A ruling passion : a novel, page 55
He was watching her with amusement. "I don't mind; thank you. Are you planning to interview Scutigera in Italian?"
"If I have to. I hope he'll consent to English. Otherwise, I'll do a voice-over translation on the tape; we don't want subtitles."
"No, we don't. You seem sure we'll have a story."
"I'm sure there's a story there, if we can just get it."
He nodded, and another silence fell. Valerie repeated to herself the word "we" as they had used it; each time, it had given her a small jolt of excitement. He was talking to her as if she were already part of the "Blow-Up" team.
Nick was looking at her thoughtfully. "Did you work when you were married?" he asked.
"No," she replied. She was surprised; he had never asked her anything about her marriages. "Volunteer work," she added, "and the spots on television I'd always done."
He smiled. "At one time you would have said that was real work."
"It is," she said with asperity. "There are plenty of places—hospitals and museums and dozens of others—that couldn't function at all without volunteers. They do hard work, sometimes forty or more hours a week, and they don't get a lot of recognition or even, sometimes, gratitude."
"I wasn't making light of it," he said mildly.
"Weren't you? Then why talk about it as if it isn't real work?"
"Because you did. You said you hadn't worked when you were married, and then you said you'd done volunteer work."
A laugh broke from her. "You're right. I shouldn't have." She gazed at him reflectively. "The difference is the salary: the power behind it. Someone has the power to pay it, and the worker has the weakness to need it. Where wealth isn't involved in a relationship, there's no difference in power, and then it isn't thought of as work."
'Tou mean ifs a cooperative effort. Or friendship."
"Or marriage."
He smiled. "Thafs always the hope, isn't it? But wealth isn't all there is; what about authority? Teachers have power over students; generals over corporals..."
"You're right, but the principle is the same: ifs the power to give and take away from one who is needy and therefore weak. When I do volunteer work, I'm everyone's equal because they have nothing to take away fi-om me. I certainly wouldn't be afraid of losing a volunteer job if I happened to displease someone."
"Could you lose it if you were incompetent?"
She paused. "I suppose so. But most likely I wouldn't be fired; I'd be shifted to a different job."
"Because of who you are?"
"Because nonprofit organizations are always desperate for help."
They laughed. Their appetizers were before them, and Nick tasted
the prosciutto. He looked surprised, and took another bite. "Wonderful. Like nothing in America."
"No, what they call prosciutto in America isn't good. I always wait until I'm in Italy to eat it."
"But if you don't get to Italy often..."
"Then I eat other foods. Isn't it worth waiting for the best?"
"There are people who never get to Italy."
"Then they won't eat prosciutto. They can eat American ham; we do that pretty well. There's no reason to compromise."
"You've made no compromises since your husband's death?"
"Of course I have, but only when there was no other choice."
"For example."
"My first apartment. The house I'm in now. I can take the same number of dollars and buy a kind of ham that's approximately as good as prosciutto, but I can't take the money I've budgeted for rent and find another kind of housing even close to my farm in Middleburg."
He nodded. "What else cQd you compromise on, besides housing?"
"Nothing. I don't buy clothes, because I can't afford the ones I'm used to, and I have enough to last for a long time. They're not in style—I suppose that's my compromise—but they're still what I expect clothes to be."
Again, he nodded, his eyes somber. "This conversation would be incomprehensible to anyone who had always been poor."
She looked at him with a slight frown. "You think I'm being insensitive."
"I think you don't understand what it means not to have money. I'd guess that you think whatever has happened to you isn't quite real. You may feel that the past is like a dream, but, dream or not, you somehow expect to get back to it, even if you don't know how it will happen. If you had to put a date on it, I imagine you'd say before your clothes wear out."
Valerie's color was high. "I don't remember you being crude. Is that because I was so naive in those days that even you struck me as admirable?"
"I deserved that," Nick said abrupdy. "I apologize." Seeing the flash of her eyes, the proud lift of her head, he suddenly wanted her, and admitted to himself that he had wanted her since they sat down together. It had added to the tension of the dinner, he thought, and wondered if it had added to Valerie's too. He looked at her, remembering her body in his arms, her mouth beneath his. The room blurred
and receded; all he could see was Valerie's moudi; all he could feel was her body, as familiar as if it had been yesterday that she moved beneath him, drawing him in.
Then, forcibly, he locked it away; once again, he denied it. It was too soon. He wasn't ready to say he wanted her again, not to her, not to himself. "I apologize," he said again, and there was only the slightest tremor in his voice. "My manners are usually better, even if my judgment isn't. I think I'm having trouble because I don't feel we're alone."
Valerie raised her eyebrows.
Nick gestured toward the empty table beside them. "Nick and Valerie, fourteen years younger, eating dinner and trying to bridge the differences between them."
"They're not at that table," Valerie said. "They're inside us; we're the same people."
"I don't think so. I know how much I've changed and I can see—"
"You haven't changed at all."
"—that you have, too. I think I've changed, and we can talk about that sometime, if you'd like. What bothered me a minute ago was that I thought you hadn't changed. But I was wrong; I've seen you at work and I know how different you are."
She shook her head. "I don't think people change very much. I suppose we always wish they would, so the world would be orderly and predictable, but I don't believe any of us really becomes something else." Her look turned inward for a moment. 'What might happen, especially if there's some kind of shock, is that we'd discover parts of ourselves we didn't know about. Whatever I am now was always there; people just didn't see it."
"Or you didn't use it."
"Or I didn't use it," she repeated evenly. "Thank you for reminding me.
Their eyes challenged each other as the waiter brought their dinners, refilled their wine glasses, and discreedy vanished. Nick let himself say it silendy: he wanted her, perhaps more than ever. "Will you believe me," he asked, "when I say that I'm very glad to be here with you?"
"Yes," said Valerie. "I'm having a very good time."
They burst out laughing, and at that moment something relaxed between them, and they talked easily for the rest of the meal.
"I have two days in Florence," Nick said as they sat over coffee. It was late; the two of them were alone in the restaurant. For the first
time Nick realized that the room, though sleek and handsome, was far too bright. It had not been designed for lingering. "I'd like to plan them with you, but not here. Is there someplace more relaxing we can
go?
"Why don't we just walk? Florence doesn't have much night life, but it's wonderful for walking."
Nick dropped his idea of an intimate corner with soft lights, quiet conversation and a late-night drink. "I'd like that," he said.
He had no idea, when he finally returned to the Excelsior, how far they had walked, but he knew he had never seen so many churches, piazzas or shuttered shops, and thought he would never see as many again. The streets were not as crowded as during the day, but stiU they found themselves veering to left and right to avoid the Florentine pedestrians who give way to no one, but mysteriously recognize other Florentines and weave safely past at the last moment. "I have the wrong genes," Valerie laughed when once again she failed to stare down an oncoming couple and had to sidestep nimbly to keep from being mowed down. "Maybe if I lived here I'd figure it out."
"If I didn't know better, I'd think you lived here now," Nick said, admiring her sureness in the city. He followed as she turned corners without hesitation and crossed piazzas to find just the street she wanted of all those that led into and out of it. He enjoyed striding beside her, their hands brushing now and then, their steps matched. He knew he had never been so attracted to her as now, when he was not sure, in fact, what they would find together. But he gave himself up to the warmth of her voice, the pleasure he took in her quick mind, and the sexual current that ran between them in the matched rhythm of their steps, their murmured words, the way their heads tilted toward each other, the quick awareness of each other whenever their hands touched. And he knew she felt it, too.
They emerged from a narrow street into the Piazza della Signoria, a quarter of it excavated to expose newly discovered foundations from the time of the Roman Empire. A roof had been built above it, and spotlights illuminated it. Nick and Valerie gazed through the wire fence at the stone stairways and interconnecting rooms that made a complex of apartments, some still filled with rubble, others neady swept, their contents catalogued. "I wonder what we'll leave behind," Nick murmured. "Not television, I hope; at least not the television that's around now." He looked at Valerie and smiled. "That's a dream and a goal: to do something with television that we'd be proud to have other generations dig up."
She nodded. 'Tou will. You've already begun."
'W^ will," he amended. 'We've already begun."
She smiled to herself. We've already begun. They turned from the excavation and looked across the piazza toward the Uffizi Palace. "We'll come back tomorrow," Valerie said. "It's too beautifril to miss. Santa Croce too, and Piazza della Repubblica—and of course the Uf-fizi and the Pitti Palace and the Academy... Two days doesn't even begin it; you need at least a week, and you'd still be cheating yourself."
"Two days," Nick said firmly. "You give me a preview, and I'll come back when I can do it justice."
They walked along the Amo and crossed it on the Ponte Vecchio, the covered bridge lined with shops that, locked up for the night, looked like antique wooden jewel boxes. Nick thought the city was like a fabulous setting for an ancient tale. After the unrelenting newness of California's pastel houses and sprawling shopping centers, the ambiguous juxtaposition of Washington's marble and slums, and east-em Virginia's modern, urban bustle, Florence seemed to be a stage set that looked backward to a past of grandeur and violence, its buildings mellowed with age, its streets darkened by centuries of wagon wheels, marching troops, crowds of people, and automobiles. It was hard to believe people lived ordinary lives there.
"We'll have to come back," Nick murmured. "I want much more than a week."
They crossed back to the other side of the Arno on the Vespucci Bridge, and eventually reached the Excelsior. Both of them thought about Valerie's coming to Nick's room, and neither of them mentioned it. "I'll walk you back to... what is it?" he asked.
"Monna Lisa."
At the locked iron gates, Valerie rang the bell and the night receptionist let her in. "Good night," she said, holding out her hand. "Thank you. It's been a wonderftil evening."
Nick held her hand, and then his arms were around her, and their bodies were together, solid, yielding, close. They stood silendy in the large foyer with the fireplace and sofas on the left and the receptionist at his desk on the right. He was conscientiously writing, his head lowered. Probably wondering why we don't go upstairs, Valerie thought, and a laugh trembled on her hps. She put up her hand and touched Nick's face. "Good night," she said. She was trembling with wanting him, and quickly walked past the receptionist to the stone staircase, and ran upstairs.
Nick avoided the receptionist's eyes. He thinks Fm a fool. An Ameri-
can who knows nothing of love. But outside, walking back through the narrow Borgo Pinto, by now empty of cars and people, he knew it was all right. They had time. They had a lot to sort out, but whatever they finally found together, this time they would know what they wanted, and they'd stick with it.
He was happy. He could not remember when he had last felt like this. His stride lengthened; he felt powerful and immortal. Like a kid in love, he thought, smiling to himself, and he knew that was something else he had to think about. But not that night. By the time he was back in his room, it was almost three in the morning, and he did not think about anything: he went to sleep.
What he did think about, when he awoke, was calling Valerie. He reached for the telephone before his eyes were open.
She answered immediately. "I was planning our day; are you ready for more walking?"
"Anything you say, if I can start with breakfast."
"Why don't we do that here? It's served in the dining room, and Fm sure they'd welcome my guest. I'll see you downstairs in an hour."
That was the beginning of a day Nick never forgot: intense, exhilarating, stimulating, exhausting. At lunch, eating pasta with cream sauce in a small trattoria near the Pitti Palace, he wondered if that was what life with Valerie would be like. But of course it would, he thought; he had known that even at Stanford; what he had loved most in her then was her infectious excitement at everything life had to offer, and her determination to reach out for it. To make thin£fs happen . ..
Nick knew he had been like that himself, all his life, though too often it had been submerged beneath the fierce drive to succeed at work, and he knew Valerie had loved it in him as he had loved it in her. Now, as they toured Florence all that long day, they shared their excitement: the feeling that everything was a source of wonder and delight, and they were the most fortunate of people to be able to partake of it.
The center of Florence is small, easily traversed on foot, but most of the miles Nick and Valerie walked were on the marble floors of palaces that housed some of the world's greatest art, and the stone and marble floors of churches where they stood with heads back until their necks were stiff, admiring brilliant frescoes four and five hundred years old, trying to see those hidden from them behind the scaffolds and protective mesh of restorers, and contemplating the magnificent sculpted tombs of popes, artists and scientists. They walked through Michelan-
gelo's house, the walls covered with frescoes he had painted while living there, and the science museum where, for some reason, a preserved finger of Galileo was displayed behind glass.
Much of the time they did not talk. The heart of Florence is memories, and Valerie and Nick, who were finding the way from their own memories to the present, let themselves fall under the enchantment of the city's past. And as they did, they became more aware of each other. For all the glories of the Renaissance, the best part of that day was the contentment they felt seeing them together.
But they were not always silent. When they were between palaces and churches, walking through the city beneath the hot, hazy sun and cloudless sky, they talked and laughed with the freedom of two friends on a holiday. They both wore slacks and open-necked shirts, both tucked their wallets into pockets so their hands were free, and both walked with the same easy stride through the cobblestone streets, navigating in the tumultuous scene that is daytime Florence.
They walked with josding crowds of pedestrians down the middle of each narrow, shaded street until they heard a car or, worse, a bus approaching. Then, with everyone else, they moved to the thin strip of sidewalk on one side or the other, flattening themselves against a building until the car or bus had passed. They dodged motor scooters driven by men in business suits with ties flying like kite tails, or young women in the tightest of miniskirts, feet planted firmly together on the center floorboard. They emerged from the dark streets into the brilliant sunshine of the piazzas where flocks of pigeons wheeled above artists and cartoonists at their easels. They sat in outdoor cafes, watching the parade of people that never stopped. At two in the afi:ernoon, when the museums and shops closed, the whole city clanged with the sound of iron shutters being slammed down over shop fronts. Then Valerie and Nick went to the Boboli Gardens, and the churches, which never closed. At four, when the shutters were flung up and the shops sprang to life, they window-shopped as they walked to their next destination.
Dinner was at nine. By then even Valerie could not walk another step. "You're very impressive," she said as they sat in the courtyard at Enoteca Pinchiorri. "Most people couldn't take that pace."
"Most people don't have you for a guide. It was a very special day. Did we leave anything out for me to see if I do come back?"
"Today was an appetizer. There's a feast waiting for you."
"Then I'll find a way to come back. If you'll come with me."
"I'd like that very much."
He smiled, realizing how much he was beginning to count on her openness and lack of pretense. "Tell me about your other visits here," he said, and all through dinner she talked easily about her trips to Europe that had begun when she was eight. She ended with the last trip she and Carlton had taken, to Switzerland, to visit friends.
"That was only a couple of months before he died," she said, and frowned slighdy. "I never thought of that; I wonder if he had a bank account there. I wonder if that's where the money is."
"You've never told me that story," said Nick. "I only know parts of it from the newspapers. I'd like to hear it."
"I'll tell you sometime. Not now, if you don't mind. I feel so wonderfully far from it. Foreign countries always do that, at least for me; sometimes I can't even visualize home and the everyday things I do, and that makes the place I'm visiting, wherever it is, seem romantic. Ifs much more fun to think about romance than home and all those ordinary things."
"It's like the past," Nick said with a smile.
