Hill Towns (29 page)

I stood beside the tiny light in the closed shop and leaned against the stone wall. I breathed in and out, in and out, as Corinne had taught me, and presently I looked again at the map. I could see so clearly the route one must take to the Fondaco di Tedeschi: so simple. But I had missed it somehow, and now I did not know how to get back on one of the map’s penciled streets because I did not know where I was.

I heard footsteps, several of them, brisk and firm and confident; they seemed just one
calle
over. There must be a bridge down this alley; there was always a bridge. If 238 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I crossed it I would find the walkers, and I would walk with them, or just behind them, as if I was going where they were.

It must be to some place of lights and people. The steps were so sure….

I hurried down the alley and found the bridge and crossed it and ran straight into them—four men who did not look like husbands and fathers going home to dinner or to a bar or a video arcade. Not at all. They stopped, a quartet of darkness, across the street, barring my way.

“
Scusi
,” I said, and my voice trembled. “Where is the…
dove
il
…I need to find the post office….”

They smiled. They smiled and looked at one another, and then at me, and began to make that simpleminded crooning I had thought was so funny when I first heard it with Yolanda. The kissing of fingertips, the motions in the air with the hands, and the guttural words that I did not understand but knew in my cold blood. And they began to walk toward me, very slowly.

“I want you to tell me where the post office is this instant,”

I said, in a high, silly voice. “If you don’t I will call the police.”

Call the police because four men will not tell you where the post office is?

I had the absurd notion that I would simply sit down on the cobbles and laugh like a madwoman, but then I said,

“Oh, never mind, I’ll find it myself,” and turned, and walked very fast back down the way I had come, to the steps that led up the little bridge. Behind me I could hear them coming fast, almost running.

I began to run. I ran over the bridge and down the other side, and down a winding
calle
beside still another canal, and ahead, sensed space, an opening. I ran for it as hard as I could, without pretense and without hope. I knew I could not outrun them.

HILL TOWNS / 239

I reached the opening: another dark campo, this time with a small plain church in it, and a covered wellhead, and dark houses all around, but nothing else. Dead end. No way out.

I turned to the men behind me.

“
Va a farti frattere, stronzi
!” I screamed. “
Va fan culo
!” I went at them with my fingers curved into claws, my eyes screwed shut, and my mouth wide open. I must have seemed a madwoman. Far up, in two or three of the houses, pale lights bloomed. The men stopped, backed up, muttered among themselves, turned around, and sauntered out of the campo, laughing. They did not look back. I went over and sat down on the steps of the little church. Soon the lights in the houses went off again.

I sat there for what seemed a very long time. I did not look about me or consult my map. I only sat there. I had no idea what time it was. Surely, at Do Spade, they had missed me by now. Someone would be looking for me; someone would go back to the Fenice, and Alvise would tell them about the map, and they would begin to retrace it. Perhaps I had only to sit here and they would come for me. When I saw it in my mind, it was Sam Forrest I saw. I saw him come around the corner of the alleyway into the campo, and I heard him say, “For God’s sake, Cat, where have you been?”

There was another sound. A thin, wavering, strangling sort of sound, a kind of tiny gagging.

I looked toward it, in the shadow of a big terracotta pot with a dead plant of some sort in it, by the door of one of the dark houses. It was a cat. A cat crouched low, its head hanging almost to the cobbles: wheezing, struggling for breath, very sick. The cat was very sick; I knew it was dying.

I thought, simply, This is more than anyone should have to bear, and got up to go away from

240 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

there, to leave the campo, to begin my hopeless journey through the streets again.

And saw the others.

All around the dying cat, other cats were ranged, utterly silent and still, in a circle. Dark, they seemed, and large, and sharply made, sharply carved in the thin light from the foggy sky. They sat or crouched, and they waited. The terrible choking went on, faltered, stopped. Began again. I ran. I thought that if I was still in that campo when the sound finally died, what came after would send me beyond reason forever.

I ran for a long time, and when I had to stop, my sides knife-stitched and my throat aching with spent breath, black motes dancing in front of my eyes, I was at a street corner where a few people were gathered. I heard still others, not far away. I looked and then began to run, a sob of joy in my throat. Just ahead of me, leaning against a gray wall, his head bent down to the person in front of him, was Joe. I could only see his back, a slender, slouching back in his blazer, and the gilt of his hair, but it was Joe; it was there in the way he held his head, the way he put his hands out to the person with him….

I stumbled and nearly fell and caught myself against his shoulder.

“Oh, God, I’m so glad to see you!” I cried, and he turned around.

Lipstick, running crazily up from the long mouth and under the large nose, thick green eye shadow on the drooping eyes, so sad, so sad…rouge like plague spots, like pestilence, on coarse-pored cheeks. We stared at each other.

I began to cry and ran past him and around a corner—and was in the elegantly lit, sweetly shadowed HILL TOWNS / 241

Campo La Fenice. There were the dear green vines on the little pillars of my hotel, and there the crowds of well-dressed, strolling people, and there the Teatro Bar, with people like me, people I know, eating and drinking and laughing. And in the midst of them, Sam Forrest, at a table on the fringe of the space, staring straight across the campo at me. Beside him sat Yolanda Whitney. They had been drinking beer, and when they saw me they got up hastily and trotted across the campo, and I stood still and let them come to me.

It was Sam who caught and held me, smoothing back my hair, rocking me gently back and forth, back and forth. And Sam who sat me down and washed the tears and sweat off my face with a napkin dipped in mineral water and listened as I said, “I thought I could find you all, but I got lost. I couldn’t…I saw a cat die, Sam. And…I think some others ate it….”

His face twisted and he said, fiercely, “Goddamn them for going off and leaving you. And damn you, Cat, for not calling me. We’ve been looking for you for two hours….”

“Joe,” I said. I was amazed at how, now, my voice was cool and even. “Is Joe here?”

It was Yolanda who spoke then. She put her arms around me and said, “They’re waiting at Vino Vino. They thought you might think to go there. We…Sam and I…went out looking. Don’t worry about them. I’m sure as hell not going to. Right now I’m taking you up and putting you straight to bed. Sam can go tell them you’re safe. If he wants to.”

“I may,” he said, “and then again, I may not. Sleep well, Cat lady. See you at lunch tomorrow with their fucking lord and ladyships. Ah, sweet Jesus.”

242 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

He kissed me on the cheek and shambled off toward San Marco. Yolanda led me into the Fenice, her arm firm and warm around me, and up to our dark room, and shucked me out of my clothes and pulled the coverlet up. She did not turn on the light, but she started the ceiling fan.

“Sleep late,” she said. “And then, about ten, you and I are going to have a long breakfast and then go shopping and bleed Joe Gaillard’s American Express card bone dry. Don’t even think we’re not.”

“Thanks, Yolie,” I whispered, and wanted to say more, but sleep and the fan’s wash took me down like an undertow. I have no idea when Joe came in. I did not stir until after nine the next morning, and by then he was gone again.

T
HERE WAS A NOTE. I PICKED IT UP FROM AMID THE

CLUTTER on the bureau top. Perhaps Joe and I would simply go on communicating via notes for the rest of the trip.

Have gone over to the hotel with Ada to help her and Maria
get Colin up and dressed. He insists on coming to lunch. See
you there. By the way, where were you last night? We waited
and waited. Love, J
.

We waited and waited. Love, J
. I crumpled the note up and threw it into the wastebasket.

“What’s this
we
stuff, paleface?” I said aloud, and then snapped my lips shut as I felt tears well and sting feebly. No more tears. I was not going to cry anymore. In any case, I did not think there were many more tears left. There seemed to be a vast, cool, dead space inside me. I would operate out of that and go through the remaining days, and then we would go home.

When I thought the word, no picture came.

I showered and dressed, feeling as stiff and frail as if 243

244 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I had been beaten or was in a wreck of some sort. It was still very hot, and the sun had burned most of the color out of the canal and sky. I thought I would have some coffee, and then perhaps a plan for the morning would present itself. It seemed important to have one. It was nearly ten when I went downstairs.

The desk clerk—the day clerk, not Alvise—told me that Signora Whitney was waiting for me in the garden, and I remembered then that Yolanda had said we’d have breakfast and then go shopping. Why not? It would pass the time.

And then, when I saw Joe again, there would be people about, and I would not have to ask him the huge thing that hung in the air between us.

Why didn’t you look for me last night
?

And I would not have to see in his eyes the answer. I could not imagine one that would serve.

Yolie was there at a table, drinking
caffè lungo
and poring over a list of some sort. She was in a white linen blouse, sheer gathered skirt, and sandals, her hair tied up in a ponytail, sunglasses pushed atop her head. She looked about fifteen. Her face was scrubbed and shining, her eyes clear.

It struck me she had looked younger and healthier each day we had been with her, after those first two in Rome, and I remembered she had drunk nothing stronger than mineral water since then. Rome had obviously been an aberration, a kink of some sort. Tension and anger over the dropped program, the despair of a woman making her way alone in a fast, hard profession. She looked as appealing and whole-some this morning as she did on her television programs, and I liked her a great deal more than I had ever thought I might.

She looked up and smiled, and I smiled back. It was a HILL TOWNS / 245

stiff, small smile, but it made me feel a little better. I could function, then.

“Ready to do some serious Joe Gaillard bashing?” she said.

“You mean shopping?”

I busied myself with the menu so I would not have to look at her. I did not want to talk about last night; what happened was too large and intense for chatter. It felt shameful, as if I had done something so irrevocable and embarrassing that everyone would remember it about me forever after, even though they might not wish to. Maybe it was like that to be a drunk.

“Shopping, dishing, bitching, whichever way you like,”

she said, pouring coffee for me. “He was an asshole last night, and so was Ada. I told him so too. And I’m going to tell her when I see her.”

“You saw him this morning?”

“I sat out here until he came by on his way to go help Ada with Colin, as he so carefully explained his errand of mercy.

And I asked him as nicely as you please how you were this morning, and he said he didn’t know; you were dead to the world when he got in last night, and he hadn’t wanted to wake you. So I let him have it.”

“Lord, Yolie, what did you say?”

“That you’d gotten lost way back in that section over near the Rialto where nobody in their right mind goes after dark, and practically walked yourself to death trying the find the restaurant, and a bunch of greasers cornered you and nearly raped you, and you ran into all kinds of other gruesome things, and what in hell did he think he was doing, sitting over there drinking wine with Ada Forrest while you were lost in Venice and Sam and I were out of our minds trying to find you? And that I wouldn’t leave my worst enemy to try and find that

246 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

damned bar by themselves and it had been my impression that you were his wife, not his enemy, though lately you couldn’t prove it by any of us. And—”

“Oh, God,” I breathed. “You didn’t. Oh, Yolie, I was going to handle it. I…there was no real harm done.”

“No?” she said. “You were shaking and crying and white as a sheet—I thought you were going to faint—but there was no harm done? Cat, listen, it may be none of my business, but it’s pretty obvious that you…that there’s some sort of emotional thing going on with you, or has been. You handle it well, but I’ve seen the little tremors in the hands, and the sweats, and the pills in your bag. I know the signs. I’ve been there myself. I think you’re much better, and you may be nearly well, but you don’t let someone who’s fragile, who’s…healing…go into that kind of jeopardy. Not knowingly. And he can’t say he didn’t know.”

“Well, he didn’t know I was going to try to do it by myself,” I said. “He said in his note for me to call Sam and go with him.”

My own words sounded reasonable to me, calm and sane.

Perhaps I had overreacted; maybe he had not, after all, been careless with me.

“But you didn’t.”

“No. I fooled around until it was so late I knew he’d have left himself, and…well, really, I wanted to see if I could do it. It seemed simple, and it was still light. I thought an idiot could do it, and I was tired of always being—unable to do things by myself. I’m not a child and I’m not stupid. But I couldn’t do it. I guess…I’m not ready yet. Maybe I’m not going to be. I feel like such a coward!”