Dickie turned with his hand on the doorknob. “I don’t know what my father thinks I’m doing over here—drinking myself to death or what. I’ll probably fly home this winter for a few days, but I don’t intend to stay over there. I’m happier here. If I went back there to live, my father would be after me to work in Burke-Greenleaf. I couldn’t possibly paint. I happen to like painting, and I think it’s my business how I spend my life.”
“I understand. But he said he wouldn’t try to make you work in his firm if you come back, unless you wanted to work in the designing department, and he said you liked that.”
“Well—my father and I have been over that. Thanks, anyway, Tom, for delivering the message and the clothes. It was very nice of you.” Dickie held out his hand.
Tom couldn’t have made himself take the hand. This was the very edge of failure as far as Mr. Greenleaf was concerned, and failure with Dickie. “I think I ought to tell you something else,” Tom said with a smile. “Your father sent me over here especially to ask you to come home.”
“What do you mean?” Dickie frowned. “Paid your way?”
“Yes.” It was his one last chance to amuse Dickie or to repel him, to make Dickie burst out laughing or go out and slam the door in disgust. But the smile was coming, the long corners of his mouth going up, the way Tom remembered Dickie’s smile.
“Paid your way! What do you know! He’s getting desperate, isn’t he?” Dickie closed the door again.
“He approached me in a bar in New York,” Tom said. “I told him I wasn’t a close friend of yours, but he insisted I could help if I came over. I told him I’d try.”
“How did he ever meet you?”
“Through the Schrievers. I hardly know the Schrievers, but there it was! I was your friend and I could do you a lot of good.”
They laughed.
“I don’t want you to think I’m someone who tried to take advantage of your father,” Tom said. “I expect to find a job somewhere in Europe soon, and I’ll be able to pay him back my passage money eventually. He bought me a round-trip ticket.”
“Oh, don’t bother! It goes on the Burke-Greenleaf expense list. I can just see Dad approaching you in a bar! Which bar was it?”
“Raoul’s. Matter of fact, he followed me from the Green Cage.” Tom watched Dickie’s face for a sign of recognition of the Green Cage, a very popular bar, but there was no recognition.
They had a drink downstairs in the hotel bar. They drank to Herbert Richard Greenleaf.
“I just realized today’s Sunday,” Dickie said. “Marge went to church. You’d better come up and have lunch with us. We always have chicken on Sunday. You know it’s an old American custom, chicken on Sunday.”
Dickie wanted to go by Marge’s house to see if she was still there. They climbed some steps from the main road up the side of a stone wall, crossed part of somebody’s garden, and climbed more steps. Marge’s house was a rather sloppy-looking one-story affair with a messy garden at one end, a couple of buckets and a garden hose cluttering the path to the door, and the feminine touch represented by her tomato-colored bathing suit and a bra hanging over a windowsill. Through an open window, Tom had a glimpse of a disorderly table with a typewriter on it.
“Hi!” she said, opening the door. “Hello, Tom! Where’ve you been all this time?”
She offered them a drink, but discovered there was only half an inch of gin in her bottle of Gilbey’s.
“It doesn’t matter, we’re going to my house,” Dickie said. He strolled around Marge’s bedroom–living room with an air of familiarity, as if he lived half the time here himself. He bent over a flower pot in which a tiny plant of some sort was growing, and touched its leaf delicately with his forefinger.“Tom has something funny to tell you,” he said. “Tell her, Tom.”
Tom took a breath and began. He made it very funny, and Marge laughed like someone who hadn’t had anything funny to laugh at in years. “When I saw him coming in Raoul’s after me, I was ready to climb out of a back window!” His tongue rattled on almost independently of his brain. His brain was estimating how high his stock was shooting up with Dickie and Marge. He could see it in their faces.
The climb up the hill to Dickie’s house didn’t seem half so long as before. Delicious smells of roasting chicken drifted out on the terrace. Dickie made some martinis. Tom showered and then Dickie showered, and came out and poured himself a drink, just like the first time, but the atmosphere now was totally changed.
Dickie sat down in a wicker chair and swung his legs over one of the arms. “Tell me more,” he said, smiling. “What kind of work do you do? You said you might take a job.”
“Why? Do you have a job for me?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
“Oh, I can do a number of things—valeting, baby-sitting, accounting—I’ve got an unfortunate talent for figures. No matter how drunk I get, I can always tell when a waiter’s cheating me on a bill. I can forge a signature, fly a helicopter, handle dice, impersonate practically anybody, cook—and do a one-man show in a nightclub in case the regular entertainer’s sick. Shall I go on?” Tom was leaning forward, counting them off on his fingers. He could have gone on.
“What kind of a one-man show?” Dickie asked.
“Well—” Tom sprang up. “This, for example.” He struck a pose with one hand on his hip, one foot extended. “This is Lady Assburden sampling the American subway. She’s never even been in the underground in London, but she wants to take back some American experiences.” Tom did it all in pantomime, searching for a coin, finding it didn’t go into the slot, buying a token, puzzling over which stairs to go down, registering alarm at the noise and the long express ride, puzzling again as to how to get out of the place—here Marge came out, and Dickie told her it was an Englishwoman in the subway, but Marge didn’t seem to get it and asked, “What?”— walking through a door which could only be the door of the men’s room from her twitching horror of this and that, which augmented until she fainted. Tom fainted gracefully on to the terrace glider.
“Wonderful!” Dickie yelled, clapping.
Marge wasn’t laughing. She stood there looking a little blank. Neither of them bothered to explain it to her. She didn’t look as if she had that kind of sense of humor, anyway, Tom thought.
Tom took a gulp of his martini, terribly pleased with himself. “I’ll do another for you sometime,” he said to Marge, but mostly to indicate to Dickie that he had another one to do.
“Dinner ready?” Dickie asked her. “I’m starving.”
“I’m waiting for the darned artichokes to get done. You know that front hole. It’ll barely make anything come to a boil.” She smiled at Tom. “Dickie’s very old-fashioned about some things, Tom, the things he doesn’t have to fool with. There’s still only a wood stove here, and he refuses to buy a refrigerator or even an icebox.”
“One of the reasons I fled America,” Dickie said. “Those things are a waste of money in a country with so many servants. What’d Ermelinda do with herself, if she could cook a meal in half an hour?” He stood up. “Come on in, Tom, I’ll show you some of my paintings.”
Dickie led the way into the big room Tom had looked into a couple of times on his way to and from the shower, the room with a long couch under the two windows and the big easel in the middle of the floor. “This is one of Marge I’m working on now.” He gestured to the picture on the easel.
“Oh,” Tom said with interest. It wasn’t good in his opinion, probably in anybody’s opinion. The wild enthusiasm of her smile was a bit off. Her skin was as red as an Indian’s. If Marge hadn’t been the only girl around with blonde hair, he wouldn’t have noticed any resemblance at all.
“And these—a lot of landscapes,” Dickie said with a deprecatory laugh, though obviously he wanted Tom to say something complimentary about them, because obviously he was proud of them. They were all wild and hasty and monotonously similar. The combination of terra cotta and electric blue was in nearly every
one, terra cotta roofs and mountains and bright electric-blue seas. It was the blue he had put in Marge’s eyes, too.
“My surrealist effort,” Dickie said, bracing another canvas against his knee.
Tom winced with almost a personal shame. It was Marge again, undoubtedly, though with long snakelike hair, and worst of all two horizons in her eyes, with a miniature landscape of Mongibello’s houses and mountains in one eye, and the beach in the other full of little red people. “Yes, I like that,” Tom said. Mr. Greenleaf had been right. Yet it gave Dickie something to do, kept him out of trouble, Tom supposed, just as it gave thousands of lousy amateur painters all over America something to do. He was only sorry that Dickie fell into this category as a painter, because he wanted Dickie to be much more.
“I won’t ever set the world on fire as a painter,” Dickie said, “but I get a great deal of pleasure out of it.”
“Yes.” Tom wanted to forget all about the paintings and forget that Dickie painted. “Can I see the rest of the house?”
“Absolutely! You haven’t seen the salon, have you?”
Dickie opened a door in the hall that led into a very large room with a fireplace, sofas, bookshelves, and three exposures—to the terrace, to the land on the other side of the house, and to the front garden. Dickie said that in summer he did not use the room, because he liked to save it as a change of scene for the winter. It was more of a bookish den than a living room, Tom thought. It surprised him. He had Dickie figured out as a young man who was not particularly brainy, and who probably spent most of his time playing. Perhaps he was wrong. But he didn’t think he was wrong in feeling that Dickie was bored at the moment and needed someone to show him how to have fun.
“What’s upstairs?” Tom asked.
The upstairs was disappointing: Dickie’s bedroom in the corner of the house above the terrace was stark and empty—a bed, a chest of drawers, and a rocking chair, looking lost and unrelated in all the space—a narrow bed, too, hardly wider than a single bed. The other three rooms of the second floor were not even furnished, or at least not completely. One of them held only firewood and a pile of canvas scraps. There was certainly no sign of Marge anywhere, least of all in Dickie’s bedroom.
“How about going to Naples with me sometime?” Tom asked. “I didn’t have much of a chance to see it on my way down.”
“All right,” Dickie said. “Marge and I are going Saturday afternoon. We have dinner there nearly every Saturday night and treat ourselves to a taxi or a carrozza ride back. Come along.”
“I meant in the daytime or some weekday so I could see a little more,” Tom said, hoping to avoid Marge in the excursion. “Or do you paint all day?”
“No. There’s a twelve o’clock bus Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I suppose we could go tomorrow, if you feel like it.”
“Fine,” Tom said, though he still wasn’t sure that Marge wouldn’t be asked along. “Marge is a Catholic?” he asked as they went down the stairs.
“With a vengeance! She was converted about six months ago by an Italian she had a mad crush on. Could that man talk! He was here for a few months, resting up after a ski accident. Marge consoles herself for the loss of Eduardo by embracing his religion.”
“I had the idea she was in love with you.”
“With me? Don’t be silly!”
The meal was ready when they went out on the terrace. There were even hot biscuits with butter, made by Marge.
“Do you know Vic Simmons in New York?” Tom asked Dickie.
Vic had quite a salon of artists, writers, and dancers in New York, but Dickie didn’t know of him. Tom asked him about two or three other people, also without success.
Tom hoped Marge would leave after the coffee, but she didn’t. When she left the terrace for a moment, Tom said, “Can I invite you for dinner at my hotel tonight?”
“Thank you. At what time?”
“Seven-thirty? So we’ll have a little time for cocktails?— After all, it’s your father’s money,” Tom added with a smile.
Dickie laughed. “All right, cocktails and a good bottle of wine. Marge!” Marge was just coming back. “We’re dining tonight at the Miramare, compliments of Greenleaf père!”
So Marge was coming, too, and there was nothing Tom could do about it. After all, it was Dickie’s father’s money.
The dinner that evening was pleasant, but Marge’s presence kept Tom from talking about anything he would have liked to talk about, and he did not feel even like being witty in Marge’s presence. Marge knew some of the people in the dining room, and after dinner she excused herself and took her coffee over to another table and sat down.
“How long are you going to be here?” Dickie asked.
“Oh, at least a week, I’d say,” Tom replied.
“Because—” Dickie’s face had flushed a little over the cheekbones. The chianti had put him into a good mood. “If you’re going to be here a little longer, why don’t you stay with me? There’s no use staying in a hotel, unless you really prefer it.”
“Thank you very much,” Tom said.
“There’s a bed in the maid’s room, which you didn’t see. Ermelinda doesn’t sleep in. I’m sure we can make out with the furniture that’s scattered around, if you think you’d like to.”
“I’m sure I’d like to. By the way, your father gave me six hundred dollars for expenses, and I’ve still got about five hundred of it. I think we both ought to have a little fun on it, don’t you?”
“Five hundred!” Dickie said, as if he’d never seen that much money in one lump in his life. “We could pick up a little car for that!”
Tom didn’t contribute to the car idea. That wasn’t his idea of having fun. He wanted to fly to Paris. Marge was coming back, he saw.
The next morning he moved in.
Dickie and Ermelinda had installed an armoire and a couple of chairs in one of the upstairs rooms, and Dickie had thumbtacked a few reproductions of mosaic portraits from St. Mark’s Cathedral on the walls. Tom helped Dickie carry up the narrow iron bed from the maid’s room. They were finished before twelve, a little lightheaded from the frascati they had been sipping as they worked.
“Are we still going to Naples?” Tom asked.
“Certainly.” Dickie looked at his watch. “It’s only a quarter to twelve. We can make the twelve o’clock bus.”
They took nothing with them but their jackets and Tom’s book of traveler’s checks. The bus was just arriving as they reached the post office. Tom and Dickie stood by the door, waiting for people to get off; then Dickie pulled himself up, right into the face of a young man with red hair and a loud sports shirt, an American.
“Dickie!”
“Freddie!” Dickie yelled. “What’re you doing here?”
“Came to see you! And the Cecchis. They’re putting me up for a few days.”
“Ch’elegante! I’m off to Naples with a friend. Tom?” Dickie beckoned Tom over and introduced them.
The American’s name was Freddie Miles. Tom thought he was hideous. Tom hated red hair, especially this kind of carrot-red hair with white skin and freckles. Freddie had large red-brown eyes that seemed to wobble in his head as if he were cockeyed, or perhaps he was only one of those people who never looked at anyone they were talking to. He was also overweight. Tom turned away from him, waiting for Dickie to finish his conversation. They were holding up the bus, Tom noticed. Dickie and Freddie were talking about skiing, making a date for some time in December in a town Tom had never heard of.
“There’ll be about fifteen of us at Cortina by the second,” Freddie said. “A real bang-up party like last year! Three weeks, if our money holds out!”
“If we hold out!” Dickie said. “See you tonight, Fred!”
Tom boarded the bus after Dickie. There were no seats, and they were wedged between a skinny, sweating man who smelled, and a couple of old peasant women who smelled worse. Just as they were leaving the village, Dickie remembered that Marge was coming for lu
nch as usual, because they had thought yesterday that Tom’s moving would cancel the Naples trip. Dickie shouted for the driver to stop. The bus stopped with a squeal of brakes and a lurch that threw everybody who was standing off balance, and Dickie put his head through a window and called, “Gino! Gino!”
A little boy on the road came running up to take the hundred-lire bill that Dickie was holding out to him. Dickie said something in Italian, and the boy said, “Subito, signor!” and flew up the road, Dickie thanked the driver, and the bus started again. “I told him to tell Marge we’d be back tonight, but probably late,” Dickie said.
“Good.”
The bus spilled them into a big, cluttered square in Naples, and they were suddenly surrounded by pushcarts of grapes, figs, pastry, and watermelon, and screamed at by adolescent boys with fountain pens and mechanical toys. The people made way for Dickie.
“I know a good place for lunch,” Dickie said. “A real Neapolitan pizzeria. Do you like pizza?”
“Yes.”
The pizzeria was up a street too narrow and steep for cars. Strings of beads hanging in the doorway, a decanter of wine on every table, and there were only six tables in the whole place, the kind of place you could sit in for hours and drink wine and not be disturbed. They sat there until five o’clock, when Dickie said it was time to move on to the Galleria. Dickie apologized for not taking him to the art museum, which had original da Vincis and El Grecos, he said, but they could see that at another time. Dickie had spent most of the afternoon talking about Freddie Miles, and Tom had found it as uninteresting as Freddie’s face. Freddie was the son of an American hotel-chain owner, and a playwright—self-styled, Tom gathered, because he had written only two plays, and neither had seen Broadway. Freddie had a house in Cagnes-sur-Mer, and Dickie had stayed with him several weeks before he came to Italy.
“This is what I like,” Dickie said expansively in the Galleria, “sitting at a table and watching the people go by. It does something to your outlook on life. The Anglo-Saxons make a great mistake not staring at people from a sidewalk table.”