Curt found it hard not to think of Angelo that day, but thinking of Angelo made him an unusually easy companion, Frederick found, though he didn’t know the reason. All he knew was that whatever he suggested, Curt went along with it. They visited the Colosseum after breakfast, and Frederick eagerly pointed out the various orders of columns on the façade—Tuscan, Ionic, Corinthian—the Corinthian pilasters at the top (a later addition), the numerals over the entrances, the genius of the Roman arch, the centuries of decay and damage, fire and earthquake, the numerous reconstructions, its use and reuse as amphitheater, church, monastery, cemetery, squatters’ den, factory, stone quarry, Liszt’s joke that it would make a fine concert hall, what Goethe and Byron, Hawthorne and Dickens and Henry James would have seen when they visited, and what they wrote. The saga of Daisy Miller, and her untimely death from malaria after an ill-conceived tryst one night in the Colosseum, was told in riveting detail. Curt was surprised one building could have meant so much to so many people, could have figured so prominently in so much famous literature, and then the thought of those ancient spectacles, the scenery rising from chambers beneath the arena, the dressing rooms, the slaughter of animals and humans—he allowed himself to be drawn into the coils of history and fantasy as Frederick deftly maneuvered him around groups of tourists and droning tour guides, and Curt felt privileged to have his own personal guide.
Amazing, he said to himself afterward, as they sat on a low wall opposite the entrance, enjoying a cigarette and keeping an eye on two young Italian men sitting nearby, and their fascinating physical camaraderie (one minute arm-wrestling, the next laughing, smoking, then lying on their backs, their shirts riding up their torsos)—amazing how a person like Frederick lives every day of his life, he thought, with so much knowledge in his head, and this is just one old building in one European city! He was filled with awe at how little he himself knew and how much he must learn even to come close to Frederick, but the thought, as such thoughts often did, made him churlish, and so he retreated to the equal and opposite position—all authority, all expertise is bullshit, it’s experience that matters, and…the thought inevitably trailed off into deserts of its own, and then the sight of those two handsome young Italians, or a speeding Vespa, distracted his attention, and he imagined racing seventy miles an hour. But how lucky I am, he thought (for Frederick was standing over him, offering a hand to pull him up), that Frederick loves me. And mixed with thoughts of Angelo, and wondering if there might be some opportunity to see him outside the hotel, or even inside the hotel when Frederick wasn’t around (maybe when he goes to the Vatican, for really Curt didn’t care if he never saw it)—the best thing, he decided, was to go along with Frederick today, humor him, because what he gives in return is so great. He took hold of Frederick’s hand and rose.
From the Colosseum, they wandered towards the Monte Capitolini, bought sandwiches from a street vendor, and sat in Michelangelo’s plaza, surrounded, Frederick explained, by some of the most perfectly proportioned buildings in the Western world. But the more Curt observed the Italians and other European tourists around them (it was easy to spot the Americans, and both Frederick and Curt shrank from their shrill voices, their imposing ways), he felt, I look too much like an American, I need new clothes, and so they spent the afternoon, closer to the hotel, in the shopping streets around the Spanish Steps and along Via Veneto, going from one store to another, outfitting Curt with clothes to make him look the part of a world traveler. In the dressing room of Brioni’s, Frederick stood before him buttoning a shirt, his fingers brushing the skin of his chest, and on an impulse Curt threw his arms around him, kissed him, grabbed his crotch until he felt the erection, opened his pants, knelt down, and proceeded to give him a blow job, and Frederick knew it was madness to do this in a dressing room where their feet could no doubt be seen, but this was Rome, they were far from the lives they normally led, and he submitted to the pleasure and it carried him up until he came inside Curt’s mouth, and Curt, his mouth full of cum, stood up and kissed Frederick and the cum spilled down their chins and Curt said, Thank you, thank you, Frederick, I feel—
“Signori, signori.”
“Oh, shit!” Curt whispered laughingly, thrilled with the excitement of doing something so incredibly transgressive. In Rome, he was starting to notice, half of what he himself did and said struck him as rude—he wanted to change his personality, change his manners, really wished in some ways he were European instead of American—even began inflecting his statements and questions differently, almost with the touch of a British accent. He knew, once he got back to New York, it was all over with Collin. For Collin could never make possible experiences like this.
The next morning, Angelo noticed something different about Curt. “Already you look Italian,” he said as he placed the coffee before them. He smiled and gave Frederick a wink.
“New threads.” Curt described their shopping expedition.
“Maybe we exchange clothing. You look more Italian, I look more American.”
They laughed and teased as Curt continued his narrative of their travels the day before. As Frederick listened and observed the two young men’s interaction, he sensed something unspoken amidst the chatter (“Stand up and see if my shoulders are as broad as yours”—“But you’re taller than me”—“Maybe not in bare feet”). He felt he’d missed a beat in their story, that, indeed, they were playing out a story, some new narrative unfolding before his eyes.
“And the volcano is quite nice, still active. It is dangerous to live there, but it is the most populated volcanic region in the world. You will love to see it.”
“It sounds great,” Curt said to Angelo while looking at Frederick, as if silently to ask, Wouldn’t it be great?
“So Wednesday morning early I pick you up at the hotel. We go to Pompeii, and maybe later we drive to Positano. The Amalfi coast is magnifico, and it will be inconvenient to get there by coach or by train. Much easy to drive by car.”
“Maybe,” Frederick said, hoping to delay a decision and, eventually, talk Curt out of it. He looked at Angelo, who now seemed less the image of an heroic Mediterranean god and more the seductive, threatening, dangerous type of the Roman street hustler, the sort they’d seen prowling the Spanish Steps.
They argued over the invitation as soon as they got back to their room. Curt had his heart set on going. Frederick, though disinclined to tell Curt the real reason, felt equally sure it was a bad idea. He said there were too many other things to do in the city and they couldn’t really afford a day out of town.
“I don’t need to see everything in Rome. This is a chance to experience the real Italy with a real Italian. I hate always being surrounded by tourists.” Frederick felt insulted, but to insist would only inspire further, stronger resistance. He mustn’t appear jealous. “You don’t have to go, you can do what you want. But so can I, right? There’s no law saying we have to be together every minute of every day, is there?”
Of course not, he said, but now felt he must go, for surely something was afoot. “Unless you’d prefer I didn’t.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Oh, I don’t know, sometimes when you’re young…I’m just trying to figure out—”
“It’s up to you, I have nothing to figure out. I’m going.”
“All right. I’ll go.” Curt didn’t respond. “I mean, I would like to go.” Still Curt was a blank. “Okay?”
“Yes, okay. Fine. Good.”
But Frederick knew it wasn’t fine and good. Once on the road with Curt and Angelo, he experienced the full oddity of his position. He felt like a chaperone, the elder parent who insists on riding along with the kids on their first date—and being given pride of place in the front seat next to Angelo, as they drove south from Rome toward Naples, didn’t mitigate the strong feeling he was nevertheless taking a back seat to the friendship—or something more than friendship—blossoming between the younger men. Everything Angelo said—about the geographical diff
erences between the Lazio and Campania regions through which they passed, the most common Italian surnames, famous locals Sophia Loren and Enrico Caruso, the Neapolitan origins of pizza—seemed a performance, a bone thrown to the old man, with the real communication taking place sotto voce. And to some extent he wasn’t wrong. For he never saw, as Angelo careered down the highway at top speed, how Curt, sitting directly behind Angelo, passed his left hand forward alongside Angelo’s hip, slid it into his pants pocket, spread his fingers, and squeezed Angelo’s thigh through the fabric, nor how every time Angelo gently removed Curt’s hand from his pocket, all the while carrying on the conversation, Curt put it right back in.
“Most New Yorkers do not own a car,” Frederick explained. “The island of Manhattan is so narrow and congested, a car is more a hindrance than a convenience.” But Angelo wasn’t familiar with the words “narrow,” “congested,” “hindrance,” “convenience”—nevertheless he caught the drift of what Frederick was saying and managed to hold his own while feeling Curt’s fingers pressing his thigh, as if on cue, each time Frederick made a remark.
“I would feel like a dog—how you say ‘al guinzaglio,’” he murmured to himself knowing neither of the Americans would be able to supply the words. He raised his right hand from the stick shift to indicate the collar around the neck and the long cord attached from the neck to the hand of the owner, and he let drop his hand momentarily onto Frederick’s hand.
“Leash.”
“Leash,” Angelo repeated but pronounced it “lish,” which made both Curt and Frederick smile. And for a moment Frederick felt included in the circle of friendship. For this was something that united him and Curt beyond any doubt—their fluency in English only.
“The world is forever changed because the automobile—” Frederick started to say philosophically, but Angelo cut him off to point to the silhouette of Mount Vesuvius rising in the distance. Frederick imagined a column of fire shooting up, the top of the mountain exploding, raining down lava on the valley below, drenching all civilization in molten rock. It was powerful, vivid, real as nothing thus far on their vacation had been. It wasn’t art, it was nature, it was life, and life, Frederick felt, was terrible. But the road bent towards the sea and the mountains flattened out as the perspective changed and Vesuvius disappeared. Now Angelo was talking about Positano and the beautiful coast and the fishing villages and the food and sun and palm trees and beaches, and wouldn’t it be nice to spend the night in one of those towns? Curt explained the proximity of beaches to New York City, “But it’s nothing like this,” he said, and now Frederick felt he must put down New York in order to praise Rome, say how much better everything in Italy was—the food, the physical beauty of its women, the clothes people wore, the compact automobiles they drove, the climate, the mountains, the history.
“Everything in the US is new. We have no history,” Curt said. The thought was novel and interesting to him.
“But this is why I like the US. You begin the world all over again and you can be whatever you want. You are free.”
“But only some people are free. That’s a myth about the US,” Curt said.
“What is the word?”
“Myth. M-Y-T-H.”
“A-hah, myth,” Angelo said. “Mitologia.”
Frederick grew quiet as they approached their destination. The boys, meanwhile, grew more animated. Angelo warmed to the discussion of differences between the old world and the new. Clearly he’d given the topic a great deal of thought, and he enjoyed theorizing about it. Occasionally Frederick would interject a few words (“Something many Europeans don’t realize about the US is how religion dominates our society—how Puritanical we are. We are seen by the rest of the world as the standard-bearers of freedom, but our values are provincial”), but more often than not it had a stifling effect on conversation. His sentences were too long, his syntax too complex, his vocabulary too sophisticated, so much so that Curt was moved to make a joke or change the subject or ask a question about some passing sight. He knew Frederick was making an effort to connect but too often failing in the attempt. Now and then he felt chastened and came to Frederick’s rescue. “How are you?” he asked once they’d parked the car after filling the tank.
“Fine,” he said, wishing he could pour out his insecurities to Curt, knowing it was entirely uncalled for.
“You sure?”
“As long as I’m with you, yes.”
“Well, here I am.”
“And how about you?”
“Good,” he said with a diffident tone, masking, Frederick was sure, his real feelings; he’s trying not to show how much he prefers the company of Angelo, right now, to mine.
“Ready?” Angelo stood before them and put one arm around Curt’s neck and the other around Frederick’s and pulled them towards him and growled. “I am hungry. Will you like to eat now?”
It was left to Curt to say he was starving and to decide for the group they should eat.
Frederick was glad to be out of the car, glad to be moving his legs, a few steps apart from Curt and Angelo. Naples, however, was a disappointment—noisy, dirty, choked with automobiles, graffiti everywhere. He never imagined an Italian city could be so unbeautiful. But he had to persevere. Get through the day. Time was merciful. It only moved in one direction. Eventually it would be evening. Eventually they would return to Rome, to the hotel. After all, he thought he heard Angelo say something about work tomorrow afternoon. His sketch pad! That was the answer. He told them he wanted to go off to do some sketching and would meet them later. He wasn’t so hungry anyway. Angelo protested—out of politeness, no doubt—but then assented, as if sooner or later he’d expected Frederick to peel off, leaving the two of them alone. There was the complicated business of re-calibrating plans—whether to tour Pompeii, “But I thought you wanted to see the ruins,” “How far is Pompeii from here?” The longer it took to resolve, the more impatient Frederick became to venture out on his own.
They agreed to meet in front of the Central Station in Piazza Garibaldi. Just east of the square was the old city, so Frederick figured since he was here already, he might wander through. The cramped, dusty streets and seedy establishments held little appeal, however, and, to make things worse, he quickly lost his way in the labyrinth. After half an hour going in circles, he found himself back at the main square, at which point he decided to cut his losses and head toward the Capella Sansevero to see Giuseppe Sanmartino’s sculpture of the Veiled Christ. He spent the rest of the afternoon in the chapel, sketching and contemplating the otherworldly figure of the dead Savior draped in a transparent veil, the incongruous sound of a radio broadcasting song after song by Nino Soprano, the young, handsome Italian crooner of the moment, coming from somewhere seemingly within or perhaps just outside the chapel. The last to leave the chapel, he was ravenously hungry and ate an awful pizza near the railway station. The station, he noted, was an angular, modern monstrosity recently erected in place of its venerable ancestor.
When they rendezvoused that evening, Angelo and Curt seemed comfortable, casual. They had gone to Pompeii after all, driven to the foothills of Vesuvius. Curt embraced Frederick when they greeted each other. “You would have loved Pompeii,” he said. He seemed eager to show Frederick how much he’d learned, as if he’d been storing up information and images just for him. Whatever really happened between them, Frederick thought, they weren’t showing it.
“How was your afternoon? Did you make some good sketches?”
“May I see?” Angelo asked.
Frederick opened his sketchbook and began flipping the pages. He passed over a sketch he’d done of Curt the day before.
“What is this?” Angelo asked. Frederick reluctantly showed him the page. It was a drawing of Curt, nude, on the bed in their hotel room.
“When did you draw that?” Curt asked incredulously.
“Yesterday morning. You were asleep.” He wanted to turn the page, but Angelo held it open and scrutinized it.
“You sleep with no clothes?”
“Sometimes.”
Curt sounded contrite as he said it. Frederick couldn’t understand why he was pretending to be so modest. And then it hit him: it wasn’t Angelo’s gaze that embarrassed him, it was Frederick’s.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Thursday morning Curt woke to find Frederick’s bed empty. A note on the dressing table said he’d gone to catch the sunrise from the Spanish Steps. But it was odd he hadn’t taken his sketchbook with him. He sat up in bed and opened the sketchbook. He found the drawing of himself asleep in the nude. He marveled at Frederick’s skill. His body wasn’t nearly so good, he thought, but if that’s how I look in Frederick eyes, who am I to argue? It might be nice, actually, to frame it and hang it in the bedroom back home. “Our bedroom,” he said to himself as he got up and opened the drapes, admitting a flood of light. He swung open the doors to the balcony and breathed in the fresh morning air. The day was cloudless. He returned to bed and paged backward through the sketchbook. There were drawings of the train station in Naples, Mount Vesuvius from a distance, a man draped in a veil, lying on his back, the bay of Naples, then the Colosseum, the Arch of Constantine, the Spanish Steps, then pictures of trees and bushes growing out of body parts, a human head with leaves and branches covering the face, hair made out of moss, hands that tapered to flowering branches, a girl half human, half tree. Then pages with drawings of Penn Station in New York, not demolished but ruined, as if it were an ancient Roman ruin, with broken walls and vegetation growing on top, cattle grazing in the waiting room, sheep roaming the concourse, skyscrapers in various states of decay, some crumbling as if made of dirt, then more pages with images of the station as it actually appeared, with dump trucks, cranes, scaffolding, whole sections torn away, buildings, automobiles, pedestrians glimpsed through shattered windows and skeleton walls.
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