The Rise And Fall Of Great Powers Part 17

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 pa.s.senger above the engine buzz. Tooly looked toward Sarah but found only empty s.p.a.ce, 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 gla.s.ses 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 gra.s.s.

"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, eyegla.s.ses 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 canapes 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 pa.s.s a certain age as a woman, and n.o.body 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 s.e.x anymore. Men are never that clean, are they, and they're hairy and sweaty. s.e.x 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? G.o.d, 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.

Sarah scooped grounds into the moka coffeemaker. "You know, I wondered about you," she said, back turned, reaching into the cupboard, clattering through crockery for espresso cups.

"Wondered?"

"I mean, what happened to you?" she said. "Where did you go? You cheap runaway-not even caring about those who brought you up with blood, sweat, and tears." Sarah was a person who got the tone all wrong, who stood at the threshold of a subject, pretending a lack of interest, then barged in. "I suppose you're so very angry at me."

"I'm not angry."

Sarah shooed away this denial. "And you're not well," she said. "You're clearly not."

"What do you mean? I'm fine."

"You look sickly. You look ill. Like you're starving away."

"You're starting to sound like you were my mother."

"Such a hurtful thing to say."

They stood there, gazing at the bubbling espresso pot.

"You asked how I spend my time here," Sarah resumed. "One thing I was embarra.s.sed to say is church. Don't worry-I don't try to foist it on people. Just something for me. But I find it comforting. And interesting. A different way of seeing what happened. A way to forgive myself."

"You blame yourself for things?"

"Of course."

"Such as?"

Sarah poured the coffee. "Sugar?"

Tooly saw the sugar bowl in Sheepshead Bay, crawling with ants. "What do you regret?"

"But are you staying overnight? You didn't pick a room yet."

"I have that hotel booked in Rome," Tooly repeated, clearing dishes to hide her irritation.

"Don't bother with the plates. Just leave them, if you so desperately want to get away from me."

"I like doing dishes. It's a weirdness of me, one of many. Everywhere I go, I insist on doing the washing-up." Despite her outward cheer, Tooly bridled at the familiar rigmarole of Sarah. Years of being plunged into unease, years of trying to coax her out of moods. "I was thinking of those stories you used to tell me," Tooly said, and heard herself appeasing again. "About those animals when you were growing up in Kenya. Must've been quite a childhood, out there in the wild."

"Wasn't that wild."

"I imagine leopards leaping out whenever you left the house."

"We had a garden like everybody else. Could've been anywhere."

"People say if you're born in Africa you have the place in your veins forever."

"I don't say it."

"Italy's more like home now?"

"How could it be?"

"Would you ever go back to live in Kenya?"

"I left for a reason. It was small-minded and remote. White Africans talk interminably about how gorgeous it is-the land, the land, the land. Bores me to tears. Kenya does have proper countryside; all other landscapes look wrong when I see them-overgroomed and hacked up. But why would I go somewhere just to look at land?"

"You've not got relations left there?"

"None I'd want to know. And Mummy and Daddy are long dead."

"I don't remember you visiting them."

"Why would I? They were otherwise occupied."

"How so?"

"Sipping," she responded. "My mother drank to get unhappy. Daddy just soaked."

Tooly had heard these tales of woe before. Perhaps she should have sat through them all again. But she just couldn't. "Sarah, I came here to talk to you."

"Which is what we're doing."

"I need to ask you some questions."

"How dramatic."

"About Humphrey first."

"The old darling!"

"Sarah, where's he from? Somewhere in Russia, right?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well," Tooly responded, "I've seen him recently. You know his accent? It's gone. Can you explain that?"

"Don't know what you mean."

"He talks like an English speaker now. It's like hearing someone completely different. Not completely," she corrected herself. "The voice is the same. It still seems like him."

"I don't believe you."

"Why would I invent that, Sarah? What possible reason? I came here for help in figuring things out. Stuff that you know. Stuff that pertains to my life."

"What on earth could you mean?"

"Tell me about Venn, then. Where did he go?"

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"What else could it mean?" She looked up at the ceiling. "I find it disappointing-extremely, extremely-that you won't ever be direct with me."

"I'm the most direct person in the world," Sarah responded with astonishment.

"Then please try, right now."

Over the next two hours, Tooly peppered her with questions. Sarah had been there. Could she not just explain? Rather than doing so, she spun interminable yarns, depicting herself as innocent and kind while flinging blame on everyone else-above all Venn, whom she depicted as the improbable devil in her tale, with Humphrey as the saint.

"That's not what happened," Tooly interrupted. "Do you honestly believe what you're saying?"

Sarah lit a cigarette, flapping at the air to clear the smell. "You know what we should do after you go back to your shop?" she said brightly. "We should try Skype together. No one ever agrees to do it with me. I'll show you how tomorrow."

This visit had been folly. Another round of make-believe with Sarah.

"I'm not here tomorrow. I've made that clear."

"You're being silly-so much I can tell you still."

"Right now, then. Just one thing."