Hill Towns (37 page)

I think I must have dozed, because when Sam said, “Well, look who’s back in the land of the living,” I HILL TOWNS / 307

started violently and shot to my feet, heart pounding in my ears. His voice had seemed to boom in the air like cannon shot.

He stood on the balcony looking down at the pool, and I went to look too. Maria and Colin and Joe sat in chairs at the umbrella table where our group always sat, sipping drinks and laughing at Ada, who was doing a sinuous, absurd little dance on the burning terra-cotta of the pool apron. She wore her black bikini and had her silver mane pulled over her face, and a scarlet hibiscus thrust between her teeth. She should have looked ridiculous, but she looked exotic and wonderful and all but naked, a pagan eater of red flesh. Joe called something to her through cupped hands, and she laughed and tossed her hair back and rushed at him and planted a long kiss square on his mouth and went back to her dancing.

Colin and Maria laughed and cheered and clapped.

“That should make him all well,” Sam said laconically, and then turned and looked at me.

“Is that what’s bothering you? Your distinguished husband and my charming wife?” I shook my head, but he said, “I believe it is.”

“No.”

“I hope not. It means less than zero. I mean really less than nothing. Ada does that. Some women shop and some do volunteer work; Ada kisses men. Each according to their talents.”

My husband doesn’t kiss women, I thought. Or didn’t.

And this kiss is not like that other one.

Aloud, I said lightly, “I don’t mind. Why should I? Joe’s wife kisses Ada’s husband. Or had you forgotten?”

“Not hardly,” Sam said, looking at me without smiling.

“Not so’s you’d notice.”

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“Maybe,” I said, the ringing in my ears escalating until it seemed to roar in my head, “Ada’s husband ought to do it again. Just to make sure he remembers how.”

He stepped back into the room and opened his arms to me and I went into them, and raised my face, and closed my eyes. When he kissed me this time, when his mouth moved to my throat and then to my breast, when he pulled me so hard into the curve of his body that I could feel the heat of him through his clothes and through mine, I did not pull away. I pressed him against me so tightly I could feel my nails go into his flesh through the shirt. Explain that to Ada, I thought dizzily. Something deep inside me, which had been clenched and chilled ever since we got to Italy, heated and softened and opened. I heard a sound start in my throat.

Against my breast, his mouth answered me.

The phone rang.

I froze. He did not move either.

“Let it ring,” he murmured hoarsely.

But the moment was gone, broken. Finally he moved away from me and went to the desk and picked the phone up, pushing the wiry tangle of copper hair off his neck. I stood looking out into the garden, seeing but not registering that Ada was back in her chair and everyone was talking normally now. Presently I felt, rather than saw, Sam behind me.

“Yolie, wanting to know what time,” he said. His voice was still thick and hoarse. “She’s a regular ball-breaker, is Yolie. Well, Cat. Saved by the bell. Unless you were asking?”

I turned to him and put my hands on his shoulders and smiled. Somehow things were better now. I could HILL TOWNS / 309

not have said why, except that the savage, shocking pain was gone. I felt equal to anything.

“Not yet,” I said. “Not quite yet.”

“Ask soon, Cat.”

“I will,” I said. “I will.”

The session was over and we both knew it. I gathered up my packages and started to the door. I did not care, now, whether Joe was in our room or not. I could handle it either way. I had a formidable weapon. I could effect it with one word: now.

He walked with me to the door.

“I forgot to ask you,” he said. “What did you see? What did you like best?”

I started to laugh.

“Balls,” I said. “I saw balls.”

I was still laughing as I reached the staircase. Behind me, I heard him start to laugh, too.

Our last dinner in Florence did not quite jell. The food was wonderful, and we drank a great deal of wine before and during dinner and had brandy and grappa after, but there was still a lingering feeling of unease and disorder. I could have accounted for it if I thought Joe knew I had seen him with Ada in our room, but I knew he had not. And I knew I was handling myself flawlessly. You can always tell when you are doing something well.

Joe had been asleep when I got back to our room, and I had bathed and changed into the green dress I had bought in Venice and gone down to the little library off the lounge to read until dinnertime. He did not appear until we were all seated at the table on the loggia, in the vine-shrouded arbor where I had sometimes sat during 310 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

the days. In the flickering light from the hurricanes he looked very thin, and there were still shadows under his blue eyes, but his narrow face was washed with new color, and the silky fall of his hair seemed lighter, sunbleached. There was a kind of interior hum about him, a motor running softly and strongly somewhere inside. It was the way he had been with me in the early days of our marriage, when he and I both had known that we would soon make love. I felt a kind of weary, bitchy amusement when he sat down next to me and slipped his arm around me. His hand slid back and forth on my bare back, under the dress. Now, at the evening’s end, his fingers traced my shoulder blades and ran lightly up and down my spine. Save it, bubba, I know who lit that fire, I thought. I smiled at him.

“You look good,” he said into my ear. “You really look pretty tonight, Cat. You must have had an awfully good time at the museum this morning.”

I turned my face into his neck and bit his earlobe delicately and quite hard. I felt him flinch slightly.

“Fabulous,” I said. “Maria and I saw more naked balls than at a marine boot camp. Marble, of course.”

“Did you, now,” Joe said. Across the table, Sam laughed.

I looked at him. I had not done that much this evening. Our eyes met and held, and I turned away.

“What a pity they were marble,” Yolanda said.

“Isn’t it,” Maria said from across the table.

There were round pink spots on her cheekbones, and her eyes glittered. Beside her, Colin tossed back brandy and did not look at her. He had said little all evening; Maria had chattered.

They’ve had another fight, I thought. We are not going to survive this trip. None of us are.

Yolanda was drinking quite a bit, for the first time HILL TOWNS / 311

that I knew of since that awful night in Rome when Joe had physically carried her into the Hassler. She was not at all drunk now, though, simply quieter than usual, and somehow very sharply focused. Her face had a full, suffused look to it, and her mouth seemed swollen, and there was an unmistakable fading hickey on her neck. When she had first appeared at the table, Sam had grinned at her and said, “Christ, Yolie, you look like you been rode hard and put up wet.”

“I have,” she said, grinning fiercely back at him. “Don’t you wish it had been you?” To the rest of us, she said, “I’ve missed you guys. What’s been going on in Eden?”

“Sam is nearly done with Cat,” Ada said, smiling across the table at me, shimmering in silky white. “And Colin is in a cast but out of pain, and Joe is much better. Maria and Cat went to the Uffizi this morning. Other than that, we’ve been very quiet. We’ve stayed pretty close to home.”

“Sounds like a veritable barrel of monkeys,” Yolie said. “In case you were thinking of asking, I’ve stuck pretty close to home, too, at least until this morning, at which time the lovely and talented young Cosimo got his feelings hurt and went home to his mama. She’s going to get the shock of her life. He’s definitely wind-broke, as Sam would say.”

“I bet he is,” Sam said.

Every one of us at this table is in some kind of state over sex, I thought suddenly. I am so goddamned sick of sex and innuendo and nuance I could vomit.

At the end of the meal, when we were sitting and drinking grappa, putting off getting up and going to our rooms, Joe said, “I did a smart thing. I went off and left all our travelers’

checks in the safe at the Fenice. You guys are going to have to pay up till we get to Siena.”

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For some reason it infuriated me.

“Damn it, Joe,” I said tightly. “When did you discover that wondrous feat?”

“When I got up to take a bath this morning.”

He looked at me in slight confusion. His brows puckered in annoyance; I was not generally sarcastic with Joe.

“I wish you’d told me. American Express is right past the Ponte Vecchio, on the Via Guicciardini. Maria and I were right there.”

“You were already gone, Cat,” he said coolly. “It doesn’t matter. There’s bound to be an office in Siena.”

He looked at Ada and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

“There is,” she said. “It’s up near the big banks. I know exactly where. I’d be glad to run down tomorrow afternoon and get them for you. You ought not stand in line for hours, and it usually takes that in a small office like Siena.”

“I can get them,” he said. “I feel fine now. Really.”

“Maybe we could all go get them,” I said.

“I have an even better idea,” Yolie said. “Cat, why don’t you stay behind for another day and get them here in the morning, and then we can see some gardens and maybe the Pitti tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll show you my Florence.

You can have half of my bed; it’s absolutely huge, and I promise they’ll change the sheets. We’ll drive over to Siena the next morning and meet the others. It’s only forty miles.”

“Well, you know, maybe I might,” I said slowly. I thought of a slow, sunny day, full of gardens and secret old streets and a long dinner in some tiny dark restaurant in a lost part of the city, and laughter. Easiness and laughter.

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Joe put his hand on my shoulder.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea at all,” he said. “I don’t think Cat can handle that by herself.”

I turned to look at him. He stared impassively back at me.

“Yes, I can,” I said.

“Cat, I want to do about another hour tomorrow afternoon,” Sam said. “We’re getting awfully close now.”

I looked at him across the table. In the candlelight his face, too, looked closed, almost unknown. The anger flared again, surprising me.

“Sam, really,” Ada said. “Cat needs some time to herself.

You’ve had sole custody of her almost every afternoon.”

“I really need her now,” he said.

“No, you don’t,” Yolanda said briskly. “You’re spoiled.

What’s one day? Cat hasn’t had much time just for herself this trip.”

“Do what you like, of course,” Joe said distantly. He moved his hand from my shoulder. “Ada can get us settled in.”

There was a silence around the table. I could feel it rippling, like water when you have tossed something heavy into it. I looked across at Yolanda in the wavering light and smiled. She smiled back.

“Let’s do it,” I said.

T
HEY LEFT EARLY THE NEXT MORNING FOR SIENA, ADA at the wheel, Maria beside her, Sam alone on the middle seat, already opening his sketchbook, Joe and Colin on the back seat.

“Sick bay,” Sam said as they climbed into the back. Joe looked at him sharply, but Sam only grinned benignly and said to me, “You can still change your mind, Cat. No telling what you’re going to miss.”

“That’s as good an argument as I ever heard for staying,”

I said. “Be careful, you all. We’ll see you tomorrow around lunchtime. Wait for us.”

Joe looked at me through the open window. He seemed much better; rest and the new coat of tan made him look himself again. He had been fast asleep when I came out of the bathroom the night before, and was nearly dressed when I woke this morning. We had said little, but that had been pleasant. I was relieved. I knew he had been genuinely angry at me last night about staying over. I wasn’t sure why. It was hard to

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read Joe’s anger in this place. It was hard to read my own.

I knew he was still annoyed at me, though. He gave my cheek only a swift, glancing kiss when he got into the car.

“Be very careful,” he said. “I still don’t like this.”

I put my hand lightly over his.

“It’s only a day,” I said.

I watched the station wagon out of sight down the curving drive and then went out into the garden and sat down to wait for Yolanda. It was early yet for the other guests, and I had the terrace and the pool to myself. The sun had not yet climbed over the line of cypresses at the far edge of the garden, and the pool was perfectly still, a mirror giving back terra-cotta urns and flowers, the sentinel fingers of the cypresses, the sky still brushed with fingers of pink cloud, but blue high up in its vault. There was no sound except birdsong and occasionally, from the road far below, the ci-cada buzzing of
motorini
. I took a deep breath and inhaled thyme and the sweet scent of drying grass clippings and, from somewhere nearby, the rich smell of fresh strong coffee.

I stretched my arms and legs as far as they would go and closed my eyes and smiled. I was alone in Italy for almost the first time. Alone in a place not the Mountain for only the second time in my life. The first time, in Venice, I had been sick with fear, ravaged by it. Here I was so happy as to be almost giddy.

A waiter came and I ordered a pot of coffee and two cups.

I was nearly through my first one when Yolanda came out through the French doors and toward me. She had her hair in one fat, glossy braid down her back and wore a peasant blouse pulled down on her brown shoulders and an ankle-brushing skirt of a vivid print. The 316 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

skirt had a slit far up her sleek thigh, though, I noticed with amusement, and she had on espadrilles that tied at the ankle.

She looked like a peasant painting from the Mezzogiorno, perhaps by Mantegna, lush, high-spirited, very young. I had never known anyone whose looks could change as swiftly as hers: worn, jaded, almost old when she had been excessive or was sad; bursting with youth and health when all was well with her. It struck me that I had no idea how old she was. She could have been any age from the mid-thirties to the mid-forties, depending on when one saw her. I knew she had still been a student when Sam had painted her, but I did not know exactly when that had been.