Cast a Cold Eye (11 page)

The wide
letto matrimoniale
in the bedroom, the wash-stand, and the bidet with the towel over it, the dressing-table on which were arranged, very neatly and charmingly, Miss Grabbe’s toilet waters and perfumes, her powders and lucite brush and comb, her lipsticks, orange sticks, and tweezers, all had an air unmistakably functional, to which the books and magazines, the cigarettes and pretty colored postcards set out, invitingly, in the sitting room contributed their share, so that it was not so surprising as it might have been to see, when the balcony doors were opened, the figure of Mr. Sciarappa lounging on the terrace, like a waiting client, with a copy of
Life.

This conception of his position, however, seemed not to have struck Mr. Sciarappa. He was there, it seemed, simply for the practical joke of it, for their shrieks, for Miss Grabbe’s discomfiture. He laughed at them with candid merriment, saying, “
Caro,
I give you a surprise.” The two friends had not seen him so lively since one night in Milan when a tired fat woman, running for a tramcar, had failed to catch it. He showed no inclination at all to step into the role that stood there, ready for him to try on. He had come, he said, as a courier, proposing to take them to dinner, to the Piazza San Marco, to Harry’s Bar, where the smart English officers went and the international set with their electric-blue suits, blonde mistresses, heavy jaws, and decorations from Balkan kings. With all these little offices and services, his mind was completely occupied. His original mission, Miss Grabbe, had plainly dropped into some
oubliette
of his faculties, and the two friends, observing him, could nearly have sworn that his sole purpose in coming to Venice had been to prepare a place for them, like Jesus for his disciples in Heaven.

Dinner, however, soon restored him to his normal state of disaffection. Once the four were seated upstairs, in the yellow lamplight at Quadri’s, he was his old self, bored, petulant, abstracted. He jumped up from his chair with almost indecent agility to speak to a bearded gentleman in a respectable suit of clothes, and came back finally to announce that this was Prince Rucellai, an illustrious Florentine nobleman who practiced the trade of antique-dealer. In the manner of all Mr. Sciarappa’s native acquaintances, the prince at once quitted the restaurant, but Mr. Sciarappa’s attention went with him out into the square, abandoning the Americans summarily for the evening. It was as if he suffered from some curious form of amnesia that made him mislay his purpose halfway on the road to accomplishment. He was in Venice and could not remember why, and he stayed on hoping, somehow, for a refreshment of his memory. Now and then, during the following days, the Americans would find him looking at them with a curious concentration, as though their appearance might recall to him his motive in seeking their society. From Miss Grabbe, on the contrary, whose emeralds should have furnished him his clue, he persistently averted his eyes.

The little bohemian heiress, in fact, was the center of his inattention, an inattention principled and profound. From the very first night, apparently, she had associated herself in his mind with culture, and hence, merely by talking about them, she had fallen into the class of objects—cathedrals, works of art, museums, palaces maintained by the state—which, by being free to all, were valuable, in his opinion, to none. And by the same trick by which he substituted an empty space for the cathedral in the Piazza San Marco, he “vanished” Miss Grabbe from the table at dinner. The possibility of her buying a palazzo, which she spoke of continually, he simply declined to credit. His business interest, it would seem, was far too deep to be aroused by it, and no commission could be large enough to make him expand his idea of money to accommodate within it the living heresy of Miss Grabbe. All over Venice, volunteer real-estate agents were at work for her, the concierge at the Grand Hotel, the liftboy, a gondolier, two Communist painters in a studio across the Canal. Mr. Sciarappa only smiled impatiently whenever this project was mentioned, and once he nudged the young lady and significantly tapped his head.

Miss Grabbe, for her part, was unaware of his feelings. The first evening on the balcony, she had expressed herself strongly against him. Pointing dramatically to the blue lagoon, the towers, the domes, the clouds, the Palladian front of San Giorgio, all as pink and white, as airy, watery, clear, and neat as the bottles and puffs on her own dressing-table, she had taken the young man’s arm and invited him to choose. “My dear, why do you see him? He is not our sort,” she had said. “Life is too short. He will spoil Venice for you if you let him.” The young man had simply stared. Mr. Sciarappa was a nuisance, but he felt no inclination to trade him for the Venetian “experience.” The bargain was too sharp for his nature. If Mr. Sciarappa obstructed the European view, he also replaced it. The mystery of Europe lay in him as solidly as in the stones of Venice, and it was somewhat less worn by previous inquisitive travelers. Night after night, he and the young lady would sit up examining Mr. Sciarappa with the refined passion of connoisseurs. It was true that sometimes at the dinner-hour they would try to give him the slip, yet they felt a certain relief whenever he rose from behind a potted plant in the hotel lobby to claim, once again, their company. He had become a problem for them in both senses of the word: the impossibility of talking
with
him was compensated for by the possibilities of talking about him, and the detachment of their attitude was, they felt, atoned for by their neighborliness in the physical sphere. How much, in fact, they had come to feel that they owed Mr. Sciarappa their company, they did not recognize until the afternoon, extraordinary to them, when he was not on hand to collect the debt.

The day of the fiesta he silently disappeared. Like everyone else in Venice he had been planning on the occasion. Colored lanterns had been attached to the gondolas, floats were being decked, and rumors, gay as paper flowers, promised a night of license, masking, and folly. A party of English tourists was expected; Miss Grabbe was trying on eighteenth-century court costumes with the Communists across the Canal. Apparently, Mr. Sciarappa had set this as the date of his own liberation, for at the apéritif hour he was not to be seen, either at the hotel or, as he had stipulated, in the Piazza. The two friends connected his appearance with the arrival of the English tourists, for at the first mention of their existence, his mind had ducked underground, into the tunnel where his real life was conducted. They had known him long enough to see him as a city of Catacombs, and to interpret his lapses of attention as signs of the keenest interest; his silences were the camouflaged entrances to the Plutonian realm of his thoughts. Nevertheless, they felt slightly shocked and abandoned. Like many intellectual people, they were alarmed by the confirmation of theories—was the world as small as the mind? They telephoned their hotel twice, but their friend had left no messages for them, and, disturbed, they allowed Miss Grabbe to go off with her maskers while they watched on the cold jetty the little gondolas chasing up and down the Canal in pursuit of the great floating orchestra which everybody had seen in the afternoon but which now, like Mr. Sciarappa, had unaccountably disappeared.

Some time later, they perceived Mr. Sciarappa alone in a gondola that was rapidly making for the pier. They would not have recognized him had he not called out effusively, “Ah, my friends, I am looking for you all over Venice tonight.”

The full force of this lie was lost on them, for they were less astonished to find Scampi in a falsehood than to find him in a new suit. In dark blue and white stripes, he stepped out of the gondola; gold links gleamed at his wrists; his face was soft from the barbershop, and a strong fragrance of Chanel caused passers-by to turn to stare at them. The bluish-white glare from the dome of San Giorgio, lit up for the occasion, fell on him, accentuating the moment. The heavier material had added a certain substantiality to him; like the men in Harry’s Bar, he looked sybaritic, prosperous, and vain. But this transfiguration was, it became clear, merely the afterglow of some hope that had already set for him. Wherever he had been, he had failed to accomplish his object, if indeed he had had an object beyond the vague adventure of a carnival night. He was more nervous than ever, and he invited them to join him on the Canal in the manner of a man who is weighing the security of companionship against the advantages of the lone hand. The two friends declined, and he put off once more in the gondola, saying, “Well, my dears, you are right; it is just a tourist fiesta.” The two retired to their window to wonder whether the English tourists, and not themselves or Miss Grabbe, had not been, after all, the real Venetian attraction. The
Inglesi’s
arrival might well have been anticipated in a newspaper, particularly since they had the reputation of being rich collectors of furniture. Mr. Sciarappa’s restless behavior, irrational in a pursuer who has already come up with his prey, was appropriate enough to the boredom and anxiety of waiting. Indeed, sometimes, watching him drum on the table, they had said to themselves that he behaved toward them like a passenger who is detained between trains in a provincial railroad station and vainly tries to interest himself in the billboard and the ticket collector.

Miss Grabbe had taken very little part in all this mental excitement. So far as the two friends could see, he had no erotic interest for her. She was as adamant to his virility as he to the evidence of her money—it would have disturbed all her preconceptions to discover sex in a business suit. She received his disappearance calmly, saying, “I thought you wanted to get rid of him—he has probably found bigger fish.” In general, after her first protest, she had grown accustomed to Mr. Sciarappa, in the manner of the rich. For her he did not assume prominence through the frequency of his attendance, but on the contrary he receded into the surroundings in the fashion of a piece of furniture that is “lived with.” She opened and closed him like a guidebook whenever she needed the name of a hotel or a hairdresser or had forgotten the Italian for what she wanted to say to the waiter. Having money, she had little real curiosity; she was not a dependent of the world. It did not occur to her to inquire why he had come, nor did she ask when he would leave. She too spoke of him as “Scampi,” but tolerantly, without resentment, as nice women call a dog a rascal. She was not, despite appearances, a woman of strong convictions; she accepted any current situation as normative and was not anxious for change. Her money had made her insular; she was used to a mercenary circle and had no idea that outside it lovers showed affection, friends repaid kindness, and husbands did not ask an allowance or bring their mistresses home to bed. So now she accepted Mr. Sciarappa’s dubious presence without particular question; it struck her as far less unnatural than the daily affection she witnessed between the young man and the young lady. She domesticated all the queerness of his being with them in Venice. “My dear,” she remonstrated with the young man, “he simply wants to sell us something,” dissipating Sciarappa as succinctly as if he had been a Fuller Brush man at the door. It irritated them slightly that she would not see the problem of Sciarappa, and they did not guess that now, when they had given up expecting it, she would grapple with their problem more matter-of-factly than they. While the two friends slept, through the night of the fiesta she and Mr. Sciarappa made love; when he departed, in dressing-gown and slippers, she thanked him “for a very pleasant evening.”

Mr. Sciarappa, however, did not stay to cement the relationship. He left Venice precipitately, as though retreating ahead of Miss Grabbe’s revelations. He was gone the next afternoon, without spoken adieus, leaving behind him a list of the second-best restaurants in Florence for the young lady, with an asterisk marking the ones where he was personally known to the headwaiter. “Unhappily,” his note ran, “one cannot be on a holiday forever.” On a final zigzag of policy he had careened away from them into the inexplicable. Now that he had declared himself in action, his motives seemed the more obscure. What, in fact, had he been up to? It was impossible to find out from Miss Grabbe, for to her mind sex went without explanations; it seemed to her perfectly ordinary that two strangers who were indifferent to each other should spend the night locked in the privacies of love.

Sitting up in bed, surrounded by hot-water bottles (for she had caught cold in her stomach), she received the two friends at tea-time and related her experiences of the night, using confession matter-of-factly, as a species of feminine hygiene, to disinfect her spirit of any lingering touch of the man. Scampi, she said, accepting the nickname from the young man as a kind of garment for the Italian gentleman, who seemed to stand there before them, shivering and slightly chicken-breasted in the nude, Scampi, she said, was very nice, but not in any way remarkable, the usual Italian man. He had taken her back from the fiesta, where the orchestra had never been found and she had grown tired of the painters, who looked ridiculous in costume when no one else was dressed. He had pinched her bottom on the Riva and undressed her on the balcony; they had tussled and gone to bed. Upon the cold stage of Miss Grabbe’s bald narrative, he capered in and out like a grotesque, now naked, chasing her naked onto the balcony, now gorgeous in a silk dressing-gown and slippers tiptoeing down the corridor of the hotel, now correct in light tan pajamas dutifully, domestically, turning out the light. For a moment, they saw him all shrunken and wizened. (“My dear, he is much older than you think,” said Miss Grabbe confidentially), and another glimpse revealed him in an aspect still more intimate and terrible, tossing the scapular he wore about his neck, and which hung down and interfered with his love-making, back again and again, lightly, flippantly, recklessly, over his thin shoulder.

“Stop,” cried the young lady, seizing the young man’s hands and pressing them in an agony of repentance to her own bosom. “Does it shock you?” inquired Miss Grabbe, lifting her black eyebrows. “Darling, you
gave
me Sciarappa.”