Against the Day (140 page)

   
“A
bit elegant. Are we celebrating something?”

   
“You’ll
see.”

When
they were left alone, she said, “Now, about this frightfully irregular sexual
life of yours, Cyprian—whatever are we to do?”

Aware
of exceeding even the most indulgent of limits to selfpity, “I should mention
I’ve been a catamite these last few years. Someone whose pleasure has never
really mattered. Least of all to me.”

“Imagine
that it does now.” Beneath the virginal tablecloth, she had lifted her foot,
her shapely foot in its closely laced winecordovan boot, the tip of whose toe
she now placed unambiguously against his penis. To his bewilderment, that
hitherto disrespected member grew swiftly attentive. “Now,” beginning
rhythmically to press and release, “tell me how this feels.” But he could not
trust himself to speak, only smile reluctantly and shake his head— yet in
another moment he had “spent,” almost painfully, in his trousers, rattling the
coffee service and the pastry plates and soaking the tablecloth extensively
with coffee in his efforts to avoid notice. Around them the restaurant went its
imperturbable way. “There now.”

   
“Yashmeen—”

   
“Your
first time with a woman, if I’m not mistaken.”

   
“I—hm?
what are you—we
. . .
didn’t. .
.”

   
“Didn’t
we.”

   
“I
meant that if we ever really—”

   
“ ‘
If’? ‘Really’? Cyprian, I can smell
what happened.”

Summoned to Venice at last
, Cyprian, with time on the train to think, kept reminding
himself that it had not, after all, been the sort of thing one ought to be
taking too romantically, indeed how fatal a mistake it would be to do so. As it
turned out, however, this was too much to expect of Derrick Theign, who,
ordinarily a bit more taciturn, now flew without warning into hightessitura
dismay, the moment Cyprian arrived at the
pensione
in Santa Croce loudly
ejecting what would soon amount to gallons of mucus and saliva, smearing and
setting askew his spectacles, chucking about household objects, some of them
fragile and even expensive, destroying items of Murano glass, slamming doors,
windows, shutters, briefcases, potlids, whatever was slammable and handy. Later
in the day, as if having in all this percussion belatedly heard its cue, the
bora arrived, bringing from every dismal pocket of illfortune and mental
distress upwind of here its imperatives of mortal flaccidity and blue
surrender. The neighbors, who didn’t usually complain, being not above a spot
of drama themselves from time to time, did complain now, and some quite
aggrievedly, too. The wind racketed through every loose tile and unsecured
shutter.

“A sweetheart. A bloody
sweetheart
for
God’s
sake, I could vomit. I
shall
vomit. Haven’t you a
cherished photograph of the beloved, which I might perhaps vomit
on?
Have
you any idea of how
sodding
completely
you have just destroyed
years
of work, you
ignorant, fat, illdressed—”

“One way to look at it, of course,
Derrick, but objectively one can’t say she’s really a ‘sweetheart’—”

   
“Nance!
Pouffe! Sod!”

Yet
Theign, for all his apparent loss of impulsecontrol, was careful to refrain
from bodily violence, which Cyprian in any case now, curiously, found himself
not as eager for as he once might have been.

Signor
Giambolognese from downstairs had his head in the door.
“
Ma signori, um po’ di moderazione, per piacere
. . . .
”

“Moderation! You’re Italian! What do you people bloody know
about moderation?”

Later,
when Theign was calmer, or maybe only too tired to scream, the discussion
resumed.
“ ‘
Help her.’ You’ve the sheer
sodomitical
side
to ask that of me.”

   
“Strictly
a business arrangement, of course.”

   
“That
might take some thought.” Theign threw his eyebrows into engagement, usually
not a hopeful sign. “What can you pay me with? What perverse coin? The bloom’s
been off your rosebud for quite some time—
if
I still wanted it, which I’m not at all sure I do, why, I’d just
take it, wouldn’t I. The price of rescuing your maiden from these Austrian
beasts one would think you’d have learned something about by now might be higher
than you want to pay—it could even mean being sent someplace that would
make the Gobi seem like Earl’s Court on a Bank Holiday—oh yes we’ve rooms
full of files on all these mapless horrors—which chiefly exist, in fact,
to send you miserable lot out into, in the sure and certain hope we’ll never
have to set eyes on you again. Are you quite resolved that’s what you want?
What do you imagine you’d be ‘saving’ her for anyway? beyond the next willy
down the queue, or willies, Turkish more than likely, she’d welcome the change
in size I’m sure.”

   
“Derrick.
You want me to assault you.”

   
“How
intuitive. Enough to know better than to try, one hopes.”

   
“Well.
If this isn’t just as manly as it gets.”

hen Foley Walker returned from
Göttingen, he and Scarsdale Vibe met at an outdoor restaurant in the foothills
of the Doloites near a river in clamorous descent, the surroundings filled with
an innocent light reflected not from Alpine snows but from manmade structures
of some antiquity.

Scarsdale and Foley had agreed to
delude themselves that in this sunspattered atrium they had found temporary
refuge from the murderous fields of capitalist endeavor, no artifact within
miles of here younger than a thousand years, marble hands in flowing gestures
conversing among themselves as if having only just emerged from their realm of
calcium gravity into this trellised repose
.
. . .
The table between them offering fontina, risotto with white
truffles, veal and mushroom stew
. . .
bottles
of Prosecco waiting in beds of chipped ice packed down from the Alps. Girls in
striped headscarves and flowing skirts hovered thoughtfully just offstage.
Other customers had been discreetly seated out of earshot.

   
“All
humming along in Germany, I take it.”

   
“The
Traverse kid did a skip.”

   
Scarsdale
stared at a truffle as if he were about to chastise it. “Where to?”

   
“Still
looking into that.”

“Nobody disappears unless he knows
something. What does he know, Foley?”

   
“Likely
that you paid to have his Pappy put out of the way.”

“Of course, but what happened to
‘we,’ Foley? You are still the ‘other’ Scarsdale Vibe, are you not?”

   
“I
must’ve meant that technically it was your money.”

“You are a full partner, Foley. You
see the same set of books I do. The mixing of funds is a mystery deep as death,
and if you like we can observe a minute of silence to contemplate that, but
don’t be disingenuous with me.”

Foley took out a huge jackknife,
opened it and began to pick his teeth, Arkansas style, as he had learned to in
the war.

   
“How
long do you think he’s known?” Scarsdale kept on.

“Well. . .” Foley pretended to think
about it and finally shrugged. “Would that matter?”

   
“If
he took
our
money, all the time knowing what he knew?”

   
“You
mean he’d owe us the money?”

   
“Did
he catch sight of you when you were there, at Göttingen?”

   
“Mmmnh
. . .
I’m not sure.”

“
Damn,
Foley.” Servinggirls withdrew into
the pale archways, solemnly waiting for a better moment to approach.

   
“What?”

   
“He
saw you—he knows we’re onto him.”

“By now he’s likely slipped into the
depths, wherever lost souls go, so what’s it matter?”

   
“Your
personal guarantee. Could I have it in writing?”

Up here in north Italy
, as in France one might buy ordinary village wine hoping to find a few
cases of overrun from a great vineyard nearby, Vibe’s theory was to buy all the
schoolofSquarciones he could put his hands on in the hopes that someplace in
there might be an unattributed Mantegna somebody had overlooked. It was the
current fashion to disrespect the painting skills of the famed Paduan collector
and impresario himself, so any actual Squarciones kicking around, including
embroideries and tapestries (for he had begun his working life as a tailor),
would be going for a song. In fact, Scarsdale had already picked up a minor
angel just by singing “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away” to a sacristan who
might have been insane. Well, actually, he had Foley sing it. “But I can’t
carry a tune in a bucket,” Foley pointed out, “and I don’t know the words.”

   
“Candlelight,
sycamores, you’ll pick it up.”

Scarsdale
had never been reluctant to hand out tasks to Foley that were embarrassing at
best and often competitive with some of Foley’s old Civil War nightmares.
Though they betrayed some mysterious flaw in the industrialist’s selfregard
which someday could prove worrisome, these exercises in personal tyranny
happened on average no more than once or twice a year, and

Foley had been able so far to live
with them. But on this European excursion, the humiliation rate seemed to have
picked up a notch—in fact not a day went by that Foley didn’t find
himself carrying out some chore better left to a performing monkey, and it was
beginning to irritate him some.

At the moment they were out in the
Lagoon among the Lost Lands, Scarsdale underwater and Foley up in a little
steam
caorlina
fitted for diving. The millionaire, rigged out in rubber
hoses and brass helmet, was down inspecting a mural, preserved for centuries
beneath the waves by a varnishing technique now lost to history, attributed
(dubiously) to Marco Zoppo, and known informally as
The Sack of Rome.
Seen
through the brilliant noontide illumination, approached with the dreamy
smoothness of a marine predator, the depiction seemed almost threedimensional,
as with Mantegna at his most persuasive. It was of course not just Rome, it was
the World, and the World’s end. Haruspices dressed like Renaissance clergy
cowered beneath and shook fists at a sky turbulent with storm, faces agonized
through the steam rising from vivid red entrails. Merchants were strung by one
foot upside down from the masts of their ships, horses of fleeing and terrified
nobility turned their heads calmly on necks supple as serpents to bite their
riders. Peasants could be seen urinating on their superiors. Enormous embattled
hosts, armor highlighted a millionfold, were struck by a radiance from beyond
the scene’s upper edge, from a breach in the night sky, venting light, light
with weight, in percussive descent precisely upon each member of all these
armies of the known world, the ranks flowing beyond exhaustion of sight, into
shadow. The hills of the ancient metropolis steepened and ascended until they
were desolate as Alps. Scarsdale was no aesthete, the Cassily Adam rendition of
Little Big Horn was fine enough art for him, but he could see right away
without the help of hired expertise that this was what you’d call a true
masterpiece, and he’d be very surprised indeed if somebody hadn’t already sold
reproductions of it to some Italian beer company to use in local saloons over
here.