Hill Towns (13 page)

“Yes, thank you.”

He poured it and I sipped, grateful for the fire that flowed into my stomach. It was a very empty stomach. Neither Joe nor I had eaten since lunch on the Alitalia flight, eons ago.

From across the roof, and as if from very far away, I heard Joe’s lazy school voice saying, “Well, if my memory serves, Carl Alberto Salustri, otherwise known as Trilussa, said:

“‘
Don’t wanna work, I don’t, so what the Hell
?

I’m not cut out for it, and work’s a bore
.

Don’t wanna work, I don’t, need I say more
?

Or can I save my breath and take a spell
?’”

Joe paused and looked around at the group, who looked mildly back at him. He laughed, a small dry sound, and Colin laughed too. But no one else did.

Joe said, “Another of your literati, an expatriate like yourselves, said of it, ‘It’s as good a place as any to wait for the end of the world.’ I think that was in Fellini’s
Roma
.”

Colin laughed again, but no one else did. Joe had found a book at home called
A Literary Companion to Rome
and had memorized countless epigrams written by travelers over the centuries about the city. He tossed them off constantly to Colin, who loved them. I did too. I loved knowing what other travelers had found for themselves here. It was like having, instead of one set of

102 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

senses, many. I had heard the bits that Joe quoted tonight many times before.

“I believe it was Gore Vidal who said it,” Joe added into the silence. No one responded.

My heart squeezed with anguish for my husband, my beautiful, brilliant husband, drowning in his pedantry like a fish in air on this hateful roof. I thought I would go to him and put my hand in his and say, simply, I believe we’ll go home now. And we would do just that. Maybe we would go all the way home, Joe and me together, as we had done before. I would do it as soon as I finished my brandy.

“Did he really say that?” one of the women said, a tall blonde in a short black leather skirt. “It doesn’t sound like Gore. I play tennis with him when he’s in Rome. I’ll ask him.”

I stared at her. Sweat beaded her face and ran down her smooth brown legs. Well, really, leather in July, in this furnace of a city. I thought it would be a great pleasure to slap her sweaty, supercilious face. Joe could handle her, though; one soft drawled sentence would cut her down to proper size. I had heard him do it over and over again. I had never known anyone Joe couldn’t handle with his wit and his school voice.

“Maybe it wasn’t Vidal,” Joe said, not in his school voice, and smiled, and shrugged. The smile looked as though it had been cut into his face with broken glass.

“I don’t think it could have been,” the woman said, and turned back to the group. I banged the glass down on the bar and started toward Joe. At that moment Ada Forrest came as smoothly out of the shadows behind the buffet table as a white shark and took his arm and bore him over to the other side of the roof, where a bank of potted trees with tiny white lights in them made a

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bower, and low wooden chairs stood. She stood beside him, her white head just level with his chin, her arm linked with his, and pointed to something down below and whispered into his ear. I saw him throw his head back and laugh, and she laughed too, a rich sound, like tawny port. They turned away from the stone parapet and I moved toward them, grateful to Ada Forrest, grateful to hear the all-rightness in my husband’s laugh. But they sank into two of the chairs that faced the city and began to talk. I could not hear what they said. They did not look back at me.

I stopped and went back to the bar and picked up my drink and looked around. No one was looking at me. I took my drink over to a carved stone bench that sat against the parapet, in the shadow of a great, gnarled old vine…wisteria, I thought numbly; it must be a real show in the spring. I leaned my forearms on the parapet. Here I was in deep shadow, from the vine and the warm terra-cotta side of a little rooftop structure that housed, perhaps, a sink and refrigerator and toilet, or maybe garden tools and pots.

The parapet overlooked the back of the house. A great black hill rose behind it, and there was a dark medieval-appearing structure crowning it. Between the backs of the old row houses and the beginning of the hill was a vast ditch or ravine, thick with overgrowth on its lips, inky black in its depths. I stared into it. All of a sudden the blackness looked sweet, seductive, cool, endlessly soft. The fear erupted from the deepest core of me and flooded me like a firestorm, filling me up to the ends of my hair shafts, to the ends of my fingers and toes, to the backs of my tight-pressed lips. I had never felt such sucking terror before, not even in the worst of my times off the Mountain. Not ever….

104 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I closed my eyes. I felt the brandy glass fall from my suddenly dead fingers and tinkle on the edge of the parapet, but I never did hear the shards hit the bottom of the black ravine.

Perhaps there was no bottom to it. I felt myself sway; the rooftop rolled greasily beneath my feet.

Someone put a hand on my shoulder. Not Joe, it was not Joe’s touch. I could not seem to open my eyes.

“I would be extremely pleased if you would do me the honor of sitting here on this bench with me and getting drunk,” Sam Forrest said. I opened my eyes then. He bulked up huge beside me, teeth and eyes gleaming in the green gloom of the vine shadow, smelling rankly and wonderfully of sweat and the earth. He had two glasses in one hand and a bottle of bourbon in the other.

“I keep a bottle in reserve for very special occasions,” he said. “Not many people have the innate class to ask for it. I was glad to hear you did. Neat or with water? I don’t think there’s an ice cube in all of Italy tonight, but I’ll look—”

“Neat,” I said. My voice sounded normal; how could it? I thought in simple wonder.

He poured two glasses of the bourbon, a lovely, warm, living amber, and gave me one, and clinked his glass to mine.

My hand shook only slightly.

“Here’s to the start of a beautiful friendship,” he said.

He drank his bourbon down quickly and so did I. Without asking he filled both our glasses and sat down heavily on the carved bench and patted the seat beside him. Warmed from throat to stomach with the whiskey, I sat. Neither of us spoke for a small time; I sipped and looked around the rooftop, my lips buzzing numbly, wondering what on earth I would find to say to Sam Forrest that would keep him by my side…for my mind was blank and white except for a fierce desire not to be

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alone on this roof any longer. It occurred to me that Ada Forrest might have seen me standing here and sent him to rescue me; I could imagine the light, languid voice saying,

“Oh, for God’s sake, Sam, go over there and talk to her.

Nobody else is going to, and it’s obvious she’s not going to mingle. It’s what you get, asking people you don’t know to these damned parties.”

I might have felt embarrassed nearly to death by this image, except by that time the whiskey had done its work and I felt removed from everything around me, as if I stood behind a pane of warm, clean glass. I will say whatever it takes to keep him here, I thought. I will be so cute and clever he’ll want to stay all night. Joe will have to come find me sooner or later, and then we can go home. I wonder why I never thought of drinking before. It’s better than Valium by a long shot.

In the shadow I could feel Sam Forrest looking at me; I could feel the impress of his eyes on the side of my face. I turned to him and smiled. It was, I fancied, a wise smile, a sophisticated one.

“Tell me what you’re working on now,” I said.

He laughed.

“Right now I’m working on a hangover,” he said. “Aside from that, absolutely nothing.
Nulla. Niente
. I haven’t hit a lick at a snake since this time last year. I thought I’d have it in gear by this spring, but I didn’t, and now it’s summer and nobody can work in Rome in the summer for all the tourists and the visitors dropping in to see what you’re working on now.”

Even the whiskey did not dim the flame of mortification that burned in my chest and cheeks. I knew he could read its ensigns there. Of course, he must hate the crowds of people who came to his door here; they must, like Joe and me, seem literally to drop in on him from 106 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

the skies, people drawn by his charisma, his celebrity, his consummate art….

“We should have thought of that,” I said formally. “Of course you can’t work. Listen, Sam, please don’t feel you have to stay here and talk to me. I’m fine; I’m having a lovely time looking at your wonderful view. Joe and I will have to run in a minute; it’s going to take years, practically, to get back to our hotel….”

He reached over and covered my hand with his. Only then did I realize how cold I was, despite the still, thick heat. His hand felt like a fire-warmed mitten.

“I didn’t mean you, Cat,” he said. “No, come on, look at me. I’m sorry. Christ, somebody should sew my mouth shut.

I only growled at you because I haven’t been able to work for a year and it’s nobody’s fault but my own and it scares me and makes me madder than shit. I wouldn’t be working if you and everybody else in Rome left me alone for the rest of my life, and I’m here drinking bourbon with you because there’s nowhere else on this goddamned roof I’d rather be.

You and Joe don’t have to run in a minute because Ada isn’t going to let go of him till it thunders. Don’t you worry about Joe. He’s going to be just fine.”

I looked across the rooftop to the group around the bar.

Everyone fluttered there like luminous moths around the flame that was Ada Forrest in her burning white. On one side of her, Colin and Maria stood arm in arm, laughing.

Maria wore a brightly printed cotton skirt to her ankles and a white blouse pulled low on her brown shoulders; even from here I could see the great shelf of her breasts and the cleavage between them. She looked somehow oceanic, an archetypal figure, fecundity written in every line and curve.

Her hair was wild on her shoulders and fell over one black eye. I thought of

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the Willendorf Venus and felt awe and incredulity at the transformation. Colin, beside her, seemed somehow diminished, even in the low-buttoned Italian shirt and narrow pants. It was as if the heat and the thick night had sucked some of the vitality out of his burnished golden hair and blunted, somehow, his fine, narrow English features.

On the other side of Ada, his arm still linked through hers, Joe laughed and lifted his glass and said something to the crowd around them, and everyone laughed in response.

Glasses clicked and Maria ran over and kissed Joe on the cheek, and Ada gave his arm a little squeeze.

I thought that Joe was, indeed, going to be just fine.

“We may get home by morning, at the rate he’s going,” I said, trying out a little laugh that ended in a hiccup. “Oh, lord. Excuse me.”

“Where are you staying?” Sam said.

“At the Cavalieri Hilton. Up there somewhere. I’d never get there by myself.”

He laughed too.

“Do I perhaps detect the fine hand of my wife in your accommodations? I’m right, aren’t I? Nobody would think to stay there unless Ada put a bug in their ear. I think she’s on the payroll.”

“It’s not a bad hotel,” I said. “It’s really sort of pretty.”

“It’s an awful hotel.” He grinned. “But it is much beloved of rich Americans, and Ada likes to hang around the pool.

She looks fantastic in a bikini, for an old broad, and I think she believes that if we lie around there long enough I’ll get lots of commissions from my rich compatriots, maybe to do a mural in a mall in Kansas City or a heroic statue for a state-of-the-art cat-food plant in Scranton.”

108 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Do you take commissions?” I said, uncomfortable with the talk about Ada.

“Hell, yes,” he said. “Right now I’d take a commission to do the catfood plant in a minute, if I thought it would get me off dead center.”

“Do you work here at home?” I asked.

“No, I’ve got a studio in a house off the Campo Fiori. It’s a long walk, but I like the flowers. I’ll take you to see it while you’re here, if you’d like to.”

“I would,” I said, and drank some more bourbon. Sam Forrest was very easy to talk to. I couldn’t remember why I had thought he would not be. I thought I could talk to him about anything.

“Do you have children?” I said, startling myself. I had not been thinking of children, not consciously.

“Not with Ada,” he said. “But yes, I have a son. Terry. He lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; runs two or three Ford agencies near there. He’s around…let’s see, thirty-two or -three now.

Has a pretty little blond wife and two pretty little blond kids.

I’m a grandfather. Actually.”

“How on earth did he end up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama?”

I said.

“Well, I met his mother when I was in graduate school at

’Bama, and then I stayed on and taught in the art department, and we got married and he was born, and one thing led to another and his mother and I divorced and she stayed on, and…so has he. It’s hard for a certain kind of Southerner to leave home. Like cheerleaders and Ford salesmen.”

I turned my head to look at him. The words were tinged with bitterness, but there was nothing in his barbaric red face but lazy humor and a kind of half-lidded enjoyment.

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“She was a cheerleader?”

“She was. Prettiest girl at ’Bama that year. Like to dazzled me right out of my mind. Stars fell on Alabama, like the song says.”

That amused me. I began to sing, softly, “We lived our little drama, we kissed in a field of white, and stars fell on Alabama…last night.”

He chimed in on the last line, in a good voice, tenor, smoky with bourbon. The group at the bar turned to look at us, smiled, and turned away.

“But you didn’t stay,” I said. “May I have some more bourbon?”

“Here you go; hold your glass steady. No. I didn’t. I started to grow and change and she didn’t, and I just got to where I had painted everything there was to paint around Tuscaloosa, Alabama. So I finally moved on. I think, on the main, she was right relieved.”