18. Rome, November #3
I joked that Mary took everything for granted, “including me.” But she didn’t seem to hear.
So I grabbed hold of her hand and we did it together.
We made a fist and swiped it so fast that it left behind a whirl of pink light like a comet.
I screwed my eyes shut and opened them again.
What Mary had laid out for us in that bathroom was strong.
I dropped her hand and we laughed. It became a game.
I knocked the air, and she knocked at the apartment building to one side of her.
I knocked a car. She bashed a window. I pushed at a pair of bikes that were propped against a lamppost. When they both fell, unlocked, Mary laughed in surprise, then raised an eyebrow.
“This means we can take them, right?”
I assured her, yes. I would have agreed to anything that prevented her from going to see Vincenzo. But she didn’t need my approval. Mary often appropriated minor objects with the carelessness of someone who had been given everything she wanted. India, the Alps, Chateau Marmont.
Soon, we were barreling through the Forum toward Piazza Venezia.
Behind us, the Colosseum loomed, bone white.
We powered fast away from it and down over the cobbles toward the busy roundabout of Piazza Venezia.
Mary raced ahead, tantalizingly lifted from the seat, her calf muscles flashing in the lamplight as she pedaled.
By the time we’d turned left and onto Campo de’ Fiori, she was looping all over the place, shrieking and laughing.
“Where are we going?” I called as she almost took out an old man. “ Mi dispiace, signor! ” Suddenly, as I said this, I was jolted into a flashback of Mr. Greening, regarding me with disgust. My parents to the side of me, white with fury.
I’m sorry, sir. I said I was sorry.
I squeezed my brakes in protest. “I thought we were going back to yours?” I shouted breathlessly. She began to weave her way over to me, making little circles on her bicycle.
“Can’t you tell what I’m spelling out?” She was standing up on her pedals, yanking the handles of her bike, like a dog chasing after its own tail. “I’m saying your name. Look. G-U-S.” She wheeled around and grinned at me. “Have a go at mine.”
I smiled back at her, then pushed downward on the pedals, exhilarated, steering jerkily through the letters of her name.
M-A-R-Y.
She clapped her hands with encouragement, following my movements.
“ Brava ,” she yelled.
I did it again—this time more confidently. I raised myself up from my saddle:
M-A-R-Y.
Those were the letters I traced on her skin later that night, right along her shoulder blades.
Mary’s apartment on the Lungotevere was magnificent: grand, frescoed rooms full of antiques, dirty ashtrays, and unfinished canvases from previous terms. The kitchen off to the side was more compact, with shiny white cupboard doors and a chrome coffee machine.
Mary snorted what was left in her baggie from a plate in the kitchen, then staggered into the bedroom, collapsing on her bed, which jutted into the center of the room. Wriggling free of all her clothes except for her knickers, she lay prettily on her side.
“You look like a model,” I couldn’t help saying.
“ You’re the model,” she slurred. “And I’m so glad you’re here.” She leaned in and kissed me softly on the cheek. Our eyes met, then she turned over and asked me to rub her back. “I’m too wired to sleep,” she mumbled.
Her body was very brown and narrow, her spine protruding out of her lean flesh as she turned away from me.
I reached out to touch her, breathing shallowly.
To prevent my hands from trembling, I concentrated on pressing the letters of her name into her skin, all the while paying close attention to the little sighing noises she made.
After a few minutes, Mary ordered me to take off my clothes, too.
“I’m a really hot sleeper,” she whispered drowsily.
I turned out the lamp and undressed, then climbed back in.
She inched herself toward me. For a while we lay there, tucked close to each other like apostrophes on her wide, princessy bed.
I concentrated on quieting my breathing.
Then I pulled the eiderdown up from our knees, to cover us both.
When I brought my hand underneath it, I let it fall on the warm outside of Mary’s thigh.
A shock of adrenaline at this act. Then fear over what to do next.
My excitement of touching her was tempered by dark shades of shame.
At first, my hand felt disembodied; I could scarcely feel her skin at all, only its warmth.
I waited for her to move me, but Mary carried on breathing steadily through her mouth.
For a few moments, I left my hand there, while I watched the car headlights from outside cast long shadows on the opposite wall.
Then, my heart hammering, I inched closer again.
Her hair smelled of smoke and sweat, mixed in with the detergent of her bedsheets.
I raised one finger, then two, then, feeling myself flood with fear, my whole hand upward to her waist.
My nerves were alert, electric. But she never protested.
She let me keep my hand there, even when my fingers trailed up and down the smooth curve of her side.
Several minutes passed as we lay like that: Mary making little contented sounds, while I could barely take in air.
Then, from outside, came the sound of an ambulance, its blue lights filling the room through the gaps in her window shutters.
Mary stirred toward consciousness; her body stiffened.
The vehicle passed and she turned away from me, to pass the rest of the night, lying like a baby, flat on her front.
Mary was still lying in that position when I got up the next day to get her a glass of water. It was morning. I’d barely slept.
“Where’s my phone?” she mumbled drowsily, slapping her hand around the bedside table.
“I put it on charge for you,” I said, collecting it from the sideboard. “Hold on.”
Mary guzzled the water and called me an angel, then dropped her head back on the pillow, making indiscriminate sounds of regret about her hangover and all the coke and the property we had stolen. Simultaneously, a peal of church bells nearby filled the room.
“I need confession!” Mary groaned. “I need a celibate priest,” she said, and laughed. “I demand a very hot but celibate priest.”
I laughed, too, and climbed back into bed.
Mary’s phone remained loosely in my hand, but I didn’t want her to look at it yet.
I wanted to retain the intimacy of our space.
It was impossible to know if she thought what had happened in the early hours was a big deal.
Was she masking her eyes for her headache, or to avoid me?
“Hold on,” I said as I became aware of her phone vibrating. I squinted at the screen. “He’s calling. Finally, your holy father!”
Mary sat up. “Vincenzo? Give it to me.”
She reached up for the phone, breasts unfurling flat as I playfully lifted it away from her.
“Shall I answer it?” I teased. “Let him know you’re unavailable?”
“Gussie—” she warned.
“I could say you’re a little tied up ?”
Mary didn’t get the joke. Her face was thunder. She swiped once more for the phone. I withheld it.
“For fuck’s sake, Gussie!” She sprung angrily out of bed, grabbing my wrist and snatching her phone from my hands. “Seriously! Could you just stop being such a fucking freak ?”
I laughed shakily, but her words hurt. Mary threw on a robe and went over toward the balcony. “Where are you going?” I asked. She ignored me.
I lay there for a moment, heart racing, as I recovered from the heat of our exchange.
But then, as my gaze wandered around her room, at the books on her bedside table, the piles of jewelry alongside it, I began to reflect on something else I’d seen on Mary’s home screen, late last night when I put it on charge.
Her background was an old photo of her parents, but layered above that was a message notification: a direct message from some artists’ mentoring scheme.
Sorry for the DM, but I just had the strangest dream about you!
I registered the exclamation mark with a stroke of unease, but I couldn’t place the source of it. I was probably jealous at the assumed intimacy of the exchange, just as I resented the conversation Mary was conducting with Vincenzo in Italian on the balcony.
I realize now, those misgivings were tiny jolts of recognition. Whoever was writing to Mary shared the same gushy cadence of a woman I also regularly corresponded with. And yet, this knowledge was too deeply buried, too early to name. For months, years, I forgot about it.
Here it is now: the memory retrieved. I see Jean’s predatory text message overlaying Mary’s family snapshot on her home screen, like a blot of dark ink: the scribble of someone demented, as they go back through old photograph albums, desperate to redact the past. A black stain obscuring the Finbows’ faces, spreading slowly outward, gradually erasing them.