Matala (3 page)

I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled. It rose over the din and caught her ear, and she looked directly at me. I stayed put, though. Didn't make a move toward her. It was for her to fight her way through the crowd. To come to me. To come in. To join the party.

“What'd you—have to pay?” I shouted. She carried the sleeping sack and pillowcase they give you when you check in. She nodded and flushed a little. At the hotel you could see she'd uncapped the hairspray and fired up the blow-dryer to get the maneish volume that was so in vogue then and that she wore so well.

I said, “Sorry about that.”

“It's not a bad cover for the hottest club in town.”

“There you go.” I pointed toward Didier, of the glossy black beard and tied-back hair, and said, “Darcy, Didier. He's a carpenter from Montreal. He pretends he can't speak English so he can screw with my head.”

She sat across from the older man and said with a perfect accent,
“Est-ce que cela lui fait une tête de baise?”

Didier threw his face up, pounded the table, and laughed so hard I was afraid he was going to vomit.

“What?” I said. My French was nowhere near good enough to pick up her meaning.

“She wander do dis make you a fock head,” said Didier.

“For sure,” I told him.

“Fer shure,” Didier mimicked, driving it through his nose.

“Beer?” I asked Darcy.

“Wine? White.”

“You got it.” I slipped into the crowd and left them to chat.

N
OW, AT THE BAR
, J
USTINE
wouldn't look at me though I stood with my arm against hers. She said, “Pretty incredible, baby boy,” in the accent that still sounded exotic to me even after these couple years.

Justine was a dark woman—hair, eyes, skin, soul—and she wore a yellow scarf around her throat tonight and a loose skirt with different-colored scarves hanging from it and a loosely knit sweater. She was thirty-nine years old.

What she was really saying now was “You were right. You win. So go ahead and gloat.” But if I even hinted at vindication, Justine would use that as an excuse to start in all over again, crawl up my back. I figured her pleasure at seeing this girl here was just about evenly counterbalanced by her indignation at having been so vocally wrong. And it would take the tiniest tip to send the thing over again in that direction. So I said nothing.

“Well?” she said after several moments.

“She'll be good for it. We should do all right.”

“I'm sure,” she said.

She waited for me to offer some advice as to how to go about it, but again I refused to bite. She was running it still. I acknowledged that. I didn't care. I just didn't want to get into it with her.

“She's having wine,” I said finally. “I'll get a few down her.” The implication was: Then you can take over.

Justine placed her palm on the back of my neck.

“Nice work, boyfriend,” she said, and I knew I'd played it right. Made her happy again, at least for the moment. She looked at me now and smiled.

D
IDIER WAS SAYING TO
D
ARCY,
“And so you just see him on da street, just like dat?”

“I guess that's right.”

“Magic,” he said. It sounded like
ma-zheek.
“Magic of the road. He say he hope you to come.”

She smiled and looked up as I set the drinks down. She kept her eyes on me but said to Didier, “He told me he's been traveling here for a year.”

“For me,” Didier said, tapping himself on the chest, “more dan tree.”

“How old are you?”

“Four-four,” Didier said. “You sink my wife dat she missing me yet?” He laughed again then grabbed my arm and said, “Dis one, he a good man. He just here”—he tapped his own temple—
“un peu fou. Tu comprends?”

A little nuts, he was saying. Which I granted. I had dropped out of college, after all, to run off with a woman I barely knew and done dangerous things—chemical, sexual, criminal—with her for which I'd had no previous desire or inclination. But in the years before I met Justine, I had failed to comprehend (or rather had forgotten) the power of imagining. I suppose that was her great gift to me. I was coming to recognize the malleability of reality itself. This story is in some part, I suppose, about my renaissance.

I slid a beer to Didier and the wine to Darcy, and lifted my own bottle. “To the opera,” I said, “that you're not at.”

“Amen,” she said.

T
HEY SHOT POOL
. T
HE GIRL
laughed and dropped her head whenever she made a stupid shot, and Will grinned and bumped her out of the way with his hip. Cute. She even got Will to dance when someone played “Psycho Killer.” Justine had never seen him do that before. And, of course, they drank—they and the greasy idiot Didier in his lumberjack shirt. The girl had the silly tart act down pretty well, although she didn't look like someone who would let herself get too off her tits. But then assistance was available in that regard.

Young Gianfranco, the boy-bartender, brought another glass. Justine couldn't pay anymore, and wouldn't have in any case, and Gianfranco knew that. But it didn't matter. She was here. It was her temporary court. People came to talk, to stand by her, and when they ordered their own drinks, if they failed to offer to buy her one, too, Gianfranco simply deducted a little something extra from the bills they handed him. They never counted the change anyway.

They called her
La Madre.
They sought advice. They sought compassion. Revenge. Chemicals. Some of them didn't know what they sought, they just came to be near. And Justine smiled and nodded and let them touch her in their subtle ways. This was Rome, after all.

It wasn't hard to imagine Will watching the water slip beneath him, imagine him feeling he was watching time itself roll away, feeling himself getting older even as he stood there above the dirty old Tiber. Justine imagined him looking at the watch, fiddling with it, the Clerc he'd nicked a week earlier. He could have pawned it and fed them both for days, but he fell in love with it, a stupid boy trick, and now he was hungry.

She knew that hunger. Justine knew all the hungers. They would age anyone. Will was a child still, she often told him. “You're my little boy now, and I will take care of you, as a good mother should.” But lately she had not. So it had come to this point, of the boy standing over the river, feeling that empty pain, watching the flow, and undoubtedly thinking about how it was no longer the Justine who'd rescued him. How that Justine had gone away somewhere, and how tired he was. Road tired, yes, and hunger tired, and not-enough-sex tired, and lonely tired—all of those, but those were understandable, to be expected. This was another kind of tired. A tired of. Tired of fighting. Tired of waiting. Tired of being tired.

Justine knew, and she knew that Will thought she did not. Will didn't believe Justine understood anything except herself. He had it just exactly backwards.

As he stood looking down, watching the flow, Justine could picture the young woman coming onto the bridge as clearly as if she had been there herself.

And now, however improbably, she, the wealthy little American wonder girl, was here—drinking, dancing, bumping, giggling, and watching Justine, even as Justine watched her. She caught the glances, the peeks in the direction of the bar. The girl might have been naive, but she wasn't stupid. She knew where the power lay. So it was time to move. Justine said
ciao
to Gianfranco and slid him a little change. When Will and the girl got back to their table, they found her sitting there, acting friendly with Didier, who by that time was so drunk he could barely speak.

“Well, hello,” she said. “I'm Will's mother.” The girl's eyes widened. Didier started to laugh, and Will laughed, and Justine smiled at her and said, “Sit, baby girl.”

And just like that the girl was beside her, close to her, leaning in so that their arms brushed, as if the two of them were already fast friends or as if Justine was the one she had really come here to see. That was just how she was, how she felt to people—as if they could lean on her.

“So you found our little Will wandering the streets and bought him some dins.”

The girl nodded.

“That was generous of you.”

“Not at all.”

“She say she knowing him,” said Didier, seeming to wake up. “She say dey go to
l'ecole
togedder. Den she jus see him on da…
qu'est ce que s'avez dire, le pont?”

“Bridge,” the girl said.

“Ah, oui.”

“Really,” Justine said. “Kind of amazing, isn't it?”

The girl gave a sheepish little smile and looked away. It was all so much goofiness, but Justine understood how delicious it felt. She understood that. Everything, even the stupid parts, were so rich and filling.

“
Oui
, yes. Amazing,” said Didier. “Ho-lee Gawd.”

“But then lots of things are amazing,” Justine said.

“What do you mean?” the girl asked.

“Just how it works out. How you want something, maybe, but you don't even know what it is exactly. You just know you want it. You want to find out what it is, and then you want to have it, but you have no idea how to go about it. And then it just comes to you. And there you are.”

She could feel Will watching as the girl stared at her, as she fell into the black pool of Justine's eyes.

The girl said, “And what do I want?”

“You're asking me? I just met you.”

“What do you want?” Will asked.

“I don't know. I know I have to go soon because I have to get up really early, like six, and take a bus to the train station and a train to Florence so I can see even more classic
merde
and follow the creep of Western civilization across Europe.”

“But—”

“But what I really want is another drink.”

Justine smiled and put her hand alongside the girl's on the table so that their pinkies overlapped. “Well,” she said, “we can manage that. That's what we're here for.”

S
O
J
USTINE AND THE GIRL
had themselves a good old-fashioned chin-wag. And it struck her finally what the girl wanted. It was true what Will had said earlier—one like this, from money and all, having herself flown all over the world to study this or that, was bloody bored with it, hard as that might be to imagine. But that was not the heart of it. She wanted what many of them wanted but didn't know it: someone to tell her no. Just that. You can't have that. Can't go there. Can't see this. No, no, no. Justine doubted anyone had ever said it to her.

There and then it was not her place to fill the girl's needs, to satisfy her unacknowledged desires. Rather it was the other way around: She was there to help see to theirs. It was Will who had to be looked after, and this girl was simply another means.

Still, a different thought flickered through Justine's mind, of the darker possibilities this woman might present. The possibility of salvation for them all. It was too beguiling to imagine. And what it would require, what it would cost, was too frightening. It was altogether too much to contemplate. And anyway, she told herself, the possibilities of its actually playing out, even if she decided to try to turn it that way, were next to nil. So put it away, she told herself. There was no chance.

Justine went to the bar and ordered another round, which, as it happened, the girl had offered to pay for. Nice, that. Beers for Will and Didier, wine for herself and the girl. She made sure to push all the change back at Gianfranco, who gave a wink as he set down the tray and said,
“Grazie, Madre.”

She put her hand over one of the wineglasses and held it there for several moments, until the sudden fizzing and bubbling stopped.

The girl had mentioned the early train to Florence she had to be on with her group. That suggested possibilities. And those brought Justine back again to the dark notions brewing in her. She could see it laid out, the way it might play if she steered it just so, how it could end up being more than just the folding in the girl's wallet and a few pieces of plastic to fence. So much more. But that was a very different game, one she had forsworn when she found Will again.

Back at the table, the girl touched her on the shoulder and leaned in so close that she could feel her breathing.

“I've got to get up early.”

“Not to worry,” Justine whispered.

“One more,” said Will. He leaned across and said something into her ear. The girl giggled and maybe even blushed a little. He was turning into a real pro, there was no doubt. But Justine couldn't help the jealous bite that came with watching it, the feeling that Will was enjoying this in ways that weren't strictly part of the game.

She handed out the beers and set one of the wineglasses in front of the girl, who said, “Oh, gosh.”

“One for the road, sweet,” Justine said. “Come on then, tip it up.”

She sipped again, and Justine could see that she was on the edge anyway, that point where, if she were to let it go, she'd just keep drinking until she was stupid. But Justine also saw that the girl knew that. She had gotten good at getting very close without slipping over. Well, this would be something new for her then.

She took another sip. She knew where she was. That was why her first reaction, upon standing to go to the bathroom, was more surprise than anything. She looked as if someone had just hit her across the back of the knees with a cricket bat. They let go, and she caught herself on the table. The crowd around them let go a loud whoop in honor of someone else who couldn't handle the plonk, didn't know how to control herself. But it wasn't that, she seemed to want to tell them. It wasn't that, Justine almost wanted to say to her, to assuage her.

The girl sat for perhaps a full minute, watching. She took another sip. I'm okay, her face said. Okay. She stood again. And then, as if that invisible someone had moved the target higher, the bat came down across the back of her head this time. Justine could see the room swimming and swirling in her eyes. For a moment she panicked and seemed to struggle to draw breath. She opened her mouth and looked at Justine, who thought that in her own eyes the girl could perhaps see what it was. Justine saw, for just an instant, a realization, a dawning. The girl felt frightened, but that moment passed. It became an abstraction, a distant part of something else that was not now and not here. The crowd shouted again, but Justine did not think she heard it. Or, rather, she probably did hear it but would not remember, and so it would be as if it had never happened.

Now the girl no longer struggled to breathe. It was all that was left for her—breathing and looking blankly at the world and at Justine before her.
La Madre.
Always there to help.