James Salter - Light Years

She looked about briefly and shrugged.

He climbed the steps to the office, where, after much consultation of ledger pages though the hotel was almost empty, and several discussions between someone invisible in the back room and the clerk, it was arranged that they should have another room—a suite, in fact.

Viri could not bring himself to speak in Italian. “Will it be the same price?”

“Yes, the same price,” the clerk said, not bothering to look up.

“Thank you.”

“Certainly, sir.”

They walked down to the cala after lunch. The sun was warm. The descent wound past villa after villa, all new, all with freshly sodded lawns. Lia was talking about where one could live in Rome, in what kind of apartment. His mind was wandering. The roofs of the villas, the little driveways, were all identical. From time to time, he offered a sound of agreement. He tried to seem at ease.

They lay on the pebbled beach. The bar of bamboo and palm fronds was closed, it was still too early in the season.

“Talk to me,” she said. “You talk so little about yourself. I am fascinated by your name. How did you come to be named Vladimir?”

“It’s a Russian name. My family came from Russia.”

“From which part?”

“I don’t know. From the south.”

He lay there silent. A lone attendant was raking up seaweed. The water was too cold for them to swim. Looking down, he suddenly saw beneath him the thin, white legs of his father. He wrapped the towel around himself. Lia’s flesh, always a faint brown, exotic, strange, was faintly goose-pimpled from the wind.

“Do you want a towel?”

“I prefer the sun,” she said.

“What is it like in Sicily?”

“I’ve never been to Sicily.”

They walked up slowly. It was very long, he had tried not to think of it on the way down. Twice she stopped to rest and he stood waiting, once above a trash heap. “They throw it anywhere,” she said. “You know, there’s a strike, amore . They don’t collect it any more.”

He began to notice the green plastic bags stuffed in the underbrush along the road.

“We should have driven down,” he said.

“ Sì .”

In the late afternoon the room had a smell of dampness. He noticed a mosquito gliding along the upper wall. He lay on a small daybed near the terrace doors, Lia beside him. Her robe was open—he had untied it—her eyes concealed in shadow. The black print of her navel, the even blacker cuneal hair shone up at him like dark stones at the bottom of a pond. She was thin, her flesh was soft, easily bruised. There he was, between her legs, she was uncovered, sprawled among her clothing. The mosquito had slipped from sight, vanished. They were clasped in each other’s arms, disinterested, naked, soiling the rumpled bedspread that covered a mattress.

The act was somehow shameful, an act of boredom and desperation, entered into because everything else had failed. It ended quickly. He lay by her side and put his arm beneath her head, drawing the robe over her at the same time as if she were a shop and he were closing her for the night—a shop one had to talk to. She said nothing. She lay unmoving in the dark.

In Porto Santo Stefano they found a restaurant and sat down for dinner. Only one other table was occupied. “I suppose it’s a little early,” he commented.

“ Sì .”

He was counting on the meal to replenish some of the joy that had fled from him, as one counts on medicines or amusements. He read the menu, he read it again like a man looking for something which is inexplicably missing. The waiter stood near his elbow.

She was not hungry, Lia confessed. The announcement disheartened him. He began to suggest things she might like. “Bollito misto.”

“No.”

“They have some fish.”

“Nothing, amore.”

The restaurant was empty; even the street outside was quiet. He sprinkled salt from the small glass dish by dipping into it with the tip of his knife and then tapping. He tried to drink the wine. He had ordered too much.

She watched him eat and said little. She was like a stranger he had encountered on a journey, suddenly he did not know if he could trust her. He was certain she could sense his nervousness. The waiter was sitting near the door to the kitchen; the owner seemed half asleep.

“It feels as if we were in exile,” Viri said. “The tagliatelle is good. Have a taste.”

She accepted. His hand held forth the fork in the deserted room, like a room where an assassination is to take place.

“Do you want to go back to Rome?” she asked.

He felt guilty. He felt he was spoiling everything. “I don’t know. Let’s decide tomorrow,” he said. “I’m a little nervous, I don’t know why. I’m sure I’ll get over it. And the hotel… Perhaps it’s the barometer or something. Give me a day or two, it will be all right.”

And later, in bed, he saw her approach, raise her arms and take off her nightgown. Even this act frightened him. She slipped in beside him, naked, unhurried. “Amore , of course I’ll wait,” she said. “You know that. I am yours,” she said in a voice without hope. “Do what you like to me.”

THE TERRORS OF BANISHMENT, OF a new world. What in the beginning was novel, curious, slowly hardens to intractable life, the laughter fades, it is like a difficult school, one which will never end. He did not recognize the holidays. Even Sundays were meaningless, feared, with everything closed like a book.

Adorato , she whispered, amore dolce . Forgive this relentless courtship. She had little restraint left, she said. She had hungers only an orphan could know. She had begun to lose hope. Somehow it strengthened her. The terror of desperate longing which she had unfurled before him she now withdrew. In its place was a kind of aristocratic submission. She went to Milan with her parents. They saw the opera. She had her hair cut. The proprietor of the hotel wants his daughter to cut hers like mine , she wrote. They went to exhibitions, shopped. Even that does not quite kill the loneliness. I am wistful for you. I smoke a cigar in the evenings. They call me Cigarello, brown and thin . She came back witty and beautiful. Her eyes were cool. She wanted him, she said. She was living a d’Annunzian passion, one of acceptance, despair. I would like to fit your hand like a favorite soap. They were sitting on a bench in the Villa Borghese, eating milk chocolate from a bed of foil. The color of her nipples, she said later. She had to go home for dinner. Ciao , my swan, she smiled.

They were married on a Sunday. Lia’s mother gave Viri an enameled French ring that had been in her family. She believed in him. She was gay at the bridal supper, the greatest of her dreads had vanished. Even the brother was cordial.

They began a second life. They lived on Via Giulia in an apartment on the third floor. One ascended an oval stairway at the end of the hall. It was not large, but it had a study. There was morning sun, a small kitchen, a bath. Lia was very happy. An intellectual apartment, she said.

They were calm, they were at peace in Vecchia Roma, the part of the city he liked. He began to walk among its shops and streets, routes to the Piazza Navona, to Sant’Eustachio. He slept well. He was slim. He worked with Cagli and Rova. He seemed younger, there were fewer lines in his face or, having been deep from uncertainty, they were fading now. Perhaps it was only the light.

The door had two locks. “Rome is filled with thieves,” Lia said.

He stood beside her as she turned the key two, three, four times, driving the bolt ever deeper. There was also a key for downstairs, and two for the car. He remembered how once they had never locked anything except when they went to the city. He remembered the river, the dry lawns of autumn warmed by the sun. He longed for home.