The Marble Quilt (24 page)

Not necessarily things I need, or want, to know.

Other questions merely perplex me, add to the air of confusion and hopelessness that surrounds the investigation.

“When you visited him in his apartment, did he ever ask you to take off your shoes?”

“Did he ever make reference to someone called Ludovico?”

“Do you know if he had friends on Borgo Sant'Angelo?”

“No,” I answer. Repeatedly, no.

They've assured me, from the very start, that I'm not a suspect. After all, I have my alibi. When Tom was murdered, I was nowhere near his apartment; I was with some American businessmen, giving them a tour of the Vatican museum.

Still, alibis can be fabricated. Friends will lie.

“Did he ever mention an article he was writing about the floors at San Clemente?”

Actually, the article about the floors at San Clemente he did mention. It was part of his new life, his Italian life, in which I played, at best, a marginal role. In this life Tom taught English, and wrote the occasional travel piece, and devoted much of his time to exploring some of the more arcane corners of Roman history; thus his fascination with church
floors, in which hand-cut pieces of marble—hexagons and triangles, circles and diamonds and teardrops—were arranged into precise geometries. Speckled deep red porphyry, green
serpentino
, butterscotch-colored
giallo antico
: “like the squares of a quilt,” he once told me. “Only instead of cloth, the quilt is made of marble. A marble quilt.”

“Not only San Clemente,” I tell the
maresciallo
. “Also Santa Maria in Cosmedin, and San Giovanni in Laterano, and Santa Maria Maggiore.”

His deputy types; reads. “The professor spoke to me of an article he was writing about the floors of Roman churches.”

“He had been living in Rome for three years, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Obviously your Italian is fluent.”

“It's my job. I'm an interpreter.”

“Of course. My compliments. In your view—that is, speaking as an authority on language—did the professor speak a good Italian?”

“Not bad,” I say, “considering that he only started studying once he arrived here.”

“Yet his mother was from Italy.”

“She was born in Naples.”

“Actually in Caserta. But that is very close to Naples. In your view, was the professor's Italian sufficiently fluent that he would never have misunderstood what another person was telling him?”

“Misunderstood?”

“That is to say, might he have misunderstood what another person said to him, if the
other person were speaking Italian?”

“He might have.”

The
maresciallo
cracks his knuckles. Then he removes his ring and polishes it with his shirtsleeve. Then he takes a cigarette from a pack lying open on the desk. “Do you smoke?”

“No, thank you.”

He lights the cigarette.

“How often do you come to Rome?”

“Two or three times a year.”

“For work?”

“Usually. But sometimes just for pleasure.”

“Did you ever come specifically to visit the professor?”

“A few times.”

“And the last time?”

“I was working.”

“Where were you working?”

“PepsiCo was hosting a conference for its European executives.”

“Why didn't you stay with the professor? You did on other occasions.”

“There was no need. A hotel room was provided for me.”

“And if a hotel room hadn't been provided for you?”

“I might have stayed with Tom. But probably not.”

“Why not?”

“Well, his apartment was very far out from where I was working. Also, when you
used to live with someone—when for years you shared a bed with someone—it can feel awkward, sleeping on the living room sofa. It can feel … wrong.”

His deputy—the one sitting on the edge of the desk—smiles in sympathy. Clearly he knows of what I speak.

“How long did you live with the professor?”

“We lived together for ten years, five years ago.”

“In San Francisco?”

“Yes.”

“And now you live in Düsseldorf.”

“Yes.”

He opens a folder; examines what appears to be a list of questions; writes a note to himself.

“When you did stay with the professor—on the sofa—did he ever make advances toward you?”

“Good heavens, no! We were well beyond that.”

“Did he ever bring someone home to share his bed?”

“Of course not! Tom didn't do that sort of thing.”

The
maresciallo
raises his eyebrows. I wince.

“What I mean,” I correct, “is that he never
admitted
to doing that sort of thing. Certainly he would never have brought anyone home when he had a friend staying. He claimed to live like a monk.”

The deputy at the computer types; reads, “When I came to Rome, it was usually for work, in which case I stayed at a hotel. When I came for pleasure, I sometimes stayed
with the professor, which made me uncomfortable as a consequence of our having once lived together, in San Francisco. The professor never made advances toward me, however, nor was I concerned that he might bring someone home to share his bed, because he never admitted to doing that sort of thing, and in my opinion, would never have done that sort of thing when he had a friend visiting. He told me he lived like a monk.”

“Change the last line,” the
maresciallo
says. “I don't like ‘He told me.' Change it to ‘He claimed.'”

“He claimed to live like a monk,” the deputy repeats.

I wonder if in America cops would ever be so fastidious about their prose style.

Oh, what a nasty business an autopsy must be! Not that there was ever a worry about preserving “the integrity of the body,” or any of that New Agey nonsense we used to hear in San Francisco—not in this case, since by the time the police broke down the door and found it, Tom's body had very little in the way of integrity left. He was tied to the kitchen table. His skull had been smashed in. He had been rotting for seven days.

By then, of course, I was back in Düsseldorf. During the last forty-eight hours before my flight, I must have called him a dozen times. And a dozen more times from Düsseldorf. Always his answering machine picked up. The
carabinieri
listened to the messages, then got my number out of his Filofax. They were very nice. They never said I
had
to come back to Rome—only that if I were willing to, it would be a great help to their investigation. Otherwise the German police could interview me by proxy.

Naturally I agreed to come back.

Tom's San Francisco friends, those couples whose children he had babysat and whose dinner parties he had catered, started calling me. Over the phone they spoke cautiously of the need to “protect Tom's reputation.” Obviously they'd seen the newspaper articles, the ones in which his Rome friends, the correspondents, made pretty obvious what everyone took for granted anyway: that he had been done in by a hustler, some Romanian or Albanian he'd picked up at the station and brought home. Sex, then a beating, or perhaps sex that included a beating, followed by a blunt object smashed against his skull. (Was it perhaps the obelisk of
semesanto
, the red brecciated with chunks of white, like pieces of fat in a salami?)

And then, somewhere in those hours, the red wine. And the shoes. And the beans.

Did I mention that his nose had been broken—
before
he was killed?

With his San Francisco friends, it wasn't a question of what they themselves believed; it was a question of what they wanted other people to believe: a matter, it seemed, less of protecting Tom's reputation than their own. After all, they had trusted him with their children. To have it revealed that Tom had been conning them the whole time, that in truth he was no different from any other faggot—this would have been too embarrassing. So they decided to take the line that the police and the journalists were wrong; worse, that they were homophobic, to assume that just because Tom had been beaten and bludgeoned to death, his killer had to be some lowlife he'd dragged in off the street. “Maybe those others,” his friend Gina told me over the phone, referring to the twenty-two homosexual men who have been murdered in Rome over the last decade, “but not Tom.” To Gina, the important thing seemed to be that his name never be added to that statistic; that the
number remain twenty-two.

“It had to be something else. What if he surprised a burglar?”

“But nothing was taken.”

“Or maybe it was someone he was having an affair with. A lover.”

So was it better to have been murdered by a lover, I wondered, by someone you trusted, than by an immigrant you had picked up in the men's room at the train station?

That mysterious men's room, where the urinals were divided by glass partitions—glass, of all things.

Tom told me that. Not that he'd ever been there himself, he added: it was only from his friend Pepe, who frequented such places, that he garnered this intelligence. Pepe, according to Tom, spent much of his time in the park on the Monte Caprino. That kind of park. Only once had Tom accompanied him there, under duress, after a boring lunch party. He noticed the plants, not the loiterers. “Oh, that's spleenwort—
asplenium filicinophyta
!” he told Pepe. “Wait here while I go home and get my Japanese pruning shears.” And Pepe waited, and Tom went home, and came back with his Japanese pruning shears. For a cutting.

Soon a rumor began to circulate in San Francisco that he had been having an affair with a fellow English teacher, and that very likely it was this teacher who had murdered him. A lover's quarrel.

If this was true, I could well understand the teacher's motives. Back when I lived with Tom, I too found myself tempted, on more than one occasion, to pick up a blunt object; to smash in his skull; to break his nose.

Oh, he could be such a hypocrite! And he met a hypocrite's just end. Like the
hypochondriac who finally gets something fatal. In the angry weeks right after I heard the news, when Gina and her husband, Tony, and all sorts of other people were calling every night to talk about “damage control” (they actually used that phrase), a few times—just to horrify them—I said, “Come on, folks. What do you really think? Don't you really think he got what he deserved?”

A few months before he died, I went back to San Francisco. I went to look at the house we used to own together. High on a San Francisco hilltop, the fog woolly, rolling across the sky in grand, sluggish banks. And this was appropriate, because the street on which we had lived was called Wool Street.

Back then, the house was yellow. Now it was white. Pristine. There were Jaguars and Acuras and Jeeps parked along the curb: not the battered pickup trucks and Volkswagen Beetles of our day. For when we lived there, Bernal Heights was a run-down neighborhood, even a bad neighborhood. At that point, of course, I couldn't have afforded in a million years to buy back our old home. Now that San Francisco was the dot-com capital of the world, even a funny, creaky little house like ours, with no backyard and a crumbling foundation, went for $700,000 or $800,000. Or more.

A strange sensation, to be priced out of a place you once thought of as yours. But then again, one of the lessons of marble—one of the lessons Tom taught me—is that ownership of any kind is a dream.

Were any of them still around, our old neighbors? Walking across the street, I peered at a letterbox: LOPEZ, it said. But it should have said, COOPER.

Where was Dominic Cooper, whom I barely knew, but who sometimes waved to me,
walking past with his dog? An Old English sheepdog, the fur on her head pulled back into a topknot so that it wouldn't get into her eyes.

Dead, I supposed. Most of them were, our neighbors, either because, a dozen years ago, they were already old, or because they were faggots.

Bad faggots.

Tom and I were not bad faggots, so we remained alive. For the moment.

Tom was the good faggot. He wrote children's books that never got published. (Not getting them published—this was an essential part of being the good faggot.) He rolled his own pasta, and volunteered at an AIDS hospice, and never went to any of the bars or sex clubs for which San Francisco was infamous—oh no! Instead he lived with me. We had matching gold rings. We told people we'd met at a party in New York, when really I'd seen his dick before I ever saw his face, emerging inquisitively from under the partition between two stalls in the men's room at Bloomingdale's.

Most of Tom's friends were young marrieds. They trusted their children with him. Not only that, they made a fuss over how much they trusted their children with him. “Tom's so good with kids!” they'd say. “He's Justin/Samuel/Max's favorite babysitter. When we go away, Justin/Samuel/Max
loves
spending the weekend with Tom.”

In other words, not a child molester. To leave their little boys with Tom was to make a sally into that favorite West Coast game of More Liberal Than Thou. It was to flaunt their tolerance in the same way that a few years later, when they got rich, they would flaunt their immunity to greed. Not BMWs, not Manolo Blahnik pumps. Instead Birkenstocks, SUVs, and several million in stock options.

It goes without saying that they never asked Tom to babysit their
daughters
. What
would have been the point of that?

He was godfather to something like eleven little boys, at least three of whom were named after him.

And now all those Justins and Samuels and Maxes—yes, and Toms—they must be teenagers. I wonder if they remember the June mornings when he would take them to watch the Gay Pride Parade. Hoist them onto his shoulders. Their parents alongside, smiling at the drag queens done up as Carol Burnett or Debbie Reynolds.