When he uttered those words she took his implication whole; she went back to her chores with the conviction that Reverend Tanner had made a bargain with her, that all she need do was to remain his wife’s closest helper, her devotee, her constant friend, and then, if she must, let him know what trouble might lie ahead. She knew he meant Hector, there could be no one else, it was only he who was spending more time with her since she had grown infirm.
She kept vigilant of their movements whenever Reverend Tanner spent a night away, but it wasn’t only for him. One night she tried to watch them but they extinguished the oil lamps and the only thing she could do was listen. There was hardly any sound to start, not even any shifting or creaking from his cot, just the barest rustle of clothing, the press of lips, the scantest murmurs, and then, finally, the breathing. His breaths came first, very low, and then hers as if it were difficult, as though a patch of thick gauze were covering her mouth. Their rhythm ticked loose and various until suddenly it unjumbled, clicked in. All the while June, tightly crouched in the peerless dark between the wall and a kerosene barrel, was suppressing her own breath, her lungs aching for release, the gleaming painting of their lovemaking begun to screen in her mind. Strangely only her belly felt alive, this yawning breaking emptiness that pushed low and hot while the rest of her went heavy, dead, and it was only when they were finally done and surely fallen asleep that she dared move, her hands and feet tingling and shaking enough that she had to crawl on her elbows from the storeroom.
The following day, having returned to the orphanage, Reverend Tanner sat down next to her during the evening meal. June sat alone now, having agreed not to monopolize Sylvie’s company. She had completely forgotten about her conversation with Tanner on awaking that morning, her throat parched, her head fogged and aching, as if, like Hector, she had been drinking all night.
“How goes it, June? Is everything fine?” he asked. Sylvie was at a far table eating with the younger children. Hector was not present, being likely out in the field.
She could merely nod, not yet ready for his questioning.
“You don’t seem terribly certain,” he said, though almost jocularly, as though he didn’t in fact wish to hear anything else.
Her memory of the previous night was a stilled curtain but its music now rose up in her chest and brought the skin of her neck to life, her cheeks feeling as though they were suddenly flushed. She thought Tanner would take her aside for an interrogation but all he did was brood a moment with a half-expectant, half-wary gaze and say brightly, “Well, I must be going. Good day, June.”
For days afterward she tried to determine what to do. All her considerations foretold only trouble if they should continue, and yet she found herself hoping for Reverend Tanner to spend an evening away again. It was like the hunger she didn’t suffer anymore, this grave sensation so resident that it took on its own life, its own existence, was the body within her body that now drew all her energies. At fourteen her figure was at last changing, after being stunted during the war; since living at the orphanage she’d put on more than eight kilos, mostly on her thighs and hips and on her chest, which the older boys glanced at, but warily, fearing she might catch them and take it as a provocation to fight. She noticed this and sometimes she’d sit back wherever she was and make a show of closing her eyes, let them look at her for as long as they wanted. She might even press her shoulders back, to accentuate the new fullness. Her doing so wasn’t in vanity or pride, or from the slightest interest in any of them; it was pure experimentation, a trial to determine how it felt to be an object of desire, and she found that the more she felt their stares the more her own desire fired, trebled, eventually took on its own reason.
So she stayed silent when in the ensuing weeks Tanner departed on his various trips, and waited for Sylvie to emerge from her cottage in the middle of the night. Whenever she and Hector let the oil lamp burn, June could see them glide over each other with a patience and tenderness that was the opposite of the jerky, horrid couplings she’d had to witness during the war. And though she was startled by the broad, taut ropes of his body, her eye kept resting upon Sylvie’s calf, her knee, the way her belly would grow shallow under his kisses and dip far enough below the spur of her hip that she appeared starved herself. She had the loveliest glow, the light seemed to stream from her eyes, from her half-opened mouth; nor did the illumination dissipate until well after they were done, when June saw her open a small black kit and remove a needle from its velvet-lined well. Hector did not take it himself but he helped her, binding her calf with the rubber cord and tapping her heel and then shooting her with the medicine that made her shiver and then go slack, turn a ghostly bone-blue.
When Reverend Tanner was present June would sometimes stay late with Sylvie in the back room. He allowed it enough times that after a while her presence after the generator went out became almost customary. They would all be reading, Sylvie and June in the narrow bed, Tanner in his own out in the front sitting room. He always retired earlier than they, and they took turns whisper-reading aloud by the oil lamp books from the army base library, children’s books but also others that Sylvie had chosen for her,
Little Women
and
Great Expectations
and
The Good Earth
. Sometimes June would ask Sylvie to read
A Memory of Solferino
to her and she’d refuse at first but always eventually yield, the passages entering them, June thought, with both pain and bliss like the medicine in the kit, and making them cling more tightly to each other.
One night June fell asleep there, and when morning came she awoke to find herself wearing one of Sylvie’s nightgowns and tucked in the spoon of her slumbering body. She carefully turned into her and took in the warm, round scent of her hair, the sour-sweeter one of her neck, and masked her eyes in the scant damp of her nightgown; then on succeeding nights she would pretend to fall asleep and then watch Sylvie slip outside to the chair in back with her kit, feel her when she returned, her weight seeming to have doubled as she fell against June’s chest. It was then that June waited, sometimes hours, for the measure between Sylvie’s breaths to lengthen, for her to descend further into deepest sleep. This happened almost nightly: she would turn, lie on her back. Her lips would soften and ease. If there was starlight or moonlight her face and long throat gleamed with its luminance, this woman an ashen statue, only half alive. Here was the only beauty in the world. And then one night June could not help herself; she pulled back the blanket as if it were the frail leaf of an antique book. Her hands crept to Sylvie’s throat, where her nightgown opened, and undid the mother-of-pearl buttons that ran down to the hem; she took them one by one, the near half of the nightgown falling away, exposing the whole length of Sylvie now to the cold night air. June touched the belly, grazed the lowest rib, the small, flattish breast no fuller than one of her own. The nipple pushed up between her fingers, as dense as clay, and without knowing what she was doing she put her mouth over it, closing her eyes. She couldn’t breathe again, her heart as if collapsed in her chest, this tiny leaden node, poised for Sylvie to protest, to stir. But she did not. Nor did she when June’s hand slid down and nestled in the burning cup of her long legs, not moving, nor stirring, neither wanting the other to wake.
FOURTEEN
IN SIENA THEY HAD to share quarters again, as there were only six guest rooms in the
residenza
, a converted townhouse looking out over a tiny cobble stone piazza. Like everything else Hector had seen in this country it was old, beautiful, more than slightly decrepit, its façade saturated in the exact color (at least in his memory) of his mother’s light-brown eyes, this burnished, timeless wood. But the constant, nearly inescapable sighting of exquisite landscapes and antique architecture was wearing on him. Maybe he was imprinted too deeply by modest Ilion, or war-ravaged Seoul, or forgettable, low-slung towns like Tacoma and Fort Lee and then the many other crumbling, forlorn places he’d drifted through in between, and after these few days he felt that he was being overwhelmed, that his eyes hurt. The feeling that he should be comforted and uplifted by the beauty only made him feel more misplaced than ever, misguided, lost in a museum of someone else’s life.
Their room was very large, a half-floor suite with high coffered ceilings and marble-tile floors and rich draperies and decorated with old rugs and paintings. The furniture, June had commented, was top quality. Hector had never seen such a place, much less stayed in one. The bath had a tub carved from a single block of marble and the fixtures were burnished brass and the bath and bed linens had been freshly starched and ironed, the crisp hand of their fabric pressed to a high sheen. Vases of sunflowers were set on either side of the single king-sized bed (he would sleep on the red velvet sofa), its baronial walnut headboard carved with a scene from the Palio di Siena, the famous horse race held in the main plaza, a tight phalanx of charging horses and riders thundering to the finish, the town’s huge clock tower serving as the background. The Palio was held in July and August, but in some years (like this one) there was also a special race in September; this was to be run tomorrow. He had parked their car in a lot on the northern end of the old city walls and taken a taxi toward the center. The only reason they were able to get a room at all was an unexpected departure due to illness by a Swiss couple at one of the most expensive lodgings in town, which the driver knew of because he’d driven the couple less than an hour earlier out to their parked car. The cabdriver, named Bruno, was a brightly garrulous young man who spoke a distinctive English and told them all about the “garish” and “anomalous” Palio tomorrow, about the history of the race and the
contrade
, groups from different wards of the city, each of which backed a horse. After he delivered them to the hotel and spoke to the owner (they would pay only twice the printed rate, normally tripled because of the race), Hector gave him fifty dollars and explained he was looking for someone and asked him to come back in an hour, to be their translator and guide.
June had planned to accompany them after a quick bath. But when she was done she called weakly for him and he had to help her once again from the tub, this time blotting her wet skin and hair with the towel. She wavered there before him like a terribly sick child, barely able to stand upright. She was partly revived by the warm water but perhaps altered, too, and she spoke with a breathy delirium about how deeply grateful she was to him, saying again that her lawyer would ensure he was well compensated. She wrapped her arms around his neck and fell into him in her full nakedness and murmured that he could do whatever he wished to her, kissing his ear, his neck. He could feel the cling of her damp legs about his thigh and although he could not in a lifetime accede to so wrong an invitation, the barest instinctual shiver crept up from his groin to his chest, momentarily rousing him before a flood of shame clogged his throat. She collapsed into him and he wrapped her in a robe and helped her to the bed. She said she would just rest for a moment, but after lying down she asked him for a shot of morphine. He opened her kit and prepared the shot, unable to quell the thought of doing the same for Sylvie Tanner, to numb and pleasure, too.
“Where are we, now?”
“In Siena.”
“Oh yes, yes. Will you go find Nicholas?”
“I’ll try.”
“Bring him back here soon,” she said, a waxy veneer dulling her eyes. “Very soon.”
He rolled her onto her side and injected her in her rump and she drifted off to sleep. It was easier for him to do it for her, of course, rather than watch her struggle with the vial and syringe, to twist and try to find a good spot. When he did it her breathing would quicken and she might even reach out and hold tightly to his shirt and then softly exhale with a certain ripe agony when he finally injected her. In her overly grateful euphoria she once said she loved him. He didn’t know how to answer.
Sometimes he may have jabbed harder than necessary, or in a spot that wasn’t fleshy enough, and she’d cry out sharply, gritting her teeth. He did so because a part of him was afraid of her, because he wanted to get away from her but couldn’t force himself to do so. But in guilty compensation he now gave her more of the drug, drawing down a few more lines on the syringe. She was no longer insisting she needed to keep her mind clear. What was left of her body was in charge of her and as such she somehow seemed a bit stronger, fuller, her cheeks not so drawn and wan; she was suddenly eating more, having a butter cookie along with the gelato she had him buy her every other hour or so, which was the only regular thing she consumed, save water; maybe it was all the sugar that was plumping her up, propping her. Earlier they had stopped at the big highway cafeteria and she’d had an anise cookie and lemonade, and she surprised him by rising from her chair like any healthy, sprightly woman and walking out to the car for the Italian phrasebook in order to ask the girl at the register what the best route would be to Lombardy, after leaving Siena. But her exertions had now left her like this, and when it was clear she would sleep for a while he drew closed the heavy draperies, the place as shrouded and hushed as a mausoleum.
He bathed and shaved and put on the last of the shirts she’d bought him, which was still in its clear plastic package. Everything else of his stunk. They had been traveling without a thought of doing wash and so he gathered their dirty clothes up into a canvas drawstring sack he found in the closet, rooting through her luggage and pulling out what was unfolded or dirty. Her things smelled only marginally better than his, the odor more of dampness and spoilage than body smells. Someone could easily argue that all of him had spoiled, even as his physique remained remarkably sound, that a special scan of his abstract being would show an unsettling result, revealing a soul neither bountiful nor spare but used up, right down to nothing. Of course Dora would not have said so about him, but he couldn’t help wondering during the long, silent hours in the car whether he had been fooling her and himself, whether she would have eventually seen him for what he was, agreed with June that he was a man who wanted to hide himself away forever. He wasn’t useless (as a gravedigger, a janitor, a driver, a nurse, now a laundry maid), but by any weighing of the present evidence-what one might have banked via family or friendship or love or self-purpose, not even counting the mistakes or transgressions or outright crimes-he was not a worthy man. It was as plain as his thirst. His heart felt smashed every time he pictured Dora, but if he was honest it soon revived with what he had to believe was a rush of liberty, if liberty degraded, this feeling that he was released once again from the onus of having to hope or dream.