“Some Roman bloke built it as his grave,” he said. “He’s buried underneath, I think.”
“He must have been very important,” said Alice.
“Look at me,” said August, finding a voice for the pyramid’s long-deceased occupant, “I’ve got a really big pointy one.”
“Ah, yes, men and their obelisks.”
“I believe what we have here,” said August in a low, authoritative tone, “is an early example of obelisk enlargement: Turn your obelisk into a great big pyramid and really impress the ladies.”
“Quite the expert, aren’t we?”
“Quite.”
A little past the pyramid, an abundant garden spilled enticingly over a high wall. Alice stopped, momentarily mesmerized by the colors in the wall’s render—pink, yellow, ochre, terra-cotta, red, brown. “Okay expert,” she said, “what’s in there?”
On the next corner a middle-aged couple wearing backpacks were consulting a guidebook. “Would you mind averting your eyes,” August said, “while I ask these people and then pretend I already know the answer to that question?”
August scooted ahead to the couple. Alice watched as they smiled and nodded and handed over their guidebook. There seemed to be quite a bit of chatting and exchanging of information. Finally, August handed back their book and shook hands. He pointed back to her, and they waved, and she waved back as if she had met them. Then they headed off toward the river, and August trotted back to her.
“It’s the protestant cemetery,” said August. “Keats and Shelley are buried there.”
They decided to go in and walked down a side street to the great arched entrance, where a sign on the iron doors announced it would not open until 9:00 A.M. the next day. August started to walk away. There was a beat before he realized that Alice had not joined him. He turned and asked what she was doing. Alice said she found it hard to believe that the guy who taken her down the Spanish Steps on the back of a motorino was going to let a gate and high wall deter him.
Oh, bloody hell, said August to himself as Alice started to look for a point of ingress. Farther down the street, a car had backed into a No Parking sign and bent it toward the wall. A large oleander bush, covered in pink flowers, provided the perfect cover to scramble up the pole without being observed.
Alice unpeeled her backpack and was up in no time. She reached down from castle-like crenellations on the top of the wall. “Backpack,” she said, and August hoisted it up to her. “Come on,” she said and vanished, leaving him no option but to follow.
The light was fading, and a gentle rain began to fall. August shimmied up the pole and had almost reached the top when he lost his purchase and began to slip, describing a 180-degree arc until he was dangling upside down. August slid slowly to the ground, very glad that Alice could not see him.
After a second failed attempt at climbing the pole, August scaled the wall, tearing a hole in the knee of his jeans on the jagged render. He hoisted himself up and lay panting between two stone-capped merlons until Alice called quietly that someone was coming. Swinging his legs over the other side of the wall, he hovered for a second before plummeting into a thick hedge.
Removing sticks and leaves from his hair and clothing, August scrambled out of the hedge, warning Alice not to laugh. Alice, laughing, confessed that no one was coming; she just wanted him to hurry up. He checked his knee for blood. There was a slight graze. Alice offered to call his mother and report the injury. He gave her his best withering look, but she was already occupied elsewhere, admiring their environs.
A network of pretty pebbled paths, bordered with little hedges, crisscrossed a gentle slope that rose away from them. Tombstones of many different styles and denominations appeared to have been artfully arranged among the pines, pomegranates, and Judas trees. Swirling through their branches, the rain vaporized into a trail of sacred mist.
August and Alice began to move together along a pebbled path. Alice tucked her backpack into a hydrangea near the entry gates. August found a sign pointing to famous grave sites. Goethe and Shelley were straight ahead. John Keats was off to the left. Without discussion they started up the hill, scanning inscriptions, examining urns and crosses, looking for Shelley.
Alice came upon him first. When August saw her standing still, he realized that she had found him and joined her in front of the simple marble slab, lying in the dirt, engraved, Percy Bysshe Shelley. There was a Latin inscription, Cor Cordium. August thought it had something to do with hearts but could not be sure. The dates of Shelley’s birth and death were also inscribed in Latin above an English verse:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange
Alice moved on. August heard her utter a small cry. He walked over and stood next to her, looking down at a small gravestone.
“His son William,” she said. “He was four.”
According to his gravestone, William Shelley had predeceased his father in 1819. “By three years,” calculated August.
“I wonder how he died,” said Alice.
She tried to conjure what it would be like to lose a child, the horror and injustice of it, but the scale of the grief was simply beyond her. She looked around. August was gone. She wandered across the hillside of graves and through a square arch in a weathered orange wall. The garden was less formal here, the graves less frequent. It was, she imagined, more like an English park. In the failing light, she could see August standing by a headstone and beyond him, outside the walls, the looming triangle of the Pyramid of Cestius.
August stood in front of John Keats. He had studied him in English, of course, like all good English boys, but had not realized that the celebrated poet was so young when he died, leaving a significant body of work behind him at just twenty-five years old. Michelangelo had been the same age when he sculpted his masterpiece The Pietá. August wondered what he might achieve by twenty-five. He had three years to pull a rabbit out of the hat; the clock was ticking. Alice materialized next to him.
“Keats,” he said. “I’m not sure why, but I always felt like I actually got him.”
“He was a second child, you know,” she said, “just like you.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And he had this really brilliant older brother who never said a word.”
“Oh, shut up,” said August.
Alice started to chuckle.
“Do you want me to recite something?” he said.
“No.”
August decided to press on regardless. “Fill for me a brimming bowl, And in it let me drown my soul; But put therein some drug, designed To banish—” Alice silenced him with her finger on his lips.
“Shh,” she said gently, smiling up at him. It was the first time she had touched his face. He thought he might lie down next to Keats and die there and then.
“We’re in the poem,” she whispered. “Now, this, all around us, is a poem.”
They looked around. The rain had stopped, and the world was glistening. The sun had not yet set, but the moon was rising.
August flooded with adoration. Feeling slightly dizzy, he sat on the damp grass. “We should probably be heading back,” he said, reaching for something normal to say and think. “Find somewhere to stay.”
“Let’s stay here,” she said.
“It’s wet,” he said.
“I’ll get my backpack. We can lie on my stuff.”
“What if it rains?”
“We’ll get wet.”
Alice ran off down the path toward the bush where she had secreted her belongings. August remained on the grass, unable to move. Something was happening to him, something from which he would never recover, he was certain.
While August was out of earshot, Alice called Daniel to say good night. Daniel was on his way back to the hotel after a satisfactory but not brilliant spaghetti marinara. He asked Alice if she realized that you weren’t supposed to put cheese on seafood pasta. Alice rep
lied that her phone was running out of charge. Fortuitously, her phone then ran out of charge, and she was saved from having to respond to his farewell Love you with the lie of Love you, too.
Alice grabbed her backpack and started off. In the half-light two squirrels scurried across the path on front of her. The truth was, she realized, that she would tell any lie necessary to spend time with the young Englishman sitting in the damp grass next to John Keats. She would do anything for this time with him. She stopped and dropped her backpack on the gravel, circling it to gather herself.
August was still sitting on the grass when Alice appeared through the darkness. They greeted each other with a look. No words formed in the thick, warm air around them. Alice started to search through her backpack. An orchestra of crickets and other insects serenaded them with crunchy, familiar notes. She produced a raincoat and laid it on the grass next to August. He lifted himself onto it. Shyly, Alice sat down next to him. August rested his head on the backpack and cleared his throat. Alice turned and saw that he had positioned his arm so that she could use it as a pillow. She lay back. He smelled exactly as she imagined he would. She nestled into him and closed her eyes. He measured the weight of her next to him. She breathed out. He breathed her in.
He would not close his eyes tonight. He was not going to miss a moment, the only living man in a shimmering garden of the dead, cradling majesty in his arms.
TWENTY-FOUR
Ending in the Via Margutta
THERE WAS A TIME WHEN I THOUGHT I LOVED MY FIRST WIFE MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF. BUT NOW I HATE HER GUTS. I DO. HOW DO YOU EXPLAIN THAT? WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT LOVE?
—Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love
Alec stood at the large window of their Rococo-meets-Swedish-Modern room in the Hotel San Marco, overlooking a stretch of twinkling lights on the Roman horizon. A jubilant pop tune blasted from Meg’s phone on the orange-and-pink silk bedspread. He had showered and shaved and was solemnly dredging a bottle of birra, when Meg danced out of the dressing room in a little black dress and presented its gaping back for him to zip.
“I ordered some champagne,” she said, oblivious to his somber mood. “I know it should have been prosecco, this being Roma and all, but champers just feels more celebratory somehow.”
Alec zipped her dress.
“I can’t believe we did it,” she continued. “We did it! I said we’d do it in a day, and we did.” She swept a pair of diamond hoop earrings from the crystal coffee table and began to insert them in her ears.
“So if Horatio can give us the tiles by the end of the month, I guess that means they should be installed—what?—two weeks after that?”
Alec made no attempt to reply.
“I don’t think we should use a local company to deliver them,” she said. “You know how hopeless the Italians are at moving things from A to B.” She inspected her earrings in the mirror. “Do American couriers come here? Of course they do. I’m so thrilled.” She slipped her left foot into a black stiletto and her right foot into a red pump, turning left and right to decide on the best shoe for the dress.
“Megan,” said Alec, still looking out the window.
She swiveled toward him. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “I always feel like I’m in trouble when you call me that.”
Alec turned to look at her.
“I am in trouble,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I don’t think I can…” He paused, trying to find a way to say what he had decided to say. “I’m not going to…”
“What?”
“I’m not coming home.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m staying in Rome.”
Meg kicked off her shoes, stormed into the Versailles Hall-of-Mirrors bathroom, and slammed the door. Alec walked to the bathroom and tried to open the door, but it was locked. He knocked. “Open the door,” he said. He waited for a while, but when Meg did not appear he sat on the bed.
Suddenly the bathroom door flew open, and Meg barreled out. “It’s that slut doctor,” she said, “isn’t it?”
Alec looked up at Meg.
“Oh. My. God. Are you in love with her?”
He did not answer.
“You can’t fall in love with someone in a day!” she spluttered.
“I fell in love with you in a day,” he said.
Meg lashed out to strike him, but he grabbed her wrist.
“This isn’t about Stephanie,” he said, trying to sound calm.
Meg pulled her hand away. “So you’re not in love with her?”
“I’m not in love with you anymore. I’m sorry.”
He watched a childlike look of shock and hurt move across her face.
“How can you say that?” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I am telling you now,” he said.
Meg looked around, hoping to discover that she had somehow stepped into the wrong room.
“What about the kids?”
“Frankly, I think they’ll be relieved,” he said.
Why was he doing this? She could not understand why he was doing this. She slapped herself hard across the face. She slapped herself again, bringing release, an instant exorcism. She went to slap herself a third time, but Alec stood and grabbed her wrist again. She had self-harmed in the past, mostly clawing her thighs or pinching her wrists, but only after arguments with her father, with whom she had a particularly combative relationship. Alec had never seen her hit herself before.
“Stop it,” he said gently. “Please stop it.”
Suddenly realizing that he was restraining her, she wrenched herself from his grip and began to pace up and down in a kind of panic. “So that’s it!” she said. “Just like that. No, no, I don’t accept it! I do not accept it.”
Meg threw her arms around Alec and buried her face in his chest. “Please don’t leave me,” she said. “I know I’m nuts, but I can change. Please give me another chance. Please, please just say yes.”
“Meg. Look at me,” he said. “Look at me.”
But she would not look. Slowly she melted away from him.
“What a giant cliché you turned out to be,” she said. “Successful guy with too much time and money on his hands hits a bump in the road with this wife so bails out with a more exotic model. How predictable!”
“I’m not leaving you for Stephanie,” he said. “I’m just leaving.”
“Bullshit!” she screeched. “Have the guts to admit what you’re doing!”
In the mulatto of her Australo-American accent, the word “guts” spewed at him with a peculiarly Australian ferocity. He remembered meeting her father and brother for the first time on their vast outback cattle station. Direct and uncompromising, they were a breed not to be messed with.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said, trying to be direct and uncompromising himself. “I don’t have a clean, strong purpose. I’m not in love with Stephanie, but I do have feelings for her. Which makes me realize I no longer have feelings for—”
“Get out!” screamed Meg.
“If you insist on steamrolling over the top of me,” he said, “what hope is there of—”
Once again she screamed, “Get out! Now! Go on. I can’t bear to be with you a moment longer!” A fury of spittle sprayed into the air with her words. Alec felt some of it settle on his face. He reached out for his wife, but she recoiled.
“Go!” she shouted.
Alec walked to the door. He turned to say something, but there was nothing he could say that could excuse any of this as far as she was concerned.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted, her voice hoarse with effort and anger.
He opened the door to see the retreating figure of a room service waiter, trotting as fast as he could without actually running. It would have been funny if things weren’t so damn sad. At Alec’s feet, there was a platinum tray and ice bucket with a bottle of Bollinger Vieilles Vignes Françaises Blanc de Noirs and two crystal flutes.
/> Alec pushed the tinkling tray into the room with his foot and walked down the hall toward the elevators. He was reaching for the down button when a meticulously engineered hermetic whoosh and click announced that the door to their room had closed behind him.
Meg lay on the bed. She sat up. She lay down. She sat up. She lay down. The infinite number of things that could happen next began to occur to her in little flash-frame scenarios. There was nothing to do but kill herself. No, she would remarry; a handsome European with a title. No, she would do good works and become famous, and he would come crawling back, and she would make him grovel. She sat up and looked at the very expensive champagne she had ordered less than half an hour ago when she lived in a different universe.
She imagined smashing one of the crystal champagne flutes and carving it up her thigh. She pulled her black dress up her pale legs and conjured the release. She could see the beautiful red blood flowing forth and pooling on the carpet. She could feel blobs of liquid falling on her thighs. It wasn’t blood. The liquid was clear; she was crying. Why am I crying? she wondered. She fell back on the bed as her diaphragm contracted and she shocked herself with a sob. She sobbed for so long and so loudly that the people in the next room thought she was having a prolonged orgasm and called reception to complain.
Alec burst into the night air and walked toward the Spanish Steps. It had been raining, but the rain had stopped, leaving the air fresh and the city glittering with reflected light. The streets were brimming with tourists on their way home from dinner and Romans on their way to dinner. Half of them were pounding the pavement in sensible nylon-and-spandex-blend travel pants and the other half were teetering in haute couture.
Alec slipped into a noisy bar without noting its name and ordered a double vodka. He sat in a dark corner, filled with the momentousness of what he had just done. Surrounded by jovial chatter, he could hardly think, but this was just as well; he did not want to think. He took a long swig of his vodka, enjoying the burning sensation in his throat. Returning the glass to its cardboard coaster, Alec could feel the muscles of his neck and upper back relax. He was free, free at last.
One Summer Day in Rome Page 17