“Around here,” Caroline said, “death is never an emergency. The only emergency is pain.”
We stayed for lunch—corn chowder, chicken with almonds, chocolate pudding. Comfort food, all made by Tom. Then the roommate of the man who’d died called Caroline over to his bedside and whispered something to her. “He wants to speak to you,” she said.
“Who? Me?” asked Tom. “Why?”
“I don’t know.”
We walked over to the man’s bed. He had a tube in his nose. He could barely lift his head.
There was a chair next to the bed, and Tom sat down in it.
The man lifted his lips to Tom’s ear. “Don’t you remember me?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” Tom said. “I …”
“I’m a friend of Ernie’s. Keith Musgrave. Don’t you remember that weekend in Lake Tahoe? We rented a cabin—you and Ernie and Steven and I. Four boys and only one bed.”
Tom blushed. “Oh, of course. How are you?”
“How am I?”
“Sorry,” Tom said, “I didn’t mean …”
“It’s O.K. So how’s Ernie doing these days? Are you two still in touch?”
“Ernie? Oh, well, he’s … passed on. Just a few weeks ago.”
“Ah. So I’ll be seeing him soon.” Keith looked up. “Or on second thought …” And he looked down.
Tom stood. “I’m afraid we have to go,” he said. “It’s certainly been a pleasure.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” Keith answered, turning to look out the window. And we headed out the door.
It had started raining by the time we left the hospice. I remember Tom’s silence in the car, his pale and vulnerable profile: chiseled sideburn, protruding nose, watermelon-colored lips. His hand gripping the wheel. One half-obscured, blinking brown eye focused, urgently, on the road. We had no plans for the rest of the weekend, and I was desperately trying to think some up, running in my head through an ever shorter list of friends on whom we could still count for company … but Mary’s baby was sick, and Gina and Tony were at Disneyland, and Joan’s best friend was dying. Suddenly a car made an illegal left turn in front of us, Tom honked the horn, smashed on the brakes, we skidded in the rain and nearly collided with a 94 bus. “Fuck,” he said, in a voice that suggested he was sorry we hadn’t, then, righting the car, lugged us back into traffic.
“Was the problem that you didn’t recognize him?” I asked.
“Who?”
“Keith.”
“Oh, him. No, at first I didn’t.”
I stretched my arms behind my head. “So I guess it mustn’t have been a very good weekend.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just … that if it had been a good weekend, you’d have remembered it.”
“We didn’t do anything unsafe, O.K.?”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Well, clearly that’s what you’re wondering … and if that’s the case, you can rest assured. I’ve been completely up front with you so far as my history is concerned. You’ve got nothing to worry about.”
“Of course I’ve got nothing to worry about. We never have sex.”
“Oh, so we’re back to that again—”
“We’re not back to anything.”
“Why won’t I just have the test and be done with it.”
“I never mentioned the test. You brought up the test. All of this is in your head, not mine.”
We arrived home. The rain had gotten worse. I remember that I was correcting proofs, and Tom was sitting at his desk, drawing endless concentric circles with a protractor, when I felt a drop of water hit my head and, looking up, saw a patch of paint on the ceiling bulging like a tumor, rainwater collecting underneath. Tom noticed it the same moment I did, a pregnancy gathering there, and then before we could do or say anything the fragile membrane broke, and water fell to the floor, as before a birth. He jumped up, grabbed a box of tissues, and dropped to his knees before the spreading gray stain on the carpet.
“Call a plumber!” he screamed, but I just watched as he piled tissues on top of tissues to soak up the water.
“But, Tom, a plumber can’t—”
“Are you just going to stand there? Aren’t you going to help at all?”
“O.K., O.K.”
“You don’t need to use that tone of voice. There’s really no justification for that tone of voice. And bring some paper towels.”
I went into the kitchen, where we kept the phone books. I called a plumber, though I could not fathom what he was supposed to do. In crisp tones, he informed me that a weekend visit would cost $55 off the bat, plus $35 an hour, plus parts. “Whatever,” I said, hung up, and went back into the living room, where Tom was still crouching over his soggy pile of tissues.
“I’ve called the plumber. He’s on his way.”
“You’re so slow. Three minutes I’ve been waiting here for you to bring me paper towels. And now that I think about it, it’s probably been three minutes every day since we started living together—at least. That’s twenty-one minutes a week, eighty-four minutes a month, over a thousand minutes a year. Which means that in ten years, I’ve lost a hundred and sixty days—something like five months—just waiting for you. Now give me the damn paper towels.”
“I forgot the paper towels.”
Tom looked up at me. I sat on the sofa.
“I can’t stay here anymore,” I said. “I’m going crazy. You’re driving me crazy.”
“Are you saying you’re leaving me?” he asked, his voice low, as if he’d been expecting it.
“Not you. This.” I pointed to the rug, to the sopping pile of tissues.
“I knew you’d do this one day,” Tom said. “You’re a coward. You think you can run away from pain. Soon enough you’ll find out, though. No one can.”
He quieted, and I turned to watch where the rain was falling against the window, so thickly sheeted that for a moment it seemed to be flowing upward.
“Just don’t expect me to be waiting for you when you come back,” Tom said. He was rubbing his hands together, gathering the white clots of tissue into a ball.
“I wouldn’t expect that.”
Suddenly our voices were calm, we were talking like normal human beings. “Where are you planning to go, anyway?” he asked, as casually as if I were a friend planning a vacation.
“I thought Düsseldorf.”
“Düsseldorf!”
“There’s a job in Düsseldorf. I saw it posted at school. For an interpreter.”
“Oh, that sounds grand! Now I know why you were taking all those language courses.”
I hadn’t known myself until then.
He threw a vase at me. I remember feeling a certain detached curiosity, because no one had ever thrown anything at me before, and the vase was the same color as the water, and suddenly, everywhere, there were pieces of vase, and water, and flowers.
I put on my jacket, even though my shirt was soaked with the stinking water the flowers had been rotting in. “Vincent!” I heard him call as I went out the door, but his voice was distant already, as if I’d never see him again. I got into my car. He was standing by the window, looking out at me. Silent. The heavy rain against the glass made him look as if he were melting.
Via in Selci
Is it only thanks to what happened afterward—to that shadowing of motive with which retrospect tints the past—that I remember Tom, the last time I saw him, as somehow both sullen and brazen, withdrawn and at the same moment broken-bottle sharp, as if he had decided to throw off once and for all that wadding of gentility in which most of our intercourse sheathed itself? Not surprisingly, the occasion was dinner. The Morgue. Across a marble table the metaphorical ironies of which would only become apparent later on, we peered at each other—or rather, I peered at him and he peered over my head, over my shoulder, at a new waiter who had started the day before. Since the episode with Enzo and the pasta and chickpeas—no
t suprisingly, he had never gone back to Trattoria da Giuseppina—this matter of Tom and waiters had become a source of worry, and not only to me but, I learned later, to all his Roman friends. “Look at those forearms,” he said, and I did—hairy and dark, the requisite gold bracelet slung low on the wrist. The hands that gave us our pizzas were blunt-fingered, with clean, moon-colored nails.
“Noontime shadow,” Tom said.
“Noontime what?”
“That type would never make it to five o’clock.”
It was typical of his jokes. “He looks like Tony,” I said.
“Does he?” Tom put on his glasses, which of late he’d taken to wearing on a cord around his neck. “No, he doesn’t. He doesn’t look anything like Tony.”
We ate our pizzas quickly, and without saying much. Later, I would try to explain to the carabinieri the peculiar impression I took with me as we left the pizzeria, of something having changed in Tom … and yet my Italian wasn’t up to explaining just what that something was. Now I’ve had time to consider the matter, and I think I can fairly say that what had changed was his attitude toward love. Somehow it was both harder and sharper than it had once been, vulnerable and rapacious at once, like a can with a rusty edge. When we’d lived together, I’d often thought that Tom perceived love the way dogs did, that the idea was for us to be a warm lap in which he and I could curl up; love, in other words, as sleep. Only I hadn’t played along. I’d left, and in doing so robbed the crypto-dream-house of its lazy, cozy, dull, lovely dream.
All this I try to tell the maresciallo and his typing deputy, who takes down every word. Even so, I fail, at least in my own mind, to get the idea across in all its raggedness. Any student of language knows that limit. They are silent while I speak, and I speak for a long time. Then I stop speaking. The deputy stops typing. “Yes,” he says.
The other deputy coughs; interrupts. “Excuse me,” he says, “but may I ask if the professor ever expressed any resentment, after you left him?”
I shake my head. “Not a word. He never rebuked me, or threatened me, never even tried to convince me to come back. In fact, the only thing he said was that he respected the choice I had made, and wanted to do everything he could to make sure we stayed friends.”
The deputy types: Tom’s nobility, his humility, glow green against that black screen. And yet even as I extol him, I’m doubting myself. After all, for whom else but me could he have been performing the last night at the Morgue, when he stared so brazenly at the waiter? Not merely undressing him with his eyes, but tearing into him with his eyes, the rusty edge of his eyes—as if to say, because of you, Vincent, I am brought this low. This is my revenge. There is no better way to hurt someone else than by hurting yourself.
The interview is almost over. Across from me, the maresciallo regards his folder; says, “Bah-bah-bah”; drums his fingers against the desk. “Let me see if there’s anything else … Oh yes, the waiter at the Morgue. What did he look like?”
“Well, he was tall. Dark.”
“The classic Mediterranean?”
“I suppose you could say so.”
“Thin?” interjects the typing deputy.
“No, quite well built.”
“Hairy?”
“Quite.”
“Hairy like me,” the maresciallo asks, “or like my colleague?” And he points to the deputy at the corner of the desk.
I glance from one chest to the other. Both men have the first several buttons of their shirts undone, and both have abundantly, one might even say exuberantly hairy chests … which Tom, it was true, always admired. I don’t have a hairy chest. In fact, I wasn’t his type at all, nor was he mine.
And yet I don’t go along with the pornographic joke, I don’t, as Tom, in his last days, might have done, say, “Well, I’m not sure. Perhaps if you took your shirts off …” For Tom is dead, and I must not be nearly so bad a faggot as I have pretended, for I simply tell the maresciallo, “I would have to say hairy like your colleague,” and then look away, as if it’s no business of mine.
The maresciallo gets up from his chair. “Thank you,” he says. “I believe we’re finished now.”
“Are we?”
“All that’s left is to print out your statement. You can read it and see if there’s anything you’d like to change or delete … or add. Then you need merely to sign the document and you’re free to go.”
“But who killed him?”
He laughs. “If we knew that, we wouldn’t have dragged you here from Düsseldorf, now would we?”
Pages spit out of a printer and are handed to me.
“My name is Vincent Burke,” I read, “and I first met Thomas Carlomusto in New York in 1985 …”
The story of our lives, then. Yet who would have guessed it would have been written here, and in such exceptionally elegant Italian?
After the interview’s over—after I’ve signed the statement, shaken the hands of all three carabinieri, and been treated, against my will, to yet another coffee—I walk through the Forum to the Colosseum, and then down Via San Giovanni in Laterano, until I reach the church of San Clemente. The church has just reopened. No one’s there except for a young seminarian, perhaps an assistant to the sacristan, who has come to remove the guttered candles. Through the gloomy church light he looks at me; across pews and frescoes and acres of marble, those intricate floors by which Tom was so bewitched.
Was it him, then? He could not resemble the maresciallo less: a beanpole of a boy, with narrow shoulders, squinting eyes, a fat nose out of which hairs grow. Like a grotesque figure in some Renaissance painting … and yet, as he gathers the dead candles, he gazes at me, and his gaze is unwavering.
Was that what got Tom, then: the allure of the uniform? The rough belt loosened, and then, all at once, his mouth inside the cassock, sucking in the odor of wool and sweat?
The seminarian’s hands clutching his head, like a bobbing pregnancy?
Well, it’s possible. Anything’s possible. It could have been the Fascist student, or an offended waiter, or a marble thief. Or a Romanian hustler—an extracommunitario—picked up at the station men’s room, the one with the glass partitions. Or a fellow English teacher. Or it could have been me. Really, there’s no reason at all why it couldn’t have been me.
You’ll never know. The case will never be solved. In a few months the folder with Tom’s name on it will be shut, taken off the maresciallo’s desk, and deposited in that storage room through which I was led on the way to his office. Filed away with others of its kind.
Twenty-two others, to be precise.
I approach the seminarian. “Buon giorno,” he says.
“Buon giorno,” I say, and feed a 500-lire coin into a black metal slot. There is an echoey clangor as it hits the dark bottom of the collection box. Then I take a fresh candle and light it; set it down amid all the other votives; form my lips around Tom’s name.
I walk away. I have no idea if the seminarian is watching me, if he is lifting a monstrance or an obelisk to smash against my skull. Instead I have my eyes on the floor. These Escher-like interlardings of color really do create the most peculiar illusion of depth … and yet if you fell into them, they would break your nose. You couldn’t lift it off, once you’d been spread out on that table, and the marble quilt had been drawn over your eyes.
By the Same Author
Novels
The Lost Language of Cranes
Equal Affections
While England Sleeps
The Page Turner
Martin Bauman; or, A Sure Thing
The Body of Jonah Boyd
The Indian Clerk
The Two Hotel Francforts
Stories and Novellas
Family Dancing
A Place I’ve Never Been
Arkansas
Collected Stories
Nonfiction
Italian Pleasures (with Mark Mitchell)
In Maremma: Life and a House in Southern Tuscany (with Mark Mit
chell)
Florence, A Delicate Case
The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer
Copyright © 2003 by David Leavitt
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. For information, write to Bloomsbury USA, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York, 10018.
Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York
Bloomsbury is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
“Crossing St. Gotthard” originally appeared in The Paris Review and was also included in the anthology Bright Pages. The first part of “Route 80” was broadcast on National Public Radio and included in the anthology The Wedding Cake in the Middle of the Road. “Speonk” first appeared in DoubleTake, “The Scruff of the Neck” in The Southwest Review, and “Heaped Earth” in Tin House.
An earlier version of “Crossing St. Gotthard” was published in a limited edition by
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