Hill Towns (12 page)

Did he think Sam Forrest was somehow maligning his protégé? And since when had he thought of Maria in terms of her sexuality? I knew he was as genuinely fond of her as I was, admiring as I did her

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sweetness and devotion to Colin and her awesome intellect.

Gina Lollobrigida indeed. How long had it been since Joe had seen her in a movie, or since she had even made one?

Sam Forrest said, not looking back, “Maria has obviously suffered a sea change into something rich and strange. I think every guy at the party has a pretty clear idea what young Leslie Howard sees in her. Nice young woman on top of that. She obviously does not take after her second cousin once removed, or whatever Ada is to her. Must be the Tuscan side of the family coming out. Ada’s from deep in the Mezzogiorno, though she claims Florence. Here’s the elevator. Watch your extremities, you two. It’ll shut on you. See those X marks on the wall? One for every Roman pecker this sucker has snatched.”

I snorted with laughter and Joe said something unintelligible under his breath, and the door shut, and Sam thumbed buttons, and we lurched upward. For what seemed endless minutes we stood pressed close together in the tiny, dingy cell, in the pale-urine light from the single ornate fixture and the complex smells of cooking and sour carpeting and Sam Forrest and generations of other Romans who had risen and fallen here. And then we ground to a stop, and the doors squealed open, and we stepped out into the midst of the party on Sam’s rooftop.

I gasped. It was just so beautiful. I have never seen anything so lovely, so exotic, so totally beyond expectation as that candlelit rooftop in Rome on the first night I was there.

I don’t expect I ever will again. My life at home was rich in beauty, and I was no mean mistress of it, not an unsophisticated woman if a narrowly defined one. But I had no context for this, no standard by which

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to measure it. It was an enchantment woven of apt, sweetly fitted, uncontrived skeins: the flowers were loose summer bouquets jammed into vases and pottery jars; the candles were set simply in unmatched sticks, saucers, and hurricanes; the small tables were scarred and weathered to a lovely dark-silver patina by their summers on this roof; the night was the deep, soft, midnight blue of a Roman July; the air smelled sweetly of the strange vines that rioted everywhere, and of all the lives lived around and below us, and of fruit and bread and wine; music spilled like liquid from a little radio sitting on the wide parapet: Vivaldi. People laughed and talked quietly. And all around, like the sea seen from its bottom, Rome, floodlit and glowing and pulsing and humming and burning. Saint Peter’s dome, and lines of cypress and umbrella pines black against the deep blue. Almost directly above us, columns gleamed on the long crest of a hill, uplit, fantastic among the dark pines.

Sam Forrest turned around and smiled at us. He pointed to the hill.

“Janiculum,” he said. “Saint Peter was crucified up there.

Beyond it is the Aventine. It’s one of the big Seven.”

A long shudder ran through the core of me, so profound as to be almost sexual. What must it be, to live every day of your life in the presence of these monuments to events that divided time for the entire world? How could a life lived here dare be trivial? I reached back and took Joe’s hand and pressed it. He pressed back.

A woman detached herself from the crowd and came toward us. At first I thought she was an albino, she was so pale. Her face and hair were almost the same pearled white, and she wore white, too, a pair of wonderfully HILL TOWNS / 95

cut white silk culottes and a silk shirt open to her waist and knotted there. She was not tall, but she was very thin and so she looked somehow long, all of a swallow, a spill of milk. There were big, chunky baroque pearls at her throat and ears, and her mouth was a slash of scarlet in all the gleaming whiteness. My dazzled eyes first registered freakish-ness, a kind of monstrousness, something out of Fellini. But by the time she reached us I saw she was very beautiful. Her features were perfect, if bleached, and her silky white hair, loose and long on her shoulders, was stunning. Her eyes were the blue of snow light, as far from the live-coal blue of Sam Forrest’s as it was possible for the color blue to be. Her hand, when she wrapped my own with it, was long and firm, and so warm as to be almost hot, but dry. How could there be fire in that marble tomb of a body? How did it come about, the union of the snow woman and the fire man?

“I’m Ada Forrest,” she said. “Welcome to Rome and to our party. We’ve been hearing all about you.”

There was no trace of any accent in her light voice.

She leaned over and kissed me, first one cheek and then the other in the Roman fashion. Her face was hot; her breath stirred warm against my cheek. She smelled of something clear and dark and slightly bitter, as foreign to me as she herself.

“My dear Joe,” she said, and moved past me to Joe and kissed him too.

“It is entirely my pleasure to meet you,” Joe said, still in the cool school voice. I knew he was as dazzled by Ada Forrest as I was. The voice Joe uses with women is normally warm and slightly teasing. I think he is as unconscious of it as he is of the air around him.

Ada drew us toward the group on the roof. Before they turned to greet us I looked at them: almost every 96 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

woman there wore something silken and ankle-brushing, like Ada’s pants, or so short as to show leg far up the thigh, and tight, in hectic scarlet or black or white. The men wore elegantly tailored light jackets over open-collared shirts, and pants that were cut narrow or in the deeply pleated European manner. Everybody held stemmed glasses, and many smoked.

Shoes were invariably pointed and burnished. No one wore pastel flowered sundresses and sandals, and no one except Sam Forrest wore chinos. And Joe, of course. I, who had never cared what I wore because I had never doubted it was right, felt a crippling callowness, a painfully inappropriate youngness. I felt, I thought, exactly like what I was: a middle-aged woman in a teenager’s dress. I wanted to shout at the group, I have grown-up clothes too, but some Roman idiot stole them! Still behind me, Joe muttered, “La dolce vita,”

and I knew he felt as ill at ease as I did.

Then Maria burst out of the group and ran and threw her arms around us, and Colin was there, pounding indiscriminately on our backs and hugging us over Maria’s small body, and the shell of discomfort broke, and warmth and gaiety flowed over us, and we moved into the body of the party.

I still do not have a sense of everyone we met that night.

I never saw most of them again. They were, I surmised, Sam and Ada Forrest’s closest friends, the ones you would invite to celebrate the rituals of life with you. I knew the Forrests had never met Maria and of course not Colin, but I assumed the Italian sense of family ran deep, and Ada Forrest kept up with her kin in American and had regular news of her cousin’s child, the bright one, the one who was marrying the extraordinary young Southerner. It was, I thought, a lovely gesture to invite

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them to come to Rome and start their life together there—and to pay for most of the trip. I thought perhaps Ada Facaros missed her cousin, Maria’s mother, and wanted to renew the old ties of blood and kinship. I was touched that so famous an international couple as she and Sam would want to do something as simple and graceful as introduce their young kinswoman to their friends and ask them to share the celebration of her new life’s beginning. It was a sweet, somehow comforting thing to do. We did it at home, on the Mountain.

But the people Joe and I met that night were not like the people back home on the Mountain. They were not, with a few exceptions, like any people I had ever met.

Before I left home I had envisioned this party and seen in my mind a sort of idealized gathering of international artists, the European art community at its best. I anticipated intense talk of works in progress, names I knew from the pages of art magazines, a smattering of austere Italian academics.

But, except for Ada Forrest and one dark, languid young second wife of a documentary film producer, none were Italian. We met Englishmen and one or two Orientals and one Finn, towheaded and long-faced and very funny. And we met many Americans. Of them, almost all were Southerners. That should have put me at ease, as Sam Forrest’s accent had when he first spoke, but somehow it did not. They were not of my South; none came out of our academic world.

There were two or three other artists in various media, considerably more who worked “in film,” seven or eight who did things in television, a few who said they were “in business” and smiled as if I should know what business that might be, a tall man from Mississippi who said he played tennis, journalists, and a scattering of writers whose 98 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

names and works I did not know. I could tell from Joe’s face, intensely interested and composed, that he did not either. I felt shame and a deep disorientation for both of us. It was our business to know writers.

It seemed to me that the people we met who identified themselves with a profession were mostly men. The women either had no outside work or did not speak of it. Some were introduced as so-and-so’s wife, but many others were introduced only by their names. They were all ages, from Maria’s to perhaps a decade older than Joe and Sam Forrest, whom I knew to be in his early fifties. Not all were beautiful or even pretty, by any standard I knew, but almost all of them were stylish and virtually all were arresting. It was more than dress or bearing. It lay, somehow, in their manner. By no means did all the women on Sam and Ada Forrest’s rooftop seem especially happy or animated, but all seemed secure in the knowledge that they belonged, in every atom of their beings, exactly where they were.

The essential gulf between them and me seemed written in neon in the humid air. Rightness seemed to seep out of their very pores, just as otherness did mine. I wondered, feeling with despair the fear start to warm and quicken again, if we on the Mountain ever seemed this way to visitors and newcomers. If we did, we should be ashamed of ourselves.

This was as alien and discomforting a feeling as I had ever had. It seemed far deeper, more fundamental than being a stranger at a party. It was plain that few people knew or sensed it, and in my escalating anxiety and self-consciousness I did not believe that any would have cared if they had. Even Maria and Colin, once they had hugged us and introduced us around the group, drifted off, two young people utterly strange to me, twined around each other as HILL TOWNS / 99

though no indulgent eyes followed them. They kissed a great deal, and once I saw Colin lift Maria’s damp hair aside to whisper in her ear and put his tongue into it. I turned almost desperately to Joe.

“Let’s get a drink,” I said, and my voice sounded high and artificial in my own ears.

The bar was set up in a corner of the rooftop garden that overlooked the dark street below. Sam Forrest steered us there and asked us what we would like, but before we could answer the young man who said he played tennis snatched his arm and drew him into a group at the end of the white-clothed table, and a babble of talk and laughter started up.

Sam gave us a “be right back” wave of his hand and melted into the group. I looked around brightly. No one was looking at us. I gave Joe a brilliant smile that I could feel in my cheek muscles.

“What can I get you?” the young bartender, who looked like someone’s son or nephew, said.

“Bourbon and water,” I said, and he looked embarrassed.

“I don’t think we’ve got any,” he said. “There’s some scotch, though. And some brandy.”

“Make it brandy,” I said. “Over ice.”

“And you, sir?”

“Campari and soda,” Joe said.

I simply stared at him. Joe always drinks bourbon. Always.

“When in Rome,” he said, looking with a great show of interest around the rooftop. His arm was loosely around my shoulder, and I could feel the sweat in the palm of his hand.

I thought it sprang from more than the thick, hot night air.

Nothing about Joe was different from what it usually was; he was as tall and stooped-slender and loose-jointed as ever, and his face, in the

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soft, wavering light from the hurricane lamps on the bar, was still narrow and deeply carved and handsome. But I could feel the unease in him. It was as if, underneath the surface of a placid long-known pool, an unaccountable maelstrom had suddenly started up. I had literally never felt deep uncertainty in Joe before, not even during my therapy; I felt as though a tree or a boulder had suddenly revealed its dense, swarming atoms to the naked eye. Tiny, bright spears of terror spurted up my wrists, and my face tingled numbly.

I swallowed my brandy in a gulp and handed the glass back for a refill.

“Christ, Cat,” Joe said under his voice. “Somehow this doesn’t seem the perfect place to get drunk.”

I drank down the second brandy, and the fear receded a little.

“Just don’t leave me,” I whispered to Joe, who was still sipping his Campari and soda and scanning the rooftop. “I know we’re going to have to go mingle, but please don’t leave me.”

“I won’t,” he said, and smiled, and more of the strangeness shrank back. “But go easy on the brandy. I don’t want to have to fight Sam Forrest or that tennis player for your honor.”

“Since when did you ever have to?” I said, stung.

“Just joking, Cat. Lighten up. I’m not going to leave you.”

But he did. In a few minutes the main body of the party, which was clustered around the buffet table at the other end of the roof garden, parted, and Colin Gerard called out of it, “Hey, Joe! Come tell these ignoramuses what Trastevere’s greatest poet said about the Trasteverinos!”

Joe smiled, and let his arm drop from around my HILL TOWNS / 101

shoulders, and walked away from me toward the group. I took a step after him and then stopped. I could not seem to make my feet move.

“Would you like another brandy, ma’am?” the young bartender said.