Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The students had mandatory dinner in the dining room three nights a week, and that first night was one of them. Julia showed Elsie the way.

“You have to participate in the conversation du jour,” Julia explained. “But don’t worry. It’s not that hard.”

Still, Elsie worried. It was only her first night, and what if the chosen subject was something like—what had that boy said when she arrived? Ancient Etruscan pottery or something? Confidence, she told herself.

The academy dining room was as stunning as the rest of the main building. Its frescoed ceilings were a colorful garden, the faded gold brocade wallpaper mostly covered with what Julia said was a constantly changing gallery of student work. The brass-nailhead-trimmed mahogany chairs and tables and rugs had obviously been chosen for their venerable age rather than comfort. The food was good and nothing like Italian food Elsie’d had before, no ketchupy spaghetti, no pillowy garlic bread soaked in butter. Instead crispy fried artichokes, pasta Amatriciana flecked with pork and chilies and tomatoes, chewy bread, revelatory wine, and perfectly ripe cherries and melon for dessert. Afterward, the leading professor, Pietro Basile, rose to introduce the topic he’d chosen for conversation: “In what ways has the ancient Jewish ghetto lived on in Rome?”

Julia snorted. “The better question is, In what ways has it not? Countries have a habit of capitalizing on the suffering of those they subject. Rome is no different. They’ve turned the ghetto into cultural tourism. Those artichokes we had for dinner? Those were a ghetto recipe. I doubt the privileged ever thought to eat thistles until the poor had no choice but to do so.”

Laura Mesner, a summer intern from New York, and the other resident at the Augusta, who Elsie had just met, retorted, “God, I get tired of hearing you talk about the poor. Like you would know. You’re at the American Art Academy in Rome.”

Julia shot her a withering look. “At least I don’t suffer from poverty of the soul.”

Laura rolled her eyes.

“Anyone else?” Pietro Basile boomed. He was a tall, muscled sculptor, the hair on his arms still dusted with dried clay slurry. “We’re talking of the ghetto, remember, not the poor.”

At another table, another student began to talk about the spiritual legacy of the ghetto. Julia leaned close to Elsie and whispered, “Let’s go down to the Babuino tonight.”

“What’s the Babuino?” Elsie asked.

Laura, on Julia’s other side, said, “Oh, that sounds fun! Yes, let’s.”

And then the suggestion traveled all around the table, and instead of just the two of them planning for what Elsie began to understand was a night at the cafés and bars on a street called the Via del Babuino, there were six. After dinner, Elsie changed into her best dress, one she’d designed at Chouinard, a sleek sleeveless sheath with a bow at the empire waist and a bit of lace at the high neckline. She’d only been able to afford a polished cotton of sage green, but it gave the dress a sheen that in some lights turned it satiny, and she was pleased with it. With gloves and a short bolero jacket—which she’d also made—she thought the outfit had a certain sophistication.

Or at least, she did until she saw the dress Julia wore. It was black, pleated silk, with broad straps ending at a banded bodice, simple and beautiful, and the way the skirt moved made Julia look so free and unencumbered that Elsie felt immediately imprisoned by her fitted sheath. Julia wore no gloves, while Elsie’s hands were sweating in hers, and the evening was too warm for the jacket. She slipped the button loose and pulled off her gloves, then shoved them impatiently into her purse.

Julia’s gaze swept over her. “Pretty dress.”

It seemed all right then. The dress. The jacket. “It’s my own design,” she said proudly.

Julia flicked her fingers at her own collar. “The lace too?”

“It’s too much, isn’t it?” Elsie said.

Julia smiled. “I didn’t say that.”

“I thought the lace was too much. It makes it fussy.”

Julia leaned close. Her lips brushed Elsie’s ear. “Never admit your doubts.”

The flicker of a touch sent a shiver through Elsie—a surprise. She didn’t know what to do with it. “Where are the others?”

“I told them to take the boys and go ahead and we’d meet them at Il Baretto.”

Elsie frowned. “Did I take too long?”

“No. But you and I aren’t going to Il Baretto. Unless ...” A pause. A careful look. “Unless I’ve mistaken you. Maybe you’d rather spend the evening with them.”

Elsie recognized a challenge in her words. “No,” she said. It had taken her only a few hours to understand that Julia was clearly a leader here, and Elsie wanted to belong. “No. Where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise. But a good one. I think you’ll like it.”

Elsie followed Julia out of the residence hall and down the hill, where they plunged immediately into a group of nuns.

“Be prepared,” Julia warned her, weaving through them. “It’s a Holy Year. The faithful are everywhere.”

“What’s a Holy Year?”

Julia laughed. “Not a Catholic, I see.”

“No.” Her parents, like their neighbors, were suspicious of Catholics. All that ritual and incense. “Are you?”

Julia dragged on her cigarette. “Religion is a drug. It keeps you from thinking too hard about anything important.”

Elsie had never heard anyone speak like that. She’d gone to church every Sunday with her parents and never questioned it. Julia’s words gave her an uncomfortable feeling, as if she were edging up against some invisible border, a world she couldn’t understand. “So you don’t know what a Holy Year is either?”

“Sure I do. The pope declared this year one of jubilee. We’ve all been granted universal pardon. So I guess if you’re going to sin, now’s the time to do it.”

“I see.” Somehow that didn’t seem quite right. Elsie couldn’t imagine the leader of any church saying it was okay to sin. But she didn’t know, really, and Julia seemed so certain.

The neon signs were coming on with twilight, casting colors onto cobbled streets that shone from the wear of centuries. Crowds in the Piazza di Spagna loitered about the stairs of the Trinità dei Monti, and the boat-shaped fountain at the bottom. Then Julia veered into a narrow street crowded mostly with men: men smoking, men talking, men staring at her with their expressive Italian eyes and vaguely obscene smiles, their “ cara, cara, cara ,” their whistles and chittering. Elsie wanted to hide. If a man had acted like this in Zanesville—or even LA—she would have called the police. But Julia waved them off dismissively. When they passed an odd fountain bearing theatrical faces and a bucket of paintbrushes at the top, Julia said, “It’s the street of the artists. Via Margutta.”

The buildings were tightly pressed together, the shabby plastered surfaces ochre and russet that took on deeper tones in the twilight, neon signs glowing, creating red-, green-, and yellow-hued umbras, lights coming from the clubs and studios and cafés, music eking from inside. Cigarette smoke hung in clouds about the vined walls, twined about the branches of a tree—a tree, rising from a tiny plot beside a front door, crowding the street more.

Raucous talk, laughter, from the crowded streets and from the vine-covered balconies overlooking them and from hidden courtyards; Elsie felt watched on all sides, as if there were hidden dimensions, layers and layers of shadows, of caverns and chambers, of secrets. Fantastic and strange, magical and delightful and romantic. Graffiti marked some walls, drawings in chalk; here and there someone had hung a painting. Before a door were mounds of stones, some carved, some awaiting the chisel or the mallet.

“Over there is a brothel.” Julia pointed to a second floor with closed, chained shutters behind a balcony. “There’s another one a bit farther down. A few of them.”

“Oh.” Elsie couldn’t hide her shock. She’d never seen an actual brothel. Only streetwalkers. “Really?”

“Here we are.” Julia stopped before a group of men smoking in front of a large green door with a cast-iron fanlight. Music—jazz—emanated from inside, and shadows moved behind the single foggy window. “Hey, Tony!” Julia called, and one of the men detached himself from the group and came toward her, dropping his cigarette on the way and grinding it beneath his shoe.

“ Cara mia .” He enfolded Julia in his arms. His hands went to her hips, trailing down, gripping her buttocks and pulling her closer until she gave him a rough shove and said something in Italian.

He rolled his eyes and stepped back with a grin. He turned to Elsie and started talking.

“She doesn’t speak Italian,” Julia said. “Yet. This is ... um ... Isabella. No, that doesn’t work, does it? How about ... Maria?” A frown. “Too common, I think.”

Tony laughed. “She has forgotten her name?” He was tall and trim, with muscled arms and broad shoulders and an undeniable appeal. His thick dark hair held a touch of curl. He reminded Elsie of Tony Curtis, but this man’s eyes were very brown.

“We don’t like her name. We’re looking for a new one,” Julia told him.

“I have always liked Julia,” he said.

“There are already a thousand Julias in Rome,” Julia said. “We don’t need another.”

He studied Elsie with mock seriousness. “She looks like a Bianca.”

Elsie frowned. “Doesn’t that mean ‘white’?”

“You don’t like Bianca?” he asked teasingly.

“It’s just so . . . bland.”

“She’s not bland,” Julia told him. “This one’s special, Tony.”

Elsie stared at her in surprise. Julia smiled back—it sent a disconcerting flutter through Elsie, as if Julia saw something she could not possibly know.

“I see.” Tony turned to the green door. “Come have a drink, not-Bianca. This is my club. La Grotta.”

He swept her to the door, Julia following close behind. Music poured out as if it meant to imprint itself upon the smoky twilight, that hard messy beat, that low moan of the saxophone turning the evening dark, sneaking into those deep and longing parts of Elsie, reminding her of the jazz that night on the road with Walter. She hadn’t heard it live since. The audiences at the nightclubs in LA preferred mambas and sambas and cha-chas, so that’s what the bands played. Everyone wanted to dance these days, but this wasn’t cha-cha music. This was I want to get under your skin music. She felt Tony’s hand at her lower back with a tingling awareness. The smoke in the place felt dense and solid. La Grotta. It didn’t take much to translate that into something she could understand. A grotto, a cave. Yes, it felt like that here.

Dim and smoky. Scallop-shaped sconces were few and far between and lit the brick walls in limited wedges of light. Tables crowded the place, some with small oil lamps flickering, pressing futilely against the smoke and the darkness and the physicality of the music from the small stage—barely a stage—at the back of the building, which held a quartet. No one was dancing, but every table was full, and the chairs against the walls were full, too, and people stood in front of the windows, blocking any light from the street. Some people talked, but mostly everyone listened intently to the band. Shoulders jerked in time, heads bobbed, bodies gyrated in their seats.

The bar was crowded too. Elsie swayed as she watched the band, aware that Tony and Julia spoke intently in low Italian before Tony went back to the bar. His place, Elsie supposed he had business. But then she noted the way Julia watched him go, studied and careful, and she followed Julia’s gaze. Tony disappeared into the crowd at the bar. Then she heard Julia’s voice in her ear. “I’ll be right back.”

As if she’d been waiting for Tony to go. Elsie nodded. Julia did not follow Tony, as Elsie half expected her to do. Instead, she wove her way through the tables toward the stage, half-hidden by the smoke. Then she veered to the left and just ... disappeared.

Elsie blinked. It took a moment before she discerned the black curtain to the left of the stage, which obscured some room or alcove or hallway from the rest of the place. That’s where Julia had gone. Elsie watched that curtain so intently it dissolved again into the misty darkness and she couldn’t decide if it was really there or she’d imagined it. Something glinted on the olive oil cans stacked near the stage stairs, a reflection from a cigarette, the glint off a ring as someone else approached the curtain. A man. Elsie narrowed her eyes, trying to focus in the faint light, trying to decide if she really saw him, or if he was just an imagined shadow within a shadow, a man dressed in black slipping behind a black curtain.

The band ended the song to applause and people banging their hands on the table, and Elsie tore her gaze from the curtain long enough to watch the sax player gulp from a drink at his side and pick up his instrument again. He began a long, soulful solo, mesmerizing. For a moment she forgot the curtain, and when she looked back again, Julia was coming toward her.

“Ready for some fun?” Julia asked.

“Isn’t that what we’re already having?”

Julia took Elsie’s hand, her fingers tight, her touch stirring those vague longings that the music had already raised. “Come on.”

Outside, the night had grown darker. Julia took only a few steps and turned down a vicolo that Elsie hadn’t noticed before, disguised as it was by a narrow gate, crowded by a pot with an overgrown laurel. Julia nudged the gate with her shoulder; it creaked open and then they were in a short, covered passage smelling of must and cat urine, and there was the cat, too, giving them a baleful look as it meandered toward them. The passage opened into a courtyard, small and dirty, with terra-cotta urns of bent and scraggly palms and more cats, some lounging in the urns, others watching from the tops of brick walls half a story up, most of them with tails undulating mistrustfully. A lamp shining from someone’s window above made silhouettes of a line of laundry; between the sleeves and the trousers peeked a narrow piece of sky that was intensely, deeply dark blue.

Julia released Elsie’s hand and sat on the edge of an urn, the pleats of that black silk falling over her knees. She reached into her purse and took out what looked like a hand-rolled cigarette, and then motioned for Elsie to sit as well. She did, on the urn opposite, though her narrow skirt gave her little room to maneuver and she balanced awkwardly. The lace at the collar tickled her throat in the sweaty warmth. She wished she hadn’t put it there, and decided she would remove it as soon as they got back.

Julia put the cigarette to her lips and pulled out a silver lighter. She held the lighter to the tip, the click, the fleeting stink of naphtha, and then the stink of something else: the smoke didn’t smell like tobacco, but weedy and skunk-like. Elsie knew immediately what it was, not because she’d ever tried it, but because she’d smelled it sometimes outside the pool halls.

Julia took another drag and wordlessly held out the reefer to Elsie, and it was clear in the lamplight that she expected Elsie to take it. And Elsie, who knew when she was being dared, reached out and took it from Julia’s fingers. Then she put the marijuana cigarette to her lips and inhaled.

The smoke choked her. She coughed hard, her eyes watering. She went hot with embarrassment, but Julia only watched her with that unreadable gaze and said, “You know you shine.”

Elsie was so stunned that she forgot about the cigarette burning in her hand. Julia motioned for her to smoke it. Elsie put the thing to her lips again, and this time she didn’t cough so much. She didn’t feel anything either. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to feel.

“You’re not like everyone else here,” Julia went on.

“What makes you say that?”

“I don’t know. You have a look . I can’t define it. Where are you from?”

“Ohio.”

“Oh, well. I don’t know Ohio. Is it a different kind of place?”

Elsie laughed. “Different from here. Where are you from?”

Julia ignored her question. “So how did you get here?”

Elsie told her about Walter, the pool halls, leaving him, and Chouinard. Julia listened intently. When Elsie finished, Julia said, “Walter sounds like a jerk.”

“He was a decent pool player. And he got me out of Zanesville.”

“Sounds like you played the game better,” Julia noted.

Elsie grinned. “Maybe. I’m a good learner.”

“I hope he taught you not to listen to liars.”

“Like people who tell me I ‘shine’?”

Julia handed back the reefer. “Yes. Except for me. I’m telling you the truth. I’m not wrong about you, am I?” Julia spoke with a quiet intensity—how did one deny such a question?

Elsie could not. She swallowed and took another desperate drag, nearly choking as she tried to talk through her exhalation. “No, no you’re not. I mean to be somebody someday.”

Julia gave her a curious look, a small laugh that made Elsie wish she hadn’t said it. But then Julia took the reefer and sucked it down to the end.

Elsie babbled, “What about you? You’re studying archaeology, you said. What will you do with that? Are there many women archaeologists?”

Julia tossed the cigarette to the ground. She contemplated it for a moment. “Not many.” Then she looked up at Elsie with that same look, the look that made Elsie want to curl inside herself, so penetrating it was. She thought Julia meant to tell her something else, something important, but instead Julia said, “Come on, let’s go back to La Grotta.”

She grabbed Elsie’s hand to help her to her feet. It was only then that Elsie realized she was a bit woozy—or something; she couldn’t quite say what, but the conversation fell away. She felt languid and loose and the night felt addictive; she wanted to drink it up, warm and fragrant with cat, murmuring with strains of music leaking from the nearby club and talk from Via Margutta, that blue of the sky in the narrow space between the buildings a blue she could not get over.

The creaking squeak of a window opening cut through the other noises, and with it a louder music from just overhead, someone’s apartment, their record player, haunting horns and piano blasting through the night in a song Elsie had heard a hundred times before. “Stormy Weather”—how strange to hear it in Rome, on a crowded street, floating from above—and then a man keening “Leeeennnaaaa! Leeeennnnnaaaa!”

She looked up, but she couldn’t see the window he called from.

“Leeennnnaaa!”

Elsie stood there, arrested by the music and the man’s desperation, his crying into the deep blue night. “He sounds like he’s dying for love.”

“For something, anyway.”

“No, really, Julia. He sounds like he’s dying.”

“Leeennnaaa!” The cry came again, louder this time, more plaintive. They both looked up.

Julia straightened from picking up her purse from the ground and gave Elsie a look of such powerful revelation that Elsie’s breath caught. “Hey, that’s it,” Julia said. “It’s perfect.”

“What’s perfect?”

“The name! The way it came ... it’s like a sign. It fits you. Lena.”

Elsie stared at her. Lena. The name draped like silk, settling into Elsie’s every dip and curve.

Lena. Elsie murmured the name, liking the feel of it in her mouth, her tongue against her teeth. Designed by Lena.

“Yes,” she said.

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