Hill Towns (35 page)

I slept, badly, on the sofa in the alcove. Somehow I did not want to ask for a rollaway bed, not in this seat of some un-remembered Florentine noble. I felt suspended in amber, stopped in time. I was restless but did not want to take the jitney into Florence. I did not know what I wanted and could seem to make no move to break the spell of the slow, sunny days in the Villa Carol. I was waiting, I thought, but I did not know for what.

Maria spent mornings and evenings with Colin, but she swam and sunned in the afternoon with Ada, and after the first day Colin joined them by the pool. You could see that the pain was gone. Even with the cumbersome cast and the crutches, he moved nearly as lithely as he had before, and I often heard his voice in the afternoon, as I sat on the chair Sam had set up for me by the windows in his and Ada’s room, crowing and teasing, full of strength and his old untouched, easy foolishness. When I glanced out the window I saw them, Colin and Maria browning in the sun, glistening with sun oil and droplets of water, laughing as they had laughed by the pool at the Hilton in Rome. Colin, I thought, was himself again, but Maria was not. She was happy again, once more the sensuous Latin creature she had been when we got to Rome, and yet not quite the same. There HILL TOWNS / 291

was something older about her now, entirely a woman, the girl all gone.

You will have to grow up to her quickly, Colin, I thought, surprising myself. Or you will lose her.

Ada oiled herself and lay under the sun on a lounge or swam lazily in the turquoise water. It was not crowded because the Villa Carol kept only twenty or so guests at a time, and during the day most of them were in Florence. The ones who were at poolside looked often at Ada Forrest, alabaster in her black bikini and her scarlet mouth. After luncheon she disappeared. I do not know where she went; not to her room.

Sam and I were there.

He was painting furiously now, largely silently. He was as withdrawn as he had been on the trip from Venice, but there was a new electricity about him. He fairly crackled with it. Oh, he talked with me, and joked, as he had before, but I did not think his heart was fully in it, and we did not talk deeply again, or long, as we had before. He worked on my portrait in the afternoons; I do not know what he worked on in the mornings, but I knew he was laboring at something.

Ada said so, and I could see the piles of sketches and tissue overlays scattered all over the room, along with his clothes.

He was losing the flush of sun he had gotten in Venice, and there were strain marks around his blue eyes and his mobile mouth, and the coppery freckles stood out more masklike than ever. His Brillo brush of hair was wild, uncombed, and badly in need of cutting. He could also have used a bath.

He looked like a man possessed.

On the second afternoon I got up to go and give Joe his three o’clock pill, as I had done on the first day. I heard Ada calling me and looked out at the pool. She was waving up at me.

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“Don’t stop,” she called. “I’ll go up and give him his medicine. It’s on the bedside table, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I called back. “But it won’t take me long.”

“Go on with the portrait. Don’t break the momentum. I’ll sit with him for a while. I need to get out of this sun, anyway.”

“Let her,” Sam muttered from behind his easel. He had a brush between his teeth and was working with a palette knife, slashing hard and rhythmically.

“Sam, I’m the one who should be taking care of him,” I said.

“Any idiot can give a man a pill,” he said. “Only you can sit for this portrait. Come on, Cat. We’re getting near the end. It’s going to be just goddamned wonderful.”

I sat back down. He had not commented on the portrait before.

“I’m anxious to see it,” I said. “It’s going to be interesting to see how you see me.”

I was fishing and knew it. I wanted the old effortless understanding between us back, the sense of specialness, the total weight of his attention. I wanted it on me, not on the woman of the canvas.

“How I see you is not the point,” he said. “How I see you would probably scare the shit out of you or embarrass you.

This painting is about something else that’s in you. Something that the paint sees, and the canvas, and the brush.

Sometimes it doesn’t have a goddamned thing to do with the way I see.”

“Well, what do you think? Two more days, three?”

“Can’t tell. I’ll probably wind it up in Siena. Well before we go on from there. What is it, you getting tired or bored?

God, you must be.”

“No,” I said. “Really, I’m not. But I haven’t seen anything at all of Florence yet.”

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“Well, you didn’t really come to Italy to see the sights, did you?” he said. I could hear the knife scurry on and then stop.

I thought he was listening to his own words and for mine.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, you came to be with the newlyweds and all that.

I think. Maybe it wasn’t what I meant.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said in a low voice. “I didn’t really come to Italy to see the sights.”

He was still for a moment and then resumed his work.

After a few minutes, I knew he was lost to me again.

Toward the end of the session, when the light was slanting lower and I was tiring, a great mass of silver-white cloud, like back-lit alabaster, sailed over the sun, and the light in the room turned odd and luminous.

“God, that’s wonderful!” he cried. “Hold that, just like that. God, please let that cloud stay….”

He worked frantically, humming to himself, muttering tonelessly under his breath, jumping back from the canvas, lunging forward again. He paced about, fiddling with the shutters, touching me abstractedly in small pats, moving my neck and arms and head with swift, light fingers. He dove at the canvas again, painted some more, darted out to touch my hair, close my lids with his thumb. I sat very still, let him move me about like a doll, my breath high and shallow in my throat.

He bent and kissed me lightly and softly on the mouth and then sprinted back to the easel. I did not think he was even aware of doing it, but then he put his head around the canvas.

“Did I really do that?” he asked.

“You did. Who did you think I was?”

“I knew who you were,” he said. “I always know that.”

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“You couldn’t have proved it by that piddling little kiss,”

I said, wishing that I could bite off my tongue.

He walked slowly over to me and stood there, his hands on his hips.

“You asking, Cat?”

“No….”

“You don’t want to put it off too long,” he said, and went back to work.

Just then the sun came flaming out from behind the marble cloud, and after a few more minutes we stopped for the day.

That night Joe coughed dryly and monotonously until nearly dawn. I took the pillows from the sofa and a blanket and slept on the balcony.

Joe was still asleep when I started down to breakfast the next morning, but when I touched his face it was cool and dry, and it seemed to me that his breathing was deeper and fuller than it had been for several days. Just as I was pulling the door shut behind me, he called sleepily, “Cat? Where you going?”

I went back into the room.

“Down to breakfast. I thought you were asleep. How do you feel?”

“I think I’m better,” he said. He stretched, long and hard.

“God, every muscle in my body is sore. Are you coming back up?”

“I will if you want me to. But I thought not; you coughed all night long. Maybe you ought to sleep some more.”

“Well, maybe I will. But first I’m going to take a long shower and shave. I can smell and taste me. And then I’m going to order some breakfast. Real breakfast, not a HILL TOWNS / 295

goddamned
caffè lungo
and a hard roll.
Then
I’ll sleep a little more. Maybe I’ll get up for lunch; will you have it with me?”

“Of course,” I said, smoothing back the lank hair on his forehead. It looked darker, sunless. His face was pale and gold-stubbled. “But let’s have it up here. Maybe, if you feel like it, you can come down for dinner. You don’t want to push too hard with the drive to Siena coming up tomorrow.

Meanwhile, I’ll ask them to bring you something breakfasty to eat.”

“I’m sorry about this,” he said, looking up at me. “I don’t even remember getting here; I’m going to miss Florence completely. Have you seen even a scrap of it?”

“I think I might go down this morning,” I said. “Maria said she wanted to do a fast lap around the Uffizi. I haven’t missed it, Joe. I’ve seen the entire city spread out below us every day and every night, and to tell you the truth, it’s been good to just stop for a day or two. Everybody was tired. This way we’ll be fresh for Tuscany. We can always come back to Florence; Ada says this isn’t the time to see it anyway. It’s wall-to-wall students and tour buses now. And hot.”

“How’s Ada?” he said. “The last thing I really remember is Ada stuffing pills down my throat in the back seat of the car. How’s everybody? How’s Colin? How’s the portrait coming?”

“It’s getting down to the wire,” I said. “Sam says it should be done by the time we leave Siena. Everybody’s fine. Colin’s ankle was fractured, not sprained. It’s in a cast and he feels much better. Yolie I don’t know about. She’s staying somewhere in the old section with a boy toy presented to her by her loving landlords. Or that’s what Sam says, anyway. She’ll meet us here in the morning. You haven’t missed much.”

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“I’ve missed you,” he said, and drew my hand to his mouth and kissed the palm.

“I’ve missed you too,” I said, my eyes filling.

Everyone was at breakfast on the terrace except Sam. Ada said he was working on the portrait’s background.

“It’s no use even trying to talk to him when he’s this close to finishing,” she said. “I don’t envy you, Cat. I’ll just have them toss some raw meat in to him. I plan to stay well out of his way all day.”

“Want to come with us to the Uffizi?”

“Oh, no,” Colin said. “She’s promised to play seven-card stud with me this morning. If I can’t go down to Florence, at least I can win all Ada’s money.”

“Don’t be piggy, baby,” Maria said indulgently. “Ada’s done nothing but hang around here and dose sick people for two days. Give her a break. Maybe she’d like a breather from the halt and the lame.”

“It’s not a lot of fun to be stuck up here while everybody else is off seeing Florence,” he said sulkily. He was in plaid madras shorts this morning, with a freshly ironed oxford shirt and a scuffed Topsider on his bare brown foot. His face and arms and legs gleamed redgold with fresh sun, his chiseled face was flushed bronze, and his hair gleamed. Except for the cast ankle, he was as perfect as one of the statues we would see in the Loggia dei Lanzi this morning. He seemed untouched by pain or much else, new-minted. The thought slunk guiltily through my mind that at home, on the Mountain, he would have seemed a young god, immortal.

Here, in this rich old country, he seemed merely barely finished.

Do be careful, Colin and Maria, I thought. You really should go home.

“I don’t mind staying; I want to,” Ada Forrest said.

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She wore white slacks and a pale peach T-shirt almost the color of her skin and looked like a piece of fruit at the absolute shimmering zenith of its ripeness. “I hate Florence in the summer. I’ll stay and pass out the morning medications.

Doesn’t Joe get a pill about midmorning?”

“He can take it himself,” I said. “He’s much better. I’m going to send him up breakfast and then he’s going back to sleep, and will probably have dinner with us. Don’t bother, Ada.”

“It’s no bother,” she said.

The Villa Carol’s smart van dropped us, at Maria’s request, at the Oltarno entrance to the Ponte Vecchio, and we walked across it slowly, past the dim, fabulous small jewelry shops on either side, like Aladdin’s caves, past the vendors and portrait artists and sidewalk performers. It was like going to a circus, a medieval one. We were caught fast in the slow-swimming shoals of tourists and Florentines. The bridge smelled of dust and close-packed people and the good, fishy, river-water stink of the Arno below, and simply of great, dry, shadowy age. I felt a prickle of the old bridge fear, a warning curl, like a subterranean growl from a waking dog, and I walked lightly and breathed shallowly, waiting to see what the fear would become. I took Maria’s arm, more out of a need for the feel of familiar flesh than to steady either of us.

But the fear remained at a low simmer, giving a kind of preternatural seeing to my eyes, a clarity to the teeming dimness of the bridge. I remembered reading somewhere that in times of stress, the pupil dilates so that as much light as possible will be let in, so that nothing dangerous will remain unseen. It served me well on the Ponte Vecchio. I believe I saw things that morning, details, bits of richness, that perhaps the others did

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not. After a few minutes I began to revel in it. I still remember that walk.

“It’s really wonderful, isn’t it?” I said gratefully to Maria.

“It is,” she breathed. “It’s incredible. I’m so glad we got away.”

I thought she had been going to add “by ourselves,” but she did not.

I stopped at a shop and bought things: a signet ring for Joe that I knew he would not wear on the Mountain, a pair of lovely, austere, dull-silver candlesticks for Corinne, a heavy gold cuff bracelet with bas-relief lions and unicorns on it for Lacey. She would love the matte satin feel of it, and the fine detail of the animals, and it would look beautiful on her slender arm. I had a sudden sharp vision of her standing just here, as I knew she had stood three summers ago. She would have smelled the smells, tasted the dust and river thickness, heard the complex symphony of sounds, felt the cobbles beneath her feet and the presence of many people all around her. There was little she would have missed. She would have perceived the bridge in a crystal wholeness that few sighted people did. The thought made me suddenly and fiercely glad.