius never gave it a thought; from the moment he was with her, he was nothing, he disappeared, he was a crumb at the corner of her mouth, thoughtlessly licked away by her indifferent tongue. He was in thrall to her benevolent disdain.

Was it improbable that he should have succumbed to her so thoroughly, so suddenly? It was not sudden at all—Petronius came to believe that he had been waiting for her all his forty years. As for the intensity of his passion, he had never believed in romantic love, had had no interest in its vocabulary or conventions. Now, wary of exploring the nature of his feelings for his lover, all he knew and all he cared to know was that he was consumed by desire that, in the consummation, made him feel consummately known by the consumer, in a way that he had not even suspected he wished to be known by anyone. He felt like a piece of fruit, a most delicious apple whose sole reason for existing is to be eaten, and that some miracle allowed him to be reborn each time he was devoured, only to be devoured again and again. If this was love, he thought that perhaps it was indeed best that he say nothing to her about it.

Despite his age, his travels, and his accomplishments, Petronius was strangely inexperienced in the ways of love. Like many men of his class—like Nero himself—he had been debauched by an older woman sent to him by his mother. She had been perfectly competent, and not unattractive, but he had been only fourteen years old and had found the whole thing unpleasant and unnerving, especially when she’d screwed up her face as though she were in pain and howled like a stuck cat in an orgasm that he saw, in retrospect, was surely faked. After that, his experience of physical relations with women had been essentially limited to assignations of convenience with patrician wives either bored with or ambitious for their husbands, and prostitutes of the high and low kind alike—all of whom had every motivation to be pliable and obliging. It was not that he had not had ample opportunity, should he have sought to exploit it, or that women did not find him attractive, which was a matter of indifference to him. It was simply that he had no interest in procreation, no inclination toward marriage (despite its evident benefits for his political career), and no particular talent for emotional intimacy. Other men, he gathered, used sex as an instrument of power, revenge, violence, communication, perversion, or the stroking of their tender egos. For Petronius, it was an instrument of release, and nothing more. He had found it to be extremely useful when trying to unwind after a day on the Senate floor or the battlefield, and at its very best the act might perhaps evoke certain transient feelings of invincibility or belonging, but not for long and certainly not for keeps.