No Place for an Angel (32 page)

He could never drive that car, even though he could overlook all the rest, without feeling like a kept man. The fact that the relationship was not a sexual one (and this Irene, outsmarted for once, had never once imagined) seemed, perversely enough, to make his independence even more of a pressing matter; a cicisbeo was worse than a hired lover. So he got the car, and it went immediately to his head.

He had not ever in his life owned a car, though he had once begun to save for one—having felt exactly the same way then as he did now—that he couldn't drive around in cars owned by the family of Linell McIntosh. He recalled that former time, and seeing how much better off now he was than he was then, he could begin to burst into hoarse and rasping song while wrestling through Roman traffic, something few people, it can be safely said, have ever been capable of. His songs were mainly those of a decade before, or even wartime, and he could not, Catherine told him gently, pulling down her skirt, carry a tune. But he went on just the same: “I'd rather have a paper doll to call my own. Then have a fickle-minded real life girl. . . .” A Lambretta skidded to a pulsing stop before him. He almost had ten accidents a day; to Catherine's mild dismay he seemed not to notice these minor things. It occurred to her, though she did not say it, that he was a sort of comical counterpart of Mario, the Italian he spoke of so often. That he would any day now enter his ten-year-old Austin in the mille miglia, like a man in Texas who had been so proud of his ploughing mare which could also do, all day long, a shambling gait he thought of as a plantation walk, that he entered her in a swanky horseshow in Fort Worth and literally expected her to win every prize.

She did not like Barry to know that he amused her. His art, she saw, was serious, almost too serious to him, and she thought he might even be good. Besides, they were giving each other health, that precious thing so few people will ever think they will ever need. Until they get sick. Your mind can get sick before you know it, thought Catherine, and soon you do not see any more, you do not hear any more, you walk but do not know where you are going, you forget to eat. “What, Barry? What did you say?” “What comes after ‘Send me one dozen roses . . .'?” “‘Put my heart in beside them . . .'” “Good girl!” At a stop light on the Barberini he smacked her on the cheek.

Linell McIntosh eluded, Irene pushed indefinitely aside, himself not dead in Siracusa after all, himself at least to all appearances the lover of a rich American signora molto simpatica, and besides the owner of his own car—at this point, grinding gears, he laughed at himself. But the truth was, in spite of all this foolishness, his heart, perhaps foolish also, was genuinely high. For success had begun to glimmer before him again, that swamp light, that foxfire, that delicate resplendent butterfly dipping from flower to flower over a wide meadow, sailing easily over the ditch too wide to jump and gone by the time he had plunged down and scrambled muddy and spent up the farther side. He felt success rise indefinable in his throat when he dragged up out of the Mediterranean one fair morning at nine that curious wide shell, open
almost to flatness at the front, scrolled mysteriously into its own secrecy toward the rear, sensed its deep sexual suggestion of openness and mystery, its colors too a deceptive contrast, dull brown without, the interior obscurely flesh-colored and filmy with the elusive iridescence of the sea. He began at once to remember Bernini; the moulded stone his triton sat upon in a public square in Rome was a shell supported on a pedestal of dolphins, while the figure drank his fill from a great conch, drenching his neck and shoulders with a lavish gush of water. A step further and he would consider doing colored sculpture, as the Greeks had done. He always wondered why this was practiced no more. And so stood transfixed in the sunlight until Catherine, perched on a rock with some post cards on her knees, thought he looked somewhat like a statue himself, just by thinking of them, his skinny tough body poised about the shell on which he gazed as though all creation would burst from it at any minute. She remembered Latham with a captured chipmunk held tenderly in his hand while his finger stroked the tiny frightened head. “Look, Mother, just look. See the stripes? He's perfect, and scared to death. Don't shake, don't tremble.” Did she feel nothing of what Barry wanted her to feel for him because he always brought Latham to her mind? Barry claimed to be older than he looked, but she could never really believe him. She imagined that he took easily to girls like the rattle-brained Arkansas girl he had at one time, haphazardly, it seemed, even married. They were all limited in their pretty little heads, Catherine imagined, and he quickly ran out the other side of these relationships. She only hoped he didn't get hung up on her. She was too fond of him for that to happen.

Once at night, staying with him at Sperlonga after a day of swimming in a sea freshly running after a rain, he had picked her up as she lay half-asleep in a ratty old beach chair after supper and wine, and carried her to his side of the shack and laid her down beside him. But though she put her arms around him, she presently fell asleep, as softly quiescent as a child. The next day he hardly spoke to her. “Maybe you think something is wrong with me?” she ventured at lunch. If he looked hurt and was hurt, it was something, she saw, that in his charity he had not given a name to. “Why you instead of me?” he asked irritably. That broke it up, and presently they were laughing.

In the afternoon he polished the car with the remains of their drinking water, whistling tunelessly. They might have been in a back yard in Texas, Catherine thought, after Sunday dinner. That night at a crossroads returning to Rome, a car clipped in from behind, failed to stop and raked across their fender. The only odd thing about it was that Barry, so often wrong, was completely in the right. The other driver, a portly Roman returning from the country with his daughter, a rather sullen girl whose mind was obviously elsewhere, had been entirely at fault. Barry, inspired by his own righteousness and by the car madness (his identity now so close to the fenders and doors and bumpers it seemed his own body had been run down), exploded in a volley of Italian. “Cretino!” he finally shouted. It seemed to him later that anyone should have known better than that. Insurance cards were exchanged like dueling notes. The Roman said nothing, but bowed, held the door for his daughter, if daughter she was, and allowed Barry to drive on ahead. “I should call him,” Barry said, two days later, “and tell him I'm sorry.” He had just received word from the States that a minor fellowship he had applied for had been granted. The shells had already led him somewhere. He had sent sketches of them in by the ream. His heart was mellow. “I'd just forget the accident,” Catherine said. She added, offhandedly, as a wealthy Texas girl always did, “The insurance people will take care of it.”

Barry, who knew only too well how things taken for granted, like medical care and insurance, value received for value given, meant nothing in Italy, heard this with a touch of apprehension. He saw himself groveling in agony before the public telephone in Siracusa with none to help and no assurance he would be able to get back into the room he had quitted because whether he was dying or not the padrona wanted no long-distance supplementario on her bill. God, what people! Then he forgot it all. He had a secret little plan for making even more money than the fellowship would bring him. He had been told by a Cockney spiv he knew who worked around the Italian tourist offices in the Piazza Esedra that some people who ran cars up to the border to renew their permits made the practice pay handsomely by smuggling contraband French and Swiss merchandise over into Italy. “They keep a lookout for certain names only. By the time you could even get suspected, you could have made a million or so lire. These chaps are well informed. They know exactly what they're doing. They even warn you that now's the time to stop it. You stop, take the profit and never do anything like it again. It happens all the time, why shouldn't you?” Barry dismissed the idea, but it had come back to him more than once. Catherine would never know it;
the thing that amused him to consider was Irene's self-righteous tirade if she ever found out. Irene, who had cheated Charles all over Siracusa, and for all he knew was at it still, tearing off to find Mario on every provocation. He wondered what had been left out of his make-up that he could never see the latent morality in money. In this sense he was like an Italian. Money always stood in the way of everything he wanted and kept trying to color all his deeper satisfactions. He wanted to slap it aside, like so much cobweb. Linell McIntosh's family had thought it was all right to dismiss everything in the world which had to do with art (they even expected him to see the light and dismiss it too), but the minute he touched their money, you could hear them squalling all the way to New York. If this was right, he hoped he'd never see it.

While he was still pondering all this, he and Catherine stopped by his rooms on returning from the sea on a late July afternoon and found a down-at-the-heels quiet stooped man waiting at the door. He was doing a routine check on foreign cars in Rome, he explained, and would like to see Barry's documents. The upshot was that Barry owed the Italian government twenty million lire. From that moment on, Barry had not a moment's peace. The fine hung above him like the blade of the guillotine, suspended night and day with unmoving accuracy, every time he looked up into those velvet summer skies. They were like the eyes of Linell McIntosh, he thought, and hastened off to his next appointment, a white hope for escape, reprieve, or even justice. Like a hound subject to fits and owned by no one, he ran daily through Rome, going to see semi-amused lawyers who thought all Americans were either rich or had access to money, customs
officials who said one thing one day and another the next, confidence men who took his bribes to win the ear of personal friends in high administrative positions whom, it turned out, they had never even met, going next on side trips on buses to Milan and Bologna to locate the Australian who had sold him a car with fake documents and had by now mysteriously disappeared, to long conferences with a Lloyd's insurance man who was a member of the exiled Polish aristocracy, and all, all, he finally had to face, dragging himself to yet another fruitless appointment with an English tourist he had bribed to hide the car in a haystack outside Rome, because he had been an idiot in the first place and having paid for the car and insured it and got his driving license, had never once suspected that it could have been in Italy for eight years without ever having had the slightest right to be there. Once stirred up, tribe after tribe of Italian bureaucrats began to join the torture circle, drumming and dancing about him, occasionally hurling a flaming brand. Once he inquired, he found himself charged with the accumulated fines of ten other people who had previously owned the car, all now vanished and not to be found. Like the contraband which he had planned to traffic in himself, the car had, with the help of postwar confusion, been smuggled into Italy. Barry lost weight until he was skin and bones, rushed around so much he had no time even to shave, and was plagued by a nervous stomach. Why did this happen to me? At long last, he remembered the crossroads at twilight, the exchange of insurance cards and the one word “Cretino!” splitting the soft air. Thoughtlessly in his pride before Catherine, he had hurled this word at a quiet signorile Roman, in the presence of his daughter or mistress. Now all of Italy had turned on him. His work was at a standstill, he was ashamed to go to Charles Waddell, in anguish lest Irene should know of his humiliation.

Only Catherine was privy to his misery. She sympathized and offered to write a check. He could pay her later, she said. Money was not important, she told him. He rejected the very idea.

He could not understand, he said, why, since so many people had been far more at fault than himself and had shrewdly and deliberately violated the law, he had through ignorance to take all the blame. This was a legal matter, Catherine suggested. She had not been married to a lawyer for nothing. No, said Barry; things always went wrong for him, always. Catherine did not agree or disagree. A sense of anxiety had begun to pervade her. Why was he so easily brought down? Wasn't it simply because he had no money? No, it had been his effort to appear well before her which had led him into the whole purchase of the car. A desire to protect him awoke, yet she saw plainly that he was destined to get in over his head before he knew what was happening. Arkansas (he had been lied to, driven beyond endurance), Siracusa (fleeing his estranged wife, he had had a plausible collision with a boulder out from Agrigento and had landed beneath the façade of a Greek temple with his knee gashed open), now Rome. He should have known, she thought. It was exactly what he was afraid of her thinking. I should have known, he admitted, but it was too late. His only excuse: he had been thinking of seashells. It was not enough.

I do not wish to protect any man, thought Catherine, in matter-of-fact Texas terms, though her manners prevented her saying so. “I'm worrying you, Barry,” she said. She added, with the sincerity of wanting to think she was telling the truth, “In a way, you see, it's really all my fault.”

She gave everything on a silver platter, as was her habit, and then, gathering up the exquisite bag she had bought when coming by to keep a dinner date with him, she walked out of his studio and away, lonely again, with the country she had almost discovered, just as Barry had almost discovered the taste of success, dissolving in her every step into unreality.

Desperately lonely, after a few days, she sought out Irene, who asked her to lunch, as Charles was away.

Catherine industriously kept her promise to Barry and said nothing to Irene about his imbroglio. They lunched on the terrace with Charles' pots of roses withdrawn to sentinel distances.

“What happened to your marriage, Catherine?” Irene came right out and asked. Nobody on two continents had ever asked her that simple question. Not even phalanxes of psychiatrists had once come up with anything so plain.