“What are you?” Ned asked. “A conductor, a waiter?”
“An earl,” he said, “an earl in real life. No, just kidding. I work at a bank.”
Fife acted like a semiroyal. At the coat check he turned out his pockets and left a pile for a tip because the coins were too heavy and his suit was bespoke. The money was dirty, besides.
“I’ll take you home,” he said to Ned, and then to Isabel, “I sense your hesitation. I’ve a good driver. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried.”
But Ned could see she was, and who was this man really? He looked like Oscar Wilde, ungainly and full of appetite, but rich, there was that. Ned could see the money nudged against the curb and the driver on alert.
“After you,” Fife said, and in Ned went and was instantly made imperishable in the vault of Fife’s car.
“Is it German?”
“Why not?” Fife said.
And why not roughly, an all-night magic act willing girls? After a while, the girls got tired; nothing much was happening to them, and Isabel had no ideas. She seemed incapable of enjoying herself anywhere. She said, “I can’t talk,” but Ned waved her off.
She said, “Ned, please, Ned. Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned, Ned.”
“You’re such a drag,” he said.
“Ned, Ned, Ned.” Her voice was tiny and squeaky. She said, “I can’t see!”
“Open your eyes!”
“I can’t.”
He led her out of the party and propped her against the building’s gate. Told her to wait, he’d get a taxi.
The next thing he knew, there was Fife loudly returned to the street and undressing — at least he heard undressing sounds. Fife was shouting at Isabel to open her eyes and Isabel was making panicky squeaks, chittering like a squirrel. Fife had hold of her.
“Open your eyes, you dumb cunt!”
And she did and she puked on his shoes.
*
They came up with the idea of Rome together, Fife and Ned, and they all three took off for a week in December, but it rained most of the time and the discolored statuary looked like so much salvage in the dingy gush of water. So much for the city of fountains. At night the Piazza Navona twitched in gaseous light — they might have been in Las Vegas but for the sodden stalls of nativity scenes, carnival hawked: cheap. Even the church was dank despite the pulsing coils of heaters.
“Here, stand here,” Ned said, and Isabel stood as near as she dared but was not warmed and said so.
“I’m cold, Ned, really.”
Ned, however, Ned was irrepressibly hopped up, red, manic, an all-out tourist: Borromini, Rainaldi, Bernini.
Ah! Another bloody Christ, another bloody saint, another sepulchre of little bones brittle as brushwood: the tedium of martyrdoms. “I’m cold,” Isabel said, “I’m going home,” by which she meant the hotel on the hill overlooking the Spanish Steps, the Hassler, a brocade corruption enjoyed at someone else’s expense, in this case, Fife’s.
*
“Answer me, Ned. What are we doing with this man?”
“Getting out of the house,” he said. “Isabel?” When she didn’t answer, he reminded her of what he, Ned, had been good for: experience. And he wanted to see more and he was fascinated by this jaded, shallow man’s bullying way of making money. And he didn’t want to think about what might have been anymore. They had to believe they had made the right decision. “Isabel?”
She sat on the ledge of the sink and stuck out her face at the mirror, used a tweezers lightly.
Ned peed.
“Please,” she said, distasteful twang in her voice. “I’ll be finished in a minute.”
“Fife’s waiting.”
“Let him wait.”
Ned washed one hand and held the other indifferently over the patch between her legs.
“Make yourself at home,” she said, worrying an eyebrow.
On his way out, he turned off the light.
“Hey!” she called after him. “I’m here, remember?”
*
Another night, another scrim walked through to darker places. Fife was dancing with Isabel — that much Ned knew — but where did the music come from? They didn’t come back for dances. “Ages,” he said, and Fife tapped Ned’s forehead as if in blessing.
“You’re ahead of us, Ned. What do you want, Isabel?”
“Water,” she said. Then, “Don’t whine, Ned. I only want water.”
Fife moved down the bar, touching all he passed. Ned watched him, wonder-struck: Why had Isabel decided to dance with Fife? “Why did you?” he asked.
“He asked me,” she said. Isabel’s face was near his when she asked, “Some things that have happened between us should stay between us, don’t you think?” She said, “It’s okay to tell him I’m depressed — tell anyone, I don’t care — but the reason? You don’t know the reason, not really. There are a lot of reasons but only some of them have to do with you.”
“With me, I hope,” Fife said, taking a sip of his golden drink at the same time he handed Isabel a like drink.
“I asked for water,” she said.
“Did you?”
Fife hitched Ned off the barstool and walked him — talked him — to the back of the bar and into a warm, wine-red leather space; Ned was in a womb or a wound and Isabel was patting him. The next thing he knew he was in bed at the hotel, alone in bed at the hotel — same shirt and shorts but the rest of his costume on the back of a chair.
“Isabel?”
No response but when he woke again, light bordered the shuttered balcony and the bedroom was fully returned, palpably quiet. He could see nothing had been moved; his pants’ legs still buckled off the back of the chair, and outside he saw yet more rain. Was Rome always this wet in December? Ned stood at the window, thankful the room was generously heated and the accusatory mirror that was his wife was turned away, a lot of hair on a pillow. When had Isabel come back? It might be his turn to play wronged, but had she been away at all? Perhaps they had gone to bed together, or had she put him to bed? He saw on the bedside table, his side, a carafe of water and aspirin: She had thought of him. He had done nothing for her but it was for himself, a self-loathing mission, playing to an older man’s desires — to simply sit on the edge of their bed and talk and talk, drinking bourbon — playing with Fife so as to see all he could see at Fife’s expense. On narrow streets mopeds, like insects, screeched past and scared Isabel, and he knew, Ned knew she was scared, yet he did not wait for her. Now she was asleep and on his bedside table a carafe of water, aspirin. She had thought of him. That was nice. She was nice. Fife wanted to extend their vacation, go to Florence, see Ghiberti’s doors. But Ned was thinking not today and maybe not on this trip.
“We’ve got the morning to ourselves,” Ned said when he next woke. “Look, I’m all yours.”
Afterward, they lay together and agreed that Fife was only fishy when he was drunk; then he was a fishy-fleshy sputterer. And his name wasn’t Fife but Lewellan, which he hated, and so his friends called him Fife from Fifield, a middle name. Some friends called him Fife the third, and one of his oldest called him Life.
Ned sometimes called him Lew. He dialed his room and said, “Listen, Lew, Isabel’s got one of her headaches, so we’re staying in today. Depending on how she feels, maybe we’ll have dinner.”
Isabel silently cheered.
*
Ned had a lot of friends and they celebrated Boxing Day in Oxford on a walk with some of them from the night before. Isabel couldn’t look at anything too closely for too long or else she was queasy from all she had had to drink while Ned’s friends from Brown, Phoebe, and some guy named Straight, moved robustly — boastful of all they had consumed. A few others who had spent the night stayed behind. Phoebe was engaged to a lawyer, Ben Harris, whom she had left in New York to visit Oxford friends. She knew her way around and led Ned and Isabel and Straight blithely over the shivered lawn to Magdalen College and its deer park. The college was ancient but the frost was new, everything new and clean except that Isabel felt used and stale as if she had slept in her clothes. Then there was Ned with his flask. “Please, Ned. Must you?”