“It’s after two,” Tom said. “Want to take a little walk and go by the post office?” Sometimes Luigi opened the post office at two-thirty, sometimes not until four, they could never tell.
They walked down the hill in silence. What had Marge said about him, Tom wondered. The sudden weight of guilt made sweat come out on Tom’s forehead, an amorphous yet very strong sense of guilt, as if Marge had told Dickie specifically that he had stolen something or had done some other shameful thing. Dickie wouldn’t be acting like this only because Marge had behaved coolly, Tom thought. Dickie walked in his slouching, downhill gait that made his bony knees jut out in front of him, a gait that Tom had unconsciously adopted, too. But now Dickie’s chin was sunk down on his chest and his hands were rammed into the pockets of his shorts. He came out of silence only to greet Luigi and thank him for his letter. Tom had no mail. Dickie’s letter was from a Naples bank, a form slip on which Tom saw typewritten in a blank space: $500.00. Dickie pushed the slip carelessly into a pocket and dropped the envelope into a wastebasket. The monthly announcement that Dickie’s money had arrived in Naples, Tom supposed. Dickie had said that his trust company sent his money to a Naples bank. They walked on down the hill, and Tom assumed that they would walk up the main road to where it curved around a cliff on the other side of the village, as they had done before, but Dickie stopped at the steps that led up to Marge’s house.
“I think I’ll go up to see Marge,” Dickie said. “I won’t be long, but there’s no use in your waiting.”
“All right,” Tom said, feeling suddenly desolate. He watched Dickie climb a little way up the steep steps cut into the wall, then he turned abruptly and started back toward the house.
About halfway up the hill he stopped with an impulse to go down to Giorgio’s for a drink (but Giorgio’s martinis were terrible), and with another impulse to go up to Marge’s house, and, on a pretense of apologizing to her, vent his anger by surprising them and annoying them. He suddenly felt that Dickie was embracing her, or at least touching her, at this minute, and partly he wanted to see it, and partly he loathed the idea of seeing it. He turned and walked back to Marge’s gate. He closed the gate carefully behind him, though her house was so far above she could not possibly have heard it, then ran up the steps two at a time. He slowed as he climbed the last flight of steps. He would say, “Look here, Marge, I’m sorry if I’ve been causing the strain around here. We asked you to go today, and we mean it. I mean it.”
Tom stopped as Marge’s window came into view: Dickie’s arm was around her waist. Dickie was kissing her, little pecks on her cheek, smiling at her. They were only about fifteen feet from him, but the room was shadowed compared to the bright sunlight he stood in, and he had to strain to see. Now Marge’s face was tipped straight up to Dickie’s, as if she were fairly lost in ecstasy, and what disgusted Tom was that he knew Dickie didn’t mean it, that Dickie was only using this cheap obvious, easy way to hold on to her friendship. What disgusted him was the big bulge of her behind in the peasant skirt below Dickie’s arm that circled her waist. And Dickie—! Tom really wouldn’t have believed it possible of Dickie!
Tom turned away and ran down the steps, wanting to scream. He banged the gate shut. He ran all the way up the road home, and arrived gasping, supporting himself on the parapet after he entered Dickie’s gate. He sat on the couch in Dickie’s studio for a few moments, his mind stunned and blank. That kiss—it hadn’t looked like a first kiss. He walked to Dickie’s easel, unconsciously avoiding looking at the bad painting that was on it, picked up the kneaded eraser that lay on the palette and flung it violently out of the window, saw it arc down and disappear toward the sea. He picked up more erasers from Dickie’s table, pen points, smudge sticks, charcoal and pastel fragments, and threw them one by one into corners or out of the windows. He had a curious feeling that his brain remained calm and logical and that his body was out of control. He ran out on the terrace with an idea of jumping on to the parapet and doing a dance or standing on his head, but the empty space on the other side of the parapet stopped him.
He went up to Dickie’s room and paced around for a few moments, his hands in his pockets. He wondered when Dickie was coming back? Or was he going to stay and make an afternoon of it, really take her to bed with him? He jerked Dickie’s closet door open and looked in. There was a freshly pressed, new-looking gray flannel suit that he had never seen Dickie wearing. Tom took it out. He took off his knee-length shorts and put on the gray flannel trousers. He put on a pair of Dickie’s shoes. Then he opened the bottom drawer of the chest and took out a clean blue-and-white striped shirt.
He chose a dark-blue silk tie and knotted it carefully. The suit fitted him. He re-parted his hair and put the part a little more to one side, the way Dickie wore his.
“Marge, you must understand that I don’t love you,” Tom said into the mirror in Dickie’s voice, with Dickie’s higher pitch on the emphasized words, with the little growl in his throat at the end of the phrase that could be pleasant or unpleasant, intimate or cool, according to Dickie’s mood. “Marge, stop it!” Tom turned suddenly and made a grab in the air as if he were seizing Marge’s throat. He shook her, twisted her, while she sank lower and lower, until at last he left her, limp, on the floor. He was panting. He wiped his forehead the way Dickie did, reached for a handkerchief and, not finding any, got one from Dickie’s top drawer, then resumed in front of the mirror. Even his parted lips looked like Dickie’s lips when he was out of breath from swimming, drawn down a little from his lower teeth. “You know why I had to do that,” he said, still breathlessly, addressing Marge, though he watched himself in the mirror. “You were interfering between Tom and me— No, not that! But there is a bond between us!”
He turned, stepped over the imaginary body, and went stealthily to the window. He could see, beyond the bend of the road, the blurred slant of the steps that went up to Marge’s house level. Dickie was not on the steps or on the parts of the road that he could see. Maybe they were sleeping together, Tom thought with a tighter twist of disgust in his throat. He imagined it, awkward, clumsy, unsatisfactory for Dickie, and Marge loving it. She’d love it even if he tortured her! Tom darted back to the closet again and took a hat from the top shelf. It was a little gray Tyrolian hat with a green-and-white feather in the brim. He put it on rakishly. It surprised him how much he looked like Dickie with the top part of his head covered. Really it was only his darker hair that was very different from Dickie. Otherwise, his nose—or at least its general form—his narrow jaw, his eyebrows if he held them right—
“What’re you doing?”
Tom whirled around. Dickie was in the doorway. Tom realized that he must have been right below at the gate when he had looked out. “Oh—just amusing myself,” Tom said in the deep voice he always used when he was embarrassed. “Sorry, Dickie.”
Dickie’s mouth opened a little, then closed, as if anger churned his words too much for them to be uttered. To Tom, it was just as bad as if he had spoken. Dickie advanced into the room.
“Dickie, I’m sorry if it—”
The violent slam of the door cut him off. Dickie began opening his shirt scowling, just as he would have if Tom had not been there, because this was his room, and what was Tom doing in it? Tom stood petrified with fear.
“I wish you’d get out of my clothes,” Dickie said.
Tom started undressing, his fingers clumsy with his mortification, his shock, because up until now Dickie had always said wear this and wear that that belonged to him. Dickie would never say it again.
Dickie looked at Tom’s feet. “Shoes, too? Are you crazy?”
“No.” Tom tried to pull himself together as he hung up the suit, then he asked, “Did you make it up with Marge?”
“Marge and I are fine,” Dickie snapped in a way that shut Tom out from them. “Another thing I want to say, but clearly,” he said, looking at Tom, “I’m not queer. I don’t know if you have the idea that I am or not.”
&
nbsp; “Queer?” Tom smiled faintly. “I never thought you were queer.”
Dickie started to say something else, and didn’t. He straightened up, the ribs showing in his dark chest. “Well, Marge thinks you are.”
“Why?” Tom felt the blood go out of his face. He kicked off Dickie’s second shoe feebly, and set the pair in the closet. “Why should she? What’ve I ever done?” He felt faint. Nobody had ever said it outright to him, not in this way.
“It’s just the way you act,” Dickie said in a growling tone, and went out of the door.
Tom hurried back into his shorts. He had been half concealing himself from Dickie behind the closet door, though he had his underwear on. Just because Dickie liked him, Tom thought, Marge had launched her filthy accusations of him at Dickie. And Dickie hadn’t had the guts to stand up and deny it to her!
He went downstairs and found Dickie fixing himself a drink at the bar shelf on the terrace. ”Dickie, I want to get this straight,” Tom began. “I’m not queer either, and I don’t want anybody thinking I am.”
“All right,” Dickie growled.
The tone reminded Tom of the answers Dickie had given him when he had asked Dickie if he knew this person and that in New York. Some of the people he had asked Dickie about were queer, it was true, and he had often suspected Dickie of deliberately denying knowing them when he did know them. All right! Who was making an issue of it, anyway? Dickie was. Tom hesitated while his mind tossed in a welter of things he might have said, bitter things, conciliatory things, grateful and hostile. His mind went back to certain groups of people he had known in New York, known and dropped finally, all of them, but he regretted now having ever known them. They had taken him up because he amused them, but he had never had anything to do with any of them! When a couple of them had made a pass at him, he had rejected them—though he remembered how he had tried to make it up to them later by getting ice for their drinks, dropping them off in taxis when it was out of his way, because he had been afraid they would start to dislike him. He’d been an ass! And he remembered, too, the humiliating moment when Vic Simmons had said, Oh, for Christ sake, Tommie, shut up! when he had said to a group of people, for perhaps the third or fourth time in Vic’s presence, “I can’t make up my mind whether I like men or women, so I’m thinking of giving them both up.” Tom had used to pretend he was going to an analyst, because everybody else was going to an analyst, and he had used to spin wildly funny stories about his sessions with his analyst to amuse people at parties, and the line about giving up men and women both had always been good for a laugh, the way he delivered it, until Vic had told him for Christ sake to shut up, and after that Tom had never said it again and never mentioned his analyst again, either. As a matter of fact, there was a lot of truth in it, Tom thought. As people went, he was one of the most innocent and clean-minded he had ever known. That was the irony of this situation with Dickie.
“I feel as if I’ve—” Tom began, but Dickie was not even listening. Dickie turned away with a grim look around his mouth and carried his drink to the corner of the terrace. Tom advanced toward him, a little fearfully, not knowing whether Dickie would hurl him off the terrace, or simply turn around and tell him to get the hell out of the house. Tom asked quietly, “Are you in love with Marge, Dickie?”
“No, but I feel sorry for her. I care about her. She’s been very nice to me. We’ve had some good times together. You don’t seem to be able to understand that.”
“I do understand. That was my original feeling about you and her—that it was a platonic thing as far as you were concerned, and that she was probably in love with you.”
“She is. You go out of your way not to hurt people who’re in love with you, you know.”
“Of course.” He hesitated again, trying to choose his words. He was still in a state of trembling apprehension, though Dickie was not angry with him anymore. Dickie was not going to throw him out. Tom said in a more self-possessed tone, “I can imagine that if you both were in New York you wouldn’t have seen her nearly so often—or at all—but this village being so lonely—”
“That’s exactly right. I haven’t been to bed with her and I don’t intend to, but I do intend to keep her friendship.”
“Well, have I done anything to prevent you? I told you, Dickie, I’d rather leave than do anything to break up your friendship with Marge.”
Dickie gave a glance. “No, you haven’t done anything, specifically, but it’s obvious you don’t like her around. Whenever you make an effort to say anything nice to her, it’s so obviously an effort.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said contritely. He was sorry he hadn’t made more of an effort, that he had done a bad job when he might have done a good one.
“Well, let’s let it go. Marge and I are okay,” Dickie said defiantly. He turned away and stared off at the water.
Tom went into the kitchen to make himself a little boiled coffee. He didn’t want to use the espresso machine, because Dickie was very particular about it and didn’t like anyone using it but himself. He’d take the coffee up to his room, and study some Italian before Fausto came, Tom thought. This wasn’t the time to make it up with Dickie. Dickie had his pride. He would be silent for most of the afternoon, then come around by about five o’clock after he had been painting for a while, and it would be as if the episode with the clothes had never happened. One thing Tom was sure of: Dickie was glad to have him here. Dickie was bored with living by himself, and bored with Marge, too. Tom still had three hundred dollars of the money Mr. Greenleaf had given him, and he and Dickie were going to use it on a spree in Paris. Without Marge. Dickie had been amazed when Tom had told him he hadn’t had more than a glimpse of Paris through a railroad station window.
While he waited for his coffee, Tom put away the food that was to have been their lunch. He set a couple of pots of food in bigger pots of water to keep the ants away from them. There was also the little paper of fresh butter, the pair of eggs, the paper of four rolls that Ermelinda had brought for their breakfast tomorrow. They had to buy small quantities of everything every day, because there was no refrigerator. Dickie wanted to buy a refrigerator with part of his father’s money. He had mentioned it a couple of times. Tom hoped he changed his mind, because a refrigerator would cut down their traveling money, and Dickie had a very definite budget for his own five hundred dollars every month. Dickie was cautious about money, in a way, yet down at the wharf, and in the village bars, he gave generous tips right and left, and gave five-hundred-lire bills to any beggar who approached him.
Dickie was back to normal by five o’clock. He had had a good afternoon of painting, Tom supposed, because he had been whistling for the last hour in his studio. Dickie came out on the terrace where Tom was scanning his Italian grammar, and gave him some pointers on his pronunciation.
“They don’t always say ‘voglio’ so clearly,” Dickie said. “They say ‘io vo’ presentare mia amica Marge, per esempio.’” Dickie drew his long hand backward through the air. He always made gestures when he spoke Italian, graceful gestures as if he were leading an orchestra in a legato. “You’d better listen to Fausto more and read that grammar less. I picked my Italian up off the streets.” Dickie smiled and walked away down the garden path. Fausto was just coming in the gate.
Tom listened carefully to their laughing exchanges in Italian, straining to understand every word.
Fausto came out on the terrace smiling, sank into a chair, and put his bare feet up on the parapet. His face was either smiling or frowning, and it could change from instant to instant. He was one of the few people in the village, Dickie said, who didn’t speak in a southern dialect. Fausto lived in Milan, and he was visiting an aunt in Mongibello for a few months. He came, dependably and punctually, three times a week between five and five-thirty, and they sat on the terrace and sipped wine or coffee and chatted for about an hour. Tom tried his utmost to memorize everything Fausto said about the rocks, the water, politics (Fausto was a Communist, a card-c
arrying Communist, and he showed his card to Americans at the drop of a hat, Dickie said, because he was amused by their astonishment at his having it), and about the frenzied, catlike sex life of some of the village inhabitants. Fausto found it hard to think of things to talk about sometimes, and then he would stare at Tom and burst out laughing. But Tom was making great progress. Italian was the only thing he had ever studied that he enjoyed and felt he could stick to. Tom wanted his Italian to be as good as Dickie’s, and he thought he could make it that good in another month, if he kept on working hard at it.
11
Tom walked briskly across the terrace and into Dickie’s studio. “Want to go to Paris in a coffin?” he asked.
“What?” Dickie looked up from his watercolor.
“I’ve been talking to an Italian in Giorgio’s. We’d start out from Trieste, ride in coffins in the baggage car escorted by some Frenchman, and we’d get a hundred thousand lire apiece. I have the idea it concerns dope.”
“Dope in the coffins? Isn’t that an old stunt?”
“We talked in Italian, so I didn’t understand everything, but he said there’d be three coffins, and maybe the third has a real corpse in it and they’ve put the dope into the corpse. Anyway, we’d get the trip plus the experience.” He emptied his pockets of the packs of ship’s store Lucky Strikes that he had just bought from a street peddler for Dickie. “What do you say?”
“I think it’s a marvelous idea. To Paris in a coffin!”
There was a funny smile on Dickie’s face, as if Dickie were pulling his leg by pretending to fall in with it, when he hadn’t the least intention of falling in with it. “I’m serious,” Tom said. “He really is on the lookout for a couple of willing young men. The coffins are supposed to contain the bodies of French casualties from Indochina. The French escort is supposed to be the relative of one of them, or maybe all of them.” It wasn’t exactly what the man had said to him, but it was near enough. And two hundred thousand lire was over three hundred dollars, after all, plenty for a spree in Paris. Dickie was still hedging about Paris.