The Opposite of Chance

by Margaret Hermes

  “Not at all. Sit,” Helena patted the bed beside her. Betsy noticed for the first time that her left foot was encased in a thick white sock and elevated on one of the pensione’s unimpressionable, boulder-like pillows. “Ridiculous, isn’t it?” Helena had followed her gaze. “Only an idiot would cripple herself on vacation.”

  “But what happened?”

  “Actually, I happened,” Stephen said. “Helena’s taking too much credit—merely a matter of her being in the right place at the right time. I got myself entangled in the cord of the traveling iron, which was sitting on top of the wardrobe. So I’ve given her a broken toe as a souvenir of our trip.”

  “A memento mori.” Betsy was pleased with herself until she saw the blank faces. “A reminder of mortality,” she shrugged.

  “Well, anyway, it’s transformed him into the most attentive of husbands: he can’t do enough for me. I spent one day out on crutches. Never to be repeated. My arms ached and I kept bumping my foot,” she shook her head. “I decided I’d rather lie here and be waited on.”

  “But then you’re stuck in the pensione?” Betsy raised her eyebrows: “A prisoner of your own Désirée.”

  This time the couple laughed and Helena said, “Are you by yourself? Good. Then there’s no one to object to your spending time with us.”

  Having resolved to take up with no Americans during her travels, Betsy had remained resolute and lonely. She decided she had earned a vacation from her vacation. “Sounds good. Turns out I brought along something that might help you pass the time, Helena. Tar Baby.”

  Helena looked blankly back.

  “The latest Toni Morrison,” she said, handing over the book. “In return for the water. I finished it on the train so it’s really dead weight. But I couldn’t just abandon it.”

  “Perfect. I’ve been trying to force myself through Anna Karenina but it’s impossible to care what happens to her. I’ll start your book this morning.”

  The man with the eyeglasses came through the open door. “Good morning,” he spoke into his collar. His greeting didn’t take any of them in.

  “Paul, you remember Betsy from last night. We’ve recruited her.”

  Paul nodded in her direction and the very act of recognition seemed to exclude her. Not much for women, Betsy concluded.

  “Now, what have you seen already?” Helena grilled her. “If I have to lie here, I at least get to direct traffic.”

  “Nothing yet, really. I only arrived yesterday and then I just wandered around trying to find a place out of the sun. I didn’t really see anything. When I couldn’t go another step, I stumbled in here. I was so tired I even agreed to take a triple room. Mostly I’ve slept.”

  “You and Stephen,” Helena clucked. “He’s been nursing me so faithfully—guiltily—that he hasn’t taken in a single museum or church—nothing.”

  “And you?” Betsy sympathized.

  “It’s shitty luck but it could be worse. I was in Florence six years ago, as a student.”

  “Her junior year abroad, lah-de-dah,” Stephen raised the tip of his nose with his index finger.

  “At least I have my memories.” She put the back of her hand to her forehead.

  “What about you, Paul?” Betsy asked to show she wasn’t edging him out of the circle.

  “What? Oh, it’s my first time here but I arrived four days before Helena and Steve. I thought I might as well come on ahead when they called the strike.”

  “What strike?” Betsy thought she might have heard something about a railway workers strike happening somewhere, maybe England.

  He looked at her as though she had confirmed his suspicions about her IQ. “The Major League baseball strike. With any luck it’ll be over by the time we get home. Anyway, I’ve seen everything here I want to see. And more.”

  “Paul’s impatient to leave,” Helena confided as though he weren’t present. “He thinks Florence is hot and dirty and crowded.”

  So it had seemed to Betsy as she tried to find a cool and clean and open space the day before. Still, Paul’s dismissal irked her, precisely because it resonated.

  “I have a plan,” Helena announced, hands folded clerically across her chest. “Stephen and Betsy go off to the museums and Paul stays and keeps me company. He can read aloud while I languish—doesn’t that sound romantic? Betsy has even supplied the book and Stephen needs a break. He won’t leave unless there’s someone to watch over me. So, Paul, if after all your whining about this city, we find you prefer it to me, Stephen and I will both be deeply offended.”

  “I’ll be happy to stay,” Paul said, “but I’m afraid I’ll bore you.”

  Betsy examined Paul’s face and found him in earnest. This trace of humility elevated him a notch.

  “We can bore each other. So,” Helena turned to Stephen and Betsy, “where are you two off to?”

  Stephen made a deferential bow to Betsy.

  “I guess I’d like to start with Michelangelo’s David.”

  “Agreed,” he said. “Anything you want, Helena, before we abandon you?”

  Stephen and Betsy walked to the Galleria dell’Accademia. “It’s at 60 via Ricasoli,” he said. “Ricasoli. Everything in Italy sounds like something to eat.”

  Stephen questioned Betsy about her travels. He was easy to talk to—partly, she supposed, because he was unavailable. Betsy found herself, quite unexpectedly, telling him about her divorce.

  They saw the David, instinctively separating when they arrived at the great hall, each viewing from their chosen vantage points. Afterwards they stopped at one of the outdoor cafés and Stephen resumed, as though following a momentary interruption, “So you came to Europe for romance. A new love to erase the old.”

  “No,” she was surprised to be so misunderstood. “I came to be alone really.”

  He raised an eyebrow quizzically.

  “You can’t be more alone than in a crowd of strangers. I figured that not only would I not know anyone—not even the mailman—but I’d be isolated by language. I can’t speak anything but English, except the standard travelers’ phrases I try to memorize while I’m riding on the trains. Anyway, it’s worked. I’ve been thoroughly alone.” After all, the people she’d met in airports and on trains couldn’t be counted as traveling companions. “Until today.”

  “And tomorrow? Where are you headed after Florence?”

  “Not sure. I don’t have an itinerary exactly. Just a return plane ticket. I thought I might brave Venice next.”

  “Why ‘brave’ Venice? Helena said she’d like to move on to Venice as soon as her foot is better. We should go together: safety in numbers.”

  “It’s not that I’m afraid of being alone in Venice. I guess I’m afraid of being in Venice at all.”

  “Is this a mystery?”

  “More a superstition. A sort of morbidity, I suppose. When I think of Venice, I think of death and decay. It’s the idea of elegance and decadence intertwined that unnerves me. You know—an ornate gondola skimming above a fetid canal. Somehow I don’t think I expect to escape from Venice intact.”

  “Well, I don’t know about elegant decadence—I’m just a country boy—but I do know I’m glad I’m not doing Florence by myself. Helena has good instincts.”

  “Grazie. And I’m pleased to have your company. Helena also has good taste.”

  As they walked back to the Désirée, Stephen said, “What made you decide to come off your retreat and take up with us?”

  She laughed. “I think your wife did the deciding. But I must have been ready.”

  When they returned, Helena’s voice spilled out the perpetually open doorway. “You’re back,” she burbled, shifting gears as soon as they appeared. “Well? What do you have to say for yourselves? For it?”

  Betsy realized that she and Stephen had not once discussed the statue though they had tou
red the rest of the gallery together, a comfortable flow of words passing between them. She was conscious of being slightly if inexplicably embarrassed. “It was—what’s the word I want?—not powerful exactly—affecting.”

  “Maybe you were carried away by the worshipping throngs,” Paul said.

  She was startled by the hostility.

  “People draping themselves around the base, getting their pictures taken,” he continued.

  Despite recalling her own shudder of distaste at precisely the scene Paul described, she was angry. “I didn’t expect to be moved, not after a lifetime of photographs and reproductions, but there was something extraordinary—I don’t know—some cruelty in the face, something heartless, and yet at the same time this utter innocence.”

  “Don’t apologize,” Stephen said. “I felt the same.”

  “Ah, simpatico,” Helena smiled. “Enough talk. I’m starving. How about you, Betsy? I say we send the men out to forage. We’ll picnic here.”

  “If I can pay my share.”

  “We know you’re no freeloader. Toni Morrison for water, wasn’t it?”

  When the men left on their assignment, Helena tugged on Betsy’s arm. “You mustn’t mind Paul. It has nothing to do with you. He’s just like that.”

  “Like what exactly?”

  “Oh, always complaining.” She laughed. “I’m sure he thinks Europe is a cliché because he’s seen everything in the art history books.”

  “Sounds impossible to please.”

  “He likes you, though.”

  “Does he?” Betsy’s eyes widened. “That’s a surprise.”

  “Really?” Helena said vaguely as she chewed on her bottom lip, her thoughts somewhere else.

  “How’s your foot?” Betsy asked with a guilty start, fixing, she was sure, on the cause of Helena’s distraction.

  “Better, thanks. No more throbbing. Just plain hurts now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, really, I meant it when I said it was better.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  “Enough about my malingering. I’m becoming disgusted with myself. Let’s talk about you and the wonderful Fates that brought you to us. Stephen was in need of somebody to do the tourist things with and I’m thrilled to have a woman to talk to, but I think it’s especially good for Paul that you’re here. He can be painfully serious, and we know him so well that with us he doesn’t feel the need to make an effort.”

  “I’m supposed to be a good influence?”

  “You’ll hardly notice.”

  By the time Stephen and Paul had returned, balancing three bottles of wine and plastic-foam dishes rim upon rim filled with tortellini and scallopini, and a napkin of sliced bread, and slabs of watermelon, Helena and Betsy had revealed enough of their pasts to share a flushed, conspiratorial ease. Betsy had related to Helena much of what she’d told Stephen about her divorce. In return, Helena confided that she had married Stephen in defiance of her parents, who had wanted her to continue along the path of debutante balls and corporate connections they had so purposefully set her on. “But Stephen has proven himself to the family. I suppose we’ll never be in Daddy’s tax bracket, but even Daddy admits I could never find anyone else so devoted.”

  When Stephen and Paul stepped through the door, the air in the room was thick with intimacy.

  “I’ve decided,” Helena announced with an imperious toss of her glossy, chocolate-brown curls, “that in a few days I’ll be able to walk. Probably a grotesque parody of a walk, but I want you all to know I’m improving.”

  “Good news,” Stephen said, toasting his wife with a triangle of watermelon.

  “We’ll be able to leave Florence,” Paul said.

  “Where is it you want to go?” Betsy asked, trying to draw him out, trying to draw him in.

  “I don’t know. Zurich maybe. Lausanne. Someplace cool. Someplace else.”

  The next day Betsy and Stephen inched their way through the Duomo at Stephen’s suggestion. The day after, he asked her to choose their course. A pattern had established itself. Each morning Stephen would tap on Betsy’s door and together they’d breakfast in the comfortably crowded dining room, sitting at one of the tables close to the balcony with its tumult of red and pink flowers. Stephen would butler a tray back to the sleeping Helena, and Paul would arrive from his solitary breakfast—he had managed to secure one of the city’s single rooms on the other side of the river. While Betsy and Stephen followed the crowds of tourists through Florence, Paul remained with Helena. In the late afternoons Stephen relieved Paul at Helena’s bedside and then Betsy and Paul found themselves thrown together. Betsy suspected they would both prefer some solitude, but Paul’s hotel was too far away and, besides, neither wished to disappoint Helena. They developed the habit of reading or writing letters in each other’s company.

  During these siestas, she sometimes imagined Stephen and Helena behind their closed door. They were a handsome pair, pleasant to look at, another of the works of art that belonged to this city. She pictured him cradling Helena’s heavy curls in his lap while soothing her temples with long, tapering fingers. She thought if that was marriage, then perhaps she had never really tried her hand at it.

  “How long have you known them?” she asked Paul.

  “What? Oh, Steve and I were in school together—engineering. I took a job in Venezuela for a year. The money was good but that was as long as I could stick it out. Anyway, that’s when he met Helena. I flew back for the wedding.” He tilted his head modestly and shrugged, “Best man.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “I don’t know. They’ve been married pretty long now. About four years, I guess.”

  Betsy was conscious of being older than the others only when she was alone with Paul.

  Every evening the four would come together. After the first night these gatherings were transferred to Betsy’s considerably larger room. (A room for one person became available at the Pensione Désirée, but Betsy, in a burst of extravagance, rejected it as too small. It was not so much that she was choosing the more expensive room, she rationalized, but that this room had been allotted to her by the Fates for this purpose.) They’d position the little writing table between the single and double bed and lay out the various foodstuffs on it. Stephen had discovered a bar that sold good, extremely cheap, chilled wine by the bottle. Paul would drink only chilled wine and the others wordlessly agreed he was most in need of lubrication. The parties went on until all hours, the same participants each night. The arrangement appeared to suit even Paul.

  Each evening ended in the same way: Betsy passing whispered good nights through the door as Helena left supported on either side by the two men. It was an unfailingly comic departure, none of them as steady as they should be, white-swathed foot extended before them, all three staggering the length of the marbled hall with the heightened caution of inebriates in a sleeping house.

  Each night Betsy wondered if she would hear Paul’s muffled tap upon her door as he made the return trip down the corridor. Once, his steps stopped just outside her room. She wondered how she would respond to Paul. She wondered if she would let him make love to her. A new love to—as Stephen said—erase the old. Could she and Paul—poles apart—come together for anything more lasting than an interlude in Florence? The strongest force between them, after all, was Helena. She waited, her fingers now unmoving at the buttons of her shirt, until his steps retreated.

  Her sixth morning in Florence, Betsy proposed that she and Stephen visit the Palazzo Vecchio. She was conscious of Helena’s too bright smile following them through the open door. And conscious of a complete absence of expression on Paul’s face.

  “Aren’t we neglecting Helena?” she asked dutifully after Stephen led her down the flights of stairs and into the open air. She was afraid he would agree.

  “Not at all.
She wants us to go.” He settled a reassuring arm around Betsy’s shoulders.

  “Well, Paul then. Maybe he’s ready for adventure again. You two could have a day out on your own. I’d be happy to spell him.”

  “Trust me. We’ll all be happier if you don’t.”

  Touring the Palazzo Vecchio, Betsy felt sick with a kind of vertigo. There were paintings and altarpieces, statues, goblets—the art and artifacts of too many ages, all against a backdrop of ceilings, walls, and floors that were painted, carved, molded, and inlaid. The objects so filled her senses that they became obstacles to seeing. Outside, she took deep breaths of hot air, steadying herself against the cool stone at the entrance to the Loggia. The sculpture garden offered sanctuary, but Stephen pulled her on to the Uffizi.

  She hardly looked, holding something of herself in reserve, until they arrived at the Primavera. She had seen so many reproductions of the vast canvas, so many fragments isolated into postage stamps or book jackets, yet the Botticelli was as fresh as the season it celebrated.

  Like two children, they stood motionless for some time and then bolted from the room. Without words they left the building and its endless rooms of exhibits.

  “Let’s walk,” he said.

  “But I’m so tired.”

  “Your eyes are tired. Your mind is tired. Walking will help spread the tiredness around.”

  “All right.”

  Crossing the Ponte Vecchio, they lingered occasionally to look at a sketch by a sidewalk portrait artist. At the left bank of the thick, green Arno, they did not stop but immediately returned through the tunnel of shops and street vendors. Blindly, Betsy followed him along the streets that intersected without plan or reason.

  When they arrived at the pensione, the door to Helena’s room was closed.

  Stephen turned to Betsy. “Let’s go out for a drink.”