The Marble Quilt (27 page)

We came to some ruins—old arches and bits of aqueduct. Behind a tall fence, fields of grass and wheat spread out. In the distance I could see sheep grazing against a silhouette of buildings, one of which I recognized as St. Peter's.

Adua parked the car. We got out. It was raining, which should have clued me in on what they had in mind. With a kind of medical authority, as if it were a gland to be palpated, she felt at the metal fence. A sign was tacked to it, explaining in bureaucratic Italian that this was an archaeological zone: no trespassing.

“I think we can get over it,” Adua said, fitting her foot into one of the wire squares of the fence. Yet when she hoisted herself up, the fence sagged. She started again. “Push my ass,” she commanded, and we did. She hauled herself over, dropping abruptly onto the other side.

Tom went next, then I. As I fell, my jeans caught on the fence, which ripped a hole in them.

“Don't worry,” Tom said. “Torn jeans are fashionable this year.”

I looked back at the fence. How were we ever going to get back over it? I wondered. Meanwhile, Tom and Adua had set off toward St. Peter's. I followed them. For several minutes we trekked through mud and grass. Very far out, so far that you could no longer see the car, the ground started yielding up marble. The rain had moistened it, making it easier to see. I hadn't noticed before, but both Tom and Adua were carrying backpacks. Very quickly, they began gathering up their booty. “Look, this one's perfect!” Tom said, digging out a hexagonal paving stone.

“Oh,
cipollina
,” Adua said, as she yanked a column fragment from the mud. “Look,
the surface is striated, like a slice of onion.”

After about twenty minutes—by now their backpacks were nearly full—a dog appeared. She was a very friendly, very dirty, brown-and-white sheepdog. I patted her head. Next some sheep rounded a hillock, accompanied by an old man carrying a stick. All of them gazed at us.

Immediately, Tom and Adua put down their backpacks.

“Good morning,” Adua said to the old man. “Are these your sheep?”

“They are.”

“What are you raising them for? Ricotta?”

“Ricotta, pecorino.”

She smiled confidingly. “It's not too easy now, finding a really fresh ricotta in Rome. Not like in the old days.”

“Everything was better then,” the shepherd agreed.

Rather disingenuously, I thought, Adua touched Tom on the shoulder and pointed toward the skyline. “Perhaps you can help us,” she said to the shepherd. “I've brought my American friends here so that they could get a view of the city from a distance, and we were wondering if that building was St. Peter's.”

“Yes, it's St. Peter's,” the shepherd answered. “And that one's San Paolo fuori le Mura.”

“Of course! I didn't recognize it from here.”

The shepherd now proceeded to give us a telescopic tour of the great Roman monuments. Adua asked him how long he had been working these fields. All his life, he said. Seventy-eight years.

“Well, we'd best be heading back,” she said after a few minutes, and offered her hand. “It's been a pleasure.”

“
Arrivederla, signora
,” the shepherd said, moving away with his dog.

Adua and Tom picked up their backpacks, and we started moving back toward the fence.

“Incredible, isn't it?” Tom said. “Sheep and shepherds—yet we're still inside the city limits.”

“I hope he didn't notice what you were up to,” I said.

Adua laughed. “Don't worry,” she said. “He's not interested in marble. He's only interested in his ricotta.”

After that, Tom became a fixture at Adua's poker games. The other players, he told me, were “lunatics” like him. He had “gotten the disease.” He sent me letters in Düsseldorf describing his winnings: a slab of
giallo antico
from Ostia, some perfect tesserae of green
serpentino
from the baths of Caracalla. “Adua's had a lot of her pieces put into the floor of her apartment, like tiles,” he said. “Only she keeps them covered with a carpet. She lives in terror of the
carabinieri
coming after her.”

Via del Boschetto, he told me, was getting too expensive, so he had decided to sublet the apartment of a friend of Pepe's, on Via Bulgaria, in the Olympic Village. “Far out from the center, but the place is huge, and has a terrace. And compared to Via del Boschetto, I'm paying nothing. Practically nothing.”

“But isn't it a problem getting to work?”

“Why? The fifty-three bus stops right outside my door.”

I visited him only twice on Via Bulgaria. Even by the grim standards of the Roman
periferia
, the Olympic Village was ugly to the point of inspiring a kind of interior desolation: what Eastern Europe must have looked like before the wall came down. Long ago the habitations of 1960s athletes (designed, no doubt, according to sound principles of architectural rationality) had been converted into public housing: long, low rows of apartment blocks, constructed from umber-colored brick and raised up on pylons. A bramble of antennas sprouted on the roofs, and though there was space beneath the pylons for plenty of shops, almost all were vacant, only the most basic—a tobacconist, a grocery store, a pharmacy—having proved capable of flourishing in such meager soil.

Most of Tom's neighbors were elderly. They trod up and down the pedestrian walkways, daughters of seventy leading mothers of ninety. On the door of the pharmacy, to which he took me the first day, a placard announced, AVAILABLE HERE: INCONTINENCE DIAPERS.

As a language, Italian tends to eschew the sort of polite euphemisms in which English glories. Yet Tom, who in San Francisco had always displayed such a need for cheer, here seemed immune to the dreariness of his surroundings. Indeed, as he led me across the so-called park, clotted with weeds and littered with hypodermics, or down dark streets that, because the city had designated this the official zone for driving lessons and driving tests, were always filled with cars screeching to a halt, irritated instructors slamming their feet on auxiliary brakes, he exulted. “This is the real Rome,” he said. “You want to eat the way the Romans eat, you want to eat
abbacchio
cooked the Roman way? This is where you'll find it.”

As for his apartment—well, as he had promised, it
was
large. Essentially it consisted
of a corridor off of which three square rooms opened. The floors were terrazzo, the walls a blinding white, the ceilings lit by naked bulbs. Because he had as yet had no time to shop, there was little in the way of furniture: a table (the one he was tied to) and two chairs in the kitchen, a foldout sofa in the living room, an ugly laminate armoire and a mattress in the bedroom. No lamps, no pictures, none of the decorative frippery to which he had been so devoted in San Francisco. Instead the apartment was dark, especially on those mornings when the sirocco swept down the long, quiet streets, spattering every outdoor surface with Saharan sand. Most of the marble he kept hidden in the armoire, and took out only when he wanted to show it off.

No doubt the apartment's strangest feature, however, was its door, which was padded, covered in what looked like red leather, and buttoned like a chesterfield. It would not have looked amiss in an asylum. Nor would any loud noise—for instance, a scream, or glass breaking—have been likely to penetrate that door. For what reason, I wondered, had Pepe's friend had it installed?

His new apartment made me frightened for Tom, much more frightened, even, than I'd been the day I'd gotten off the plane and he'd walked up to me, so changed that I barely recognized him. Everything about the move seemed contrary to his spirit—or perhaps I should say, contrary to the spirit he had displayed when we lived together. And why did he need so badly to save money? We had just sold the house, so he had some cash. Was it because he was spending everything he earned on marble? Or on something else?

It occurs to me, sitting in the
caserma
, that perhaps I ought to mention the poker games to the
maresciallo
. Only if I do, I might get Adua in trouble—assuming they
haven't already found her. No doubt
her
number was in Tom's Filofax.

So did they just show up at her door, leading her, for an instant, to believe that her day of reckoning had come at last, and that her marble was to be confiscated? That she was to be fined, jailed, ruined? Probably. Until they explained the real reason for their visit. Tom was dead.

Something else I hadn't thought of: after the murder, when the
carabinieri
searched his flat, they must have found the paving stone. The one in
africano
. Not to mention the obelisk—a poker game winning. And God knows what other contraband.

Oh, how complicated it's all getting! Such a proliferation of motives! If Gina knew, she'd be thrilled. Yes, she'd say, it had to be one of those marble thieves. An intrigue. Killed for the sake of some
cipollina rossa
. Or a fragment of
frutticoloso
, so called because its many component colors suggest a basket of fruit, and, according to Adua, the rarest of the rare.

If they ask me, I'll tell them. I'll tell them everything I know. As long as they don't ask me, though, I'm keeping my mouth shut. This was something I learned to do in San Francisco, when I was cheating all the time on Tom: always tell the truth, but never volunteer anything.

Would things have gone better for us if we'd behaved like all the other faggots we knew, and had what was known as an “open” relationship? If Tom had been the sort of man who, upon surprising his lover in bed with someone else, didn't get mad, but got undressed … well, would we be living on Wool Street still? Sitting on a fortune in real estate? Still together? Tom still alive?

No, no. The scenario's too simplistic. For just as easily as it might have liberated me, the knowledge that Tom, too, was getting up to “that sort of thing” could have provoked in me a jealousy equal to his own. Or the lifting of the onus might have defused the thrill of adultery altogether. When transgression is divorced from subterfuge, the illicit becomes banal. The pleasure of cheating, it's in the scam, not the payoff—right?

So I took his loyalty for a ride. He never found out. Discord overwhelmed us, and we parted.

Oh, everything went so wildly, so perversely out of kilter! None of this was supposed to happen: not the Olympic Village, not Düsseldorf, not the patrol car nosing its way stealthily around the corner of Wool Street as I stand gawking at the house we used to own. For suddenly I'm there again—no longer in the
caserma
at all. The policeman slows, lowers his sunglasses. And what am I but a loiterer, a ne'er-do-well, just the sort of rabble he's paid to scare away?

Of course, if I wanted to, I could explain my presence to him. “I used to live here,” I could say. “This neighborhood used to be my neighborhood. I used to shop at the grocery store on the corner.” But I don't want to. Instead I smile, walk back across the street, and climb into my rental car. Switch on the ignition. Drive away.

It's all my fault. I squandered what I should have cherished. I took for granted Tom's reliability, the fact that every day, at every hour of the day, I knew where to find him: mornings in the kitchen, writing or cooking; from noon to one, the gym; afternoons back in the kitchen, or babysitting. More crucially, on those rare occasions when he veered from his routine, he always made a point of calling to tell me. “I'll be at Gina's until three-thirty,” he'd say. “Then I'm going grocery shopping. Then I have to meet Mrs.
Roxburgh to plan a lunch. I should be home by seven, unless I hit traffic—”

“That's fine,” I'd say.

“Let me give you the number at Mrs. Roxburgh's,” he'd say.

“That's all right. I don't need it,” I'd say.

“I just don't want you to worry,” he'd say.

As for me, I gave him no outward cause for anxiety. I kept all my ducks in a row. Only sometimes I'd call half an hour before one of his dinner parties and say that I couldn't come. “I forgot that we have a test this week. My Urdu class.”

How feeble was the noise he made on these occasions, disappointment thudding in the echo chamber of purported indifference.

Sometimes I wondered if he ever got suspicious. I rather hoped he might. I rather hoped he'd make inquiries, and discover that indeed, an Urdu class
was
being offered at San Francisco State on Thursday evenings. For my deceptions were artful. I knew Tom well enough to know that once he found out the course existed, he would never check whether I was actually enrolled in it. Instead, shame at having distrusted me in the first place would swamp him, inducing that superfluity of regret that in his case almost always took the form of an urge to bake: something creamy and sticky, which I would find waiting for me when I got home.

It was on these nights—sitting in our kitchen in the aftermath of some carnal misdeed—that I would experience most deeply the giddy relief of the liar. Nor is this delight so remote, in the end, from artistic ecstasy, the pleasure of seeing a well-crafted thing work well.

All my ducks in a row.

Or perhaps I have it wrong, and it was Tom who was playing
me
for the fool. Perhaps, the whole time, he too was getting up to “that sort of thing”; in which case his pledges of fidelity, his insistence on keeping me abreast of his many activities—all this was as much a needless vaudeville as my Thursday night Urdu class.

Needless—unless what he needed was to feel that he was getting away with something.

I tried to remain faithful, if not to him, then to his fear, to his largely unspoken conviction that only by being “good” might we hope to avoid the sort of fate so many others had suffered. For he seemed to perceive our coming together as a covenant, the terms of which required us to give up, in exchange for health, the very life implied by the place where we had come together. Only by retreating from a septic world, as the storytellers in the
Decameron
had done, might we save ourselves, save each other.