The Light in the Piazza and Other Italian Tales (20 page)

Jim Wilbourne asked her the name of the pensione where they had all stayed in Venice. A friend of his was going up. “But do you think they’d enjoy it this time of year?” she asked. “What’s the matter, the weather?” The weather, obviously; she hardly needed, she thought, to nod. “I must be thinking of Verona.” He frowned. “There was a big fireplace—” She shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

The door of the café stuck on the way out; getting it to work, he gave her an odd smile. He walked along with her for about a block, then, saying something about somewhere he had to be, he turned abruptly and went back the other way.

She turned around in the cold misty street, looking after him. The street was long and narrow and completely deserted, the shop windows covered over with iron facings that had been bolted to the pavement. Almost involuntarily, she lifted her hand. “Wait!” She did
not speak very loudly and it was a wonder he heard her at all. He did stop, however, and looked back.

She began to walk toward him, and presently he even came a step or two to meet her. She stood huddled in her dark coat. The damp got in everywhere. She shifted her feet on the cold wet stones. “It’s a silly thing to ask—I keep meaning to mention it whenever I see you, then I always forget. Do you remember a conversation we had in Venice when you said that someone you knew named Ingram—you mistook him for my husband—had been shot in a hunting accident?”

“I had hoped you’d forgotten that. It was a hell of a conversation. The whole place was depressing. Some start for a year in Europe.” He did not exactly look at her, but past her in a manner so basically unsatisfactory to her she would have liked to complain about it. Then when he did look at her, her face, she realized, slanting up to him, must have become unconsciously strained. She laughed.

“I’m shivering in this cold. This is ridiculous, of course. I wouldn’t have remembered it at all, but Rita mentioned it to me, not long ago—this same man, I mean. But what she said was that he never had any accident at all. Neither he nor anyone else she knew.”

“Well?”

“Well, I simply wondered what the connection was. Why did you say it at all?”

“I must have got him confused with someone else.”

“Oh, I see. Someone you know and she doesn’t?”

He did not reply.

“Was that it?” she insisted.

“Lots of questions,” he remarked, amusing himself, though he was not what she could call light about it. “I guess I just don’t remember it so well as you.”

“It was in San Marco, in Venice. You ran after me and broke your dark glasses and just after that Jean Coggins came there—to meet you.”

Watching him was like looking up into a dark mirror, or trying to catch some definite figure embedded in glass. Yet his features were singularly without any motion at all. She had, as she had had before, the impression of a photographed face.

“Oh, yes, Jean Coggins. …” She thought for a moment he would not continue. “She wanted you to stay on. She got me to ask you. I told you that,” he added impatiently. “In fact, I went to some trouble to tell you. As for her coming there, I don’t remember that—I don’t think it happened.”

A Lambretta sputtered behind her, turning with a cough into the narrow, resounding street. The echoes clapped, climbing up to the high tile eaves above them. Pools of rain, surfaced in the uneven paving, seamed and splashed. Jim Wilbourne and Martha Ingram stepped back into a shallow alcove against an iron door, where large white letters were painted, advertising the name of the shop. The roar mounted with an innocent force and turmoil that seemed close to drowning them. Then it passed, faded, turned a corner. They both stepped back into the street.

“All this seems to have got on your mind in some sort of way,” Jim Wilbourne said. “Here, come on, I’ll walk you home.”

The damp chill had crept up to her ankles, but she did not stir, though he caught her elbow to urge her forward. Her private idea of him was beginning to form; namely, that he was a sort of habitual liar. He might, if this was correct, be incapable of telling the truth even when it would do him no shred of harm to do so, even when it might be better that way. Any exact nature of things he was called upon to reconstruct might seem always to escape him. Hartwell had called her in once about a mix-up that had involved Jim Wilbourne and she had said then that she thought he was absentminded, but Hartwell protested, “That simply won’t hold a thing like this.” Then she said, “I don’t think he would do anything to damage his work.” They were, between them, she and Hartwell, aware of new Americans, newer than themselves, perhaps different, perhaps more nearly right, than they who had been “out here,” “away from things” for
longer. The feeling was that people, like models of humanity, might quickly become obsolete in some overruling set of American terms even now, beyond their knowledge or power, being drawn up; so their confidence grew weak before the solid advantage of the Wilbourne image. He was so definitely American-looking, while Hartwell had recently given in to shoes with pointed Italian toes that looked extremely odd on him, and Martha went habitually to Roman dressmakers and looked extremely well, though hardly Fifth Avenue. So with this thinking interchanged between them, Hartwell agreed not to make an issue of the Wilbourne default, and let the matter slide.

Martha said to Jim Wilbourne, “Naturally it got on my mind. It concerned me, didn’t it?”

“Not at all. It concerned me, Jean Coggins, and a man you used to be married to.”

She gave a laugh that did not sound altogether pleasant, even to herself. “A rather close relationship,” she said. Rambling about in those half dreams that Gordon Ingram’s giant mahogany bed, like being lost on a limitless plateau with the same day’s journey always in prospect, seemed both to encourage and deny, she had often thought the relationship could be a lot closer. Yet now she regretted most the times that it had been. She would have liked to extinguish those times not only out of memory but out of time itself.

They began to walk off together in her direction. She protested against being any trouble to him, but he did not seem to hear her, and soon he was walking ahead at a rapid, nervous pace she found hard to keep up with in her thin shoes. His long legs and narrow heels were striking accurately down before her. The streets were narrow and dark and his raincoat went steadily on, as though its light color cut a path for them.

“Jean Coggins,” he told her with his short hoarse laugh, “has a lot of boyfriends but never gets to bed with any of them. We found this out from the maid whose sister works for the family of one of the boys. She’s a great girl in
topolinos
, picnics, out among the tombs.
She could probably make love in a sarcophagus. Her morals are well defined, but what if she never gets over it?”

“How do her parents get along with all this?” Martha asked.

“Her parents,” said Jim Wilbourne, “are still in Venice, dancing around a flower pot.”

This was not only funny, but true; Martha often saw them there herself.

He slowed his step, letting her catch up even with him, and for a moment caught her hand. “Why do I always talk to you about Jean Coggins?”

“It does get monotonous,” she admitted.

“I can’t think why I do it. She’s comical. All the Cogginses are comical.”

“You told me you loved her. You’re probably still trying to get out of that.”

“I don’t know. It was the Italian boy—”

“Yes, I know. Alfredo.”

“I remember now I told her to ask you herself, about staying on in Venice, but she didn’t have the nerve. She found you awe-inspiring, your intelligence, authority, something—I don’t know. As for me, I had some sort of strong feeling for you, right from the first. I imagined you felt the same, but then—” He broke off, but added, rather dryly, “Your attention was elsewhere. You seemed—enclosed.”

She said nothing, walking, hearing their footfalls on the stones, and how sometimes the sound of them interlocked and sometimes not.

“I try not to think of myself at all,” she ventured. And this was true; she would have put herself quite outside her own harsh, insistent desire for him, if this had been possible. As it was not, she meant simply to hold it aside.

“Well, you don’t succeed,” he said pleasantly. “Nobody does.”

“You took that way of getting my attention by telling me that Gordon—that my husband—” Only to get that question out of the way! She felt she could get herself intellectually right, at least, and as
for the rest—But striving with him to get it answered only drew her deeper in, and her feeling mounted that it was no more possible to make him speak openly to her than to make an intelligent animal consent to converse.

“I kept trying to get out of it, once I started it,” he reminded her. “But nothing seemed to work. I had some notion you were slipping away from me. You did it repeatedly—it was a question of whether anything on earth could reach you at all. On that peculiar day, the question seemed what you might call urgent.”

“But even on a peculiar day,” she argued, “to make up death like a parlor game—”

He stopped walking. “I didn’t invent any death. You did—or seem to have.”

It was true. Her heart filled up with dread. Not even her dream had mentioned death. The wildest leap of all had been her own.

“Oh, God!” she murmured. “Oh, my God!” She stood before him, her head turned severely aside. They had reached the top of her street, and from the far end there came, in the narrow silence, the trickle of a commonplace little fountain. The mist, shifting, prickled sharply against her cheek. Some minutes back, from high up among the roofs and terraces, a cat had mewed, trapped on a high ledge.

He drew her in, quickly, easily, against him. The motion for them both was accurate beyond measure, and the high tension between them broke up almost at once. At its sudden departure, she gasped sharply. His arm still tightly around her, he brought her to her doorway and leaned against it with her. A small boy went past without a glance, and then a girl in a swinging coat, who looked twice and then away. The street came back to them, constricted, gray-black, high and dim.

“You’ve made too much of a mystery of this,” he said. “I wanted to see you before, but—well, obviously, it was difficult. And, then, how could I be certain what went on with you?”

“I don’t know,” she said, but rousing somewhat out of the muffled clamor of her senses, she thought to ask, “How did you know that anything went on?” To which he did not reply.

She thought of his various hesitances and evasions in terms of his life being elsewhere: how could he manage to get into hers without disturbing his own? The problem could have any degree of intensity for him. She fully intended to say this, when he said,

“There’s nothing very unusual about all this that I can see. You’ve wanted him out of the way all along. You wanted me to get rid of him. You see that, don’t you?”

And he had cast her, with one casual blow, straight into madness.

She was back in her terrible private wood where the wind howled among the thorn trees; she was hearing the roar of the gun down by the stream, the crash of the autumn-garish leaves. She was racing to get there in time and the thorns tore her gown and her flesh. “Out of the way,” “get rid of him”—these phrases were plainly and diabolically murderous, and she could not hear either one or echo it without a shudder. How could Jim Wilbourne speak with such an absence of horror? An accomplice speaks this way, she thought, brought too late into the action to have any but the most general notion of it, but once there, what way can be taken back to the time before him? With a staggering mental effort, nothing short of heroic, she closed down the lid on her chestful of bedlam, and said to him calmly,

“You must understand. Hatred is too much for me. I can’t face it. You have to believe that.” He stirred, shifting her weight entirely against his arm and shoulder, but as he said nothing, she presently hurried on. “We would be here, anyway, whether you had told me that miserable story in Venice or not. We’d still be here—I know that’s true!”

This declaration was so swift and plain, it caught them in like all of truth, in one warm grasp, so that she felt it might never have ended, until he drew back to point out, “My darling, of all places in
the world to make love! Do I break the door down? Haven’t you got a key?”

She drew herself back, collecting the shreds and rags of what she had been thinking. Something was being ignored; she found it about the same time as she located the key. “But you do see what I mean to say.” Her hand lay urgently on his arm. “It’s important to me to know you understand.”

“I understand it isn’t true. You’d never have called me back tonight if it hadn’t been for what you call my miserable story in Venice. And you know that, Martha, don’t you?” He gave her a demanding shake. “Denying it—that’s no good.”

“I know, I know, but I—” The words rushed out at last like a confession. She felt a deep pang of relief, and was unable to finish what she had begun by way of protest. She felt shaken and outdone. All her life she had longed for some world of clear and open truth, reasonable and calm, a warm, untroubled radiance (the sort of thing that Gordon Ingram wrote about so well). But though she thirsted like the dying for it, it never appeared to her, and she wondered if every human being was not surrounded by some dark and passionate presence, opaque and confusing, its face not ever to be discerned without enormous cost. The rush of her emotion had thrown her fully against him, and she disengaged herself slowly. He let her go.