“But —”
“Don’t say that you’re tired and that we only just got here—say yes.”
“Yes.”
A few blocks from the pensione, he took her hand lightly in his. Betsy felt something flutter, birdlike and distantly familiar, in her chest. Farther on, he drew her off the pavement into one of the openings that held immense wooden double doors with colossal brass globes as knobs. He leaned in against the door with his left hand and slowly traced the line of her throat with his right. Involuntarily, she closed her eyes.
He moved as if to kiss her and she pulled away, feeling the cold press of brass upon her spine. “We ought to go back. Helena might be awake now.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He smoothed the worried crease in her forehead with his thumb. “Don’t be upset. I’ll behave.”
There was something about his mouth, not quite a smile, that reminded her of the David. She frowned, straining to see what was still unclear. Suddenly her face froze, blank and cold as virgin marble. “Helena wasn’t sleeping,” she said dully. “Paul was with her.” A child’s half-sob escaped her. “But I thought Helena had picked me for Paul.”
Had she instead been chosen for Stephen? Or was it enough that she merely seem to Paul to belong to Stephen?
Stephen ran the fingers of one hand through the front of his crisp, wavy hair. “I don’t suppose you’ll go on with us to Venice now.”
She knew then she would never see Venice.
“We’ll all be disappointed.”
She blinked back tears. Helena’s Daddy was right: there could be no husband more devoted than Stephen.
Fumbling for her key in the hallway, she saw through the now open door of Helena and Stephen’s room to Paul sitting rigidly on the straightback chair.
Betsy settled her bill with the concierge that night. It was necessary to leave before breakfast if she wanted to be certain of not seeing any of the threesome again. Before she hunted out another pensione, she would look for a schedule of trains that could take her to the Italian Lake District where, the guidebooks promised, the air was cool and Americans seldom went.
Monkey Business
8.
Paul had a problem, a mathematics problem. He was headed toward the room shared by his best friend, his best friend’s wife, and Paul’s lover and there were only two people in that room.
He stopped on the second floor of the Pensione Désirée and caught himself before he knocked on the door of the room to the immediate right of the stairs. Fist in midair, he glanced up. Another numerical befuddlement. He shook his head at the 1A painted in gilt on the transom. Paul recalled with annoyance that Italians called the second floor the primo piano and the first floor the piano terra or something like that, something meaning the ground floor. He was looking for 2A which was up on the third floor, which they persisted in calling the secondo piano. And if that’s what they called the levels in buildings, what did they call pianos anyway?
It wasn’t that he was unfamiliar with the layout of the Désirée or that he hadn’t mounted the steps to Steve and Helena’s room at least twenty times by now, but he was addled. This morning his complex mathematics problem had suddenly become exponentially more complicated.
He had stopped at the front desk on his way into the pensione to learn the Désirée’s checkout time and to deposit his suitcase behind the desk before climbing the stairs to collect Steve and Helena and their belongings. The proprietress accepted his case and gave him a deadline of eleven o’clock. In the interest of clarity, she held up both hands and then added an index finger. As he started to turn away from the desk, she offered some additional information.
“La signora è partita stamattina presto.”
He looked at her blankly.
She sighed heavily. “La signora,” she tried again, this time going with a minimalist approach.
He nodded.
“Partita.” She pointed toward the massive wooden exterior doors.
“The signora left?” He could feel panic erupt lava-like in his stomach and then rise quickly to his chest. He had heard of situational depression. He supposed this could be the onset of a situational heart attack. Unaccustomed to locating himself in his body, he concluded that his physical relationship with Helena had set into motion a whole series of physical and chemical reactions and interactions. Something more over which he had no control. “Which signora?”
“L’americana.”
“But which Americana? Helena or Betsy?” The thud he thought he heard could have been him stomping his foot in frustration or it could have been his heart. Either way, the body asserting itself.
Could Helena have left Steve because they had been found out? Did her going mean Steve knew about the two of them? Had she confessed? Was she right now headed toward the pensione where he’d been staying, trying to find him, trying to negotiate the streets with her enormous suitcase and a messed-up foot? Did it mean that from this day forward they would be together? And what about Steve? Had he lost his closest friend? His only close friend? Was it too late to start worrying about that now?
It seemed an intentional torment before the woman finally answered, “Elisabetta.”
Betsy. Then Helena was still upstairs.
Was he disappointed?
A reprieve. Of sorts. He could continue to assume his best friend did not know that Paul had slept with his wife.
But Betsy’s leaving was bad enough. It had changed the equation. Instead of Betsy and Steve pairing off to go sightseeing while he “kept Helena company” until her foot healed, they would be reduced to a threesome. A threesome was not divisible by two. Not anymore anyway.
When he reached the secondo piano, he tapped lightly on the appropriate door and it flew open as if he’d released a spring.
“Good morning,” Steve said.
“She’s gone,” he blurted, never adept at small talk.
“Betsy?” Steve returned after a moment’s hesitation. “Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean—‘gone’?” Helena said. She was lying on the bed fully dressed, a cool confection in the sultry air, iced in filmy white cotton scattered with yellow rosebuds. Paul imagined a convent of small Italian nuns bent over the cloth, embroidering the tiny flowers.
“I don’t know,” Paul repeated.
“Did you see her?” she frowned.
“No. The lady at the desk. The one with the frozen eye —”
“The owner,” she encouraged him.
“She told me. But I’m not sure I got it right.”
Helena picked up the receiver next to the bed and immediately launched into Italian. At the close of the conversation, she said, “Si, si. Grazie, signora.” They awaited her report. Helena left them dangling a minute, as though she had forgotten they were there. “Oh,” she said. “She’s gone all right. She paid the concierge last night and took off before breakfast this morning. The owner saw her leave with her backpack.” She tapped her chin. “Before breakfast. That shows determination. Or extreme cowardice. I wonder what you could have done to scare her off like that?” She was looking at Stephen.
“I don’t think it was anything in particular I did,” he said slowly, choosing his words with as much care as he’d chosen the souvenir he’d purchased for Helena’s father. “I got the idea she didn’t want to be part of our quartet anymore.”
“Really. I would have said she liked us all very much. Was devoted to our merry little band of wanderers, in fact. I can’t believe she left without coming to say goodbye.”
“Devotion lends itself to disillusionment and sudden departures, don’t you think?” Stephen said.
Paul said, “But she knew we were expecting her to go to Venice with us today.”
He was bewildered. Not by Betsy’s departure—though he was c
ertainly surprised that she had left so abruptly—he was bewildered by himself.
He had lain awake most of the night trying to reconstruct the afternoon, the minutes immediately after Helena had asked him to close the door so they could talk without being disturbed by other guests of the Désirée. There was talk and then somehow there was kissing and then . . . He shook himself. He wanted both to relive each touch and to erase the entire episode from his memory, like wiping discarded design specifications from a blackboard. A clean slate, that’s what he wanted.
He never planned to make love to Helena. He didn’t know what had come over him. When she confessed that she was afraid that Steve and Betsy were falling in love, he had wanted to comfort her, reassure her.
Everything was a blur—not just the . . . the event itself, but the future.
It seemed to him that he went from being Steve’s best friend—his best man—to Steve’s worst enemy without anything—any thought—in between.
He wanted everything to be just as it had been before yesterday.
Or did he?
Helena glanced at Paul dismissively and then erased the expression before he caught her.
Paul would’ve been flattened by the knowledge that she occasionally referred to him as “Stephen’s dogsbody.” Not that he would have understood a dogsbody as the British equivalent of a drudge, but he would’ve recognized the intent to demean, to discount him. She was more widely read than either Paul or Stephen and that was not surprising. It would have been surprising had she not been, for she exuded leisure where they projected industry. Like practitioners in the medical field or the sciences, the bulk of their reading came from trade publications. Between them, at any given time, they had subscriptions to five different engineering-related journals. Helena enjoyed sprinkling her conversation with vintage words and arcane phrases, much as she liked wearing vintage or otherwise unexpected clothing: she took pleasure in being noticed.
Baiting Stephen, Helena had also conferred upon Paul the title “Your Man Monday Through Sunday.” (Had he overheard, Paul could have convinced himself that she was praising his loyalty, his steadfastness as Steve’s closest friend. Of course, now he had proven himself profoundly lacking in that quality.)
Until their trip to Europe, Helena had been equal parts amused and annoyed by Paul’s attachment to her husband. She probably would’ve continued on just so, ricocheting between warm benevolence, tepid tolerance, and icy irritation, had it not been for having to take to her bed. This absurd injury to her foot meant she couldn’t do any of the things she had planned to do in Florence. Helena cast about for a new plan. She could have settled on improving her Italian or learning to knit. Instead, she decided upon seducing Paul.
Helena liked a challenge and Paul offered that in spades. He was too straight an arrow and too devoted to Stephen for an unambiguous seduction. The real conquest lay in making Paul believe that he had seduced her.
It wasn’t that Helena was promiscuous; it was that she was bored. She hadn’t strayed from her marriage vows before now, largely because she was in love with her husband. And in some small part, she’d been determined to parade her fidelity before her father, who thought she had married beneath her.
Stephen squinted at the Florentine sunlight glinting off the diamond he had purchased on a monthly payment plan. Staring at Helena’s ring took him back to the gathering at the Thorne house to acknowledge their betrothal. Mr. Thorne had given Stephen a first edition of Oscar Wilde’s fairy-tale collection, A House of Pomegranates, as an engagement present. “I think this story will interest you particularly.” He had placed a leather bookmark at “The Birthday of the Infanta,” the fable of a princess who is given a hunchbacked dwarf to dance for her on her birthday. When she asks for him to be brought back to perform for her again later, the Dwarf believes that this must mean the Infanta cares for him. But seeing himself in a mirror for the first time, he realizes that the Infanta only cared to ridicule his freakishness and he drops to the floor, kicking and flailing. When she comes upon this new performance, the Infanta demands an encore. Her servant tries to prod the Dwarf into action and then announces that he has died of a broken heart, to which the Infanta replies, “In the future, let those who come to play with me have no hearts.”
Stephen had been furious with his prospective father-in-law, but he’d also felt a shiver of fear. Both he and Mr. Thorne understood that a bored Helena was a dangerous Helena.
Paul supposed he understood nothing about relationships except that he felt closer to Steve than to anyone ever since they had first met back in the civil engineering program at Cornell. Steve had even accompanied him to Akron for his father’s funeral. Paul barely remembered his mother, who had died from some kind of cancer when he was eight. An only child, he had no reason to go back to Akron anymore. Steve helped him with the paperwork in putting the family split-level up for sale. The following Christmas, the new-minted orphan was invited for the holidays to Eden, outside of Buffalo, where he was welcomed by Steve’s parents and tolerated by his siblings. And the Christmases after that. But all that changed, naturally, when Steve acquired a fiancée.
From their introduction, Paul had admired Helena’s appearance and her poise and stood more than a bit in awe of her self-assurance. He confessed to Steve that he kept having to shake off the feeling that Helena had just been dethroned somewhere. “In some kingdom that has recently shifted to a parliamentary form of government or been taken over in a military coup.” Steve had laughed uneasily, the story of the unfeeling princess too recently read, and clapped an arm around Paul’s shoulders, saying, “Sometimes she can be a royal pain in the ass, but mostly she’s wonderful.” Then he asked Paul to be his best man.
Steve had fallen for Helena during the year Paul spent in Venezuela where the main project he had worked on involved designing and building a telephone station for CANTV, Venezuela’s phone company. The actual construction part of the job ranged from overseeing the laying of concrete to installing an electrical network and a grounding system to building perimeter fences. It also ranged from all-consuming concentration and busyness to unpredictable delays and abject loneliness. He didn’t attempt to learn Spanish. What was the point? He couldn’t get Steve to join him down there so he knew he wasn’t staying.
Three years into the marriage, Steve and Paul finally managed to get hired on a project together. An architect Steve referred to as Frank Lloyd Wrong hired them as a team to engineer his design for a residence built into a diabase mountainside. Paul, having building experience on a range of projects in South America and, later, in Montana’s high country, and Steve, with his master’s emphasis in geotechnical engineering, were employed to oversee the excavations and make the outcroppings of wood-and-stone rooms secure. In keeping with Steve’s not-Wright theme, and because the building with its extensions protruding at right angles was located in Pennsylvania (though at the eastern, opposite end of the state), Paul christened it Fallingrock.
They both admired the lines and the sheer cussedness of the finished product, but neither could imagine anyone actually living there. If the landscape’s starkness and isolation didn’t get to you, then the indigenous toxic creatures surely would. Like a pair of closely related monkeys, Steve and Paul picked numerous ticks off each other at the close of each workday, fraternal primates unselfconsciously engaged in a practice that affirmed their bond and preserved their well-being. And then there was their shared instinctive response to the snakes.
Steve announced to Helena that the architect was an amateur herpetologist.
“Actually”—anytime Paul began a sentence with “actually,” Helena was instantly irritated—“he’s an amateur ophiologist. A herpetologist has made a study of all reptiles. Ophiologists confine themselves to snakes.”
F. L. Wrong told the two engineers that, being of a scientific bent themselves, they would be interested to know that of the twenty-one species of
snakes native to Pennsylvania only three were venomous and, of those, only the timber rattlesnake and the copperhead could be found locally. And, he assured them, they could readily tell those apart from the harmless species.
“Wrong said we could tell the difference by looking the snake in the eye. ‘Poisonous snakes have slit-like pupils, like cats’ eyes, and the nonpoisonous ones have round pupils, like humans,’” her husband quoted to Helena.
“Actually,” Paul corrected, “he said ‘venomous.’ A ‘poisonous’ snake would be one that sickens you upon ingestion.”
“Right,” said Steve. “He also said that venomous snakes store their venom in sacs on both sides of their heads, giving them a flat sort of triangular shape that’s distinctive from the nonpoisonous—I mean nonvenomous ones.”
Helena shuddered. “Here’s hoping you guys never make acquaintance with any, poisonous, venomous, or non. I’d rather you didn’t get into a staring contest with a snake.”
“No worries there. We’re both the act-now-ask-head-shape-questions-later type,” her husband reassured her.
Paul shrugged. “Between us, we’ve killed five so far. All round-eyes as it turns out.”
“We don’t dare tell Wrong. He’s trying to get them all on the Endangered Species list.”
Paul nodded, “But we’re not taking any chances. I looked up the timber rattler. Its Latin name is Crotalus horridus. That’s enough of a warning for me.”
After Fallingrock was completed, the trio decided upon a trip to sinuous Italy to counter the months of sheer escarpments and stark perpendiculars in Pennsylvania. Helena maintained that Stephen first needed the antidote of the City of the Seven Hills so the two of them went to Rome for a few days while Paul flew directly to Florence. Steve and Paul had never been anywhere in Italy but Helena had spent two semesters in Florence during college and was looking forward to feeling the same kind of exhilaration she had then.
If only she hadn’t broken her toe. Or, actually, if only Stephen hadn’t broken it by sending that damned travel iron crashing down on her foot. Her middle toe had swollen like a leech glutted with blood. And the whole foot had throbbed horribly. Even now, the top of her foot was bruised and sore to the touch. When she wasn’t concentrating on pouting prettily, she’d wonder if she hadn’t decided on diverting herself with Paul in part to punish Stephen.
The Opposite of Chance Page 9
