Hill Towns (11 page)

to Joe, “You are sure? The old city. It is not such a good spot for Americans. Not so much of the night life.”

“It’s a private home,” Joe said. “We are going to a party there.
Un ricevimento
.”

“Ah,” said the doorman. “A party.” And he nodded wisely.

He leaned into the taxi and spat out a rapid command to the driver, who nodded and closed the window. We glided away down the mountain in the lowering dusk as if in a gondola, sealed away from Rome in new vinyl and steel and chill air. For the first time since we had reached the airport in Munich that morning, we relaxed and took deep breaths.

At the end of this ride would be lights and festivity and love, and faces we knew, and language we spoke. There would be food and drink and laughter. Colin’s voice on the telephone was jubilant and assured, somehow different, somehow very…Italian. Maria’s was vibrant and full of something I had not heard before, a kind of teasing sensuality, a small, very feminine something.

“It’s so beautiful you won’t believe it, Joe,” she said. “Like a fairy tale. And I can’t wait for you to meet Sam. He says tell you to tell the driver to look for the lamppost with the wreath of white flowers on it; it’s the third door down from that, on the left. The street numbers are all worn off on this block. Oh, I’m going to give you such a hug! Hurry up!”

“I think Maria’s been into the vino,” Joe said, hanging up the telephone. It sat on a pretty blond wood desk overlooking our balcony, which did not, after all, overlook all of Rome, but instead commanded the back parking lot and a line of low hills and a kind of mesa in the distance, upon which sat what I took to be a hydroelectric plant. The room we had reserved had been “I regret,
occupato
” when we arrived, and rather than wait

HILL TOWNS / 85

for another on the front to be made up, a process that would, the contrite little man at the desk said, take three hours, we accepted this one and a reduction in our bill. After buying Joe pajamas and two form-fitting shirts of some silky material in the appallingly priced men’s shop off the marble lobby, we showered and left immediately for Trastevere. I wore a flowered cotton sundress more suited to a morning in Florida than an engagement party, but I did not care. Joe, in the stylish Roman shirt, did.

“I feel I should have on a stretch satin Speed bikini under my pants,” he said.

“It will probably come to that. I can’t imagine where we’re going to find Brooks Brothers oxford boxers,” I said, smiling at him. Joe hated the new shirt. He looked as unlike Joe Gaillard as it was possible to look in it, foreign and rakish and showily handsome. I started to say something about gold chains and chest hair but thought better of it.

We could not see much of the panorama of Rome on the ride down the mountain. The sky had deepened to violet, but few lights had come on yet, or perhaps Rome did not light up at night like an American city. Some few pinpricks dotted the plain below, strung like a necklace, and a pepper-ing marked the suburbs we glided through, but the neon signs had not been lit. Only the white ghost of a fingernail moon hung in the sky, far to the west of us. It was impossible to tell where we were in relation to anything at all. Somehow, we did not speak much.

We reached the bottom of the mountain and turned, and passed through a neighborhood I thought I recognized from the trip up, filled with newish apartment buildings and shops and outdoor cafés and teeming crowds on foot and in the stubby little cars that Romans

86 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

seemed to aim at one another like ballistic weapons. Fiats and Vespas darted everywhere like bright shoals of fish. It all looked gay and friendly and somehow very real, and I wished fleetingly that Sam and Ada lived here or in a neighborhood like this one. The lights bloomed as we passed, and colored signs glowed like Christmas lights, and lamps in windows and candles on rooftop tables shone.

But then we were out of it, and across a bridge that I knew I had not seen before, and very soon into another world entirely. I knew from the narrow twisting streets, and the crumbling plaster houses leaning over them, and the dim piazzas and the tall shuttered windows that we were in a very old part of Rome.

“Trastevere?” I said to Joe. I said it, for some reason, in a whisper.

“I hope so,” he replied in the same low tone. “Somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.”

I had read of the celebrated piazzas and churches and fountains of Trastevere. I had looked forward to the crowds of working men and women in the
caffés
and bars, the pizzerias and markets, the rich life of the streets in this oldest neighborhood where the descendants of the first Romans were said to live. But the streets we inched through in our big cold car were mostly dark, and the occasional streetlight seemed dim and gray, as if it lacked essential oxygen. I saw few people on the streets and few lights behind the shuttered windows. This was not a place for which I felt any human ken.

The driver swung the car through an arched gate and into an even narrower, darker street paralleled by a foot-bridge.

I knew the Tiber must run just beyond it but could see and hear nothing. Far down, at a crosswalk, HILL TOWNS / 87

there were a few pale lights, and people walking past the intersection, but this street was bordered only by tall old houses, pocked and stained by what must be centuries of weather and shuttered dark. There was literally no one about, not even one of the famous high-hipped feral cats of Rome.

The driver slowed and stopped, Joe and I looked at each other.

When we did not get out, he did, and came around and opened the door on my side, and reached in and gave me his hand. I took it and got out into the warm, soft air. I would not have dreamed of refusing. Joe got out on his side too. There was a little ambient sound, but it seemed to come from far away, not from the dark houses around us. I could not believe we were in a place of living people.

“Via della Lungara?” Joe said. His voice echoed thinly in the silence. “Number twenty?
Venti
?”

The driver nodded. We looked. We saw no numbers.

The driver nodded again. Climbing out we saw, on the lamppost at the corner, dimly, a small wreath of white flowers. Well, then, this must be right, Maria had said to look for the wreath….

Joe paid the driver and he rolled silently away down the ancient street, his tires bumping softly on the cobbles. He still had not said a word. At the corner his brake lights flared red, and then the car was gone. We stood looking after it.

It might have been a mirage.

“Well,” Joe said briskly. “Third door on the left. Let’s go.”

He took my hand and we picked our way down the crazed and cobbled old street, peering into doorways. They were all solid wood and looked as old as the earth itself, and all were dark, and all were as inevitably closed as if they had been nailed shut. We came to the

88 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

third one, as dead and sealed and dark as the rest. Joe raised his hand to knock and then let it fall.

“Was it third,” he said, “or fourth?”

I looked at him; in the gloom I could not see him clearly, but he did not look at all like Joe, not at all. Not his silvery hair, or his mustache, or the narrow Italian shirt, or the neat hands—none of him was Joe. I looked around me. The street slept in its darkness, dreamed in its vast, thick oldness, seemed poached in silence. The houses were so close together I could scarcely see any sky, not even the skeletal moon.

“I don’t know which one it was,” I said, and the old fear and the afternoon’s tears surged back up into my throat, cold and thick. I pressed my knuckles hard against my mouth. I knew in a moment I was going to begin to sob with terror.

The third door on the left flew open, and yellow light streamed out into the street and over us, and a man’s deep voice, rich with the music of my own South, called, “Come in this house!”

And I ran straight into the outstretched arms of Sam Forrest as a small animal might into its burrow, or a child to home.

T
HAT NIGHT I GOT DRUNK WITH SAM FORREST. IF

IT HAD been any other night, and any other place, it would have been an evening I remembered with radiant shame for the rest of my life. Sam Forrest? The painter whose luminously barbaric early works had so excited me in my art history classes, the late-century icon who was now, as Truman Capote once said of himself, famous for being famous? Drunk, within two hours of meeting him, on his own supremely beautiful Roman rooftop? Drunk and singing “Stars Fell on Alabama”? Oh, Cat.

But at the time it seemed entirely the thing to do, the only thing to do; and it still does. I believe Sam Forrest saved my life that night. I don’t say it lightly. If he had wanted me to sit on a bench and drink fusel oil with him, I would have done it gratefully. It was that or, perhaps, jump over his balcony into the dark below, the fear riding me down like a succubus.

The first thing I noticed about him after he drew me through the old door into the dim courtyard behind it 89

90 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

was that he was much larger than he seemed in his photographs and a great deal more vivid. I knew him from all his photos in the media, but I was not prepared for the sheer redness of him. He was a massive man, heavy through the shoulders and belly, with arms and legs like the trunks of small trees and hands that seemed as large and perfectly modeled as Michelangelo’s sculptures. He wore a wrinkled white silk shirt open nearly to his waist, and chinos like Joe wore at home, only seemingly made for a giant. He was beltless, and the pants rode low on his hips. Somehow I did not think the open shirt was an affectation like the few I had seen so far in Rome; two of its buttons were missing, and no chain of any kind gleamed in the mat of silver-frosted hair on his chest. I thought, rather, that Sam Forrest was an essentially sloppy man and liked him for it. It made me feel at home; it made bolting through his door into his arms a bit less embarrassing. He smelled of thin raw gin and acrid cigarette smoke and ripe, powerful sweat, three smells I had literally never smelled on a man before. No man I knew on the Mountain smoked cigarettes or drank gin, and if they sweated they washed it off almost before it dried. I realized it was all of a piece with the rest of him and I liked it, even as my nose wrinkled metaphorically. I knew Joe would comment on the smell at some time or another, and the knowledge made me slightly and obscurely annoyed.

“I have your
View of Gahanna
; it was the first signed print I ever bought,” I babbled, looking dizzily up at him. “I’m Catherine Compton. God, I mean Gaillard. Did anyone ever tell you you look like Errol Flynn? I mean, if he were bigger….”

My voice trailed off, and I felt heat rising from my chest to my hairline.

HILL TOWNS / 91

“Shit,” I said.

Sam Forrest laughed, a great wind of sound.

“As a matter of fact, somebody once wrote I looked like an Errol Flynn balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade,”

he said. It was as thick a drawl as ever I heard at home, almost an affected sound, except you knew instinctively that Sam Forrest would not bother to affect such a small thing.

Large things, almost certainly, but not small ones.

“I’m Joe Gaillard, the man who accompanied Cat Compton to Rome, to paraphrase another celebrated redhead,” Joe said, holding out his hand. His voice was his “school” one, cool and amused.

“I figured,” Sam said. “Maria said to look for a man who was the spittin’ image of Ashley Wilkes in seersucker. In this neighborhood that could only be you. Minus the seersucker, of course.”

His eyes were small and very bright blue and nearly buried in a network of fine crinkles, as if he laughed a great deal.

His shaggy eyebrows were, like his head and chest hair, the red of rusted steel, with gray under it. He was all over freckles, freckles so dense they ran together across the bridge of his thin hawk’s nose, as if he were wearing a copper mask.

Even his thin lips were bordered with freckles. There were freckles on his hands and arms, too. His hair was thick and grizzled, as if it had once been curly but was now merely frizzed, and he wore it tied back in a ponytail. There was a gold hoop in one ear. What did that mean? Had someone told me it was an ensign of homosexuality or merely a chic thing among the young? He looked like a huge roaring pirate, a modern Barbarossa. There was no way this great red man was gay. Virility boiled off him as thick as the sweat. The blue chips of eyes took in Joe’s shirt with 92 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

good humor and even sympathy, but I heard the stiffness in Joe’s voice as he said, “It would be seersucker if I had my choice. Some fool took my bag at the airport. I had to buy what I could find at the hotel.”

“Well, you know what they say,” Sam Forrest said, turning.

“When in Rome…. Come on up. The party’s just getting going, and Colin and Maria are fairly twitching to see you two. Been twitching ever since they got here, come to that.

My God, I think he’s finally just going to lose it and sling her down on the table and have at it before the night gets much older. Steam’s practically coming off him. What’d you do back in Tennessee, keep a fire hose trained on ’em at all times?”

We followed him through the dimly lit courtyard, where a dry fountain that looked centuries old held a browning palm tree and bicycles leaned in a sweating stone archway.

I felt a startling and absurd impulse to step out of my shoes, saunter barefoot and hipshot, smack chewing gum, laugh deep in my throat. I pulled the front of my sundress higher and smoothed back my hair, which had gone frowzily wild in the humid heat. When had it gotten so hot? I did not remember this kind of heat before.

“Well, back home it just somehow never arose,” Joe said in the darkness behind me. “If you’ll pardon the expression.

The steam was mostly off her. I think I recall considerable speculation as to what precisely Colin saw in her. I mean, she’s not exactly Gina Lollobrigida….”

I cringed. I actually felt my eyes screw shut and my mouth make a silent grimace. What on earth had gotten into Joe?