Rough Strife

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  Still, this was a party and she could hardly refuse.

  “Y-n or i-n-e?” he wanted to know.

  “I-n-e. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” He smiled for the first time. It changed his face. He became ingenuous, accessible. “I-n-e sounds more interesting, for some reason.”

  “Oh. Would you have lost interest in talking to me if I had said Y-n?”

  “Almost nothing could make me lose interest in talking to you,” he said in his serious manner, and then he smiled again, gallantly.

  Caroline played with her beads. She was not used to such candor, or such flattery, so fast. But why “almost,” then? What was the “almost”? And fast was the last word she would choose to describe him. He bore himself with uncommon calm, as if he issued from a leisurely, antique place off the beaten path, a place from which old-world gallantry might travel full circle to meet new-world frankness. She lifted her glass but it was empty.

  Ivan led her over to the opposite edge of the roof, where a row of tables served as a bar. They passed the accordionist, once more playing the rare tune. He widened his eyes at Caroline and grinned as though they had a common, conspiratorial past. She edged past him in confusion.

  The young Americans hovering around the bar in bright colors appeared flighty against the historical backdrop, out of their element, like mounted butterflies inspirited with life. Vulnerable, enthusiastic prey. A bunch was laughing and exclaiming over some kind of emblem hung from a hook on a pillar. Caroline had to stand on tiptoe to see past the shoulders of the young men guffawing. The thing was a fat carrot, point downward, with a tuft of green growth on top, flanked by two large round purple onions.

  “What is that supposed to be?” she asked Ivan, and saw the instant the words left her tongue. It was bad enough that she had winked. Now he would think her not only forward but naïve, or else willfully provocative; easy game either way. Strangely, this prospect gave her a humming exhilaration.

  Ivan glanced up at the vegetable object and glanced quickly away. “It’s some kind of…uh…fertility symbol, you know. Maybe it’s a tradition at Italian weddings.” He cleared his throat and busied himself reading the labels of the champagne bottles.

  Why, he is delicate, she thought. A man of taste. She smiled more freely as he finally handed her the glass. His party manners were perfect, as though acquired with diligence. “Rather blatant, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he replied awkwardly. “It must be left over from some primitive rite. People used to be more matter-of-fact about these things than we are. A wedding, after all…” He stole another glance up at the fertility symbol. “Would you like something to eat?”

  She couldn’t help laughing out loud. “Oh no. Not right now, thanks.” Not quite yet, anyway, she was drunkenly tempted to murmur. But no, not to Ivan. She had to respect his modesty. They walked away from the tables. “You must be one of the ubiquitous Fulbrights, is that right?” Caroline asked.

  “Yes. You make us sound like a lepers’ colony, though.”

  “I didn’t mean to. What are you studying?”

  “Something about the relation of architectural style to political regimes, the rise and fall of empires, and so forth. A narrow little study. What about you?”

  “Oh, I’m not studying anything. I have no group or intellectual purpose. I’m on vacation. Between jobs, actually.”

  “When you’re not on vacation or between jobs, what do you do?”

  “Math.”

  “Math?” He stepped back. Caroline nodded. “Can you do statistics?” he asked with a kind of reverent disbelief.

  She might easily have taken offense; it was a stupid question she had answered sharply enough in the past. But happy and vaguely excited by standing so close to him that their sleeves brushed when they raised their glasses at the same time, she gave Ivan a reprieve.

  “Of course,” she said smoothly. “I’ve tutored people in it. People in the social sciences or the arts, who need it for a project. People like you.” She smiled.

  He stared as before, ran his fingers nervously through his thick hair, and refocused his eyes on her. “Listen,” he said softly, touching her wrist with two fingers, “if you’re not busy tomorrow we could go to the Campidoglio. You know, the Capitol, where they got married today? I’ll show you the wolf.”

  “Wolf? What wolf?”

  He was a man to rely on. He promised a wolf and there was a wolf indeed, beneath the great hill of the Capitol. It was a golden afternoon with a glaring, overripe sun and clean dark shadows. Yesterday, alone, Caroline had followed the other wedding guests up the stairs to the grand piazza overlooking the city, where Michelangelo once scattered flagstones, dark and light, to make a mad checkerboard. Today Ivan led her away from the steps and off to the left. Though gentle, his grip on her arm was very firm. The side path he chose seemed to lead nowhere: shadows, bushes. She had a flash of crazy fear. Where was he taking her? Who was he, anyway? And why was she letting him pull her—yes, pull, for his fingers had tightened around her arm—off into the shadows? But in less than a minute they stood at the bars of a small murky cage dug out of natural rock. Their arrival roused the wolf, who sat still and attentive in a far corner. She lifted her head and bayed, an eerie sound reverberating off the stone. Ivan beamed proudly, as if he had conjured the entire scene.

  “And I didn’t believe you.”

  “I know.” He grinned. “But it’s full of unlikely things. You’ve only been here four days. You have a lot to see.”

  “Yes,” she said, feeling suddenly weak. He made it sound overwhelming, like the ritual labors assigned in mythology. She wondered if he would be taking her on any more bizarre excursions, if he was planning to make her labors his own. Would they fetch golden apples from the ends of the earth?

  “What’s a wolf doing down here?”

  “Remember Romulus and Remus?”

  “Oh, those twins that were suckled by a wolf.”

  “Yes. Their mother sent them down the river in a basket, and the wolf rescued them and nurtured them. Later on they founded Rome. So this wolf commemorates the founding of the city.”

  “A wolf for a grandmother,” said Caroline. “Without her, no Rome, no Empire, none of it.”

  “Great mother figure, you mean?”

  “No, what I really meant was the idea of a beast as responsible for all of this.”

  Ivan laughed. “Behind every great civilization is a beast.”

  “Well, look at the ancient Romans, how beastly they were, all that murder and intrigue.”

  “But they were noble too. Remember all the noble Romans in Shakespeare?”

  “Noble and beastly together? A neat trick. Look where they put it, though, right below the City Hall. Beneath law and order they hide this savage wolf, who keeps them alive on her milk.”

  The wolf, as if eavesdropping on its visitors, approached them from the rear of the cage. Glowering from slate-gray eyes that looked at once treacherous and ready to weep, it grasped the iron bars in its front paws and raised its gray-white muzzle up towards them, against the wire-mesh barrier. In that pose of supplication, or threat, the torso of paler gray, with rows of teats like hairy knobs, quivered with each intake of breath. The wolf appeared to be panting with rage. Caroline could see tiers of ribs below the fur; she could imagine the stripped carcass.

  “He doesn’t seem very glad we’ve come,” said Ivan, resting his hand on her shoulder.

  “She. It may just be her standard performance.”

  Staggering slightly on her hind legs, the wolf jerked her head back and opened her mouth so wide that the angle between her jaws could have spanned a human neck. The teeth, glistening rows of them, were sharpened to a fine point; Caroline could picture them descending cleanly into their prey. The pink tongue was curled in a tremulous arc. The throat undulated as the wolf swallowed, and then she gave out right in their faces a howl starting in the depths of her register, streaking its way up lik
e a siren, and ending on an unresolved querulous note. Anguish, it seemed, and vast in its breadth. Caroline gasped at the sound. Ivan squeezed her shoulder.

  Abruptly, the wolf dropped down to four legs and trotted calmly back to the corner of the cage. She had withdrawn into herself and no longer projected anything, like an actor reaching the wings, the character falling like a cape to reveal the person beneath, innocuous.

  It was chilly down there in the shadows. They walked back along the path and turned to climb the stairs for the spectacular view from the high piazza.

  The beast in him did not show itself for a long time. Caroline was baffled. Perhaps he was lacking something, or she was. She had come here for pleasure and now she suffered in the flesh from wanting him. Exasperated, she pondered whether his backwardness—if she could call backward something which had hardly demonstrated an existence—might be a mode of originality, a “line,” a feat of abstinence designed to so impress her that it would be the more amply rewarded later, as in a fable. But she was no Puritan; brought up by Puritan parents, she had seen the hazards of that way early and averted them through force of will. She was unimpressed by abstinence and disliked fables where rewards were meted out with an unreal justice. Ivan could have whatever he asked of her at once, deserving or not.

  On the trip over—a ship, chosen to stretch the crossing and unravel her nerves—the images of her father dying were fresh, superimposed on the line of the horizon as she sat alone on deck. She rallied her spirit with childish visions of the sensual goodies awaiting her now that she was cut loose—dark-skinned, white-toothed musical Latins escorting her about the city of legend, making ardent love to her in shuttered rooms, povera orfana that she now was, healing with their tongues all her wounds. Mother bears licking the cub into shape. But her time was taken up by Ivan, wining her and dining her, cheaply—Fulbrights were notoriously poor; she had money and offered, but women weren’t allowed to pay. Morning and night he telephoned with intriguing plans: the beach at Fregene, the Pantheon, picnics at Ostia…He was dark-skinned and white-toothed, and he sang, too, badly, mostly corny songs from musical comedies, and occasionally he hummed the wonderful tune that the accordionist played at Cory’s and Joan’s wedding. Only he did not make ardent love. Caroline waited, a child of her time after all. Her freedom went as far as accepting advances or fending them off; nothing else.

  Instead he orated on the stones of Rome as they trod them. He walked her through the ruins of the Forum and showed off his Latin on the inscriptions. He had attended a special high school in New York for smart boys only, he told her in a rare mood of revelation, a school favored by the sons and grandsons of Jewish immigrants, like himself. Besides that, he was a Boy Scout, he informed her. Couldn’t she tell? He could still recite the Boy Scout pledge, and did (“courteous, kind, reverent…”), while they drank wine thigh to thigh in a trattoria. He knew everything about the paintings and sculpture, the fountains and the architecture, and he perused her with the same tender, educated discrimination. He looked for structure and composition, he told her, harmony of the parts and general resonance. She saw a great deal of Rome, but a Rome filtered through Ivan: he stood between the world and her eyes, refining the particles of light. And he kissed her good night at her door two times: lips warm and slightly parted lingered on hers briefly with a feeling of misplaced nostalgia, as if he and she had been lovers long ago and their passion long past, a frenzy remembered rather than anticipated, and this kiss merely the remnant, a little dangerous, a little teasing, and a little false, yet so sweet. Then he moved his lips away with the regret of old war movies: late for the train that would carry him from her, to battle and maybe to his death. She asked him in for the euphemistic coffee, but he said no. He wished he could, but he had an early morning meeting at the Fulbright office—if he came in he knew he’d stay too late. Damn right, thought Caroline. Those kisses left her wobbly as a teen-ager as she gazed from her open window after his body in retreat down the narrowing Roman vista—a study in perspective, Ivan the vanishing point. Her fingertips tingled and her mouth hung open in a moronic droop until she realized and clamped it shut, furious.

  It hurt her. She woke in the middle of the night, cold and alone and indignant. She pulled the covers close around her and huddled, then threw them off and reached for a cigarette. Inhaling with long deep breaths, she imagined them in her bed in every possible pose, his full lips open and smiling, his dark hair like an Indian’s mussed and falling over his eyes, from which he had removed the non-contact lenses and which perused her as always, and she displayed everything, she didn’t care, so long as he would…He came closer to her. It had grown so very dark all around them. She felt the heat of his skin, and an unbearable excitement. With a start, she awoke again in the dark. The air had the nasty smell of abandoned, burnt-out butts. Luckily the cigarette, half-smoked, had died harmlessly in the ashtray. There was a dreadful restlessness under her skin, as if a layer of fine ash were sliding beneath the surface. She had to get up to fling herself about, dashing in and out of the three rooms and pausing finally at the windows in the bedroom which overlooked a small square. In the daytime sturdy women, their hair wound in buns, with aprons and string bags crossed in ceaseless procession from the dairy to the butcher to the tobacco shop. They nodded to each other with austere dignity, or else stopped for vigorous dialogues that from Caroline’s window had an aura of high significance. The men, narrower and lighter on their feet, skimmed past the women like frisky motorboats skimming past steamers or barges, saluting with admiration, a touch of awe, and a whimsical recognition of difference. But now in the small hours the square was still and dark; one wrought-iron street lamp with a diminutive gargoyle at the top shone a faint yellow light on the stone walls. Every few moments a Fiat, a toy car, bumped along the cobblestones with a clatter unnatural for the hush of night. Only three windows in the buildings around the square were lit: for celebration, sorrow, conspiracy, love?

  “Don’t you ever work?”

  Ivan, leaning back with his eyes closed, lids against glass, laughed and shook his head. “I work going around like this.”

  They were sitting in a small angle of shade on the Spanish Steps, near a flower stand. The mingled aromas wafted through the hot air in sickening ripples. Caroline wiped her face with a handkerchief she had just dipped in a fountain when they emerged from the dead heat of Keats’s house at the top of the stairs. On the way out of Keats’s house their bodies had brushed and Ivan’s mouth touched her hair. Maybe it was an accident, but she wished he wouldn’t touch her if he didn’t really want her, if they were only stray Americans going about together.

  The slow-moving people in the square below were licking ice cream cones. She closed her eyes and conjured: cold, wet, sweet and vanilla melted on her tongue. Since she was a child she had done this. When her mother took away her ragged blanket she learned to fall asleep clutching a fantasy. The ice cream was cooling as it slid down her throat. Sweat dripped from Ivan’s temple to his jaw, from his jaw to his shirt. She tasted that in secret too, running her lips over the angle of the jaw, feeling the roughness of skin on her tongue.

  “I mean for your Fulbright project. Don’t you have to do a paper, or an outline, or something?”

  “Nothing much.” He smiled. “A very general outline. Mostly we’re on the honor system.”

  “That’s a good deal you people get. At my job I had to come up with results all the time. Evidence of activity.”

  “I wish work didn’t have to be like that,” said Ivan. “I wish I could support myself someday doing exactly what I like. I mean, by some miraculous coincidence doing exactly what I like would be my work.”

  “What sort of work would it be?”

  “Oh, I don’t know how to say it. I’ve never really said these things out loud.” He laughed and looked down at the square. “Not political science or history or the sort of thing I’ve been trained to do. I think I would be good at telling people how to go about gettin
g what they want. That’s if they know what they want to begin with.” Ivan paused, as if what he was hearing was new to him. “I would like to figure out strategies—it wouldn’t matter what field they were in. I would need to know just enough about the content to shape the strategy. It would be like an abstract design, but purposeful. Does that make any sense?”

  “Sure.”

  “People would come to me with their ideas and dreams, and I would figure out a way for them to be realized.” He laughed again, shyly. “Then I could do it for towns and countries and continents, and then I could be God.”

  “I see,” she said. “Well, a little ambition never hurt anyone. Tell me, do you lie awake nights figuring out strategies to get what you want?”

  “Oh no. I’m not a Machiavelli. But I have tried to do pretty much what I like, on a small scale. So far, anyway. Haven’t you? That’s the way I thought of you that first time, when you winked.”

  I didn’t wink, she longed to object, but couldn’t. “I’ve done what I had to, what needed to be done. Sometimes I liked it, not always. Even now, I can’t always do as I like.”

  “Why not?”

  She laughed without pleasure. “Because, Ivan, sometimes what I’d like to do just isn’t done.”

  “Such as?”

  “I don’t think I want to elaborate. After all, we’re really strangers.”

  “Are we?” asked Ivan, peering at her in surprise.

  “I would say so,” she replied coolly. “I would say you have kept us strangers. Strategically, maybe.”

  That was all, she decided. With that she had come more than halfway, if being met halfway was what he required.

  He was honest enough not to protest. “Let’s walk,” he said with a sigh, and got up. Out of instinct and habit she watched his long body uncurl, a procedure invariably complex and beautiful. Then she remembered and turned away.

  “You see those people coming around the corner licking their cones?” he asked. “I can’t stand it any more. I must have some. The place can’t be far.”