Those Who Walk Away (8 page)

Ray left the bar, and went in search of a barbershop. In the barbershop—where a ten-year-old boy lay sprawled on a bench with a transistor, enraptured by some quite good old-style American jazz—Ray asked the barber to leave the beard along his jawbone and his upper lip. He was not trying to change his appearance, and the beard wouldn’t do so to any extent; he simply wanted a change. He had grown such a beard in Mallorca for a few months. Peggy had liked it at first, then she had not liked it, and he had shaved it off. The barber’s mirror was long and clear, covering half the wall. Ray looked directly at himself over the double row of bottles of hair tonic and lotions, his eyes burning now in a fine frenzy of fever, he supposed, but they seemed very steady.

He had heavy dark brown eyebrows, a wide straight mouth, the lips more full than thin. His nose was strong and straight, a heavier version of his mother’s, but in his mother it had been a final asset that made her ‘a beauty.’ His red-brown hair was not in his parents, but had been the hair colour of his mother’s brother Rayburn, for whom he was named. When Ray received letters addressed to Raymond Garrett, he knew whoever had written did not know him well. From his father, an oilwell worker in his youth, a self-made man, now a millionaire with an oil company of his own, Ray had inherited wide cheekbones. It was an American face, slightly on the handsome side, hopelessly marred by vagueness, discretion, the second thought, if not downright indecision, Ray thought. He disliked his appearance, and always saw himself leaning slightly forward as if to hear someone who was speaking softly, or as if incipiently bowing, kowtowing, about to retreat backwards. And he felt that because of his parents’ money, he had had life too easy. It was still un-American to take money from one’s parents. Among his friends, lots of them painters without much money, Ray was inclined to pick up any tab, but this also was forbidden: it was showing off. He was afflicted by a constant feeling that he was not in the mainstream of life, because he did not have to hold a job. With friends, he divided bills rather too pointedly, perhaps, and each paid his share, except when he had had a couple of drinks and was able to do what he felt like, which was to say, “This is on me.”

Sitting in the barber’s chair, Ray recalled a childhood incident which stood out absurdly, and returned to him at least twice a year. When he was nine or ten, he had stayed in the house of one of his school friends, an apartment house. He had realized that his school friend’s parents didn’t own the apartment, only rented it, and that other people had lived there before them and would live after them. He had spoken to his father about it that evening, saying, ‘Our house always was ours, wasn’t it?’ ‘Of course, I built it,’ said his father. (Ray had thought then, his father might have built it with his own hands before Ray was born, because his father could do anything.) Ray had felt different then, rather special, but in a way that he did not want to be. He had wanted to live in a house or an apartment in which other people had lived before. He had felt that it was vaguely unfriendly and arrogant of him and his family to live in a house they had built themselves and owned. The apartment of his school friend had been by no means a shabby one, but rather luxurious. But years later, even into the present, the sight of a row of brownstones in New York, of ordinary house-fronts here in Venice, brought back the incident to him, and the same disquieting emotion: other people lived somehow in layer upon layer of humanity and history; his own family had a thin but rich new surface. Therefore there was, somehow, nothing for him to stand on.

At twenty, while going to Princeton, Ray had become engaged to a St Louis girl whom he had known since he was eighteen. He had thought he was in love with her, but he hardly knew how the engagement had happened. Of course, he had done the proposing, verbally, but in a way the girl had, and both their families had exerted pressure simply by ‘approving.’ A year later, just before graduating, Ray had realized he didn’t love her at all, and he had had to break it off. The experience had been traumatic. He had barely passed his examinations. He had felt a heel, thinking he had wrecked the girl’s world, and one of the happiest moments of his life had been just after graduating, when he heard that the girl had got married. He really hadn’t hurt her at all, he realized. His patents, Ray thought, hadn’t had an inkling of what he had gone through that last year in university, though they took great interests in his grades, and whom he knew, and whether he was ‘happy and doing well.’

He listened—with more pleasure than he usually listened to jazz, which in Mallorca had nearly driven him mad—to the free and easy expertise coming from the boy’s transistor, music that the plump barber cutting his hair now, and the other two barbers and the men in the chairs, seemed not to hear at all, and Ray felt that anything in the world that he wished might be possible. It was, theoretically, possible and true. Yet he realized also that he lacked the dash to make any of it come true, and that the thought had come to him because of the jazz and because of his fever. He was timid, quite unlike his father whose word was law and who did what he wanted to do, or what needed to be done, in one slashing stroke. Ray wanted his self-effacement, which even sometimes caused him to stammer with strangers. He detested his money, but there were always places to get rid of it, and Ray was using them—helping to support a couple of painters in New York, anonymous gifts (small compared to millionaires’ gifts, but he hadn’t come into his father’s money as yet) to broken-down churches in England, to relief committees for Italian and Austrian villages buried under landslides, to a couple of organizations for the improvement of racial relations. Ray could have had even more money. He had instructed his trust fund bankers to send him a sum he considered adequate; but because he did not use all his income, money was piling up in the trust fund, making more daily, despite the whacks of income tax and his occasional request for five thousand dollars for a car, ten thousand for the boat he and Peggy had bought in Mallorca.

When he left the barbershop, he walked in the direction of the bar-caffé near the Campo Manin. It was after five o’clock and growing dark. The girl might not be working now, Ray thought, if she started so early in the morning.

He found the bar-caffé, and she was not behind the counter. Ray felt very disappointed. He stood at the counter and ordered from the small boy a cappuccino he did not want. He debated asking the boy about a room somewhere. Italians were very helpful about such things, and the boy looked bright, but Ray could not bring himself to risk it. The boy might tell other people. Then the blonde girl in her pale blue uniform came in through a door at the back of the shop. A slow shock went through him at the sight of her, and he looked down at his cup; but his eyes had met the girl’s, and she said with a smile, “Buona sera,” as she must have said to two hundred people that day.

She served two men who had come in. Glasses of red wine at the counter.

He should speak before it became any more crowded, Ray thought, and began to form his sentences in Italian. When the girl was dunking cups into the sink of hot water directly before him, Ray said, “Excuse me. Do you know of a house in the vicinity where I might rent a room? It is not necessary that it be in the vicinity.”

“A room?” she asked, her grey eyes wide. Then her eyes closed half-way as she thought, wet dishcloth in left hand on the chromium sink edge. “The signora next door to me. Signora Calliuoli. In the Largo San Sebastiano.” She pointed.

The direction meant nothing to Ray. “Can you tell me the number?”

The girl smiled and looked bewildered. “It’s a long number and there is no name on the bell. If you want, I will show you when I leave. If you want to wait”—a glance over her shoulder—“I finish at six.”

It was seventeen minutes to six. Ray finished his coffee, paid, and left a tip in the saucer on the bar. He nodded to the girl, trying to look efficient and proper, said “Until six,” and went out of the bar.

The Signora Calliuoli might not have a room free, he thought, in which case the girl might not know of another place. But Ray felt carefree and happy, actually happy, and realized at once that it was due to fever and quite specious. He turned up at the bar-caffé on the dot of six.

The girl was putting on a black cloth coat. She gave him a smile and a wave. A heavy-set young man in a white mess jacket came from the door at the rear, perhaps to take the girl’s place for the evening, and she spoke to him, too, eliciting a smile from him and a glance at Ray.

“It’s not far. Four minutes,” said the girl.

Ray nodded. He wanted to tell her his name, for politeness’ sake, then realized he had to make up a new one. “My name is Philip. Filipo. Gordon,” he added.

She nodded, uninterested. “Mine is Elisabetta.”

“Piacere.”

“You want it for how many nights?” The girl walked quickly.

“Three, four. Say a week, if the signora prefers.”

They turned a corner, the wind blew straight at them, and Ray shuddered. Suddenly the girl stopped, and rang a bell in a narrow doorway directly on the street. Ray looked to right and left, then up at a five-storey house, narrower than it was high. He saw no canal near by.

“Who is it?” called a voice from an upstairs window.

“Elisabetta.” There followed a longish sentence which Ray could not understand at all.

A buzz opened the door. They went in, and met the woman who was descending the stairs. She beckoned Ray to come up and see the room. To Ray’s relief, the girl came with them, exchanging conversation or gossip with the woman.

Ray was shown a square, medium-sized room with a red-and-yellow flowered counterpane on a lumpy looking three-quarter-sized bed. A tall wardrobe was the closet, and there were pictures on the wall. But it was clean.

“You understand? Eight hundred lire per day with breakfast,” Elisabetta said.

“Very good,” Ray said. “Benone, I shall take it,” he said to Signora Calliuoli.

Signora Calliuoli smiled, and deep, friendly creases formed on either side of her mouth. She wore black. “The bath is downstairs. One floor. The toilet”—she pointed—“one up.”

“Grazie.”

“Va bene?” said Elisabetta, smiling also.

Ray wanted to embrace her. “Thank you so much,” he said in English. “Grazie tanto.”

“Your valise?” asked Signora Calliuoli.

“I’ll fetch that tomorrow,” said Ray casually, and pulled out his wallet. He produced a five-thousand-lire note. “I shall pay you for five nights, anyway, if that is satisfactory. I am sorry not to have change now.”

The woman took the note. “Thank you, sir. I shall bring you mille lire.” She went off.

Ray stood aside for the girl to precede him out of the room. They went downstairs. Ray had an impulse to ask her to have dinner with him, to ask if he could call for her at eight o’clock, but he thought he had better not.

Signora Calliuoli met them downstairs with his change. “Grazie, Signor Gordon. You are going out now?”

“Just for a few moments,” Ray said.

“There is someone always here. You won’t need a key.”

Ray nodded, hardly listening. A curtain of unreality had come down between him and the world. Ray felt energetic, happy, courteous and optimistic. The girl looked at him oddly on the street, and Ray said:

“I thought I would accompany you home.”

“I live right here.” She had stopped suddenly, her hand on the knob of another door like the one they had just left, but this door had a circular knocker of braided metal.

“Thank you once more for finding the room for me,” Ray said.

“Prego,” said the girl, and now she looked a little puzzled, perhaps suspicious of him. She was groping in her purse for a key.

Ray took a step back and smiled. “Good evening, Signorina Elisabetta.”

This brought a small smile. “Good evening,” she said, and turned to put her key in the lock.

Ray went back to his new house and his room. He meant to lie down for only a few moments, but fell asleep and did not awaken until half past eight. The tiny pinkish reading lamp was on. He had dreamed about an earthquake, about schoolchildren swimming adeptly through canals made by the earthquake, and climbing on to the land like otters. He had held a frustrating conversation with a couple of girls who sat on a high wall while he stood below, knee-deep in mud, trying to make them hear him. They had snubbed him. Fallen and damaged buildings were everywhere in the dream. Ray took two more of his pills. His fever was worse. He should have some hot soup somewhere and go straight back to bed, he thought.

He put on the blue shirt he had removed for his sleep, and made himself as presentable as possible with his limited wardrobe. A good brace of drinks, he thought, before his soup. He went to a bar and had a couple of Scotches, then walked towards the Rialto and the Graspo di Ua. He might as well have a good bowl of soup, if that was all he was eating, and the Graspo di Ua was an excellent restaurant. The walk tired him, but he reflected that he could take a vaporetto back, and that the Giglio stop should be the closest to the Largo San Sebastiano.

Ray opened the door of the Graspo di Ua and went in, grateful for the warmth that enveloped him at his first step. Ahead of him, a little to the right, Coleman faced him, laughing and talking to Inez, whose back was to Ray. Ray stared at him. Coleman’s mouth was open, his spoon lifted, though his voice was lost in clatter and brouhaha.

“How many, sir?” asked the headwaiter.

“No. No, thank you,” Ray replied in Italian, and went out again. He turned automatically in the direction he had come from, then reversed and walked towards the Ponte di Rialto, the nearest place from which to catch a vaporetto. Inez, too, had been laughing, he thought. What did Inez think? What did Coleman think about whether he was alive or not? Had Coleman telephoned the Seguso? Hadn’t he, without Inez knowing? Now Ray thought perhaps he hadn’t. Somehow it was a shattering, dumbfounding thought. Ray concentrated on reaching the Rialto and the waterbus stop.

The Seguso would pack up his suitcase by tomorrow, probably, and keep it somewhere downstairs. Would they notify the police or the American Consulate? Ray doubted if they would be in a hurry to do that. Surely whimsical guests had before departed suddenly for somewhere, and had written days later for their luggage to be sent on.