Hill Towns (36 page)

I missed her, in that instant, as you miss a newly amputated limb.

For the first time, I know that you are truly not handicapped, my darling, I said to her silently, across the enormous gulf of miles. I wish I had known that from the beginning. It would have been much easier on you.

We dodged through the traffic hurtling along the embank-ment and walked diagonally across the Piazza Pesce into the Uffizi Gallery and into a world made of flesh and shadow and light. It literally stopped the breath.

HILL TOWNS / 299

We were totally silent as we walked through the great crowded salons. Few other people spoke, either.

It was the most unrelievedly sensuous two hours I have ever spent. I knew that many, perhaps most, of the paintings here had a religious genesis, either Christian or pagan, but it was the sheer, living presence of naked flesh that took my breath. I thought that if I had been in an actual place among so much nakedness, among even so much ideally beautiful nakedness, the impact would not have been the same. It was the insight, the vision of all those long-dead eyes that brought this flesh so powerfully, so particularly, so—to me—erotically alive. This was, I realized perhaps for the first time, what the artist’s eye was. It was pure focus; it was a funnel, a powerful prism, that shut out all extranei and gave to the subject its staggering immediacy. Flesh in these paintings was flesh you felt on your own, with nothing between: a baby’s sweet pliant flesh, as in the early madonnas of Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto. The warm, damp flesh of the young and unearthly, as in the ripe, pearled Botticellis, the
Primavera
and the
Birth
of Venus
. The overtly and rankly female flesh of di Credi’s Venus. The pale, secular flesh of the Medici portraits, the frankly and skin-prickingly erotic self-explored flesh of Titian’s
Venus of Urbino
. The bursting, palpable flesh of Michelangelo’s
Holy Family
. My skin crawled, cried out for touch.

We did not speak until we were out of the Uffizi.

“Wow,” Maria said. “I wonder how many babies have been conceived after a trip to the Uffizi?”

“I wonder how much of the exalted Stendhal syndrome was just an extreme case of horniness?” I replied. “Although I doubt you’re supposed to react this way. Or admit it, rather.

Do you think there’s something wrong with us?”

300 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Nothing”—Maria smiled creamily—“that a nice, long nap back at the Villa Carol wouldn’t cure. My God, Cat, you’re actually blushing.”

“I am not.” I laughed but knew that I was.

I wondered what she would have thought if I had said, Whose room at the Villa Carol?

We had thought to linger among the sculptures in the Loggia dei Lanzi, but we had lost time in the gallery, and the driver was meeting us up in the Piazza della Signoria at noon. It was eleven now, and we were both powerfully thirsty. So we hurried through it toward one of the outdoor
caffès
. Even so, it was inescapably more of the same: flesh, naked and palpable, somehow even more so than the paintings. This was secret flesh bared to the air and sun of the world, flesh that could be touched, that cried out to be handled. Bandinrelli’s bulbous
Hercules
, that Cellini had compared to “an old sack of melons.” Ammanati’s
Neptune
Fountain
, that the sculptor himself piously declared later to be an incitement to licentiousness. Giambologna’s
Rape of
the Sabine Women
, leaving no doubt at all as to who was doing what to whom. Donatello’s impassive and somehow profoundly corrupt
Judith and Holofernes
, nearby.

And Michelangelo’s
David
. Even when we sat down at last for
caffè granita
, our eyes went to the
David
, again and again.

“It’s no wonder the Medici coat of arms has balls on it,”

Maria said, sitting in deep shade but stretching her legs out to the sun. They were brown now, sleek, newly shaved and lotioned. Her toes, in sandals, were bare and polished.

I laughed. “You seem to have noticed everything.”

“How could you not? There are balls everywhere in Florence. Every guild sign and palace and church and HILL TOWNS / 301

shield and escutcheon in this place has balls on it. Not, of course, to mention every statue. Didn’t you have that course on Florentine iconography in Art History?”

“No. We were still violently Episcopal in my day.”

“You just want to reach up there and bounce that little bundle in your hand, don’t you?” she said, looking up at the
David
.

“Do,” I said, feeling my chest redden. “I’ll enjoy explaining to Colin why you’re in the Firenze pokey.”

We sipped our drinks in silence. Then she said, “Do you feel as if you’re changing, Cat? Over here?”

“How do you mean?” I did not want to talk about this.

“You. You and Joe. Me. Colin. I feel like I’m on some runaway train or something, and everything that’s familiar to me is receding at the speed of light. I feel terribly out of control.”

It was so exactly how I had felt in Italy that I wanted to grasp her hand in relief, babble, pour it out. But I sensed that she was reaching for reassurance, the young woman to the older one. Almost daughter to mother. I wished I could have said, as she needed, Everything will be all right. You’re imagining things. But I could not. She
was
changing, had changed, before our eyes. I did not think she was in control.

I knew I was not.

“I think foreign travel does change things,” I said slowly and carefully. “I think anything that’s so profoundly different alters your view of the world. But I don’t think it changes people into someone they’ve never been before. I think rather that it adds to them. You’re you, only more so.”

I could tell by her face that she did not believe me; it was not what she meant. I did not blame her. I didn’t believe it either.

302 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I reached over and put my hand on hers.

“Sweetie, go easy on yourself. Go easy on Colin. Look at what’s happening; you’re still so very young, both of you.

You’re not who you’re ultimately going to be. You’ll change a dozen times in your lives. You’ve just gotten married and you’ve just come to Europe for the first time, and he’s been seriously hurt a long way from home, and you’ve been thrown with people you don’t know, people who live very differently from the way you have. No wonder things feel strange. How could they not? We should have let you come alone, Joe and I, and I think Ada and Sam should have butted out too. You’ve had no chance at all to get to know each other.”

“We had those years back home to do that,” she said doubtfully, but I could tell she was thinking about it.

“Not as married people, not as a formal couple. It’s different.”

“But you and Joe have changed—” she said, and fell silent.

I felt my breath go high and thin.

“Not dramatically, I didn’t mean that,” she said hastily.

“Not in any bad way. You’re just not the same over here as you were back home.
You
seem…more solitary than I ever thought you were, more adventurous. You’d never have gone off by yourself at home like you did in Venice, or at least I guess you wouldn’t have…we really never saw you except with Joe. It’s a nice difference. It’s not just you; he’s different too. Of course, he’s been sick, too…. I’m babbling.” She fell silent.

“You are. It’s the heat. Drink up.”

“The only one who hasn’t changed is Colin,” she said in a low voice. She looked up at me under her lashes. I knew we were at the heart of it.

HILL TOWNS / 303

“He hasn’t had much chance to,” I said lightly. “He hasn’t seen anything since he got married but the inside of hotel rooms.”

I wasn’t going any further with this.

But her face cleared, and she said, “He really hasn’t, has he?” and I knew I would not have to.

We finished our drinks and looked around for the van driver, but did not see the smart maroon livery among the throngs in the piazza.

“What do you think of Ada?” Maria said.

I will not do this, I thought.

“I think we’d still be sitting on the curb in Rome, trying to get to Venice, if it hadn’t been for her,” I said.

“She isn’t what I thought she’d be,” Maria said. “She’s not like the others I know in Mother’s family. We’re such a loud-mouthed tribe, the Italian half. We argue and yell and cry and make scenes. She’s out of another place entirely. An Italian Stepford wife or something. Only a million times smarter. I’m grateful to her down to the soles of my feet, don’t think I’m not, but somehow I wish she’d go home and let us do it by ourselves now, just the four of us. It’s like she has this big agenda, but nobody knows what it is.”

“Sam would be like a beetle on its back if she went home,”

I said lightly. This lumpy, unworldly child missed nothing.

“I wish she’d take him with her,” Maria said with sudden vehemence. “He’s charming and a genius and I know I’m lucky to have him in the family, but he…he sucks all the air of a room when he’s in it.”

“He does, doesn’t he?” I smiled.

“Does it bother you—you know, when he’s painting?

When you’re alone with him?”

Her cheeks reddened, and she looked down at her 304 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

glass. I felt light-headed. It was obvious she thought there was something between Sam and me, or could be.

“No,” I said. “He’s very easy to be with. Totally absorbed in what he’s doing.”

“He certainly doesn’t pay much attention to Ada,” Maria said. “It must be hard for her. She doesn’t seem to have anything much of her own. She must miss that. I wonder how she makes up for it.”

I saw, suddenly, where this was going. I held up my hand for the waiter and at the same time saw the van driver standing at the edge of the piazza, scanning the crowd. I stood and waved.

“Over here,” I cried.

On our way back to the villa we spoke only of paintings and statuary and of the things we had bought on the Ponte Vecchio. I knew we would not have this conversation again.

I would see to it.

When I got to our room, I softened my steps and eased the door open, in case Joe was sleeping. But he was not. He stood at the French doors onto the balcony, his back to the room, in only his pajama bottoms. The rush from the overhead fan stirred his hair, which I could tell was newly washed even in the dimness, even from where I stood. It lifted and fell silkily with the wind. His narrow torso looked pale and thinner, so that his ribs made shadowy stripes against the skin. He was looking straight out into the garden, over the pool.

Ada Forrest stood in the circle of his left arm. Her head was tipped toward him, and the silver hair, loose today, fell against his shoulder. She was, I thought, not so tall as I was.

When I stood there my head was level with his nose. Hers reached only to his chin. I thought at HILL TOWNS / 305

first that she too was naked to the waist, but it was only the pale peach jersey that she wore. They did not move, and I did not. I did not breathe, either.

Then Joe bent his head down to her, and she lifted hers, and he kissed her. I moved then. The air around me rang and shivered as if there had been a huge silent concussion in the empty hallway, a blast. I ran on tiptoes through it and up the staircase at the end of the hallway to Sam and Ada’s room and knocked on the door.

Sam answered it in a ratty blue terry-cloth robe, wet all over, barefoot. He blinked at me in the dimness.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing, I just forgot my key and I…there’s nobody in the room. I thought you might walk down to lunch with me, if you’re going, but you don’t usually, do you? It was a stupid idea; I’ll just get the clerk to let me in….”

He pulled me into the room and sat me down on an alcove sofa identical to mine except that it was covered with strewn clothing and sheets of an Italian newspaper and the remains of his breakfast on a room-service tray. He dumped the clothes on the floor to make a place for me.

“What’s the matter, really? Are you sick?”

“No, I swear I’m not. I ran up the stairs, is all. And it’s hotter than hell, and I didn’t have any breakfast, and Maria and I went to the Uffizi, and it was crowded as all get out—”

“Ah,” he said. “Stendhal. Let’s order some lunch up here and have some wine with it, and you can sit for a while, if you will, and then I’ll let you go take a nap till dinner. We’re going to eat in the garden. Yolie’s com 306 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

ing. I gather from her tone of voice her rooster has flown the coop.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said, and clamped my mouth shut. I knew if I talked anymore I would begin to cry. Poor Yolie.

Her man had gone. She must feel as if she had a cold sword blade through her very guts. I did.

He phoned down for lunch, one hip resting on the desk, staring at me as he talked. The room was full of crumpled paper from his sketch block, as it had been the day before, and the rich, pungent smell of fresh oil paint hung thick in the air. His palette was uncovered. He had been working on my portrait. As Ada had said.

I concentrated fiercely on talking lightly and normally and eating my lunch and drinking the wine that came with it. I thought I did it well. I felt totally removed from this room, from this place; I felt as if I watched myself from behind a pane of glass. My ears still rang, and my lips felt numb, but all in all I thought I did very well indeed. I could even laugh at Sam’s foolishness. I could even make some small teasing sallies myself. But it was better when he was quiet, when he worked. When he did, with the same restless, prowling intensity as the past two days, I could lay my head back against the seat and close my eyes. Then it felt as if I were floating in a bubble, far above the earth.

He worked in silence for a long time, and I drifted in my bubble, thinking only that I would find some way to keep it around me, intact, and that way I would get through the night, and the day after it, and the days after that. Perhaps I could even keep it whole across the Atlantic and up the Mountain.

After that, I could not see.