Villa America

by Liza Klaussmann

  Then they were lurching against the side of the tunnel, no room even to fall. The person was speaking German, that much Owen could hear. His hands were around Owen’s neck, and Owen’s on his. The pain in his ankle, in his thigh, screaming.

  He was dizzy and he knew what that meant. He gripped the person’s neck tighter and only then thought about how slender it was. A boy. He pulled the head back and hit it against the wall of the tunnel, praying for a rock in the side. Again and again, until he could feel a little give. The skull? Then the air moved around him and there was a muffled shot, gun against fabric, and the body beneath the neck he was holding slumped, and Owen let it go.

  Next to where the boy had been standing was another figure, bigger, lighter. Owen stared, feeling wild and ready.

  “It’s all right, fella,” the figure shouted at him. “You’re with the Marines.”

  Later, Owen would learn that he had fallen into a recaptured trench that was being held by only two men from the Second Battalion under machine-gun fire and constant barrage. They held it until midnight, when they and twenty other men separated from their divisions were relieved, and Owen was evacuated to a field hospital. The shot boy was some poor fucking German kid who’d gotten confused and left behind and had hid in the tunnel, hoping no doubt to make an escape under cover of darkness.

  Afterward, and for a long time to come, even when the war was over, everything felt bleached of color. In the hospital in Cannes, through the numerous operations that left him with a limp, and upon his release, when the future seemed to stretch cruel and endless before him. Yet something about what the two Marines did, something about what Quentin had done, holding to the end, that kind of unquenchable, ravenous optimism kept a small bit inside Owen alive. And it would spring back. But that was later, after he’d met them. After he’d loved them.

  The Golden Bowl

  1923–1937

  1923

  Linda Porter sat at her dressing table in her big room in her big Venetian palace rouging her lips. She was crying, but they were tears of…what? Frustration? Yes, that and something else. Not sadness.

  Things had gotten bad in Venice, and the Murphys only seemed to make it worse. Ever since they’d come, she couldn’t help feeling angry with them. All their damn self-containment and obvious affection. All Sara’s talk of how well Gerald’s painting was coming along. Yes, yes, she knew he was making something of a reputation for himself, but to bring Cole this ballet, as if Cole needed any help from him, as if Cole weren’t obviously the more talented one.

  She sighed and put down the rouge pot, not bothering to wipe away the tears making tracks through her powder. Oh, it wasn’t about Gerald’s success. Or maybe just a little. But that was petty jealousy.

  Admit it, she said to herself. Ever since she and Cole had rented the palazzo he’d seemed to feel no need for any self-restraint, no need to hide his nocturnal searches for his bit of rough. Bit of rough—that’s how she’d heard Monty Woolley refer to it when he thought she wasn’t listening. In Paris, Cole was…well, perhaps not more discreet. But somehow it was less obvious in a city, with the men out roving in packs under the respectable veneer of drinking and palling around. Venice, for all its sophistication, was ultimately just a small town.

  Then the Murphys had arrived, and Gerald’s intimacy with Cole, their ease together, bothered her. There was a sort of one-upmanship in flamboyance between them, looked upon with beatific serenity by Sara, who was clearly secure in her feelings for Gerald and his for her.

  It felt smug to Linda. She also knew that her husband loved her, but it didn’t bother her any less, his constant pursuits elsewhere. What had Sara to be smug about when anyone with eyes could see that Gerald…

  Then there was the constant talk of Cap d’Antibes and their happiness there, how natural it all was, what a simple life they led, how quaint, how lovely and interesting their children were. If she heard the names Honoria, Baoth, Patrick one more time…It made Linda want to scream.

  All right, all right; she wished she were back there with them instead of here in this mad merry-go-round of gaiety and parties and darkness. All the darkness in Venice. Oh, she loved it, really. But sometimes it just got to be too much, especially when it was shown up by people like the clean and shiny, well-pressed Murphys. She was glad Sara was now gone. But she wished Gerald would go too.

  It was unkind, maybe, but they made her sad. Yes, sad it was. Linda looked at her reflection, dabbing the damp around her eyes with a handkerchief. Then she wiped all her makeup off and started again.

  Cole swanned—there was no other word for it, preening in white as he was—into the music room of the Palazzo Barbaro and announced to Gerald: “I’m off.”

  Gerald was sitting at the desk in front of the open windows. He’d been working on the sketches for their ballet or, more precisely, fiddling with a sketch for the backdrop decor, his jacket draped over the baroque chair, shirtsleeves rolled up in the damp evening air.

  He smiled at Cole.

  “Linda is going to some soiree at the Palazzo Papadopoli, if you’d like to join her. Supposed to be hideously divine.”

  “No,” Gerald said, “I’m sitting this one out. Thought I’d play around with the set sketches, listen to the gondoliers’ love songs.”

  Cole waited two beats—he was good at that—before saying: “I may compose a few of them myself.” His friend smiled slightly, but his large, hooded eyes remained inscrutable. “Well,” he said finally, “if I can tempt you…Do you have everything you need? The bar is always stocked, as you know. Despite our best efforts.”

  “I do,” Gerald said. “I’m well fixed.” He held up his half-empty martini glass.

  Cole nodded and started to leave, then turned back and placed his hand on Gerald’s shoulder. He lit a cigarette. “Strange, I miss Sara already,” Cole said. “Awfully. Linda does too, you know.”

  Gerald knew the second part was a lie, but he patted Cole’s hand. “Me three.”

  “Right. Nighty-night.” Then he was gone.

  Gerald leaned back and stared up at the ceiling: Roman soldiers were having their way with white-shouldered, pink-nippled women. He rubbed his temples. His hangover seemed to date back at least three days. He had another sip of his martini and thought of Sara, who’d taken the train to Cap d’Antibes that morning.

  The two weeks of parties had had something to do with her early departure. She’d woken two days ago, sat bolt upright in bed, and announced: “I can’t take one more of these holocausts.”

  It was true that his old Yale friend’s lifestyle had become increasingly lavish, even outlandish, but then, many people’s had since the war. Paris was no different, nor New York. Yet that wasn’t the real reason Sara had gone. Or not only that. It was also Linda.

  “I smell a whiff of that unpleasant odor,” Sara had said to him after the incident at the Lido where everything sort of came to a head, “Eau de Disapproval.”

  She was right. He’d felt it too, though neither of them could really put a finger on the source. It just felt…taut, like one of Cole’s piano wires, ready to snap. They weren’t entirely up for all the nonstop lavish craziness, but neither were they as well behaved, it seemed, as Linda would have liked. And throughout it all, Cole sat on the fence; the man who had as many quips on the tip of his tongue as Gerald had handkerchiefs in his drawer was suddenly a deaf-mute.

  He and Sara had come down intending to stay for a month so that Gerald and Cole could work on the ballet they were writing together for the Ballets Suédois in Paris. Within the Quota, a lighthearted curtain-raiser, was to be designed by Gerald, composed by Cole, and written by both. But all the parties and hangovers and sightseeing had gotten in the way of any real work, and the conversations had begun to take on a strained quality. Furthermore, Cole never ended the evening in the palace, which didn’t surprise Gerald or Sara but seemed to aggravate Linda.

  Before this trip, he hadn’t seen his friend in months and he’d miss
ed him. He could still picture the Midwestern boy that he’d met for the first time in his junior year in college. Gerald had happened upon his room, mistaking it for someone else’s, and when he’d opened the door, he was met with one anemic electric lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, a monstrous hooked rug with a rose border that looked as if it dated back to Betsy Ross, wicker furniture, and tacky silk cushions scattered on the floor. And in the center of all this was Cole, sitting at an upright piano, all gussied up in a ghastly houndstooth suit and puce tie, hair parted in the middle—his very best Peru, Indiana, outfit. He’d introduced himself, and after consuming several glasses of claret, they’d ended up talking all night about Gilbert and Sullivan. Gerald felt he’d met someone he could be himself with.

  They’d remained friends, albeit vaguely, through the intervening years and then really reconnected two years ago, when he and Sara had moved to Paris. Cole and Linda, who’d set up there during the war, had conspired to make Gerald’s brief trip to study French landscape architecture into a permanent move.

  They’d introduced Sara and Gerald to everyone they knew. They gave wonderfully amusing and extravagant parties in their apartment near Les Invalides, dizzying nights passed in a swirl of music and platinum wallpaper and bons mots. Although despite all this, Cole did seem to be struggling a bit with his career.

  So when Gerald was offered the chance to design and write this ballet, he’d immediately proposed Cole as the composer and cowriter. Thus the trip; Cole and Linda had rented a palazzo in Venice that summer, and Gerald and Sara had arranged to visit for a sort of working holiday.

  It had started off well enough. Sara and Gerald were met by their hosts with much affection and kissing and coddling and a description of who’d done what where in the palazzo, and weren’t the linen sheets divine, and did they like the flowers in their room, and so forth. It had felt good to be back in their company.

  For their part, they’d tried to entertain the Porters with tales of their time at Cap d’Antibes. The four of them had all gone together last August, and Gerald and Sara had loved it so much that this summer, they’d convinced the owners of the Hôtel du Cap to keep it open out of season with a bare minimum of staff—a cook, a waiter, and a chambermaid.

  It had been quiet; the only other guests were a Chinese family who’d also decided to stay on after all the fashionable people left for cooler climes. But while the Porters didn’t return, Sara and Gerald eventually managed to convince Pablo Picasso—whom they’d met in Paris while he was at Diaghilev’s atelier painting sets for the Ballets Russes—to come down with his family and liven things up.

  “He’s wonderful,” Sara said over dinner in the palazzo one evening. “Funny, and very naughty. He has this terrible habit of waiting until you’ve bent over to pick something up, a towel or a glass or something, and then he sneaks up behind you and takes a picture.” She laughed. “He’s gathering quite a collection of rear ends.”

  “My,” Linda said dryly, “doesn’t he just sound wonderful.” Her fork made a small screeching noise against her Blue Italian dinner plate. “Nothing I’d like better.”

  “No, Sara’s right,” Gerald said, backing up his wife. “He’s mischievous, but natural.”

  Cole leaned back; the candlelight made the white dots on his navy silk tie seem to wink on and off. “I have the impression that when he opens his mouth to speak, little squares and triangles and two-headed women pop out instead of words.”

  Gerald laughed. “No, he never talks about his art. He’s very salt of the earth, very naughty, very fun.”

  “She’s not fun,” Sara said. “Olga.”

  “No; for a ballerina, she’s oddly serviceable. She begins to speak and you think she’s going to say something sparkling and then something entirely banal comes out.”

  Linda laughed, a harsh short sound, and Gerald saw Sara’s head come up sharply.

  “Well,” Sara said, slowly turning her gaze away from Linda, “banal or not, what I find strange is she seems to feel nothing for the little boy, Paulo. Poor little thing is left to himself to play with Gerald’s raked-up seaweed while she stands around watching her husband’s every move.”

  “Children aren’t as interesting as some people seem to think,” Linda said. “I find that with certain of our friends, the subject becomes positively obsessive, to the point where one wonders if the lady in question’s brain had been pushed out with the baby.”

  There was a silence, then Sara said: “What an interesting observation.”

  Gerald looked at the two women and then at Cole, who was smoking a cigarette, brushing some unseen crumbs off his lap. “Well,” Gerald said, “when it comes to Olga, I mean, really. His mother, who speaks only Spanish—the inimitable Señora Ruiz—has more to say for herself.”

  “The Spanish always do,” Cole said, lifting his head, his face brightening. “Saucy chatterboxes.”

  “There was one very funny moment with him, though, his only real poetic moment,” Gerald went on, encouraged. “We were walking, all of us, and there was this lovely old farm dog lying in the road in the shade of a fragrant lemon tree. It was hot, you see, midday, and cool under that tree. And up the road comes this big black car that has to stop because the dog won’t move. So the chauffeur honks the horn and…nothing. Finally, the chauffeur gets out, picks him up, and deposits him on the side of the road. So, afterward, when the car has gone on and the dog has settled back into his shady spot, Pablo says: ‘Moi, je voudrais être un chien.’”

  “Poof. He’s got his wish,” Cole said, both hands shooting up into the air. “For I hear he is indeed quite the dog.”

  “He’s not the only one,” Linda said, rising suddenly, her chair scraping against the polished wooden floor, the sound cutting through the men’s laughter. She stood there a moment, almost helplessly, before saying, “I’m sorry,” and walking out of the room.

  Gerald looked at Cole, who just smiled back at him.

  “You know,” Cole said finally, into the silence. “I think I may go for a little walk as well.”

  They’d seen Cole and Linda later, at the party they’d all planned on attending, arms linked, she laughing at something he’d said, and it was once again all smiles and warmth, as if nothing had happened.

  That night in their bed—huge, gilded, with an embroidered headboard—he and Sara had mused on it.

  “She knew when she married him,” Sara said, puzzled.

  “Yes, she knew.”

  “I suppose he’s not being very discreet,” Sara said. “To paraphrase Mrs. Pat, who cares what people do, as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses.”

  Gerald laughed. “I suppose that’s about it. But discretion wasn’t really ever Cole’s long suit.”

  “True.” Then: “Perhaps there’s another woman? One could see how much that would hurt.”

  Gerald couldn’t help but laugh a little. “There’s not another woman.”

  “No,” she said. “No, of course not.” She sought out his hand under the soft linen sheet. “They are devoted. I mean, they always seem devoted. Still, I couldn’t stand what she stands.”

  “It must be hard on both of them,” he agreed. He could hear the noise from the canal through the open windows, the rise and fall of Italian.

  She turned to him. “Do you think it’s because of us?”

  “Of course it’s not because of us,” he said, although he wasn’t entirely certain that was true. “How could it be?”

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She snuffed out the lamp on the bedside table and was quiet for a while, leaving him to wonder if she’d fallen asleep. Then he felt her reach for him, her delicate gauzy nightgown brushing against the hairs on his arms.

  “Will you come closer?” she asked softly.

  Even after eight years of marriage, he was still surprised by her need for not just sex but physical, communicated affection. He felt that need with the children—like her, his love for them
was visceral, an ache inside of him. But in his marriage bed, he wasn’t as open. It wasn’t as crucial to him, he supposed. It wasn’t in him in the same way.

  “Will you, my love?” Even more softly this time.

  She was the best part of them. Of what they’d made together. So his fingers found the hem of her nightgown.

  “Promise me you won’t ever fall for another woman.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  “You’re more than welcome tonight, you know.” Now it was Linda standing in the doorway of the music room, her body encased in a white silk gown printed with what looked like purple nightshade.

  “Thank you, but I don’t think I’m actually able,” Gerald said.

  The evening had grown closer, making the sounds of the city seem richer, denser, more resonant.

  “You could be my date,” she said, smiling.

  He knew she was trying to be kind, after Sara’s departure, after the scene at the Lido.

  “I wish this poor old body would allow me. You look marvelous.”

  She looked down at her dress, her aquiline nose casting a shadow like an arrow across her face in the lamplight. “Oh, thank you. Cole bought it for me.”

  “He has wonderful taste.”

  “Yes,” she said. “He is wonderful. Isn’t he?”

  “I think so.”

  Linda took a big breath, her bosom rising. “Well, I’m going. Once more into the arena.” She gazed at him, then turned away. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” Gerald said.

  When she’d gone, he looked back at the sketches lying before him. He and Cole had agreed on a backdrop painted to look like a huge newspaper, black and white with sensational headlines mimicking those printed in America these days: “Unknown Banker Buys Atlantic”; “Ex-Wife’s Heart Balm Love-Tangle”; “Rum Raid Liquor Ban.” It was an exciting project, but Gerald couldn’t stop his mind from wandering back to his own work, waiting patiently for him in Paris.