“Hello,” Webster said evenly.
She felt a rush of affection that almost strangled her. They had been married for six years, and she had left him a month ago. “Oh, hi, sweetie. What are you doing?”
It was early morning in Chicago, and he’d be rushing to the lab. He might be naked, fresh out of the shower, body lean and graceful as an arrow shot from a bow. He had skin like silk above the nipples on his chest.
“I can’t talk right now,” he said mournfully.
“I’m sorry. It’s seven there, right? Thought I might catch you before you left.”
He grunted. His voice had a desperate quality. “I haven’t left. But I can’t talk.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
She tried to keep her voice even and calm. When he was crying, desperate, it seemed to help. Sometimes he called her in the middle of the night to say he’d die if she did not come back to him. One time he said he was kneeling in the bathtub, holding a knife. She talked him into dropping it and calling friends.
Now he sounded desperate in a different way.
“Good-bye,” he whispered, and she heard the creak of a door opening in his apartment, the sound of footsteps on the hardwood floor, light and quick, like a young girl in summer flats.
“Is there someone in the apartment?” Margy gasped.
Webster whispered woefully, “Yes.”
“Who is it?”
“Tiffany.”
Margy hung up. She picked up the receiver, slammed it down again. Some kind of poison poured through all her veins and arteries. He sounded fine, he sounded almost . . . happy.
“Don’t worry, someday someone else will love you,” she’d said a month ago, as she stood in the doorway with her suitcase and her violin. She had even patted his arm. She was so sure she was going off with James, who was English and the violist in a quartet she’d lately joined. The quartet would play its European tour, and then she’d live with James and have six kids. She worried about Webster, kindly, as a friend. She felt relieved on the long flight to London and for at least five cities on the tour. She slept with James, and talked to Webster several times a day. It was only the adjustment, she thought. They were going to be fine.
The arched stone window let in whiffs of jasmine and chlorine and horse dung. In the drive below, a Florentine policeman loitered, dressed in gleaming white on a black horse. The hotel had been a convent in the fifteenth century, made of stone. Other women used to stand here in this window, looking out. Did anything feel simpler to them? One morning in the kitchen, Webster had bent to kiss her, and she realized she couldn’t see him anymore. She saw his face the way she did her own, with recognition, only not from the outside, the way it felt when she looked in a mirror. Did that have to mean she was connected to him, underneath, forever and ever, world without end?
The policeman shifted and gazed up at her. The saddle creaked. He looked bored, looked away.
She couldn’t take a tranquilizer now. The quartet had a concert in four hours, and she had to be able to pick up the bow. They played recent compositions and baroque, Beethoven and plane crashes for strings, with titles like “Scarecrow Eats His Liver in the Morning,” a lot of Philip Glass. The other three were probably asleep, or meditating, trying to stay calm.
Not that anyone was going to come to hear them play. It turned out they were scheduled at the same time as a musical sensation sweeping Italy. Emilio Gentille had a high soprano range, so sweet and true that he was rumored not to be a modern countertenor, merely trained, but rather the old-fashioned kind, vocal cords undamaged by testosterone. He was said to sing like a cathedral choirboy, with the power of a grown man’s lungs, pure as temple bells in Himalayan air. That night he planned to do the rarest Buxtehude cantatas, and Florence churned with fans, frantic for seats. Paparazzi milled alertly outside all the best hotels, while police stood guard and vans pulled up with wreaths of lilies and gardenias big enough to drape a horse.
Margy put on her bathing suit and shorts and running shoes. Since leaving Webster, she had felt a need to leap tall buildings at a single bound. Her blood seemed turned into adrenaline. She didn’t sleep. She worked out all the time.
Dashing out the back of the hotel, she ran across a terrace by the pool, where three paparazzi sat with cameras, smoking. Glancing up, they looked away. Another American violinist, so what.
At the bottom of the garden, old rock steps sank toward Florence, through olive groves and crackling grass and foxtails. Wisteria held up stone walls, leaves dull with dust and wilted in the blazing sun. She ran down to the city’s edge and up again, down, up, Sisyphean, till sweat leaked stinging into her eyes.
“Do re me fa sol la ti do,” she sang under her breath. She was calm. Her husband was not fucking anyone.
“This little piggy had roast beef. This little piggy had none.”
Zing, a horsefly bit her shoulder. Throwing off her shorts, she dove into the pool, swam furiously back and forth.
Back in her room, chlorine and sweat mixed in a sticky layer on her skin. The message light flashed on the phone. Webster had a lot of nerve if he thought she wanted to hear from him! She dialed the message line.
“Emergency meeting, bridal suite,” it said.
Deflated, she sank into a chair. In every city they had played, James had booked himself into the bridal suite under fake names. He was trying to hide from his ex-wife, who was Sicilian and determined, he felt sure, to put a dagger in his heart. In Milan, he registered as Signor and Signora Verdi, and in Venice as the newlywed Puccinis. In Verona, warily, he changed the theme, to Mr. and Mrs. Greenleaf Whittier. His ex-wife lived in Florence, and he tried to convince the rest of them to drop it from the tour. When he couldn’t, he barricaded himself in the bridal suite, where he was Thomas Love Peacock and bride, and had not left once since they arrived.
She did not call him back. She had something to say to Webster first. Tapping the number in Chicago, she waited. The machine did not pick up. Webster must have turned it off, but she knew it would switch on at the sixteenth ring. Waiting patiently, she heard the clicks and whirrs. There was a new greeting. His taped voice sounded cheerful—in fact, exuberant.
“Hi, this is Web. Isn’t this a great day? One of the best! Please, please leave me a message, okay?”
Web? No one had ever called him that. He was too dignified, and he almost never sounded this excited about anything. Something was very wrong.
She punched in the code for remote retrieval of the messages. Beep, beep, whir, click, said the machine. The tape rewound with ratlike squeaks.
“Hi, babe,” said a young woman’s voice. “It’s Tiff. Just got your message, and I want to say, you make me so happy. It was, like, totally worth it to wait for you, and I can hardly wait till you get over here. We’ll get in bed and stay in there for days. We won’t go out at all. We’ll just peek in the fridge for nibbles and get back in bed. We’ll be wiped out together all the time. Won’t it be ecstasy? Love ya.” Beep beep beep.
Margy threw the phone onto the bed. Her wrists were strapped in carpal-tunnel splints, and she was not supposed to pound on anything. She smashed it with a pillow, whump whump whump.
Collapsing next to it, she sobbed. She was not in love with Webster! She had left him. She had to be in love with James—that was decided, finished with. Of course Webster was moving on. He’d found another woman, a girl really, one of the students in his lab. So what? So he had Tiffany, and she had James.
She sobbed so hard her abdomen went into spasm, jerking her upright. It was like a giant hiccup, or a sit-up, ten, twelve, twenty times. At first it felt good, like dancing, or some strange aerobic exercise. Then it began to hurt. But it would not stop. She was a cog inside a clock, a piece by Philip Glass, two hundred forty repetitions of the same arpeggio.
“Oh, oh,” she said and jerked upright. “Oh, oh.”
She washed her face and smoothed her hair. Calmly, she walked down to the bridal suite. She did a knock Ja
mes would recognize, in six-eight time.
“Signor Peacock?”
He didn’t answer, but it only meant he didn’t want to let his voice be heard. She tried the door, and it swung open to a large and sunny room, brilliant green and yellow floor of serpentine limestone. Under arched windows stood the monstrous bed, white ruffles flounced with eyelet and ribbon rosettes.
James lay in the middle of it with a lit Gauloise. He was big and fair and rosy, with small black moles like brushstrokes underneath his eyes that made him look somewhat depraved (“kissed by a fairy,” he liked to say). His Oxford shirt was unbuttoned, and she could see the thick scar that circled his chest, from having half a lung removed. He was only thirty-six, but padded like an older man, and he smoked Gauloises, or Players, or Pall Malls, and drank chilled gin with rumors of vermouth. His idea of a green vegetable was avocado stuffed with crab and mayonnaise, two bottles of champagne. As he sat up, ice cubes tinkled in his glass.
“Shut that door at once,” he said in his precise accent, giving every syllable its due.
Rising quickly, belly bowed out, nimble for a man his size, he tiptoed fast across the floor and flipped both locks on the door. Sweat ran to his hair ends and hung quivering like dew on leaves, milky with alcohol.
“She’s here,” he murmured sotto voce. “She called the hotel, talked to Dmitri. And what did he say? He told her I was here!”
Dmitri was their famous name, the reason people came to hear them play. In the early days of the quartet, James had offended him by watching Margy when they played, though she was only second violin. She gave James’s big, broad back a pat. His shirt felt wet. She lifted off her hand.
“Well, your photograph was on the poster. Possibly that was a clue.”
“Possibly,” he said and smiled, looked strangely satisfied. He sat down on the bed.
“But, listen, you don’t know Cia. She makes Lucretia Borgia look like the Queen Mother. Have I told you how she flung a girl downstairs because I talked to her? Have I mentioned how she slashed my bow hand with a tomato knife?”
He held the hand up and cradled it. It was his favorite myth, how Cia had been wildly jealous, listened to his phone calls, followed him when he went out. But then, he had a lot of myths. He liked to say that London Records had asked him to record Schnittke’s viola concerto, though there was no recording date, and he never practiced it. Philip Glass had come to their New York debut and talked to James maybe a minute in the hall. Since then James sometimes hinted that Glass was writing a piece for him. Not the quartet, just him. He held his right hand out. There did seem to be a thin white line across the back.
“Look here and weep. She’d seen me talking to a woman in the street. It was nothing, just a moment’s conversation. Do you realize what she’ll do if she casts an eye on you? Don’t smile! You could be dead!”
Margy sat down on the bed. “She’s probably just going to hear Gentille anyway. At least she doesn’t call you in the middle of the night.”
Actually, Webster hadn’t called for several nights. It only felt like it. She went on with energy.
“And now that fucking little girl is there with him. That little girl that he’s fucking.”
James smoothed wet hair out of his eyes.
“Oh, well, and why should you notice? Be happy he has a girl. Stops him coming after you with a tomato knife.”
Suddenly he wrapped around her, large and damp. He pinned her on the bed.
“I’m a foxtail,” he said in a fake Texas drawl, made ridiculous by his clipped English consonants. ”Ah’m a foxtail, tryin’ to impregnate y’all.”
Panic prickled over Margy—who the hell did he sound exactly like? Someone she did not want to recall. Looking roguish, he began to flex his fingers like a cat in ecstasy. He kneaded her arm, pretending to purr. With exaggerated cat-like moves, he prowled on top of her, staring with small blue eyes.
“Some pussycats are spending too much time yowling and not enough time as they should. Murrrr-oww.”
She made herself hold still and put her lips on his. His mouth was cold and wet. She felt a surge of anger, not desire. Gasping for air, she rose and moved away.
“Oh, God, sorry. Aren’t you dying of the heat? I was just in the pool, and now I’m hot again. Let’s have a swim instead. Believe me, everything is going to look better when we’re cool.”
“James was my purple passion,” Cia said, pronouncing it poorple, full lips pursed.
The night was clear and black with huge bright stars, and they stood on a marble terrace outside the hot room where the quartet had played. Margy gulped wine in her hot concert clothes, a miniature tuxedo made to match the rest of the quartet, black wool with pintucked shirt and studs, her hair pinned up. It had been a cute idea in January in New York, but August in Italy made them all sweat on their expensive instruments. Dmitri could be heard upstairs, raving to the impresario about the air conditioning, half in Russian, half in French. The impresario raved back in Italian.
The concert had gone fine, with almost no one there to hear, and the audience had now adjourned, to rush over the Ponte Vecchio and join the crowd around the opera house. Cia herself seemed ready to desert, but she’d politely stayed to hold one of the hundred wine glasses, pretend to nibble one of several hundred crostini going to waste. She was even shorter than Margy, and plump, with creamy olive skin and lustrous black hair, big breasts almost bare inside the plunging neckline of a green silk dress. Arranging bracelets on her arms, she fixed Margy with an easy smile. She had lived with James in London and New York, and her English had a soft, round sound.
“I was lucky, I got to marry with him. Most people do not marry with their purple passion. And what about you? Who is yours? I can see you have still on your wedding ring.”
Cia saluted her with her wine glass, a gesture that seemed mocking and admiring both at once. Margy slipped her other hand over the thin gold band.
“Oh, this? It’s just that I’m so used to it. It feels like part of my hand. I don’t wear much jewelry.” She glanced at Cia’s bracelets, which were gold and set with colored stones. “But those are nice. Are they from Venice?”
James stepped through the doors, talking to an older man who looked English. They both carried glasses of a clear and heavy liquid that swirled slowly as they walked. Gin fumes braced the air around them like an electronic fence.
“So you’ll record it soon?” the gray-haired man said. James tucked his chin, as if trying not to brag.
“Well, not just yet. There’s one or two small things that have to be—” His chin went farther down into his neck. “There’s this other chap, you see. Perhaps I didn’t mention it. Trying to insinuate himself. Certain maneuverings behind the scene. Though he’s not exactly—did I tell you? I saw him in London, and you see—you see, he told me London Records had asked him. And I said—I said to him—” His eyes went impish, lips pushed out as if stiff with bottled laughter. “I said—Barry?”
They walked out of range, and Cia did not turn. She smiled at Margy, dropped her voice.
“You don’t have to worry about your old husband, you know. His mistress will take of him. He’s fine. Don’t ring his telephone if you don’t want to know. James didn’t even wait so long.”
Margy drew herself up. She wasn’t used to being taller than anyone, and it felt good. “James says he didn’t sleep with other women when he was with you.”
Cia tipped her head back, grinned. “And you believed him? Baa baa, little sheep, have you many wools!”
Trying to tamp down her grin, she touched Margy’s wrist.
“I’m sorry, but I know my chicken. He gave me horrible diseases. He’s going to give them to you. That’s what means husband, you know? It means he sleeps with other women too.”
She looked pleased and satisfied, standing square on high-heeled sandals, round feet bulging to the sides. Margy opened her mouth to say something, and closed it. That was exactly what meant husband now. At the same mom
ent, she realized she didn’t give a damn if James had been unfaithful to Cia and lied to her. She didn’t even care if he slept with other women now. She only cared that Webster could be, right that minute, making love to Tiffany. She was breathless with jealousy. She smelled her concert sweat, pungent as cat pee. She took a gulp of wine.
“How long were you and James married? Was it hard to get divorced? He hasn’t told me much.”
Cia smiled and waved one hand. “Oh, we’re still married now, of course. You didn’t know? Yes, yes, we married here, in Sant’ Ambrogio. You’ve seen it, with the little frescoes? Very nice. So you see, is no divorce for James. English divorce, ha!”
Flinging up the fingers of one hand, as if tossing rice, she laughed a lovely, pealing laugh.
“That’s why Italian men are crazy for me now, with the English husband behind the coortain.”
Preening, she glanced around. And it was true, nearby a young man with long hair sat smoking, watching Cia’s every move. He looked through Margy’s thin blond frame as if she were a palm frond in the way. Cia leaned toward her, murmuring. She smelled like strawberries and wine.
“Of course you believe him now. But, you see, he lies. Poor man, he doesn’t like the truth. Has he told you yet about Philip Glass?”
Margy felt her cheeks go hot, and Cia laughed her pretty laugh again.
Abruptly James arrived and towered over them.
“We are leaving,” he said, looking only at Margy. “This precise instant. We will walk toward the car.”
Cia seemed to grow taller. Suddenly charged with energy, she dove for the platter of crostini on the table next to them.
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