A breeze comes up. A couple of towels hanging from a line ripple in the wind. Up ahead there’s an intersection, and a car rushes by on the bigger road, its headlamps hitting the ochre façade of the corner building, flashing a streak of orange in the dark. The sound of the engine fades away and the silence afterwards is too quiet, like a river that’s stopped running.
I turn round. The glow from the single window is far back now, nothing more that a muzzy yellowish smear in the dark and at first I can’t see anything. Then I spot Billy. She’s just a shape, standing in the middle of the street, about half a block behind me.
“Bill,’ I call. ‘Come on, I’m sorry.’
She doesn’t answer, and I start to call again, but something stops me. I stare into the dark, and feel Billy staring back. A nasty feeling prickles behind my neck. It skitters across my scars like a mouse, as we stand there, neither of us moving.
Then the shrill wail of a horn splits the night, and a moped veers round the corner so fast it almost hits me.
The scooter swerves, and although I can’t see the driver’s face or make out what he shouts, his hand gesture is universal. A second bike follows hard on his heels, and they zoom up the alley, filling it with noise and light. The beams of the headlights sweep down the dark buildings, picking out nothing but worn mouldings of grey stone and the damp shine of the cobbles. Billy’s gone. Vanished as though I imagined her.
The whole thing leaves me peculiarly rattled, and I’m glad to get on to Via dei Serragli where there are lights and a sidewalk. Eager to get home, I almost trot, and when I reach our building about five minutes later the lights are on in the courtyard. The lemon trees throw shadows that look like pickup sticks and I can hear music, Vivaldi. A shrill staccato burst of voices comes from Sophie’s apartment, sharp and clear before they’re swallowed in the high notes of a violin. I look up and see that our apartment lights are on, too.
Staring up at our windows, I have the horrible thought that the only person who has a set of keys, other than me and Billy, is Signora Bardino. She, or, worse, her husband, has probably dropped by to check out the condition of their precious apartment. I have picked up my room and the living room, but, between going out for a new toothbrush and generally messing around, I didn’t do as much as I’d planned this afternoon and the kitchen is still a tip. I’m sure Billy’s ashtray’s on the table, and it looks like the French windows are loose again. La Bardina’s probably having a conniption fit even as I stand here. Or, better yet, maybe she’s found out I’m sleeping with her best friend’s husband.
I seriously consider running away and hiding in the bar. Then I figure it’s pointless. If she knows, I’ll have to deal with it sometime. Even so, I climb the empty stairs slowly, instead of taking the elevator, to buy myself time. I figure the best thing to do is say I knew Piero professionally, which has the benefit of being at least sort of true. When I get to the landing, I plaster a smile on, prepare to be charming, or at least contrite, and push the door open to find myself face to face with Billy.
Her coat and scarf are in her hand and she is standing in her socks, the clogs she was wearing at dinner tipped over in front of the hall closet. ‘Mary, I’m sorry,’ she says immediately. ‘I was really out of line. You’re right, it’s none of my business, I—’
‘How did you get here?’
She looks at me. Then she smiles, but half-heartedly. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Billy look uncertain. ‘I live here,’ she says. ‘I have a key.’
‘No.’ My voice is suddenly high and insistent. ‘No, I mean, how did you get here. Back here. So fast. Before me?’
‘I—by the river.’
It’s just not possible.
‘You were behind me,’ I insist. ‘You followed me in the street. I heard you. I saw you.’
I’m getting shriller and shriller, the same way Mamaw used to when I did something dangerous, like diving off the old quarry walls, jackknifing twenty feet into dark water, and making her angry and scared at the same time.
‘I saw you,’ I say again. ‘I apologized. I yelled at you. Then I turned round and I saw you. Standing in the street. Behind me. So how did you get here first?’
Billy has stopped smiling and is shaking her head. Her curls come loose and fall on her shoulders.
‘When you walked off,’ she says, ‘I just decided to go the way I knew. I can’t find my way out of a paper bag, you know that. So, I went to the bottom of the piazza, to the river, and came that way. I—’ She stops. ‘Look, Mary,’ she says, ‘about before, what I said. I’m sorry, really. I—’
But I don’t let her finish. My heart is jackhammering. I hear Marcello, telling me about dark streets. See Gianni’s weasel face. ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Forget it.’ I step past Billy and pull at the glass knob of my bedroom door so hard it almost comes off in my hand.
Somebody followed me. Someone stopped when I stopped, and stared at me in the dark. Or maybe they didn’t.
I sit on my bed, then I put my head in my hands and close my eyes. I’m losing it. It must be post-traumatic stress syndrome or something, but I’m falling apart. Flying into a hundred tiny pieces. First my ranting in the Boboli Gardens, now this. A guy tries to take my wallet, and I convince myself I’m being followed in the streets. I see my dead husband’s eyes in the faces of homeless people. I hear priests whispering in my ear. I can’t even find my toothbrush. I squeeze my eyes shut, screw them up, press my palms to my temples and realize my hands are shaking.
The door opens, and for once I hear Billy come in. She kneels in front of me and takes my wrists, firmly and gently, and holds them until I open my eyes and look at her.
‘Mary,’ she whispers, ‘I want to help. Tell me what happened to you? Please tell me. Please.’
And for a second, I almost do. The words rise up and bubble in my mouth, ready to pop out, drop like pebbles into Billy’s lap. Then I remember how much I hated being treated like an invalid in Philadelphia: You have to rest. We’ll take care of you. Or worse, as a curiosity: That’s the woman whose husband was knifed. I’d hear them say it at the parties I was invited to, or as I walked by at the office.
I clear my throat. Billy is still holding my hands. Her face is creased with concern, even compassion. She’s good at this. She was a nurse. I try to smile.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say finally. I parse my words, carefully. ‘I’m OK, really. It’s just that, when I was here before, my husband was killed.’
Billy’s face blanches. The normally pink spots on her cheeks go pale. ‘I am so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘Oh, Christ, Mary, I’m so sorry for what I said back there. What happened?’
I look at her for a second, and then I give a distinct impression, not of hoods and blades, but of speed and twisted metal and shattered glass. I close my eyes and mutter: ‘We were in an accident.’
Chapter Ten
OVER THE NEXT few days, the tension between Billy and me evaporates almost completely, which is fortunate, because we spend a great deal of time together due to the fact that I have misplaced my keys. Note that I use the word ‘misplaced’ not ‘lost’. That’s because I do this on a fairly regular basis—this is the second set since I arrived—and although the first time I just went ahead and had Signora Bardino’s originals copied, I don’t want to do it again. At least not yet, because they’ll turn up. They always do, in the laundry or, once, in the ripped lining of a purse. All I have to do is wait them out. In the meantime, Billy and I coordinate our schedules. We arrange to come and go together, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
I barely see Pierangelo, barricaded as he is in his office at the paper, but he’s taken to texting me, and the little messages that appear on my screen—What R U doing? I love U—are almost as good as the touch of his hand. But not quite.
I see him only once, when I go to the apartment late and cook him dinner. What I produce is nothing like as good as the food he prepares for me, but he doesn’t seem to mind. The weather is suddenly warm,
it flips between cold rain and almost summer these days, and we eat up on the roof terrace. As we watch the pigeons strut and squabble across the red chipped tiles, Piero tells me that the more he writes about Massimo D’Erreti, the more he likes him as a man, even feels close to him sometimes, and admires what he’s achieved and how far he’s come in his life. However, they can never agree about God, especially when the church has an agenda Pierangelo sees as increasingly, even dangerously, right-wing. The cardinal does good work with hospitals, with the homeless, with education. That’s all true, Piero says. Even with drug rehabilitation, as long as it’s tied to accepting doctrine. But how can you claim to fight AIDS and tell people using condoms is a sin? And refuse to help prostitutes at all? How can you call women equal, then deny them the right to control their own bodies? Make them have babies they don’t want? And insist they’re not fit to baptize other babies in your church, or give the final sacrament to the dying? How can you tell people who are gay that they’re damned, and cannot raise children or serve your God, who is also their God? Who, or what, gives you the right to judge one man or woman more fit for salvation than another? Where is the love and compassion in that? Pierangelo asks.
And I have no answers.
These are not the sort of things Billy and I talk about. We talk about ourselves. Our original reticence becomes almost completely reversed, and now we peel back the facts of each other’s lives, comparing notes at every stage. With the same kind of surface intimacy that springs up on planes, or in hair-dressers’ or between kids at camp, we discuss how we are both only children and don’t want our own children, and confess that we hate our names: Mary, which I think is boring, and Anthea, which is why she calls herself ‘Billy.’ Her mother said she was as stubborn as a billy goat, and it stuck. Billy tells me about her childhood, and her cousin Floyd, and her aunt Irene, who could always tell when the phone was going to ring because she had ‘the gift.’ We talk about where we’d like to travel next—India and France—and which paintings and buildings we like best here: Botticelli, Filippo Lippi, Bronzino, the Pazzi Chapel. Both of us want to visit Urbino and Ravenna, and go to Mantua to see Palazzo del Te and the Sala dei Giganti, the room of giants. We even bring home train schedules. Sitting on the balcony one night, I tell Billy I have always wanted to be an architect and she eggs me on. You have to have dreams, Billy says. It’s required. The bigger the better. Birth isn’t destiny, she insists. It can’t be, or else what’s the point?
Billy lights a cigarette and grins. ‘Hell, look at me,’ she adds, ‘I’ve been trying to turn myself into something else my whole goddam life. If I didn’t believe I could, I’d probably still be living in a trailer park somewhere in the back ass of Fort Pain.’
She tells me she became a nurse because they needed the money and it was the only thing her husband would let her do. It was OK for women to be in ‘the caring professions’, although he really didn’t think they should work at all. The fact that he apparently didn’t think he should work either made things kind of tough.
Billy shakes her head and blows smoke through her nose. ‘That’s what you get for getting married at seventeen. The fact I liked nursing just turned out to be a coincidence.’ Someday, she says, maybe she’ll go to medical school. You never know.
The day after this conversation there’s a trip to Siena. The university and the other schools are closing down for the Easter holidays, so Signora Bardino has laid this on as a special treat. In the end, though, Billy doesn’t go. She has a sore throat. She gets them, she says, ever since she had strep real bad as a kid, and she knows the only thing to do with them is hit them hard and fast with too many drugs. When I offer to stay with her, or help her find a doctor, she pooh-poohs the idea. She says she carries a pharmacy with her, and in twenty-four hours she’ll be ‘right as rain.’ The fact that I don’t comment on the possible relationship between the state of her throat and the number of cigarettes she smokes a day must be testament to the growing friendship between us. Instead, I just leave her a cup of mint tea early in the morning, which is all she says she needs.
In the event, she turns out to be right. Being a nurse, I guess she does know what she’s talking about. When she buzzes me in that night and I finally climb the stairs and flop down in the living room, slightly damp because it rained again and we got thoroughly soaked, Billy’s lying on the couch reading Gombrich on the Renaissance, surrounded by teacups and insisting the fever she had this morning is history. She points to a little fancy-wrapped package on the ormolu desk.
‘Arrived by special delivery,’ she says, ‘and we know what that means.’
She rolls her eyes, teasing me, as I rip the paper off like a kid. It’s a purse, a pretty bright blue one with a zip and a little gold-embossed M on the side. Pierangelo has been complaining recently that my old one is ratty, and that I should have a zip one so I don’t spend my whole time digging for euros in the depths of my bag, and I call and thank him. Then I open a can of soup and make Billy eat it while I tell her about the Pinacoteca, and the Piccolomini library, and the completely fantastic meal the Bardinos laid on at Lorenza de Medici’s restaurant at Coultobono.
Billy says it all sounds great, and that she’ll have to go by herself sometime. Or maybe we could blow the bank and go together. But forget the art and the food, what she really wants to know is if Tony and Ellen held hands all day, even while they were eating, and what the Japanese girls wore. This week the green hats have been accompanied by identical itty-bitty shoulder bags with butterflies on them. And I tell her that for Siena, Ayako, Mikiko and Tamayo sported bright pink leopard-spot sunglasses, and they didn’t take them off even when it rained.
Billy likes the idea of the sunglasses, and the next morning, when she’s well and truly back up on her feet, she suggests we make a trip to Rinascente, the big department store on Piazza della Repubblica and try to find some matching ones of our own, in a different colour, of course. Blue maybe, or green. Billy says we’re too old for bubblegum pink, we need to go for something more dignified. Possibly a pastel.
We agree to meet up in the afternoon because I want go to a last lecture before the break and Billy wants to go to the Bargello. When I leave, she’s fussing around in her room, turning things over and swearing because she’s lost her favourite eye shadow. ‘Use mine,’ I hear myself yell as I go out of the door. ‘Use anything you want!’ And marvel at the fact that things can change so fast.
Now, as we consider racks of sunglasses and hair do-dads on the ground floor of Florence’s biggest department store, I listen to her talking about a dog she had when she was a kid, and then about something Ellen told her about wanting to get pregnant.
‘So, Ellen said they really wanted a baby, and I said that was nice, but you’ve got to wonder, when people say, “I want a baby.” I mean, what do they think they’re going to have? Kittens?’ Billy shakes her head. ‘Do you realize,’ she says, ‘that if Ellen gets pregnant, there is, statistically, a one in five chance her kid’ll be Chinese?’
Billy’s conversations are like this. The topics have no apparent connection and replying is optional. It has been pouring on and off all day, and she’s dressed for the weather, carrying an umbrella and wearing a long mauve slicker and a pair of pale pink gloves that I realize look familiar because they’re mine. She plugs the sunglasses she’s been playing with back into the display, and gives it a half-hearted twirl. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I’m tired of this. Let’s get out of here.’
Outside, the rain alternates between sudden bursts and misty drizzle. We pick our way towards Piazza della Signoria, heading for Rivoire where we have decided we need a treat. In the market, where the traders sell fake pashminas and knockoff watches, knots of people gather under the deep roof of the loggia. A few tourists rub the wild boar’s nose and throw coins into his fountain, but, despite the numbers, there’s a hush. It’s something to do with the buildings themselves, with the way they crowd up to the thick cottony sky, and with the rain that
drops like grey beads. And with time, as if centuries and centuries have silted up in these streets, muffling voices and causing footsteps to fade away.
A juggler throws soggy red and blue balls into the air, and someone begins to play a saxophone. The low mournful notes trail after us as we come into the piazza, where the cartoonists lean their sketches of big-mouthed women and giant-headed men under a canopy beside Palazzo Vecchio. In the Loggia dei Lanzi the white men stand on their pedestals.
I don’t know if the white men are unique to Italy, but I have never seen them anywhere else. They’re out-of-work actors, or drama students, I guess, who cover themselves in chalky makeup and long white gowns so they look like snow-frosted Petrarchs or whitewashed models of Dante. And, although they are mute, like mimes, the white men don’t do much of anything.
There’s something perverse and Italian in their refusal to pretend to push walls apart or walk against the wind. Instead, they stand in public squares, under loggias or outside buildings, hands outstretched, feet poised, their eyes locked on some distant point. If they’re good, the crowds gather around them, half entranced by the suggestion that they really are watching a human being turn to stone, and wait, like Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, to see the statue move.
Three of them are here today. Billy and I climb the steps and join the quiet press of bodies. The figure closest to me is turned away, the starched white sheets he wears falling in columns from his thin, sloping shoulders to his feet. His neck emerges from the stiff collar, elongated and powder white beneath the fold of his turban. Billy is not as entranced by the white men as I am and she plucks my sleeve.
‘Do you think,’ she whispers, ‘that I should make a reservation for tomorrow, since there’s a bunch of us?’ We are going up to Fiesole for lunch, and I nod, and dig in my bag for my phone. Then the white man begins to move.
He turns his left palm up, in a gesture of supplication, the fingers of his wide hands spread open. His arm straightens, and the crowd shifts, swaying with him as he pivots, so slowly he looks barely human. I see the broad ridge of his cheekbone and the flat strong nose, and my stomach contracts.
The Faces of Angels Page 14