The Night Villa (18 page)

I look down the steps to reassure myself that she’s okay, but Agnes is nowhere to be seen. The vacant stone steps plunge into the rough tide—too rough to swim in, I’m sure. I scan the cliff face, but there’s no place where anything bigger than a lizard could perch. Could she have fallen without me hearing her while I was transfixed by the little priapic devil? Should I try to search the rocks at the base of the steps where the surf churns, or go back to the villa to get help? And how in the world will I ever be able to face Sam Tyler and tell him I lost Agnes on a trip to the beach?

I hear someone call my name. The sound is hollow and echoing and reminds me of Phineas’s description of the siren song he heard from the peristylium, only I can’t imagine the sirens would address me with my full title.

“Dr. Chase?” the voice calls again. Then Agnes’s blond ponytail pops out from a crevice in the rock. “Hey, what are you still doing up there? The grotto’s right here—” I follow Agnes’s voice to a cleft in the rock—so narrow it had been invisible from above—and slip in between the limestone walls.

“Careful, there’s a ledge right here. It takes a second to adjust to the light.” Agnes takes my hand and guides me into the grotto. After the brightness of the sun outside, it’s dark as night, only it’s a night unlike any I’ve ever seen: a shimmering azure night. At first I can’t tell where the water begins and the light ends. It’s like being inside a glass bowl filled with blue light. Slowly, as my eyes adjust, I make out the roof of the grotto about fifteen feet above me and the rock ledge that rims the pool of sparkling blue water. The light seems to be pulsing up from the water and casting reflections on the stone walls.

“The tide’s higher than I thought it would be,” Agnes says, “but we can swim here for a little bit and then, if you don’t mind diving, we can go through the opening underwater. There’s a rock just outside where we can lie in the sun.”

I nod, not sure I like the idea of diving, but embarrassed to look fearful in front of Agnes. All my worries about her seem silly now; she seems perfectly at ease and confident in this environment. I take off my cover-up and sandals and lower myself into the water. It’s warm as bathwater and tingly, so salty I feel buoyant. I breaststroke across the grotto and then flip over onto my back to bathe the back of my head. Wavy bands of light ripple on the stone dome above me. As I follow them they turn into undulating shapes: the curve of a woman’s hip, the flick of a tail, the roll of a shoulder, a sinuous curl of hair. Light mermaids, I think, delighting in the spectacle.

The source of the light is a triangular cleft in the rock on the north side of the grotto. I follow Agnes toward it and then watch as she dives and disappears into a fissure of light beneath the water. I have the uneasy feeling that she’s been transformed into one of the light mermaids racing across the domed ceiling, but take a deep breath and follow her. The saltwater stings my eyes, but I force them open to steer myself into the narrow cleft. Am I as slim as Agnes? I suddenly wonder. What if I get stuck underwater between the rock walls? I feel the pressure on my lungs as I squeeze through the split, and the scrape of rock on my right shoulder and then my left hip, then I’m surfacing into bright light. When I break the surface of the water, the sound of the surf crashing is all around me but the water is calm. I’m in a little cove at the entrance to the grotto, protected by a circle of rocks that absorb the force of the waves. Agnes is treading water, waiting for me.

“Isn’t it great!” she says, her smile beaming in the sunlight. “Every time I do it I feel like I’m being born all over again.”

I nod, my breath still too ragged to speak.

“Let me show you the sunbathing rock,” she says, turning and swimming about ten feet away from the grotto’s entrance. We pull ourselves up on a flat, smooth rock that’s just big enough for two of us to stretch out. The contours of the rock seem to fit the shape of my body perfectly and the stone is warm and dry. I’m on the side facing the open sea and when I turn my head I’m looking out on an expanse of water that seems to stretch into infinity and contain every shade of blue and green ever dreamed of by every painter in the world. The only object in view is a blue-and-white sailboat, about forty or fifty feet away, bobbing on the water, its sails down and its deck empty.

“Oh, gosh, I feel so much better now,” Agnes says, sighing. “I’m so glad you thought of coming down here. Being someplace so beautiful makes all my problems seem so…so unimportant.”

“I hope Simon Bowles hasn’t upset you with all his talk of cults and sacrifices—” I stop, unsure if it’s a good idea to bring up the subject, but Agnes seems unperturbed by my reference to last night’s dinner conversation.

“Oh no, Simon’s just a bit of a dirty old man. He likes to tease me just to see if he can get a rise out of me. I think the whole thing upset Mr. Lyros more than it upset me. He’s sensitive about his reasons for building this place, and Simon seemed to be suggesting he built this villa as a sort of playground instead of for scholarly research. Anyway, it wasn’t Simon who upset me, it was the letter I got today. It was from Sam…you remember Sam, right?”

“The cute boy who’s obviously head over heels in love with you? Yeah, I remember him.”

“He
is
cute,” Agnes says, giggling, and then, her voice grows abruptly serious, “but he’s not in love with me. At least not anymore. We went out in high school for a while but then…when he went off to college the year before me I broke up with him. I didn’t want him to feel hemmed in by having a girlfriend back home. I’d seen how that had worked out for some of the older girls in school. They’d start out the year with the guy’s pictures all over their lockers and wearing his college ring on a chain, and then at homecoming the guys would come back and follow the girls around to parties looking like a bunch of sad-eyed dogs on too short a lead. I didn’t want that. I told him if he still wanted to date we could when I got to college the next year.”

“That sounds pretty generous of you,” I say.

She doesn’t answer for a few minutes and then she says, “No. I wasn’t being generous at all. I didn’t want to hang around waiting for him to come home. I didn’t realize, though, how much it would upset him. He had a pretty wild freshman year as a result.”

“That’s not your fault,” I reassure her, thinking of all the wild antics that UT freshmen get up to with or without their girlfriends from back home breaking up with them. “What happened when you got to UT?”

“Oh, you know how it is,” she says. “People change, find different interests. He was living with a bunch of guys and I moved into a sorority. We still hung out, but it just wasn’t the same. When I had to leave the sorority, though, he was really nice, inviting me to move into his house, but sometimes I think it was a mistake. He started acting like he was my big brother—criticizing me, making fun of the stuff I was into, which was pretty hypocritical considering all the stuff he experimented with
his
freshman year. I should have realized that he was just looking out for me, but I thought he was trying to control me and, well, I didn’t act very nice to him.”

“But you stayed in the house….”

“He insisted. Said if I didn’t he’d call home and tell my father that I had to leave school because Dale was dangerous.”

We’re both quiet for a while contemplating just how right Sam had been. I turn my head and look toward the sea. The sailboat has drifted at its anchorage so that the stern of the boat faces me. Its name, I’m surprised to see, is
Persephone.
Its port of call, Samos, Greece. “What does he say in the letter?” I ask.

“He says he needs to know if I still have any feelings for him and that he can’t wait any longer for me. He has to know now. I think it’s because he’s met someone else.”

“It sounds to me that you do still have feelings for him, Agnes. Why else would the letter upset you?”

She doesn’t say anything and when I turn and look at her I see that she’s crying. I look away again, toward the sailboat, not wanting to embarrass her.

“I guess you’re right,” she says after a few minutes, her voice tight with the effort of not sobbing. “But I just think it’s probably too late. I mean, do you think you can ever get back together with someone after you’ve broken up and so much time has gone by? Would
you
go back with an old boyfriend if he had made a stupid mistake?”

Agnes asks this last question so earnestly, as if I were an oracle that possessed the secrets of the universe, that I’m afraid to answer. Considering the bad choices I’ve made with men, how can I possibly advise her? But then I remember how Sam had looked when he asked me to keep an eye on Agnes and I figure that the least I can do is do him a good turn. But how can I describe what it feels like to love someone so much that their absence marks you?

“Do you remember when I talked in class about Wilhelmina Jashemski?”

Agnes looks at me as if I might be losing my mind. She’s asked for advice about love and I’m talking to her about an archaeologist. “Uh, didn’t she do something with gardens in Pompeii and Herculaneum?” Agnes asks.

“Yes,” I say, pleased that she’s remembered the detail from a class she took sophomore year. “She discovered that the roots of the trees and shrubs that had been growing when Vesuvius erupted had decayed beneath the hardened lava, leaving breaks in it, which then filled up with little pebbles. When Jashemski cleared the pebbles she poured plaster in the empty spaces and made casts of their roots—”

“Like the plaster casts of the people who died in Pompeii?”

“Exactly. I’ve always thought of them as ghost roots.”

“That’s really fascinating, Dr. Chase, but I don’t see how—”

“Don’t you see? When you lose someone you love you carry around that empty place they once filled, in just that same shape. No one can ever fill it but them,” I finish lamely, feeling like I’ve utterly failed at trying to convey this idea to Agnes, but when I look at her I see that she’s staring at me, widening her eyes as if she’s trying to hold back tears.

“So what kind of ‘ghost roots’ are inside you, Dr. Chase?” she asks.

The question and how she’s phrased it, echoing my own words, takes me by surprise. I’m saved from answering by a motion from the boat that draws Agnes’s attention.

A dark head has appeared above the railing; someone coming up onto the deck. I watch the slim man in red T-shirt and white jeans lift a pair of binoculars to his face and point them in our direction. I have an irrational urge to wave.

Agnes is still waiting for me to answer her question, but I can’t take my eyes off the man in the red T-shirt. He’s taken the binoculars away from his face but he’s still looking at me. Although we’re more than a hundred feet apart I feel like the space has contracted to inches. Maybe it’s what we’ve been talking about—the particular size and shape of the ghost roots inside myself—that creates the illusion, but I could swear that the man on the boat looks an awful lot like Ely.

“I
s that boat back again?”

I turn to Agnes. She’s sitting up now, shading her eyes with one hand, looking out toward the bay.

“You’ve seen it before?”

“Yeah. The
Persephone
—who could forget that name considering what we’re doing here? And besides, the guy on it is awfully cute, don’t you think?”

I turn back to look at the lone figure on the deck. Tall, slim, dark hair and eyes, a high forehead, he looks a lot like Ely, but then, how many times in the last five years have I glimpsed Ely—in the checkout line at Wheatsville, on the hike-and-bike trail by Town Lake—and been wrong. Still…

I raise my right hand tentatively, less in greeting than as a question, and the figure on the boat does the same. I feel ridiculously as if we are trading semaphore signals across a battlefield, but then, for one moment, I feel as if we’re only inches apart, eyes locked.

Then he disappears below deck.

“Wow, you’ve made contact,” Agnes says, her voice giddy at the prospect of meeting the mysterious stranger. “Good for you, Dr. Chase.”

I feel something lift in my chest, a swelling lightness that could be happiness or fear, but then the still air is rent by the whine of an engine and the boat begins to motor away from us.

“Actually it looks like I scared him away,” I say, trying not to sound as let down as I feel.

“Maybe he just went to get a friend,” Agnes says, patting me on the shoulder. “After all, there are two of us. Unfortunately, we can’t wait around to find out. The tide is coming in and it’s a little tricky getting through the grotto when the water’s high.”

Agnes dives into the water, but I keep my eyes on the
Persephone
until she disappears around the rocky headland to the east.

It turns out to be more than a little tricky getting through the grotto at high tide. The sea entrance is completely below water level and whereas the cleft had been outlined in light on the way out, it’s barely visible going back into the grotto. I follow Agnes through the now churning surf, under the water, and through a dark tunnel. I can’t help but wonder if there’s more than one opening in the limestone cliff. What if she’s chosen the wrong one? What if she’s leading us into an underwater tunnel with no way out? I recall reading somewhere in a book on southern Italian folklore that in primitive fishing villages women were left bound in narrow sea caves to drown when the tide came in as a punishment for infidelity. As I grope my way through the narrow cleft I imagine what it would feel like to be trapped in a limestone coffin slowly filling with seawater.

When I surface, gasping for air, I nearly bump my head on the rock. This grotto looks nothing like the one we came through and for a moment I’m sure we are trapped underground in a rapidly filling tomb. But then I see Agnes at the far end of the grotto, silhouetted against a jagged seam of light. She waves for me to swim toward her and when I reach her she shows me where to put my feet to climb out of the grotto. We emerge into bright sunlight on the steps, next to where we left our clothes.

“I’m sorry,” Agnes says as she hands me a towel to wrap around my shoulders. Even in the sun, I am shivering, unable to shrug off the chill of the underwater cavern. “I should have kept better track of the time. I didn’t realize the tide was so high.”

“Does the grotto fill completely with water?” I ask, my teeth chattering.

“Well, I’ve seen water spilling out of that opening,” Agnes says, pointing to the seam we’ve just climbed out of. “So, yeah, I guess it does. You could still get through the grotto, only you’d have to make it from one opening to the other without surfacing for air. It’s the kind of daredevil stunt Sam would love,” she says with a little smile, “but I don’t think I’d want to try it.”

“Me neither,” I concur, remembering my diminished lung capacity. “I guess we wouldn’t have been good candidates for the Aquarena Springs Mermaid Show.”

When we get back to the courtyard Agnes says she’s going to go straight to the lab to see how George is getting on with the day’s scanning. I volunteer to go with her, thinking that I might be able to get a head start on the next Phineas section.

“You’re hooked, aren’t you?” Agnes asks.

“I guess so,” I admit. The truth is that my head is filled with the image of the man from the
Persephone,
with trying to line up his face with my memories of Ely, and the only thing I can imagine that will take my mind off the identity of the mysterious stranger is the next installment of Phineas’s journal. If I had any doubt that the next installment was worth getting hold of, it’s erased when we enter the lab and George looks up from the scanner, his bloodshot eyes gleaming.

“You’re going to love this next part,” he tells me and Agnes. “It’s like getting a guided walking tour through Herculaneum two days before it was destroyed.”

“Cool,” Agnes says, “I was afraid the whole thing was going to be Phineas wandering around the villa chasing after poor Iusta.”

“Well, here we’ve got him going to the baths, and
then
we get him chasing Iusta around town. Here are the photocopies of what I’ve scanned today,” George says, handing Agnes a thin stack of papers. “And my transcription of the Latin awaiting your exceptional translating skills.”

Agnes blushes at George’s compliment, confirming my suspicion that there’s a flirtation going on between these two.
What about Sam?
I want to ask.

“I’ll get right to work on it,” Agnes says. “I’ll have it ready by dinnertime.”

I look over Agnes’s shoulder at the pages of Latin and decide that unless I want to spend the afternoon pining for failed love affairs (mine, Agnes’s, Sam’s), I’d better get myself something to do. “Why don’t you give me a copy?” I ask.

Agnes looks up, a flicker of wariness in her eyes, and I realize she thinks I don’t trust her translating ability. “That way we’ll both have time for lunch and a siesta before dinner,” I add, hoping she’ll see that I’m treating her as an equal.

“Okay,” she replies, yawning a little as she takes the sheets to the copying machine. “I didn’t get much sleep last night. You look tired, too, Dr. Chase. I think our swim took a lot out of you.”

I decide, though, that instead of lunch and a siesta I need to get out of the villa for a bit. I change back into my skirt, tank top, and sandals and, tossing my wallet, a Latin dictionary, and the Phineas transcript in a canvas bag, head out the gates and down toward town. I pass iron gates covered with bougainvillea affording glimpses of majolica-tiled walkways and grape-covered pergolas. Each one looks more secretive than the last—a hidden bower where just about anything could be going on, a private Eden for those eccentric foreigners Lyros spoke of before, come to live out their fantasies.

As I approach the town, the private villas are interspersed with small hotels and shops until I’m walking in a narrow cobbled street between high whitewashed walls. It could be a medieval city except that here the ancient walls are pierced with shop windows full of gaudy resortwear and jewelry carved from coral and shell. I stop at one of the windows to look at the cameos, which are my favorites. There among the Victorian profiles and half-nude goddesses I find one that depicts two women in profile—Day and Night—a common motif in nineteenth-century cameos. The woman who represents Day has her head lifted, her hair is adorned with wheat and roses, and a dove spreads its wings across her bodice. Her sister, Night, is behind her, her star-veiled head bowed, her hair bound with poppies, an owl nestled between her breasts. No wonder this motif was so popular with the Victorians: it represented what Elgin had called last night “the dual nature of the feminine.”

The merchandise becomes pricier near the Piazzetta—designer shoes and handbags and Cartier—to go with the seven-euro lemonades served in the Gran’Caffe. It’ll cost me a fortune to drink enough lemonades to last through a reading of the Phineas, but I sit down anyway, determined to enjoy a restful hour away from the intrigues at the villa.

I order a
pizza all’Acqua
and a lemonade. The waiter brings me a tall glass with fresh-squeezed lemon juice, a pitcher of water, and a smaller pitcher of sugar syrup. The pizza is covered in the fresh mozzarella I’ve become addicted to and studded with local
peperoncino
chilis. It’s like eating a meal of dichotomies: the hot peppers pillowed in bland, creamy mozzarella, the tart lemon juice tempered by the sugar. At first I’m so seduced by the food that I can’t focus on the Latin words in front of me, but slowly, between bites and sips, I unravel Phineas’s day in Herculaneum.

When I awoke the next morning the villa was so silent that I almost believed it had fallen under a spell, or at least that the revelries of the previous evening had left all the inhabitants so drained that they still slept. But then the grizzled old servant—I could tell by his pilleus that he had recently been granted his freedom—who brought me my morning bread and drink told me that far from being asleep, his mistress and her handmaids had arisen at dawn to travel to Surrentum to pay homage there at the temple of the sirens. “As they always do before the rites,” he told me. “It’s part of the preparation.”

“And the girl Iusta,” I asked, “has she gone, too?”

“She had errands in town to perform for the mistress this morning,” he told me. I thought I saw an impudent smile creeping over his face and so I cut short our colloquy by demanding hot water.

“I’m afraid there’s none to be had as the slaves are all busy with preparations for the rites,” he told me, again with a smile that suggested he was secretly pleased at my inconvenience. I made a note to myself to speak to Calatoria about her servant’s impudence and asked if there was a decent bath in town.

“We have two,” the old man said, “a large one in the forum and a smaller, but more refined establishment on the walls of the marina. You would no doubt prefer the Suburban Baths. It is only a short walk along the marina wall.”

“Good,” I told the servant, not wanting him to think I was in any way inconvenienced by this turn of events. “I wanted to look at the marina to see if there are any boats I might commission for the rest of my journey. And I am always glad for the opportunity to see new sights.”

“Then you’ve come to the right place,” the old slave told me. “You will see things here that you have never seen before.”

The old man departed and, if I’m not mistaken, I heard him chuckling to himself as he went. No doubt he was alluding to the rites that I would be taking part in soon and trying to alarm me, I conjectured as I dressed and left the villa. Little did he know what marvels I had witnessed in my travels. I have seen in Egypt the embalmed bodies of centaurs and mermaids and in Sicily and Rhodes I have been shown the bones of giants that, according to the natives, were spewn forth from the earth during times of earthquake. I have taken part in the mysteries of Eleusis and Agrai and inhaled the vapors that rise up from the bowels of the earth at the oracle of Delphi. I doubted that anything dreamed up in this little provincial town could rival the things I’ve seen.

I did notice, though, as I made my way through the gate to the marina and down a long ramp to the baths that it is a town quite preoccupied with the pleasures of the flesh. Numerous inscriptions and drawings on the walls indicated that sexual liaisons of many kinds were practiced here on Herculaneum’s waterfront. One named Sturnus had written, “And willingly we perform the act to which the permissive Longinus consented with pleasure: quick carnal union,” and another had drawn a picture illustrating a similar union.

In contrast to these lewd decorations, I found a terrace of shrines dedicated to the gods, local and imported. In one reposed a statue of Isis suckling her son, the god Horus, which reminded me of the little statue I had given Iusta. I wondered if she had already taken it to the market and sold it, but then I reproved myself for the base thought and looked around for the baths. I found them on the last level before the beach, built right into the marina wall. Its roof formed a terrace for a private house, from which I could hear voices and laughter. I passed through a courtyard, where a statue of Marcus Nonius Balbus commemorated the proconsul’s restoration of the town after the last earthquake and then through an arched portal that had been partially and inelegantly bricked up—a result, I deduced, of damage from the same earthquake. I had observed similar signs of damage in my hostess’s villa and it now occurred to me that the dissolute nature of the town might be a result of living on unstable ground.

I descended into an elegant vestibule supported by four enormous red columns and washed my hands at a small basin with water that flowed from the head of Apollo. I had to admit that the old freedman had been right about the elegance of these baths. The cloakroom where a slave took my clothing was quite beautifully paneled in polished woods, the linen I was given to wrap myself in was of the finest weave. As I took my place on the marble bench of the apodyterium, I admired the panels of warriors locked in combat and cupids engaged in their own sports. A group of men sat across from me, too engrossed in their conversation to notice a stranger in their midst, and I settled down, patient to wait my turn in the tepidarium if it afforded me a chance to listen to the locals’ conversation.