Matala (2 page)

Darcy looked at her. “What'd you do?”

“Nothing. We went to these stupid caves, then just came back here. I think Abignale needed a nap.”

“Why didn't you go out then?”

“I did. I went biscuit shopping.”

D
ARCY HAD JUST GOTTEN OUT
of the shower and was finishing toweling off before the mirror when the phone rang.

Rhonda said, “You know who that is. They've been calling all stupid afternoon.”

Darcy wrapped a towel around her hair and answered on the fourth ring.

“Hi, Mommy. Daddy.” Daddy wouldn't say much, but she knew he was there on the extension. She then held the phone a good foot away from her ear, at which distance her mother's voice, a high, nasally trumpet of a thing, was still easily audible, or at least certain of the more heavily stressed words were.

“…were you?” Darcy heard.

She brought the phone to her mouth to speak. “I had a date. And I'm going out again. How about that? Pretty amazing, huh? And on my birthday.”

Phone away. “…date?”

Phone in. “Someone I went to high school with.”

“…possible?”

“We just happened to run into each other and had dinner. He's asked me out tonight…. Yeah, he's on a tour, too. A hotel not far from this one.”

“…ticket…opera?”

“Well, I'm sure they can carry it off without me there.”

“
…paying
for this…
hate
Americans…”

“Yes, I know. I'm careful.”

“…responsi
bil
ity…”

“I can't hear you very well, Mommy. I'm meeting him at his hotel. I should really go. Thanks for calling!”

She set the phone down and finished drying her hair. Even with the rubbing of the towel she could hear the voice blaring on for at least a full minute before it was finally silenced.

O
N THE BRIDGE
I
PRACTICALLY
warned her away from me, gave her every chance to realize her mistake, to smile and walk off, back into her life. But when it became clear she had no intention of doing that, I figured it wasn't really as if I were taking advantage. Some people just begged for it. Of course it occurred to me that maybe she hadn't made a mistake at all, that she knew I wasn't who she pretended to think I was. But I was far too hungry to think my way through all the possible wrinkles that suggested.

The trattoria I led her to was a real one, an honest neighborhood place not far from the bridge, with a trellised garden and the stuccoed building beyond it entombed by greenery, and the short, round, and so very Italian woman who greeted us in the courtyard with a wide dark-toothed smile and heavy open arms. It was perfect. I understood little of what the woman said. This girl, however, this Darcy, whoever she was, said something back to the woman in Italian—only a couple of words, but the woman laughed happily and waved us inside. And, oh, it was perfect, the smells so rich and thick they almost made me sick. It had been so long. And this Darcy got it, too, and went all goofy over it, and I, well, I didn't. I just kept it cool, watching her, but inside I felt as goofy as she acted. How weird that you could be standing there, starving, watching the river with nothing, no prospects, no chance, and all of a sudden here you were.

I sucked down all the good dark-crusted bread and then lifted the wicker basket and shook it, but the waiter pretended not to notice. It was only when Darcy said, “
Per favore, signore. Un,
uh,
un po' di più,
” that the ass hurried over, simpering and tipping his head, and took the empty basket away. When he brought more, I ate that, too, spread thickly with white butter, and it was so chewy fresh and good, I could've just had that and been satisfied. I felt the molecules breaking apart and moving into my body, filling my spaces, my cells, rebuilding me.

We'd been scrapping too long this time, and I could feel myself getting worn out by the hardness of it, the emptiness. There was something wrong with Justine. Always before, she managed things, she taught me, and we did well. We could take whatever we needed and live on it nicely, in whatever ways we chose, but now we were stuck.

I ate. I ate the salad and the mosticelli and the veal and yet more of the bread and a plate of fruit and tiramisu, and I could've eaten more, but this was fine. Darcy ate some, too, but mostly she drank and watched me. When she ordered a second bottle of the house Chianti, I took off my jacket, finally, and leaned back and felt my belly straining nicely at my shirt.

“When's the last time you ate?” she asked.

“Few days. It's been a little lean lately.”

“Who's Bill?”

My shirt was one of those blue-and-white-striped jobs they wore in the service stations back home, with the name
Bill
embroidered on a red patch over the breast pocket. I couldn't even remember anymore where I picked it up.

“Yours,” I said. “Thanks for asking.” I laughed, expecting that she would, too. It was pretty funny if you think about it, a nice little joke on the whole situation, and humor was a big part of it after all. Or it should be anyway. The old give-and-take. But she didn't even smile, just kind of rolled her eyes.

“The truth is, I really am totally busted,” I said. “But I'll pay you back. Seriously.”

“When would you do that?”

“When—”

“I mean how? Will you track me down?”

I shrugged.

“Can I just buy you dinner?”

“Sure,” I said. “Yes. Thank you.”

She was with twenty or so other American students, she told me, on this very organized unspontaneous tour of the art and architecture of the Continent, six weeks, ten cities. Tomorrow it was on to Florence and then northward and westward, until they ended up in London. She'd gotten away this afternoon just by walking out of the hotel without telling anyone. She was in trouble. She'd hear about it when she got back.

I told her I was just a traveler. I'd been on the Continent over a year already and on the road for two. She seemed to get off on this, going all dreamy again and shaking her head as if she could hardly imagine it. And the truth was, she couldn't. She had no idea. So in exchange for a good meal I'd be her little slum-side experience, the rough edge that would pull all the beautiful crap she'd see into a new focus.

W
HEN
I
GOT BACK, AS
I passed the check-in desk and went into the hostel's dim foyer, three different people—a large-headed girl from Modesto, a German woman named Helena, and some guy from Boston I'd never seen before—all told me that Justine was waiting for me in the women's dorm. They all said it seriously, too, so I knew what to expect. I still wonder, when I remember it, at the fact that those strangers, those wanderers, some of whom had been there only a few days, did her bidding like that, treated her as if she mattered, as if she ran the place and they meant something to her. Even the people who worked there treated her that way.
La Madre,
they called her. Mother Justine.

I found her sitting on a bed, alone in the long room of bunks, and sensed that she had even arranged that. Before she looked up at me, I guessed the situation from the way her knees bounced, as if she were running somehow while still sitting. And when I saw her eyes, I was certain. Then I noticed the opened pill bottle on the blanket beside her and said, “How'd you manage this?”

“Nice to see you, too, love,” she said in her smoothest, most beguiling Kentish, as she called it—a Canterbury upbringing polished by years in West London and America. Which is where I'd met her two years before as I sulked in a bar on my twentieth birthday. Later, when we'd been together for a while, I started asking her to take me to see where she was from, but she always refused, as if there was something there she didn't want me to see. Eventually I quit asking.

“How'd you get it?” I said.

“I bought it,” she said, “with the last of what we had.”

“Why?”

“I thought you'd enjoy it. I got something for us both. How was your day?”

“I thought we weren't going to. I thought we said we had to take a break.”

“Well, we're at the end of it, aren't we? Our little adventure.”

“Are we?”

“It seems we're in the process of the old crash and burn, doesn't it, Will? Rust never sleeps and all that. So I say let's burn out with it. Let's just play it out and sod all.”

“And then what?”

“I have no idea, my sweet.”

“Gimme some.”

“Such a greedy monkey,” she said, but she tossed the bottle farther down the mattress so that some of the pills spilled out. I picked out two and swallowed them dry.

“Does this mean we're leaving?”

“On what would we leave? You going to walk home?”

I sat, mulling on it, until she said, “Oh, stop the worrying. I'll get us out of it. I always have, haven't I?”

It was true.

“Hungry?” she said and began to reach into the canvas bag at her feet.

“I got dinner,” I said. “A good one.”

I told her briefly about the happy accident that led to my getting fed and thought she might at least be glad of it, that she didn't have to worry about my eating for a day or two. I thought she'd see the humor in how it was all the girl's doing, she who stopped and spoke to me, and how I didn't have to do anything but play along, turning things a little this way and that, how she even said she'd come out here later tonight, and who knew, maybe she would, but what the hell, it was all kind of funny. So I thought it might bring out a smile at least.

Justine said, “Well, aren't you the selfish bastard? You really believe she's coming here?”

“I don't know.”

“Of course you do. You knew all along she wasn't coming out to a flipping youth hostel. Not after she sobers up. So you had your little fun, got your nosh-up, and old Justine can just piss off.”

“What'd you want me to do? Bring a doggie bag?” I could have, I realized then. Ordered something else and brought it along.

Justine said, “Did you even try to get anything off her? Of course not. Because that would've helped me as well as you. But you don't think about that. You got your own belly filled, so why worry about the old hag?”

“Justine—”

“I
don't think that way. I'm always thinking of you—how can I help
us
? How can I make it better for
both
of us? So I got us a little something to make it nice, you know? For
us.”
She slapped the mattress so that the pills and the bottle jumped. “I put myself through all of this to get something you'd appreciate. And not only haven't you said even a bloody thank-you, it turns out you were out getting yourself a nice belly full. And that's the end of that. I wonder—did you get a little something extra out of it, too?”

“Oh, God.”

“No? Too bad. Because that would've been perfect, then, wouldn't it? The whole enchilada. You could've slept happily for days.”

“I don't get you.”

“Sod off, Will.”

Which I did. I went back out and walked for a long time. I thought about just keeping on going. And then when I reached into my pocket and found I'd lost the stainless Clerc automatic I'd managed to slip off the arm of a smelly German tourist on the shuttle to the Saint Sebastian Catacombs just the week before, I howled and swore into the night. What I needed any of this grief for anymore I did not know, and although I finally felt that narcotic blanket wrap around me, and felt thirsty and as if things really could get better somehow, I still thought about the possibility of going off on my own.

I thought about it all the way back to the hostel.

L
ATER, IN THE BIG ROOM
where the smoke rose into the lights, and people laughed and shouted over the jukebox, and the cold bottles of Czech Bud came one after another, I began to feel better. I was almost having an actual conversation with Didier—the Franglais we'd worked out becoming more comprehensible the more we drank—and I began to get back a little of the glow I had after dinner and hanging out with the pretty rich girl. A tour, she'd said. Six weeks. What kind of money, I wondered, must the daddy of someone like that have? A girl barely out of high school and bored already with the whole world, or at least the privileged part of it. She made it clear, though she didn't come right out and say it, that this tour thing was just about more than she could put up with. It was stifling the life out of her, and she'd really rather go off and drink at a cruddy hostel than go to the opera they had scheduled for that night. The opera, I thought as I drank in the cruddy hostel. What'd she know about any of it?

But I was glad, I decided, that she'd gone back to where she belonged. It would have been bad for her if she'd come with me, and I realized I didn't want it to be. At first, of course, I'd thought of her as prey. But then she wasn't. I had begun to like her already. I liked her ripeness, the sense that she was still unfolding, but at the same time I liked the acid she'd already learned to give off. I liked that burn.

We'd had a nice little thing, and now she was a nice memory, and that was the right thing for her to be.

I laughed at Didier, who grinned back because he was just a happy old drunk. I shook my head and looked around at the girls dancing together, at the guy letting his dog drink beer from a bowl, at the two American queens who'd come in last night arguing with each other and were still at it, and at all the people hanging on each other. My eyes rolled over it and past the entrance to the hallway, and on a little bit from there before they snapped back.

She was there. There she was. She'd come.

“Holy God,” I said.

“'O-lee
Gawd
!” said Didier.

I watched her for a moment—she hadn't seen me yet—then looked at Justine. She was at the bar, drinking and chatting with her bartender buddy and a couple of the older ladies who were always glomming on to her. I stared until Justine felt it and looked back. I tipped my head and glanced at the girl, Darcy, who was still standing there trying to figure out what to do with all this craziness, about as far from her world as I imagine she'd ever been. Justine raised her eyebrows. I nodded. She could only shake her head. It was pretty unbelievable that a mark would just walk into the den and offer herself up. And yet I felt it again: a little pause of regret. The vestige of the attraction I'd felt for her. But now it was too late, misgivings or not. Here she was with a reloaded purse and an open mouth and her big eyes and big chest and big hair, having no idea yet what she'd walked into, no clue that she was about to learn what it felt like to get fleeced and left out in the cold.