The Marble Quilt

by David Leavitt

  “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.

  Wool Street

  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 a
gain—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.

  According to this way of thinking, to look for sex outside your marriage was not merely to betray the person you loved, but to bring rabies into England—as if a vow of loyalty were the same thing as a vaccination.

  In lying there is often this lie: that we do it to protect other people.

  Keeping him in the dark was never very difficult, I think in part because, without even being aware of it, he wanted to be kept in the dark. Also, the combination of my language classes and Tom’s devotion to his friends’ children left me with large amounts of time for which I wasn’t accountable, especially on those weekends when he would volunteer to babysit for some couple who were going off to Lake Tahoe to save their marriage. He’d move himself into their house, sleep in their bed, and take care of their kids.

  During those weekends, what seemed most important to him was that he establish, with those Justins and Samuels and Maxes, the very camaraderie of boys from which, as a boy, he had been excluded, thanks largely to his inability to throw a ball, his high voice, in short, his stubborn adherence to all the classic attributes of the good faggot. For despite the cruelty that had marred his childhood, still, he longed to be treated as a boy by boys, which was why, even as he baked, he collected baseball cards, and was always trying to get me to go to the park with him to play catch.

  Now he was not so much the adult to whom children looked up as the secret playmate whose grown-up bearing and possessions (a credit card, a driver’s license) brought certain enviable and forbidden attractions within reach. With Tom, his young charges could eat the things they weren’t supposed to eat, see the movies they weren’t supposed to see. In this regard Tom fit perfectly the clinical profile of the pedophile … except that he was not a pedophile. Sexuality had nothing to do with it; to him those boys were not emblems, they were not “the boy” whose allure must wither as he himself blooms. Instead he loved them simply and individually, as well as loving the ease with which they loved him, their love reliable and pure of complication, and remote from the bristly, fitful love of adult for adult.

  And yet in the background, there always lurked a certain unease, a skittishness on Tom’s part to match the volubility with which his friends avowed their trust in him.

  For instance, I remember a dinner once—it was an occasion dinner, though I can’t recall which occasion: Thanksgiving, perhaps. Tom had done all the cooking, of course. There were children, and two or three of the couples, and only one other queer: his former boyfriend Ernie, whom he had invited only because he was alone, and dying. Visibly dying.

  I mean, you could see the patches of foundation make-up that he had rubbed onto his face to hide the KS lesions.

  A husband—this was Tony, who was married to Gina; typically, he worked in the computer industry—was talking about his boyhood. About all the “macho crap” he’d had to put up with, coming of age in the fifties. Of late Tony had joined a men’s group, the members of which went on camping trips, and danced around a wood fire, and wept together over paternal cruelties.

  “When Justin grows up,” he said, “I want him to be at peace in his masculinity. That way he’ll be a better father than I am. A better husband, too.”

  Gina picked up her napkin and dabbed at the corner of her eyes. Reaching across the table, she squeezed his hand.

  A silence fell. I remember there was a big bowl of tangerines and walnuts in the center of the table. Ernie took a walnut and cracked it between his teeth. “All well and good,” he said, “but what if Justin grows up to be queer?”

  Tony, who was taking a gulp from his wineglass, spluttered onto the tablecloth, then looked anxiously toward his son, who was playing with Lego blocks.

  He appeared to regard Justin’s fixation on the Lego blocks with relief.

  “You see?” Ernie said. “The very idea terrifies you. And yet who’s to say he won’t grow up to be queer? I did. Tom did.”

  “Ernie, please,” Tom said.

  “Look, I understand your point, and I respect it,” Tony said, “only in the case of Justin, it seems fairly obvious—”

  “Why, because he plays baseball? I played baseball. For Christ’s sake, I was pitcher on the varsity team.”

  “What Tony means,” Gina interjected, “is that we just want our son to grow up to be happy and well adjusted. To be a good partner and a good parent.”

  “So you’re saying you won’t mind if he turns out to be queer?”

  “Please keep your voice down.”

  “Well, that proves my point. Suddenly queer’s a dirty word. And if that’s how thin
gs are in your house, then no matter what Justin does, he’s fucked for life. For all your sanctimonious good intentions, you’re making it clear that you expect him to grow up a certain way. In a sense you’re ordering him to.”

  “Justin, why don’t you go to the other room?” Tony said. “The grown-ups need private time.”

  “No,” said Justin.

  By now Tom was nearly apoplectic. He hated it, he told me later, when his dinners were spoiled. And what had spoiled this one?

  “Conflict,” he replied, plunging a steel pan into scalding dishwater.

  “But Ernie only said what he felt.”

  “He didn’t have to be so confrontational. He offended Tony.”

  “Tony offended him.”

  “Tony didn’t mean to offend anyone. A guy like that, it’s not easy for him to open up. For once he was feeling at ease, like he could really say what was on his mind. Now he’ll always be on his guard with us.”

  “He offended me,” I added after a moment.

  “I just don’t see why Ernie had to be so holier-than-thou. It’s as if he thinks being sick means he isn’t obliged to be civil.”

  “Was he being uncivil?”

  “He should have watched his language. Also, his timing was terrible. He upset everybody, especially the children.”

  “The children weren’t listening.”

  “How do you know?” Tom asked.

  What seemed imperative to him, during those years, was a certain kind of forgetting: to do one’s duty, to pay one’s dues, and then at the end of the day to return to a place from which illness—even the mention of illness—was effectively barred.

  And because sex was for him so intimately bound up with illness, this had to be a place from which sex, too, was barred—virtually barred.

  So once a week—it seemed to be part of that bargain he had struck, altruism in exchange for a life sentence—he volunteered at the AIDS hospice that his friend Caroline ran. Sometimes I accompanied him. I liked the hospice, which was in many ways far more cheerful than our own crypto-dream-bunker. It was located in a small, sunny house at the end of a cul-de-sac around which children rode their bicycles with unusual ferocity. We would bring food, and if it was spring, fresh flowers—irises and tulips—and I remember that one morning Tom was arranging the flowers in vases, when one of the patients called out, “Caroline, could you come here for a moment? I think John just died.” Caroline went, and it was true: John had died. No one seemed overly upset. The police were summoned. They did not, as I’d heard they had early in the epidemic, when no one knew anything, pull a gun on the corpse. (“If you’d feel better about it, you can tie him up,” the distraught widower is reputed to have remarked on one of these occasions; “it wouldn’t be the first time.”) A doctor arrived to sign the death certificate, an ambulance to take away the body. Quiet prayers were said, and lunch was made.