I Am Livia (18 page)

The sun had begun to set, casting long shadows across the garden. It was late summer; the marigolds were in full bloom, and the air was perfumed. I told myself I should go back inside. Go and act like a good hostess and a proper wife. But I could not make myself do it, not immediately. A woman, visibly with child, can leave her guests at the dinner table, even for an extended period, and people will imagine reasonable excuses. No one will think too badly of her. That was what I told myself as I lingered in the garden. I would take a little time, calm myself, then return to my guests.

Finally, I let out a long breath and reminded myself that after all, the evening was almost over, and I must see it through. I steeled myself to go back inside. Then, a shadow moved at the edge of my field of vision, and I turned, expecting to see Tiberius Nero, coming to fetch me back to the dining room. But the man standing at the perimeter of the garden was Caesar Octavianus.

He came closer. “Why are you hiding out here?”

“I’m not hiding,” I said. “I just wanted to breathe some cooler air.”

“If you find it so unpleasant to be around me, you shouldn’t have invited me.”

He spoke as if I were some unreasonable child who had fled from him. I felt a rush of deep anger. I wanted to shatter his complacency so much that I did not guard my tongue. “I didn’t invite you—my husband did. Everyone in the Senate has to invite you, because you might take it personally if they don’t. And then they don’t feel too safe. You must know that.”

“When somebody invites me to dinner, I don’t generally analyze the reasons.”

“You just assume you’re loved wherever you go.”

“No, I’m not that much of an idiot.” He frowned. “When I was a boy, there was an elephant they used to bring out every time there was a fair. And the elephant had one trick. You could go up to it and put a coin in its trunk, and the elephant would put the coin in its master’s purse.
What I remember is how everyone approached that elephant. Like this.” He mimed going forward on tiptoe, tentatively holding out a shaking hand with an imaginary coin. “Everyone was scared to death of being trampled. Most people approach me now like I’m that elephant.”

“And that surprises you?”

“Not in the least,” he said. “I’m only saying, if I avoided socializing with people who were afraid of me, I would have a remarkably narrow social circle.”

Yes, you would,
I thought. But what struck me was that I was not afraid of him. Perhaps I should be, but I wasn’t. Of all the feelings he drew from me, fear was absent. And all things considered, that was strange.

He glanced up at the sky. “It’s very clear out.”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s very clear.”
The sky was violet, and there were no clouds. A few stars had emerged.

“You know, I’d like to have an ordinary conversation with you, just ordinary as if I was a human being and not some mammoth beast. But that’s not going to work so well, is i
t
?”

“Probably not.”

“Let’s try anyway. Say something ordinary.”

I would humor him for a moment, I thought, and then extricate myself and go inside. “I was a little surprised your wife didn’t come with you this evening,” I said. “But I’ve heard she’s about to have a child.”

“Yes, she is, but the reason she didn’t come is that the marriage has never been more than a political arrangement, and we don’t like each other. It’s more convenient for her to stay with me until the baby comes, however, so we’re both being patient about the divorce. The moment that baby is born—that day—I’m divorcing her.”

I stared at him.

“It’s by mutual agreement,” he said. “Really.
We’ll probably be much better friends when we don’t have to live in the same house.”

I noticed fireflies in the bushes, near the garden’s south wall. Their lights flickered.

We were silent. It was palpable—this thing between us that did not fit with recent history or with the fact that we were relative strangers. And I knew he felt it too, and that was why he had come out into the garden after me.

“For us to be out here together is not at all appropriate,” I said.

I was six months pregnant. My husband was in the dining room not thirty feet away. It was the kind of situation you would not find even in the most vulgar kind of farce. But I didn’t move to go back inside.

“I’m sorry that there has been so much…disruption in your life. The disorders we have been through should not touch the lives of women. The fact that we men can’t resolve our differences in some decent way shouldn’t create havoc in the…domestic sphere.”

“Wouldn’t it be pretty if that were so,” I said.

He seemed to be deep in thought, his expression troubled. Then he asked, “Do you blame me for your father’s death?”

“I blame you, among others. For his death and for the death of my mother.”

“I had nothing against your father. Still less your mother. I’m not by nature a violent or a brutish man.”

I thought of the merciless actions I knew he had committed. I said nothing.

“So you regard me as an enemy?”

“I regard myself as being at your mercy,” I said. “I’m a woman with a little child and another on the way, and a husband who lives by your sufferance. I must swallow the drink the gods have put in my mouth. You have nothing to fear from me and mine. Isn’t that obvious?”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course it is. And you have nothing to fear from me. The difficulty, as I see it, is that you think you’re supposed to hate me. And you don’t.” He paused, studying my face. “You don’t, do you?”

“I thought I did.”

“But you don’t.”
There was a trace of triumph in his voice.

I do not hate you. Of all the emotions I could feel, fear and hatred are the ones that make sense. And those are the ones I feel no trace of.

“What do you feel?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“If I were to go to kiss you, you wouldn’t back away, would you? You wouldn’t do that.”

I took a sharp breath. My heart hammered. A part of me wanted to feel his lips on mine. A part of me wanted to run. “Don’t,” I said.

“Well, you’re right, this isn’t the place or the time. But strangely enough, I still feel like doing it.”

I made myself say, “There is no place and no time. There can never be a place or a time.”

“Livia, if I had had the opportunity after Philippi, I swear to you I would have let your father live. I would have done it for your sake.”

I said nothing.

He must have thought he saw disbelief in my face, because he said, “If you think I’m lying, then consider this: Do you know how many of Brutus’s supporters I conducted a funeral service for? Exactly one. I did it for you.”

“I’ve believed all along that you did it in return for what I told you about Cicero,” I said.

But it was one thing to honor a dead enemy, something else to leave him alive and dangerous.
Would Caesar truly have done tha
t
? There was no way of knowing. “If you want thanks for granting my father a funeral, then thank you.”

“What kind of man would want thanks for tha
t
?”

A monster,
I thought.
A monster would want thanks.

“It wasn’t in return for what you told me about Cicero,” he said. “It was because of what I feel for you.
What I felt from the first time I met you.”

The question was on the tip of my tongue:
What do you feel for me?
I would not ask it. Instead I said, “Let’s go back inside.”

“If you want to.”

I walked back into the house, and Caesar followed me. Returning to the dining room, I registered the guests’ attempts to keep from staring at the two of us. Nepia’s look was knowing and, I thought, jealous. On Tiberius Nero’s face I saw amazement and dismay.

I tried to say something, but no words came. Caesar rescued me. As if nothing unusual had happened, he asked if anyone had seen the statues of a sculptor named Massilus. “I think his work is overrated, personally. But perhaps I’m missing something. Rullus, you know more than I do about art.
What do you think?”

Rullus began criticizing Massilus’s work. “Most of his statues look unfinished. You feel that with a little more effort, he might produce something truly beautiful. But it hasn’t happened yet.”

I motioned to a slave to serve dessert. An array of dates, plums, peaches, and grapes was placed on the table.

The dinner party continued for a while longer and ended pleasantly. Caesar thanked Tiberius Nero and me for our hospitality in the friendliest possible way before he left.

When we were alone, Tiberius Nero turned on me, his voice shaking with anger. “What were you doing?”

“What do you mean?”

“You came very near to insulting Caesar. And then what—were the two of you off somewhere talking?”

“Yes, we were talking. Tiberius, forgive me. I was upset, thinking about all that’s happened, all we’ve been through. And he—Caesar was very understanding.”

“Understanding,”
Tiberius Nero repeated. “Well, how did you leave it with him?”

“Leave i
t
?” I stared at him.

“You seemed to part on good terms. I’m asking if you really did. Or did you make that man our enemy?”

“He’s not our enemy. I swear he’s not. Yes—we parted on good terms.”

“Then that’s all right, I suppose,”
Tiberius Nero said.

“Are you sleeping with Caesar Octavianus?” my sister, Secunda, asked me, three days later. She had come to visit me, and we were in my sitting room, just chatting, or so I had thought.

“Am I wha
t
?”

She averted her eyes. “Sleeping with him.”

“Why are you asking me such a question?”

“I’ve heard talk.”

“From whom?”

“From the women at the market.” Secunda reached across the space between us and pressed my hand. “Livia, please—you can admit it to me.”

I had been away from the city so long I had forgotten how gossip attached to the great in Rome, and how quickly it spread. I had not considered the obvious: that everything Caesar did was liable to be discussed and twisted and picked apart by everyone, and that any hint of impropriety relating to him would be seized upon with lip-smacking relish. “What exactly are people saying?”

“That as soon as you came back to Rome, you seduced him. Oh, I’m sure that’s not true, I’m sure he seduced you—or forced you, even. Livia, did he force you?”

I shook my head. I did not elaborate. I was too stunned.

“People are saying that because of you he has told his wife he wishes to divorce her. And that the baby you are carrying is his child. And—I’ve heard that he’s shaving off his beard just to please you.”

“And you, my sister, believe this?”

“I didn’t say I believed it,” Secunda said. But then she pressed her lips tightly together in a reproving frown. She looked at that moment very much like our mother.

I ran my hands over the bulge in my abdomen. “Oh, yes, certainly, it’s his child. Have you forgotten that I’m six months along, and six months ago I was in Greece and Caesar was in Italy?”

“I know it’s not his baby,” Secunda said.

“How clever of you to deduce that,” I said coldly.

“I was just speaking out of sisterly concern,” Secunda said. “And—well, he
is
all of a sudden planning to hold a great festival, to celebrate when he shaves off his beard.”

In our strata of society, young men sacrificed at the Temple of Jupiter after they shaved for the first time, and their families celebrated the occasion. Caesar had pledged at age nineteen not to shave until his adoptive father was avenged. Before that, he had never celebrated his first shave. Now he had announced publicly that he would shave off his beard on his upcoming twenty-fourth birthday. Rather than just holding a private party, he had decided to invite all of Rome to the festivities—to hire street musicians and distribute food and drink throughout the city. It was an intelligent thing for a young politician to do, a way to curry favor with the people.