The Uncertain Hour (24 page)

“And you, Petronius?”

Petronius thought long and hard. He knew perfectly well that there was only one answer he could give; the question was whether he should give it. He couldn’t be sure of saying it correctly, and saying it wrong would be worse than not saying it at all. Everything had to be simple now, pared down to its essence.

“I have never apologized to Melissa for a wrong I once did her.”

“That’s it?” Cornelia shrilled. “Do you mean to say that if you offered her this apology, there is nothing else in your entire life you would regret?”

“That’s right.”

“Do it, then, Petronius. Do it now!”

He held on to Melissa’s smile, which, without changing, grew stronger, pulled him in closer to her.

“I may well yet,” he said.

The silence that followed was broken only by a vine stump popping in the brazier, and by Pollia’s muffled sobbing. Melissa enwrapped her in her shawl to hide her face, while Fabius merely lay staring into the embers, his face a blank cipher. If he had felt stronger, Petronius would have given that stupid boy a good crack across the face.

Cornelia cleared her throat and ran a bloodred fingernail across her right eyebrow. “I suppose you win the game, Petronius,” she said sheepishly. “Unless Melissa can top you.”

“Petronius,” Melissa said, “I believe Pollia and Fabius are ready to say their good-nights.”

Petronius sat up in alarm, suddenly feeling light-headed and nauseated again. “No, no. It’s too early,” he said, aware of the whine of panic rising in his throat, and ashamed, yet unable to suppress it. “I won’t hear of it. Come, another glass.”

“It is not early,” Melissa insisted. “The dawn will be here in two hours or less, and you still have business to transact.”

“Are you evicting our guests, Melissa? What kind of send-off is that?”

But the others were already beginning to stir, shifting their weight and leaning over in the poor, flickering light to locate their sandals at the foot of the couch. Petronius felt the atmosphere dissipating as rapidly as a breath of steam on a winter’s day, and he had reached this juncture of the evening too many times to pretend to himself that it could be salvaged. The party was over; the guests were ready to call it a night; and to insist that they linger, even for five superfluous minutes, would be to color their memories of the entire endeavor with a pallid wash of regret. Like a man’s life, a dinner is best quitted while it still has a warm soul to see it on its way. Nevertheless, he gave it one last try.

“Lucilius, you’ll stay, won’t you?”

Lucilius had already pinned his tunic around his shoulders, and was helping Cornelia on with her shawl. “Petronius, I would stay to the bitter end if you asked me to, and hold your hand all the way. But it is not my place, and you know it.”

“Titus, my dear,” Cornelia said. “It is time for us to say goodbye.”

“Anicius?”

“Kiss me, Titus. I will be going.”

“Marcus may stay, Petronius,” Melissa said with quiet authority. “The others will take their gifts now.”

“Gifts! Of course, how could I forget? Marcus, hand me the ladle in that wine bowl, will you? Gather round, the rest of you.”

The six guests drew together in a small circle around their host as he accepted the ladle from Martialis, while Melissa waited to one side. It was, of course, the priceless myrrhine ladle from Arrabona that her late husband had once given her in his ignorance, and that she had later given to Petronius in her pride. And now it was Petronius who must try to pass it on in all humility. It was a task, one of his very last, that he dearly wanted to get just right, but the ladle itself would make that difficult, for it was one of the least humble objects he had ever encountered. Even now, in this dismal, volcanic glow, it shone with an arrogant light, as if it had an inner spine of eternal liquor, the colorless blood of the gods flowing in its translucent veins, responsive to envy and fear and grasping and anger. When Petronius held it out at chest height, it absorbed the yellow of his tunic and discharged it again as bile.

“Look carefully at this ladle,” Petronius said. “You will almost certainly never see such exquisite craftsmanship again in your lifetime. It is the very embodiment of perfection, you will agree. It is said to be invaluable, but it most definitely has a value. In fact, it has been appraised at 300,000 sesterces, enough to pay a legionary’s salary for a thousand years. Whoever owns it is a wealthy man indeed. And yet, strangely, it has meant very little to any of its recent owners. It clearly had little value to the merchant who sold it for a pittance to Aulus Junius in Arrabona. Aulus Junius, in turn, passed it on to Melissa to serve cheap wine at his drinking parties. Melissa gave it to me, simply because she could find no other way of expressing herself. And now I, its last owner—well, perhaps I am able to appreciate something of its beauty, but I hold its perfection cheap. Perhaps it would mean something to a god, but it means nothing to me.

“Nero has seen it, and he covets it. In a few hours, when he sends his henchmen to pillage my house, the ladle will be at the top of their list. I am determined that he shall not have it. I cannot give it to any of you, because its mere possession will put its possessor at great risk. I cannot return it to Melissa, obviously. So Melissa and I have come up with a plan that will both keep it out of Nero’s hands and restore it to its true value.”

Petronius held the ladle out at arm’s length and allowed it to drop to the granite pavement. The sound as it shattered was like the cracking of ice on an Alpine lake in the spring thaw. The guests, rather than gasp in dismay, felt its destruction as a communal release of tension, and sighed each to themselves, as if they had only been waiting for this moment. They stared down in calm silence at the dozen or so lumps of crystal that were all that remained of the ladle. Then Petronius stooped and gathered the pieces into a fold of his tunic.

“Each of you will take a fragment home with you, as a memento of me and our time together. The shards are quite valuable in their own right—the emperor himself owns several precious myrrhine specimens—but that is hardly the point. In the daylight, you will see that each fragment emits the same light as the whole. Each pulses with the same inner life. It is my hope that these fragments, the living heart of the crystal, will seem even more beautiful than the body from which they came. And perhaps, if I am very, very lucky, that is how my friends will remember me.”

He held out a piece of crystal to Anicius, who took it and enfolded Petronius in his embrace. “You are a
good
man,” he whispered. “The world will know of this night. Your glory is assured.” And then he was gone.

Next came Lucilius. They clasped forearms, and Petronius could feel Lucilius tremble and almost falter. “You are a
brave
man,” he said, choking.

Cornelia, eyes red-rimmed but resolutely dry, grasped Petron-ius’s face between her palms and planted a long, lingering kiss on his lips. “You
poor man
.” Then, as an afterthought, she gave him another, longer kiss, and hurried on to her waiting husband. And they were gone.

Fabius stepped up, his arms by his side, eyes downcast, like a boy awaiting instructions from his father. Petronius took him by the shoulders, at arm’s length, but could think of nothing to say. How like him to feel awkward and shy at this juncture! But as he fumbled with his gift of crystal, Fabius found his tongue. “I wish you safe passage to the underworld. You are a great, a
great
Roman,” he muttered, and executed a clumsy salute.

Pollia threw herself into Petronius’s arms, pressing her face into his chest and sobbing inconsolably. And just as he had responded inappropriately to Fabius’s hapless formality, Petronius found himself ferociously excited by the heat of her body and the dampness of her tears soaking through the cloth of his tunic. As he struggled to understand what she was saying, her voice muffled by proximity and emotion, he was only dimly aware of the vision, flitting and fleeing like a thrush through the empty hallways of his mind, of himself on top of her, pinning her arms to the ground, her thighs wrapped around his hips, her sobs of ecstasy and gratitude ringing in his ears. And then, the fantasy exhausting itself at the same moment that it had sprung to life, he grasped what Pollia was saying.

“I love you, Petronius, I love you,” over and over again, until he had to push her into Fabius’s waiting arms, and they stepped away.

Petronius turned toward the house to watch them go, but time must have been playing tricks on him, for they had already vanished. The only figure that remained was the Hagesander Diana at the far end of the dining room, and she had never been of much comfort to him. He tried to think back—had he been daydreaming? Somehow his memory of the past few seconds had become all muddled. Perhaps he had not entertained his fantasy of making love to Pollia until after she had gone, until after he had heard her say she loved him? But if that were the case, what had he been thinking about when she was in his arms? He tried to remember; it had only been moments earlier, but it felt as if it had all occurred a thousand years ago in a distant land. Suddenly it seemed enormously important to him to retrieve the memory of the past minute precisely as it had unfolded. These thoughts and visions were of great moment; he had a strange feeling that he would need them with him in the afterworld, that one carried one’s last memories like currency down there, and the more precise they were, the more valuable; or perhaps they were armor down there, and the more specific they were, the more protective; or perhaps they were travel documents, and only those who could recite them faithfully would be allowed to pass; or they were genealogical testaments, and those with the most impressive memories enjoyed the most prestige among the dead. Petro-nius had no idea why these thoughts were occurring to him, rushing upon him with such irresistible impetus. He knew objectively that they were foolish and meaningless, and that he was wasting precious time indulging them, but he felt as one does in a dream in which there are multiple time schemes, and enemies can leap and fly while one’s own legs can barely move through the viscous, clinging seconds. And then, with a start of recognition so pure and true that it made his heart race, as if he had just inhaled the entire universe in one gasp, he realized that this whole thing—his fantasy with Pollia, and his confession, and the dinner party, and the death sentence, and his years at Nero’s court, and his return to Rome—was all just a dream—of course, it had all occurred in the blink of an eye, he could see that now!—and that when he turned around again to Melissa and Martialis, the whole fabric of reality that he had known for the past eight years would be stripped away, and he would open his eyes and find himself in his bed in the villa at Lake Sophon, and the sun would just be rising on a quiet summer’s morning, the cranes tiptoeing silently through the rushes, and Melissa would be at his side, naked, pressing herself against him. He swung about, his arms open wide to his salvation, and his legs gave way beneath him. When he came to, he found himself crumpled on the ground, his face drenched in hot tears, his head cradled in Melissa’s lap as if he were the aged father who had just taken that fatal fall, and he felt a shame deeper than he could ever imagine possible.

“I must get up,” he said.

“Rest a moment,” Melissa whispered.

“No, I must.”

“Shh.” The very slight pressure of her palms against his cheeks was enough to hold him down, and the coolness of her hands on his wet skin made him understand that the tears were not hers, but his own. He closed his eyes.

“I don’t want to die,” he said, feeling that somehow it was safe to say with his eyes closed, and at the same time knowing how childish the feeling really was.

“Of course you don’t.”

“There’s time still. I’ll live if you tell me to live.”

“Shh.”

He lay there a few minutes as she rocked his head gently, like a baby in a cradle, and felt his tears dry in a cold, almost imperceptible breeze—it was the sun, rising five hundred miles away over Greece and pushing the night air before it. Calm gradually settled upon him, until after a minute he realized with mild surprise that the moment had come, without thought or premeditation, the moment of serene acceptance that he had trained for his entire life and sought in vain this entire long day and night. It was here; it had stolen upon him like a long-absent lover—or no, like the mother who died long ago from a withering disease, whom one no longer remembers except as a shattered husk, but who returns in dreams clad in shining light and health, bringing her enveloping love to the dreamer who had never thought to feel its like again. He could hardly believe it; it was too good to be true, precisely as he had hoped it would be—this feeling of strength, joy, fearlessness—but never quite believed himself capable of mastering. Now he saw that it was not a moment that one mastered but that one submitted to, and that was its mystery for those who sought it. It was odd, interesting, he thought, that in just the past minute he had felt both like an old man and like an infant. The infant he had been, once, but recalled nothing at all thereof; the old man he would never be. Still, a lifetime in the interim. More than enough. One could live forever, and not have this moment of peace that he was having now. Why ruin it with stupid, vulgar thoughts of escape? How could surviving a thousand more years improve on what he had found right here, right now? He took Melissa’s hands in his own and kissed each one.

“Well?” He looked up into her face. She stared back at him, her eyes sparkling with amusement and affection, and stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. There was no hypersensi-tivity now—the whole world was contained in that touch, the rest of his body numb. He grasped her hand and held it to his skin.

“Well?”

She laughed and looked away. “I’m not going to immolate myself at your side, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Oh, Titus—or should I call you ‘Governor’? Can you really be as dim as that, after all these years? Of course I knew what you’d done. I knew it right away. Who else could have given him his marching orders but you?”