Hill Towns, page 21
He looked at me with his light eyes. The laughter that would have crinkled them back at Trinity was not there.
“Thomas Mann evidently knew a better class of German,” he said.
“And even that one died,” Sam said equably, attacking his lobster with gusto. “Was it plague or sunstroke?”
“General stupidity, I think,” Joe said. His school voice was back. I knew he loved Death in Venice and taught it in some of his small seminars as an allegory of the corruption and death of art when the world comes in upon it. I wondered if Sam Forrest had read it or merely heard of it; I wondered what he made of it if he had. He was as much in the world as any artist I could think of, but unlike Aschenbach’s his art seemed to surge and boom with health and vitality. The thought struck me that perhaps Sam should not stay too long in Venice. Maybe none of us should.
“You know,” I said, “I wonder if maybe we shouldn’t just pack up the newlyweds and go on over to Florence tomorrow. We’d only lose one day of Venice, and in this heat I can’t imagine anyone doing any serious sightseeing. It’s bound to be cooler in the hills. Or whoever wanted to stay on could come with Yolie in her car. I just think Joe and Ada ought to stay out of the sun, get up into the hills—”
“Aren’t you having a good time in Venice, Cat?” Joe said.
“I was,” I said, looking straight at him. He of all people should know whether or not I was having a good time; he, who could read me like a long-loved book. “I was, until today.”
He flushed under the sunburn, and I knew he was remembering what he had said at breakfast, about my fear and Lacey’s blindness. I knew, too, that he was sorry, and was probably thinking of a way to let me know without apologizing before other people. But he would not apologize now.
“Too bad,” he said. “Maybe you ought to go on ahead; I’m sure the bride and groom will be happy to see another set of walls. Maybe Sam will drive you, or Yolie. But Ada and I are meeting some people for lunch tomorrow that I’d like to know, so I’ll be staying.”
We all looked at him. Ada and I? He flushed again.
“Actually, we’re all invited,” Ada said, looking from Sam to me. “I thought I remembered that David and Verna Cardigan were going to be here sometime in July, so I called the Gritti, and they’re there and have asked us all to lunch tomorrow. I accepted because I thought you’d like to see her again, darling”—she smiled at Sam—“and because he said he’d like to finance a new show for you in London if you’ve got something going. I said I thought you did, or would have, soon.”
She turned to me.
“David and Verna Cardigan. Lord and Lady Cardigan, if you insist, though they certainly don’t. Passionate Sam Forrest collectors and investors; he painted Verna years ago and David liked it so much he gave Sam one of the most successful shows he ever had, in London, with the portrait as a centerpiece. I told him Sam was painting you, and they’re dying to meet the original of the new Forrest. As I told you, there are very few in the world. Verna’s is my favorite of Sam’s portraits, but of course I haven’t seen yours yet, and I’ll bet you haven’t either. Nobody sees them till they’re finished. So…of course we won’t bully you if you really do want to go on to Florence, but I wish you’d stay and meet them. They’re really very nice. And you know, I thought how unusual it would be, to have you and Yolie and Verna all together, three Sam Forrest portrait women, in the flesh. The English papers would just love it. Of course Sam isn’t going to let me call them, but it would be extraordinary, just the same.”
I looked at Sam, who grinned and said, “Extraordinary is right,” and then at Joe. Joe smiled at me; I thought he had to force it, but it was a smile, so I smiled back.
“You could dine out on it for years on the Mountain, Cat,” he said, and I knew he wanted very much for me to stay and meet Lord and Lady Cardigan, and be exclaimed over by them as the centerpiece of Sam’s new London show, and would not be overly aggrieved if the English press did indeed get word of it.
Who on earth are we turning into, Joe? I thought, and said, “Of course, then. It was nice of them to ask us. I just thought the two of you looked so sunburned and uncomfortable—”
“I’ll send Joe home with a jar of some wonderful stuff I get in Rome that will take the fire right out of him,” Ada said. “That and a nap will do it. I plan to spend all afternoon at a very discreet little salon off the Campo San Angelo. There’s a little girl there who will work all kinds of magic on me. There won’t be a trace of red when we have lunch with the Cardigans. Or tonight, for that matter. Sam and I are going to take you and Joe and Yolie, if anybody can find her, to that little place Joe and I had lunch yesterday. What did you call it, Joe? The underbelly of Venice? It’s not that, by a long shot, but it does have an interesting atmosphere, one you haven’t seen before, Cat, and the food is wonderful. We’ll have to eat early; it closes at eight. But we can find something fun to do after. Maybe Vino Vino, back in your neck of the woods near the Fenice.”
“Well,” I said. “Looks like we’re all set.”
“Looks like it,” Sam said.
Soon afterward we left the terrace, Sam and I to go upstairs for another painting session, Joe to go back to the hotel and restore himself with sleep and Ada’s unguent, Ada to her secret spa. I was nearly limp with exhaustion by then. I could not quite think why. Nothing had happened, really, at that luncheon under the umbrella by the Canal Grande, and yet, in some subterranean manner, a great deal had.
When we got to Sam and Ada’s suite we opened the far bathroom door very quietly and looked in on Colin and Maria. They lay loosely entwined on the great tester bed, fast asleep, a light plissé coverlet drawn up over them. The air-conditioner hummed full blast, and the ceiling fan spun heavily. The bedside radio purred light rock into the big dim room, and a room service tray on a gilt console held the remains of lunch, with three empty wine bottles. Sam closed the far door and locked the other one, which led into his and Ada’s room.
“I’d say they’d made up and are out for the count,” he said. “They should resurface sometime before midnight.”
I went to my chair and sat down. He moved to his position behind the easel and uncovered the painting and stood for a moment, staring at it. He picked up a brush, then put it down and went and stood for a moment before the French doors, looking out into the blazing canal. His hands were shoved into his pockets, and he rocked back and forth on the big running shoes. The ponytail switched back and forth across the broad, sweat-stained back of his work shirt. I felt the prowling tension in him from where I sat.
“Is something wrong?” I asked. “With the light, or something?”
“No. I mean, yes, the light’s too bright, but I can fix that. It’s not anything, except that—Cat, please don’t think there’s anything…going on…between Ada and Joe. There isn’t. I can promise you I would know if there were.”
“I didn’t think that,” I said, but I thought, That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it? Or at least wondering. “They’re together so much, is all,” I said. “And he’s been so annoyed with me, or whatever it is that’s eating him. I didn’t mean to imply that Ada would—”
“Ada might,” he said, not turning back to me. But I could hear the smile in his voice. “Ada in fact has, upon occasion. But this is not one of them. I know her like I know myself; I know when she’s being helpful and when she’s…interested. What she’s doing now is trying to keep Joe occupied while you’re sitting for me. It’s very important to Ada that I should be painting again. She gets distinctly nervous when I hit a long dry spell. So you can rest easy on that score, unless you think Joe has the hots for her.”
“I don’t think he has the hots for her, as you so elegantly put it,” I snapped. “But I think he may think he does. Joe and I haven’t ever…there’s never been anybody else for either of us, not since we met. And everything’s so strange now, and he’s thrown with her so much, and she’s so very beautiful. I guess I really don’t know what I think.”
“You ain’t exactly chopped liver, kid,” Sam said, turning around and picking up his brush. “He’s crazy about you; a fool could see that. He wouldn’t be so angry at you if he wasn’t. But he needs to clean up his act. He’d be a fool to drive you away.”
“I don’t think he could do that….”
“Any of us can drive anyone else of us away, Cat,” he said. “It doesn’t do to take people for granted.”
“It seems to me you take Ada for granted a good bit of the time,” I said.
“On the contrary,” he said. “I may not show it, but I am aware at all times of what Ada wants and needs. They are not always the same thing, but I am never unaware of them. Have you and Joe really never had anybody else?”
“No,” I said. “We really never have. I mean, I never have ever, and he hasn’t since we met. I guess I don’t really know about before then, for him. Is that really so very strange? You sound as though you think we ought to be in the Guinness Book of Records.”
He laughed softly.
“In my world, you ought. No, I was just thinking…there’s a quality about you, something in your face. It hasn’t been there in the other women I’ve painted, or wanted to paint. I don’t think innocence is the right word, but there’s something…like a new snowfall. Essentially still untouched. I was wondering why I was so drawn to that at this point in my life.”
I did not like the direction in which this conversation was sliding.
“Maybe you’re looking for a clean slate. Maybe you need to turn over a new leaf. Maybe it’s easier to paint…untouched faces. Less annoying character to have to fool with.”
“Don’t get prickly with me,” he said, beginning to paint. “I didn’t say you lacked character. And you’re not easier to paint. I think…you’re the hardest portrait I ever tried.”
I sat silent for a time then. He painted furiously, restlessly, paced about, changed to a palette knife, worked fast with that. At some point I closed my eyes and leaned my head against the chair’s back. I hadn’t meant to, but I felt myself drifting away, drifting. I was simply so tired….
I’m not sure what time the sounds began. I know that when they disturbed my light sleep, or whatever it was, the stabbing white had gone out of the light, and the water stipple on the ceiling was slower. I lifted my head, my neck stiff, and cocked it to one side, listening. I had never heard anything like the sounds before, and yet I knew them….
Sam had stopped painting and stood still, looking toward the closed bathroom doors.
“What on earth?” I said, turning toward the escalating sounds, and then I knew. Thrust and thump, thrust and thump, the quickening creak of springs, a high, thin keening, a lower moaning that grew and grew, sharp, muffled words—yes, yes, yes, my God yes!—a kind of dark crooning, a long hoarse cry, a pure high scream that rose and rose and rose and finally choked sharply off, as if cut by a knife. And then silence.
I had heard it all before: in a small dark room in a tiny house on a mountain half a world away, in the back of an old car, and, one last time, in the back seat of a car on the verge of a bridge swinging high over a rocky creek.
I put my hands over my ears and shut my eyes and rocked myself back and forth in the chair. After a moment, Sam came over and gently pulled my hands away.
“Why does that frighten you so?”
He was leaning closely over me. I could not look up at him.
“That’s how it sounded…that’s what they were doing, that’s how they sounded. My parents. I remember hearing that all the time until I was five. That’s how it sounded on the night they…the night they…”
“But doing it doesn’t frighten you, Cat. I don’t understand. I mean, you and Joe, you do that…don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, thinking I was going to cry again. I was very weary of crying. “We do that. We do that all the time. But that sound…I don’t make that sound…”
“What sound do you make, Cat?” he said. His voice was so low that I could hardly hear it. I could feel his breath on my face, though.
“None,” I whispered. “I don’t make any sound. I never have. I can’t. I try, I make the motions, but no sound comes…Joe calls it the silent death….”
“Because if you make a sound, you can’t hear danger coming. That’s it, isn’t it? If you make the noise of love, that love will kill you?”
“Yes.”
He put his arms around me and pulled me to my feet. He bent his head down to mine, and I lifted my mouth up to his, and he kissed me, long and sweetly and softly, and then not softly anymore. Hard, warm, hot—his hands moved down my back and around and up to my breasts and then all over me, and I gave him back touch for touch, eyes still closed, blinded, breath-spent. Strange, his hands were so large, his mouth so hard without the softening brush of a mustache. His body was so very big. I could not get all of him into my arms, as I could Joe. Strange, strange….
When he finally took his arms away he was breathing as though he had been running, hard, and I could only stand staring at him, gasping like a fish pulled onto land. If I had not held to the back of the chair, I think my legs would have collapsed me onto the floor.
“Cat,” Sam said hoarsely, “I promise you now that before you leave Italy you will make a very joyful noise, and it will be with me, and it will be a very far thing from killing you. But not now.”
“This shouldn’t have happened,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. We can’t…we can’t be together anymore. The painting will have to stop.”
“The painting can’t stop,” he said, and he smiled at me, a very sweet smile, a normal Sam smile. “But I promise you, too, that I won’t touch you again until you ask me. And Cat, you will ask.”
“I’ll sit for you, if I have your promise,” I said. “But not for a day or two. We need some time off, both of us. And Sam, I will not ask.”
“Oh, yes,” he said, “you will.”
When I got back to the Fenice, there was a note from Joe saying he and Ada and Yolanda had gone on to Do Spade, in San Polo, and for me to ask Sam to bring me. Don’t come alone, Joe wrote, you’ll never find it. You can’t handle it alone. Sam knows where it is. Come with him.
In a pig’s ass I will, I said to myself, still shaking slightly, still running sweat, still feeling the imprint of Sam’s hands on my body and my own arms hard around him. In a pig’s ass will I ask him. And I went up to Joe’s and my room, as dim and neat now as if no one had ever been in it, and stripped off my clothes and took a very long shower. And then I dressed and went downstairs and asked the desk clerk to draw me a map to Do Spade, in San Polo.
He was the one I liked, a slim, blue-eyed young man who looked like an American college student doing his summer abroad, except that his English, though good, was formal and heavily accented. He had heard Joe call me Cat, and now referred to me, shyly and with a smile to show that he meant no disrespect, as Signora Gatta. When I asked for Do Spade, he looked at me in surprise.
“Signora Gatta goes prowling tonight,” he said. “Are you sure it is Do Spade that you want?”
“I’m sure. Can I walk it from here?”
“You can walk it in—oh, perhaps twenty minutes or so,” he said slowly, “but I wish that you would not. It is oscuro…hard to find. There is no sign, and it is not the best part of Venice for signoras. Not even gatti. You do not go alone?”
“No,” I lied briskly. “I’m meeting someone who’ll go with me, but I wanted to be sure of it. I’ve heard it’s very good, very…real Venice.”
“What is the real Venice?” he said. “Do Spade, it is a place for the—what? The porters and merchants around the Rialto. A local place for workers. They are good men, most, but they are not used to seeing pretty gatti coming alone.”
“Thank you for being concerned, Alvise, but I won’t be alone.” I smiled, and took the map he had drawn, and went out into the last of the afternoon sunlight in the Campo Fenice. All at once I wished we were meeting there, at the Taverna; it looked gay and friendly in the slanting light, as familiar to me, now, as home. My place.
And then my skin prickled and my heart gave the profound, half-forgotten wringing twist that meant the fear had woken in its kennel and put its head out. I stopped, stood still for a moment. Then I turned and went back into the Fenice.
“Forgot something.” I smiled brilliantly at Alvise, and ran up the stairs rather than waiting for the elderly elevator, and rummaged in my bag until I found the nearly full vial of Valium, and took two. Then I picked up Sam’s little pewter medal from the dressing table and dropped it over my head. Saint Zita came to rest once more, heavily, coldly, between my breasts. It made an oval lump under my striped jersey, but I did not care. It was as comforting as…a touch.
“Sicuro,” I whispered to myself in the mirror. “Safe.”
And this time I strode swiftly and purposefully through the campo and into the maze of small alleys that would take me to the Teatro Rossini, in the Campo Manin, the first of the landmarks Alvise’s map told me to look for. I did not did look back until I knew that the Campo La Fenice was lost to me. Then I slowed and looked about me.
The tiny calle in which I walked looked identical to the ones around the Fenice and San Fantin and the ones Sam and I had passed through on the way to San Geremia. Miniature arched bridges, winding green canals, peeling soft red and blue and pink walls leaning close overhead, tiny campielli opening out for seemingly no reason at all, the inevitable covered wellhead centering each. Some of the alleys led nowhere, and some seemed to lead back to where—I thought—I had just walked. There were people all around me, but few carried cameras; I was not of them anymore. I had read something Henry James had written about “a narrow canal in the heart of the city—a patch of green water and a surface of pink wall…a great shabby façade of Gothic windows and balconies—balconies on which dirty clothes hang and under which a cavernous-looking doorway opens from a low flight of slimy watersteps. It is very hot and still, the canal has a queer smell, and the whole place is enchanting.”
