Hill Towns (20 page)

After quite a long time, he said, “I don’t know. I really don’t. But I do know I meant no innuendo. I hope you’ll believe that.”

And somehow I did.

We were almost to the Campo Fiori, with the light of midafternoon beginning to slant more gently outside the windows of the taxi, before I remembered that I had not once, in all that long morning on the streets of Rome, been afraid.

Sam’s studio was the top floor of a narrow, flaking russet house in the Via del Pellegrino, just off the Campo HILL TOWNS / 161

Fiori. The produce and market stalls were empty in the Campo as the taxi coasted through it, and the litter and garbage were astonishing; Sam said it was a pity we didn’t catch it before one-thirty or so, when it was full of color and life. His own winding street seemed to sleep, too. We made our way up a steep, twisting staircase whose iron railing cascaded with blooming creeper and stopped on a small landing crowded with terracotta pots full of flowers. An enormous ginger cat slept in the shade of the largest one. It lifted its scarred thug’s head at our footfall, stretched hugely, and reassembled itself back into sleep.

“Is that your cat?” I said. “He looks just like you.”

“I guess he is,” Sam said. “I never formally acquired him, but so far I haven’t evicted him, either. He likes the three squares and the soft bed I provide him, but he hates my work.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Brutta,” he said. “‘Ugly.’ For some reason the little old lady downstairs adores him and feeds him lavishly when I’m not here. She calls him ‘
bel pezzo d’uomo
.’ Roughly translated, I think it means hunk. There’s no accounting for tastes.”

The door opened and Ada Forrest stood there, silvery and translucent, in wide black gauze palazzo pants and a loose gauze top. Her hair was tied off her neck with a black scarf, and the only color about her was the slash of crimson on her mobile mouth and a red-striped-ticking cook’s apron.

She kissed me on both cheeks, a light swift peck, and touched Sam on his bare chest.

“Perfect timing,” she said. “Joe and Colin just got through lugging the last hamper up the stairs. Did you have a good morning? I hope you did; you nearly killed Joe.”

162 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I looked past her into the studio, searching for my husband. It was an enormous room, painted white and flooded with light from a wall of casement windows overlooking an inner courtyard and twin skylights. The floor was so splotched and splattered with paint that it seemed a purposeful stipple. Shelves on the three other walls held racks of canvases and stacked supplies, and an alcove half sheltered by a magnificent Chinese screen contained a deep metal sink and a small stove and, I thought, perhaps a toilet. A small, rusted compact refrigerator sat on the floor under the sink, and a butcher-block table crisscrossed with many years of knife hatchings held an array of covered dishes and crockery.

There were no paintings on the walls, and none in evidence anywhere. An easel stood under one of the windows, but it held nothing. On the deep window ledge a portable phonograph poured out Palestrina, and a big raffia tray held glasses and several bottles of wine. Down at the far end of the studio was a big potbellied iron stove with rump-sprung chairs and a studio couch ranged around it, and there Joe sat, his long legs extended out before him, feet propped on a big leather hassock, drinking wine. He was saying something to Yolanda Whitney, who sat across from him drinking what looked like mineral water with a slice of lime, and she was laughing.

Colin and Maria lay tangled on the couch, sipping wine and picking at each other with languid fingers. Everyone and everything in the room looked airy, light, lazy, enormously inviting.

“So this is what goes on behind all those shuttered windows from noon to four,” I said. “Joe looks as though he’s made a miraculous recovery.”

“We’ve been rubbing his fevered brow”—Maria giggled—“and dropping grapes in his mouth.” She glowed HILL TOWNS / 163

in a red sundress. I had never seen her wear red at home on the Mountain.

“Remarkable restorative powers, grapes,” Joe said, smiling at me over his shoulder. He wore a soft new sage-green shirt with the little Lauren polo insignia on it and brilliant white running shoes with the Nike swoosh. His golden flush was back, and his hair had damp comb tracks in it, and he looked carved of golden ice, cool and remote. Somehow, for the first time, he seemed to fit into Rome, or at least in this austere Roman room of light and space. Across from him, Yolanda wore starched blue-and-white striped chambray and sneakers and had pulled her hair into a ponytail and tied it with blue grosgrain. Her face seemed as clean-scrubbed as the little nun’s in the church we had just left, except for a touch of pink lipstick, and there were amber horn-rimmed glasses on her short, snub nose. She looked about eighteen, and as crisply clean as Joe, and just as unmistakably American. Or rather, I thought a trifle uncharitably, Irish. I could see Ada Forrest had been right when she said Yolanda was a pretty thing when she first came to Rome. That’s what she looked now: an only slightly worn pretty thing.

She got up and came to me and said, in a low, chastened voice, “I want to apologize to you again. I can’t drink, and I know it, and I’m not going to, anymore, and that’s that. If you’ll forgive that ghastly business last night, I promise I’ll leave your nice husband alone. I’d like to have you both for friends.”

What could one say to that? I said what anyone would—“Please don’t think any more about it; friends we shall be”—thinking that perhaps without the liquor she’d make an attractive acquaintance after all, if not a friend. What did I have to lose? We were leaving Rome 164 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

that night. It was as unlikely that the celebrated Yolanda Whitney would seek us out back in the States as it was that Sam Forrest would, when our time together was over. It seemed likely, rather, that she, like Sam, had a charismatic force of personality that made friends of everyone who came within her orbit. It was, I thought, part of the definition of celebrity.

“So where did you go when you left me?” Joe said, pouring out wine for me.

I hesitated.

“Santa Maria della Vittoria,” Sam said, tossing his hat onto a chair. He slicked his thick bush of wiry red-gray hair off his face with both big hands. In the white light of his lair, he looked more than ever like a ruddy falcon, a red raptor poised against white rock. His eyes were bright blue in the wash of light.

“Ah,” Yolanda said, looking obliquely up at him. “Saint Teresa.”

“Yep.”

Ada looked at Sam and then at me, cocking her white head to one side in interest.

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I see. A good choice. Sam has good instincts. Well, people, let’s eat this fine lunch I lugged over here through that damned furnace outside. And then I have a little surprise for Colin and Maria.”

Despite the heat, we ate enormously. Sweet Roman melons, the sort we simply don’t have in America; I still do not know what they are called. Tiny, cold grilled chickens with olive oil and rosemary and lemon juice and cracked pepper.

Wonderful blood-red tomatoes on fresh arugula, topped with creamy buffalo mozzarella and deep blue-green basil leaves.

Cold tortellini with shaved parmigiana. Crusty, chewy bread and more oil.

HILL TOWNS / 165

Much wine. I never had another meal in Italy that was as simply and wholly satisfying.

When we had finished, Ada pulled a clean cloth off a platter and held it out for our inspection. We gasped, and then, as one, began to laugh. Two giant yellow onions and a thick, red, rolled column of prosciutto lay on the white platter, forming as perfect a set of testicles and a penis as I had ever thought to see.

“Signora Silvestri from downstairs brought it up when she heard I was hosting newlyweds here.” Ada grinned. “She says it’s an old custom from her home village, near Siri, in Calabria. The bride and groom must each have a bite of everything on the platter, and then…I forget what then. But you get the idea.”

“If you don’t you’re dead from the neck down,” Colin said.

“What a set. Do you feel shortchanged, ’Ria?”

“Not so far,” she said, reaching for his crotch as he twisted away, laughing. “But then I haven’t tasted Signora Silvestri’s yet.”

Red flooded my face and neck and I turned away, angry with myself and yet unwilling to hear any more such talk from Colin or Maria. What was the matter with me? The platter
was
funny, earthily, sweetly funny. It had been offered in good spirits and good faith. I did not think I was a prude.

Maybe, after the orgasmic Saint Teresa, it was just too much.

Too much sensuality on the one hand, too much God on the other. I was suddenly very tired.

Ada and Yolanda began gathering up the lunch things, and Joe and Colin made reluctant noises about leaving.

“I think,” Sam Forrest said lazily into the room at large,

“that I would like to paint Cat, and I’m asking your formal permission to do it, Joe. If you’ll let her stay 166 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and sit for a little while this afternoon, I promise I’ll have her back in time for dinner. If she doesn’t mind, of course.”

“Oh, Cat, how wonderful, a Sam Forrest portrait of you!”

Maria cried.

“Darling, that’s a splendid idea,” Ada Forrest said. “She’s just right, isn’t she? I thought so when I first saw her. Do say you will, Cat!”

“Well, of course,” Yolanda said. “Cat, you’re truly blessed among women. He’s only done two or three other portraits—that I know of, of course.”

Hers, I remembered, had been one of them.

I looked at Joe. He looked at me and then away.

“I don’t see how you can do a portrait in one afternoon,”

he said, “but it’s up to Cat. It would be quite an honor, of course.”

I knew he hated the idea.

“I don’t think—” I began, but Ada cut me off.

“You really must,” she said. “Yolanda’s right, he’s done only a very, very few, and they’re enormously valuable, if I do say so. The others are in museums, but I can send you photos of them when you get back home. Trust me, they’re lovely, not like anything else he does. Oh, Cat, do! It won’t take long; he’ll do a few sketches and take some Polaroids for color and lighting and that will be it. I’ll take the rest of us somewhere fun while you sit, shall I, and then we’ll all have dinner at that marvelous rooftop restaurant at the Cavalieri, our treat. It has the best view in Rome. And we’ll drop you at the station by ten. You’ll have time to spare.”

I looked at Sam.

“I wish you would,” he said quietly. “It would please me no end.”

I realized that in the short time I had known him and HILL TOWNS / 167

been in his company, I had completely forgotten that he was one of the foremost artists of his time. This was Sam Forrest who was asking, almost pleading, to paint me.

“Of course I will,” I said. “I’d be enormously honored.”

When the others had left, chattering about where they would spend the rest of the afternoon—except Joe, who said little but “Be good and look pretty”—Sam settled me in a chair in front of the window wall and sat on a stool with a pad of paper and a fistful of oil pastels and began a series of swift sketches. At first I felt stiff and self-conscious, but he kept up a stream of his drawled nonsense, telling scurrilous stories about the various people he had met in Rome, and soon I was laughing and at ease. He made sketch after sketch and tore them off and tossed them into a pile and took several Polaroids from all angles, none that he offered to let me see. And he talked, and I laughed.

“There’s none of your work here, and I didn’t see any in your apartment,” I said. “Why is that?”

“Most of it’s in collections or museums or being shown somewhere. I don’t know. It doesn’t seem important to me to keep it around. When a painting is done, it’s over for me.

The point of it is the doing, I guess. And like I said, I haven’t done anything for…a long time.”

He told me another story, this one about the Catholic Church, so vitriolically funny that, even though I laughed, I said, “You really do hate the church, don’t you?”

“I really do,” he said.

“Why? If I may ask?”

“You may. I’m not sure I can answer, but you may ask.

Well…let’s see. I think it’s because it asks so impossibly much of its servants. Always, always the one 168 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

thing that cannot be parted with, that’s what the church wants.”

“You mean, like giving up your life for it, dying for it?”

“No. I mean giving up what you literally cannot exist without.”

He stopped sketching and looked at me.

“Would you give up your sight for your child, Cat?” he asked.

I opened my mouth to say that of course I would, but then I closed it. I looked away from him.

“I know I’m supposed to say yes, I would give up my sight for hers,” I said in a small, thin voice. “And I
have
said that, always. But I’ve always known, deep down, that I wouldn’t.

I would give my life for her in a second, but I could not give her my sight. Not that. Not a life without sight. And I’ve always been so ashamed. I’ve been terribly ashamed.”

I felt tears sting my nose and eyes and threw my head back angrily and closed my eyes against them.

“There,” Sam said, scribbling furiously. “Hold that. Just that. OK. Now. Listen, Cat. I cannot even imagine what a life without sight would be for you. The worst, worst thing ever, never being able to see what was coming at you, feeling like you do. Worse than death, of course. And that’s what the church would ask of you. Don’t cry, sweetie. Ah, shit, I’m sorry.”

I scrubbed my eyes fiercely, wondering why it was impossible to lie to him. Perhaps because he understood. He knew, and no one else ever had, no one but Joe. How to lie to a man like that?

“I couldn’t give up mine either,” he said. “And of course, that’s what the church would ask of me. Fortunately, my child doesn’t need my sight—”

HILL TOWNS / 169

“What does he need from you? What doesn’t he have that you could give him?”

“Me,” he said.