19. Rome, November #2
At the end of the evening, just after Beaker had stumbled off to bed, blaming jet lag, a waiter arrived and placed a thick cream envelope on the table. I panicked that it was the bill, but it contained a plastic key card.
“The mad bastard,” Mary shrieked. “He’s got us a room.” She gripped my hands with excitement, clunking her emerald bracelets against the table.
“For me, too?” I was incredulous.
“Let’s go!”
We charged downstairs together. Mary in the lift, me racing her down the stairs.
Inside the quiet hotel corridors, I soon realized how saturated I was with alcohol.
My limbs felt dangerously light, and the carpeted floor slanted upward as I ran toward the lift and waited for Mary at the doors.
When they opened, she was striking a pose, one long leg propped on the railing, her black evening dress pulled down and a tanned left breast exposed in her hand.
I burst out laughing and called her a complete whore, even though my mind was fixed on the jam-brown color of her nipple.
She kissed my cheek and then skipped past me, bashing the key card impatiently against the bedroom door.
It wasn’t a bedroom, but a suite, spread over many floors: a series of rooms so decadently furnished, I had to remind myself to breathe.
I went around, running my hands over the marble mantelpiece and its soft white beds, not wanting to think of my own shared bedroom in Termini, with its lime-green walls and concrete floors.
What would Mary say, if I ever let her see it?
While I explored, Mary fiddled with the speaker and rang reception to ask for a corkscrew.
On the wall was a silver button, which made me laugh with surprise.
Of course, there was a lift. It brought me upward to the top floor, a roof terrace with a view toward St. Peter’s, and a vast tiled bathroom with a sunken bath.
I rested on the lid of the toilet for a while and squinted, drunkenly, at my phone screen. There were three messages from Jean.
I just had a dream about you! she had written about thirty minutes before. I felt a sudden tightness in my chest. Then she texted again. Mary was in it too!
I exited the chat, but it was too late. Jean had already seen that I’d read it, so I would be expected to respond.
Placing the phone face down by the sink, I caught sight of myself in the mirror: flushed cheeks and dopey eyed with drink.
Why was Jean’s concern making me feel so irritated?
I thought of what Mary had said earlier: Suddenly, you were this whole other person .
Part of me knew that Jean was at the root of that quiet transformation; I was growing more confident, I knew, from the sense of safety she provided.
But I resented Jean for being the source of it.
Ever since I’d left home, I’d prided myself on the art of self-reliance, an independence which prevented me from owing anybody anything.
So, when yet another message arrived from Jean, asking if everything was okay, my response was curt:
All fine. Thanks! X
When I went back down to the living room, Mary had fixed the speaker and was trying to get a cork out of a bottle of wine by placing it in her shoe and slapping it against the wall.
It made us hysterical. I filmed her first using her stiletto, then my trainer, to make two blurry films which I considered sending to Jean.
But I resisted doing so, knowing it would be smoothing over an irritation she wasn’t even aware of.
When Mary succeeded in removing the cork, we screamed with laughter and toasted ourselves, drinking the wine out of my trainer, then the bottle.
It delighted us, just how disgusting we were being.
“I can actually taste your foot,” Mary said, gargling it like a wine snob. She filmed that, too, sending a video to Beaker. “Thank you, baby,” she cooed, turning up the music and adjusting her breasts in her reflected image as she recorded herself.
“Why is he called Beaker?” I shouted over the music. It struck me as odd that she called a man thirty years her senior baby .
“Because of this.” She crouched at the glass coffee table in front of the fireplace and tapped a heap of white powder from a little bag. “He’s a fiend. Mummy named him after his nose.”
“Oh, right,” I said, joining her on the ground. “Does he still do it?”
Mary laughed as if that was a stupid question, and retrieved more paper wraps from her clutch bag. As we knelt closely together, I suddenly saw how wasted she was. Her blue eyes were cloudy now, like beach glass. “He left me all these.”
The hours vanished in the way they do when you’re on that kind of trajectory.
We drank more. Mary tipped line after line of cocaine onto the coffee table.
I followed her lead, even though it was starting to have the opposite effect and I felt I was becoming more sober.
Still, there was that urgent feeling. We talked earnestly about nothing I can remember.
We danced, separately, and then together.
With the lights on, with the lights off.
We smoked, hanging out of the window, and played a demented game where you had to wear everything in the room that you could find.
Mary hung a kettle from her wrist and a hair dryer round her neck, which made me cry with laughter.
I wore the free condoms as ankle socks. Afterward, we put on the bathrobes and shower caps and went down into the bath.
The sunken tub was filled dangerously high.
Mary was lying fully outstretched in the scented avalanche of suds, her feet next to my ears, and her hair stuck to her face.
She was spitting water at me. Swigging wine and spitting that, too.
Then she praised my naked body, saying that I had the perfect female form.
She told me off when I climbed out of the water and tried to cover myself up.
“Stay for next term,” she said, watching me stretch upward to take a towel, running the tip of her finger down the front of my thigh. “I want to paint all of you.”
“What about Law? He won’t have it.”
“Fuck Law,” she slurred. “ Hate Law.”
There were two double beds, though Mary wanted me in hers.
Together, we lay in our towels, both trying to ignore the gray daylight which was seeping into the room beneath the blinds.
I closed my eyes. My body was throbbing from the heat of the bath and from every bad substance I had consumed.
Next to me, Mary twitched and changed positions, turning her back against my body.
I lay there, breathing deeply, driven wild by her nearness.
I thought of Jean’s advice, her certainty that Mary wanted me.
I just had to love myself enough. I had to let myself be vulnerable.
I dared to move closer, burying my face against Mary’s shoulder and reaching around to rest my hand on her warm stomach.
A moment passed. Fireworks across my skin, shoots of fear through my mind as I tried to gauge Mary’s thoughts.
For a moment, she stiffened, and I wondered if she didn’t want my hand there.
Was she afraid of this? Or was it me? Did she want this, but not with me?
I held my breath, willing her to turn. My thumb at her navel, the rough nub of an old piercing.
Much more than vulnerable, I was utterly exposed.
“Hi,” I whispered as she slowly shifted her body around to face me.
“It’s you,” she said, inching closer so that our lips touched and our smiles reflected each other.
“It’s me.” Trembling with uncertainty, I placed both hands on the indents of her lower back.
Then she held my chin with her hand and kissed me.
For several moments, she kissed me. I wanted to cry from pleasure, from sheer gratitude of it.
I only pulled away when I became too afraid of making a sound.
“Wouldn’t Vincenzo mind about this?” I whispered.
Her tongue ran playfully across my lips. We kissed again. Mary wriggled down and kissed my neck. “We’re casual,” she replied, her voice sleepy and close. “He won’t care.”
I hesitated, confused, but still glad she hadn’t disputed my use of this.
“You shouldn’t do it, if you don’t actually want to.” I meant Vincenzo but Mary misunderstood me.
“Shhh,” she said soothingly, reaching toward my stomach. “I want to.”
My heart kept on with its jumpy rhythm. Partly from the drugs, but partly also from the panicky arrival of everything I had wanted.
My throat narrowed with a swell of relief that was hard to control.
I heard myself talking quickly and nervously.
“You should stop worrying about what people think, Mary. You have so much freedom. Sometimes, I imagine I had your life—”
“Freeness,” she whispered drowsily, still intoxicated. There was a sad pause. She was very still in my arms, her face now resting by my ear, where my pulse was racing. The hair at the back of her neck felt wet from our bath. “Not freedom. I don’t have freedom.”
I pressed a finger to her lips, then pushed inside it. My stomach coiled in pleasure as she sucked it lightly. She told me her mouth felt numb from the coke. I brought her close to me again and kissed her for a long time, just to check how numb it was. Then we laughed.
“Mine, too, a bit,” I said.
She pushed her tongue over my teeth, my gums.
“Can you feel that?” she whispered.
Yes, yes, I could feel that. For me, nothing was numb; my nerves were drawn tight across my skin.
As she placed her hands on me, every touch left an almost unbearable imprint.
Too much. I was frightened of crying out again or seeming too eager.
Enough now. I climbed up onto her so that she was lying flat on her back.
Could she feel that? I asked, wanting her to feel it at last. Freedom. However fleetingly. Could she feel that, I asked again, as I listened for her sighing sounds. Did she like that?
I woke up late the next day to find our bed was empty.
Venturing downstairs, I found Mary in the breakfast room, barefoot, and wearing the hotel dressing gown over her evening dress.
She barely acknowledged me as I joined her at the table, where she was talking with someone she knew from London.
She remained sitting there, laughing and drinking coffee, when I told her I was leaving for my afternoon class.
Or that’s where I told Mary I was going. Instead, I went straight to Jean’s.
Over text, she’d invited me for tea, promising to cook me something restorative and healthy but also—she admitted it in a jokey way—because she just had to know everything. By the time I finished telling Jean the story of our night, there were tears in her eyes.
“But I don’t understand why Mary’s ignoring me now,” I said, a little disconcerted by how moved Jean was.
I showed her all the messages I had written Mary after I left the hotel.
They had been read, but ignored. “It’s starting to feel like nothing actually happened,” I said.
“Like we didn’t sleep together. That I imagined the whole thing. ”
“Except you didn’t,” Jean replied, suddenly grave.
We were sitting on her cream sofa, and she wore an apron to protect her silk shirt and crepe trousers.
A tray of jasmine tea and Sicilian lemon biscuits was arranged on the ottoman ahead of us.
“Don’t doubt yourself,” she said, squeezing my hand.
“It absolutely happened. I believe you.”
“I feel so stupid, like I pushed her too far. I wasn’t really sure what to do. She must regret it now—”
“She doesn’t regret it,” Jean said sharply.
“How do you know?”
Jean shrugged. “Don’t forget, Gus, humans are my thing.
Mary has a lot of stuff to work through.
Accepting that she wants to be in a same-sex relationship will be a big deal for her.
Families like hers are more conservative than they look.
” She paused. “Poor girl. I’ve seen this problem time and again. ”
“Really?”
She told me she’d often worked with closeted girls who’d felt trapped within aristocratic families. “They seem permissive, but their families are always the problem. You could always bring her to talk to me, you do know that, don’t you?”
I thought of how sadly Mary had spoken last night: freeness, not freedom , but when I considered introducing Mary to Jean, I felt deeply jealous.
It was the idea of no longer being Jean’s favorite.
I thought of Mary stretching out on her sofa as I did, the pair of them eating together.
I wanted that intimacy with each of them, but separately. Alone.
“So, you don’t think Mary regrets it, then?” I said. “What we did?”
Jean shook her head. “Didn’t she say your body was beautiful?” Dazed still at the memory, I nodded. “Didn’t she ask you back for next term?” Jean’s mouth made a wet sound as she smiled. “Then it sounds like we’re in love!”
“Do you think so?” There were strawberries along the trim of Jean’s apron. I stared at the print until the fruits jigged and blurred. She beamed at me.
“I do! And you know what else I think?”
She reached toward my chin and tilted it upward. Her eyes were traveling all over my face, and she was smiling at me proudly.
“What?”
“I think it’s just what we deserve.”