Black Dahlia & White Rose: Stories (20 page)

On the wrought-iron balcony outside their seventh-floor room in the Hotel Bellevesta they sat, the middle-aged American couple, as if unable to move; in a pleasurable trance gazing across the alley at a row of mostly darkened and shuttered apartment buildings. Above were rooftops obscured by shadow and farther above, the Roman sky, opaque with layered clouds, lightless, that resembled a cathedral ceiling, its fanatical detail softened by shadow.

J
ust when you think that your life is
run-down.

Just when you think that your life is
frayed, worn. Done.

If they’d had children, perhaps. But there had not been a time for children, not
the time.

David had said, wait. We can wait. And Alexis had said—(what had Alexis said?)—Alexis had said yes. Of course we can wait.

Now, so many years later it could not ever be
the time.
What had been
the time
was now, irrevocably, past. And so they’d come to Italy, to a succession of beautiful Italian places—after Venice they’d gone to Padua, Verona, Milan—to Bologna, Florence, Sienna and San Gimignano—and at last Rome. In planning their trip, David had booked them longest in Rome.

Ostensibly, to celebrate their thirtieth wedding anniversary: this was the account they gave to others, that others were happy to hear.

For all journeys are journeys of desperation—the journey takes us
away.

For most of the time that she’d known him, David had been a man driven and defined by his work: obsessed, ambitious. There was a particular sort of joy—Alexis didn’t want to think that it was inevitably masculine, but she’d never seen it in any woman of her acquaintance—in ambition that has triumphed. (Triumph over a rival? Is there any other sort of triumph? In the Pitti Palace in Florence Alexis had stared appalled at a succession of over-life-sized sculpted figures by Michelangelo depicting Hercules in the quasi-heroic act of killing his opponent—Antaeus, an Amazon warrior, a centaur, among luckless others.
The Triumph of Victory
was the bombastic title. Tourists whose nerves would have been shattered by a poorly prepared restaurant meal or hotel rooms lacking adequate services stared solemnly at these ugly tributes to brute masculinity, knowing themselves in the presence of
serious art.
There was no female equivalent to such extravagant and excessive brutality nor even the general recognition that such an equivalent might be missing.)

Within their social circle, and certainly within their families, David was considered a highly successful man. To David himself, his success was marred by the fact that others were more successful, who did not seem deserving, as he knew himself deserving. Now, in recent years, these rivals were fading, disappearing; David’s new rivals were of another generation entirely, young enough to be his children, though David didn’t feel paternal toward them, any more than they felt filial toward him. Hired in a shrinking job market, these young rivals were yet more highly paid than David had been, at the same rank, after adjustments for inflation; he knew that they were unbeatable—time was on their side. He hadn’t become embittered but only, as he often said, sharper, wiser. This sharpness showed in his face: beneath his smile of bemused or ironic well-being was an abiding wariness, the alertness of one who is anxious not to be disrespected, taken-less-seriously than he merits. David’s once-abundant hair had thinned and his skull was prominent, like some implacable inorganic substance; almost, Alexis couldn’t remember what he had looked like as a young man. His contemporary self, his middle-aged self, had seemed to have consumed his youth. Yet he seemed to her attractive, still—despite his ironic way of frowning while smiling as if the very act of smiling were a sign of weakness, vulnerability. He had not had patience with weakness in himself or in others and now that he was older, he was having to adjust his sense of manliness. As a man ages the Darwinian notion of natural selection shifts its meaning and other types of morality begin to exert their appeal.

“A barbaric world—but what art!”

Another time they’d gone to the ancient ruins for which the city was best known. The old, unspeakably cruel yet “noble” civilization that predated the modern, its acres of rubble set off by fluorescent-orange construction barriers—a jarring juxtaposition of ugly synthetic materials and the sun-baked stone of antiquity. Everywhere were decayed but yet beautiful carvings, monuments that seemed to Alexis’s untrained eye a testament to the uses of futility—the uses one might make of futility.

The history of the great Roman empire was fraught with savage cruelty, violence, and delusion, yet a visionary self-assurance that seemed lost now, in the West. Who could believe that gods mated with mortals, to create a race of demigods? Who could believe that there was anything godly in even the stunning blue Mediterranean sky? Or that any “empire” was privileged over another?

Christian Rome, and Catholic Rome that followed—so many centuries!—another empire inflated and inspired by metaphysical delusion and the terrifying self-assurance of delusion. But these centuries, too, had waned, and could not be resuscitated.

“Though I suppose, we are not so much less ‘barbaric’ now. Our waning American empire, our mission of ‘democratizing’ the world for our own economic interests . . .”

David spoke with unusual vehemence. He was not by nature a political person, his political views were centrist, economically conservative. He had little trust in any politicians yet a sort of residue of wistfulness for the idealism of his youth—the generation that had come of age in the late 1960s and 1970s—the waning idealism of the great revolutionary decade of the American twentieth century, the bitter ashes of the end of the Vietnam War.

Strange for David to speak as if, for once, the impersonal were intensely, painfully personal. Alexis felt a stab of concern—or was it love?—for her husband, that he seemed to be losing his old, unexamined sense of himself as a man among men, a rival among rivals; in Rome, their destination city as well as the city of their imminent departure, more markedly than in any of the Italian places they’d visited, David had become oddly indifferent to news of home; he seemed to have stopped checking his e-mail; ever more, he was susceptible to the most superficial distractions—annoying fellow tourists in the Bellevesta, throngs of people in marketplaces and piazzas, boisterous young Italians on motorcycles—in a crowded side street he’d paused to stare at a young girl with long coarse-black hair like a horse’s mane, a girl carrying a motorcycle helmet who was dressed provocatively in tight-fitting black leather, spike-heeled shoes and black net stockings, bizarre black-net gloves to the elbow, but fingerless; the underside of her jaw was defaced by a lurid birthmark, or a tattoo; poor David gaped, until Alexis tugged at his elbow.

He’d seemed dazed, smiling. A middle-aged sort of smile, as of one waking from a dream, uncertain of his surroundings.
He is a lonely man
Alexis thought.
My husband is a lonely, vulnerable man.

By degrees, David had ceased taking photographs except of the most exceptional sights—postcard-sights. He’d taken many more photos on his digital camera than he would ever print—many more than he would ever examine. He’d left his expensive camera in a restaurant—a young waitress had run after them, to return it.

Like many other tourists he wore sandals, but David’s sandals chafed his pale feet. His clothes were expensive sports clothes, short-sleeved linen shirts, pastel colors, stripes, limp from the heat, rumpled. His scalp, exposed by his thinning hair, had burnt in the sun, but David disliked wearing any sort of hat. Where in the past he’d insisted upon making travel arrangements, now he was more frequently depending upon Alexis to make them. The city’s great public museums and galleries weren’t air-conditioned—even their cool marble floors and high ceilings weren’t sufficient to compensate for the heat of Rome. Fans blew languid air from room to room. There in the Borghese Gallery came David in a blue-striped shirt damp with the sweat of his solid compact body—shuffling in Alexis’s wake like an undersea creature but dimly aware of its environment and pausing to stare, with a mild sort of astonishment, at the pale-marble Bernini
Apollo e Dafne.
While Alexis moved eagerly ahead consulting museum maps, David fell behind. In this exotic place, this beautiful city, he had but little sense of its geography, and little interest; he had not the slightest knowledge of the Italian language; Alexis had long ago taken French and Spanish, and so could recognize crucial words; she’d prepared for the trip, hastily, with language tapes, while David hadn’t had time—of course.

In their marriage, he’d made Alexis the repository of such things—such airy and essentially useless activities. As he’d made Alexis the repository of emotions too raw, elemental and disorderly for a man to acknowledge: the deaths of his own parents he’d needed Alexis to register, that he might grieve for them. Without Alexis, would he have grieved at all?

Here in Rome—“Roma”—Alexis turned to look back at her husband trailing in her wake, or sitting in a café awaiting her; he’d lost interest in his guidebook, or was feeling just too tired. She tried to imagine life without him—his death, one day. She shivered as if a pit were opening at her feet. She felt—she didn’t know what—a kind of numbness, nullity. She wondered if this was all that she would feel, one day, fully—or whether she was deceiving herself, in this mood of suspension, indefinition—in “Roma.”

It was Alexis’s idea to see an exhibit of Picasso pen-and-ink drawings in a private gallery near the Piazza di Spagna but the exhibit was disappointing to her, and unnerving: a succession of “erotic” drawings in which the same several images were repeated with tic-like compulsion, a leering/lascivious sort of glee; what pathos in this evidence of a once-great (male) artist reduced, as in a nightmare mimicry of senility, to so few visual ideas—fat voluptuous naked female, satyr-like younger man, elderly male voyeur. The sex-features of the female and the satyr were exaggerated, as in a caricature, or cartoon; the elderly voyeur was Picasso himself, a painful yet defiant self-portrait of sex-obsession. Staring at the walls of these drawings, each meticulously and strikingly rendered, yet, in the aggregate, numbly repetitive, Alexis felt the irony of the great artist’s predicament: he had lost his imaginative capacity to invent new images but he had not lost or transcended his sex-obsession; as if, underpinning all of his art, the great variegated art of decades, there had been only this primary, primitive obsession, a juvenile fixation upon genitals. How much more profound—more “tragic”—the final, death-haunted work of Michelangelo, Goya, Magritte, Rousseau’s
The Dream
. . . But David was shaking his head, smiling—“Well! These drawings are certainly . . .” letting his voice trail off suggestively, so that Alexis was prompted to say, “Pathetic. I think they are pathetic, demeaning.” David laughed, amused by Alexis’s reaction. “It’s the subject that upsets you, Alexis. ‘Erotica’—high-class pornography. Graphic sex makes women uneasy, they know themselves interchangeable.” Alexis said, “And men? What do you think you are?—each of you unique?”

David turned to stare at Alexis, shocked as if she’d slapped him. It was totally out of character for her to speak so sharply and so coldly to him, or to anyone.

It felt good, Alexis thought. Her heart beat in elation, a kind of childlike thrill. Discovering that she could speak to her husband in such a way, and in this foreign city in which they knew no one else and had only each other for solace.

Now recklessly she said: “You can stay at the exhibit a little longer, if you’d like to see it again. I think I’ll go out alone—I want to buy some things.”

“Of course I don’t want to see it again,” David said, hurt. “I’ve seen enough—I’ve seen enough ‘art’ for a long time.”

“I’ll see you back at the hotel. In the café.”

Alexis was walking away—she would leave him there in the chill interior of the art gallery, staring after her in amazement.

“But—Alexis—what time? We have a dinner reservation . . .”

“I don’t know—six
P.M.
—or a little later. Good-bye!”

Desperate to leave the man, to be alone.

S
hopping! In the elegant streets near the Piazza di Spagna she saw her blurred ghost-figure in the windows of designer shops and boutiques; she lingered longest in front of lavishly air-conditioned stores—
Armani, Prada, Dior, Dolce & Gabbana, Louis Vuitton—
whose doors were brazenly opened to the street in a display of a conspicuous wastefulness of energy. Her mood was near-euphoric—she smiled to see her ghost-figure merging briefly with the angular, sylphine figures of mannequins. She thought
But there is nothing I want. What is there in the world, anywhere—that I can want.

Boldly she entered one of the chic designer shops. It was exciting to her, to be alone like this; exciting to be alone in the foreign city, without the man dragging at her, pulling her down. She was not by nature a “consumer”—if she’d taken pleasure in buying things in the past these were likely to be things for other people or for the household she and David shared, that Alexis almost single-handedly oversaw. Now she stared at flimsy little shifts on chrome racks, cobwebby sweaters, halter tops scarcely larger than handkerchiefs. Prices were outrageous, ludicrous: 350 euros for one of the cobwebby sweaters, that looked as if it was unraveling. Nonetheless she would purchase something—she would
shop.
She thought
If I can want something. Then—

To extract pleasure from
consuming
! Almost it was a kind of erotic sensation, or might be—this sense that one must be worth a luxury item, if one can purchase it.

Alexis examined one of the shifts—an abbreviated “dress” designed to wrap around the body like a scarf, or a shroud; it was made of a beautifully rippling material that more resembled metal filings than fabric. Five hundred ninety euros! And another striking dress, sleek black silk with a “tattered” skirt that fell well below the knees, priced at seven hundred euros.