Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

Tooly slid the glasses back onto Sarah’s face, and the older woman hugged her, quite unexpectedly. “I need a cigarette to celebrate your arrival,” she declared. “Keep me company.” Her bedroom was the only area in the apartment where she was allowed to light up, so she lay on the bed propped up with pillows, kicked off her sandals, painted toenails stretching, crystal ashtray on her belly. She tossed over a loose cigarette, but Tooly didn’t smoke anymore. Sarah tried to cajole her into resuming, to no avail. Once, Sarah’s white-green packets of Kool Super Longs had seemed the paragon of elegance, but her draws were urgent and coarse now. “In the winter out here, you sleep late and watch a bit of TV, and, next thing you know, it’s dark,” she said. “Much better now, with the daylight back. Hey, let’s go out. I can show you the town before lunch. I just need to change.”

“Can’t you go as you are?”

“Not with my glasses on!”

“Come on — wear them.”

The background whisper of waves increased as they strode down Via Gramsci heading for the sea. A motor scooter droned past, two teenage boys in beetle helmets with unclipped straps fluttering, the portly driver shouting at his passenger above the engine buzz. Tooly looked toward Sarah but found only empty space, turning to discover her several steps behind, limping hurriedly to keep up. “You go so fast!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Tooly said. “It’s habit. Throw a coin at me if I do that.”

“I absolutely will. Look, there’s another,” she said, stooping to collect more change off the ground. This was Sarah’s pastime, developed in recent winters here: an urban treasure hunt for coins that people had dropped on the sidewalk. “If I don’t reach fifty euros for the month, I become quite agitated,” she joked. “Keep your eyes open around parking meters especially.” She squinted at the pavement, having left her glasses at home.

At the dock, the jetties sat empty, the fishing trawlers out for the day. Waterside restaurants were prepped, awaiting fresh seafood. The footpath curled an upward course toward a cliff edge at which stood an ancient Roman villa, its crumbled rooms carpeted by grass.

“Nero and Caligula were born in Anzio,” Sarah noted.

“Nice pedigree.”

Sarah pointed across the cliff at the sea. “And that’s where the Allied landing took place in World War Two — thousands of young men killed right here. In 1944, all that blue sea was gray with landing craft. Beautiful young men stuck in the holds. Lots of them with just minutes left to live.”

Paul’s father had been wounded at Anzio, Tooly remembered. “Do lots of tourists come pay tribute?”

“To be honest, there’s not much to show that it even happened. Now and then, they find machine guns underwater. There’s a couple of military cemeteries and a museum with dusty old uniforms and a few sad letters home. But the reason people come to Anzio these days is to swim and tan,” she said. “Oh — do you feel that? It’s going to rain. My hip feels funny, which means rain. There’s a reason to crash your car!”

“A built-in barometer.”

She gripped Tooly’s forearm affectionately.

In the kitchen, Sarah fetched napkins and checked recipes, tapping her lower lip.

“I do that,” Tooly said.

“Do what?”

“Tap my lip like you were doing.”

“Do I? You’re copying me,” Sarah said, eyeglasses back on her nose, finger running down the cookbook page. “Now leave me to put on the finishing touches.”

Tooly waited in the living room, hearing the clack of knife on cutting board, a pan sizzling, faucet running. She glanced into the kitchen, intending to offer help, but saw Sarah inadvertently knock loose an implant of upper teeth as she tasted sauce on a wooden spoon. Tooly pretended not to be there and waited on the terrace.

They ate blini canapés with salmon roe on sour cream to start, then frittura di paranza with lemon quarters, and pan-fried sole with potato salad. Approval produced such joy in Sarah that Tooly found herself offering it more heartily than merited. Sarah was on a high, swollen by Tooly’s enthusiasm — until the dessert, a rum baba that failed to rise properly. This was a special visit, she said disconsolately, and now everything was ruined. She knew that to be irrational and admitted it. But the intractable lifelong argument between what Sarah knew and what Sarah felt drove her to the cigarette pack. Dejectedly, she lit up in the kitchen, mindless of house rules now.

“What do you do out here?” Tooly asked. “I mean, day to day.”

“Whatever I want. Watch TV. Go grocery shopping. Keep the apartment clean. We get these rains, being near the water, and if I don’t clear all the leaves they block the drain, and the terrace floods. So I take care of that. What else? I have my treasure hunt.”

“The neighbors? Who are they?”

“No idea. I’m invisible. You pass a certain age as a woman, and nobody sees you anymore.”

“Course they do.”

“You’ll find out; you’ll become a ghost one day. Though it’s not all bad. You get to watch things happening: men and women appraising each other. I can just look, and not have to deal with the sex anymore. Men are never that clean, are they, and they’re hairy and sweaty. Sex isn’t ever that pleasurable for women — really, it’s just the pleasure of being wanted.”

“Not sure I agree with any of that.”

“Men are hairy.”

“Yes, that part is true,” Tooly conceded. “Not necessarily a bad thing. Within limits.”

“The right amount in the right places.”

“Well, yes. True of everything.”

“What strikes me,” Sarah continued, “is that men are such savages — they don’t fold their clothes, they pee on the toilet seat, they barely wash — yet when it comes to their views on women they’re suddenly so concerned about how everything looks. Each barbarian becomes an aesthete about the female body, all of a sudden expecting perfection.”

“Lots of the men I’ve encountered seem pretty grateful to settle for what they get. Though maybe that’s the ones who go for me — not, perhaps, the most discriminating category.”

“Don’t undersell yourself, Tooly. What you present is what the man buys.”

“Honesty in advertising. That’s what I offer.”

“What’s weirder still,” Sarah continued, “is how women are the opposite: we’re tidy and neat; we respect decoration; we groom; we use fabric softener, put rinse-aid in the dishwasher, feather our nests. Then we share those nests with some stinking bird who’s the opposite.”

“I don’t use fabric softener, and I don’t actually know what rinse-aid is. Then again, I also don’t have a hairy man in my house.”

“That’s probably why.”

“Because I don’t use fabric softener? God, imagine if you’re right. And men can be nice-looking,” she added, voice fading as Sarah resumed.

“Around here, I could vanish and no one would notice. I will vanish next weekend. That’s when the owners get back, and I run away like a dormouse.” She was headed north next, to an out-of-season ski lodge in Alto Adige, near the Austrian border.

This was how Sarah survived nowadays, house-sitting empty vacation homes, residing in the right places at the wrong times: a ski resort when the slopes were muddy; a beach house when it rained on the sea. “I feed cats sometimes and water plants. It’s not bad. Sometimes they give me spending money.” The owners were wealthy men for whom she had once been the other woman. They offered charity now, and she lived at the whims of pity. If their plans changed — a forecast turned splendid for the weekend, say — she had to go.