Pilgrims (15 page)

S
he had Paolo's phone number in her pocket the next morning as she and Eloise, Daryl, Marilyn, and Lyle trudged through the ruins of the Forum, a junk pile of imperial history, and snapped pictures of each other standing before a single column rising above the scattered stones. Once it had been part of a temple and now, orphaned, a mere memoir of ancient glory. Nearby, stairs rising to the six columns of the façade of a temple, the temple itself gone. Vacant pedestals where statues had stood. Cornerstones half buried in the turf. Marilyn stopped and said it reminded her of church. The old people sitting around at coffee hour talking about their kidney stones. “You don't dare use the word ‘prostate' or you'll draw a crowd. Don't even say ‘interstate' because their hearing isn't that good either, and they're likely to pull out their prostate and give you a look.”

“What does that have to do with the Romans?” said Lyle.

“Well, we read Romans in church,” said Marilyn.

They stopped to look at the great arch of the Roman Senate, which put Lyle in a funk. “All gone,” he said, softly. “A whole civilization. Gone. And soon we will be too.”

“What do you mean by that?” said Daryl.

“I read that stars get hotter just before they collapse and that's what is happening to the sun. In a billion years, it'll burn about ten percent hotter than it does now, which means that Earth will be uninhabitable. Isn't that a horrible thought?”

“No,” said Daryl. “It ‘s not. A billion years is a long time.”

Lyle threw his arms out, to embrace the Forum, the glory, the history, the classics, Virgil, Horace, Caesar, the works—“We're all going the way of these guys. In the end, we're going to turn into cinders.”

“In your case, it isn't going to take a billion years,” said Daryl. “I'd say fifteen, give or take a couple.”

“You don't understand! All the glory of the human mind—art, music, architecture, science—it's all futile. Why do we bother? It all ends up as a small dead scorched astral body drifting in space. That's the ultimate story. It's all ashes.”

Margie said, “So what should we do, Lyle? Become nihilists?”

He didn't know. But the enormity of it stunned him. All your life you strive to accomplish something. Aim for the stars. And for what? For nothing.

“So what were you going to do instead of teach biology? Sit and play Solitaire?”

They moved on to the Colosseum, its walls intact, the arena floor gone except for the stone ribbing below and the brick-lined remnant of an ancient sewer, and through narrow alleys to the Villa Borghese, a dusty park, Daryl setting the pace, Lyle trailing behind, contemplating Man's Fate, Eloise wishing Fred would call her. “I can forgive him,” she told Margie, waiting for Lyle to come out of the men's toilet. “I can understand someone you love
having a crazy fling with someone, can't you? It probably hap pens all the time!”

“Oh yes. Of course.”

When Lyle emerged, Daryl was in the mood to make a speech. Right there in front of the Temple of Venus, weeds growing in the pavement. “We're stronger than we know,” he said. “We will endure. I believe that.”
Oh please
, thought Margie.

“When my dad lost his right hand in the corn picker, he just picked it up and came back to the house and asked Mother for a bucket of ice to put his hand in and a dish towel to bind up the stump. He said he'd drive in to St. Cloud to find a surgeon to sew it back on.

“She asked if he wanted her to drive him in. He said, ‘No, I can manage. But I'll need to take your car. It's got automatic transmission.'

“She said, ‘Can I make you a sandwich?'

“He said, ‘I'm not so hungry and besides, I don't see how I'm going to manage a sandwich, Mavis.'

“She said, ‘You could steer with your knees.' And she made him a cheese sandwich and off he went. That was Dad. He came back six hours later, his hand sewn on, and within a couple weeks he was wiggling his fingers. He never regained full usage, never could put a minnow on a hook or shuffle cards and it took him a while to button up his trousers, but it was good enough.”

Margie ducked into the women's toilet and into a back stall and called Maria and told her about Paolo and Maria said, “Call him. What can it hurt? You're here for fun. So have fun. You want to see him? Flirt with him? Kiss? Maybe go to bed, maybe not? What's the harm? Do it.” And so she did. She called his
phone and before she could change her mind, he answered. He was delighted to hear from her. He had been thinking about her. “I want you to come meet me,” he said. “You could come to my hotel now. Or if you'd rather, we could meet at the coffee bar. Either one is fine by me.”

“The hotel is good,” she said in a small voice. “I'll be there in fifteen minutes. Can I bring something?” Thinking: pastry, fruit, perhaps a couple of ham croissants. “All I need is you,” he said. “Beautiful you.”

She told the others that she was going back to the hotel—not specifying which hotel—but Eloise clung to her. “Please don't go. I need you right now. You're the only one I can talk to. You understand.” Eloise was sure she had done something terrible to drive Fred away (
O, please stop
, thought Margie) and now God was going to make something very very bad happen. Something involving terrorists. “I know you think I'm crazy, but I keep seeing women with backpacks and one of them came and stood next to me and I about crapped in my pants,” she said. “Am I crazy?”

“Yes,” Margie said. “A lot of people carry backpacks. Americans and everybody else. They're as common as dark glasses.”

“I just have this feeling that I'm about to be blown up.”

“Then don't stand too close to me.”

“I mean it feels like a dangerous city. And the cops don't seem all that alert, if you ask me. Somebody could put a suitcase full of dynamite into the back of our van and blow it sky-high.”

“Somebody could dump a hundred bowling balls out of an airplane and one of them could hit you on the head and we'd be mopping up your brains. Same thing.”

“I'm serious. Everywhere I look, I see liquids and gels. A plastic explosive the size of a bar of soap, if it's placed in the right place—one minute you're looking at the ruins and the next minute you're a big grease stain.”

“Just get a grip. Nobody's going to blow us up. We're not that important.” It made Margie feel like a heroine in a war movie, a nurse during the Blitz, telling her charges to buck up, cheerio, stiff upper lip, do your part for queen and commonwealth, nice cup of tea, duckie, pull up your socks, comb your hair, it'll all be right as rain.

He was waiting for her in his pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. A bottle of wine sat opened on the table and two white tapers were burning. She had never done this before.
Done what before?
What she was thinking about doing. She didn't think she ought to do it but she thought maybe she would anyway. How else do you find out about these things? Mother said,
Oh Marjorie
, and started weeping.
When are you going to wake up?
Mother, I never tried adultery before. Maybe it's not the answer, but who knows?

Anyway, it was the direction things were headed unless she turned around and left right now. Which she didn't do. She thought she might but then it turned out that she sat down on the bed instead and when he poured her a glass of red wine, she said, “Thank you very much, Paolo.”

“It's a Spanish wine. I spent a couple weeks in Spain once and met a girl in Madrid. She was American. From Idaho. We decided to travel together.”

“How old was she?”

“Her name was Lucy. She was twenty-four, studying to be a doctor. A nice girl but so self-centered. Very immature. Younger women are highly overrated. Anyway—”

“Do you keep in touch with her?”

He smiled. “I don't believe in keeping in touch,” he said. “I believe in the moment. The beautiful moment. Life is a series of beautiful unforgettable moments and the beauty is in the moment itself. Keeping in touch—why? Retrospect only makes the moment ordinary.”

“I love you, “he said. “You're so delicate. The way you tremble when I kiss you.”

His lips tasted of smoke and wine, and then his arms were around her and he laid her down on her side, facing him, in his embrace, and he kissed her face and her neck, and then he unbuttoned her shirt and kissed her collarbone and bared her shoulders and kissed those. And then they lay, looking into each other's eyes. His were green and very steady and she saw kindness in them and she kissed them, first the left eyelid, then the right.

“What are you thinking?” he said. She said she was thinking that it was very nice to lie there with him and how lucky to meet him.

“I think so, too. Would you like to get under the covers?”

No, said Mother.
Where are your brains?
But Carl said nothing. He lay reading a book about the Battle of Shiloh and the carnage of the Civil War.

She didn't say yes and she didn't say no. But when he sat up, she sat up, and when he pulled back the covers, she pulled back her side of the covers. He took off his pajama bottoms, and he moved over to her and unzipped her jeans and helped her out of them. She
wore white panties with little cherries on them. He kissed her behind the ear and whispered, “You're delicious, my American.”

Fifty-three and a man in his thirties wanted to make love to her. That was some kind of accomplishment. Nothing you'd get an award for at a Thanatopsis banquet, but it made her feel pretty good. He raised his T-shirt over his head and she looked at him. He was rather in good shape, a patch of black hair on his chest, hairy legs, and a small rose tattoo on his shoulder. She touched it. She kissed it. And then she reached down and took his penis in her hand. She was sort of shocked that she did this. It wasn't the Marjorie Schoppenhorst that people in Lake Wobegon thought they knew. It was another Margie, one whose story was yet to be written.

He was quite hard in her hand and now a sense of urgency came over him. He undressed her quickly and he eased her down on the bed on her back and opened her legs and got busy down there doing things that she had read about but were not part of her lovemaking history. No, sir. He was down there for a couple of minutes and it was exciting and then almost unbearably exciting and then he stopped and he was pressing himself inside her and he was lying gently atop her and rocking to and fro and gently biting her shoulder. “Is this nice?” he said. Yes, it was. It was very nice. It wasn't what she should be doing right now but that wasn't the question. It was very nice. He rocked forward and back and she raised her legs and then he knelt and grasped her calves and raised them high, rolling her rump up in the air. Himself very deep inside her, looking deeply into her eyes, going on and on, riding, riding, riding, and then the warm wave in her sexual plexus and she arched her back—“Yes,” he said. Oh yes indeed. To hell with
caution. “I want you to come inside me,” she whispered. Her hands on his shoulders as he leaned down, eyes closed, the whole length of him pushing, pushing, and she cried out, “Oh yes. Yes yes yes. Oh my God.” And he gave out a great groan and she felt the hot wet of him inside her and her legs convulsed and she grabbed him by the neck and hauled him down and she sobbed—for pleasure—she lay and wept big tears of pleasure and looked at him, his nose on her nose, and said, “That was pretty great.”

She dressed in the bathroom afterward, not looking at herself in the mirror. He was lying under a sheet on the bed, smoking, a full ashtray balanced on his chest. “Sit down,” he said. “Talk to me. What's on your mind?” She sat on the side of the bed and he put his arm around her butt and stroked her thigh.

“I'm thinking about staying here,” she said. “Renting a room and studying Italian and figuring out my life.”

“For how long?”

“For as long as it takes.”

“If you do, I hope I'll be able to see you.”

“I'd love to see you.”

“But I must tell you. Rents are exorbitant. You're actually better off investing—I've earned a lot of money buying and selling apartments. Rome is hot now. Property is affordable. Huge demand. Middle Easterners wanting to get out of oppressive Muslim countries, enjoy themselves.”

“I don't know if I can afford it.”

“You'd be surprised.” He pulled her down. “Kiss me,” he said. She kissed him on the mouth, hard. “You're the best lover I ever had,” he said.

And he threw the sheet off to invite her back in, but she jumped
up. “Gotta run.” And out the door. She had to wait a full minute for the elevator and then it still didn't come, so she ran down four flights of stairs and out the front door, in a daze of pleasant bewilderment—the pleasure of the adventure and also a low throbbing voice
Bad Bad Bad Bad
—and right there on the sidewalk were Eloise and Lyle and Daryl and Marilyn.