“That’s okay,” she said. “Because I am not a saint.”
Later, she had the thought that she had been right: He was safe, but she was in mortal danger. By then, she was far too excited to care. As the hours slipped by, Massimo was always willing, never tired; he did not, as she did, burst out in a sweat or pause to gulp down whole glasses of water. His eyes did not roll back beneath the lids; he was not even breathless. He was with her every moment, encouraging her, occasionally expressing admiration for her stamina or complimenting her on some adroit maneuver. He seemed blissfully unaware that she was up to something, that his self-possession drove her on and she would not give in until she broke through it somehow and left him gasping, as she was, somewhere outside the world he knew so well.
At last she did give up, though it was her body and not her desire that failed her. She was forced to take the measure of the challenge she had set herself. Massimo was not, perhaps, a god, but he was a fortress, and she did not constitute a serious threat to his defenses. She was like some absurd swashbuckling mouse flailing away at the great iron gates with her toothpick sword. This image accosted her as she was on top of Massimo, holding him down by the shoulders, her arms rigid, ramming herself maniacally against him, and it struck her as so ridiculous that she collapsed against his chest in helpless laughter.
He held her, bemused and interested. “What is it?” he said. “Lucy, what is funny?”
“It’s nothing,” she said. “I’m just knocking myself out here.”
“You are,” he said. “This is true. You will be worn out completely.”
“But I don’t care,” she said. Then her amusement turned to chagrin and bitterness, because it was a cruel fate to be a brave mouse with no hope of success.
Massimo sensed the change in her mood and drew her face up to his, kissing her so tenderly that, for a moment, she thought he was touched by her. “My poor Lucy,” he said. “You do care for me.” Then he rolled her smoothly beneath him and, while with her last remaining strength she held on tight, he brought the matter to a tumultuous close.
He had turned the shower off now. She could hear him moving around in the narrow bathroom. The door opened and he stood before her, wrapped in a nonabsorbent hotel towel, his hair still dripping onto his shoulders.
“Good morning,” she said.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
He came to sit beside her on the bed and laid his hand upon her forehead. “No. You do not have a fever,” he said.
“I’m fine,” she repeated. “I sweated it all out last night, whatever it was.”
“You didn’t get much rest, Lucy.”
“I didn’t come here to rest,” she said.
He flinched at this indelicate remark and she felt the withdrawal of his approval. “What will you do while I am gone this morning?” he asked. He got up and busied himself over his suitcase, giving half his attention to her answer, the other half to the correct choice of socks.
Lucy stretched and yawned. A great weariness came over her; she was not, she realized, up for the battering racket of the streets outside. “I think I’m just going to stay in this bed,” she said.
“This is a wise decision,” he said. “Shall I have them bring you some coffee?”
“No. I’ll go out later and get breakfast at a bar.”
He pulled on his shirt and shorts. “I will come back at eleven-thirty,” he said. “We will have lunch at a fattoria outside the city, a beautiful place. I think you will like it.”
“Great,” she said. And that will be it, she thought. The arrangements were all made. He would leave her in Ugolino; tomorrow the mail service would pick up DV’s boxes and Antonio Cini would take her to Sansepolcro to return the car. The next day, a new driver would come down from Milan to drive her to the airport.
Massimo had finished dressing. He was bent over his suitcase, making sure everything was folded properly, that he had left nothing behind. Lucy turned away from him, toward the heavily curtained window, where a slender thread of light escaped in a thin white line across the carpet. She closed her eyes as she heard the double snap of the suitcase lock.
Be very strong about this, she told herself, or you will regret it. No tears. He clearly isn’t going to be shedding any, so why should you?
But at the order—no tears—as if in protest, hot, bitter tears gathered in her eyes, overflowed, and rushed down her face into her hair. She lay there helplessly, trying to blink them away. Massimo came to the bed and leaned over her, kissed her cheek, her neck, her shoulder. She stayed still, though her impulse was to reach out and drag him back into the bed. “Why are you weeping, Lucy?” he said. “You should not be so sad.”
“I shouldn’t have come to Rome,” she said; then her voice broke. So much for being strong, she thought. But what was the point? Strong people never got to say what they really thought.
“What are you saying, Lucy? Why should you not have come here? Has it been so disagreeable to you?” This last question had an edge of impatience to it. Could she be so ungrateful as to complain of his treatment of her?
“No. It’s just that I don’t want to know all the things I know now.”
He sat down on the bed beside her and rested his hand against her cheek, for all the world, she thought, like a mother comforting an unhappy, fretting child. “What things, Lucy?” he asked.
She turned onto her side, facing away from him, sniffing and rubbing her eyes. “I need a handkerchief,” she said. He produced a clean one from his coat pocket, which she snatched greedily without looking at him. As she pressed it to her nose, she thought, I’m keeping this handkerchief. I am not giving it back.
“What things?” Massimo said again.
“Oh, everything,” she whined, dabbing at her eyes. “I don’t want to know that Catherine left DV for Antonio, and I don’t want to know that DV fell into a septic tank.…”
“A septic tank?” Massimo said. “What is this? What are you talking about?”
“Antonio told me,” she said, turning onto her other side to face him, her tears allayed by the pleasurable urgency of giving information. “It wasn’t a well; it was a septic tank. A pozzo nero, you say.”
Massimo’s brow furrowed in deep lines of disbelief. “A pozzo nero?” he said. “How is this possible?”
“Some neighbor had opened it because the tank was cracked.”
“Please,” Massimo said. “This is too unpleasant.”
“It is,” Lucy agreed. “It’s too unpleasant. It’s all too unpleasant.”
“You must not think about such things, Lucy. Especially when you are overtired. You are still not well, you know. You should sleep a little now, and then when you wake up, you will see that everything is not so terrible.”
“Whenever I try to tell you how I feel, you tell me I’m sick,” she complained.
“Please, Lucy,” he said.
“I think you like me better when I’m sick.”
His eyes made a quick survey of the distance to the door and back again. “Let us not have a stupid quarrel,” he entreated. “We have so little time left. Why should we argue pointlessly?”
“Why not?” she replied sharply. She succumbed to an urge to recklessness she recognized as both dangerous and irresistible. “We’ve nothing to lose.”
He shrugged. It was a game he didn’t much care for, but if she insisted, he would play. “Perhaps it is more true to say you like me better when you are sick, Lucy,” he said. “I am always the same. It is you who changes.”
This stopped her momentarily. Was it true? “That’s another thing I don’t want to know,” she replied, turning away from him again.
He said nothing, only stroked her arm and patted her shoulder gently. He is trying to help me through this, she thought as another flood of tears blurred her vision and she pulled her knees up to her chest, weeping as quietly as she could into the handkerchief.
“My poor Lucy,” he said.<
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“I am changed,” she sobbed. “And it’s all your fault. Do you think I ever spent a night like last night in my life? And what do you think the odds are that I’ll ever have another, Massimo? Well, I’ll tell you, the same odds as that Jesus Christ is about to knock on that door.”
His hand rested on her shoulder and he looked momentarily at the door. “You are saying that you will not enjoy lovemaking so much with someone else.”
Lucy rolled onto her back and looked up at him mournfully. “Yes,” she said. “That’s what I’m saying.”
He took her hand in his own, smiling ruefully. “How can I wish that you will?” he said.
“This is not a compliment, Massimo,” she said. “It’s an accusation.”
“Who would not be flattered to be accused of such a crime?”
“It is a crime,” she observed.
“What do you want to say, Lucy? That you wish you never met me? That I have harmed you in some way?”
“No,” she admitted. “I can’t say that.”
“Do you imagine that I am not sad, too, that you are going back to America?”
“Yes,” she said. “That is what I imagine. I think your life is so full, you’ll be relieved to have me out of it.”
“My life is very full, that is true,” he said. “But this time I have spent with you has made me wish sometimes it was not so.”
“Is that really true?”
He gave her his most serious attention. “Yes, Lucy. That is really true.”
The paltriness of this cold comfort amused her. It was the closest to a profession of strong feeling she would ever get, she realized. On cold nights in Brooklyn, she would warm herself with the memory of it; she had made him wish he was not too busy for her. “Okay,” she said. “I believe it. You can go now. But I want to keep the handkerchief.”
He gave a weak laugh of assent and stood up next to the bed, repeating the time of his return. When he looked back at the door, she said, “I’ll be ready.” Then he was gone.
She pulled the pillow under her head and stretched her arms and legs wide apart, taking up as much space as possible. It was one of the feeble pleasures of the single life, this position. There were others, which she toted up, saving the best for last, which was never having to answer to anyone about where you were. “Why does this hurt so much?” she said, for now, on top of physical weariness, came misery, followed by jealousy. It was ridiculous, she knew, to be jealous of a married man, especially as she was not jealous of his wife, but of a woman he had just met and with whom he could not possibly be having an affair. But she didn’t believe his story about Catherine Bultman; at least she didn’t believe he’d gone to see her because he wanted to help solve a mystery. Lucy was leaving, but Catherine was here, and certainly available and safe, what with her aristocratic lover tucked away in the country and her ready access to his fortune. She wasn’t likely to give that arrangement up, but how often could Antonio be in Rome? Massimo had sniffed out the truth in his own interests; he was, as he had pointed out himself, no fool. Why would he not take advantage of what was clearly a very attractive situation?
Lucy’s only consolation was her conviction that Catherine was more than a match for Massimo. If he could get her attention, it would only be long enough for her to make him suffer.
Lucy disliked knowing what Massimo had discovered about Catherine, though it certainly made sense. It meant Antonio Cini had another face, one she hadn’t even been able to glimpse, and that Catherine herself, as she freely admitted, actually was willing to do anything for her art. Did that make her less or more sincere as an artist? There was no way of knowing. Artists needed money, like everyone else, and patrons were always insistent upon their right to exercise some kind of control. DV had believed in Catherine’s ambitions, had certainly done what he could to enable her to pursue them, but she’d found him oppressive, or so she said. Perhaps she’d only found out how much money was going out in child support every month. He certainly had not been willing to set her up on her own in a city he rarely visited. No, Antonio’s was the better offer.
How devastated DV must have been, for in spite of his bluster, he was never confident. He worked hard, doggedly, because he believed that with diligence and determination he could somehow win the prize. To have Catherine, his goddess, the woman he wanted for his muse, tell him he would be better off gardening, and then leave him for the foreign fop next door, well, Lucy could understand why he had closed himself up in the farmhouse and applied himself entirely to the steady consumption of alcohol.
But why had Catherine felt the need to destroy DV with ridicule before she left? Had she actually persuaded herself that she was leaving not because she had received a better offer, but because she had discovered he was a mediocre hack? DV was not an artist—that was his tragedy—but did that mean he had no right to love beauty?
So Lucy came through jealousy and self-pity to a state of sympathetic identification with her dead employer, a man she had not known well in life, nor had what she did know inspired her admiration. Their situations were not dissimilar; they had both fallen in love with beauty, and beauty had briefly toyed with them. But beauty was inviolable, like great art; it both excited and resisted the passion for possession. That was why she always had the sensation that she could not break through Massimo’s self-possession, and it was exactly that sense of exclusion that made their lovemaking so constantly tantalizing. Beauty is a cruel mother, Lucy thought sleepily. She draws us in and then rejects us. Irresistible, unobtainable.
Amid these esoteric musings, Lucy slipped into a deep sleep, from which she woke feeling refreshed and cheerful. There would be no further scenes, no protestations of regret, or expressions of anxiety about the future. When Massimo arrived, she greeted him with warm affection. She had slept so long, she confessed, she had failed to have breakfast, and now she was famished. He was surprised by her good humor. Certainly he had no wish for a gloomy parting, but wasn’t it a little insulting, how eager she was to leave the hotel and hurry on to the next meal?
Chapter 21
JESUS,” LUCY EXCLAIMED as she rammed both feet down hard on the brake and clutch, narrowly escaping collision with the dented rear fender of Antonio Cini’s car. It was impossible, she thought. Catherine Bultman could not have submitted to the embraces of a man who drove this poorly. Whenever he got up to a decent cruising speed, Antonio seemed to panic and reverted to this spasmodic braking. Fortunately, there was very little traffic on the autostrada.
She both dreaded and welcomed the day ahead, for the plan, as usual, had been changed at the last minute. Antonio had called to say that the shippers would not be coming, as planned, this morning, but early the next afternoon. As this gave Lucy the entire day free, he proposed that after they dropped off DV’s car, he might take her to lunch in Sansepolcro. It would be too bad if she were to leave Italy without seeing something of this ancient town.
She accepted the invitation willingly. At least it meant she wouldn’t have to sit through another dinner at the villa. And she was determined to wring some sort of confession out of Antonio. She wanted to make him drop his pose of indifference on the subject of Catherine and admit the truth, that he had lured her away from DV and that he had an emotional as well as a financial stake in her affairs.
How she would accomplish this, she didn’t know. She had proved so far a very poor detective, and she disliked the sensation of harping on a subject once it was clear the person she addressed wished to change it. She had been a perfect dupe with Catherine, as disarmed by her frankness and beauty as, she felt sure, Catherine had intended she should be. Even Massimo, who had succumbed to Catherine’s spell on sight, had been more observant and certainly more secretive than she had been.
The thought of Massimo stung her, as it was, she knew, only the thought of him she would have from now on. They had parted at the farmhouse without bitterness and without any specific plan for a reunion. Someday perhaps he would travel to America
; surely she would return to Italy. She wrote her Brooklyn address and phone number on the back of a postcard she had purchased but never mailed; it was a photograph of a cat sitting on the head of a great stone lion, and he gave her a card with his business address in Milan. She thanked him for saving her life. “It was my pleasure,” he said. “Anytime you are dying, you must call me.”
She looked up from the business card. He was smiling down at her, his habitual, indulgent, patronizing smile, but as her eyes met his, the smile disappeared, replaced by an expression of genuine sadness. “I will miss you, Lucy,” he said. He took her hand, kissed the back of it, then the palm, released her, and strode off to the car.
She stood on the drive, watching him turn the car around. But instead of waving and driving off, he stopped the car, got out, and came back to her with the easy feline grace that had always charmed her. “I want to kiss you once more,” he said. The kiss that followed was so full of heat and longing that she decided to believe it. She pressed her body against his; she clung to his neck. She would never know what his real feelings were, as they were submerged in his bravura performance, but her own condition was crystal clear.
Now Antonio had put on his turn signal, though there was no crossroad in sight. He braked again next to a sunflower field and Lucy had a vision of him plunging into the dense ranks of dark, dry stalks. He crept along for half a mile; then the road he was searching for appeared and he accelerated triumphantly into the oncoming lane.
Lucy followed, the memory of Massimo’s kiss, which it was better not to dwell upon, dislodged by her irritation at Antonio Cini. The new road was rutted and twisty, so he increased his speed. His antique car lurched and shuddered before her in the bright morning sun. As she swerved to avoid a pothole, she saw his rear tire disappearing into the next one. “Where did this man learn to drive?” she said.
In this manner, they traversed several miles of back roads where the only sign of life was the occasional eruption of raucous crows over a field. Then they passed a few low farm buildings, a dirt lot crowded with farm machinery, and another, smaller lot in which several new cars were clustered about a concrete building barely wide enough to accommodate its single window and door. As Lucy followed Antonio into a parking space, she noticed a small sign in the dusty window. EURAUTO was stenciled in faded red, white, and green letters. She turned off the engine and joined Antonio on the pavement. “How did you ever find this place?” she said.
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