Contemporary Gay Romances (5 page)

She could go now.

Because Shaun gave to Mike, and Mike gave to Shaun…True love…True love!

I had become separated from the group of tourists in yet another of those interminable villages in the Tuscan hills when I turned at a sudden vine-clustered wall and happened upon a tiny piazza.

The past frantic twenty minutes I’d been threading my way through a high-walled labyrinth of narrow alleys where every door seemed bolted shut and the lowest windows began some ten feet above my head, shielded from view by fractious-looking bushes. So the little open area I now happened upon was more than a mere opening out—it was a veritable expostulation!

Hardly larger than a tennis court, the little piazza, like the rest of the now-nameless town—for in my panic, I’d forgotten its name—was surrounded by tall, tottering, umber brick walls. But as I stumbled out of deep shadow and into the glare of the late May midafternoon, I saw that one wall was lower than the others, indeed only thigh-high, capped with rough-hewn flower boxes, carnival with bright geraniums. And beyond the little wall and gala crimson blossoms…beyond was an astounding view from a great height: the depths, the widths of an unsuspected valley, traveling ahead so ruler straight, and for so distant a passage, I swore that if I squinted, I’d be able to make out the Tyrrhenian’s triple-blue coast waters.

More surprising still, the piazzetta was inhabited and made use of. Since I’d left the others, I’d not seen a soul: not a grandmother lounging upon a towering windowsill, not a mongrel sunning amid the gnarled olives that dominated every tiny plot of garden. Along the view-end of the piazza, a miniature café had been erected: a mere three or four spindly white metal tables with elegant matching chairs, seemingly from some long-shuttered hotel—my only hint in the barbarous town of a more elaborate way of life. A single octagonal fluttering tutti-frutti umbrella had been raised between two tables. Grottoed within its shade sat the oddest beautiful people I’d ever seen.

Either of them would attract notice on the busy modern thoroughfare of any metropolis. Because the young woman was in profile to me, I suppose I noticed her first: her long neck, her honey skin, her heavily lidded sloe-eyes, her nose which, while not quite aquiline, suggested Senecan tragedies, her full, unparted lips, the tiny brushes of golden hair scalloped around her ear, the close fit of her oversized bone-colored raffia sun hat. She was sensual and chaste; all flesh yet as though carved of alabaster: such a curious melange I’m afraid I stared, rudely, astonished that she could also possess mobility. She stretched a long, fine-fingered hand before herself as though in benediction, or admiring her fingernails, and as she did, she caught not only my eye but that of her companion opposite, and her lips moved.

She’d addressed a young man whose smashed gray fedora had been tilted askew, framing in a nimbus of ash felt a richly colored chiseled perfection. True, his nose was slightly snub for so refined a harmony, his lips fuller if possible than the woman’s, his eyes more deeply set, the shallow triangle of teeth open to view excessively white against his tanned skin. Even within the shade of his hat brim, his eyes flickered darkly as he unconsciously lifted a hand in gesture to me, as though encompassing the vista, reminding me of one of those burghers of old Flanders painted as an afterthought at the extremities of a vast triptych, some merchant who sponsored the artist, and was thus allowed to eternally present his city—minuscule in the background of some stupendously dramatic, infinitesimally detailed
Deposition from the Cross
.

The slightly over-elegant gestures of the two as well as the evidence of napery, china, and glassware suggested a meal consummated, and dawdling, as though neither wished to make a decision to move. At first I thought them siblings because of their strong resemblance in beauty, then lovers from their languorous and wordless communication. Until I noticed the third member of their party.

No wonder I had missed this figure, so ensconced was it in the shell of a high, hooded, wicker-work chair. At first, all I could discern of a personage was cloth, as though linens and pillows had been enthusiastically plumped and allowed to softly deflate.

In that moment of trying to make out the figure inside the hooded chair (for I’d convinced myself that it was a person), a very small peasant woman came into view on the piazza. She was quite round and wide-faced, with ebony hair pulled back into a doubly braided bun, mounted upon the back of her head like a spare tire upon the side fender of a Rolls-Royce Phantom. Even more amazing was her costume, one almost parodistic in color and cut, it made her so much the tour guide’s
contadina
. She’d stepped out of a double door from which she must have seen me stagger into the piazza and addressed me.

“’Giorno, Signor. Voi rifrescarlei!”

Her plump hand swept toward the tables, offering me a seat. Her words of welcome drew forth slow turns from the Etruscan couple.

When I didn’t immediately answer her offer to refresh myself, she added brightly,
“Noi siamo molto gentile,”
attempting I guess to reassure me. Instead, she confused me further. Who of us I wondered, were very civilized? She and I? Or the other three?

I took a seat at the only other already-set table, sharing the umbrella a bit, and the taverna owner—for that was who I supposed the plump woman to be—nodded in approval and after asking if I was hungry, and not waiting for a response, obliged me with an oral menu: pasta and risotto of the day, coffee,
gelati di noce
, and
delice
.

Thinking I would rest here a minute before venturing down into the contentious little town again and attempt to locate the others, I ordered coffee—with milk, so I wouldn’t receive the standard bitter, dark double sip of
espresso
.

“Niente di mangiar?”
she asked appalled, as if I’d asked to drink blood.

I wasn’t hungry. Couldn’t eat a thing. Then, fatigue taking over, my little bit of Italian by now spent, I added in English, “Just something to drink.”

The woman with the exquisite profile moved an inch to look at me better.

“She asks what food you will take,” her companion said, turning in his chair just enough that I knew I was being addressed. He concluded by favoring me with the slightest hint of smile: it devastated me.

“Is it required?” I fumbled back at him.

The peasant woman waited, her apron edge twisting in her fingers.

“Not required,” he allowed, and I couldn’t for the life of me place his accent, which didn’t match any I’d heard so far in this country. “Yet,” he went on, and seemed at a loss.

“Yet preferred?” I tried.

He bowed almost imperceptibly in my direction, then smiled more fully. The pearly gates opened, irradiating the piazza, dazzling me.

“If I must eat…then…anything!” I said, casting my gustatory destiny to the winds that played with the stranger’s lapels. To the woman waiting, I said, “Anything sweet. Anything but chocolate,” I tacked on, as an afterthought.

A soft sputter of what I assumed to be a dialect of Italian between the man and the peasant woman conveyed the information. The
contadina
curtseyed in our general direction and flounced off, like a dismissed
comprimario
.

“May I ask,” his ravishing companion suddenly spoke up, “why
not
chocolate? Have we not heard it scientifically proven that chocolate is the food of love?”

Her accent was identical to his, and perfectly inscrutable, her voice as dusky in contralto as his had been burnished in baritone.

Under differing circumstances I might have disputed her statement, but I was weary and unwilling to extend myself. “I’m allergic to chocolate.”

In truth, I liked chocolate as much as the next person, but the Italians’ use of it so far in my trip had sated my limited palate for the stuff. I’d not eaten a chocolate I was comfortable with since I’d crossed the Grand Corniche into the country.

“Allergic? Exactly how allergic?” I heard twitter from the depth of the hooded wicker chair in a thin, high voice with a pure American accent, startling in its directness.

“I get fevers,” I fibbed.

“Hives too?” she asked primly.

“Not for years, no.”

“Red streaks on your arms? Rashes on your abdomen? Blotches on your bottom?”

“Sometimes.”

“
High
fevers?” she probed.

“Low but insistent.”

“A dry mouth?”

“It’s been so long since I…”

She ignored the attempt at qualification. “You see, Ercole. All the symptoms,” and she seemed to subside back into the pillows of the wicker-work in what I was forced to assume was hypoallergenic musing. In the enfolding silence—striking by the absence of birdsong—I thought of the rising pitch of her interrogation, and the name by which she had called him. Something classical, no? Hercules? Yes. And the young woman then would be whom? Dejaneira? Diana? Aphrodite?

I must have muttered the last name aloud, in Italian.

“No, no!” the young woman laughed.

Ercole now motioned to me, clearly asking me to join them.

“American?” the still nameless lovely young woman said rather than asked when I took the fourth seat at their table. She swanned a long, tanned wrist at me, and I took her hand, unsure whether to kiss it. The air around us smelled of almonds—almonds, spun sugar, something vaguely metallic. I took the soft hand and she looked at me from within the striated illumination of her sun hat.

This close, her eyes were rounder, hazel, green, golden: no, the same cream color of those long bars of
ciocolata Jesu
sold on the Via Urbana in Rome.

“The Grandmama believes it is a sign of old nobility to be allergic to chocolate,” she now said, amused. “Having blue-blood. We—Ercole and myself—we eat liters of it.” She laughed, sharing the secret with him and I would have given her the keys to my house to hear that laugh again.

So charmed by her, and by the fact of the heap of white skin, white hair, and bones I could make out among the purple material of the wicker chair, that I missed their names in the long liquidity of Ercole’s “Pardon me to introduce ourselves, etc.” I did regain presence of mind just long enough to register that he called the old woman Principessa Someone or other.

Our waitress returned carrying a tray of milky looking drinks in tall mauve coolers, each glass set within a chased silver holder sculpted in relief, so that frolicking Nereids barely fended off the advance of amorous Tritons, all of them about to be swallowed by wide-mouthed, rather jovial-looking sea serpents. They looked old and valuable. Where was my coffee?

I turned to ask if one of these was it, and was interrupted by Ercole, smooth as glass, saying, “Better than the coffee you ordered, signor. A dessert and drink in one.”

I sipped at it with a Bronzino-thin merman of a spoon. “Amaretto?”

“Amaretto, yes,” a touch of eagerness in his voice, “something else too.”

“Brandy?
Eau de vie de Poire
, perhaps?” I hadn’t a clue.

“It is quite special,” the young woman said, pointing to the Principessa’s nearly non-existent lap where I now made out a mauve glass flask, the same tint as the coolers, and like them encased in a chased silver carrier with nautical allegories.

“Absinthe?” I tried, half-joking.

They laughed and shook their heads no, and I laughed, a bit bleakly, I admit, wondering if I were being slipped a mickey, or if Ercole had mentioned among that long list of surnames I’d scarcely listened to, the name Borgia.

“This is your first time here?” the young woman asked, changing the subject. “You are here on vacation as a tourist? Or to study?”

“A little of both.”

“You pardon my curiosity?”

She might have asked me the number of my bank account, and although it was so depleted now it would hardly matter, I still would have gladly given it.

“And you adore the country?” she enthused softly.

Well…” I began, and stopped.

Manners decreed that I ought to say yes, certainly, I adored their country. But the truth was a bit more complex. Not that it wasn’t altogether lovely to look at, so many beautiful places and things to see. But I was more or less alone in Italy—and that seemed to make all the difference, didn’t it? Unable to see Italy with Sarah, I was somewhat lost, even forlorn.

I ought to note here immediately that we’d had no falling out and that Sarah had abandoned me suddenly, without warning, two weeks before, outside of Monaco. She’d simply asked me to stop the Renault and she’d stepped out, grabbed her two pieces of luggage out of the backseat where she’d placed them that morning at our
pensione
in Nice, and she’d walked into the little train station and onto the steps of a waiting train taking her back to Paris. All without a word or a hint of explanation.

I’d still not gotten over her doing it, nor even worse, her utter calm in doing it. How she’d met the train precisely on time, how she’d known precisely where I had to stop for her to catch it. (Had she planned in the
pensione
the night before, as I’d written out postcards, as I’d slept? She must have!) How she left me without a hint of complaint, or kiss, or word of good-bye. I’d thought our trip together, our being together, heaven. How could she have thought differently? What could I have done to so alienate her? To not even deserve an explanation?