A Summer In Europe (9 page)

“You are tired?” Hans-Josef asked, surprised.

“I am,” she said simply. And because he was like Richard, because she knew precisely what to expect out of him, even after so short an acquaintance, she let him perform his gentlemanly deed of walking her to the stairs and shaking her hand good night.

“You will go on the trip to Pompeii tomorrow?” he asked.

“I’m planning on it,” she said, stepping away from him as she spoke, breaking apart the easy connection she felt to him, much like pulling a magnet off of a refrigerator. She couldn’t help but come to the dawning realization that the slight attraction she felt was not toward the man himself but to the effortless familiarity of being with that man.

“I will look forward to seeing you then.” Hans-Josef bobbed his head slightly and allowed her to go upstairs by herself and collapse, nearly comatose, into bed.

But she was awake now.

For the first time in at least five years, Gwen skipped her morning stretches without good reason. She slid out of bed and got dressed, glancing around the room for Aunt Bea. She didn’t see her aunt, but a note had been left for her, taped to the bathroom mirror with a Band-Aid:

Off to breakfast! Heard you were in the BAR having FUN last night!! Don’t be late for the bus or you’ll disappoint our tour guide—ha!

xo,

B.

Oh, no.

By the time she got down to the breakfast room, her aunt had already left—probably off gossiping about her somewhere in the hotel before the morning’s excursion to Pompeii. She didn’t see Hans-Joseph there either, but she knew where she
would
see him. Checking her watch (7:23 already), she downed half a glass of juice and a small pastry—no time for oatmeal—and grabbed a banana to go. Just twenty-four hours of being with her aunt in Rome, and Gwen was starting to turn into her. A disconcerting trend.

She hopped onto the bus and spied her aunt waving to her, just moments before Guido was due to depart for the two-hour ride.

“Good morning, Gwen,” Hans-Josef said from the first seat, his welcome cordial if somewhat reserved. He eyed her with careful courtesy.

“Good morning,” she murmured back. Then she nodded at Guido, sitting in the driver’s seat and ... Was he smiling at her?

Yes, he was. His grin broadened and he said a hearty,
“Buongiorno.”

“I, um,
buongiorno,
” she managed. Now she
knew
her aunt had been gossiping about her. She hastened to her seat.

The bus had barely pulled away from the hotel when Aunt Bea began her inquisition in hushed, excited tones. “Hester said she saw you in the bar with Hans-Josef last night! Good girl!” She all but rubbed her hands together in glee. “What did you two do?”

Gwen didn’t remember seeing Hester last night, but being a part of this tour was much like living in a small town. Eyes were always watching. “We just had a couple of drinks and talked a little, that’s all,” she told her aunt. But when Gwen glanced around the bus and spotted Hester, the old woman gave her two thumbs up and a huge smile.

“What did you talk about?”

“Oh, just stuff about his life as a tour guide. He told me about his pet, er, Rolf. We were there for less than an hour, so ...” Gwen let this thought trail off, hoping her aunt would drop the subject. But that wasn’t Aunt Bea’s way.

Beatrice lowered her voice and said, “So, you went somewhere else then? Did he walk you up to the room after that? Kiss you good night?”

Gwen sighed. “No. Neither. I just came upstairs by myself and went to bed.”

“Oh.” Disappointment etched a frown on Aunt Bea’s face. “Well, never mind. There’s always tonight. Or tomorrow.”

Aunt Bea was clearly incapable of remembering Gwen’s attachment to Richard, but Gwen remembered it. She was, in fact, surprised and moderately concerned that she hadn’t heard from him. She’d sent him an e-mail from the Hotel Adriatica’s lobby the afternoon they’d arrived, just to let him know they’d gotten to Rome safely. Though she’d checked several times since then, he still hadn’t e-mailed her back.

Before Gwen could protest or remind her aunt for the umpteenth time that she had a boyfriend already, Davis decided to join their conversation. He leaned forward from his seat behind them. Sudoku workbook and pen in hand and eyes glittering with unusually good humor, he said, “Stop trying to fight it, Gwen. Don’t you know that you’ll
have
to fall in love with someone on this trip? It’s what young people are supposed to do. With drama like that going on, it makes us old folks feel like we’re watching good cable. Don’t wreck it.”

Dr. Louie, who was Davis’s seatmate for the bus ride, laughed into his fist. “Yeah,” he boomed. The man was seemingly unable to whisper. “Doesn’t matter if you’re dating someone else back home. All bets are off here. A long trip like this is a different reality.”

“Another world,” Davis added with a nod.

“A parallel universe,” Louie said.

Gwen swiveled around in her seat to talk to them both. “A parallel universe?” she asked softly.

“Exactly,” Davis said. “We’re the same players but in a different play. And when the set changes, so do the plotlines.”

Matilda, who’d been eavesdropping without apology from across the aisle, bent forward until her neck was almost at Gwen’s shoulder. “You need to have at least one fling in this play,” she insisted. “Get all angsty about it, mess up your relationships—at least temporarily—and feel your heart breaking so badly you’ll think you’re dying. That’s the unwritten script, Gwen.” She smiled merrily. “Follow along.”

“Yeah!” Davis said, getting into it and raising his pen in emphasis. “You’re young, so go wild. Dance until dawn. Disobey your relatives. Live free!”

Aunt Bea reached over the seat and slapped him on the chest with a formidable thwack. “What do you mean she should ‘disobey’ her relatives, Davis? That’s just nonsense talking now. You shush.” Her aunt paused, glancing between Davis, Dr. Louie and Matilda. “All of you are right about the rest, though.”

Gwen suppressed a powerful desire to roll her eyes. In her opinion—not that they’d listen—they were
all
talking nonsense. But there was little she could do to either comment or get away from them at the moment. She also squirmed under the steady gaze of Hans-Josef, who, being that he was only four rows ahead of them and trying to give the group a previsit lecture on Pompeii, could not have helped overhearing and certainly seeing some of her aunt’s and her aunt’s friends’ antics on the bus. These S&M people were like schoolchildren on a field trip.

Upon arrival at the famous tourist spot, Hans-Josef purchased their tickets and introduced them to their on-site guide, a thin woman named Maria-something-or-other, who was going to spend a couple of hours walking them through the city of Pompeii, starting with the “Street of Abundance.” He waited until Maria had control of the group and had done her little intro spiel on how there had once been 15,000 people living there. How it was a commercial center with villas, shops, inns, a marketplace, baths, taverns, even theaters. That they would soon see the amphitheater, which predated the Colosseum by one hundred years. And that the artwork, paintings and frescoes, excavated in the eighteenth century, had sent the Europe of the time into a neoclassical whirlwind intent on copying the style and artistic opulence of Pompeii. Only then did Hans-Josef slip to the back of the group, content to let this expert take the reins for a while.

At the earliest opportunity, somewhere near the Temple of Jupiter, Juno or, maybe, Minerva, he pulled Gwen aside and asked, “Are you feeling well this morning?”

“Yes,” she said. Then, figuring she’d better deal with this head on, she added, “I’m sorry for departing so abruptly last night. A wave of ... exhaustion caught up with me. Thanks again for the conversation and the drinks, though.”

He squinted at her. “That is all right,” he said, sounding cautious. “Perhaps we try it again another time, hmm?”

She nodded. “Sure. Perhaps.”

They walked along in affable silence, and Gwen reflected that it was an odd blessing, really, that this should be so easy. She could use a friend in Europe, particularly one who was used to knowing more about the history and culture here than anyone around him (so he would be less likely to be horrified by any gaffes she’d make). And he, too, must be craving companionship from people his own age to overlook the relative oddities of her behavior.

“So, what’s it like being a professional tour guide?” she asked him, glancing first at his very straight profile and, then, at her feet. The dust from the well-trodden path coated her new, white and oh-so-American sneakers with a thin film of rusty, ancient earth. “You are certainly well suited to it. Very organized and efficient.”

Next to her, his posture straightened even more than usual and his chest puffed out a bit. Again, a nonverbal reminder of Richard. She smiled, thinking of her boyfriend and the way he took such pride in his work.

“
Danke
. Thank you,” Hans-Josef said. “It is a career that keeps me busy. I am gone from home for several weeks at a time, yet I see many fine places in Europe like this—” He swept his hand across the expanse of open space, mostly empty save for a collection of column rubble and some buildings their lady guide said had once been the Pompeiians’ forum and public marketplace. The heart of their city.

Gwen noted a few ragtag “fountains,” some kind of bakery area and a bunch of tiles dotting the ground that they were told had once been stones to reflect the moonlight in the town square so the citizens of Pompeii could see where they were walking at night. She supposed Hans-Josef meant his words to be complimentary, but, to her, it only underscored how lonely he must be if visits to barren ruins like this—however impressive from a purely historical standpoint—were the highlights of his workweek.

“What is it about a place like Pompeii that makes you enjoy visiting it again and again?” she asked him, truly mystified but wanting desperately to understand.

He paused and pursed his lips. “I think you will see for yourself in a moment. We are nearing the site where they keep the plaster casts.”

Sure enough, their guide Maria led them toward a shedlike area with windows all around. An enclosure called the “Garden of the Fugitives.” It took no special leap of imagination to visualize the past here. It presented itself to them in the form of human-shaped plaster casts—hollow outlines of the dead in a fragile graveyard—accessible to anyone willing to look at them.

“It is interesting,
ja?
” Hans-Josef said. “You can see the figures of the people as they were on the day when Vesuvius erupted. They are frozen in time for us.”

Gwen nodded. These people had been killed in the summer of 79AD by the volcano’s poisonous gas, and then covered in twelve feet of ash. When the site was more thoroughly excavated in the 1860s, plaster had been injected into the spaces left by the long-disintegrated bodies to get the shapes of the humans who’d inhabited the area two millennia ago. She looked closer at a couple of the figures—a man on his elbow, having lost the battle to get back up again, a woman curled in a ball, eleven others who had fallen. The wrathful volcanic lava trapped these unlucky individuals forevermore in its negative space, preserving only the vaguest lines of facial expression, but Gwen could recognize a look of terror when she saw one. If her own expression were to be set on infinite pause for future centuries to gawk at, she wouldn’t want it to be like that. She wouldn’t want her very last look at the world to be one of such fear. Such horrified shock.

“The Italians have a saying,” Hans-Josef told her.
“ ‘The nearness of death exalts life.’ ”
He nodded at her as if reading her phobia and hoping to erase it.

Didn’t work.

Gwen said, “Oh,” and glanced up at Mount Vesuvius, towering above them just six miles north. The nearness of death, indeed! She then studied the people on the tour with her. There stood Zenia, who was laughing with Davis over something, her face a beam of delight. Davis, by contrast, had only a sly smile playing about the edges of his mouth, a more reserved grin. The honeymooners appeared interested in the lady guide’s discourse when not distracted or confused. Gwen noticed that Sally seemed intent on finding something in her purse and had pressed her husband into service by getting him to hold its contents—item by item—while she sifted through her belongings.

Aunt Bea caught Gwen’s eye and took in that she was standing near Hans-Josef. Nothing short of mischievousness danced across her face. To Bea’s left, Hester was huffing in exhaustion, her expression a study in determination laced with the pain of fatigue. Gwen remembered with an unpleasant start that the dear lady was ninety, after all. Not only old, but also a multiple of ten. Gwen
hated
those. Too many people she’d loved had died on an exact decade: Her mom at forty, her dad at sixty, Aunt Bea’s husband, Uncle Freddy, at fifty ... and she was thirty this year. She knew she wouldn’t sleep soundly until she’d made it to thirty-one.

“So, you see?” Hans-Josef said, breaking into her thoughts. “It is like these ancient Pompeiians are alive again for us.”

“That’s true,” Gwen said, but she refrained from adding the follow-up to this thought. That the people alive and well on the tour were just a moment away from death, too. That the only difference between the plaster-figure woman and Hester or Aunt Bea or Gwen herself was the air in their lungs and the fact that their facial expressions could still change.

Connie Sue passed by Gwen and paused with her to examine the people—the human fossils, really—through the windows of the enclosure. She then turned her gentle gaze on Gwen and whispered, “It’s sad, isn’t it, honey? There’s that saying, most people—or maybe it’s just most women—live lives of quiet desperation. Here, all of their regrets are etched on their faces.”