“Though I suppose, we are not so much less ‘barbaric’ now. Our waning American empire, our mission of ‘democratizing’ the world for our own economic interests . . .”
David spoke with unusual vehemence. He was not by nature a political person, his political views were centrist, economically conservative. He had little trust in any politicians yet a sort of residue of wistfulness for the idealism of his youth—the generation that had come of age in the late 1960s and 1970s—the waning idealism of the great revolutionary decade of the American twentieth century, the bitter ashes of the end of the Vietnam War.
Strange for David to speak as if, for once, the impersonal were intensely, painfully personal. Alexis felt a stab of concern—or was it love?—for her husband, that he seemed to be losing his old, unexamined sense of himself as a man among men, a rival among rivals; in Rome, their destination city as well as the city of their imminent departure, more markedly than in any of the Italian places they’d visited, David had become oddly indifferent to news of home; he seemed to have stopped checking his e-mail; ever more, he was susceptible to the most superficial distractions—annoying fellow tourists in the Bellevesta, throngs of people in marketplaces and piazzas, boisterous young Italians on motorcycles—in a crowded side street he’d paused to stare at a young girl with long coarse-black hair like a horse’s mane, a girl carrying a motorcycle helmet who was dressed provocatively in tight-fitting black leather, spike-heeled shoes and black net stockings, bizarre black-net gloves to the elbow, but fingerless; the underside of her jaw was defaced by a lurid birthmark, or a tattoo; poor David gaped, until Alexis tugged at his elbow.
He’d seemed dazed, smiling. A middle-aged sort of smile, as of one waking from a dream, uncertain of his surroundings. He is a lonely man Alexis thought. My husband is a lonely, vulnerable man.
By degrees, David had ceased taking photographs except of the most exceptional sights—postcard-sights. He’d taken many more photos on his digital camera than he would ever print—many more than he would ever examine. He’d left his expensive camera in a restaurant—a young waitress had run after them, to return it.
Like many other tourists he wore sandals, but David’s sandals chafed his pale feet. His clothes were expensive sports clothes, short-sleeved linen shirts, pastel colors, stripes, limp from the heat, rumpled. His scalp, exposed by his thinning hair, had burnt in the sun, but David disliked wearing any sort of hat. Where in the past he’d insisted upon making travel arrangements, now he was more frequently depending upon Alexis to make them. The city’s great public museums and galleries weren’t air-conditioned—even their cool marble floors and high ceilings weren’t sufficient to compensate for the heat of Rome. Fans blew languid air from room to room. There in the Borghese Gallery came David in a blue-striped shirt damp with the sweat of his solid compact body—shuffling in Alexis’s wake like an undersea creature but dimly aware of its environment and pausing to stare, with a mild sort of astonishment, at the pale-marble Bernini Apollo e Dafne. While Alexis moved eagerly ahead consulting museum maps, David fell behind. In this exotic place, this beautiful city, he had but little sense of its geography, and little interest; he had not the slightest knowledge of the Italian language; Alexis had long ago taken French and Spanish, and so could recognize crucial words; she’d prepared for the trip, hastily, with language tapes, while David hadn’t had time—of course.
In their marriage, he’d made Alexis the repository of such things—such airy and essentially useless activities. As he’d made Alexis the repository of emotions too raw, elemental and disorderly for a man to acknowledge: the deaths of his own parents he’d needed Alexis to register, that he might grieve for them. Without Alexis, would he have grieved at all?
Here in Rome—“Roma”—Alexis turned to look back at her husband trailing in her wake, or sitting in a café awaiting her; he’d lost interest in his guidebook, or was feeling just too tired. She tried to imagine life without him—his death, one day. She shivered as if a pit were opening at her feet. She felt—she didn’t know what—a kind of numbness, nullity. She wondered if this was all that she would feel, one day, fully—or whether she was deceiving herself, in this mood of suspension, indefinition—in “Roma.”
It was Alexis’s idea to see an exhibit of Picasso pen-and-ink drawings in a private gallery near the Piazza di Spagna but the exhibit was disappointing to her, and unnerving: a succession of “erotic” drawings in which the same several images were repeated with tic-like compulsion, a leering/lascivious sort of glee; what pathos in this evidence of a once-great (male) artist reduced, as in a nightmare mimicry of senility, to so few visual ideas—fat voluptuous naked female, satyr-like younger man, elderly male voyeur. The sex-features of the female and the satyr were exaggerated, as in a caricature, or cartoon; the elderly voyeur was Picasso himself, a painful yet defiant self-portrait of sex-obsession. Staring at the walls of these drawings, each meticulously and strikingly rendered, yet, in the aggregate, numbly repetitive, Alexis felt the irony of the great artist’s predicament: he had lost his imaginative capacity to invent new images but he had not lost or transcended his sex-obsession; as if, underpinning all of his art, the great variegated art of decades, there had been only this primary, primitive obsession, a juvenile fixation upon genitals. How much more profound—more “tragic”—the final, death-haunted work of Michelangelo, Goya, Magritte, Rousseau’s The Dream . . . But David was shaking his head, smiling—“Well! These drawings are certainly . . .” letting his voice trail off suggestively, so that Alexis was prompted to say, “Pathetic. I think they are pathetic, demeaning.” David laughed, amused by Alexis’s reaction. “It’s the subject that upsets you, Alexis. ‘Erotica’—high-class pornography. Graphic sex makes women uneasy, they know themselves interchangeable.” Alexis said, “And men? What do you think you are?—each of you unique?”
David turned to stare at Alexis, shocked as if she’d slapped him. It was totally out of character for her to speak so sharply and so coldly to him, or to anyone.
It felt good, Alexis thought. Her heart beat in elation, a kind of childlike thrill. Discovering that she could speak to her husband in such a way, and in this foreign city in which they knew no one else and had only each other for solace.
Now recklessly she said: “You can stay at the exhibit a little longer, if you’d like to see it again. I think I’ll go out alone—I want to buy some things.”
“Of course I don’t want to see it again,” David said, hurt. “I’ve seen enough—I’ve seen enough ‘art’ for a long time.”
“I’ll see you back at the hotel. In the café.”
Alexis was walking away—she would leave him there in the chill interior of the art gallery, staring after her in amazement.
“But—Alexis—what time? We have a dinner reservation . . .”
“I don’t know—six P.M.—or a little later. Good-bye!”
Desperate to leave the man, to be alone.
Shopping! In the elegant streets near the Piazza di Spagna she saw her blurred ghost-figure in the windows of designer shops and boutiques; she lingered longest in front of lavishly air-conditioned stores—Armani, Prada, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton—whose doors were brazenly opened to the street in a display of a conspicuous wastefulness of energy. Her mood was near-euphoric—she smiled to see her ghost-figure merging briefly with the angular, sylphine figures of mannequins. She thought But there is nothing I want. What is there in the world, anywhere—that I can want.
Boldly she entered one of the chic designer shops. It was exciting to her, to be alone like this; exciting to be alone in the foreign city, without the man dragging at her, pulling her down. She was not by nature a “consumer”—if she’d taken pleasure in buying things in the past these were likely to be things for other people or for the household she and David shared, that Alexis almost single-handedly oversaw. Now she stared at flimsy little shifts on chrome racks, cobwebby sweaters, halter tops scarcely larger than handkerchiefs. P
rices were outrageous, ludicrous: 350 euros for one of the cobwebby sweaters, that looked as if it was unraveling. Nonetheless she would purchase something—she would shop. She thought If I can want something. Then—
To extract pleasure from consuming! Almost it was a kind of erotic sensation, or might be—this sense that one must be worth a luxury item, if one can purchase it.
Alexis examined one of the shifts—an abbreviated “dress” designed to wrap around the body like a scarf, or a shroud; it was made of a beautifully rippling material that more resembled metal filings than fabric. Five hundred ninety euros! And another striking dress, sleek black silk with a “tattered” skirt that fell well below the knees, priced at seven hundred euros.
Alexis thought If I could be the person who would want this! Who would be transformed by this . . .
She would buy a present for her sister’s daughter—a little faux-denim jacket, maybe—a leather belt with a gold buckle—an absurdly high-priced pullover in a delicate, near-translucent fabric like muslin—except she knew that her sixteen-year-old niece would probably not wear anything Alexis bought for her even once, and wouldn’t be able to return it as she did in the U.S. She allowed herself to be cajoled into trying on one of the shifts, in a striking fuchsia color; it was certainly unlike anything she owned, or had ever worn. “Bella!”—the chic-black-clad salesgirls hovered about her, smiling in admiration.
She was thinking of her father, her poor public-school-superintendent father in Ames, Iowa, whom she’d loved so much, who had saved money diligently, as the adults of his generation were conditioned to do; her father’s chronic anxiety about medical and hospital insurance; his plan for long-time health care at home for her mother and for himself, and both had died fairly suddenly—both, in hospitals. Her father’s concern, that had shaped much of his life, had turned out to be for nothing. The money he’d saved he left to Alexis and her sister, who had not needed his hard-earned “estate.” Out of pity for this kindly, over-conscientious man, not wanting to emulate him, Alexis bought the fuchsia shift. She bought a patterned pullover for her niece, and a silk shawl for her sister. Daringly she bought a pair of open-backed leather sandals, salmon-colored, with a two-inch cork heel—she’d been seeing shoes like these on fashionably dressed women in Rome. She thought Is this my Roman self? Is this me?
She saw with surprise her youthful mirror-reflection, even her windblown ashy-blond hair with its gray streaks looked striking, attractive.
In another yet more elegant and expensive designer shop she made several more purchases, impulsively. A lightweight summer sweater with seed pearls scattered across its front—for herself. And a bizarre near-backless dress, sleek-dark-purple, with a single tight-fitting sleeve—her left arm remained bare. She smiled, the dress was utterly ravishing, very expensive. In a mirror she saw the stylish Italian salesgirls exchanging covert smiles—at the American shopper’s expense? Yet their compliments were lavish, their voices were high-pitched little bird-voices—“Bella!”
She thought of David. He would be surprised! Maybe, he would be impressed.
She thought of her lost, beloved father, and she thought of David, her husband. She felt a wave of love for the man who was her husband—who seemed to be distracted by something, some secret, he could not share with her, just yet; like a wounded creature that flares up in rage against anyone who comes too near, David would nurse his secret hurt. She would forgive him: she would buy him one of the gorgeous, ridiculously priced Italian neckties. She took some time deciding, before buying him a Dior tie in dark purple silk stripes, to match her Versace dress.
Alexis! Thank you. This is very beautiful . . .
He would look at her in surprise, yet he would be moved, she knew. Though he professed to scorn presents, he was grateful for a particular sort of attention, that suggested his own good taste, his distinction.
Bella!
It was 5:40 P.M. when she took a taxi to the Piazza del Popolo. Though burdened with packages she meant to walk back to the hotel by way of the block of apartment dwellings that had exerted such a fascination from their balcony—how curious she was, to see these dwellings close-up! She would have an advantage over David, she thought: and maybe she would tell him, what she saw. And maybe, not.
But, amid a deafening din of traffic, on foot, in her new-purchased open-backed sandals, which, in a rash moment she’d decided to wear out of the store, she couldn’t seem to locate the street, nor even the cobblestone passageway behind the hotel. It was as if, as soon as she ventured out of the area of the Bellevesta, and its surrounding glittery stores, she was in an urban no-man’s-land of narrow streets, treacherous motor scooters, delivery trucks exhaling waves of black smoke, littered sidewalks crowded with foreign-looking pedestrians—many of whom were clearly not Italian but Middle Eastern, Indian, African. Several times she was jostled—in a panic she gripped her shoulder bag, that it might not be torn from her. (Of course, their guidebook had warned of the folly of carrying shoulder bags in Rome.) When at last she located an alley between buildings just wide enough for a single vehicle to pass, it was desolate and littered, and smelled of garbage; from the front, the block of buildings was seen to be aged and derelict, abandoned and shuttered—seemingly slated for demolition. No one had lived in these decrepit quarters for some time.
“How strange! This is wrong . . .”
Fearful of getting lost, Alexis retracted her steps. Once on the busy Via di Ripetta she located the Hotel Bellevesta with no difficulty—its shining stained glass, stone and stucco facade was dazzlingly conspicuous. But she couldn’t circle the hotel, of course—the way was blocked by a high wall; and when she made her way to what she believed might be the rear of the hotel, in a littered and foul-smelling alley near a Dumpster, she saw nothing familiar. In a doorway at the rear two hotel workers lounged smoking, and staring at her—dark-eyed, very foreign-looking, unsmiling. Alexis smiled nervously at them and backed away. She’d had no luck trying to determine where their beautiful hotel room was—on this side of the hotel, or another? In the enervating heat of late afternoon she was beginning to feel light-headed but she didn’t want to give up the search for the mysterious block of apartment dwellings which she yearned desperately to see—but after another twenty minutes she found herself wandering aimlessly on a traffic-wracked street she was sure she’d never seen before—Via di Tiberio—and felt again a sensation of panic, that she was lost, or near-lost, in the very vicinity of her hotel. And it was strange to her, and unnerving, to be alone in this foreign place.
Crossing a particularly uneven cobblestone street, narrowly avoiding being struck by dark-helmeted motorcyclists rushing two abreast, Alexis lost her balance and tripped in her elegant new sandals—she turned her ankle, winced with pain—“Oh! Oh help me”—these words of childish appeal came unbidden—but luckily she hadn’t sprained the ankle. Her heart beat as if she were in the presence of danger and her face smarted with perspiration. She thought This is my punishment now. For who I am. But I won’t give up!
For another half hour in the fetid heat she continued her quixotic search—she was dogged, desperate—limping—but could not find, in these mostly commercial backstreets intersecting with the Via di Ripetta, anything resembling the block of apartment buildings with the wonderful jumble of rooftops and the quaint faded colors like peeling walls in Venice, that she and David had seen from their balcony. Another time she stumbled upon the first row of buildings she’d seen—on a nameless little street—an entire block of abandoned and shuttered dwellings, clearly slated for demolition. The dark-skinned man so slowly eating dinner, the disheveled woman sprawled on her sofa watching TV, the seductive girl with the waist-long scintillate-black hair—where were they?
“There has to be some explanation . . .”
She shivered, she was feeling sick. Seeing now to her dismay: she was carrying only three articles—her handbag, and two shopping bags. She must have left the third bag in the taxi, containing the Dior necktie
. It had cost 190 euros . . .
Shaken and exhausted she returned limping to the hotel just before 7 P.M. The sky was bright as daylight though partly massed with malevolent-looking storm clouds. In the hotel courtyard café there was no one but a middle-aged German couple and, flirting awkwardly with a young waitress who was clearly trying to humor him, a stocky slump-shouldered older man in a blue-striped sport shirt—he turned, and it was David.
“Alexis. Back so soon.”
Spotted Hyenas: A Romance
Hello? Is someone—there?”
Her voice quavered like a cello that has been crudely, clumsily struck. She was upstairs in the bedroom and gripping something—the back of an upholstered chair—tight. Through the doorway about fifteen feet away, in a mesh of light and shadow, a figure appeared to be standing, hesitantly—in a sort of crouch—not her husband, who wasn’t home yet—(she’d just glanced down into the driveway, and her husband’s car wasn’t there)—but a less stolidly-built man, with an oddly-shaped angular head, and sandy-silvery hair bristling at the nape of his neck. The stranger’s face was shadowed but his eyes gleamed like small bits of mica. In the shock of the moment Mariana had the impression that his legs were slightly stunted—just perceptibly short for the rest of his body.
She was too surprised to be frightened—she was too surprised to think But this is not possible! No one is upstairs in this house except me.
Though keenly aware of each other neither Mariana nor the intruder moved.
How many seconds, or minutes—Mariana would not afterward know.
In time, there are curious interludes of pause—an eerie suspension of the normal flow of clock-time—during which one is struck dumb, breathless and paralyzed—awaiting release.
Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories Page 17