three

In heading to Rome, Grant left a vacuum. At meals, it was just me, Vera, and Marisa, though I sometimes asked Patrice to join us. Vera liked his amiable, diffuse nature, his ram-shackle ways, and found him a waiter’s job at the Quisisana, the fanciest hotel on the island. She had somehow persuaded Andrea Milone, the manager, that it would be sensible to have a French waiter. Americans generally preferred a French waiter to an Italian one, she explained; furthermore, the combination of a French waiter with Italian food was irresistible. Signore Milone found Vera’s arguments “un po pazzo,” but he needed waiters of any national persuasion; high season—June through August—loomed, and Patrice claimed to have experience in a Parisian bistro.

The day after Grant left, I wandered into his study, hoping to absorb the atmosphere in an unobstructed way by sitting at his desk and imagining what it would be like to be Rupert Grant. Behind his amber eyes I imagined a vast consciousness—a landscape of hidden valleys, abrupt mountain ranges, tumbling seas. Reading his work with fierce attention, as I had done since arriving at the Villa Clio, I’d become more, not less, interested in the man behind the witty, eccentrically learned essays, the history-obsessed novels, and the passionate but formally restrained poems, most of which concerned some aspect of love. What I liked was how suggestive he could be: there was infinitely more on the page than met the eye, and I found myself scribbling in the margins, prompted to further thoughts by his thoughts. I became envious of his deftness, the shrewd felicity of his phrasing, the vast range of reference.

On the other hand, he seemed bland much of the time in person, reluctant to play the part of the artist-genius. He cautioned me against “reading too much into things,” as he might say. Even Vera warned me that he was “not as interesting in person as on paper,” suggesting that “only frauds are.” She said that Grant’s success as a writer had been the result of extremely hard work. “He is working all the time,” she said, “even when he’s playing. That’s the only way it’s possible.”

I didn’t begrudge Grant his success as a writer, but I’d become jealous of his relationship with Holly. Was she, like me, overly impressed by his achievements? This alone didn’t justify her erotic attachment to him, which I sensed but couldn’t understand. Physical attraction, on her part, seemed impossible, as he was forty years her senior. It was all such a howling cliché: the goatish older artist and his nubile consorts. Wasn’t Grant embarrassed by this scenario, the ridiculous tableau vivant, with Marisa and Holly sprawled at his feet by the pool? Wasn’t Vera, with her charm and undiminished beauty, able to satisfy his needs? The greater question, for me, was why Holly would participate in this spectacle.

I sat in Grant’s oak chair, sinking into his space. The globe on the left was well spun, a symbol of the author’s scope; he had written about the ancient and medieval worlds with ease. Even the complications of the modern world had never daunted him. He appeared to have read, and remembered, everything—although he always said he knew far less than anyone would believe: “It’s all smoke and mirrors,” he said. “We’re all half charlatan, even the best of us—as Auden once said.” He often dangled the name of Auden before my ears, knowing how much I admired his work. (A volume of Auden’s Selected Poems was on my bedtable, on “permanent loan” from Grant’s study.)

The photographs on the desk surprised me by their studied conventionality: Vera in a sleek riding outfit, on horseback, smiling. The children, Nigel and Nicola, at the Marina Piccola, ankle-deep in water, both tall and blond, androgynous. In a small snapshot that had turned sepia with age, a much younger Grant sat in an English pub beside Auden, whose smooth face made him almost unrecognizable. In a larger one, on a rooftop in Rome, Grant and Gore Vidal stood beside an older, smaller man in rumpled clothes. Tennessee Williams? Christopher Isherwood?

The dagger beside the inkpot caught my attention. I had seen him fiddling with it, running a finger along the sharp blade. Once I had seen him hurl it, for no reason, across the room at the wooden board pinned to the wall beside the map. It had stuck tip-first in the wood. “A little trick I learned in school,” Grant said. “In another life, I’d have been an assassin. Writers are all murderers in disguise, what?”

Murderers in disguise? I didn’t understand. My idea of a writer was far different from this. To me, a writer was a healer, a builder, a creator. Not a destroyer. When I suggested as much to Grant, he shook his head sadly and clucked his tongue. “If you’re really a writer, Lorenzo,” he said, “you’ll slay your next of kin first, and proceed from there. It’s a bloody business. A bloody goddamn business.”

I leaned over a gray folder marked “Poems, Unfinished.” Opening it, I saw on top, in Grant’s meticulous script, a brief poem or fragment:

Green eyes I love, and yellow hair,
a hip that tilts into the sun:

I should be driven to despair
if she thought I was not the one.

Not so good, I decided. Sentimental, plain without the kind of simplicity that is hard-won. The last line was ludicrous: “if she thought I was not the one.” On the other hand, it was unfinished, a scrap of verse that might develop into something of interest. What upset me was the subject: Holly. It could not be a poem about anyone else: the green eyes, the yellow hair, the hip. The way her hips would shift to one side when she stood: that was part of her lovely awkwardness. I felt consumed by jealousy now. It is always dreadful when someone else desires exactly what you desire, sees exactly what you covet, appreciates its genuine but—as you dared to hope—unrevealed value. I wanted to be the only one in the world who “got” it, who understood why Holly was so appealing.

A further rush of unpleasant feelings overwhelmed me, a mixture of envy and resentment tinged with despair. I wanted Holly, not only physically, although certainly that. I thought of her in Rome with Grant at the moment, in a wide bed in some plush hotel room, unclothed; the image was painful, a brain blister in need of pricking. I wanted to lie beside her in that bed myself, to feel the length of her body, its contours and textures. I wanted to touch her hair, to brush her face with my fingers, to pull her as close as skin itself, breathing her breath, losing myself inside her. And I wanted her to know me. To see me. I wanted a deep intimacy that included friendship and erotic love, and I wanted to know her mind, to linger in the curls and twists of her consciousness, to see things through her eyes.

Though I didn’t really know her yet, Holly represented something I had never had before, a kind of wisdom that—so far—I could only know by intuition. Her ironic sense of the world appealed to me, in part because it was without the tinge of contempt I often heard in Vera. My friends and relatives back home were definitely not ironic. They devoted themselves to surfaces. To accede to them, one had to spread an immense veil of ignorance over every object of perception, every scene and sentence. I did not want to live my life without irony, in that thinness of expression where only one dimension is acknowledged.

Suddenly I felt hands on my shoulders—caressing hands. Turning, I saw that it was Vera, and the intimacy of her gesture surprised more than alarmed me.

“You’re snooping, aren’t you?” she asked, whispering, close to my ear. “Naughty chap!”

“Just sitting here.”

She kept massaging, squeezing the cords at either side of my neck, softening them. “You’re tense, darling,” she said. “You do need a good massage, don’t you?”

I did, but this seemed like the wrong place and the wrong person. My muscles involuntarily stiffened, and I leaned forward away from her. This was, after all, the wife of my employer—a woman more than two decades older than me.

Her lips brushed my ear. “I won’t bite,” she said. “Relax.”

I could not relax, but decided not to resist, letting Vera massage my neck and shoulders, digging and kneading with both hands. When finished, she leaned her cheek against my head, breathing into my hair. “I’ll give you a better massage one day,” she said, “if you like.”

“I guess,” I said.

“Tell me the truth,” she said. “Are you a virgin?”

“No,” I said. At least four women stood between me and my virginity, although I had yet to encounter either love or amorous continuity. I’d had four one-night stands, and during all but one I’d been seriously drunk or stoned. The names of my first three sexual partners were beyond retrieval, and the fourth I recalled only with pain—the whole thing had been her idea, not mine; the act itself had seemed less like lovemaking than hydraulics, and it left me with a wasted feeling. In general, the sexual revolution of the sixties, which had opened the door to ecstasy for so many of my friends in college, had remained only slightly ajar for me. Although my fantasy life was rich, I was poor in actual experience.

“You’re lying, naughty boy,” Vera said. “I can always tell when someone is lying, especially about sex. You’re a virgin. It’s printed on your forehead. In italics.”

“I’ve had four lovers,” I told her.

“Four! I take it back, then. You’re a man of the world.”

Her patronizing tone annoyed me, and I was about to complain when she planted a wet kiss on the back of my neck. I rose from the chair at once.

“I’m sorry if I interrupted you in the midst of profound thoughts. Have a seat, if you like. Read the great man’s idiotic jottings. But I’m waiting for you in the kitchen when you’re finished. Today you will learn how to make polenta. Now that is important.”

She left me standing there, disappearing through the door in her white diaphanous shift, more like a young girl than a mature woman: unpredictable, willful. I realized that, in spite of myself, I was attracted to her, and found the idea of a full body massage by those fingers an appealing one. But I knew enough to resist, aware that life at the Villa Clio would become only more and more complicated, my heart rooting in soil where nothing good could issue from that attachment.