The Uncertain Hour

by Jesse Browner

  He was silent at breakfast the next morning, and she could not draw him out.

  “What’s come over you, Titus? Are you ill?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Talk about what?”

  “I can’t stand it here any longer.”

  Her tone in response was cautious and measured, as though she were talking to an eccentric stranger who might yet prove to have a dagger concealed about his person. “When you say ‘here,’ where is it, precisely, that you’re referring to?”

  “Here in Rome, of course! This terrible place, these awful people.”

  Again, she considered carefully before answering. “Titus, you spent three weeks on the boat extolling Rome’s virtues and raving about how happy we’d be here.”

  “But that was before you were here. I see it all now. A person like you doesn’t belong in a place like this. It was a mistake to come.”

  “Where do you imagine a person like me belongs?”

  “Somewhere far away from all this. Somewhere where we can be alone. Somewhere simple and quiet, where we have room to think and breathe and be ourselves. A haven, a hideaway.”

  This time her delay was even longer, and when finally she spoke her voice was subdued. “But I’ve just come from a place like that,” she said.

  Something rotten came over him. In the following weeks, he watched her as she went about her business, and he watched himself watching her. In Bithynia, it had been just the two of them together; their love had been something supremely remote, otherworldly. That was how he had come to understand the very definition of love: two people on a raft in the middle of a cold, inhospitable sea, clinging to one another for safety and solace. It had been a beautiful, comforting vision. He had imagined, too, that their life in Italy would pursue the same course, that she would never have to show him any other face than that which she showed him when they were alone together. All he needed to survive was her; what else could she need but him? That was not how things had befallen—he continued to cling desperately to her, but now her eyes were fixed on the approaching shore, and he couldn’t bear it. He had never considered what would happen when they made landfall; he had wanted to be alone with her forever.

  She had rejoiced with her first step on dry land; he had despaired. She was walking away from him, embracing her salvation; he had imagined himself to be that salvation. How could she do this to him? The more confident and ebullient she was, the more peevish and resentful Petronius grew. He could feel it happening; he was changing—something was changing, or had changed. In his more lucid moments, he recognized that he was acting like a child denied a privilege that it felt was its due. He hated what he felt himself becoming—a fearful, grasping, panicked man, barely a Roman at all. He had a knot in his stomach from morning to night, and at times imagined that his breath had gone sour from whatever was putrefying inside him. She could not have been unaware of the transformation that had taken place in him, but she chose not to confront it. If she had, she would have been compelled to admit that her every apprehension concerning Petronius had been well founded, and that it had been a mistake to trust in his assurances. Acknowledge it or not, he felt himself turning into her worst nightmare, and helpless, like her, to reverse the slide.

  And then one night, Petronius had a dream, or perhaps it was a visitation. He dreamed that the centurion Aulus Junius came to see him in his tent on campaign in Armenia. Petronius was sitting at his desk with a large map of the eastern empire spread out before him. Aulus stood to attention on the other side of the desk and told him that he had been killed in battle and wished to discuss the terms of his discharge. Petronius responded that he seemed in good health and demanded some proof that he was indeed dead. Aulus raised his tunic to reveal his penis, which he placed on the desktop between them. It was enormous, heavy and inert, at least a cubit in length, and black and shiny like an eel. Indeed, even as Petronius watched, it came to life and began to writhe and squirm like some hideous snake. Petronius looked to Aulus for some explanation, but he merely smiled sadly, then turned his attention back to the penis. Petronius could see now that it was inching across the map in a westerly direction. Having begun its journey in the Euxine Sea, it had traversed Anatolia and had almost reached the Aegean. Petronius realized with a start of horror that it was making for Italy, and that when it reached Rome something tremendous, cataclysmic, would occur. He woke up, bathed in sweat, heart pounding, his own penis painfully erect and pressed up against Melissa’s buttocks. Without thinking, he took her there and then, from behind; it must have woken her up, but she did not stir.

  The meaning of the dream was as clear as day, as if it had been interpreted by a priest. His guilt in the death of Aulus Junius had followed him home and finally caught up with him, just at the moment when his spirit was in turmoil and vulnerable to its message. That he was experiencing a crisis of conscience there was no doubt, but he had gone through those before without feeling that his entire world had been turned upside down. This was of an altogether different order. He had become Phineas tormented by the harpies, Odysseus pursued by the wrath of Poseidon. It had been sheer hubris on his part to imagine that he could escape with impunity the consequences of his own crime.

  He lay awake all that night, consumed by panic and despair. At the darkest hour, he felt even that he was on the edge of madness, and laughed pitilessly at himself. It was not his part in Junius’s death that ate at him; after all, every soldier takes his chances on the battlefield, and no officer could ever lead were he to assume personal responsibility for the death of every man under his command. Rather, it was the dream’s revelation, or reminder, that Petronius had staked the entirety of his future happiness, and that of Melissa as well, on a shameful, cowardly deceit. He might have sought to win her through patience and constancy; instead, he had abused his power and authority to dispatch an ill-matched rival. What was more, he had no doubt that Melissa would never have recognized her husband’s death as an acceptable price for her own liberation. It was not enough that Petronius had betrayed every moral and ethical principle on which the actions of a Roman patrician, soldier, and man of honor must stand, the very foundation of his understanding of what it means to be a man; he had also made Melissa an unwitting accomplice in the betrayal. And he knew now with utmost certainty that no good, or serenity, or happiness could ever come of it. Confident in her right, Melissa had already embarked on a path down which he could not follow. Either he must bring her up short with a confession of the truth, and risk destroying everything, or he must allow her to continue on her way alone.

  Shortly before dawn, he nudged her awake.

  “Do you never feel sorry for what we’ve done?” he asked her. She was instantly alert to the tone of his question.

  “What is it you think we’ve done?” she answered tentatively.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I don’t.”

  “All this. All we have. Your husband died so we could have it.”

  “The Parthians killed my husband. He was a professional soldier. He died honorably in the line of duty. It was his destiny, and nothing we did or could have done would have saved him. Why do you torment yourself?”

  Now was the time to tell her, and yet Petronius could not even bring himself to look her in the eye. He sank back upon the mattress. There would be no point in pursuing this line of thought. She would have to be as raw and defenseless as he was if it were to be at all fruitful, and very obviously she was not. Why should she be? There was no “we” in this matter to begin with. It was Petronius who had ordered Aulus Junius to the front, not she. She had asked for nothing, not even a divorce. She still did not know what he had done—or pretended not to know—and Petronius did not have the courage to tell her.

  PETRONIUS TURNED AND slowly crossed the terrace, unsteady on his feet. Aware that he was being observed, and uncertain as to how long he had absented himself, he tried to approach with measured dignity. It was a pathetic
exercise in futility—his entire body was trembling, and everyone could see it. Melissa made room for him on the couch, and he slipped under the covers beside her. No one was talking now.

  The fires still roared in the braziers, but the wind had spent itself, and the tide was at full flood, drowning the rattle of shale and the sucking of the tidal pools. The silence made Petronius dizzy. A lightness of body, an almost nauseating sense of incorpo-reality, made him feel as if he might float off the couch, lifting the heavy counterpane with him through the garlanded pergola and into the bed of stars above. The moon was long gone and the stars were unmoored, waving to and fro like anemones in a gentle current. He stared at them, uncomprehending; they were pinholes, but instead of allowing light to flow in from the outer spheres, they drained it from the inner, and the night now pressing in was the product of that centrifuge, a void at the center of a spinning orb of which he himself was the axis. And here, to add to his confusion and disorientation, he felt a return of the painful sensory acuity that had overwhelmed him earlier. From the village up the hill he suddenly perceived the din of frenzied revelry, laughter, and song, as piercing and mirthless and imminent as the clash of metals on the battlefield. The upper slope and the acropolis were bathed in the ghostly red of bonfires, and Petronius fancied he could detect the smell of old vine stumps and burning garbage. A lone lamp hung from the stern of a darkened yacht anchored offshore, and he caught a hint of the hushed conversation of its occupants, sleepy and dissatisfied after a night of sparring. He found his left hand trailing in the water table, and the caress of the water on his fingertips made him feel as if his entire body were naked and immersed. His perceptions were birds, emerging from their shelter when the storm has spent itself. Or not birds, but bees—each scent, each fleeting shadow, each sound far and near an angry bee, circling his head, attacking and distracting, protecting the queen hidden at the core of their swarming multitude. He lifted his head and smelled the dawn rising in Asia Minor.

  Someone was talking to him. There was a hand on his shoulder.

  “Are you all right, Petronius?”

  “Where am I?”

  Silence. The fire crackling.

  Anicius clapped his hands and slid out from beneath the blanket. “Time for some light-hearted verse, I think.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  Anicius positioned himself before the company, at the far side of the water table. He anchored his feet firmly in declaiming position, coughed into his fist, placed his left palm flat against his chest, raised his right arm, and began to recite.

  The day being humid and my head

  heavy, I stretched out on a bed.

  The open window to the right

  reflected woodland-watery light,

  a keyed-up silence as of dawn

  Or dusk, the vibrant and uncertain

  hour when a brave girl might undress

  and caper naked on the grass.

  You entered in a muslin gown,

  bare-footed, your fine braids undone,

  a fabled goddess with an air

  as if in heat yet debonair.

  Aroused, I grabbed and roughly tore

  until your gown squirmed on the floor.

  Oh, you resisted, but like one

  Who knows resistance is in vain;

  and, when you stood revealed, my eyes

  feasted on shoulders, breasts and thighs.

  I held you hard and down you slid

  beside me, as we knew you would.

  Oh, come to me again as then you did!

  They all applauded and laughed rather more hysterically than was strictly called for. Petronius knew that his unsteadiness and silences were making them uncomfortable, and he regretted it deeply. He could hardly blame them for giving way to false hilarity, but he chided himself for losing control of the evening. There was very little time left, and perhaps he should be making a greater effort to steer the mood away from thoughts of death.

  “That was rich, coming from you, Anicius,” he said.

  “You’re right, Petronius. Yet somehow it speaks to me, that poem.”

  “What’s in it for you? When’s the last time your eyes feasted on breasts?”

  “It’s all in how you look at it. There’s less difference between a girl’s breasts and a boy’s buttocks than you might think. Anyway, my tastes have served me well over the past sixty years, and buggery is a good deal safer, politically, than running around with other men’s wives.”

  “Was that intended for me, Anicius?” Petronius asked.

  “No, for me, I think,” Martialis said.

  “For Cornelia, perhaps.”

  “Honestly, will I never live that down?”

  “The pot finds its own herbs.”

  “Can’t you find anyone else to quote but Catullus, Martialis?”

  Despite the prevailing tension, the poem had left a lingering perfume in the air that seemed to have touched everyone with languor and wistfulness.

  “You know,” Fabius began dreamily, “when I was a boy, I never could understand that bit about the vibrant and uncertain hour. What could it mean? The poet didn’t know if it was sunrise or sunset?”

  “And now that you’re a man, what do you make of it?” Martialis asked, but his sarcasm was lost on Fabius.

  “I’m still not sure I catch his meaning, to be honest.”

  “It’s about love, surely?” Pollia ventured.

  “You mean, how the person you love is always there just when you need her?”

  “No, I mean how we create the person we love from our own imagination. We don’t see the person standing before us, but the image we impose upon him, like a mask. Ovid imagines a beautiful girl dancing naked on the lawn, and his lover becomes that girl. That’s why he can’t get her back—she’s a figment, a chimera.”

  “A Platonic ideal?”

  “Not necessarily an ideal, Cornelia. It can work both ways, I suppose. You can imagine unpleasant traits that aren’t there, too.”

  “I hate to drag your pretty little ideas through the mud,” Mar-tialis said. “Ovid has a heavy lunch, he’s a little worse for the retsina, lies down to take a nap, falls asleep thinking about pussy, has a wet dream. That’s why he can’t get her back. End of story.”

  “Marcus Valerius Martialis,” Cornelia scolded. “Must you always be so coarse and cynical? Pollia was trying to elevate the conversation.”

  “There’s only one elevation that matters in love.”

  “Don’t you believe in love, then?”

  “Oh, I believe in love. I believe in love just as I believe in empire. They’re both transactions between partners of unequal strength, dressed up in heroic rhetoric. When I used to get into fights in the school yard, I’d squat on my opponent’s chest and spit into his face until he said the magic words. Either he could say ‘Marcus is the best!’ or he could say ‘I love you!’ I didn’t care which, but I wouldn’t let him up until he said one or the other. That’s much my view of love.”

  “You’re a horrible person. Lucilius, won’t you defend a lady’s honor?”

  “I’m a lawyer, Cornelia, not a necromancer.”

  “Petronius?”

  “If you’ll excuse me, I have to piss.”

  Petronius felt painfully self-conscious as he sought to extricate himself from the counterpane and make his exit with dignity. All eyes were upon him; no one now pretended light-heartedness or diversion—the night was too late for that—as he tottered to his feet and stumbled off into the darkness. Seemingly from out of nowhere, Commagenus stepped forward to offer his arm, but Petronius waved him off and faltered on, his mind a sodden bale of straw and sawdust. The house was dark now, a single torch burning at the door to the dining room. Had the other slaves abandoned the household for the festivities, or simply gone off to bed? Perhaps they had run away. No matter; there was wine left in the bowl, and Martialis to sniff out more if they should run short. It was still a beautiful night, and some conversation perhaps left to drain f
rom its lees.

  He heard the crunch of shells. Looking round, he found that he had wandered into the kitchen garden; the oyster-shell pathway should have been sharp and abrasive against the soles of his bare feet, but he felt nothing. He lifted his tunic and stared off into the dark orchard, where not a branch now stirred, as if the very night had tired of itself (or of him and his protracted drama) and gone to sleep. Even his heavy stream of urine made only a drowsy drumming as it thudded into the dry soil of an empty vegetable bed. Petronius shook himself off and turned to leave. But here was a sound—a whimper and a cry—and he turned back. It came from the darkest part of the garden, a corner where the outer walls of the kitchen and the larder met, a spot so sunless even at the height of summer that nothing would grow there. Now, as his eyes adjusted to the layered dark, he found that just the dimmest light from the dying embers of the oven room, glowing through the kitchen window, picked out the quivering form of a tiny animal at the foot of the wall. It was the same brown puppy he had seen tethered to the gardener boy’s ankle that afternoon, now tethered to the hinge of the kitchen door. The creature was clearly both terrified and elated by this nocturnal apparition; it cowered, averting its head in submission, yet its tail thumped vigorously in the dirt. Petronius considered the dog. This dismal patch was no place to leave a lonely and frightened animal, alone in the world and in the night. How could it ever know or hope that dawn would bring release? That was not something you could teach or explain to a dog. It would think that the night lasts forever, and come the day it would forget the night and worship the sun. And if, in the midst of the eternal night, someone should come to rescue it, or if at the height of the blazing day someone should beat it and lock it away in a dark room for some unknown infraction, well—that is what life is. For a dog. If it is a trained dog, it is pleased to obey orders; if it is a neglected dog, it skulks and flees and will not be made to work. But either way, it is always a dog and cannot ever be compelled to understand its own limitations. It is a self that creates the world and fills it entirely, and yet remains at the mercy of its own creation. Look at this poor, pathetic creature at his feet, not twelve weeks on this earth and it knows already to fear the night and solitude, and to praise the day and companionship. What else could it possibly need to know? Yet who would stoop to call that wisdom?