Matala

by Craig Holden

  I sucked down all the good dark-crusted bread and then lifted the wicker basket and shook it, but the waiter pretended not to notice. It was only when Darcy said, “Per favore, signore. Un, uh, un po’ di più,” that the ass hurried over, simpering and tipping his head, and took the empty basket away. When he brought more, I ate that, too, spread thickly with white butter, and it was so chewy fresh and good, I could’ve just had that and been satisfied. I felt the molecules breaking apart and moving into my body, filling my spaces, my cells, rebuilding me.

  We’d been scrapping too long this time, and I could feel myself getting worn out by the hardness of it, the emptiness. There was something wrong with Justine. Always before, she managed things, she taught me, and we did well. We could take whatever we needed and live on it nicely, in whatever ways we chose, but now we were stuck.

  I ate. I ate the salad and the mosticelli and the veal and yet more of the bread and a plate of fruit and tiramisu, and I could’ve eaten more, but this was fine. Darcy ate some, too, but mostly she drank and watched me. When she ordered a second bottle of the house Chianti, I took off my jacket, finally, and leaned back and felt my belly straining nicely at my shirt.

  “When’s the last time you ate?” she asked.

  “Few days. It’s been a little lean lately.”

  “Who’s Bill?”

  My shirt was one of those blue-and-white-striped jobs they wore in the service stations back home, with the name Bill embroidered on a red patch over the breast pocket. I couldn’t even remember anymore where I picked it up.

  “Yours,” I said. “Thanks for asking.” I laughed, expecting that she would, too. It was pretty funny if you think about it, a nice little joke on the whole situation, and humor was a big part of it after all. Or it should be anyway. The old give-and-take. But she didn’t even smile, just kind of rolled her eyes.

  “The truth is, I really am totally busted,” I said. “But I’ll pay you back. Seriously.”

  “When would you do that?”

  “When—”

  “I mean how? Will you track me down?”

  I shrugged.

  “Can I just buy you dinner?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Yes. Thank you.”

  She was with twenty or so other American students, she told me, on this very organized unspontaneous tour of the art and architecture of the Continent, six weeks, ten cities. Tomorrow it was on to Florence and then northward and westward, until they ended up in London. She’d gotten away this afternoon just by walking out of the hotel without telling anyone. She was in trouble. She’d hear about it when she got back.

  I told her I was just a traveler. I’d been on the Continent over a year already and on the road for two. She seemed to get off on this, going all dreamy again and shaking her head as if she could hardly imagine it. And the truth was, she couldn’t. She had no idea. So in exchange for a good meal I’d be her little slum-side experience, the rough edge that would pull all the beautiful crap she’d see into a new focus.

  WHEN I GOT BACK, AS I passed the check-in desk and went into the hostel’s dim foyer, three different people—a large-headed girl from Modesto, a German woman named Helena, and some guy from Boston I’d never seen before—all told me that Justine was waiting for me in the women’s dorm. They all said it seriously, too, so I knew what to expect. I still wonder, when I remember it, at the fact that those strangers, those wanderers, some of whom had been there only a few days, did her bidding like that, treated her as if she mattered, as if she ran the place and they meant something to her. Even the people who worked there treated her that way. La Madre, they called her. Mother Justine.

  I found her sitting on a bed, alone in the long room of bunks, and sensed that she had even arranged that. Before she looked up at me, I guessed the situation from the way her knees bounced, as if she were running somehow while still sitting. And when I saw her eyes, I was certain. Then I noticed the opened pill bottle on the blanket beside her and said, “How’d you manage this?”

  “Nice to see you, too, love,” she said in her smoothest, most beguiling Kentish, as she called it—a Canterbury upbringing polished by years in West London and America. Which is where I’d met her two years before as I sulked in a bar on my twentieth birthday. Later, when we’d been together for a while, I started asking her to take me to see where she was from, but she always refused, as if there was something there she didn’t want me to see. Eventually I quit asking.

  “How’d you get it?” I said.

  “I bought it,” she said, “with the last of what we had.”

  “Why?”

  “I thought you’d enjoy it. I got something for us both. How was your day?”

  “I thought we weren’t going to. I thought we said we had to take a break.”

  “Well, we’re at the end of it, aren’t we? Our little adventure.”

  “Are we?”

  “It seems we’re in the process of the old crash and burn, doesn’t it, Will? Rust never sleeps and all that. So I say let’s burn out with it. Let’s just play it out and sod all.”

  “And then what?”

  “I have no idea, my sweet.”

  “Gimme some.”

  “Such a greedy monkey,” she said, but she tossed the bottle farther down the mattress so that some of the pills spilled out. I picked out two and swallowed them dry.

  “Does this mean we’re leaving?”

  “On what would we leave? You going to walk home?”

  I sat, mulling on it, until she said, “Oh, stop the worrying. I’ll get us out of it. I always have, haven’t I?”

  It was true.

  “Hungry?” she said and began to reach into the canvas bag at her feet.

  “I got dinner,” I said. “A good one.”

  I told her briefly about the happy accident that led to my getting fed and thought she might at least be glad of it, that she didn’t have to worry about my eating for a day or two. I thought she’d see the humor in how it was all the girl’s doing, she who stopped and spoke to me, and how I didn’t have to do anything but play along, turning things a little this way and that, how she even said she’d come out here later tonight, and who knew, maybe she would, but what the hell, it was all kind of funny. So I thought it might bring out a smile at least.

  Justine said, “Well, aren’t you the selfish bastard? You really believe she’s coming here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you do. You knew all along she wasn’t coming out to a flipping youth hostel. Not after she sobers up. So you had your little fun, got your nosh-up, and old Justine can just piss off.”

  “What’d you want me to do? Bring a doggie bag?” I could have, I realized then. Ordered something else and brought it along.

  Justine said, “Did you even try to get anything off her? Of course not. Because that would’ve helped me as well as you. But you don’t think about that. You got your own belly filled, so why worry about the old hag?”

  “Justine—”

  “I don’t think that way. I’m always thinking of you—how can I help us? How can I make it better for both of us? So I got us a little something to make it nice, you know? For us.” She slapped the mattress so that the pills and the bottle jumped. “I put myself through all of this to get something you’d appreciate. And not only haven’t you said even a bloody thank-you, it turns out you were out getting yourself a nice belly full. And that’s the end of that. I wonder—did you get a little something extra out of it, too?”

  “Oh, God.”

  “No? Too bad. Because that would’ve been perfect, then, wouldn’t it? The whole enchilada. You could’ve slept happily for days.”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Sod off, Will.”

  Which I did. I went back out and walked for a long time. I thought about just keeping on going. And then when I reached into my pocket and found I’d lost the stainless Clerc automatic I’d managed to slip off the arm of a smelly German tourist on the shuttle
to the Saint Sebastian Catacombs just the week before, I howled and swore into the night. What I needed any of this grief for anymore I did not know, and although I finally felt that narcotic blanket wrap around me, and felt thirsty and as if things really could get better somehow, I still thought about the possibility of going off on my own.

  I thought about it all the way back to the hostel.

  LATER, IN THE BIG ROOM where the smoke rose into the lights, and people laughed and shouted over the jukebox, and the cold bottles of Czech Bud came one after another, I began to feel better. I was almost having an actual conversation with Didier—the Franglais we’d worked out becoming more comprehensible the more we drank—and I began to get back a little of the glow I had after dinner and hanging out with the pretty rich girl. A tour, she’d said. Six weeks. What kind of money, I wondered, must the daddy of someone like that have? A girl barely out of high school and bored already with the whole world, or at least the privileged part of it. She made it clear, though she didn’t come right out and say it, that this tour thing was just about more than she could put up with. It was stifling the life out of her, and she’d really rather go off and drink at a cruddy hostel than go to the opera they had scheduled for that night. The opera, I thought as I drank in the cruddy hostel. What’d she know about any of it?

  But I was glad, I decided, that she’d gone back to where she belonged. It would have been bad for her if she’d come with me, and I realized I didn’t want it to be. At first, of course, I’d thought of her as prey. But then she wasn’t. I had begun to like her already. I liked her ripeness, the sense that she was still unfolding, but at the same time I liked the acid she’d already learned to give off. I liked that burn.

  We’d had a nice little thing, and now she was a nice memory, and that was the right thing for her to be.

  I laughed at Didier, who grinned back because he was just a happy old drunk. I shook my head and looked around at the girls dancing together, at the guy letting his dog drink beer from a bowl, at the two American queens who’d come in last night arguing with each other and were still at it, and at all the people hanging on each other. My eyes rolled over it and past the entrance to the hallway, and on a little bit from there before they snapped back.

  She was there. There she was. She’d come.

  “Holy God,” I said.

  “’O-lee Gawd!” said Didier.

  I watched her for a moment—she hadn’t seen me yet—then looked at Justine. She was at the bar, drinking and chatting with her bartender buddy and a couple of the older ladies who were always glomming on to her. I stared until Justine felt it and looked back. I tipped my head and glanced at the girl, Darcy, who was still standing there trying to figure out what to do with all this craziness, about as far from her world as I imagine she’d ever been. Justine raised her eyebrows. I nodded. She could only shake her head. It was pretty unbelievable that a mark would just walk into the den and offer herself up. And yet I felt it again: a little pause of regret. The vestige of the attraction I’d felt for her. But now it was too late, misgivings or not. Here she was with a reloaded purse and an open mouth and her big eyes and big chest and big hair, having no idea yet what she’d walked into, no clue that she was about to learn what it felt like to get fleeced and left out in the cold.

  I put my fingers in my mouth and whistled. It rose over the din and caught her ear, and she looked directly at me. I stayed put, though. Didn’t make a move toward her. It was for her to fight her way through the crowd. To come to me. To come in. To join the party.

  “What’d you—have to pay?” I shouted. She carried the sleeping sack and pillowcase they give you when you check in. She nodded and flushed a little. At the hotel you could see she’d uncapped the hairspray and fired up the blow-dryer to get the maneish volume that was so in vogue then and that she wore so well.

  I said, “Sorry about that.”

  “It’s not a bad cover for the hottest club in town.”

  “There you go.” I pointed toward Didier, of the glossy black beard and tied-back hair, and said, “Darcy, Didier. He’s a carpenter from Montreal. He pretends he can’t speak English so he can screw with my head.”

  She sat across from the older man and said with a perfect accent, “Est-ce que cela lui fait une tête de baise?”

  Didier threw his face up, pounded the table, and laughed so hard I was afraid he was going to vomit.

  “What?” I said. My French was nowhere near good enough to pick up her meaning.

  “She wander do dis make you a fock head,” said Didier.

  “For sure,” I told him.

  “Fer shure,” Didier mimicked, driving it through his nose.

  “Beer?” I asked Darcy.

  “Wine? White.”

  “You got it.” I slipped into the crowd and left them to chat.

  NOW, AT THE BAR, JUSTINE wouldn’t look at me though I stood with my arm against hers. She said, “Pretty incredible, baby boy,” in the accent that still sounded exotic to me even after these couple years.

  Justine was a dark woman—hair, eyes, skin, soul—and she wore a yellow scarf around her throat tonight and a loose skirt with different-colored scarves hanging from it and a loosely knit sweater. She was thirty-nine years old.

  What she was really saying now was “You were right. You win. So go ahead and gloat.” But if I even hinted at vindication, Justine would use that as an excuse to start in all over again, crawl up my back. I figured her pleasure at seeing this girl here was just about evenly counterbalanced by her indignation at having been so vocally wrong. And it would take the tiniest tip to send the thing over again in that direction. So I said nothing.

  “Well?” she said after several moments.

  “She’ll be good for it. We should do all right.”

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  She waited for me to offer some advice as to how to go about it, but again I refused to bite. She was running it still. I acknowledged that. I didn’t care. I just didn’t want to get into it with her.

  “She’s having wine,” I said finally. “I’ll get a few down her.” The implication was: Then you can take over.

  Justine placed her palm on the back of my neck.

  “Nice work, boyfriend,” she said, and I knew I’d played it right. Made her happy again, at least for the moment. She looked at me now and smiled.

  DIDIER WAS SAYING TO DARCY, “And so you just see him on da street, just like dat?”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “Magic,” he said. It sounded like ma-zheek. “Magic of the road. He say he hope you to come.”

  She smiled and looked up as I set the drinks down. She kept her eyes on me but said to Didier, “He told me he’s been traveling here for a year.”

  “For me,” Didier said, tapping himself on the chest, “more dan tree.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Four-four,” Didier said. “You sink my wife dat she missing me yet?” He laughed again then grabbed my arm and said, “Dis one, he a good man. He just here”—he tapped his own temple—“un peu fou. Tu comprends?”

  A little nuts, he was saying. Which I granted. I had dropped out of college, after all, to run off with a woman I barely knew and done dangerous things—chemical, sexual, criminal—with her for which I’d had no previous desire or inclination. But in the years before I met Justine, I had failed to comprehend (or rather had forgotten) the power of imagining. I suppose that was her great gift to me. I was coming to recognize the malleability of reality itself. This story is in some part, I suppose, about my renaissance.

  I slid a beer to Didier and the wine to Darcy, and lifted my own bottle. “To the opera,” I said, “that you’re not at.”

  “Amen,” she said.

  Three

  T HEY SHOT POOL. THE GIRL laughed and dropped her head whenever she made a stupid shot, and Will grinned and bumped her out of the way with his hip. Cute. She even got Will to dance when someone played “Psycho Killer.” Justi
ne had never seen him do that before. And, of course, they drank—they and the greasy idiot Didier in his lumberjack shirt. The girl had the silly tart act down pretty well, although she didn’t look like someone who would let herself get too off her tits. But then assistance was available in that regard.

  Young Gianfranco, the boy-bartender, brought another glass. Justine couldn’t pay anymore, and wouldn’t have in any case, and Gianfranco knew that. But it didn’t matter. She was here. It was her temporary court. People came to talk, to stand by her, and when they ordered their own drinks, if they failed to offer to buy her one, too, Gianfranco simply deducted a little something extra from the bills they handed him. They never counted the change anyway.

  They called her La Madre. They sought advice. They sought compassion. Revenge. Chemicals. Some of them didn’t know what they sought, they just came to be near. And Justine smiled and nodded and let them touch her in their subtle ways. This was Rome, after all.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine Will watching the water slip beneath him, imagine him feeling he was watching time itself roll away, feeling himself getting older even as he stood there above the dirty old Tiber. Justine imagined him looking at the watch, fiddling with it, the Clerc he’d nicked a week earlier. He could have pawned it and fed them both for days, but he fell in love with it, a stupid boy trick, and now he was hungry.

  She knew that hunger. Justine knew all the hungers. They would age anyone. Will was a child still, she often told him. “You’re my little boy now, and I will take care of you, as a good mother should.” But lately she had not. So it had come to this point, of the boy standing over the river, feeling that empty pain, watching the flow, and undoubtedly thinking about how it was no longer the Justine who’d rescued him. How that Justine had gone away somewhere, and how tired he was. Road tired, yes, and hunger tired, and not-enough-sex tired, and lonely tired—all of those, but those were understandable, to be expected. This was another kind of tired. A tired of. Tired of fighting. Tired of waiting. Tired of being tired.