Hill Towns (46 page)

“Here,” he said, and we broke out of the cobweb of alleyways into a great open space, bordered with uplit red towers and graceful Gothic palazzi and houses. It seemed, after the claustrophobic darkness, to be made of light. Lights blazed in the symmetrical structures fringing it; lights picked out the contours and details of the fine towers; light seemed to pour upward from the very stones of the piazza toward the moon, lying just above the great white-tipped bell tower. The Torre del Mangia.

“Oh, God,” I breathed, blinking. “It’s the Campo, isn’t it?”

“It is. Now was that worth the hike, or what?”

“I never saw anything so brazenly dramatic,” I said.

386 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“It’s stunning. It’s almost scary. How could you ever relax here? You’d have to sit up straight the whole time.”

“This is where people come to relax, though,” Sam said.

“This is the big civic playpen. Shops and
caffès
and restaurants; in the daytime this is wall-to-wall people. And you should see it during the Palio, the big medieval horse race.

It’s a circus. We missed it by a week. Watch your step; there may be a few tokens from it still lying around. When your eyes get accustomed you’ll see there’s plenty going on.”

They did, gradually. He was right. There were people walking arm and arm across the great shell-shaped piazza, people sitting in the outdoor
caffès
, people going in and out of doors on the ground floor.

“Are we going to drink here? It’s awfully bright,” I said.

“We are going to eat first,” Sam said. “If I’m going to last out a night of debauchery with Catherine of Siena, I’m going to have to get something in my stomach, or you’ll end up having to drive my inert carcass home. And we wouldn’t want that.”

I scrubbed my face into his upper arm.

“No, we wouldn’t,” I said.

But in the end we did not. Sam headed for Il Campo, directly on the piazza, but it was hopelessly jammed. A line straggled out the door.

“I thought all doors opened for Sam Forrest,” I said. “Don’t they know who they just snubbed?”

“All doors open for Ada Forrest,” Sam said. “I don’t have anywhere near her clout.”

We tried a few other restaurants on the square, but all of them were just as mobbed. In the end, Sam led me back into the darkness, into the warren of alleyways HILL TOWNS / 387

behind the Palazzo Pubblico. There, after another seemingly endless stumbling trot through the darkness, we found a tiny hole-in-the-wall of a place where only a few dark-clad men sat silently at tables, drinking.

“Maybe they have sandwiches,” Sam said, sinking down at one of the scarred tables in back, beside a rough-cut concrete wall. “Christ, it’s like Hitler’s bunker.”

“They have whiskey,” I said, seeing the bottles lined up above the tiny, filthy bar. “That’s a good omen.”

“We are doomed,” Sam said. “On your head be it.”

A silent waiter brought a bottle of whiskey and thick, filmed glasses to our table and went away. I don’t know what sort it was. It was fiery and raw. I poured us both half a tumbler full and lifted mine to him.

“To
la dolce vita
,” I said. “And lots of or something.”

“Or something,” he repeated solemnly, and we drank.

The evening seemed to dim out then, to soften, flicker, snap back into focus, blur again. We drank the bottle of whiskey and went somewhere else, a dark grotto full of quiet, anonymous people, that might have been the first. We had whiskey there, too. Somewhere in that place, or perhaps the next one, there was a jukebox. I remember dragging Sam to his feet, laughing, and dancing with him in a tiny dark space next to it, surrounded by empty tables with their chairs tipped over them. I think there were still people at the bar, but by then I could not have been sure. I knew I had drunk enough so that the Cat Gaillard I had been earlier that day would be out cold, but this new woman was still on her feet. On her feet, her body pressed hard against Sam Forrest’s, her arms around his neck, her face pressed into it. This woman nibbled his neck and kissed his face 388 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

and held her mouth up to his and was kissed in return. This woman was still swaying there with the big man when the music ended and the dim lights flickered on.

Sam lifted his head and looked down at me owlishly; he shook his head as if he were coming up out of water. I still clung to him, drowning in the feel of his body against mine, smeared and swollen with the kisses. He lifted my chin with his hand.

“I think they want us to leave,” he said hoarsely. “What now, Cat?”

“Now,” I said, letting my head fall back over his arm and then snapping it up again, “now I’m asking.”

He was silent for a moment, and then he said thickly, “You sure? A spite fuck is a sorry thing.”

“It ain’t spite when it’s willing,” I said.

“Then let’s go home.”

But when we reached the dark pavement outside, it was obvious that neither of us could manage the long, black climb back up to the parking lot beside the cathedral. We leaned against each other for a moment, and then he said, “I’m going to get the manager to call us a cab. We’ll never find one. We can come back and get the car tomorrow, or get somebody at the hotel to do it.”

“There’s no tomorrow,” I sang. “There’s just tonight.”

“Hold on,” he said, and went back into the bar.

When he came back out, I pulled him into the shadows and kissed him again. We were still kissing when the taxi driver came around the corner to fetch us, and we clung tightly to each other as we stumbled after him to a street where cars were able to navigate, and fell back into each other’s arms in the back seat of the cab when the driver jerked it into motion. By the time it stopped, on the gravel in front of the darkened Villa di

HILL TOWNS / 389

Falconi, there was nothing in the world for me but sensation and the feel of him, and the thick smell of his body and breath.

After the taxi left we stood for a moment, looking up at the sleeping villa. No lights showed, at least on the front.

My room and Joe’s was dark. So was Sam and Ada’s, on the other end. I glanced into the parking lot across the road; no RV towered there. It was the first time that night, I realized murkily, that I had thought of Joe. The thought did not hold.

The semicircle of gravel gleamed ghostly white in the bright moonlight. Sam looked down at me.

“It’s like standing in a floodlight. We can’t stay here. What did you have in mind, Miss Cat?” he said. His tongue was as thick as mine.

I hesitated. What
did
I have in mind? Now that I knew I would make love with him, and soon, where had I thought to set that love? I did not know.

“I guess my room and yours are out,” I said. “And the car is back down there. What do
you
think?”

He took a deep breath.

“Christ, whatever’s closest…I’m not going to be able to wait long.”

“I don’t know,” I said. And then I did.

“This is perfect,” I said, taking his hand. “This is absolutely perfect. This spot was made for us.”

I pulled him behind me, around the side of the villa and down into the tangled vegetation that lay behind it. Three steps in and we were swallowed by profound blackness.

“My God, Cat, they’ll find our skeletons ten years from now,” Sam whispered behind me. “We’re going to fall and never land.”

But I knew we would not. The night and the moon 390 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

light seemed to have seeped through my skin into my bloodstream; darkness and wildness bore me up like invisible hands. I felt surreally clear and focused and surefooted, a creature of the night, a wild thing. I was not going to fall, and I would not let him fall.

“Come on,” I whispered back to him. “You’re safe.”

He was. We both were. My feet felt the path through the soles of my shoes; my eyes saw the shapes of trees and shrubs and thorns as if they had been lit for me. I went down the slick, overgrown path as if it had been a floodlit highway, and he followed me, stumbling and grunting and flailing but never falling. By the time we reached the clearing, I was tingling all over with the night and what lay ahead; laughing, manic with it.

“
Voilà
,” I said, and stepped into the little glen where the falcon’s cage was.

The moonlight was so bright here it seemed solid; you might simply climb it up into the sky, to the cold moon itself.

Maybe, I thought raptly, we’ll do that. After. After….

“Holy shit,” Sam breathed. He looked around the little glen and then walked over to the falcon’s cage. We could see her clearly in the white radiance. She sat still in her dully shining gray, looking at us impassively out of her black hood with the yellow headsman’s eyes. Sam put a finger into the cage, slowly. She lifted her long wings silently, as far as she could, and snaked her head low, but she did not move from the perch. Slowly, as she had done before, she settled back into herself, still looking at us.

“Holy shit,” Sam breathed again, to himself. “I want to paint that.”

“Well,” I said. “Is this going to do?”

He looked at me, and then around the clearing.

HILL TOWNS / 391

“You mean, in that little shack there?”

“No. I mean right here. On the ground. Under the moon.

With her for a witness. Right here, Sam.”

He looked at me a little longer, smiling faintly, and then walked over to the shed and jerked the creaking door open.

“I don’t want to go in there—”

“No.”

He leaned into the shed, and when he straightened back up, he was holding a tattered blanket. He snapped it smartly in the air, and the dust motes rode dizzily up the shafts of moonlight.

“There’s a pillow too,” he said. “Somebody else has the same idea, or had. You want the pillow?”

Silently, I shook my head. I looked at him.

He spread the blanket out on the floor of the glade and stepped onto it and looked back at me.

“Then come here to me,” he said.

I started forward and then stopped.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait just a minute. Stay right there. I want to do it this way.”

Smiling, he sat down cross-legged on the blanket.

“Like I said, Cat. You don’t want to wait too long.”

I ran across the glade and ducked into the little shed. It was piled and jumbled and smelled of rotting cloth and dust and something like dusty grain. I felt spiderwebs break across my face, but they did not bother me on this night. On this night I felt nothing but the steady, sweet hum of my own blood and the print of his body still, against mine.

I unbuttoned the white linen and let it fall to my feet. I unhooked my bra and let it fall; I stepped out of my panties, out of my shoes. I closed my eyes for a moment, and then I opened them, and ducked back out of the shed, and stood before him in the moonlight.

392 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

It seemed that I stood there a long time before he spoke.

The white bath of the moon was almost palpable on my naked body; it was like being touched all over by millions of tiny, prickling fingers. They almost burnt, but I could not tell if it was a cold burning or a hot one. When he still did not speak, I lifted my arms under the weight of the moon and held them over my head and turned around, very slowly.

“Do I look like you thought I would?” I said. My voice was caught deep in my throat.

“I knew how you would look,” he said, and his voice caught too. “I knew when I started to paint you. How you would look. How you…will be. I have seen you already; I have had you already, a hundred times.”

I felt a flicker of flatness, of disappointment. I let my arms fall.

“I hope the original lives up to the image,” I said.

“A hundred times over,” he breathed. “A thousand times over. God, but you are beautiful! Come, Cat….”

He got up onto his knees and held out his arms to me. He did want me; I saw that he did.

“Wait just once more,” I said, a new thought coming into my mind. A fine thought, a wonderful thought. “Wait and watch me. Watch me, Sam!”

“Jesus, Cat!” he said, and then, “OK, I’m watching.”

I turned and ran across the glade toward the little hanging bridge. I think he only noticed it then.

“I hope you don’t have any therapeutic ideas about fucking on that thing,” he said, and there was laughter close under his words.

“No, now watch!”

“I’m watching.”

I stopped at the lip of the bridge, took a deep breath, and ran onto it. It dipped and swayed sickeningly, and HILL TOWNS / 393

my heart rose up in my throat, but I did not stop. I let my run take me on out, into the very middle. Then I stopped and looked down.

There was nothing below me but blackness. Nothing on either side. Nothing in the air above me. Here, on this bridge swinging over darkness, the moon’s fingers reached only the very tips of the trees that made a canopy over whatever lay below. I stood still and let my hands fall away from the damp ropes on either side that served as the bridge’s only guard rails. I closed my eyes. I did not hear water and did not sense earth. The bridge might have spanned some essential chasm that opened straight into the core of the planet.

I stood for quite a little time, listening to the deep, sweet thrum of my blood past its pulse points, thinking of nothing at all except the feeling of the thick night on my naked body.

Then I thought of his hands on it, and my blood quickened, and I turned and ran off the bridge again and across the glade to the blanket.

He lay on his side, eyes closed, chest rising and falling serenely.

All of a sudden I was very tired and cold. I knelt beside him and shook him, feeling a little night wind that I had not known was there putting fingers all over me, into secret crevices and folds, into my hair, on my lips.

“Wake up,” I whispered, shaking his shoulder. “Sam, wake up!”

“Jus’ a minute,” he mumbled, not opening his eyes. “Jus’

got to rest a minute. Jus’ a little while. Then we’ll do it….”

“Sam, I’m cold.”

“C’mere,” he said, eyes still shut, reaching his arms out to me.

394 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS