Hill Towns (40 page)

It was a cellar of some sort. The walls were a stained stucco that had once been white, and the back one was actually dug out of dirt and stone, the old earth of this place. There were paintings or posters scattered about on the curving walls, but the smoke was so thick and the paintings themselves so grimed that I could not tell what they were. Groups of people loomed up out of the murk like ships out of a heavy fog; they were all intertwined with each other in Bosch-like knots, and everyone seemed to be young. Heavy-metal rock reverberated in the cavelike space, from a hidden record player or tape deck, I thought. There was no room for a live band. We pushed through the throng. Hands reached out to touch Yolie: tweak her cheeks, slide across her shoulders perilously close to her breasts, cup her buttocks under the skirt. They were familiar touches in every way; she knew all of them and jibed at them in Italian as she passed. Comments whose tone, if not content, I recognized followed me as I plowed along behind her, but no one touched me.

Taddo had kept a table for us in the very back, against the earth and rock wall, and we slid into chairs. It was quieter here, and there was a good view, if you could call it that, of the entire long room and the standup bar that bisected the far wall halfway down. This was three deep with young men.

All of them turned to look at us, slow, nearly insolent looks that were like fingers on flesh. Yolie stared back at them, her eyes measuring

334 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

their flesh as they had done ours, her head cocked. Then she blew a kiss to the crowd, calling out something guttural to them, and they all laughed and turned back to their drinks.

“What did you tell them?” I asked brightly. I was almost frightened of this place. I had seen nothing like it before.

“To go beat their own meat; I’d seen them all before and we weren’t buying. Tonight.”

“God, you didn’t—”

“Not in those words, no. But I do know them all. I come here a lot. Besides having the best pasta in Florence, it’s a veritable supermarket.”

I felt a curl of distaste, just the faintest plume. Enough was enough. I was tiring of her obsession with young men. I wanted to eat a leisurely dinner and get a good night’s sleep and be on the road to Siena early. I found I missed Joe quite a lot. It struck me suddenly that this would be the first night I had ever spent away from him, except for his rare trips out of town for Trinity.

I looked at the bar full of young men and around the room again. Except for two or three couples dancing in the middle of the room, and one or two who seemed to be kissing in dead earnest at tables at the other end, I saw no other women. Almost everyone in this place was male.

“It’s a supermarket, all right,” I said. “Where are all the women?”

“Oh, they come and go,” she said. “Mostly they’re upstairs right now.”

It dawned on me.

“My God, Yolie, this is a…a
bordello
!”

“Probably more of an old-fashioned ’ho’house,” she said, grinning sidewise at me. “Don’t worry. Your virtue HILL TOWNS / 335

is safe with me. I established a long time ago that I don’t work here. I just shop. Where better? And like I said, the pasta really is the best I’ve ever had.”

A waiter appeared with three bottles of wine. He poured out for Yolie and me, into thick, chipped glasses. She tasted and made a grimace of pleasure and nodded, and asked what pasta the house had tonight.

“
Salsiccia di cinghiale
,” he said.

“
Due
,” Yolie said. “
Più tardi
.”

He nodded and went away, and she motioned for me to taste the wine. I did. It was powerful, raw and thick. It warmed me all the way down.

“Well,” she said, lifting her glass and clicking it to mine,

“to your night in a Florentine whorehouse. You can dine out on it for years.”

I drained my glass and she refilled it. Suddenly all the sinister darkness, the dampness, seemed to drain out of the place and the night. It
would
make a wonderful story, I thought. I knew I would tell it again and again on the Mountain. It was the sort of thing Trinity loved. Joe would laugh each time and be secretly envious that it had not happened to him. Sooner or later the story would be transmuted so it had. No matter. I would tell it tomorrow night, at dinner, in Siena.

Sam would love this night, I thought. I laughed aloud.

“Feeling better?” Yolie said, smiling at me across the table.

She was on her third glass of wine.

“I am,” I said. “I must have looked like Little Nell.”

“Nope. You look good, in fact, Cat. You look like a different woman from the one I first met in Rome.”

I thought about that meeting. It was she who was a different woman now, not I.

“Do I? I don’t feel different,” I said.

336 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Oh, I’ll bet you do, if you think about it,” she said.

We finished the first bottle of wine and started on the second. That one was nearly half gone before she spoke again.

“How’s the portrait coming?”

“Nearly done,” I said. “Sam says he’ll probably finish it in Siena.”

“Ah. And you haven’t seen it yet?”

“Nobody has.”

She laughed. “Ada has. You can bet your bottom.”

“She says not,” I said.

“That doesn’t mean anything. Ada says what needs to be said. It’s why she’s aboard. She’s seen it, all right. She’s peeked if he hasn’t shown it to her. It wouldn’t be hard. He doesn’t hide his work.”

I looked at her more closely. Were the bright eyes just a bit too bright; was her mouth a bit stiff, her words just the slightest bit slurred? I couldn’t tell. My own face was flushed and my lips felt larger than they should, and a little numb.

I should stop with the wine right now, I thought, but I did not. I drank another glass. We were near the bottom of the second bottle, now.

“You don’t like Ada, do you?” I said.

“No. You don’t either. Women never do.”

“Why don’t you?” I said. My own words felt thick. I thought I should cut this conversation off right now, but I didn’t want to.

“No,” Yolie said owlishly, “you first. Why don’t you? Is she fucking Joe?”

“God! No!” I cried. I was profoundly shocked. At the bar, heads turned to look at us.

She was silent, looking at me, smiling slightly. I felt my face flame.

“Ah,” she said softly.

HILL TOWNS / 337

“No,” I said again. “She’s not fucking him. I don’t think.

But she’s kissing him. Or vice versa, or both. I saw them yesterday, at lunch. Oh, what do I know? She could be; they’ve had enough time….”

“Well, then, are you fucking Sam?”

Through the Chianti haze I felt a clear, sharp rush of anger.

“I certainly am not! Why would you think I’d…do that?”

“He does that when he’s doing portraits,” Yolie said matter-of-factly, reaching for the last bottle. She spilled a little on the rough wooden tabletop and touched her finger to it and licked it. Then she looked at me.

“No reflection on you. It’s just that you’ve spent all that time together, and you do seem terribly vulnerable. You did from the first. That excites Sam. Not even a few kisses, Cat?

Not even tempted? He’s irresistible when the dam starts to break. I know.”

“I don’t like the way this is going, Yolie,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, around my thick tongue.

“Ah,” she said. “So there
has
been a little slap-and-tickle.

Thank God. I was afraid he was losing it this time, and you were approaching sainthood. Well, then, you really can’t blame Joe too much, can you?”

“It’s not at all the same thing! Not at all!”

“Oh?”

“No. I didn’t kiss Sam in the first place; he kissed me. And I told him when he did that it couldn’t go any further.”

“But you kept sitting,” she said. “
Did
it go any further?”

I fell silent. It had, of course. At my request. But only because Joe…

338 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

I felt tears start in my eyes. She put her hand over mine, on the tabletop.

“Americans behave badly in Italy, Cat. All of us, in one way or another. You ought to stop it now, though, before it gets past the kissing. It will, sooner or later. Sooner, probably, if he’s nearly done with the portrait. He’ll hurt you.”

“Maybe I’ll hurt him,” I said pettishly.

“Oh, Cat, you can’t. I wish you could. There’s nothing there to hurt. You know, when I first met him, I kept waiting to see his dark side. Every genius has one, you know: the wild rages, the romantic drunkenness, the black despair, whatever. It’s part of the mystique, it comes with the territory.

It lends humanity to all that…extraordinariness.”

She stumbled on the word, badly. But she went on.

“But Sam doesn’t have a dark side. The other side of him is just this flat, pure plane of focus and energy; it all goes into the work. It’s one slick, straight, hard, shiny surface.

You couldn’t chip it with dynamite. There’s no way to hurt him.”

I was angry now, really angry.

“You make him sound inhuman. He’s not. He’s the most human man I’ve ever met. If you don’t know that, you never really knew him.”

She stared at me, squinting a little, as if to focus on my face.

“You planning on fucking him? If you are, you better hurry. You’ve only got between now and the instant he finishes that painting. After that you’re history.”

I started to get up out of my chair. She put her hand out and grasped my wrist. Her grip was strong.

“Stay,” she said. “I need to tell you something about Ada and Sam. It’s for your own good, Cat. It really is.”

HILL TOWNS / 339

I sat back down, slowly, more because I realized I was not sure how to get back to the hotel than to hear what she would say. But I was curious too.

“Did you fuck him, Yolie?” I said, and thought simply to myself, I don’t think I’ve ever used that word to anybody but Joe in my life before tonight, and now I’m scattering it like grass seed.

Yolie grinned widely.

“Did I ever. From the first day. All over the place. In taxis.

In doorways. On the Janiculum in broad daylight. In his studio; he had a room somewhere in Trastevere, a great, huge, shabby space with nothing in it but a table and a chair and an easel, and these wonderful, heavy old brocade drapes across a whole wall. We did it on the chair and the table and managed to rip the drapes right off the wall. His landlady ran him out for that. Of course, he was a lot younger then, and I was still in college….”

Her voice trailed off, and the smile softened. Her eyes were focused a long way away.

“You were in love with him, weren’t you?” I said quietly.

“Oh, yes. And for that time, he was in love with me. He doesn’t fake that. He wouldn’t bother. But the minute the painting was done, even before the paint was dry, it was over. I became a sort of pet, one of Sam Forrest’s girls, a family member. He keeps us, you know. It took me years to get over him.”

You’re not over him yet, I thought. Aloud, I said, “Where was Ada all this time?”

“Who knows? Shopping. Or bending over with her eye to the keyhole. Anywhere. Nowhere. I used to worry about Ada. She was terribly good to me; I really didn’t want to hurt her. But later I came to see that she encour 340 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

aged the whole thing. It was she who suggested the portrait, she who asked me to stay with them. She threw us together, literally.”

“That’s sick. It really is,” I said, my voice trembling.

“Hang on,” Yolie said, putting a hand on my arm and getting up from her chair. “I have to go pee. I really do. I’ll be right back. Don’t go, OK, Cat?”

“I won’t,” I said.

I sat looking down at the tabletop. It’s all spoiled, I thought. Nothing will be the same after this; it can’t be. She’s wrong about Sam, of course, but I wish I’d never heard that stuff. I wish I’d gone on to Siena with them….

I wondered if I could get her to eat when she came back, eat and sober up, so that we wouldn’t have to talk of it anymore. Or even better, just to go back to the room and go to sleep. Then I looked up, in the direction in which she had gone, and I saw her, standing in the doorway to the toilet, holding herself upright with one hand. The other was on her hip. She was looking at a young man who stood at the bar. I had not seen him before; he was tall and slender and very pale in the gloom, and his glossy blue-black hair grew down over his forehead in a point, like a medieval jester’s cap. He stood sideways to the bar, so that he was in profile to me, and he was looking straight at Yolanda across the smoky room. His nose was a crag, a jut, a beak, his mouth red and thin. He was smiling slightly, and his hand rested lightly, casually, on an enormous erection. It strained his pants, stood out like the prow of a Viking ship. I saw his eyes drop to it and go back to Yolanda’s face. Her eyes followed his, and held the taut cloth, and then climbed his body to his face. She smiled in return.

I knew we would not be leaving.

HILL TOWNS / 341

She wobbled unsteadily back to our table and sat down, still smiling at the young man. Then she turned to me.

“New boy on the block,” she said.

“Listen. Why don’t we take out our food and go back to the room?” I said cheerfully. “We’ve both had too much wine.”

“No. You listen. It’s important.”

She was serious now. I knew she was going to say what she felt she had to, no matter what I said or did. Well, then, I would listen, hear her out. Then, perhaps, she would agree to leave.

“Shoot,” I said.

“Well, first, Ada wasn’t a secretary when he met her on the Spanish Steps,” Yolie said. “She was a prostitute. Young, alone, and far from home, gorgeous, scared to death, and turning tricks like a house afire on the Spanish Steps because she couldn’t afford an apartment. He was young and stupid and he wanted to paint her and he did, and while he was doing it he fell in love with her. For his pains she gave him the clap. Gonorrhea. God knows how long she’d had it. For some reason he didn’t show symptoms, not at first anyway.

By the time he did, and got to a doctor, the damage was done. He’s been sterile ever since. Later he became impotent for long periods of time. He’s always blamed her for that, though the doctors told him it didn’t have anything to do with the disease. She’s sterile too, of course. She had a hys-terectomy not long afterward.