“San Francisco, then Rome. I’ve got a collection of Eakins portrait studies that I’ve been putting together for a client in San Francisco, and a man in Rome has got a little bunch of Fuseli drawings that I’d be a fool to pass up.”
Mara finished her lime bar and wiped her mouth with the napkin and then carefully wrapped the stick in the napkin.
“You’ve been working on these a long time?”
“Most of the year.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said, but she wasn’t successful at hiding her disappointment at the prospect of his leaving. Strand was a little surprised, and gratified, at her reaction. “When are you leaving?”
“In a couple of days.”
“Oh, that soon?”
She was pursing her lips slightly, her eyes diverted to her pencil as she doodled distractedly in the bottom corner of her sketchpad.
“I was wondering,” he said, “when I get back from San Francisco if you’d like to go on to Rome with me.”
Her pencil stopped. She didn’t look up. She said, “Oh… well…”
He could see her mind working in her face, something he was beginning to appreciate about her. It was an unusually transparent behavior, a lack of calculation that he found refreshing. His entire professional life had been spent dealing with people under control. Spontaneity, apparent spontaneity, was rare.
“In a few days?” she asked, still not looking up.
“Right.”
She nodded slightly, as if having confirmed something to herself, and then she looked up at him.
“I want to say something, Harry.” Her face reflected just a hint of acknowledgment that she thought she was stepping into risky water. “I’m forty-two. I don’t want to pretend that I’m in my twenties, and that I’m engaged in some sort of game here. One, I don’t have the patience for it anymore. Two, I don’t have the time for it anymore. I’ve wasted too much of it already. I must have thrown away five years in the last twelve months. Three, I want you to know, without having to be coy about it, that I like you very much, and, frankly, I don’t want you to wander away before we get to know each other better. Really get to know each other.”
She stopped, but not long enough for him to say anything before she went on.
“If you don’t have the same… interest… in continuing this in a serious way, just tell me. I’ve been through quite a lot in the past couple of years, and I think I can handle honest answers if they’ve got honest feelings behind them. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’d be cruel about it if you didn’t want this to go on.”
She paused again, but again she didn’t let him interrupt her train of thought.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, well, I think I’m a romantic woman, but at this point in my life it seems to me that good common sense is just as important.
“I’ve been burned pretty badly with this marriage, Harry, despite my bravado about it. I just can’t make that kind of mistake again.” She stopped and looked down. “But we seem to have so much to offer each other. If this is a… possibility for us, well, I’d hate for us to miss an opportunity simply because we didn’t know how to talk to each other about what we’re really feeling.” Again she confronted him with her eyes. “I don’t want the rituals of… getting to know each other to confuse what we might be genuinely feeling. We can’t mistake, or misrepresent, our feelings for each other, Harry. Either way.” She paused. “I think… that would be a shame.”
He couldn’t answer her immediately. Though she had spoken haltingly, there was no misunderstanding the depth of her feelings, and Strand wanted to accord her the same considerate deliberation.
“I can’t think of anything I’d like better than to continue this… as long as we can.” He thought a moment, his arms crossed. “I don’t know how far down the road I’m thinking. I don’t know that I have ‘plans.’…”
“No”-Mara sat up in her chair, putting the sketchpad down on the floor-“I didn’t mean that you had to spell it out for me. I, it’s just that, a trip like that, it could change things.” She stopped, seemingly frustrated at her own inability to express precisely what she was thinking. “Harry, you know what I mean here. I’m so very grateful to you for our friendship… for you sharing your home, for Meret’s friendship… for you including me in your life.” She took a deep breath. “For me, it could easily go farther than this. It seems like we’re at that point where this could become something else, something more.”
“But you don’t want to do that yet. Or maybe ever.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I’m afraid to if… Look, I don’t want sex to complicate a friendship. If it’s only going to be a friendship.”
Strand stood, put his hands in his pockets, and leaned his shoulder against the window frame. He looked outside a moment and tried to straighten out his thoughts. When he turned back to her she was reaching up and taking the two pencils out of her hair. She tossed them onto the floor by her sketchpad, shook out her hair, and leaned back in the corner of the chair and looked at him.
“Do you think it’s possible that you could be expecting too much from this?” Strand asked.
“Expecting too much? What do you think is out of proportion in what I’ve just said?”
“It sounds to me like you’re wanting guarantees.”
She frowned at him, waiting for him to go on.
“Guarantees,” Strand said, “that you won’t get hurt. Guarantees that I’m going to be the kind of person you want me to be. Guarantees that I’m not going to disappoint you.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, and this time he had no perception whatsoever of what was going on in her mind. The silence went on longer than he imagined it would. She broke her gaze and looked away. She nodded slightly, as if to herself, her eyes finding and settling on a drawing on the wall near her chair.
“Okay, I see your point,” she said. “Maybe I’m trying to be too careful.” She shook her head, thinking. “Maybe I’m, I don’t know, trying too hard to avoid the common little disasters that destroy a relationship, the kind of things that afterward, when it doesn’t work out and it’s over, you say to yourself, I should have seen that coming.”
“I’d like to do that, too,” Strand said. “But you can’t take the risk out of being human. Especially the kind of risks that two people take when they’re trying to feel their way into each other’s lives.”
She seemed embarrassed and at the same time a little sad, a reaction that puzzled him.
“Believe me,” he said, trying to diffuse her confusion, “I didn’t mean to push this. It was only a suggestion.”
“Harry, I’d love to go to Rome with you. I would dearly love to.” She smiled apologetically. “I don’t know. I guess I thought I wanted it too much.”
“Good,” he said, smiling too.
CHAPTER 9
ROME
Ariana Kiriasis sat on a large, damask-upholstered divan in the upstairs sala of her home in a quiet street in the Aventino, the southernmost of Rome’s seven hills. She was looking out to the view over her balcony, the double doors of which were thrown open to the pleasant morning air and to the sound of crows in the stone pines on the grounds of the nearby churches of Santi Bonifacio e Alessio and Santa Sabina. This single view was the reason she had bought the old house, as well as the reason it was grossly overpriced, considering its wretched plumbing and deteriorating stucco walls, which she had had to pay handsomely to have repaired.
Having an artistic and romantic eye, she had never regretted her decision. To the northwest, the view encompassed a long stretch of the Tiber and all of the district of Trastevere. On a day like today, with a slight haze in the summer air, the filtered light illuminated the dome of Saint Peter’s with exquisite effect, as though it were a colossal pearl hurled from heaven onto the muddy banks of the Tiber.
This was the view Ariana stared at now, but it was not the view she was seeing. So intensely was her mind engaged that she actually saw nothing at all. On the sofa beside her, and scattered over the floor around her small slippered feet, were the pages of the morning’s International Herald Tribune, which her maid brought to her every morning with her espresso and pastry.
