Italian Fever (15 page)

He turned her onto her side, fitted her hips against his groin, and kissed her softly, repeatedly, along her shoulder and neck. As she moved against him, her head slipped over the edge of the mattress and she was looking down into DV’s agonized face.

This was the bed DV had slept in with Catherine.

She pushed herself away from the edge, deeper into Massimo’s embrace. But she could feel DV there, staring up from the floor, and lingering everywhere in the room, like a chill. He hadn’t died here, but she did not doubt that he had suffered, and some residue of that suffering still coated every surface.

Go to Rome, she told herself. Forget DV Get away from this house. Go spend a few days among the living.

Chapter 12

W
ITHIN THREE MINUTES
of their entrance into his dining room, Antonio Cini, who constituted the first test of their discretion, surmised the new state of intimacy between Lucy and Massimo. He might have managed it sooner had he not been distracted by an argument he was carrying on with his father, which concluded when the old man broke away in a huff and stalked off to his dark hall without acknowledging the arrival of his guests. Antonio turned his attention upon them; his cold eyes raked over Lucy like a descending glacier, and she understood that something on her surface had altered since his last inspection and that he knew she and Massimo were now lovers. He took her hand and bent over her, placing light kisses on each cheek, murmuring her name like an insinuation. She noticed a fragrance—perhaps it was something he put on his hair—too sweet, and muddled by something acrid, perspiration, or just the odor of his flesh. The combination was sickening. She was
reminded of the last time she had been in this dining room. None of the other guests had been ill that night; surely there had been nothing wrong with the food, but the memory of her illness and the oppressive closeness of Antonio combined to put a sudden check on her appetite. “So you are completely recovered,” he said. “Thanks to the good efforts of this gentleman …” and he took Massimo’s hand with something almost like enthusiasm. Lucy was struck again by the odd, archaic diction of his English. Where had he learned it?

The routine of the evening was much as it had been the first time. Antonio offered drinks and then suggested a sojourn on the loggia. It was a warm, clear evening, the air heavy with a lemony perfume. Lucy took her glass to the arch and leaned out over the thick stone sill, looking up at the stars dreamily, for in their progress from the dining room she had passed close to Massimo and he had brushed his fingers against her hip with an informed pressure that was unmistakably intentional. She didn’t know if Antonio observed this sweet familiarity, but she decided that she didn’t care, and not caring gave her an agreeable sense of bravado. The two men settled in the chairs behind her; she could hear them talking in a blend of English and Italian. Massimo was explaining his plan to return to Rome on the following day. Antonio showed no surprise at the news, nor did the addendum that Lucy would be spending a few days in the capital city as well provoke his habitual indifference to any exclamation beyond a polite expression of solicitude.

Lucy turned from the window. “I’m not going down with Massimo,” she explained. “I have a few things to do here before I leave. I want to gather up some papers to mail from the post office in Sansepolcro. Then I thought I’d take the train from there. Do you think it would be safe to leave the car in the station for a few days?”

“I don’t see why it would not,” Antonio said. “But what car will you be taking?”

“The one at the house,” she replied. “DV’s rented car.”

As if the mention of DV’s name contained some silencing property, Antonio studied his
aperitivo
for a moment before answering, “I wonder if that car will even start.”

“Why would it not start?” Massimo objected. “It is a new car.”

“Oh, it probably will,” Antonio agreed. “It’s just that it hasn’t been started in so long. Perhaps the battery will want recharging.”

Lucy frowned. There was always some complication. “Surely DV used it now and then,” she said.

“No. As a matter of fact, I know he didn’t. He never went anywhere, you know, your friend. That car has not been moved in”—he did some mental calculations on his fingertips—“I would say it has been five months.”

Lucy stared at him blankly, trying to incorporate this unexpected vision of DV as an expatriate recluse into the store of knowledge she already had about him. It wouldn’t fit; it didn’t make sense. “DV loved to drive,” she said.

“Did he?” Antonio replied.

“It is of no importance,” Massimo put in. “If the car is not running, I will send someone to start it up in the morning.”

“Let me offer an alternate plan,” Antonio said. “I have nothing to do and I would be happy to drive you, Lucia. The post office can be difficult; the workers there are without manners. I could be of help to you there, and, in addition, you would not have the worry of leaving the car at the station.”

“You ankle is still so weak,” Massimo reminded her. “It would be much better if you did not drive. I have never liked this idea.”

“I couldn’t inconvenience you,” Lucy protested, though she could see that it was already decided between the two men and nothing she said would change that decision. She had been assigned to Antonio’s care. The thought of half an hour alone in a car with him sent a needle of pain along the length of her spine, and she took a big gulp of red wine as an antidote.

“It is no inconvenience,” Antonio assured her. “Nothing could please me more.”

She smiled at this exaggeration of what she took to be his true feeling, which was, at best, idle curiosity. He is motivated by such weak and desultory forces, she thought. Even now, he was distracted from his disingenuous protest by the arrival of his father and grandmother, who appeared in the dining room trailing the cloud of disgruntlement that was the effluvia they exhaled. Lucy exchanged a look with Massimo, so brief that she couldn’t read it, but it reassured her nonetheless. Antonio rose from his seat. “We will go in now,” he directed. As Lucy passed in front of him, his fingers brushed her bare elbow. To her consternation, this contact, so accidental and surely innocent, made her flinch. Antonio marked her response. “Lucia,” he said softly behind her, reprimanding her, and she felt the heat of blood flushing into her cheeks. The old man stood at the head of the table, fixing her with his raptor’s eyes as she moved toward him. Behind her she could hear Massimo and Antonio exchanging what sounded like opinions. Why was the old man staring at her so fixedly? she wondered. He looked as if he wanted to tear her apart.

The gold and bronze of the sunflowers called up an unbearable memory—Lola in summer, long bronzed legs, full golden breasts, her golden mane loose and wild in the wind in a furious contest with the blazing sun.

Lucy sighed. It really was astounding how completely wrong DV got everything. First a comparison between a sunflower and a woman was just not appropriate. The colors were wrong; sunflower petals were not gold, nor were their centers bronze. It was as if he’d never seen one. Then there was the obvious leglessness of the plant, as well as the mathematical neatness of the petals about the center, the very opposite of the wild golden “mane” of the woman. Bad as it was, the sentence had caused DV some difficulty. He’d scratched out the word
hair
and, just to muddy things up and make the reader forget sunflowers and think of lions instead, he’d substituted the word
mane
. He’d inserted
loose and wild
, and changed
contest to competition
, then back to
contest
.

Poor man, Lucy thought. He had no gift at all, but because he made so much money, he was doomed to keep at it, year after year, page after page. Whenever he’d been interviewed, he’d talked about the sheer physical and mental torture of writing, how it took so much out of him, how he stumbled away from his desk like a fighter from the ring, bruised, battered, wondering where he would find the courage to go in for another round. Interviewers loved this sort of talk. They never thought to say, Well, if it is so inhumanly difficult, why not do something less arduous and possibly more fulfilling, something more suited to your abilities? Instead, they emitted sympathetic noises and wrote it all down. The artist suffers for his art—this was the accepted and ubiquitous party line subscribed to by the press.

But why, Lucy wondered, why exactly did they have to suffer so much? She didn’t imagine that DV’s difficulties, which were largely the result of a failure to master basic grammar and syntax, were comparable to the Olympian agonies of an artist like Michelangelo, or even to the stoic, brain-racked
labors of Flaubert, or Henry James. No, DV was not an artist of that caliber. He was just a man who wrote books and shouldn’t have. But even he suffered and even he imagined that it was in the service of the great god Art and that it was to be expected. If the Master was so cruel, so notoriously merciless and demanding, why enter his service? What was the charm of it?

Lucy pulled the chair out, sat down at the table, and gave her attention to the last writing DV had done before his death. There wasn’t much of it. Malcolm Manx was still in the countryside, recovering from a love affair, but very soon things began to change. The Porsche modulated somehow into a rented Ford and Malcolm wasn’t meeting anyone on his travels. He spoke to no one but the occasional shopkeeper, and no one was particularly nice to him or impressed by him. In fact, in a brief encounter with a gas station attendant, he was treated rudely and shortchanged of fifty thousand lire, but he was so intimidated and inept at the monetary system that he didn’t realize it until much later. Then, although the money meant nothing to him, he felt angry and humiliated. His broken heart got worse instead of better; he realized that the woman, Lola, had left him not because she was neurotic, haunted by a nightmarish past, torn by her attachment to an old or even a new lover, but because she had found him boring. Everything reminded him of her. He stopped driving and started walking. The fields of giant sunflowers regarded him attentively as he passed. They’re just plants, he told himself, but they were far from still. Their giant featureless faces rotated silently on their thick stalks, following the sun all day long. And, of course, like everything around him, they put him in mind of his lost love.

He was drinking a lot and not leaving the house. He fell on
the steps and banged his hip and shin. Then, abruptly, the voice changed. Malcolm was sitting at a desk, pouring out a glass of bourbon. He picked up his pen and wrote:

I have lost the thread of this story. I thought I knew how it would end, but I was wrong. After you left—that was not in the plan, though it was in the story—after you left. After she left, he

That was it. After she left, he … Why had he stopped mid-sentence? Was he interrupted? Did the phone ring, or did someone knock at the door?

Or did he see someone through the window? The man with the rifle?

She looked out the window, across the drive to the place where she had seen the man. It was late afternoon, the sky was pale, the air cool, and there was a stillness in the scene that fascinated her. Nothing moved, not even the leaves on the trees, and there was not a sound to be heard. Massimo had gone to Rome, to the arms of his family, where he would be welcomed, fawned upon, served, where his wife would be impatient for the children to get to bed so that she could be alone with him. Oddly, this vision did not disturb her. In fact, she liked the thought of him there, comfortable and at ease among his own things in the city that was also, in a deep, familial way, his own. She was not, she knew, in any sense a threat to that world of his, and she assumed that he knew this. He had surprised her by telling her that he did not ordinarily “have affairs,” because he hadn’t the time or interest, didn’t need such diversions, and he confessed that he had never made love to an American woman before.

“And what do you think of it?” she asked. “Is it different?”
They were lying in the big bed in DV’s apartment. She had rested her head against his chest; their legs were casually entwined.

“Oh yes,” he said. “Very different.”

“In what way?” she persisted.

“In a way that is sweet,” he said. “It is because you are so shy.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought I was immodest and noisy.”

He made a snorting sound—was it a laugh or difficulty in breathing? Then he changed the subject.

A small bird, some variety of sparrow, with a reddish stain across its breast and dark patches near its beak, had alighted on the windowsill and hopped right onto the desk. Lucy kept still. One so seldom sees a wild bird this close, she thought. The bird eyed her, tilting its head from side to side cautiously, then, satisfied that she was not dangerous, fell to picking at the edge of DV’s notebook. Lucy’s thoughts wandered back to Massimo, to his lovemaking, which so astonished her. Twice in the night, sleeping fitfully in what she thought of as DV’s bed, she had waked to find his hands moving over her, and without speaking, in a state of dreamy arousal so complete and free of self-consciousness that the memory of it made her blush, she had encouraged his caresses. It was all so easy, this affair; it was like falling into a feather pillow. And the certainty that she must give it up soon gave it a poignancy that she could hardly bear, though she knew she would bear it when the time came. There was no particular reason to keep it a secret, but it irritated her that Antonio Cini had guessed something of it. And that was just it—he could only guess something, and that something was to him, no doubt, contemptible, or merely laughable. Wasn’t this just what American women always did? They came to Italy to find lovers, and why shouldn’t they be
accommodated, since it was so easy, they were so willing, and then, of course, they went home and worked up their little adventure into a grand affair, something to curl up with on those long, cold, bitter American nights alone. She had read all this in his eyes. Surely he would find some subtle way to prod her about it on the ride to the train station tomorrow, just as she hoped to prod him about his pursuit of Catherine Bultman. It promised to be an unpleasant, though possibly rewarding, trip.