No Place for an Angel (29 page)

In this way Irene in Siracusa turned from Barry to Mario and her full attention was his own. He could not miss the strength of it—that was what she knew. She scarcely spoke to him at all; she listened, watched, curved her vision to every chance motion of his hand, turn of his head, shift of his stance at a window—like a jungle plant, she devoured him silently within her soul. She did not tell him the one thought outside himself that obsessed her: that there wasn't enough time. She instead went wild with care to wall out the fact, to lock it up in the closet, having hit it on the head, and in its knocked-out state, she turned resolutely from it, pretended it wasn't even there, giving herself to him slowly with discrimination and deliberate quiet grace which said they had landed on an island nobody knew about and would never be found by anyone but each other.

Sometimes she lay silent, her limbs turned to beaten gold. What she thought was that it had happened now, the literal joining
of herself to Italy. Maybe it was Charles who had unconsciously picked out Mario for her; his praise of Mario had let her know that here was someone to admire; “the finest sort you'll find in Italy,” he had said. She would not have wanted less, or taken less, to quench herself with. The months before had been all waiting. She was only just now seeing it. Someone would arrive, she must have felt over and over; someone was coming. Who? And there he was, and not a stranger. Someone long known had quivered like the surface of water, muted and transformed into the figure of a lover. His fine almost transparent lids had lowered slightly, his cool quick eyes had grown hot, his humor, like the snapping off of a spectrum which had limned him publicly, had vanished utterly. So she meditated, and moved his sleeping hand and head to shift herself. She never hurried. As devoted as when she waited hand and foot on Barry, the modulation in her also seemed of the slightest nature that could be imagined, her pleasure itself hushed within her until the walls trembled and melted down before her eyes, and she died away with all those Athenians that she would never forget now and could practically, she assured herself, call by their first names.

“Perché ridi?” he asked her, waking up. “Why do you smile?”

“I don't know.”

She recalled Catania, the way he had hesitated before consenting to come with her. “Did you know then, or guess?”

“I thought perhaps, but then I thought this several times before with you and nothing resolved itself. Several times in Paris, I had this impression of you, that someday me or somebody like me would take you, in a quiet place.”

“And you never tried?”

“There were no quiet places.”

“But from the time I appeared, you foresaw—”

“Well, not quite. I thought maybe the artist—but then if he had been your lover you would not have wanted anyone with you. Don't tell me you are helpless, Irena.”

“What a little past we have to talk about.”

“How is that? I have known you as long as anyone in Italy.”

“As a wife, hostess.”

“But you are good, no? I could admire you, dissolve the clothes from you while taking soup.”

“If I remember all that, I have to remember getting your coat, seeing you leave the house without me.”

“I extend the past for you and you don't want it.”

“Only since Catania.”

“Many little rules.” He shook his head. “No, you knew what you were about. You brought me here. I foresaw . . . well, not for sure, but something. And now your rules will be no good. I haven't wished this for you. You will see change. I cannot spare you this—it has scared me for you.”

“I never tried stopping anything. Don't you change either?”

“Call it the same for both of us.” They fell into a long gravity of feeling and gave themselves to one change after another and each had to get a name and recognition and each fall away like a milestone behind while another took them on. It could not, Irene decided, continue. She felt dazed and crazy.

Gravely, after two days she offered to have a child for him. He shook his head, eyes brightening with tears. He could hardly lift his hand to touch her coarse hair. And she would have done it; he knew it and she knew it. The deep link forged, herself eclipsed, she slept the profoundest of all sleeps short of death, here at the mysterious dead center, the stillness of her life.

Barry Day now had nothing to do but try to shift to a cooler spot in the bed in his lonely pensione room, to turn his pillow, portion out his cigarettes, to make himself stop reading the magazines, books and newspapers Irene had brought because they were giving him a blinding headache and he would soon know them off by heart. He hobbled around the room a few more turns each day, leaned out the window on elbows that almost turned to stone, watched the whitewashed buildings in the sun, the dusking over of the port, the scarflike unfurling of the waves, came alive out of himself slowly but unmistakably to the distantly perceived rhythm of Irene and Mario, somewhere together.

When they appeared, usually with a few minutes of each other, their skin luminous with each other's presence and pressure, almost impalpable with the chiaroscuro of love, their lines merging into every surface, a throb of life passed out to him. Had he, all along, been just an excuse? He was a little bitter, a little doubtful; but who is going really to question life too closely, as long as life is what it unmistakably is? Certainly not Barry, who had just come too close to losing it. He took what came, from them as he would have from anybody, except Linell McIntosh. He never criticized. They had a fine abundance he would not like to
be caught quarreling with; by having him as an excuse they just missed the awful expertness they might have had if it had all been done on purpose. They owe it all to me, damn them, he thought. He reminded Irene when she appeared that she had forgotten his cigarettes, and off went Mario to get them. (Does somebody have to think of Charles? Does it have to be me?) He heard Irene, just outside, telling the padrona what to ask the restaurant to send him. He tried to think exclusively of food, for he was hungry now almost hourly and it should have been easy to do nothing but dream up menus, but instead his mind drifted to the two of them, their love glowing and flaring about the streets of this unlikely city. Where did it begin? Out among the ruins, he guessed. A classic place. Had Mario just said something about Greek poetry, had Irene turned her ankle on some broken steps, had she gone to sleep in the sun, been chased by a goat, frightened by a gypsy? More likely nothing had seemed helpless about her at all; she had probably just seduced him, or maybe they had turned, kissed and liked it. But why bring Mario down there at all if she hadn't realized—? Here Barrry refused to go further.

He stopped and began to draw sketches in his mind, for the sensuous delight of imagining Irene deep in her rapture, alone with Mario on the brink of a pool way off in a silent wood, might have driven Rubens crazy, or so it amused Barry to reflect. Golden light dripped through the painting. Mario's back and thigh were a white relief, contrasting with the dark of the foliage. Barry had been too sick when he arrived to notice if there was a wood or a garden within fifty miles of Siracusa, but he counted on Irene to inform herself and find it, if it existed. She was a perpetual tourist, he thought, and by God she was going to have it all, to the last drop.

She came back in and turned his pillow for him. She had moved into the good hotel, she told him, because now that he was better she was not needed here and it was cooler over there. “But don't tell Charles,” she warned him. “He might wonder about Mario or something crazy like that.” She was smoothing her hair at the mirror. Her radiance cross-stitched to him out of the reflection.

“Okay,” he said. “You chose to stay with whoever had ten stitches in his knee.”

She drew on lipstick, hardly listening. He guessed she would have admitted everything outright if he had asked her.

“Maybe we'll never leave,” said Barry lazily, even his thoughts going in time to the idle flap of the oyster-colored curtain in the port breeze, his vision permanently snared in the slow unscrolling of waves on the shore. “Had you thought of that?”

She fitted the lipstick together. “I don't think at all. About anything.”

Some weeks before, panicky, alone, half-dead with infection, his head flaming, he had closed hot eyes from hanging up the phone to Rome, where nobody had answered it, dizzily counted out lire for the gettoni to a clerk whose hands did not wish to touch them, and who turned away from him and whatever might be the matter with him, leaving him to stumble, blunder out into the street, clutching at every wall, jerky with fever—and had come to the very end of Italy. He had had the irony, in this extremity, to think: Will it vanish, too? He aimed twice at the pensione bell and missed it, finally hearing the jangle inside and the footsteps, like a last human hope. (She had threatened twice to throw him out on the street, fever and all.) He had also wondered, waiting for the door to open and quite possibly slam in his face, Will I ever leave here, ever?

Now a real change had come about: to Barry it was more profound than the inevitable fact that Irene and Mario had become lovers. It had happened to all of them, the three of them, and he was as much a part of it as they. It had happened while the two of them made love and while he lay mending, watching their faces when he could and when he couldn't watching the curtains, the sun, the shore and the sea. Siracusa. It was a refuge, the place that Linell McIntosh never got to. It felt like home.

Their love, if it had any chance to be more profound than a hit-and-miss encounter some place, any place, some time, any time, had far more to do with him than they knew. It had come out of the black blood, the curdled corruption that had poured from his wound, had sprung out fresh-fleshed and sensual as a bold flower. He believed that it lived on in his presence; even though they might be thinking (even saying) they wished he was at the bottom of the sea, he thought he had to do with the strength of its blooming, the whole day through. And the whole night, too, God knows, he thought, with a long exhausted sigh. He slept, sinking in upon his soul.

Then Charles came, to take them home.

Irene saw him first, and was thunderstruck. She was trailing back to the hotel after breakfast in a café. She was alone, not hastening, keeping to the rhythm she had chosen from the first, though Mario had just said what he had had to: “We can't stay here forever; nobody can do that.” She had not replied, but had carried it off alone, out of the hotel, to eat by herself and let his words soak in. Now she was returning along the esplanade and there was Charles, as though he had heard it too.

He was sitting on a bench, turned sideways to the water of the small harbor, facing directly toward her, though he had not yet seen her. He seemed taller than it was possible for anybody to be—Mario was scarcely taller than she. His long neck was stiff and high, his lip harshly straight, his bald brow creased with dissatisfaction and sun-glare. By some trick of perspective his contentious head cleared even the masts of the freighters anchored out in the harbor. She wondered if it might have been sighted in Africa. Her thought flashed to Mario, but there she was, with a river's width of bare distance between her and any point of escaping unseen. Irene herself was no small object, and when she moved the direction was usually forward. She advanced on numb feet and saw in the corner of her eye, just a short distance away, coming from the opposite direction, a quick urgent figure hastening down the steps that dropped down toward the esplanade. She knew it was Mario, but she could not look, warn, advise.