Hill Towns (8 page)

Old money. When I think of the words “Golden Boy,” I think of Colin Gerard. How on earth he had come to be so besot-ted with Maria Facaros Condon from Newark, New Jersey, was a source of much speculation and enjoyable gossip at Trinity. Colin, the consensus has it, could do better.

Maria came to Trinity on a full scholarship to study political science and met Colin during her freshman year, when he was a junior. There is no explaining chemistry; she is dark and dumpy and short and wild-haired, so large-breasted as to be a campus joke and so quiet that until she began to come to our parties with Colin I had never heard her say a single word. She said few even then. She is awesomely smart; her grades, undiluted with extracurricular activities, outshone even Colin’s, and she sailed through graduate school so easily that people still talk of it at the Faculty Club; and she is considered the best of Trinity’s young instructors. She cares little for clothes and wears no makeup, and though she has a sweet, rather medieval face and a really beautiful low, rich voice, she is remarkable for very little except her mind and her breasts. Colin absolutely adores her. Steam practically comes off him when he is with her, and off her with him, and they manage somehow always to be touching each other.

It is either uncomfortable or amusing to be around them together, depending on your point of view. How can he? the campus says over and over. It would be like keeping your own cow.

No one is crass enough to say she is common, of course, but the word somehow lingers in the air when she is in a group.

HILL TOWNS / 59

I like her, and I like Colin better for loving her. I have never managed to warm up to him all the way. Maria Condon is, I realized finally, me, only in a different skin. An outsider.

“Because she’s no competition, basically,” I said once to Joe when he asked for the thousandth time why I thought Colin so adored her. “He’s a thousand times prettier than she is. Look what he gets: all boobs and food and bed and adoration forever, plus a mind he can show off whenever anybody gets too snotty about her. And best of all, she’s a pie in Mama’s eye. Can you see Lucy Semmes Gerard introducing her around to the post-Junior League crowd in Richmond? Don’t knock Maria, Joe. I like her enormously. She’s me, you know.”

“What are you talking about?” he protested. “You’ve always been—elegant, a sprite, really lovely. A little Greek boy, an Athenian at Plato’s school. You are, even now. She’s an Athens saloonkeeper’s daughter.”

“Sicilian, maybe. Don’t be precious, darling. It doesn’t become you. What do you care, as long as Colin is happy?

And is he ever happy! I think they’d better get married immediately, before they get any happier. Would you like to ask them if they’d like to be married in our garden? I know he loves it, and it would probably get him off the hook with his mama.”

But tonight Colin had announced that he and Maria had decided to be married in Rome, in Michelangelo’s beautiful Piazza del Campidoglio, over the coming Fourth of July.

And, he said, grinning around the room, there was going to be a dinner the night before in Trastevere to which we were all invited, if we could manage it. Given by Sam Forrest, in his rooftop garden. We were all invited to that, too.

There was a soft explosion of sound, as near to a 60 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

babble of excitement as we get on the Mountain. Sam Forrest! An American expatriate living in Italy for years, a painter of such renown and charm that hardly a glossy international magazine managed an issue without some mention of him and his beautiful Italian wife, Ada, of their legendary parties and his extravagant showings and openings. His huge canvases, flaming with bawdy color and a kind of elegant savagery, hung in every important museum in the world and most large private collections. The whole world knew about his affairs and his feuds and his brawls and his periods of reclusion, when he locked himself into his studio or retreated to a borrowed one and painted as if possessed by devils for months at a time, seeing no one, emerging thin and depleted with another show’s worth of work. Somehow he did not repeat himself and had not, so far, faltered in his trajectory.

His talent was immense and real. The life he led with Ada Forrest was exactly, he said over and over in the magazines and newspapers, the sort of life an artist should lead. Neither of them asked anything of the other or minded what the other did. And what they, together and separately, did was as famous as his paintings. Sam Forrest. Sam Forrest with this young graduate assistant and his bovine child from Newark, New Jersey?

“Did you win the wedding in a Top Forty contest?” Hays Bennett said.

“Actually, Hays, he’s family,” Colin said. His smile was creamy with satisfaction.

“Family. I see,” Hays said. “Your mother’s or your father’s?”

“Well…Maria’s, really. He’s her uncle or something. By marriage. He’s married to her mother’s cousin, I believe.

The family who still live in Florence.”

HILL TOWNS / 61

“Naples, Colin,” Maria said in her smoky voice. She smiled at him indulgently. “The Mezzogiorno. It’s not at all the same thing.”

“Well, wherever,” Colin said. “Isn’t that something? Even I didn’t know, and then she hands me this letter from him….”

We all looked at Maria. She dropped her eyes.

“It sounds like bragging,” she muttered.

“So, anyway, you’re all invited,” Colin crowed. “And right now, before God and man and this assemblage, Maria and I want to issue a formal invitation to Joe and Cat to come with us and be our attendants and drive with us through Tuscany. Go on our honeymoon with us. Is that tacky, or what? How about it, Joe? Show us the Italy of literature. Be our cicerone.”

The group fell silent. Joe did not speak. I felt Hays’s eyes on me.

“Let’s do it,” I said, my heart bucking like a wild thing under my silk shirt. “Let’s just…do it!”

“Ah, God, I’d love to, but we couldn’t,” Joe said. “Cat couldn’t….”

“Oh, yes,” Corinne Parker said. “Cat could.”

“Could you?” Joe looked at me. Everything that was unsaid, had always been unsaid, shimmered in the air between us. I could not read his eyes. They were, still, the eyes of the stranger who had spoken earlier.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then,” Joe said, smiling, “we will. And on your head be it.”

E
VEN BEFORE WE LEFT—WEEKS BEFORE, IN FACT—THE

world on the Mountain turned strange. Everything seemed too bright and vivid; I felt, as I went about making preparations for the trip, that the air around me was perpetually lit by unseen strobe lights.

“Do you feel like we’re making a movie about getting ready to go to Italy?” I said to Joe.

“Nope,” he said. “I feel like we’re already there. Nothing has felt this real in a long time as this trip.”

He had been listening to Italian language cassettes for several weeks, and studying guidebooks, and reading prodi-giously about the cities we would be visiting. Books on the hill towns of Tuscany, on Etruscan history and art, on food and customs and architecture littered his study and the big room over-looking the Steep in which we practically lived.

He was already fluent in the idiomatic Italian of the cassettes and peppered his conversation with phrases he liked.

62

HILL TOWNS / 63

“
Buon giorno, Catti. Ho fame. Quando che colazione? Fac-ciamoci un bicchiere. Dove sono i gabinetto
?”

“Good morning,” I would reply. “Breakfast is never unless you feel like cooking it. And it’s about twelve hours too early for a drink. And you damn well know where the toilet is.

Joe, do you realize that virtually everything you’ve learned so far has to do with eating and drinking or the elimination of same?”

“I have my priorities,” he said. “OK, how about
spogliati
?”

“If it’s not about food or shit, I’m game,” I said.

“It means, take off your clothes,” he said, leering.

“They do that in Italy?” I said, peeling my nightgown off slowly to the rhythm of an imaginary bump and grind.

“Why else do you think they close the shops from noon to four? Ah, Cat, you’ll have every man in Italy pinching you. Look at you. Like a little willow tree, and blond all over except for those wicked black eyes—”

“
Basta
,” I said huskily into his neck. “I’ll show you priorities.”

We made love a great deal in those days just before we left. I still don’t know why. It was not the slow, deep, honey-thick love of our settled married life but the intense, fevered, searching love we had made when we were first learning each other’s bodies. We did it many places we had forsaken since the first prodigal flush of total license: the kitchen table, the rug before the fire in the big room, the garden, the bath.

Joe seemed to me insatiable, and I felt nearly so. It was as if we sought to imprint one another’s bodies, inside and out, on our minds and hearts and visceras. It felt as if we had a time limit to do so. It felt as if we were going to be parted and wanted to be sure we did not forget each other….

64 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“We really ought to cut this out for a little while. We’ll be jet-lagged before we ever see the jet,” I said, a few days before we left. We were lying on the sofa under the window wall that faced the Steep and the blue summer air beyond it. We were stark naked and sheened with sweat, and guests were due sooner than I liked to contemplate. Colin and Maria were coming for a last American supper; they were leaving the next morning, to try and wade through some of the seemingly impenetrable red tape that surrounds foreign marriages in Italy. Corinne was coming too. I had Tuscan bean soup simmering, and as near as I could devise to the crusty dark bread of Italy baking in the oven.

“I just want to make sure that when some strutting Roman stud comes on to you, you’ll remember me and sneer in his face,” Joe said.

“I can’t imagine ever wanting to do this with anyone but you,” I said honestly, feeling swift, inexplicable tears sting my eyes. I hugged him hard. I thought once more how totally wonderful his attenuated body felt under my hands, each long, subtly defined muscle sliding beneath the pads of my fingers, oiled with our mutual sweat. I thought that any other body, especially a dark, stubby, tightly packed one, would make me physically ill. I loved all of Joe: mind, heart, soul, spirit, flaws, eccentricities, but it was his body and his beautiful narrow, carved face that weakened my knees and thickened my tongue. I had often wondered what would happen if he were to be altered in some essential way: a bad accident or a wasting, disfiguring illness. Could I still feel this simple, joyous lust for him that had lasted all the years of our marriage? I thought I could now, but it would take effort, and perhaps closed eyes….

“I’m not programmed to run off with Italians, unless HILL TOWNS / 65

they happen to look like Ichabod Crane,” I said, running my fingertips down his back to where the cleft in his narrow buttocks started. “No, don’t, really. If we don’t get dressed Corinne will come in and turn the hose on us.”

I think Joe was almost totally happy in those last few days.

He whistled, he sang in the shower, he broke into small silly dance steps when he went about his daily business. He filled notebooks with things he wanted us to do and see in each city and kept a separate list of places to eat and drink. Almost everyone we knew on the Mountain had been to Italy at one time or another, and everyone had suggestions. Joe listened avidly, and jotted and noted and culled his lists, and cheerfully ignored the jibes of his more traveled colleagues when they made indulgent references to innocents abroad and ugly Americans. Joe was neither innocent nor ugly and knew it.

In his mind, I believe he had already conquered Italy as surely as he had the Mountain, from the moment he knew for sure that we were going. The stranger who had taunted me, however lightly, on the night of our spring party, was gone, and the man I had loved and known for more than twenty years was back, and then some.

It was I who was the stranger.

“I don’t feel like myself,” I said to Corinne in the kitchen that night. “I don’t feel excited, I don’t feel connected, I don’t even feel frightened. Last year I couldn’t even go to Atlanta, and here I am going all over Italy, and I haven’t even had to take a pill. I pinch myself a dozen times a day just to see if I’m real, or if this is a movie I’m watching, or a dream.

That’s how it feels. Just…unreal. Is this recovery or some kind of new breakdown I don’t even know about yet?”

66 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“You tell me. It’s your psyche,” Corinne said, tearing off a crust from a warm loaf. “Mmm. Good. Neither one, probably. Probably just a new kind of defense your subconscious sent up, like a flare, when it caught on that you were going about as far off the Mountain as you could get. Go with it.

It’s the smartest part of you. I brought you a little ammuni-tion, by the way.”

She fished in the pocket of her cardigan and brought out several slips of paper and stuck them into my apron pocket, my hands being slicked with olive oil and wine vinegar.

“Thanks. What are they?”

“The names of decent English-speaking shrinks in each city you’re going to. And some spare prescriptions for generic tranquilizers. Also my phone number at the Cape. I’ll be there most of the time you’re in Italy.”

I looked at her. She was smiling, but I could see she was serious.

“Joe can take care of me, if it should come to that,” I said.

“I’m not going to be alone at any point. But thanks anyway.”

“You ought to have your own resources, Cat, even if they’re pills and shrinks,” Corinne said. She was no longer smiling.

“But Joe—”

“So Joe gets hit by a Fiat. What then?”

Through the calm white snowfall of unreality the old panic coiled and struck like a snake, then faded swiftly.

“Then I take the whole bottle of pills and call everybody,”

I said waspishly. “I can’t go through Italy zonked, Rinnie.”

“I’d rather you went through it zonked than be frozen to some hotel room,” she said. “Take the stuff and don’t argue.