Four

 

Beneath the Pincio a pale mannequin bends

Under the leaden burden of green eyelids,

Proposes poses patiently and spends

Her last lire on a pack of gum.

Atop the dum-dee-dum Janiculum—

It was no use. I had been working on the poem for three mornings and I had only got through the easiest of Rome’s hills. Even if I managed to do the Janiculum today, there would still be the Palatine, the Capitoline, the Esquiline, the Quirinal, the Viminal—impossible. An opening paragraph of a short story, one stanza of one poem, and the setting for a play. Not enough. If only I knew how they were supposed to end; if only I knew what I wanted to say. I was a failure.

I snapped closed my notebook and looked across the piazza at the vivacious fountain. Young men in lean trousers and pointed shoes sat on the rim smoking while children played in the street. At least an hour more before I could begin picking a trattoria for lunch; too late to do a museum. Another morning shot trying to write, trying to be somebody. I might as well have gone to Pompeii with Frank’s Academy friends the Ericksons or stayed in Spain. The days were passing me by and I was closer to broke than to a solution. As I washed down my pink pill with my espresso, I wondered if I should see another doctor. Was the fuzz on my face spreading? I felt it with my finger. Insufficient ovulation—when would my treacherous body stop playing tricks on me?

I finished my espresso, left a tip on the table, and put out my cigarette before crossing the piazza to the shady side. In Italy nice women don’t smoke in the street. In Spain I had ignored the customs, laughing when Manolo warned me I could be arrested for kissing in the street. But I had had a man to protect me then; now I was no longer up to it. My nerves were in such a state that I needed all my energy just to survive the ordinary indignities of walking alone; I wasn’t going to ask for trouble over a lousy cigarette. When in Rome … But of course it wasn’t just Rome; it was everywhere. Everywhere, harassed by day, afraid by night. Why? Eyes to the ground, I passed the young men smoking on the fountain’s rim and followed the ancient paving stones back to my hotel, self-conscious of every step. I stuck out all over.

I knew it was supposed to be flattering to be hissed at, but it was not. At best—when I felt good about myself—it was annoying, like the aggressive solicitations of derelicts; there was no way to ignore it and every response was wrong. At worst—when I felt bad about myself, which was most of the time these days—it was a humiliating assault. A woman needed an excuse for walking the streets alone. Like blacks in white neighborhoods back home, we had to walk with our eyes to the ground. In fact, the only sure way to walk the streets unharassed was to be with a man.

The obvious excuses—a guidebook, a novel—seldom worked. They didn’t even enable one to sit reading in the park. “Good book?” a man would ask, sitting down beside me on the bench in New York or Rome, and I would either have to insult him, jolly him, or get up and move on. Easier not to sit in the park. Once, back in New York, in the subway station late at night a drunk had started pawing a woman down the platform. I went to find a transit cop. When I returned with one, the drunk had disappeared, and the cop graced us with his wisdom instead. “You’re lucky this time, girls, but it should be a lesson,” he said. “You girls should know better than to wander around alone at two a.m. You should be home.”

It was always the same story, in subways or suburbs. From my beginnings in Baybury Heights, a nice neighborhood where we moved because it was “safe,” it was always the girl who was kept in the house after school if a boy molested her, never the boy. Ostensibly she was kept in for protection, but how was it different from punishment if she couldn’t even play on the street? Since boys would be boys, they might be scolded, but no one ever kept them indoors; they could take care of themselves. No one ever said “girls will be girls”; for girls were expected to be ladies. Every Baybury girl was early taught her place through the ritual rape called “pantsing.” My own occurred one muddy March day in the third grade.

My best friend Jackie was staying after school to practice on the bars that day, so I stayed too. We were practicing a new trick: over-and-over-two-legged. It was a hard trick, but I mastered it. On the bars practicing was what counted; lithe and limber, I practiced and was good. Over and over we went, skirts and hair flying down and then up, the skin behind our knees smarting from the friction with the steel, until the pain finally forced us to stop. We gathered up our trading cards and were just heading through the Victory Gardens for the road when Jackie remembered she wasn’t going home after all, she was going to wait for her mother at her cousin’s house down the street from school.

My stomach flopped over as though I were still on the bars. Without Jackie, I would have to walk unprotected past all the vacant lots on Auburn Hill. I looked back anxiously for someone else to walk with, but there wasn’t a soul in the playground.

Jackie and I started walking slowly down Cranberry Road. It was still wet enough from the previous night’s rain for a few worms to remain on the sidewalk, and we walked slowly to avoid them. I hated the sidewalk worms. Besides, the skin behind our knees smarted if we went quickly. But no matter how slowly we walked, I knew the moment was coming when we would have to separate.

Finally we reached Jackie’s cousin’s house. With no visible regrets, Jackie turned into the drive, kicked at the gravel, and said goodbye.

“See you tomorrow,” I managed to answer, as though it were any other day. And then, proceeding by myself to the end of the block where I turned reluctantly into Auburn, I began my lone descent of the hill.

Dawdling as I walked, I pretended nothing could happen. What was there to be afraid of? Didn’t I know all the boys in my class? Not even they, I told myself, would want to hide in the weeds among worms. When I saw the grasses moving on the flat of the hill just before the descent, I began to think the whole walk home was a dream, that the sidewalk worms were really snakes moving the grasses. Please get me home, I begged of nobody I knew under my breath. Tensely I gripped my trading cards. I quickened my step as I neared the spot where the grasses moved, then marched past, eyes ahead, heart pounding, fingers crossed, not daring to look around.

Just as I was ready to break into a gallop for the final stretch home, a red bandanna descended over my eyes, and I was dragged backwards off the sidewalk into the wet field.

“Get her down!”

“Get her ankles!”

“Quick! Sit on her!”

It was happening, then. I was going to be pantsed.

“Somebody sit on her,” I heard again.

“I can’t breathe! I can’t breathe!” I cried, thinking I would suffocate under the blindfold.

Someone pulled my arms over my head and pinned them down at the wrists, others took my legs, squeezing at the ankles, holding them from kicking until someone else sat on them.

“Let me go!” I kept crying until my words melted into tears. I felt humiliated by my tears (cry baby! cry baby!), though I cried as much from rage as from fear.

When I was finally able to catch my breath I began to fight, kicking and biting, as though there were some possibility of fighting free. But of course there was none.

They gripped my legs at last and, raising me from the buttocks, ripped off my underpants. Then they forced my legs apart at the knees and held them open for one endless moment, staring deep into my secret. No one touched, no one spoke; they saw, their eyes burning me like dry ice.

It wasn’t shame I felt then, only hot, inexpressible fury. You, Melvyn Weeks! You, Bobby Barr! You, Richie Englehart! You, Nazi Richard Conroy! But in the end I was stripped even of my wrath. For the project of my pantsing, once completed, seemed to lose all its appeal to its perpetrators. Stripping me had been only a gesture, an afternoon diversion for a lazy day. Maybe the third-grade boys of Baybury Heights Elementary School already felt seen one, seen them all, or maybe they were only interested in power. For, a moment later, they pulled me shaking to my feet and pushed me back on the sidewalk as though they were my friends. They threw my pants and my trading cards after me, and ordered me on pain of “getting it” never to tell anyone what had happened. Then they ripped off the blindfold, gave me a shove, and diving quickly back to their hiding places in the wet field, finally set me free.

Grown men didn’t do things like that to us—not in broad daylight, not without an excuse. They kept us in place with veiled threats and insinuations; and they only undressed us mentally, an indignity it was hard to prove. But walking alone was still a problem. In Spain, where no one had felt qualified to interpret my motives, my celebrity had kept me immune from judgment. In Munich I had been justified by having a husband. But here, as a single woman assumed to be in the running, I was subject to all the abuse the Romans could dish out. It is not always, as Mae West says, “better to be looked over than overlooked.” All those dashing Italians I had fallen for in my first enchantment with Rome—Giuliano, the guard at the Colosseum; Angelo, the guide; Mario and the other cowboys on the Piazza di Spagna who followed American women to the cafés of the Via Veneto and whispered extravagant phrases in their ears between sips of Cinzano-soda—those romancing Italians were so full of mocking adulation that they could barely conceal their contempt. I gave them up when I realized that for them I was interchangeable with every other presentable American of a certain age, even the poor starlets who hung around the Via Veneto. Romans collected Americans as Americans collected Romans: parasites all. I felt better now, knowing I could refuse them, but I still had to face them in the restaurants and cafés, at parties and on the street.

I walked into my hotel, too weary for midmorning. I was way off schedule. I would have to face the world twice today.

“Any messages?” I asked at the desk.

“No messages, signora.”

I walked up the three flights to my room.

Stockings and underwear were strung across the room on a portable clothesline. They stretched from bedpost to light fixture to doorknob, cutting off access to the chair. So much dirty laundry. I made for the bed. Why shouldn’t I take a siesta like the Italians? So what if I took mine before midday? I knew I ought to be giving myself a pep talk, studying the guidebook to regain my enthusiasm, picking out my afternoon excursion. But little puddles were forming under each piece of laundry dripping onto the discolored marble floor of my room, and I wasn’t up to tourism.

So much had changed since I had first arrived in the Eternal City full of energy and resolve. On my husbandless high, I had slid into my new life with wide eyes and a loose schedule, taking Rome slowly like old wine. One sight a day, preceded by plenty of homework. Like James’s lady, Isabel Archer herself, I had gone about Rome in a “repressed ecstasy” over the “rugged ruins” and “mossy marbles,” wandering among ruins that had once been emperors’ palaces. I had sat in cafés behind dark glasses watching the crowds, or, tiptoeing through naves and apses, been dazzled by medieval mosaics and Renaissance paintings. To be taken for more than a superficial tourist while I wrote my play was all I’d wanted. “I’ll be living in Rome for a while,” I had written everyone at home, giving a genuine street address, not merely American Express.

Now, after only a few months, I had apparently succeeded. Even when I conspicuously carried a guidebook, no one took me for a tourist any more. I was becoming a fixture at this café and that tabac. But far from being fulfilled by my permanent status, I had become exposed. The only purpose I could produce had vanished. If I wasn’t a tourist, then what was I doing here?

People had various justifications for being in Rome. Frank’s old friends the Ericksons up at the American Academy were here on a prestigious grant—that is, Paul Erickson was. There were painters here, businessmen, and plenty of genuine tourists too, distinguishable by having departure dates. Some had eccentric purposes, like the twenty-one-year-old Oklahoman I met at the Vatican who, passing for a tourist, briefly attached himself to me, even courting me by the guidebooks. After a week of Alfredo’s for fettuccini Alfredo, Sistine Chapel for Michelangelo, Via Condotti for neckties, he finally confessed what he was up to. (Too bad; I had enjoyed being with such a seeming innocent in that sly old city, a tourist again myself.) We were exploring a recess of the catacombs together one Sunday, searching out ancient Christian bones with flashlights, when suddenly he touched my arm gingerly and threw himself on my mercy. His father, he said, had sent him abroad to get laid.

No shit! I tried to imagine my father sending me to Europe to get laid. There was a smell of old martyrs in the tomb. I felt old and jaded.

Now, he said, it was almost time for him to return to the States and he still hadn’t made it. Wouldn’t I help him out? I, married, with nothing to lose, an older woman, a Jewess, worldly, understanding—

“You’re a sweet boy, George, but I’m off sex.” He probably didn’t even find me pretty.

“I didn’t think you would. I just thought—I mean, I hoped—”

“I’m really sorry, George.”

“Oh well. It’s been very nice knowing you anyway, Sasha. I liked you.”

If I wasn’t a tourist, then what was I doing here? The streets answered for me: Manhunting. Like secretaries on a cruise; like “career girls” in Washington; like college girls, nurses, entertainers, stewardesses, actresses, models—like all unclaimed women: looking for a man. No answer I could give was half as good as Nancy Erickson’s “my husband is at the Academy,” though what Academy wives actually did was of interest to no one. They kept house, visited the ruins, studied Italian or Italian cooking. Some took special courses arranged by the Academy for Academy wives. Even so, in some ways poor Nancy Erickson was better off than the starlets and models on the Via Veneto who all had that recognizable haunted look, as though they were being spooked. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were pure parsley, nothing but garnish—worthless without a man to adorn. If they sat alone in a café they kept looking nervously at their watches, pretending they were waiting for someone in particular. I knew that syndrome. Mannequin was the perfect word for them: somewhere they had given away their souls and now they had only bodies, lovely bodies, left to show.

My program was different from theirs, but in form only. Mornings writing in some café; lunch; Roman culture in the afternoon; dinner. And always my book to read. They looked at their watches pretending they had a man; I looked at my book pretending I didn’t want one. But we were all waiting. As I observed the models from behind my book, I wondered if they knew all about me, too.

“What are you doing in Rome?” “Studying Roman culture”; “gathering material for a play.” However sincerely I gave my answers, they all sounded as flimsy as “I’m an actress, temporarily unemployed.” The moment we appeared on the streets available, we were all tossed into the same salad, consumed fresh or deposited in the crisper to wait. It was impossible to make oneself out an exception. And so, as the weeks slipped by, I found myself spending more and more time like this, just lying around in my room avoiding the streets, watching the puddles under the laundry enlarging drop by drop into days and weeks, waiting. Waiting for messages; waiting for inspiration; waiting for my money to run out.

The buzzer, like a shot of adrenalin, startled me off the bed.

“Pronto, pronto”—my best Italian word.

“Telefono, signora; signore Leonardo Bucatelli.”

“I’ll be right down.”

Quickly I inspected my face and ran a comb through my hair (impossible to leave the room without); then, avoiding the puddles on the floor, I picked my way to the door and dashed down the stairs to the lobby to answer the phone.

I had met Leonardo in the American restaurant I sometimes went to for a hamburger with catsup and french fries or a chocolate milkshake. Reading The Portrait of a Lady while I ate, I had noticed out of the corner of my eye one of the lean-trousered Italians eyeing me through dark glasses from across the room. While my eyes stayed on the book, I tracked him with my antennae, getting ready to rebuff him if he sat with me. But when I peeked up, I saw him walking to my table with Gregory, the restaurant owner, for a proper introduction.

As soon as we were introduced, Leonardo picked up my book, turned it over, and said in English but with the lilt of Italian, “Ah, Henry James.”

“You know Henry James?” I asked surprised.

“Leonardo’s half American and his wife is American,” said Gregory, as though that were explanation enough.

“My former wife,” said Leonardo. He asked if he could sit with me, then ordered American coffee.

I was impressed that he did not start in whispering sibilants in my ear. In the course of the conversation he mentioned he was leaving the following evening for Sicily.

“Sicily! How lucky you are!” I said.

“Why don’t you come along? I’ll be back in less than a week.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure. I have some work to do, but it will be nice to have company the rest of the time. Gregory can vouch for me.”

For the first time in months I did not feel, sitting with a man, as though I were parading before the judges.

Speeding down the famous coast into the fragrance of lemon trees and the soothing breezes of the Mediterranean, Leonardo told me his story. His father was Italian, his mother American. He had grown up rich in Italy, then gone to college in Florida. There he had taken a full-blooded American wife, transplanted her to Rome, and given her “everything.” He would never understand how she could, only months before, have left him for Miami. “Isn’t it a woman’s duty,” he cried, throwing his arms dangerously in the air on one of that shoreline’s spectacular curves, “to live where her husband lives?” When his hands returned to earth, one of them made for the steering wheel, and one of them made for me.

I suppose it was foolish of me not to have made my position absolutely clear before setting one foot inside Leonardo’s white Alfa Romeo. I ought to have declared straight out: No fucking; I want to see scenery, not bed sheets. But as it was, the blue miles were speeding by and my explanation was still only an unconfirmed hypothesis. It could not, as I had hoped, go without saying.

Finally I cleared my throat and began. (It’s always so hard to explain oneself.) “It’s not that I’m against sex on principle,” I heard myself saying. “It’s just that it usually makes for unpleasant complications.” When I looked over, Leonardo was eyeing me suspiciously.

It did sound prudish—shades of Girl Alive—it was not what I meant.

I tried again. “I mean, in principle I believe in free love. But in practice, I try to avoid it.”

His look was getting worse—as though I were some sort of proselytizing religious creep. I still wasn’t saying it right. The sea breeze, free and capricious, mocked my failing efforts at precision.

“What I mean is,” I tried one last time, shouting now to cover my uncertainty, “I like you very much and I’m sure we’ll have a fine time together in Sicily, but I never intended that we’d sleep together. I mean, can’t we take separate rooms and split the expenses?”

It sounded absurd, like something out of a B movie or a teenage novel. Listening to myself, with the voluptuous smell of lemon trees enfolding us and now and then the rush of the sea, I was ashamed to find myself sitting inside a rather unpleasant American prude. I knew she was a fraud: there were times when she fucked like a bunny, yet now she was acting like a Midwestern schoolteacher, sounding positively dowdy. No wonder the poor driver looked uncomfortable. I wanted to expose her, but I knew I couldn’t say a word without becoming implicated. Well, she would just have to explain herself; I had all I could do to watch the speedometer and the treacherous road, on which Leonardo, finding himself a captive, was driving faster and faster in a futile effort to escape.

Part way down the coast we stopped for the night in Sorrento, where I rejoiced to see my first unpotted palms. The air was lush as the song. I stood awkwardly aside as Leonardo spoke to the desk clerk in Italian; more awkwardly still when he informed me that there were no single rooms left, only double rooms at fifteen dollars apiece. “Do you really want a separate room?” He seemed almost as embarrassed as I. And what could the desk clerk be thinking?

My position was untenable. “I guess we can share a room,” I said.

In the room, we were both surprised to find only one (double) bed. “I’ll sleep in the chair,” offered Leonardo.

It was insulting. Did I impress him as really so inflexible that I would insist he spend the night sitting upright in a chair? “That’s all right,” I threw back, moving off to the bathroom with my toothbrush and robe. “We can share the bed.”

Lying next to Leonardo in the dark, sensing the hot breath in his lungs and the blood in his veins, I felt miserably misunderstood. How had I managed, despite such care, to wind up once again in this predicament? My life looked like a repeating decimal. Lying apart on my side of the bed was tantamount to declaring myself frigid. That silly prude in the car had contaminated me with her dowdiness, and now I needed a good cleansing.

“Goodnight,” said Leonardo politely.

“Goodnight,” I said. But longing to merge with my antithesis into a clean, new creature, I made some slight sign for Leonardo to approach me.

Our encounter in romantic Sorrento was quick and gentle, of little moment in itself; but as we fell apart to sleep I felt it take on a special significance. For, as unwittingly as a Typhoid Mary or the lucky one-millionth depositor in the Bank of America, uncircumcised Leonardo Bucatelli obligingly becoming my twenty-fifth lover, had boosted my lifetime average up over one a year. Another first.

The next day we drove down to Messina where there was a car ferry to Sicily. On the way, Leonardo inquired into my views. He listened thoughtfully as I denounced the double standard, sexual hypocrisy, and lechery. I used the largest words I knew to defend my position. He nodded gravely now and then, treating me with all the respect due a woman who not only fucks but insists on paying her own way. Mine, he said, was a rare and liberal doctrine. “I have always preferred intelligent, liberated women to the beautiful sluts on the Via Veneto.” Though he noted my words as pure philosophy, appreciating that he had stumbled onto a good thing, he had no idea what to make of me.

Sicily meant Taormina, the pride of the travel folders, with perfume added. In the mornings in Sicily we took our breakfast together on the terrace of our hotel overlooking the sea, and after gobbling those rich native pastries that are made so poorly by comparison in Rome, we went separate ways, coming together again at suppertime. Enchanted by the Sicilian seaside I, who had never before seen free-growing cactus, steeped myself in the surprise of cactus fruit sparkling like garnets in the sunlight and the magenta profusion of bougainvillaea. Leonardo set off in the mornings in a business suit to act out PR Man for a prestigious American firm, and spent the afternoons in bermuda shorts marching through the streets of the picturesque village with his camera glued to his eye like any American, snapping his own native hibiscus. Nothing but sex ever passed between us.

In order to avoid the stigma of being a whore, I posed as an intellectual, abandoning all pretensions to voluptuousness. It was scary to find myself in sensuous Sicily disarmed of my best weapon. Instead I used my second best. “Don’t you go anywhere without your notebook?” asked Leonardo. Oh, I was hooked on my book. “You know,” he said, joining me for an hour on the beach, appraising me coolly in that hot sun, “you ought to get yourself a bikini. Your body is really very nice. You should show it off a bit.”

Discovered by some foreign connoisseur, like the Greek ruins of Sicily! Leonardo’s invidious compliments only provoked more of my bookish rhetoric, so inappropriate in that tropical setting. I turned my back to the sun to hide my mustache (if any) and took refuge in the warm water Ulysses himself was said to have sailed.

Floating on the surface, I communicated with the outer world through a snorkel and studied the stylish fishes who swam up to my mask enticing me after them, only to wriggle effortlessly out of my reach after prizes of their own. Though my back burned, that warm water was my element and those fishes my paradigm. It was they whom I missed when the time came to ferry back through Scylla and Charybdis and drive on up the coast to Rome.

I could tell by Leonardo’s manner as soon as I picked up the phone in the Alberto lobby that there was something wrong. I hadn’t heard from him once since we had returned to Rome, and now all of a sudden he had to talk to me about something “very serious.”

“Is there something the matter, Leonardo?”

“Yes. We’ll talk about it later. Do you want to meet me at the Ristorante Navona in an hour?”

“An hour’s fine,” I said. “I hope it’s nothing terrible.”

“We’ll talk about it at lunch,” he said ominously.

Anyway, lunch. Whatever he wanted to discuss, at least today I wouldn’t have to brave a restaurant alone. “Ciao,” I said and returned to my room to fix myself up.

Perhaps, I thought, slipping my feet into Italian shoes, I’d give the poem another try tomorrow after all; maybe the play would come too if I could loosen up.

Leonardo, suntanned and manicured, sat chewing a toothpick and girl-watching behind his dark glasses. It was a little past noon—the most revealing hour under the cruel Roman sun. The café glittered elegantly in its finely wrought Piazza Navona setting. As I fluffed my hair and walked to his table, Leonardo popped up to pull out a chair for me. “Let’s sit inside,” I said, shading my face.

Inside, I had the good sense to keep talking all the way through the pasta, so that we were well into the meat course before Leonardo came to the point. Even during the small talk he had revealed his mean intentions by sprinkling the conversation with sarcasm like so much grated cheese. Now, despite visible efforts, he was barely able to keep the fury out of his voice.

He wiped his mouth and put down his napkin. Was I aware, he asked at last, of being ill?

Yes, I was.

Then why, he demanded, had I not warned him about my disease before assaulting him in bed? Why had I not at least allowed him to take precautions? However the same stunt may have been pulled on me, there was no excuse for me to pull it on him, who had been nothing if not kind to me.

I put down my fork, rising to the attack. “Wait a minute, Leonardo. Who assaulted who?  ” Vindication rose in my throat. “I told you as soon as I got into your car that I had no intention of sleeping with you.”

“Yes, you told me your intentions. You and your high-minded theories. I was fool enough to fall for them.”

“What are you talking about?”

He gripped the table and pushed a reddening face toward me. “Your disease. I’ve caught it.”

I relaxed, relieved. “But that’s impossible, Leonardo,” I said kindly, resuming the meal. “In the first place, what I have isn’t catching. And in the second place, even if it were, you couldn’t get it. It’s a female disease.”

He looked at me with contempt. “Look, Sasha. You might as well face it. What I’ve got is gonorrhea, and I got it from you. Now, if you have any concern at all for the people of Italy, you will come quietly to my physician and take the cure.”

The people of Italy! I took a long, stalling swig of my wine to let it sink in: The clap. Souvenir of Spain? As I reached for the carafe to fill my glass again, Leonardo mounted his assault.

The words go whizzing by my ears, but I am barely able to catch them. Leonardo has abandoned the polite formality with which he usually speaks his mother’s English for the passionate gesticulation of his father’s countrymen.

I duck as he calls me una donna pericolosa (a dangerous woman!), but at last the accusation “carrier” catches me square in the ear.

I—a carrier! Quickly I compute: from the time I left Spain until I was led astray by this PR man I’ve slept with no one but my husband, who doesn’t count. Though I can as easily have caught it from Leonardo as he from me, I note he’s the one doing all the shouting. His voice rises and my lofty persona dissolves. I see I had better behave. Even if they’ve done no other damage yet, the insidious bacteria have already destroyed my image.

Yes, I must have a cure. A V.D. victim needs all the help she can get. The embassy won’t bail me out of this, the Ericksons would snicker if they knew, and all those foreign doctors with their shots and pills have likely been operating on a false diagnosis. I’m afraid it’s Leonardo’s help or no one’s: I’m utterly alone.

Over dessert we reconciled. With the magnanimity of a gentleman, Leonardo assured me that the cure would involve nothing more than a routine series of penicillin shots which we could take together. At least, I consoled myself, it would be a good reason to get up and out in the mornings. Sipping our coffee we were thick as conspirators, and when we finally left the restaurant for the doctor’s office, it was arm in arm.

“Eccola!  ” exclaimed the doctor excitedly, as Leonardo, gazing into the microscope’s eyepiece, scrutinized a tiny precious part of me smeared on a slide. I bared my buttock and received the needle.

During our cure, Leonardo and I grew closer than we had been in Sicily. We met for breakfast each morning at a café near the doctor’s, unless I had spent the preceding night at his place. We stretched out our single bond like taffy. There was nothing aphrodisiacal in the antibiotic; it was just that, sinners together, we suddenly had more and worse in common than with anyone else.

• • •

The tourists were swarming to Italy and we were just over our cure when some rich friends of Leonardo’s came to Rome on an extended honeymoon. Nice Americans. Jumping to the usual conclusions, they assumed I was in love with Leonardo. They were so solicitous I could tell they felt sorry for me. It was unbearable.

“I understand you’re separated from your husband,” said the wife sympathetically, wandering with me among the ruins. Up ahead her husband and Leonardo had stopped to study the map of the Forum. “Is your husband in Italy too?”

“We were living in Munich when we separated. He’s probably gone back to the States by now.”

There was an awkward silence. “And how long do you plan to stay in Rome?” she asked politely.

I had used up all my answers. “Till my money runs out I suppose; after that I just don’t know.” The very words that had once proclaimed my daring now rang of defeat.

We caught up with the men following the tourist map through the Forum—the Forum where Vestal Virgins had once guarded the sacred fires with the power of their chastity; the same Forum where Isabel Archer had turned away the most eligible suitors on the continent. I hung back while the others talked over old times until the sun set and it was time to choose a restaurant. Spaghetti alla Carbonara? Zuppa di Pesce alla Romana? Carciofi alla Giudia? Let the newlyweds choose among the specialties of a Rome I had already tasted.

In the back of my mind I was deciding I really mustn’t see Leonardo any more.

No question my nerves were shattered. I was oversensitive and touchy. My excursions had become a sham: I found myself leaving the maps in my room and turning corners at random to avoid the street people. All the ruins started to look alike. My writing was a failure, and I abandoned it. Each foray into a restaurant was an assault, with everyone seeing I was eating alone. What is she doing here? I could see them wonder; Doesn’t she have a man? Isabel Archer had finally married, and just as her story promised to be resolved it turned out it was only beginning.

And mine? Was twenty-four old or young? Was I ugly or beautiful?

The frightened face in the mirror had the haunted look of the mannequins. Just under the surface I sensed a fine network of ugliness which might begin showing through any moment. Too late to start a career; too late even to go back to school. I, who had always prided myself on being the youngest in the class, couldn’t now join those chain-smoking women who “went back to school” after having their children. I remembered them shyly attending our classes wearing either sensible shoes or clothes embarrassingly young for them, trying to speak an alien slang. I had cringed for them as the young men, suppressing sneers, momentarily suspended debate while they asked their female questions. I knew I would never be able to survive that.

On my twenty-fifth birthday, alone in my room, I received a cable from New York. It was from Frank. happy birthday. time to come home. The next day on an impulse I put my wedding ring on again, and after that it was much easier to walk the streets. I even wore it to a farewell party up at the Academy the Ericksons threw before they sailed for home. They invited everyone they knew, including a genuine Italian princess. All the Americans, drinking sparkling lambrusca as though they would never taste it again, kept singing “Arrividerce Roma” louder and sloppier the drunker they got. In the days following, most of them left Italy for another academic year.

The tourists were leaving too. It became possible once again to view the Sistine ceiling without stepping on someone’s toes. The Roman pines stayed green, but the days had already perceptibily shortened; the sugar maples would be turning on Connecticut’s Merritt Parkway. Maybe Frank was right; maybe it was time to go home.