‘Could feel like living in a corset,’ said Jim, on the subject of formal gardens, ‘but I do like the idea of some kind of maze.’
‘Why a maze?’ Rick asked.
‘So Leni can’t find me,’ he said, slyly.
‘This will be my home,’ said Leni, gazing at the plans, and Rick saw how her finely chiselled cheekbones caught the light with an almost luminous sheen.
But the villa didn’t look like a home to him, more like a museum: stonily elegant, monumentally impersonal.
‘I grew up in the ugliest steel town in Pennsylvania,’ she said, turning to him with a quiet aristocratic candour that was disarming, and as if this statement explained everything. ‘One knows that one’s real home is out there somewhere. I guess you just have to live long enough to find it.’ She had a breathy, almost swooning drawl, at odds with her sharp features. ‘I hope you’ll come and visit us, perhaps in the spring.’
And so it went on, an evening of the most urbane pastoral talk. The focus of their discussion was an extension that needed to be added at the back of the villa, a modern kitchen and a spa bathing area as well as an office, something that would not mar the lines of the façade. There was much talk of purity, of simplicity and of austerity, and how they could build a rustic-looking barn-shaped shelter for Jim’s collection of old Porsches, any one of which, with his love of puzzles, he could take apart and put together again himself.
‘It’s the only time you’ll ever see him relax,’ said Leni.
‘Does he actually drive them?’ Rick asked.
‘Oh, he goes for a spin, now and then, but that’s not really the point, if you know what I mean.’
He didn’t, but he had heard Jim boasting of his Porsches more than once, though Jim’s boasting was as engaging as the rest of him, and amusing even, in light of his buffoonishly inept driving.
‘I do hope you’ll come and visit us,’ she said again. ‘You know, Jim has been toying with the idea of setting up a work space at the rear of the villa where the staff can fly over for weeks at a time. Kind of a working retreat.’
‘I try and talk him out of this,’ said Marc. ‘You should never mix work with holiday.’
‘Why not?’ Jim exclaimed. ‘Work should be play, and play should be productive.’ He locked his long, bony fingers together into a knot. ‘The whole person, eh, Rick?’
Rick smiled. It was all part of Jim’s utopian dream, that there were places and things that could be perfected and where everything would come together and all would be well.
Leni was gazing at the drawings, her elbows leaning on the table. ‘This will be my home,’ she said again, as if she could will it into being.
Jim gave his wide, glinting grin. ‘As close to heaven as heaven can be.’
In the summer of that year, Rick began a relationship with one of the Canadian programmers, Mira Gospadarcyzk. Mira had what he thought of as a Polish look, the blonde hair, the creamy skin, and she was plump, something he liked in women. He liked that feeling of solidity between the sheets. She also had a sharp wit, and she was lazy, another quality he found attractive. He was drawn to her insouciance, her way of lounging at full stretch on one of the orange sofas in the coffee bar like a big, blonde cat. She was a gifted mimic in a way that Jim too found amusing: he would quite often get the giggles in her presence. Rick wondered if it were this, or the fact that Mira was clever, that induced such tolerance in a man who was a workaholic. There was also something in the teasing banter between them, the way it struck the odd note of cruelty, that made him suspect they might once have been lovers. Who had rejected whom? Mira perhaps. She used her wit to keep her emotional distance, and that was fine with Rick. After the recent disaster of his love life, all he wanted was a companionable relationship plus sex. It seemed to suit them both.
In late summer, he and Mira rented a van and took a five-week break in Europe. When Rick told Jim he was taking a holiday Jim slapped him on the back and said, ‘Great! That’s great! You know, come May, Leni and I will be at the villa. Why don’t you drop by, stay a while?’ Mira, on learning of this offer, rolled her eyes. But all through the drive across Belgium, France, Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria Rick found he was looking forward to a few days in the Tuscan hills; it would be the apotheosis of what he had begun to think of, wryly, as his European experience.
They arrived at the villa at dusk. The house stood in shadow, a mysterious cube. It was a palace, but it was also austere. In the distance the hills were soft in a fading light, but the grounds around the villa were bare and unkempt.
Leni and Jim were not at home. A taciturn housekeeper greeted Rick and Mira at the grand entrance and then showed them to a bedroom on the third floor. It was a large, impersonal room, like a gallery; long and narrow with a high ceiling and walls of flaking pink limewash. An imposing bed of dark wood stood against one wall and there was little else in the room apart from a cupboard of massive dimensions, elaborately carved. It had a wad of cloth under one end to prevent it tilting forward on the uneven floor.
Mira opened the cupboard; inside was a row of old garments. ‘Look!’ she exclaimed, her head disappearing into folds of satin and velvet, but the smell from the cupboard was musty and when she drew out a green beaded dress and held it up to the light, the silk was moth-eaten.
Already he felt claustrophobic. He needed to go for a walk but by now it was dark. ‘Let’s see if we can find something to eat,’ he said.
They stepped out into the corridor but took what proved to be a wrong turn, and after making their way down three levels of a narrow stone staircase found themselves in a stone-walled antechamber with a faded trompe l’oeil of a vineyard at one end and no apparent doorway. It seemed they had come to a dead end. Why, they asked one another, would anyone build a staircase that led nowhere? There must have been a doorway once that was now bricked up.
Just as they were beginning to feel disoriented, they heard a car roar into the driveway and could tell from the sound of the engine that Jim was at the wheel.
That night over dinner Leni and Jim took up the conversation from the evening at Notting Hill as if they had never left off. They had no interest in where Mira and Rick had been. All they talked about was the villa.
‘Those two are nuts,’ said Mira as they walked up the main staircase to their room. Rick was silent. The villa had begun to exert a spell over him; it was both strange and familiar. ‘I feel I’ve been here before,’ he said.
Mira gave him a look of affectionate contempt. ‘Yeah, as a servant,’ she said.
When they entered their room she went straight to the massive cupboard and flung open its doors. Now it was her turn to be seduced. Like a woman in a trance she began to browse through the crush of hanging garments, fingering the embroidered silks and velvets, exclaiming, with a kind of reverent awe, over this or that detail.
‘Do you think anyone would notice if I took some of this stuff?’ she said.
‘Are you kidding? I’ll bet Leni has an inventory of everything in the place.’
Mira began to sneeze from the mould but it did not deter her. After a while he left her and went out into the long corridor, which led to a gloomy bathroom at the far end with an ancient lavatory, a cistern high on the wall with a rusted chain. When he returned she was lounging on the bed in a voluminous ball gown of silver-grey velvet embroidered with intricate loops of black beads that flickered in the light.
It had the desired effect.
The next morning, under the shower, the skin on his chest stung from the soap. He looked closely and could see a fine network of pink abrasions, left there by the beads.
At breakfast on the terrace, Leni appeared with a folder that she presented to him over coffee. He glanced at its contents and saw that she had prepared a detailed itinerary for him and Mira, which mostly consisted of visits to art treasures in the surrounding towns. He began to formulate a polite way of saying that he didn’t like churches and would prefer to go on some walks, but
at that moment a chauffeur-driven car pulled into the driveway and Marc the architect got out. Bounding up onto the terrace with all the eagerness of a large, friendly dog, he took his place at the table and began immediately to consume a pastry. ‘Where is Jim?’ he asked.
‘In the war room,’ said Leni, referring to Jim’s office off the rear courtyard. ‘I’ll send Nina to fetch him.’
Mira yawned and got to her feet. ‘I need a hike,’ she said.
‘Lunch is at two,’ said Leni, stirring her coffee. She didn’t look up.
As they set out on their walk he told Mira about Leni’s itinerary and she pulled a face. ‘She’s a control freak. All she cares about is her precious limewashes and her fat architect.’ Then she gave that alluringly acerbic laugh that never failed to arouse him.
For a lazy hour they strolled in silence around the grounds of the villa. He liked the fact that Mira never felt the need to talk. He found it drew him to her, the quiet between them, and when they came upon a derelict farmhouse he tore the splintery shutters from an unglazed window and they climbed across the stone sill and made love on the dusty floor. Every room smelled of sage and cat’s piss but behind the house were the remains of a garden, and there they lay on the warm earth, and dozed for a while beneath the uneven shade of a deformed apricot tree. It was as if here, at least, they were beyond the gaze of the villa.
When they returned to what Mira now referred to as HQ, Nina ushered them to the rear terrace, which was lined with lemon trees in terracotta urns and shaded by a canopy of mauve and white wisteria. Leni and Marc were already seated for lunch and Jim was approaching from his office, dressed in white drawstring pants and a white singlet, an outfit that might have made him look positively ethereal were it not for a ridiculous straw sombrero perched above his rimless spectacles.
After an indolent lunch, Leni called for Nina to clear the table. Marc had been gone all morning to investigate some local stonework and it was time now to discuss the maze.
Jim had more or less settled on a high hedge design in a blend of laurel and holm oak, but he could not decide on a ‘goal’. Every maze had to have a goal but he and Leni couldn’t agree. Leni liked the idea of some Etruscan antiquity, still and contemplative: a terracotta canopic urn or the head of a maenad set on a marble plinth, or maybe a tomb fresco set in the ground, a stone slab with winged lions and sphinxes in relief. But Jim wanted something more ‘interactive’. He loved the maze at the Villa Garzoni, where, in the grotto at the centre, there was a tap that activated water jets set along the paths so that the first person to arrive at the centre had the fun of turning them on and drenching anyone who had the misfortune still to be lost in the maze.
‘What if you wanted to go into the maze alone?’ Marc asked. ‘There would be no-one to sprinkle.’ But this, as Leni said, only showed how little he knew Jim. Jim would never go into the maze without company. What would be the point of that?
‘Why do you need a goal?’ Mira asked. ‘The objective, Jim, is to find your way to the middle of the maze and then to find your way out again. To not get lost. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Oh, that? That’s boring,’ said Jim with his high, abrasive whinny. ‘And what a letdown. You spend all this time figuring out the right path and when you get there, zilch!’
‘It would betray a lack of imagination not to have something in the centre,’ Leni said, coolly. ‘Like you couldn’t think of anything’ – she gave one of her elegant shrugs – ‘or you didn’t care.’ She gave the impression that carelessness was the quality she most abhorred.
It was clear that Leni didn’t care for Mira. As was becoming her habit, she turned to Rick. ‘What do you think?’
‘Put something you love at the centre,’ he said, ‘otherwise what incentive will you have to find your way there? After a few times the novelty will wear off, you’ll get sick of it and you’ll just be paying someone to trim the hedges.’
‘Exactly,’ said Leni, softly.
‘The problem is,’ said Mira, ‘that Jim’s in love with a sprinkler.’
Leni ignored her. She was gazing at Rick now with a certain look. As though she thought him simpatico, a kindred spirit. He saw then that her identification with the villa was complete; Leni was the villa and the villa was Leni. When she conducted them on a tour and smiled with satisfaction at the restoration of the trompe l’oeil she might have been gazing at a flattering portrait of her own face. The stone staircases were the pathways of her body, the lime-washed stucco her own skin. He knew nothing then about how some women, and men, became the houses they live in, how the house is a substitute or ideal self. The self is not perfectible but the house is. Leni was trying to create a paradise on earth, a perfection that would forever elude her, and it was not inherently to do with wealth, although money was one of its pathways. Jim, on the other hand, was more interested in the game, the puzzle.
That night Mira came down with a fever. Already he had learned that, when sick, she wanted to be left alone. He tried to be solicitous but his hovering seemed only to annoy her. Apart from bringing her water and helping her into the antique bathroom, he was at a loose end, and so, after a day of just hanging around, he succumbed to Leni’s itinerary. For the next two afternoons he allowed her to drive him around the neighbouring towns.
Unlike Jim, Leni was an expert driver and he enjoyed the authoritative verve with which she negotiated the steep bends. And after the first hour he felt oddly comfortable with her, even though, as he had suspected, she was bent on guiding him through a series of churches.
A few looked like medieval fortresses, blunt with a primitive beauty. Inside they had been remodelled and Leni instructed him on the finer points of their Byzantine geometry or, if from a later era, their baroque parabolas. Some of these churches, she told him, had been built over the original Etruscan temples of the pagan era, constructed on the ruins. One or two had even incorporated elements of the original: a stone wall here, a few temple pillars there. That would be right, he thought: the world reinventing itself, over and over. But he ventured few observations, for he was intimidated by her learning. Instead he was alert to her body language, to the merest hint of flirtation. He thought about how he might handle it if she made it clear she wanted him. He waited for the first subtle sign. But there was none: she was bent only on his instruction.
Meanwhile, he was struck by the contrast between the madonnas of the frescoes and Leni, who revered them; the madonnas so passive, so ample, so voluminous in their flesh and the folds of their skirts; Leni so willed, so streamlined and thin. At one still point in the afternoon they sat on a stone bench at the rear of the nave of a small chapel and Leni slipped off a sandal and rubbed her foot. For the first time he noticed her feet. They were peasant feet, short and broad, yet she had a way of wearing a plain leather sandal that was aristocratic, like everything else about her: the cuff of her shirt; the single strand of pearls around her neck; her antique gold earrings; her calculated perfection, which was both artifice and yet of her essence. It was difficult to imagine her looking ruffled.
How startling, then, that night when he got up for a leak and surprised her in the dilapidated, high-ceilinged bathroom on the first floor. She was vomiting into a white sink surrounded by green tiles, and perhaps it was the colour of the tiles but her skin had a sickly greenish hue. It was a shock, for she seemed so touchingly vulnerable, despite the high-handed manner in which she waved him away. He can still recall that wave, the elegant white hand fluttering against the green tiles.
On the fifth day Mira revived and they packed their things into the van without regret. He had decided he did not like the villa. The spell was broken. In every room the air was redolent of lost promise, of unfulfilled dreams, and he doubted that Leni could restore that promise. Despite all the plans and extensions, all the attention to detail, somehow the villa seemed to remain uninhabited. It was as if Jim and Leni were children playing in an abandoned house, or travellers passing through.
The day before he and Mira departed, he sat on the sunny terrace and watched as two men laid out a pattern for the maze with radiating lines of string. He thought of something he had read in one of Leni’s coffee-table books, about how the formal gardens of the villa were meant to be complemented by a hunting park, a wild area ‘where the irrationality of nature could be accepted’, but it struck him that even this was contrived. Everywhere in Europe, Nature seemed fully under human control; framed and mounted and polished and trimmed; fenced and cultivated, with every square inch of the land owned. It was so unlike the wild, formless bush of his childhood, its surreal monotony, its white light, the infinite gape of its horizon.
Even Jim’s Porsches had failed to interest him as much as he thought they might. The garage had been completed and the inert machines stood there in a row like stuffed panthers in a museum. Their lines were beautiful but they seemed excessive, overwrought. A frozen potential. Everything that in Jim and Leni’s telling, and in his own imaginings, had had immense charm now impressed him as lacking a vital force, some inner spark. It was all so … so calculated. Leni, for example, had a whole wall covered with samples of limewashes, and her precise, softly spoken monologues over lunch, mostly on the look of things, made him irritable and restless. By the fourth day of his stay Jim and Leni had seemed to him to be like sleepwalkers in a waking dream; a lavish and sometimes engaging dream, but a dream, nevertheless. The obsessiveness, the fussiness of both was somehow beside the point.
But what was the point? It was some years since he had asked himself this question, and this Arcadia here in the Tuscan hills was the last place he might have expected his sensual parachute to be deflated by metaphysics. For the first time since leaving Sydney he had been ambushed by his old ennui.
A Short History of Richard Kline Page 4
