Read The Marble Quilt Online

Authors: David Leavitt

The Marble Quilt (29 page)

“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with which retrospect tints the past—that I remember Tom, the last time I saw him, as somehow both sullen and brazen, withdrawn and at the same moment broken-bottle sharp, as if he had decided to throw off once and for all that wadding of gentility in which most of our intercourse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—not 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 Mitchell)

Florence, A Delicate Case

The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer

Copyright © 2003 by David Leavitt

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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
Elysium Press.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA HAS BEEN APPLIED FOR.

eISBN: 978-1-62040-709-7

The Marble Quilt
was first published by Houghton Mifflin in 2001
and was included in
Collected Stories
, published by Bloomsbury in 2003
This electronic edition published by Bloomsbury USA in June 2014

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