Two Weeks in Another Town (12 page)

“La giacca,”
she said, in a happy whine.
“La giacca del signore. E pulita.”

She shuffled across the carpet, in a thin aroma of old-lady sweat, and hung the suit up in the wardrobe, stroking and fondling it as though it were her dearest pet. Jack would have liked to give her a tip, but he couldn’t get out of bed naked in front of the old lady. It wouldn’t shock the old lady, he was sure (what scenes she must have come upon, walking into the hotel bedrooms of Rome for thirty years, with a towel over her arm, what surprised nakedness of body and soul), but she would have to wait for another time for her hundred lire.

“Grazie,”
Jack said, hunching under the covers, conscious of the slight perfume of Veronica’s body that clung to the sheets.
“Grazie tanto.”

“Prego, prego,”
she whined, her eyes roving around the room, taking it all in, cognizant of everything, no clues ever lost on her, Holmes with dugs, in a blue apron, compiling her endless backstairs thunderous dossier in this Christian city. She backed out of the room, deprived of her hundred lire, her face an accusation of the everlasting meanness of the rich, poverty once more, and not unexpectedly, further impoverished. She didn’t close the door, and Jack heard her going out through the living room grumbling to herself, the dying sound of her passage a grandmother’s echo of the roar the crowd must have made outside the Kremlin walls in 1917. He heard the salon door close behind her and he stretched luxuriously in the warm bed, listening to the chug of the steam in the radiators, allowing the memory of the afternoon to flood deliciously over him. Well, now, he thought lazily, it wasn’t such a bad thing that the nose began to bleed, or else what excuse would she have been able to make to come up to the room? The next time I see the drunk who hit me, maybe I’ll shake the bastard’s hand.

He reached out and turned on the bedside lamp, and looked at his watch. Seven o’clock. Insomnia, there are cures available. There was no sign that Veronica had been there, unless you accepted the frail, close fragrance that clung to the sheets as a sign. He wondered when she had left. He remembered hearing a Frenchwoman say once that it was rude for a man to fall asleep after making love. Oh, you rude, uncultivated American, he thought comfortably, oh you Comanche.

He thought of his wife and tested himself for guilt. He felt a lot of things, lying there in the warm tumbled bed, but he didn’t feel guilty. In the eight years that he had been married to Hélène, he had had nothing to do with other women. He had thought of it often enough, of course, and approached it once or twice, but had always pulled back at the last moment. Not from a sense of morality—his moral sense was involved in other ways, and he had been through too much marriage and seen too much of other marriages to be able to believe that physical fidelity was the rule rather than the exception, in the age and in the places in which he lived. He had been faithful until that afternoon to Hélène because—Because he loved her? There were times, like the afternoon at the airport, when he didn’t love her at all. Because he felt guilty at not being able to love her enough, and scrupulously kept to the form of the marriage, hoping that one day the substance would materialize? Because he was grateful to her for her goodness and her beauty and her love for him? Because he had been married too often and had suffered and had made others suffer too much? Because, after all the riot, he was satisfying himself with comfort and routine and cannily renouncing passion? Well, he thought, this afternoon, comfort and routine had been forgotten, and well forgotten. Still, if there had been any danger of his falling in love with Veronica, he told himself, he would not have let her come up to the room. But this way—he moved lazily in the bed, turning toward the place where Veronica’s head had lain and where two long dark hairs webbed the pillow—this way (O, benevolent accident) no harm would come to anyone, and maybe a great deal of good. What the hell, he thought, it’s only two weeks.

As for Hélène (dancing—one reported, one invented, one telephoned, one lied or didn’t lie—in a night club at three in the morning)—he wasn’t sure what she did, at all. She was Parisienne, her religion was fashionable French, in other words, almost nonoperative on questions like this—she was beautiful and attractive to men, she had had several affairs he knew of, before marrying him, and probably others he didn’t know of, she was out of the house almost every afternoon on the hazy and flexible errands women invent for themselves in Paris, and he made no investigation of how she used her time. He knew that if he were to come into a Paris drawing room and see her for the first time, he would take it for granted that she was a woman who took lovers. Well, if she does, he thought, with the tolerance of recent pleasure warm in his veins, and if she doesn’t tell me about it, and if it makes her feel as good as I do now, more power to her.

He threw back the covers and got out of bed, whistling tunelessly under his breath. He flipped on the switch for the chandelier and. looked at the bureau for a note from Veronica. There was nothing there. He was certain she wouldn’t have gone without leaving her address and telephone number and he padded, barefooted and naked, into the salon to search for it. But there was nothing there, either. He shrugged, undisturbed. Maybe it’s better that way, he thought, love and farewell, maybe she’s smarter than I give her credit for being.

He went back through the bedroom, still whistling. Then he recognized what he was whistling. Walkin’ My Baby Back Home. He stopped whistling and went into the bathroom to turn the water on for a bath. When he switched on the light he saw, scrawled in lipstick on the mirror over one of the basins, a large crimson V. He grinned, looking at it. No, he thought, that doesn’t mean farewell. The phone will ring eventually.

Happily, he turned on the water for the bath. There was a wide full-length mirror in the bathroom and he stopped in front of it and regarded himself thoughtfully, standing there naked, with the steam of the bath rising in clouds behind him. When he was young, he had spent considerable time looking at his body in the mirror. He had played football in high school and part of his freshman year in college, until he had torn a cartilage in his knee and the doctors had told him he had to quit or risk being lame for life. He had had the body of an athlete then, and he had stared into the glass with almost embarrassed pride in the sloping powerful shoulders, the flat ridges of muscle across the stomach, the long, heavy legs so finely conditioned that with each move you would see the small play of the tendons under the smooth skin. And when he had gone into the theatre he worked out in the gymnasium four times a week, on the bags, sparring, on the bars, so that no matter what claims any role might make on him, his body would be able to respond completely and with grace. But after the war, after the time in the hospital, with all the muscles gone slack and soft from the morphia months, and the scars from the grafting still red on his skin, and the curious, thick disarrangement of his jaw, he had avoided looking at himself, to spare himself pain. And since then, when a mirror happened to surprise him, in a locker room or in a strange bedroom, he had observed himself with distaste, noting critically the growing heaviness, the thickening of the years. He had recovered completely—the invalid’s flabbiness had disappeared, and his body looked powerful and healthy—but the grace and suppleness had gone, he felt. The body of the boy who had raced down the field under punts and leaped high into the air for passes was only a memory, submerged in the grossness of time.

But now he found himself regarding his body with approval. Remembering how well it had served him that afternoon, he looked at his naked reflection with new eyes. Not so bad, he thought, with an inner smile for his vanity, the monopoly of youth is not complete—after all, a body is made to wear for a long time and not all the changes of maturity are for the worse. Take off ten pounds, he thought, staring critically at his waist, and it wouldn’t be too bad at all. Anyway, there’s no paunch yet, and the important lines are still flat.

He got into the deep old-fashioned bathtub and lay there for a long time, luxuriously adding hot water every two or three minutes, feeling the cleansing sweat run down his forehead. Lying there, he saw the big lipstick V on the mirror above the basin, now misted over with steam, and he wondered how he could prevail upon the maid to leave it there, for the whole two weeks of his stay.

Later, getting dressed, he decided that he felt too good to go to a cocktail party. He went downstairs and told the doorman to tell his driver he wouldn’t need him that night. Then he went into the bar and ordered a martini, pleased at being alone and at the prospect of solitude for the evening. The same group of young Italians who had been in the bar the night before were there again, but this time Jack suffered them benignly, without jealousy.

He finished his drink and left the hotel and strolled slowly down the tree-lined avenue, looking in at the windows, his coat thrown open, despite the dark nip in the air. Half by accident, he found himself walking toward the theatre where
The Stolen Midnight
was playing. When he reached the theatre he stood in front of it and looked at the stills of himself curiously, but without emotion, without regret. He looked at the pictures of Carlotta and wondered where she was now and what she was like after all the years and how he would feel if she were to come into a room in which he happened to be. For a moment, he was tempted to go in and see the picture again, to study his ancient self in the covering darkness and try to find out just what it was about him twenty years before that had captured Veronica. But he decided against it, feeling he had indulged himself in enough narcissism for one day.

He had dinner quietly, in a small, deserted restaurant. Remembering the ten pounds, he ate no bread or
pasta.
After dinner, he walked down toward the Forum, stopping, in for an
espresso
and a glass of sweet Italian brandy. The Forum, locked for the night behind its gates, was deserted and shadowy in the pale light of a quarter moon, and a freshening wind made him button the collar of his coat tight around his neck.

Standing there bareheaded in the winter wind, he had a happy feeling of being disconnected, private to himself. At that moment, nobody in the whole world knew where he was. No matter what claims anybody might have on him, no matter how much anyone might want or need him, he was, for the time he stood there, unreachable, his own man. I am in the heart of Europe, at the roots of the continent, alone, he thought, secret among the ruins.

He remembered a few lines of one of Cicero’s orations that had been spoken in this place, reverberating among these stones.
O tempora, o mores! Senatus haec intellegit, consul videt; hic tamen vivit. Vivit? Immo vero etiam in senatum venit, fit publici consili particeps, notat et designat oculis ad caedem unum quemque nostrum.
High-school Latin and the scrawled-in pony on his desk at home when he was fifteen years old.
What an age! What morals! The senate knows these things, the consul sees them. Yet this man lives. Lives, did I say? Nay, more, he walks into the senate, he takes part in the public counsel. He singles out and marks with his glance each one of us for murder.
Then they strangled Cicero, far from the scene of his triumphs, after the applause had died down. Poor old man, how he must have regretted his gifted tongue when they came to get him.

I am a Roman, he thought, playing a game he had indulged in when he was a child, when he would close his eyes in bed at night and say to himself, I am an Eskimo, my igloo is warm, the seals are barking across the ice, or, I am Nathan Hale, they are coming to hang me in the morning, or, I am Jubal Early, on a black horse, riding around the Union lines. I am a Roman, he thought, and Christ has just been born and just been crucified, although in my lifetime I will not hear of either event. I have had my dinner, and the wind from the Apennines is heavy with winter and I have drunk a little too much wine and heard a man from Athens play on the flute, accompanied by a boy on the lyre. The silence and the darkness in front of the Senate steps is doubly welcome now because of all this. Tomorrow, they say, Augustus will make an appearance, and there will be games, and the gladiator with the net and trident will be matched against an African lion. You can hear the roars of the beasts even now, locked in their stone pens beneath the Colosseum floor. The man with the net and trident, you imagine, is quiet for the moment, mending his net, making sure of the knots, sharpening his long fork, contemplating the next morning.

Roman, you stroll alone in the cold midnight air, surrounded by the tall marble pillars, thinking of the violent, merciless men, the astute voluptuaries in togas who throng the place in daylight and you feel how permanent and indestructible it all is, how this stone seed grows and flourishes, days without end, on these low, central hills.

He heard steps in the distance and he saw, outlined against the light of a lamppost, the figures of two policemen. The policemen stopped and looked at him and Jack could guess at the everlasting policemen’s suspicion in their eyes as they surveyed him, waiting for him to make one false move, scale a wall, bend for one marble fragment, pocket one crumbling shard of history.

The policemen Americanized him, took away his ghostly Roman citizenship. Eyes were upon him; he was no longer unreachable; the world once more put its claims upon him; he was subject to search and seizure and could be forced to announce his identity. The noise of chariot wheels drummed away to a whisper in the distance, the lions fell silent and their pens were open to the moon in the stripped arena; the music heard far off came from a bar and it was a record playing “Trumpet Rag.” No pipes, no lyres under the policemen’s eyes, and the Vespas coughed in the streets under their control. Christ and Cicero were dead a round two thousand years and only the night wind coming from the mountains to the north was the same.

Jack made his way along the wall, looking down at the uneven paving below (blood, sandals, bronze wheels). The policemen watched him, thinking, If necessary, we will get him another night.