The Uncertain Hour

by Jesse Browner

  All who are born poor believe they were born for something better, that some mistake has been made. She never once suggested that she was more sensitive, more artistic, or more receptive than her peers, but it seemed obvious that she must have been. What kind of soldier’s wife moons about in ruined courtyards over ancient statuary? Either she was incubating her dreams, or she was mourning them.

  She did not say what had become of those dreams; she didn’t need to. She had no education to speak of, and was somewhat vulgar of speech, but a ferocious intellect blazed in every word she uttered. Having been raised with no great expectations above her sex and station had not prevented her from being bitterly disappointed in life. She was bright enough to recognize that her misery, having failed to devolve into resignation or blindered complacency, remained her saving grace. Miraculously, after all these years, she still seemed to cling to some desperate scrap of hope that something might yet be salvaged from the debacle, and as a result she was afraid of nothing. Why else would she be walking through the dark streets with a total stranger?

  They walked in silence for some time, Petronius awed and enchanted by her body language and tone of voice, to which he paid the closest attention. She seemed to be telling him all this not in any attempt to elicit his sympathy, but rather simply because he was there, a convenient sounding board for private thoughts that had outgrown their confinement. It was unlikely that she had anyone in her personal life in whom to confide them, but then again, how unusual it would be to find someone, anyone, of her Stoic thoughtfulness in a provincial military outpost.

  “You’ve given this a great deal of thought,” he said finally.

  She shook her head and dropped her shoulders. “I have a great deal of time on my hands.”

  “And how have you determined to resolve your dilemma?”

  Again she shook her head. “I don’t understand your question, Governor.”

  “What are you going to do about it, Melissa Silia?”

  She laughed, and a spark of lamplight glanced off a white tooth. “I’m not stupid, Governor. I know what you asked me; I just don’t know how you could ask it. What would you expect me to do, a thousand miles from home, a woman with nothing but her good name to protect her? Should I seek a divorce, do you mean, and somehow find my way back to Cremona, where no one wants me?”

  Petronius thought he knew what she might do, but her questions had been purely rhetorical.

  She went on coolly, unruffled. “As it happens, I have already resolved my dilemma. I resolve it anew every day, by taking refuge in my own thoughts and milking the consolations of philosophy.”

  “Is that why you are speaking so brazenly to me?”

  She stopped in her tracks and looked up at him, but still he could make little of her face in the dark.

  “Am I brazen? I suppose I am. You seem like a nice man.”

  Now it was Petronius’s turn to laugh. “If that’s all it takes,” but he held back when he sensed that he had offended her. “Forgive me.”

  “That’s all right. It doesn’t change anything.”

  They went on again in silence, and by the time they began to slow their pace as they neared the barracks, Petronius was smitten. He would offer himself as her lover and give her a new life, a new future. Not now, but soon; she should not think him impetuous, or profligate in his gifts, or lightly enamored. Let her know that he was not the same as other men, that he was more than “nice,” that he had come to save her. How sweet would her gratitude be; how well he would reward it!

  They stopped some few blocks from the camp gates; she would go the rest of the way by herself. There came the faintest glow from a kitchen hearth through the chink in a curtain; he positioned her so that it fell on her face. It was not much, but it was the best sense of her features he had yet had. She seemed to him to be very beautiful, her cheeks rosy from the cold, her eyes glistening. She lifted her face to his and he knew that she would let him kiss her if he wanted to, fuck her right there in the doorway, as she’d surely done before with other strangers generous enough to listen to her story. Instead, he bowed, wished her well, and walked away.

  AS HE SHEPHERDED his guests down the steps and across the terrace, Petronius was pleased above all that the weather had held so nicely, allowing them to eat outdoors in mid-December. The formalities of indoor dining would have made it so much harder to establish the kind of relaxed intimacy he sought for the evening, and that came so much more naturally to Asian than to Italian gatherings. A dinner party is like a river, Petronius thought; it must be allowed to flow, to reconfigure itself, to rise and fall within the shifting banks of conversation and conviviality. Sometimes it may be slow and lazy; at other times it may rush headlong and reckless through treacherous shoals, perhaps even claiming a victim or two. But to contain it within the rigid conventions of a formal Roman dining room and its hierarchical seating assignments is to tame that river, to make it a soulless canal. There are occasions when that becomes necessary, but this night was not one of them. On the outdoor dining couch, a broad and open sigma, none was higher than any other—all heads pointed toward the center, the axis, all congeniality focused, all sense of status erased. Decorum was Hermes, not Zeus. After a few drinks, they would all be children again, lying together on a communal bed, careless and conspiratorial on a mattress shaped like the new moon—the moon of the Saturnalia, All Fools’ Moon.

  Petronius could sense a great feeling of happiness, radiating like a low-burning fire. Privilege; satiety; gratified expectations of elegance, poetry, and justice; incuriosity rewarded—these were the components of what his peers called happiness. It was what they were feeling now—the weather and the sea and Mercury, the Cumaean god of commerce, were cooperative, equal participants in the evening’s pleasures, nothing more and nothing less than expected. This was Petronius’s knowledge of happiness, too. And if, for the merest moment, he allowed that it was lazy, or false, or impious to entertain the imposture, it was a self-correcting imbalance, like a water clock, that never allowed movement to overtake it. The thought was there, and it was gone; even when it lingered, as it lingered now, long enough to register, it registered only as a shadow of itself, as we note the bird flying above us by its shadow underfoot, and when we look up it has gone. Petronius’s guests were happy; more importantly, if asked, they would have identified themselves as happy; and therefore Petronius was happy.

  “Shall we?” With one arm lightly encircling the waist of Cornelia, the ranking matron, he led them down the stairs. At the bottom, Martialis was waiting in his borrowed tunic with a worried look on his face. He had evidently gone on ahead to fret and pace in the darkness. He hardly bothered to lower his voice as he waylaid the party.

  “When are you going to tell them? They have a right to know.”

  “Tell us what, Petronius?” Cornelia perked up.

  “The menu, my dear.” And to Martialis: “They already know, Marcus. Please don’t bring it up again. Now come with me.” Petronius hooked him with his free arm and led him, mute and unresisting, to the dining couch. There, the group dissolved, some moving to the left, others to the right as they flowed around the couch and sought their natural places. As each sat on the edge of the mattress, assigned slaves deftly removed and stowed his or her sandals. The guests draped themselves across the couch so that, in a moment, each reclined on his or her left elbow, facing the center, in positions that corresponded precisely to those they would have assumed in the dining room: Martialis and Melissa to the left, in the family places, with the third position left open for Petronius; Anicius, Cornelia, and Lucilius in the places of honor; then Fabius and Pollia on the right, in the places of lesser prestige, leaving the seventh position empty for the missing guest.

  Petronius muttered a rote invocation of the gods, and the dinner was officially under way.

  “Who is our absent ninth, Petronius?” Lucilius inquired, spitting an olive stone into his fist and dropping it onto the marble ledge of the water table.
Petronius remained standing, like a chorus master, at the opposite side of the basin.

  “It was to have been Martialis’s bosom companion, Lucius Castricus, but the rumors sweeping through Baiae seem to have swept him right off the coast. He is not to be found. I believe he intends to leave us in the lurch.”

  “For shame.”

  “Poor form.”

  “What have you done, Petronius?” Martialis barked, glaring into his goblet. “Have you mixed perfectly good Surrentine with Vatican rotgut? You may have no respect for your guests, but surely so precious a vintage did not deserve to be slaughtered?”

  The remark drew a general chuckle that very nearly masked the discomfort of Martialis’s palpable anger and embarrassment over his absconded friend. Castricus had clearly been scared off by the threat that hung over the evening. Petronius could hardly blame him. He smiled indulgently, aware that, with the evening now officially launched, posterity was watching and potentially recording his every move. He was also acutely conscious of the irony of having a biographer who mocked him and theatrically indulged his own grievances. He smiled, but he worried: he couldn’t very well remind Martialis explicitly of his duty to pay attention, could he, or compel him to be of better cheer?

  “Before you malign the wine, Marcus,” he said, “you may be interested to know that it was laid up in the consulship of Lucius Apronius Caesianus, and is therefore a year older and considerably more mature than you. Mellower, too, one hopes. Also, it is not Surrentine, but Falernian, from vineyards that belong to this very estate.”

  Martialis smiled bitterly. “Is it Petronius we dine with this evening, or is it Lucullus?” He was not, apparently, in a forgiving mood, and Petronius decided to ignore him for a while and see what that might do to improve it. He took an oyster and a slice of citron from a passing tray, and watched the creature shrink from the spray of acidic juice. Then he slipped it from its shell and held it on his tongue, allowing his mouth to fill with the vapors of brine and live flesh. He was pleased to find that the intense pleasure of raw shellfish, a tiny package of squirming life unadulterated by the ubiquitous putridity of garum and asafoetida, was one he was still able to enjoy.

  He stepped back, out of the coronet of light, to observe the gathering of those with whom he had chosen to spend his final hours. They were being swarmed over now by slaves bearing trays of food, wine, and shaved ice, but they were alone among themselves, as Romans were everywhere and at all times. They leaned into each other, as if connected by invisible filaments, not of love, but of hunger, the way baby birds strain open-mouthed toward their mother. Were they friends? Petronius was reminded of another dinner—had it only been eight years since? In Tigranocerta, in Armenia, during a brief lull in the fighting, General Corbulo had entertained a delegation of Parthian noblemen, and invited Petronius to attend. He had been fighting the Parthians for some time now, and had killed any number of them, but had never seen them up close in a relaxed social setting. The men held hands when they walked. They rarely spoke to each other without touching, at the elbow, at the waist, at the shoulder. They would often reach out, grasp their companion’s head, and pull him in so as to whisper intimately in his ear, as if they were lovers. Petronius had never seen Romans behave that way. Lucilius had been Seneca’s intimate for many years, the recipient of many confidences, but Petronius had never seen them touch. Here were seven Romans lying on a couch together, all with much in common despite differences in age. If one were to ask them about the nature of friendship, they would be able to quote the appropriate Greeks with easy familiarity; if one were to ask them who their friends were, they would answer without hesitation. If one were to invite them to play a game, in which they were required to name those they would invite to attend to them as they lay dying, they would thrill at the challenge and clamor for the first try. Petronius himself, a week earlier, would probably have named precisely these people here before him tonight, confident that each would be in Baiae for the season. And here they were, as if by magic, so how was it that he suddenly felt a longing for the company of his steward and his chef? What were Commagenus and Lucullo doing at this very moment? The thought of Commagenus reminded Petronius of the task he must attend to before he could join the party in earnest. He slipped away and found his steward waiting for him in a small guest bedroom at the end of a quiet hallway.

  At the bedside table, a single lamp was lit. Its golden orb of wavering light left the corners of the room in darkness, but shone upon a set of items on the tabletop: a brass wine krater, embossed with Olympic scenes; a thick wad of Egyptian cotton, combed free of seeds; a roll of linen bandages; the golden-hilted dagger which Corbulo had presented to Petronius in personal recognition of his contribution to the destruction of Volandum. Petronius had never yet drawn blood with the gift. He picked it up and bounced it in his palm, assessing its weight and balance, and sat at the edge of the bed. The hilt glowed like a living thing in the lamplight, all coiled energy like a panther crouching to strike. He closed his fingers around it, dousing the glow.

  “Let’s try not to be too messy about this, Commagenus. There’s still a long evening ahead,” he said. The steward bowed and stood at hand, a towel draped across his forearm.

  Petronius held his left wrist over the krater, tilted at a slight angle, and the dagger at the artery. It would have been far more efficient, he knew, to open the vessel at the elbow, but that would not have served his plans for the evening. He also had to take care not to sever the artery entirely, but merely to slice into it, and to that purpose he had tested the blade earlier against a leather strop and found it good. This action he was about to undertake, he had seen it done countless times by friends, fellow soldiers, and enemy captives; in his mind’s eye, like any Roman aristocrat, he had so often rehearsed his own turn at it that it now seemed perfectly natural, part of a daily routine, like shaving. He nodded at Commagenus, who moved forward to drape the towel across his lap. He pushed the blade into the skin and pulled back smartly—again, as he had done countless times at the throats of his enemies. There was no pain worth noting. The blood began to flow in controlled spurts into the krater. There was some minor spattering at first off the bottom of the bowl, but the towel spared his tunic.

  This was not bad. There was no fear, only detachment at the sight of his own life’s blood filling the bowl. That was how he knew it would be, that there could be no failure of resolve. But his spirit was still troubled, his mind hot and restless—the serenity and acceptance he had sought all day were still missing, and that was not how it should be. He ought by now to have been able to let it all go, the doubts, the questioning, the clinging to unresolved desires and ideas. What a man of his age and accomplishments had yet to answer for, he could not imagine; and still his mind was behaving as if it had further work to do. Physically, he had long since been prepared; the spiritual did not interest him, as he did not believe in the immortality of the soul; but emotionally, he had been surprised and disappointed to learn that day, he was as unripe for this departure as if he’d never picked up a philosophy book in his entire life. His thoughts were muddled, fervid, tumbling over one another like water in a cataract, when they ought to be gentle and softly flowing now like a broad river emptying itself into the sea after the long journey from its source. “He who understands the limits of life knows that it is easy to obtain that which removes the pain of want and makes the whole of life complete and perfect. Thus he has no longer any need of things which involve struggle,” Epicurus had said. Petronius had expected that the distraction of hosting the dinner would lift him from this mire of confusion, but he’d been wrong. Fortunately, there was time left to remedy the situation.

  Petronius knew from experience and experiment that a soldier on the battlefield generally dies if he loses more than three or four pints of blood from a gushing wound. By that calculation, he figured that he could afford to drain about one pint every two hours over the course of the evening before he became seriously incapacitated a
nd was forced to take leave of his guests. Having tested the krater earlier, he’d found that one pint of liquid reached to the javelin held horizontally at the shoulder of an Olympic athlete embossed on the side. His blood had reached that level now, and he nodded to Commagenus, who waited with the cotton and bandage. The steward knelt at Petronius’s feet and pressed a thick wad of cotton to his wound. It bloomed bright red even in the few moments it took to wrap the bandage around his wrist and bind it tightly. They both stared intently at the dressing; neither knew what would happen next. If it failed, Petronius would be dead within minutes and the dinner would have to be interrupted, the loved ones summoned for a hasty, unsatisfactory good-bye. If it held as planned, the festivities could go on all night, if need be, with no farewells necessary at all. They waited, Commagenus every bit as focused on the binding as if it had been his own wrist. After a minute or so, when it became clear that the flow of blood had been successfully stanched, Commagenus exhaled an almost inaudible snort of relief through his nostrils.

  “Good,” Petronius said. “Now I want you to fetch Syrus, Demetrius, Hermes, Lilia, Vellia, and Lucullo in here. Be quick about it. I have guests waiting for me.” Commagenus bowed and fled.

  As a soldier, Petronius was gratified when a well-laid plan was executed efficiently and effectively. This one, to all appearances, was proceeding as foreseen. He had long known—long before the date of his death had been fixed—that he should die at the table, as it were, and not on the dais, as so many with intellectual pretensions had done and would continue to do. Far better to die with saffron than with rhetoric on one’s lips. Lucan had botched his own suicide entirely, ridiculously reciting from his own mediocre epic poetry, making a fool of himself for all eternity. Seneca had done little better—it was still hard to believe that he’d actually had the gall to bequeath to his friends “my sole but fairest possession: the image of my life”—but he’d been lucky enough to have an excellent and loyal wife to doctor the account for posterity. Still, in all fairness, they had stayed in character: lived as orators, died as orators. And Petronius, known throughout Italy as a purveyor of exquisitely elegant entertainments, felt that at the very least a similar conformity was required of him. If one had a reputation, however unfair, as a debauchee, people would be puzzled and skeptical if one were said to have died as a Stoic. Ultimately, they might doubt or reject the account given of one’s death, and then one’s name would die with one’s body. In a culture of fame and imagery, there can be no ambiguity—the people’s expectations must be met—if posterity is to pay any attention whatsoever. Glory is most often said to be won, but Petronius suspected that it was generally the outcome of negotiation and compromise.