CHAPTER THREE

When I woke up the next morning my euphoria was gone. I didn’t exactly have a hangover, but I didn’t feel like getting up too suddenly. The Cinzano bottle was standing on the table, empty; what I found ominous about this was that I couldn’t remember finishing it. Arthur used to tell me not to drink so much. He wasn’t a great drinker himself, but he had a habit of bringing a bottle home from time to time and leaving it out where I would see it. I suppose I was like a kid’s chemistry set for him: secretly he liked mixing me up, he knew something exciting would happen. Though he was never sure what, or what he wanted; if I’d known that it would’ve been easier.

Outside it was drizzling, and I had no raincoat. I could’ve bought one in Rome, but I’d remembered the climate as unbroken sunshine and warm nights. I hadn’t brought my own raincoat or my umbrella or many of my own things at all, since I hadn’t wanted to leave any obvious signs of packing. Now I began to regret my closet, my red-and-gold sari, my embroidered caftan, my apricot velvet gown with the ripped hem. Though where could I have worn them, here? Nevertheless I lay in bed, longing for my fan made out of peacock feathers, only one feather missing, my evening bag with gas-blue beads, a real antique.

Arthur had a strange relationship with my clothes. He didn’t like me spending money on them because he thought we couldn’t afford it, so at first he said they clashed with my hair or they made me look too fat. Later, when he took up Women’s Liberation for flagellation purposes, he tried to tell me I shouldn’t want to have clothes like that, I was playing into the hands of the exploiters. But it went beyond that; he found these clothes an affront of some kind, a personal insult. At the same time he was fascinated by them, as he was by all the things about me he disapproved of. I suspect he found them arousing and was irritated with himself because of it.

At last he made me so self-conscious that I found it hard to wear my long dresses in public. Instead I would close the bedroom door, drape myself in silk or velvet, and get out all the dangly gold earrings and chains and bracelets I could find. I would dab myself with perfume, take off my shoes, and dance in front of the mirror, twirling slowly around, waltzing with an invisible partner. A tall man in evening dress, with an opera cloak and smoldering eyes. As he swept me in circles (bumping occasionally into the dressing table or the end of the bed) he would whisper, “Let me take you away. We will dance together, always.” It was a great temptation, despite the fact that he wasn’t real.…

Arthur would never dance with me, even in private. He said he had never learned.

I lay in bed, watching it rain. From somewhere in the town I could hear a plaintive mooing sound, hoarse and metallic, like an iron cow. I felt sad, and there was nothing in the flat to cheer me up. Flat was a good word for it. An advertisement in the back of a British newspaper would have called it a villa, but it was only two rooms and a cramped kitchen. The walls were covered with unpainted plaster, splotched and mottled from water seepage. Across the ceiling ran beams of naked wood – Mr. Vitroni must have thought they’d be rustic and picturesque – and these harbored centipedes, which dropped from them sometimes, usually at night. In the cracks between the walls and the floor and occasionally in the tiny bathtub there were medium-sized brown scorpions, which were not supposed to be deadly. Because of the rain outside it was dark and cold, it was dripping somewhere, and it seemed to echo like a cave, perhaps because the two flats above were still empty. Before, there had been a family of South Americans above us who played their guitars late into the evening, wailing and stamping their feet so that chips of plaster fell like hail. I wanted to go up and wail and stamp my feet too, but Arthur thought it would be pushy to introduce ourselves. He grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

I rolled over, and the mattress got me in the spine. There was one prong that stuck up, right in the middle; but I knew that if I turned the mattress over there would be four prongs. It was the same mattress, with its chasms and pinnacles and treachery, unchanged by a year of others. We’d made love on it with an urgency reminiscent of motel rooms. Arthur was stimulated by the centipedes, which lent an aura of danger (a well-known aphrodisiac, witness the Black Death). Also he liked living out of suitcases. It must’ve made him feel like a political refugee, which was probably one of his fantasies, though he never said so.

In addition he could think we were going somewhere, somewhere better; and in fact whenever we moved he did perceive the new place as better, for a while. After that he would perceive it as merely different, and after that as merely the same. But he valued the illusion of transience more highly than the illusion of permanence, and our entire marriage took place in a kind of spiritual train station. Perhaps it had to do with the way we met. Because we started out by saying goodbye, we became accustomed to it. Even when he was just going to the corner for a package of cigarettes, I would gaze at him as if I would never see him again. And now I would never see him again.

I burst into tears and shoved my head under the pillow. Then I decided this would have to stop. I couldn’t let Arthur go on controlling my life, especially at such a distance. I was someone else now, I was almost someone else. People used to say to me, “You don’t look at all like your photographs,” and it was true; so with a few adjustments I’d be able to pass him on the street one day and he wouldn’t even recognize me. I untangled myself from the sheets – Mr. Vitroni’s sheets, thin and carefully mended – went into the bathroom, and ran cold water over a washcloth to deflate my face, noticing just in time the small brown scorpion concealed in the folds. It was hard to get used to these ambushes. If Arthur had been there I would have screamed. As it was I dropped the washcloth on the floor and crushed the scorpion with the tin bottom of a can of cleansing powder, also supplied by Mr. Vitroni. He’d stocked the flat well with products for keeping it clean – soap, toilet disinfectant, scrub brushes – but for cooking there was only a single frying pan and two pots, one minus the handle.

I shambled out to the kitchen and turned on the burner. I was never any good in the mornings before coffee. I needed something warm in my mouth to make me feel safe; here it was filter coffee and milk from the triangular cardboard container on the windowsill. There was no refrigerator, but the milk wasn’t sour yet. I had to boil it anyway, everything had to be boiled.

I sat at the table with my hot cup, adding another white ring to the varnish, eating a package of rusks and trying to organize my life. One step at a time, I told myself. Luckily I’d brought some felt pens; I would make a list. Hair dye, I wrote at the top in apple green. I would go to Tivoli or perhaps Rome for it, the sooner the better. With my hair dyed there would be nothing linking me to the other side, except my fingerprints. And no one would bother about the fingerprints of a woman pronounced officially dead.

I wrote Money, and underlined it twice. Money was important. I had enough for about a month, if I was frugal. Realistically I had enough for about two weeks. The black velvet Colosseum had set me back. I hadn’t been able to take much out of my bank account, since a large withdrawal the day before my death would’ve looked funny. If I’d had more time I could have arranged it through my other bank account, the professional one. If there had been anything in the other bank account. Unfortunately I usually transferred most of it to my own as soon as it came in. I wondered who would get the money; Arthur, probably.

Postcard to Sam, I wrote. I’d bought the postcard already, at the Rome airport. It had a picture of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I printed the agreed-upon message in green block letters:

That would tell him I’d arrived safely. If there had been complications, I would have written: WEATHER COOL AND FRED HAS DYSENTERY. THANK GOD FOR ENTEROVIOFORM! LOVE, MITZI AND FRED.

I decided to mail the postcard first and worry about the money and the hair dye later. I finished my coffee, ate the last rusk, and changed into the second of my new baggy dresses, a white one with gray and mauve lozenges on it. I noticed that my nightgown had a rip halfway down the seam, at thigh level. With no one looking at me, watching for these transgressions, would I become sluttish? Why don’t you take better care of yourself, a voice said, don’t you want to make something of yourself? Needles and thread, I wrote on my list.

I wrapped my head up in the scarf with the pink Mounties and put on my dark glasses. It was no longer raining but it was still gray; the glasses would look odd, but I couldn’t help it. I walked up the winding cobbled street towards the market square, running the gauntlet of old women who sat every day on the doorsteps of their aggressively historical stone houses, their huge obsolete torsos crammed into black dresses as if in mourning, their legs like bloated sausages encased in wool. They were the same old women that had looked me over on the previous afternoon, the same ones that had been there a year ago and two thousand years ago. They did not vary. Bongiorno, each one said as I ent past, and I nodded at them, smiling and repeating the word. They didn’t seem very curious about me. They already knew where I lived, what my car looked like, that I was foreign, and every time I bought something in the square they would know about that also. What else was there to know about a foreigner? The only thing that might bother them was that I lived alone: it wouldn’t seem natural to them. But it didn’t seem natural to me, either.

The post office was in the front part of one of the damp historical houses. It contained only a bench, a counter and a bulletin board, with some pictures tacked to it that looked like WANTED posters: surly men, front and side. A couple of policemen, or were they soldiers, were lounging on the bench in their leftover Mussolini uniforms: high stiff boots, leg stripes, sheaves of wheat on the pocket flaps. The back of my neck prickled as I stood at the counter, trying to make the woman understand that I wanted an airmail stamp. All I could think of was Par Avion, wrong language. I flapped my arms like wings, feeling idiotic, she caught on. Behind me the policemen laughed. Surely they would sniff out my passport, which was glowing through the leather sides of my bag like molten iron, like a siren, surely they would ask to see it, question me, notify the authorities.… And what would the authorities do?

The woman behind the counter took the card in through her slotted window. As soon as Sam got it he could let me know how well we’d succeeded. I went out, followed by the shiny beetle eyes of the policemen.

It was a good plan, I thought; I was pleased with myself for having arranged it. And suddenly I wanted Arthur to know how clever I’d been. He always thought I was too disorganized to plot my way across the floor and out the door, much less out of the country. I was the one who would charge off to do the shopping with a carefully drawn-up list, many of the items suggested by him, and forget my handbag, come back for it, forget the car keys, drive away, forget the list; or return with two tins of caviar and a box of fancy crackers and a half bottle of champagne, then try to justify these treasures by telling him they were on sale, a lie every time but the first. I would love him to know I’d done something complicated and dangerous without making a single mistake. I’d always wanted to do something he would admire.

Remembering the caviar made me hungry. I crossed the market square to the main grocery store, where you could get tins and packages, and bought another box of Peek Freans and some cheese and pasta. Outside, near the café, there was an ancient vegetable truck; that must have been the horn I’d heard earlier. It was surrounded by plump housewives, in their morning cotton dresses and bare legs, calling their orders and waving their bundles of paper money. The vegetable man was young, with an oiled mane of hair; he stood in the back of the truck, filling baskets and joking with the women. When I walked over he grinned at me and shouted something that made the women laugh and shriek. He offered me a bunch of grapes, wiggling it suggestively, but I wasn’t up to it, my vocabulary was too limited; so I went instead to the regular vegetable stand. The produce wasn’t as fresh but the man was old and kindly and I could get away with pointing.

At the butcher’s I bought two expensive, paper-thin slices of beef, which I knew would have a pallid taste. It was from yearlings, because no one could afford to pasture a cow for longer than that, and I never did learn to cook it properly, it always came out like vinyl.

I walked back down the hill, carrying my packages. My red Hertz Rent-A-Car was parked opposite the wrought-iron gate that led to the path. I’d got it at the airport and there was already a scratch on it, from a street in Rome that turned out to be one-way, senso unico. Some of the town’s children were clustered around it, drawing pictures in the film of dust that covered it, peeping through the windows almost fearfully, running their hands along the fenders. When they saw me they drew back from the car and huddled, whispering.

I smiled at them, thinking how charming they looked, with their round brown eyes, alert as a squirrel’s; several had blond hair, startling against their olive skin, and I remembered having been told that the barbarians used to come this way, ten or fifteen centuries ago. That was why all the towns were built on hills.

“Bongiorno” I said to them. They giggled shyly. I turned in at the gate and crunched down the path. Two dwarfish hens, the color of shredded cardboard, scuttled out of my way. Halfway down I stopped: I was trying to remember whether or not I’d locked the door. Despite my apparent safety, I couldn’t afford to get careless or lazy. It was irrational, but I had the feeling that there was someone inside the flat, sitting in the chair by the window, waiting for me.