Hill Towns (31 page)

“Yolie gave me holy hell this morning,” he said, “and she should have. I had no idea you’d been through such a bad time last night; I’m sorry, baby. I thought you’d just decided not to come. I truly didn’t think you’d try it alone, but that’s no excuse. I’ve left you by yourself way too much on this trip. I’m not going to do it again. You’ve done wonderfully well over here, so well I forget what you’ve come through, how bad it was for you all those years. Shit, I haven’t even told you, have I? That I’m proud of you? But you’re not up to things like last night, and I’m not going to let you go it alone again. I’m going to take much better care of you. If you’ll forgive me?”

They were the words I’d wanted to hear, and they should have made me feel like Cat with Joe again, cherished and safe. Instead, I bristled inside, very slightly.

“I did OK by myself, considering,” I said. “Did Yolie tell you I ran off a bunch of thugs who were going to rape me or worse in some deserted little campo? Went at them with my nails and told them to go fuck themselves?”

He laughed and hugged me to him briefly. The hat tipped off his head and tumbled onto the floor, and he got up and retrieved it.

“You probably insulted the very life out of a bunch of 256 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

good blue-collar husbands and fathers on their way home from a little bocce,” he said. “My God, Cat, I’d love to have seen that! My good little kitten, her tail all fuzzed up and spitting, yelling Italian dirty words at the butcher and the baker and the glassmaker.”

“They were going to hurt me, Joe,” I said.

“Oh, honey—”

“They were. You weren’t there. I know they were.”

“Well, they shan’t get a chance, because I’m not going to let you go off by yourself again,” he said soothingly, and began to collect his luncheon outfit from among the things I’d bought him. I sat for a little space of time, looking at the naked back of him, feeling inexplicably out of sorts, and then I got up and showered and dressed.

He wore the hat with his beloved chinos, the black silk T-shirt, the creamy jacket with the sleeves rolled up, and a red ascot. He rolled another of the ascots thin and tied it around his waist. He had had his good Brooks Brothers loafers polished to a dull shine, and he wore them without socks.

His ankles were slender and tanned and strong. He looked, literally, like no one I’d ever seen before, theatrical and foreign and incredibly handsome, film-star handsome. His face had darkened from the days in the fierce sun of Italy, and his mustache was lighter, spun gilt against his face. His teeth flashed. You could not see the blue eyes under the brim of the hat.

“My Lord,” I said. “Marcello Mastroianni in
Miami Vice
.

Just look at you! You’ll be beating women off you in the streets.”

He studied himself again in the mirror, laughed, and turned to me.

“That’s a great dress,” he said. “Did you get it today? Turn around and let me see.”

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I turned slowly before him, like a mannequin.

“It only needs one more thing,” he said, grinning at me.

“What?”

“Take your bra off, Cat. You don’t need it anyway. That dress was made to kind of slide over little nipples.”

“Joe!”

“Will you try it? For me? If I can wear all this stuff to please you, can’t you just shuck a bra you never did need to please me?”

“I’d feel like a call girl,” I said, my face hot. “What on earth do you think you’re doing, pimping for me? I’m not going to lunch with Lord and Lady whoever and half of Venice with my tits showing!”

“You can get away with it precisely because you look like a Florentine angel and not a call girl,” he said. “Very few women could, but you can. Come on, Cat. Dare you.”

“This is absolutely perverted,” I said. “You’d hide your face if any woman we know on the Mountain came to lunch with her tits hanging out. Me especially.”

“As you say, we’re not on the Mountain now,” he said. “I just thought since I was going to go native, you might like to try.”

I went into the bathroom and took off my bra and smoothed the silver-green jersey dress down over my body and looked at myself in the mirror. He was right. The silky stuff of the dress just skimmed my nipples and hips and stomach, like a tunic; the effect was insouciant and erotic, in a careless sort of way, and very young. I took off the earrings and pearls I’d put on with it, and stripped off the pantyhose, and slid my feet back into the cobwebby high-heeled sandals I’d bought that morning. That was right, just dress and shoes and skin. I went back out into the bedroom and stood there, hipshot, while he examined me.

258 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

“Wow,” he said softly. “I think maybe you better go put your underwear back on. You didn’t take off your panties too, did you?”

“Jesus, Joe! Of course not! But I’m damned well not going to put the bra back on. You started this, you can live with it. Come on, we’re late already.”

We were. By the time we reached the Gritti terrace the others had gathered under one of the ubiquitous market umbrellas. This table, like the one at Sam and Ada’s hotel, occupied a choice situation in the corner of the vast floating structure, separated from the glitter of the Grand Canal only by large pots of flowering trees and shrubs. It was, I thought, stepping onto the slightly heaving floor, like being on a giant raft; it felt oddly festive, gay, and carefree.

“Like Huck and Tom, running away on the river,” I said to Joe as he took my arm to steady me.

“Well,” he said, “here goes nothing,” and we walked over to join our party.

Sam and Ada sat together, something I had never seen them do, with their backs to the dancing canal, Sam in the disreputable blazer and a sweat-splotched shirt and blue jeans, the plantation hat resting almost on the tip of his nose.

Ada wore a red linen sheath that bared her incandescent shoulders and an enormous red straw hat that left only her sunglasses, her red mouth, and the loose fall of the silver hair on her neck showing. It was a spectacular effect. I saw eyes all over the terrace go to the group again and again, though whether drawn by Ada or by Sam Forrest I could not tell. I remembered anew that his face was internationally known by those who followed the art and celebrity scene, but then I thought that even if you did not know who he was, you would have to look at him. He drew the eye like a wild

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animal, or wildfire. He stood when we approached, looked Joe and me both up and down, and grinned.

“Holy shit,” he drawled. “We have been visited by the
haut
monde
, no two ways about it.”

I thought his eyes stayed a bit longer on me, and blushed, and put on my dark sunglasses. From behind their comforting shade, I saw him nod, very slightly.

To their right, on a padded wooden bench that ran along the railing on that side of the terrace, Maria Gerard sat, and beside her, his leg stretched out full length on the bench, Colin Gerard half sat, half lay. He was noticeably thinner, and his golden tan had gone mustard-yellow and was flaking over his high cheekbones, but he was smiling widely, and there was color in his face, two hectic circles of it on each cheek, like theatrical makeup. It should have made him look healthier, but somehow it did not. I thought he did not look well at all. His hair was lank and needed cutting, and there were deep saffron circles under his eyes. All at once I was worried about him, quite worried. He looked as if he had been literally eaten away by the pain of his injury.

And Maria. Maria was a pasty shadow of the buxom, joyous young woman whose marriage we had celebrated not a week earlier. She, too, had lost her high color and the shine that had sat upon her like the bloom on a grape. Her unruly dark hair had been dragged straight back and tied low on the neck, like a European peasant woman’s, and she had not bothered to put on lipstick. Or perhaps, I thought, watching her chew distractedly on her lower lip, she had eaten it off.

Maria had never been one to make herself up, but she did wear lipstick. Without it she looked sallow and used; in a black knit dress and black shoes and stockings that I had not seen before, she seemed to me a foreshadowing of the 260 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

middle-aged woman she might, with ill luck, become. Even as she looked up to greet us, she glanced obliquely at Colin.

Worried, I thought. She’s worried too. We really ought to get him to a doctor.

Yolanda was not present.

Across from Maria and Colin, on Sam and Ada’s right, sat the two people we had come to meet. Even without introductions, you would have known Verna Cardigan for what she was: an Eastern European woman of once-great beauty, now enormously wealthy. Lord Cardigan, beside her, could have been any frail old man taking the sun like an ancient turtle at any grand European hotel. It was Verna who was unmistakably herself and no one else.

She was not beautiful now, but she was monumentally handsome, and I thought perhaps that was all she had ever been. But in her first youth she must have been truly spectacular. There was something about her, even now at fifty or thereabouts, that was monumental, like a pagan colossus.

Like…yes, like Sam Forrest. Lord, I thought, what a matched pair they must have been in those early London days, when he was painting her. I wondered if he had kissed her too, on an afternoon of dancing light, and what had come after that.

I looked around the table smiling a polite, social smile while I waited to be introduced, thinking there were indeed three Sam Forrest portraits on this deck over the water of Venice, and wondering if he had kissed us all, and more.

I had gone a long way yesterday, I thought, a long distance, measured in more than miles. I did not think I would come entirely back from it.

“Hello,” I said, walking over to Verna Cardigan and putting out my hand. “I’m Catherine Gaillard. It was lovely of you to ask us to join you.”

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“Yes,” she said in a deep, cigarette-rasped voice. “I wanted to meet you. So you are Sam’s Cat. His eye has not left him, I see.”

She tilted her head and looked at me intently and smiled.

Her teeth were long and square, slightly yellowed with nicotine, and her lipstick was a startling candy pink, thick and chalky, the kind we had worn in the seventies. Her eyes were hidden behind huge dark glasses, but crinkles fanned out from their corners when she smiled. Her chin was large and square, her nose was aquiline, and her forehead was high and slightly domed. She wore her straw-blond hair in a chin-length straight bob. It fell over one eye like Marlene Dietrich’s had. Her skin was olive, sallow with old tan and leathery, and she wore no makeup that I could see except the lipstick. She was lined like fine old glove leather, and there were creases in her face and neck and jowls, and there was no hint that she cared at all. She took off the glasses, and her eyes were the strange dark-lashed yellow of a wolf’s.

This woman was a Valkyrie, without doubt. Sam’s vision had been true.

“This is my husband, David, who has also been so anxious to meet you,” she said. “He thinks perhaps Sam needs a tiny little kick from the muse and hoped you would administer it. See, David, she is lovely. He has not done anyone like her before. I think there will be a new show soon, yes?”

She just missed saying,
Ja
, and I could hear the millenniums of undiluted Aryan German in her voice. Her simple surety, the sense of self, was almost frightening. Well, it was what they had always had, wasn’t it, those purest of Germans?

David, Lord Cardigan, held up a tiny face like a monkey’s, or a very old papier-mâché mask, and smiled with 262 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

his thin lips pressed together. He did not wear sunglasses, and his eyes were almost colorless, opaque and milky. But I thought they had been blue, and his hair sandy, like a proper Scot’s. Remnants of it were pasted over his mottled skull like strands of seaweed. He had liver spots and tissue-paper wrinkles, and the closed-mouth smile somehow held great charm. It was impossible not to smile back.

“Lovely, yes,” he said in a cracked, chiming voice. “A Botticelli in her green, like she has just come in with the spring.

La Primavera
. Or were you thinking della Francesa, Sam?

There is that too.”

“Bernini, perhaps,” Ada said, smiling her red smile.

The Cardigans were silent, studying me, and then they smiled and nodded together.

“One can’t see it at first, but then…oh, yes. Quite stunning,” said Verna Cardigan.

“I shall lobby very hard to finance this show, Sam,” Lord Cardigan piped.

Sam grinned lazily.

“I think she’d prefer you thought of her as Cat Gaillard,”

he said. “Wouldn’t you, Cat?”

“That would be nice,” I said. I was intrigued with the Cardigans, but I was childishly annoyed too. I did not like being studied and cataloged, and I did not wish to be dis-missed as simply Sam Forrest’s new painting. I could not have said why I cared what Lord and Lady Cardigan thought of me; they were so obviously the people I had thought I would meet in his orbit when we first came to Rome, the international artsy set. And I surely would not see them again after today. But I did care.

“Of course,” David Cardigan said. “Of course you are a woman in your own right, my dear, and no doubt a gifted one; all of Sam’s portraits are of distinguished HILL TOWNS / 263

women. Verna, and our dear Yolanda, and Ada, such a manager and hostess she is. What is your area of expertise?

Don’t tell me you race motorcars.”

“She takes exquisite care of me,” Joe said, stepping forward and bending over Verna Cardigan’s large, shapely hand.

Diamonds flashed massively in the sun. I looked at him incredulously; surely he was not going to kiss her hand?

“She’s a great gardener,” Sam said. “Her garden is famous all over the place back home. And an art historian.”

“Then you will love Florence,” Verna Cardigan said. “The wonderful art, and the Boboli Gardens, and of course the gardens in Fiesole, and the Medici villa at Poggio, and I Tatti, though I think that is private now…. Well, and so this is Professor Joe. Mm-hmm. What a wonderful hat. I think I will take it home with me, and you with it.”