“I do, now that you say it.”
“I thought he might be following me,” Sasha said, “making sure I was okay. And then, when it seemed like he wasn’t, I got really scared.”
Ted let go of her arms, and she folded them in her lap. “I thought he could keep track of me because of my hair. But now it isn’t even red.”
“I recognized you.”
“True.” She leaned toward him, her pale face close to Ted’s, sharp with expectation. “Uncle Teddy,” she said, “what are you doing here?”
It was the question he’d been dreading, yet the answer slid from Ted like meat falling off a bone. “I’m here to look at art,” he said. “To look at art and think about art.”
There: a sudden, lifting sensation of peace. Relief. He hadn’t come for Sasha, it was true.
“Art?”
“That’s what I like to do,” he said, and smiled, remembering the Orpheus and Eurydice this afternoon. “That’s what I’m always trying to do. That’s what I care about.”
In Sasha’s face there was a slackening, as if some weight she’d been bracing herself against had been removed. “I thought you came to look for me,” she said.
Ted watched her from a distance. A peaceful distance.
Sasha lit one of her Marlboros. After two drags, she squashed it out. “Let’s dance,” she said, a heaviness about her as she rose from her seat. “Come on, Uncle Teddy,” taking his hand, herding him toward the dance floor, a liquid mass of bodies that provoked in Ted a frightened sensation of shyness. He hesitated, resisting, but Sasha hauled him in among the other dancers and instantly he felt buoyed, suspended. How long had it been since he’d danced in a nightclub? Fifteen years? More? Hesitantly, Ted began to move, feeling hulking, bearish in his professor’s tweed, moving his feet in some approximation of dance steps until he noticed that Sasha wasn’t moving at all. She stood still, watching him. And then she reached for him, encircled Ted with her long arms and clung to him so that he felt her modest bulk, the height and weight of this new Sasha, his grown-up niece who had once been so small, and the irrevocability of that transformation released in Ted a ragged sorrow, so his throat seized up and a painful tingling fizzed in his nostrils. He cleaved to Sasha. But she was gone, that little girl. Gone with the passionate boy who had loved her.
Finally she pulled away. “Wait here,” she said, not meeting his eyes. “I’ll be right back.” Disoriented, Ted hovered among the dancing Italians until a mounting sense of awkwardness drove him from the floor. He lingered near it. Eventually, he circled the club. She’d mentioned having friends there—could she be talking to them somewhere? Had she gone outside? Anxious, foggy from his own drink, Ted ordered a San Pellegrino at the bar. And only then, as he reached for his wallet and found it gone, did he realize that she’d robbed him.
· · ·
Sunlight pried open his sticky eyelids, forcing him awake. He’d forgotten to close the blinds. It had been five o’clock by the time he’d finally gone to bed, after hours of helpless wandering and a series of lousy directions to the police station; after locating it finally and relaying his sad tale (minus the pickpocket’s identity) to an officer with oiled hair and an attitude of pristine indifference; after the offer of a ride to his hotel (which was all he’d really been after) from an elderly couple he’d met at the station, whose passports had been stolen on the Amalfi ferryboat.
Now Ted rose from bed with a throbbing head and rampaging heart. Phone messages littered the table: five from Beth, three from Susan, and two from Alfred (I
lose
, read one, in the broken English of the hotel clerk). Ted left them where he’d thrown them. He showered, dressed without shaving, drained a vodka at the minibar, and removed cash and another credit card from his room safe. He had to find Sasha now—today—and this imperative, which had seized him at no specific moment, assumed an immediacy that was the perfect inverse of his prior shirking. There were other things he needed to do—call Beth, call Susan, eat—but doing them now was out of the question. He had to find her.
But where? Ted deliberated this question while downing three espressos in the hotel lobby, letting the caffeine and vodka greet in his brain like fighting fish. Where to look for Sasha in this sprawling, malodorous city? He reviewed the strategies he’d already failed to execute: approaching dissolute kids at the train station and youth hostels, but no, no. He’d waited too long for any of that.
Without a clear plan, he took a taxi to the Museo Nazionale and set off in what seemed the direction he’d walked yesterday, after viewing the Orpheus and Eurydice. Nothing looked the same, but surely his state of mind could account for the difference, the tiny metronome of panic now ticking within him. Nothing looked the same, yet everything looked familiar: the stained churches and slanting crusty walls, the hangnail-shaped bars. After following a narrow street to its wriggling conclusion, he emerged onto a thoroughfare lined with a gauntlet of weary palazzi, their bottom floors gouged open to accommodate cheap clothing and shoe stores. A breeze of recognition fluttered over Ted. He followed the avenue slowly, looking right and left, until he caught sight of the yellow smiley face overlaying a palimpsest of swords and crosses.
He pushed open the small rectangular door cut into a broad, curved entrance originally built to receive horse-drawn coaches, then followed a passageway into a cobbled courtyard still warm from recent sunlight. It smelled of rotting melons. A bandy-legged old woman wearing blue kneesocks under her dress bobbled toward him, her hair in a scarf.
“Sasha,” Ted said into her faded wet eyes. “American.
Capelli rossi.”
He tripped on the
r
and tried again.
“Rossi,”
he said, rolling it this time.
“Capelli rossi.”
Realizing as he spoke that the description was no longer quite accurate.
“No, no,” the woman muttered. As she began to lurch away, Ted followed, slipped a twenty-dollar bill into her soft hand and inquired again, rolling the
r
this time without a hitch. The woman made a clicking noise, jerked her chin, and then, looking almost sad, gestured for Ted to follow her. He did, filled with disdain at how easily she’d been bought, how little her protection was worth. To one side of the front door was a broad flight of stairs, splotches of rich, Neapolitan marble still winking up through the grime. The woman began climbing slowly, clutching the rail. Ted followed.
The second floor, as he’d been lecturing his undergraduates for years, was the
piano nobile
, where palace owners brandished their wealth before guests. Even now, lousy with molting pigeons and stuccoed with piles of their refuse, its vaulted arches overlooking the courtyard were splendid. Seeing him notice, the woman said,
“Bellissima, eh? Ecco, guardate!”
and with a pride Ted found touching, she threw open the door to a big dim room whose walls were stained with what looked like patches of mold. The woman pulled a switch, and a lightbulb dangling from a wire transfigured the moldy shapes into painted murals in the style of Titian and Giorgione: robust naked women clutching fruit; clumps of dark leaves. A whisper of silvery birds. This must have been the ballroom.
On the third floor Ted noticed two boys sharing a cigarette in a doorway. Another lay asleep under a straggling assortment of laundry: wet socks and underwear pinned carefully to a wire. Ted smelled dope and stale olive oil, heard a mutter of invisible activity, and realized that this palazzo had become a rooming house. The irony of finding himself smack in the midst of the demimonde he’d tried to avoid amused Ted. So here we are, he thought. At last.
On the fifth and top floor, where servants once had lived, the doors were smaller, set along a narrow hallway. Ted’s elderly guide stopped to rest against a wall. His contempt for her yielded to gratitude: what effort that twenty dollars had cost her! How badly she must need it. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m sorry you had to walk so far.” But the woman shook her head, not understanding. She tottered partway down the hall and rapped sharply on one of the narrow doors. It opened and Ted saw Sasha, half asleep, dressed in a pair of men’s pajamas. At the sight of Ted her eyes widened, but her face remained impassive. “Hi, Uncle Teddy,” she said mildly.
“Sasha,” he said, realizing only then that he, too, was breathless from the climb. “I wanted to…talk to you.”
The woman’s gaze jumped between them; then she turned and walked away. The moment she rounded a corner, Sasha shut the door in his face. “Go away,” she said. “I’m busy.”
Ted moved nearer the door, flattening his palm against the splintery wood. Across it, he felt the spooked, angry presence of his niece. “So this is where you live,” he said.
“I’m moving someplace better.”
“When you’ve picked enough pockets?”
There was a pause. “That wasn’t me,” she said. “That was a friend of mine.”
“You’ve got friends all over the place, but I never actually see them.”
“Go! Leave, Uncle Teddy.”
“I’d like to,” Ted said. “Believe me.”
But he couldn’t bring himself to leave, or even really move. He stood until his legs began to ache, then bent his knees and slid to the floor. It was already afternoon, and an aureole of musty light issued from a window at one end of the hall. Ted rubbed his eyes, feeling as if he might sleep.
“Are you still there?” Sasha barked through the door.
“Still here.”
The door opened a crack, and Ted’s wallet bounced on his head and dropped to the floor.
“Go to hell,” Sasha said, and shut the door again.
Ted opened the wallet, found its contents untouched, and replaced it in his pocket. Then he sat. For a long time—hours, it seemed (he’d forgotten his watch)—there was silence. Occasionally Ted heard other, disembodied tenants moving inside their rooms. He imagined he was an element of the palace itself, a sensate molding or step whose fate it was to witness the ebb and flow of generations, to feel the place relax its medieval bulk more deeply into the earth. Another year, another fifty. Twice he stood up to let tenants pass, girls with jumpy hands and cracked leather purses. They hardly glanced at him.
“Are you still there?” Sasha asked, from behind the door.
“Still here.”
She emerged from the room and locked the door quickly behind her. She wore blue jeans, a T-shirt, and plastic flip-flops, and carried a faded pink towel and a small bag. “Where are you going?” he asked, but she stalked down the hall without comment. Twenty minutes later she was back, hair hanging wet, trailing a floral smell of soap. She opened her door with the key, then hesitated. “I mop the halls to pay for this room, okay? I sweep the fucking courtyard. Does that make you happy?”
“Does it make
you
happy?” he countered.
The door shook on its hinges.
As Ted sat, feeling the evolution of the afternoon, he found himself thinking of Susan. Not the slightly different version of Susan, but Susan herself—his wife—on a day many years ago, before Ted had begun folding up his desire into the tiny shape it had become. On a trip to New York, riding the Staten Island Ferry for fun, because neither one of them had ever done it, Susan turned to him suddenly and said, “Let’s make sure it’s always like this.” And so entwined were their thoughts at that point that Ted knew exactly why she’d said it: not because they’d made love that morning or drunk a bottle of Pouilly-Fuissé at lunch—because she’d felt the passage of time. And then Ted felt it, too, in the leaping brown water, the scudding boats and wind—motion, chaos everywhere—and he’d held Susan’s hand and said, “Always. It will always be like this.”
Recently, he’d mentioned that trip in some other context, and Susan had looked him full in the face and chimed, in her sunny new voice, “Are you sure that was me? I don’t remember a thing about it!” and administered a springy little kiss to the top of Ted’s head. Amnesia, he’d thought. Brainwashing. But it came to him now that Susan had simply been lying. He’d let her go, conserving himself for—what? It frightened Ted that he had no idea. But he’d let her go, and she was gone.
“Are you there?” Sasha called, but he didn’t answer.
She threw open the door and peered out. “You are,” she said, with relief. Ted looked up at her from the floor and said nothing. “You can come inside, I guess,” she said.
He hauled himself to his feet and stepped into her room. It was tiny: a narow bed, a desk, a sprig of mint in a plastic cup filling the room with its scent. The red dress, hanging from a hook. The sun was just beginning to set, skidding over rooftops and church steeples and landing in the room through a single window by the bed. Its sill was crowded with what appeared to be souvenirs of Sasha’s travels: a tiny gold pagoda, a guitar pick, a long white seashell. In the middle of the window, dangling from a string, hung a crude circle made from a bent coat hanger. Sasha sat on her bed, watching Ted take in her meager possessions. He recognized, with merciless clarity, what he’d somehow failed to grasp yesterday: how alone his niece was in this foreign place. How empty-handed.
As if sensing the movement of his thoughts, Sasha said, “I get to know a lot of people. But it never really lasts.”
On the desk lay a small stack of books in English:
The History of the World in 24 Lessons. The Sumptuous Treasures of Naples
. At the top, a worn volume entitled
Learning to Type
.
Ted sat on the bed beside his niece and put his arm around her shoulders. They felt like birds’ nests under his coat. The prickling sensation ached in his nostrils.
“Listen to me, Sasha,” he said. “You can do it alone. But it’s going to be so much harder.”
She didn’t answer. She was looking at the sun. Ted looked, too, staring through the window at the riot of dusty color. Turner, he thought. O’Keeffe. Paul Klee.
On another day more than twenty years after this one, after Sasha had gone to college and settled in New York; after she’d reconnected on Facebook with her college boyfriend and married late (when Beth had nearly given up hope) and had two children, one of whom was slightly autistic; when she was like anyone, with a life that worried and electrified and overwhelmed her, Ted, long divorced—a grandfather—would visit Sasha at home in the California desert. He would step through a living room strewn with the flotsam of her young kids and watch the western sun blaze through a sliding glass door. And for an instant he would remember Naples: sitting with Sasha in her tiny room; the jolt of surprise and delight he’d felt when the sun finally dropped into the center of her window and was captured inside her circle of wire.