Hill Towns (25 page)

“All right,” I said, standing in the doorway of our darkened bedroom looking at him. He lay with his back to me. He was naked to the waist, and the darker-gold whorls at the crown of his head stirred in the wind from the sluggish ceiling fan. His smooth torso was misted over with sweat. I felt hot too, in my black sleeveless silk. After the two dresses that had vanished with Joe’s luggage, it was the most formal thing I had brought, and some-how I felt like dressing up a little tonight. But now it seemed too much. My pantyhose were already damp. I

204 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

turned away to go out the door. I would have a drink in the lobby while I waited for Yolanda.

“Cat?”

“Yes?”

“How’d the painting go this afternoon? I almost forgot.”

His voice was thick with sleep.

“Fine,” I said, and shut the door.

Yolanda came down into the little garden, where I was sipping white wine, at a quarter to seven. She looked crisp and young, in yellow linen and citrine earrings that almost brushed her tanned shoulders, and she smelled wonderfully of something both flowery and bitter at the same time, like Venice itself. She kissed me on both cheeks and I returned the gesture, and all of a sudden we grinned at each other like school friends, or cousins. Two pretty, if not so young, women, all dressed up and alone in Venice, with somewhere wonderful to go. Not for the first time I thought it might have been fun to grow up in a large family, to have a sister.

“Where’s Joe?” she said, taking a bite of one of the little sandwiches I’d ordered and then not wanted.

“Sleeping off the Titians and the Tintorettos and whatever Ada fed him at some marvelous, authentic little workingman’s bar that surpasses all the wonders of the Accademia,” I said.

I probably sounded spiteful and jealous, and then I knew somehow she would not think so or, if she did, would understand. I had a clear and powerful thought:
She is on my side
.

But I did not know in what. I laughed aloud, and she did too.

“Well, she takes a bit of sleeping off, does Ada. But a perfect hostess. You must admit that. The veritable Perle Mesta of Venice.”

We walked out into the swirl of pedestrian traffic in HILL TOWNS / 205

the campo and were immediately swallowed up in the street life of evening Venice. On every street corner, from every doorway, men young and old called after us, made as if to follow us, kissed their fingertips and made gestures I was just as glad I did not understand, trotted along behind us baying and snorting and howling. I don’t know why I had not noticed this sort of attention earlier; I had been warned, back on the Mountain, that being blond and fair I would attract a great deal of amorous adulation in Italy. But it had not really happened before tonight. Of course, I had mostly been in groups, and moreover in groups that included Joe and Colin and Sam Forrest. I did not think many Italian men would be eager to contend with a great, shambling red pirate with a ponytail.

At first it was funny, and Yolanda took my arm and told me to ignore and enjoy it, and we laughed and shook our heads and the would-be suitors retreated, holding hands to mock-stricken breasts. But one group of three dark, older, unsmiling men did not seem so theatrically amusing and persisted in following closely behind us. We were almost to Harry’s when I thought I felt a hand brush my buttocks, and I reddened and quickened my step, and then Yolanda whirled and spat something furiously at the group and I knew she had been fondled too.

One of the men said something equally low and fast back at her, and she planted her small high-heeled pumps apart and put her hands on her hips and shouted, “
Va a farti
frattere, stronzo! Va fan culo! Mis lasci in pace! Chiamo la
polizia
!”

When the men did not retreat, she smiled a slow sly smile and put her arm around me and squeezed. Then she kissed me on the mouth. Loudly.

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The men wheeled abruptly and slunk away, muttering in disgust.

“What was all that about?” I said, laughing a little, but with my heart pounding faster than I liked. I wanted to wipe my mouth with the back of my hand but did not.

“Well, one of them grabbed my ass, and I told him to keep his filthy hands to himself, and he intimated that we were prostitutes and could expect no better, and I told him to go fuck himself and leave us alone or I would call the police.

And then I indicated that we were lesbians. That always works when nothing else does. It’s funny; you’d think there was nothing else does. It’s funny; you’d think there was nothing too depraved for Venice, but the idea of lesbians absolutely revolts Italian men. A direct disparagement of their manhood, I think. They all suffer from
gallismo
. Roosterism.”

I laughed so hard I bent at the waist, holding my arms across my stomach. She began to laugh too. We were still standing there, just outside Harry’s famous bar, laughing helplessly and holding on to each other, when Sam and Ada and Maria found us.

“It must be good,” Ada Forrest said, smiling. She wore black, as I did, but managed, I thought, to look more the
contessa
than the
prostituta
.

Sam simply shoved his hands into his blazer pockets, rocked back and forth in the filthy, sockless running shoes that seemed to be his only footwear, and grinned affection-ately at us. Even Maria smiled; I say even, because otherwise she was the picture of misery. Her face was pale and her nose and eyes were red and swollen as if she had been crying.

“Yolie has just saved us from a fate worse than death,” I gasped, and told them about the exchange. By the time I reached the bit about the lesbians, Maria was laughing along with the rest of us. When the others went HILL TOWNS / 207

ahead into Harry’s, I hung back and put my arm around her.

“What is it, sweetie?” I said. “Colin feeling bad? You feeling just a little bit housebound?”

“We had an awful fight,” she said in a low, rapid voice. “I said I’d like to go out with you all just this once, just to see Harry’s, because I’ve heard so much about it, Hemingway and all, and I’d come home real early and bring him back something wonderful, and stay in with him the entire rest of the time we’re here, and he blew up at me. He said by all means to go; he’d see if he could tap out a message to room service with his cane, and I said not to be silly, I’d get something for him before I left, and he said it had been his impression that I’d said something recently about in sickness and in health, and I said I just wanted to go to Harry’s Bar for one damn hour and what was the matter with him, and he said maybe his mother had been right all along! Oh, Cat…that hurt! That really hurt!”

She began to cry again, and I found a tissue and wiped her face and gave her my compact and lipstick.

“Dearest love, it’s just a fight. Your first; now you don’t have to worry about having it later. It’s like getting the first scratch on a new car. He’s angry because he can’t move around and feels foolish because he knows he brought it on himself, and it probably still hurts, and he’s bored, and he wants to see Venice too. And it’s hot. And he knows he’s keeping you from seeing everything you wanted to see on your honeymoon, and that makes him even madder. He loves you and he thinks he’s spoiled things for you and that makes him mean.”

“You’d think it would make him just the opposite. He’s never been…mean before. But that thing about his mother—”

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“He’s lost control. It’s different for men than for us when that happens, I think,” I said. I saw all at once that this was true. Wasn’t it what Corinne had been saying? I needed to think about this….

“You think so really?”

“I know so really,” I said, giving her a little hug.

When we went upstairs to join the others at the big table by the window overlooking the Grand Canal, she was smiling again.

Sam Forrest’s lips shaped the word
Thanks
to me, silently.

I smiled and made the small OK circle with thumb and forefinger. Around us, early diners stopped their talking and sipping and stared, and the dark-suited, distinguished man who had been talking with Sam stood erect and frowned ever so slightly.

Sam leaned toward me and said, in a low voice, “Cat, obviously no one else is going to tell you, so I will. A joke’s a joke, but enough is enough. In Italy, when you do that, you’re calling someone an asshole. It’s what the sign means: asshole. If you really want to be effective, you follow it by hissing, ‘
Stronzo
!” You have, my darling girl, called half of Italy an asshole by now, and I for one do not want to have to fight Signor Cipriani or some other equally distinguished personage for you.”

The blood actually drained from my face, and I thought for a moment I might faint. Joe. Joe knew. Why had Joe not told me? Why had he simply laughed…and not told me?

“I truly didn’t know,” I whispered, tears starting in my eyes.

“Of course you didn’t,” Ada Forrest said, and patted my arm. “Joe should have told you by now.”

“Wonder why he wouldn’t,” Sam said equably.

“Wonder why who wouldn’t what?”

HILL TOWNS / 209

Joe came up to the table, looking rested and scrubbed and handsome in his newly cleaned blazer and chinos and the soft green shirt he’d bought in Rome.

“We were just wondering why you didn’t want to tell me what it meant when I made that adorable little circle sign,”

I said. “The one that means asshole.”

He laughed.

“I know, I should have. But you were so cute, Cat; you’re such a…a lady, I guess, and there you were, the madonna of the Mountain, calling all those people—well. I’m sorry.

Christ. You didn’t do it again, did you?”

“Only to Sam,” I said.

“Oh, well.” Joe grinned at Sam conspiratorially. Sam was studying the wine list. He did not look up.

“Let me recommend the risotto
primavera
,” Ada Forrest said. “It is absolutely superb.”

It was. The entire dinner was wonderful. You think of Harry’s, perhaps, as a tourist place, but the upstairs dining room served some of the best food we had in Italy, and the service was silken and impeccable. The other diners were quiet and attractive, and somewhere between the risotto and the veal chop I forgave Joe and slid into the light, lovely fabric of the night. The only jarring note was a small child, a little English boy of perhaps seven, with a perfectly tailored, miniature Eton jacket and a chipmunk overbite, who kept playing to his fair, cool mother and eyeing his even fairer, chillier father with the metallic eye of a budding Oedipus.

His voice was that shrill, upper-class British tremolo that grates abominably and can pierce concrete and steel, and he kept piping things like, “Doddy is being naughty tonight, isn’t he, Mummy? Doddy isn’t at all nice to us.” And, “It’s too bad Doddy is too big to sit in Mummy’s lap because I’ll bet he wants to, but only I can do that,”

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and he climbed into his mother’s ample lap, resting his cheek against her considerable sunburnt cleavage. His father, face frozen into neutrality, did not lift his eyes from his
fritto
misto
, and his mother only brushed the thick hair off the boy’s avid face and said in nearly the same little trill, “Sit down and be a little man, Derek, darling, do. Doddy isn’t going to want to take us anywhere nice again if you can’t behave.”

“Doddy would love to take the little bastard out beyond Torcello somewhere and drown him,” Sam said under his breath. “Mummy probably gets more from little Derek darling than she does from Doddy. On the whole, my sympathies are in Doddy’s camp entirely. Christ, the English upper class and their little tots. See what you missed, Yolie? That could be you, pushing some horny little bugger off you while your old man read up on terns.”

Yolanda lifted her head and looked squarely at Sam.

“How fortunate for me that I missed it all,” she said. I looked at her; what was in her voice? Did anyone else hear it? Did I imagine it? Sam dropped his eyes, and everyone else went on eating.

You are really halfway out of your mind tonight, I said to myself. This place will have you singing with the mermaids if you don’t get a grip on yourself.

It was quite late when we finished dinner, and on the way back toward the Campo La Fenice Sam stopped at a flower kiosk and bought bouquets for me, Ada, Yolanda, and Maria.

Small nosegays, really, picked that morning and past their prime. But they were pretty, and it felt a very fine thing, to walk slowly through the nighttime alleyways of Venice carrying flowers.

At the apex of one of the high-arched little bridges over a tiny canal, back in the dark quiet maze of tiny HILL TOWNS / 211

calles
that bordered the campos of San Fantin and La Fenice, we stopped and leaned on the railing and looked down.

Around us, on other streets, we could hear conversation and foot traffic and see lights, but this particularly tiny bridge and the canal beneath it were very quiet. One or two lone lights shone, high up in old windows, but they gave little il-lumination, only pinpricks in the thick velvet darkness. Below us the water was green and black, swirling. We could hear it slapping at stones of doorways. It was like being in a dream, vivid and palpable, but without ambient sound. Mist hung in the curves and bends of the canal and crawled up doorways. None of us spoke.

“Look,” Yolie whispered, and around a curve in the canal came a large silent gondola, and behind it another. We could hear the gondoliers singing softly then, sounding bored and ready to go home: “O Sole Mio.” An American Italian song, I thought, Neapolitan, a tourist song. It did not belong in this dark oriental fairy tale.

There were three couples in each gondola. All women. All late-middle-aged stout women with “done” American hair and print drip-dry traveling dresses. They sat quietly, hands folded, looking half rapt and half scared. Widows, I thought.

Widows from some nice service club or Sunday school class in the Midwest, come to Venice in safe numbers, lost in black-green water, being sung to by bored men who would laugh at them when they decanted them, finally, at their budget hotel near the train station.