Page Turner Pa (7 page)

Kenneth was undoing the drawstring of his sweatpants.

"So you said two hundred for an hour, is that right?"

"Yup. Plus twelve for the taxi."

Joseph counted out bills. "The fact is, I've never been to Kansas City, though I've been just about everywhere else in this godforsaken land. Let's see, twenty, forty, sixty, eighty." Suddenly he stopped. "Oh, dear. Oh, I can't believe this. This never happens. Let me—" Again he counted.

Then he smiled across the room. "This is very embarrassing," he said, "and I don't know quite how it happened, but I don't seem to have enough cash on hand. I have—let me count it again—eighty-four dollars. But that's not possible! I got money this morning! Oh, the vet, of course. I had to pay the vet in cash. You see, my dog died today." He sat down.

Kenneth said nothing. Already he had his shirt back on, was tying up his shoes.

"I'm sorry," Joseph went on. "You wouldn't by any chance take a check, would you? Or a credit card?"

"I turned down another job for this."

"I really do apologize. I'm not in the habit of doing this sort of thing."

Kenneth was dressed again. Joseph saw him to the door.

"Let me at least give you forty dollars for your trouble," he said.

"I turned down another job for this," Kenneth repeated.

"Then eighty." He handed Kenneth the bills. "Sorry again."

Kenneth said nothing. Folding the money in his fist, he stepped through the door, which Joseph closed and latched without a word. Sitting down on the floor, Joseph listened for the elevator. For some reason he was remembering a summer afternoon not so many years ago when, driving toward Rome, he and Kennington had had to stop for cows crossing the road. The sound of the bells they wore around their necks was almost music, almost an echo of cows' voices.

Amazing, memory's trick of seeming random, when of course there is always a key: in this case, Italy. Rome. Where Kennington, for all Joseph knew, might be sleeping; might be fucking; might be dead, or drunk, or stumbling down streets the stones of which the torchlight had burned to a primeval intensity.

Only minutes ago, a boy ... he winced. He hated sounding, or feeling, like Kennington's mother. Yet it was true: they'd gone to choose Sophie from the litter, and Kennington, just like a little boy, had fallen to the floor and let the puppies crawl all over him. They'd licked his face, licked, when he laughed, the bright polished surfaces of his teeth, while Joseph watched, and the breeder lady smiled. "I can see your son's a real dog lover," she'd said.

"Yes," he'd echoed. "You're a real dog lover, aren't you, son?" Somehow calling him "son," as he sometimes did in bed, excited him. But Kennington, in a heap of dachshunds, was too convulsed with laughter to answer.

"E
NOUGH BLUE
in the sky to make a Dutch boy a pair of pants," Pamela said. "Remember that?"

Paul, stirring sugar into his coffee, shook his head.

"Just an old expression your grandmother used to use. When we were going on a picnic, and it started to rain, she'd peek out the window, and say, 'We'll go if you can find enough blue in the sky to make a Dutch boy a pair of pants.' Well, what do you think, Pauly? Is there?"

He looked at the sky, where threads of clouds still drifted. He looked at his mother. She had on dark glasses. Nonetheless her features—yesterday discomposed by shock and uprooting—were starting to reassemble themselves. Yes, she was ceasing to be the walking disaster to whom pride alone lent some semblance of dignity, and becoming again the laughing woman she had usually been, the laughing woman Paul had always thought of her as being.

"I'd say yes," Paul said. It was eight in the morning, and they were breakfasting on the loggia of their hotel.

"Still, we ought to take umbrellas as a precaution. Oh, I'm so excited. I want to see the Colosseum, the Parthenon—"

"The Pantheon."

"The Pantheon, the Forum. Unless of course you'd rather be by yourself. If that's the case, Paul, just tell me. I understand."

"No, no, we can sightsee together."

They got up. An inward sense of victory had turned the corners of Pamela's lips upward in the slightest smile. Something had happened. She didn't know why, but this morning, as she was finishing her make-up, Paul had barreled into her room and flung himself against her. "Sweetheart," she'd said, her arms going round him. "Honey, what's the matter?" But he hadn't answered.

People rarely admit it, Pamela observed to herself, but the sorrow of a beloved can be gladdening. Usually when he was upset, Paul pulled away from his mother, as he had last night. She'd had to train herself not to plead for his company. And then, when she least expected it, these hiccups of childhood would seize him, and something would freshen in her, especially as she knew they would come less and less frequently as the years passed, then not at all.

In the Pantheon, he read aloud to her from Georgina Masson. Beneath the enormous aperture at the center of the dome the marble, inset with little drains, was still wet from last night's storm. "Listen to this," he said. "In the niches there used to be statues of all the gods and goddesses, and according to Pliny, the statue of Venus wore as earrings two halves of a pearl Mark Anthony took from Cleopatra. And the pearl had a twin that she dissolved in vinegar and drank to win a bet."

"Cleopatra drank a pearl?"

Paul nodded.

"Ugh," Pamela said. "No thank you. Not for all the tea in China." Then they were pushed away by a bargelike woman who was leading a German tour group to Raphael's tomb with a flyswatter. "Until the twentieth century this was the largest dome in the world. Some of the bricks date from 125
A.D.
And the interior—it says here, 'The concrete was mixed with travertine, tufa, brick and pumice stone in successive layers, with the heaviest materials at the lower levels, the lighter tufa and pumice mixture being used at the top of the dome.'" Paul shut his book. "It must have really been something before all this Christianizing."

"Must have been," his mother echoed.

They went out the immense bronze doors. Tiny cars, the smallest she had ever seen, buzzed around the piazza. Their wheels were half the size of those on her station wagon, and a few had only three of them.

"Look at that. That car doesn't even have a steering wheel, it has handlebars, like a motorcycle. And it's called an Ape."

"No, it's pronounced
ah-pay.
That means 'bee.'"

"So ape is bee and cold is hot. What a funny language." She pulled her scarf tighter around her neck. In fact she was more at ease talking about cars than the Colosseum, the dust of which smudged her shoes, and which in any event stank of urine. For the architecture of Rome was not only monumental, it was monumentally indifferent. It bore down. Thousands have come and gone here, it seemed to say. Goethe, Liszt. You do not matter.

They went into more churches than she could keep track of. In one of them Paul started reading to her about the apse. She was too embarrassed to admit that at forty-seven years old she didn't know what an apse was. And then all the ruins started to seem to her to be just so much stone and earth. Unlike Paul, she couldn't extrapolate a temple from two columns of marble. Rome to her was dirt, deadness.

When they finished their touring they took a walk down the Via Condotti. In the shops saleswomen in ruthlessly tailored little suits followed them everywhere, as if they were thieves. These women's shoes were not scuffed. There wasn't a wrinkle on them. Whereas Pamela, in her black slacks and wrinkled blouse, might as well have had a sign taped to her back that read "
TOURIST
." Every shopkeeper addressed her automatically in English. No wonder the little gypsy girls in their filthy patterned skirts and shawls flocked to her in front of the Spanish Steps! When it happened, Paul was across the piazza, buying a newspaper. Suddenly a bevy, several pregnant, had surrounded Pamela. They thrust torn maps and dirty pieces of cardboard into her abdomen. At first she thought they were asking directions. "I don't speak Italian!" she told them, as quick hands slipped inside her purse. It was all rather dreamy. "Stop that!" she said, slapping them away. "Stop it! Paul!"

He turned. "I'm coming!" he called. Then a tall man intervened, whacking at the girls with his umbrella. "
Andate vial
" he shouted, grabbing one by her ponytail. The girl howled, while her friends laughed, flurried, regathered like skittish birds a few feet off.

"
Dai,
" the tall man said to the girl, who was trying to pull away from him.

She spat.

"
Dai,
" he repeated, his voice grim, yanking at her ponytail to hurt her.

She thrashed. The other girls lingered on the periphery and shouted for him to leave her alone.

"
Va be', va be'!
" the girl said finally, a bright red wallet dropping from her skirt.

The tall man pushed her away, picked up the wallet, handed it to Pamela.

"Everything in order?"

"I think so."

Rubbing the back of her head where he had hurt her, the girl hissed imprecations at him. In her strange language she vowed that he would suffer headache his whole life, that his first-born child would die, that he would lose every good thing he had.

Then some
carabinieri
rode into the piazza on their horses. She hurried off.

"Thank you so much." In unconscious sympathy with her attacker, Pamela touched the back of her head. "I can't tell you how grateful—" She stopped speaking. "But you're—"

Across the fountain, Paul watched, his eyes narrow.

"Have we met before?" Kennington asked. He asked the question of Pamela, but he was looking at Paul.

 

It really was a coincidence. That morning Kennington had just been coming out of the Caffè Greco, when he'd noticed Paul and his mother gazing into a shop window on the Via Condotti. Paul was wearing a neatly pressed white shirt and khaki trousers. His mother, who had a large quantity of dark blond hair, came up only to his shoulder.

His first impulse was to run up and greet them. Then he thought better of it and, hurrying back into the caffè, watched them through the door. In front of the shop they were laughing ... at what? The designs? The prices? Or was it that nervous laughter, as he knew from experience, people so often emit upon being told something they think ugly is actually beautiful?

Finally Paul's mother linked her arm through his, and they continued down the street.

Like a spy, Kennington followed them.

In the Piazza di Spagna, Paul went to a kiosk and bought a newspaper. It was then that the gypsy girls attacked his mother. Speaking to her had never been Kennington's intention; indeed, his intention had been simply to watch; to try to gauge, from the way they interacted, how much Paul might have told her. But then the mother was in trouble, and he had no choice but to intervene, his own mother having brought him up to be chivalrous to ladies. Pamela looked dazed, so he took them back to the Caffé Greco, where under a framed photograph of Buffalo Bill (he had customed there in 1903) they drank coffees, hers with a little grappa added. "I really can't thank you enough, Mr. Kennington," she said. "It all happened so quickly. One minute I was just standing there admiring the steps and the next those little fingers were everywhere. I mean, I assumed they were only asking directions!"

"Never underestimate gypsy children," Kennington answered. "Their parents train them by making them stick their hands in bowls of broken glass. You have to be just as quick, and just as brutal."

"Well, you're certainly my hero today." She brushed hair out of her eyes. "You know, it's only our first morning here? That wallet had everything in it. Credit cards, traveler's checks. We're alone here in Rome, you see. My husband and I are separated."

"Ah."

"And what a coincidence! At breakfast Paul was telling me that he saw the poster for your concert."

Kennington looked at Paul, who was studying the foamy residue at the bottom of his cup.

"Also, your Italian is so good! Where did you learn it?"

"Here and there. I had an Italian teacher for a while."

"Aldo Minchilli, right?" Paul interposed. "Right."

"Well, Mr. Kennington, you simply must let us take you to lunch. To thank you."

"On the contrary, you must let me take
you
to lunch."

"But that's ridiculous—"

"I insist."

"But there's no reason—"

"Exactly."

As with the barman, the force of masculine will proved indomitable. "Okay," Pamela said. "How about we just go to lunch and then decide who pays? Does that sound all right?"

They went. The owner of the trattoria to which Kennington led them called him maestro and kissed Pamela on the hand. "And how is Mr. Mansourian?" he wanted to know.

"Fine, fine," Kennington said, while through the archway that opened onto the kitchen, a young cook ran his fingers through a pile of freshly cut fettuccine as tenderly as if it were his lover's hair.

"This is so wonderful!" Pamela said when the first courses arrived. "And such a far cry from the stuff we're used to back home! You know, mushy spaghetti in watery sauce."

"It's a good place. I always try to come here when I'm in Rome."

"Do you come often? Are you on tour?"

"The poster Paul saw was for the last of my Italian concerts."

"What an exciting life you must lead, traveling all the time and staying in hotels."

Kennington smiled, not sure how to explain that like most people who spend most of their lives in hotels, they no longer held much glamour for him.

"The funny thing is, I've probably been to Rome a dozen times, and I've hardly done any sightseeing. It's always been too hectic. You know, interviews, lunch, interviews, concert, boring official dinner. Then the next morning you leave. Now I've decided to stay on a bit. Do you know I've never even been to the Sistine Chapel?"

"You should have Paul take you around. He's a wonderful tour guide, aren't you, honey? Today we did the Colosseum, the Parthenon—"