Hill Towns (15 page)

I took the cloth and held it out before me. It was indeed a bikini, a black one, two scraps of silky cloth that would not have made an adequate dust rag.

“Ada and Sam are here? At the pool? I thought we were on our own till the wedding this afternoon. Did I invite them? Joe, I can
not
wear this thing. I have spider veins. I’m pale as a ghost. All my ribs show. You were sweet to think of it, but I really don’t want to swim.”

“I invited them last night,” he said. “Ada went on and on about how hot it was, and how wonderful it would be to get wet and cool, and I knew we were going to have to reciproc-ate sometime, and this way we’ll get an evening to ourselves tomorrow night. We’re going to swim and have drinks and some lunch”—he laughed at my face—“or rather you can have Pellegrino and some lunch and we’ll have the drinks, and then everybody’s going to go home and change for the wedding, and we’ll all meet at the Campidoglio at five. Come on. Put this on and come on down; I’ve got to get back. We are hosting a very fancy party this morning. You know who else is down there?”

“John Paul the Second?” I said acidly. I did not feel like chatting brightly with Sam and Ada Forrest, and I was not about to put on the ridiculous bikini and parade HILL TOWNS / 119

around the Samuel Goldwyn swimming pool I had seen the evening before, and I liked neither my husband’s costume nor his indulgent tone of voice. Least of all I liked myself. I had spent precious hours of my time in Rome in drugged sleep and caused Joe to speak to me as one would to an er-rant child, and it put our relationship onto a skewed and sliding kind of footing I would not have imagined possible.

“In a manner of speaking,” Joe said. “Yolanda Whitney, the pope of the hearthside—or is it popess? In the more than considerable flesh, which is spilling out of the smallest bikini I ever saw. You’ll make her look like one of her own hand-quilted ottomans. She’s in Rome to shoot a show on adapt-ing Italian crafts to the average midwestern home or something. Apparently the Forrests have known her forever. A three-year-old could see she’s got the hots for Sam. Apparently it’s a rather generic effect among women.”

He leered showily at me, and I knew he was not entirely happy with the time I had spent at Sam Forrest’s side the night before. Well, tough. I would not have spent any time at all with Sam if Joe had not allowed Ada to tow him away without so much as a backward look.

“Perfect.” I groaned. “All this and Yolanda Whitney too.

Be still my heart.”

Yolanda Whitney was the kind of super-celebrity that only American television can spawn, the sort who celebrates both America and television itself. She had started out with a column on crafts and country decorating in a supermarket women’s magazine, hit the talk show circuit, and proved astoundingly popular showing viewers how they could make rustic artifacts and bibelots from materials at hand. She made cornshuck dolls and

120 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

centerpieces, dried-flower swags and garlands and banners; she painted driftwood and gilded gourds and lacquered autumn leaves and wild berries and turned ordinary ranch houses and condominiums from coast to coast into seasonal wonderlands straight out of nineteenth-century rural Vermont. Because of Yolanda Whitney, every third American home had a quilt stand, a warming pan, whiskey barrels full of herbs, dried flowers hanging all over the kitchen, and paper bags full of sand and candles along the driveway at Christmas. She had her own magazine now, too, but it was her television show that kept her before the eyes of America.

I had seen her a number of times, neatly curved and crisply aproned and bubbling with enthusiasm, her cheeks rosy with health, her shining brown hair in a coronet of braids around her pretty head.

“I’ll bet she smells like pine cones and salt dough all the time,” I had said grumpily to Joe one recent Christmastime, watching her whip up a northern woodland fantasy of a holiday centerpiece.

I thought now I would rather be beaten with wire whisks than go down to that Esther Williams pool and sit and listen to Yolanda Whitney burble about macramé and decoupage.

How on earth had the Forrests come to know her?

“You go on,” I said. “I’ll be down in a little while. Yolanda Whitney. Shit.”

“Cheer up. Maybe she’ll tell you how to make a centerpiece of gilded squirrel turds,” Joe said. He made a face and went out the door, and I let my towel fall to the floor and turned away from the mirror over the desk and put on the bikini. It felt infinitely more naked than nakedness, and I moved into position in front of the mirror and closed my eyes. Then I opened them. In the

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shadowless light of the white and beige room I saw a tall woman, more thin than slender, skin all over a kind of bluish white in the fluorescence, every bruise and broken capillary and scar and discoloration glowing lividly, double line of ribs looking like an old-fashioned wash-board, hipbones and knees and elbows as sharply knobbed as the bole of a young tree. I sucked in my small stomach and threw my shoulders and head back and smiled. The bikini flattened my already small breasts against my rib cage and rode sharply up into my crotch. My hair looked white in the artificial light, a wild cap of short cotton-candy curls atop a narrow face with too many hollows and far too many teeth. I snatched up a lipstick and scrawled red across my mouth.

Like somebody stole the third-year med school skeleton and put lipstick and a bikini on it, I thought furiously, and shucked out of the thing and put on the sundress I had worn last night and sprayed myself all over with Sung and went out, slamming the door behind me. I left the bikini in a wadded ball in the middle of the floor.

Got any more terrific ideas, Joe Gaillard?

The great marble lobby was dim and nearly empty, so that going out onto the pool terrace beyond was like walking out into the desert from a cave. All I could see at first was the azure lozenge of water, the bright primary colors of the market umbrellas around it, and a great void of radiant white light where the vast panorama of Rome should have been.

I pulled sunglasses out of my pocket and put them on and stood for a moment, letting my eyes adapt. Slowly the scene around the pool came into focus, double lines of chaises facing the water on which lay bodies showing a great deal of oiled brown skin and little else, umbrella tables with wrought-iron chairs also full of nearly naked people, 122 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

tiers of tables being set for luncheon by beautiful young men in hotel livery, pots of cypresses and flowers, several bars with awnings and stools doing a brisk business, the ubiquitous flowering vines everywhere. Beyond, Rome emerged from a haze of white heat, palely, flatly. It looked like a badly faded drop cloth, all dimension bled out of it by the fierce sun. It was still and very hot and seemed no time at all. Even the sound of American rock from several huge boom boxes beside lounges around the pool was muffled and tinny. The weight of the sun on my head was punishing, and I could not seem to get a deep breath. The pool was largely empty, and the water looked wonderful. I thought what it would be like to dive into it and idle along the bottom, how everything would look, sun-shot and wavering and blue, only the silvery spume of my blown-out breath disturbing the deep coolness.

For a moment I regretted the crumpled bikini on the floor of my room, but only for a moment.

I heard someone calling my name and turned and saw my group at the far end of the pool, with Maria standing and waving at me, and walked toward them along the scorching concrete apron, feeling as though I were wading through wet cement, feeling on my drooping, reedlike whiteness the scornful dark eyes of every sleek, naked brown person I passed. I got a confused impression of much dark, wet chest hair, tangled gold chains, coconut-smelling oil, green eye shadow, and about a million brown breasts glittering with droplets of pool water or sweat. By the time I reached the umbrella table and the cluster of lounges they had staked out, I was running with sweat myself and pounding with hangover.

“I really don’t know how I am going to do this,” I HILL TOWNS / 123

said aloud, but very softly. “Morning, everybody,” I said in a stronger voice. “Is it always this hot in Rome?”

A babble of voices answered me:

Joe saying, “Ta-
da
! She is risen! But where’s your new bathing suit?”

Sam Forrest saying, “Morning, muffin. You look altogether better than you have a right to.”

Maria saying, “Come sit and talk to us, we didn’t get a chance to last night, I’m so glad you’re here, this is divine.”

Maria Condon saying “divine”? Maria in a bikini?

Colin saying, “Cat! Go back and put your bikini on! It’s cruel to get everybody’s fleshly hopes up and then back out!”

Colin Gerard, talking to me of bikinis and fleshly hopes?

Ada Forrest saying, in her spilled-honey voice, “Pay no attention to this herd of goats. You’re smart to stay out of the water. This sun would cook that lovely white skin like pork in half an hour.”

Ada Forrest, gleaming like a pearl in her own whiteness as she lay full under the fist of the sun, her mouth and bikini strokes of scarlet, not a drop of sweat on her translucent skin, the white globes of her breasts and her carved waist and stomach untinged by the pink of the cooking pork she predicted for me. Her glorious white mane of hair was wrapped in a scarlet towel, and her ice-blue eyes hidden by huge black sunglasses. She looked unreal, phantasmagoric, almost uncanny, among the fleshy brown bodies around the pool.

I dropped into a chair beside Maria and hugged her as she leaned over to kiss me. A thick smell came off her, of sweat and sun oil and something I thought could only be semen.

Joe had been right, Maria in her red-flowered bikini was overpowering: brown, glistening

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flesh spilling everywhere, the great bobbling breasts barely contained, all of her the firm, healthy consistency of sun-hot rubber. Her smile was wide and joyous, and she almost laughed aloud in her happiness. I squeezed her hard in a surge of pure love. Maria on this day reduced everything to its simplest and most elemental form; her glowing flesh and barely sated sensuality made nuance and cynicism almost obscene.

“I hope you are always as happy as you are right this minute,” I whispered to her, and she hugged me back.

“See Rome and die.” She laughed.

“God, I hope not,” Colin said from one of the lounge chairs. He wore American swim trunks, faded tartan that hung low on his slim hips. They were what all young Trinitarians wore on the Mountain, but here they looked callow, provincial, wrong. He seemed to know it. He had rolled them as high as they would go on his beautiful brown ath-lete’s legs and sat so that the muscles in the carved torso played whenever he moved. He was thickly oiled and wore black glasses like Ada’s. He could not seem to keep his eyes off Maria.

Sam Forrest should have looked obscene in the small blue bikini that was almost hidden under the bulge of his belly, but somehow he did not. He was massive, copper-gold all over with freckles and furred with bronze hair, hard and shining as amber or marble. I thought of some great pagan colossus or, for some reason, of Ozymandias. He wore a towel draped over his head, and sunglasses, and he was drinking a glass of red wine and picking grapes from a plate and popping them into his mouth. All that was missing was the satyr’s ears and hooves and the pipes.

Beside him, Joe in his new Italian leisure clothes looked pale and almost fussy, the classic comic English HILL TOWNS / 125

man on holiday in the Mediterranean, complaining because they had wine but no tea. I felt shamed and mean-spirited for even thinking such a thing and wished he would move away from Sam and sit somewhere else. But the only other empty place was beside Ada, and I realized I did not want him to sit there, either. Where, I wondered, was the fabled Yolanda Whitney?

As if in answer to the thought a woman heaved herself out of the pool and came over to us and slumped down into the chair next to Ada, snorting and shaking bright drops of water everywhere.

“Damn, Yolie, you’re worse than a wet dog,” Sam said mildly, and Ada tossed her a towel without comment, and the woman dried herself energetically with it and dropped it on the cement beside the lounge.

“Meet our friend Yolanda Whitney,” Ada said, and the woman squinted up at me. “Yolie, this is Catherine Gaillard, Maria and Colin’s friend from America. You’ve already met Joe.”

Yolanda Whitney’s eyes did not sparkle now. They were flat and dark, like pebbles or marbles. Her hair was not wound around her head in glistening braids but leaped about her face in wet spirals, like Medusa’s. She seemed much larger than she did on television, fat, even; her flesh was tanned deep mahogany, but there was an unhealthy bluish tinge under it, and it was slack and peppered with yellowing bruises. The color in her face was hectic: sunburn, not natural rosiness. She did not look at all healthy. She looked wrecked, downright dissipated, years older than I had thought from her television show. The sweet smell of alcohol came off her in waves, and my stomach contracted at it. I could scarcely believe this was the same woman who taught the world to make cornshuck dolls.

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“Ah, yes,” she said. Her voice was deep and thick, as if she had a cold. “Cat. I’ve been hearing about you.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I’ve enjoyed your show.”

“How nice,” she said. “Are you crafty, Cat? I’ll just bet you are.”

She said it in such an unmistakably spiteful tone that I could think of nothing to reply. What was the matter with this woman? Everyone looked at her, and Ada murmured,

“Charming,” and Sam said, from behind the sketchbook he had picked up, “Put a lid on it, Yolie. It’s way too early.”

Her face went white under the sunburn and then dull red, and she turned her back on us elaborately and walked off toward the bar.

“On the contrary, I’d say it was way too late,” I heard her say as she went away.

“Has my deodorant failed me?” I said, heat crawling up my neck into my face. I said it as lightly as I could. I sat back down in my chair beside Maria, grateful for the shade of the umbrella and the shelter of my sunglasses, poised for flight.