When Reverend Tanner was present June would sometimes stay late with Sylvie in the back room. He allowed it enough times that after a while her presence after the generator went out became almost customary. They would all be reading, Sylvie and June in the narrow bed, Tanner in his own out in the front sitting room. He always retired earlier than they, and they took turns whisper-reading aloud by the oil lamp books from the army base library, children’s books but also others that Sylvie had chosen for her, Little Women and Great Expectations and The Good Earth. Sometimes June would ask Sylvie to read A Memory of Solferino to her and she’d refuse at first but always eventually yield, the passages entering them, June thought, with both pain and bliss like the medicine in the kit, and making them cling more tightly to each other.
One night June fell asleep there, and when morning came she awoke to find herself wearing one of Sylvie’s nightgowns and tucked in the spoon of her slumbering body. She carefully turned into her and took in the warm, round scent of her hair, the sour-sweeter one of her neck, and masked her eyes in the scant damp of her nightgown; then on succeeding nights she would pretend to fall asleep and then watch Sylvie slip outside to the chair in back with her kit, feel her when she returned, her weight seeming to have doubled as she fell against June’s chest. It was then that June waited, sometimes hours, for the measure between Sylvie’s breaths to lengthen, for her to descend further into deepest sleep. This happened almost nightly: she would turn, lie on her back. Her lips would soften and ease. If there was starlight or moonlight her face and long throat gleamed with its luminance, this woman an ashen statue, only half alive. Here was the only beauty in the world. And then one night June could not help herself; she pulled back the blanket as if it were the frail leaf of an antique book. Her hands crept to Sylvie’s throat, where her nightgown opened, and undid the mother-of-pearl buttons that ran down to the hem; she took them one by one, the near half of the nightgown falling away, exposing the whole length of Sylvie now to the cold night air. June touched the belly, grazed the lowest rib, the small, flattish breast no fuller than one of her own. The nipple pushed up between her fingers, as dense as clay, and without knowing what she was doing she put her mouth over it, closing her eyes. She couldn’t breathe again, her heart as if collapsed in her chest, this tiny leaden node, poised for Sylvie to protest, to stir. But she did not. Nor did she when June’s hand slid down and nestled in the burning cup of her long legs, not moving, nor stirring, neither wanting the other to wake.
FOURTEEN
IN SIENA THEY HAD to share quarters again, as there were only six guest rooms in the residenza, a converted townhouse looking out over a tiny cobble stone piazza. Like everything else Hector had seen in this country it was old, beautiful, more than slightly decrepit, its façade saturated in the exact color (at least in his memory) of his mother’s light-brown eyes, this burnished, timeless wood. But the constant, nearly inescapable sighting of exquisite landscapes and antique architecture was wearing on him. Maybe he was imprinted too deeply by modest Ilion, or war-ravaged Seoul, or forgettable, low-slung towns like Tacoma and Fort Lee and then the many other crumbling, forlorn places he’d drifted through in between, and after these few days he felt that he was being overwhelmed, that his eyes hurt. The feeling that he should be comforted and uplifted by the beauty only made him feel more misplaced than ever, misguided, lost in a museum of someone else’s life.
Their room was very large, a half-floor suite with high coffered ceilings and marble-tile floors and rich draperies and decorated with old rugs and paintings. The furniture, June had commented, was top quality. Hector had never seen such a place, much less stayed in one. The bath had a tub carved from a single block of marble and the fixtures were burnished brass and the bath and bed linens had been freshly starched and ironed, the crisp hand of their fabric pressed to a high sheen. Vases of sunflowers were set on either side of the single king-sized bed (he would sleep on the red velvet sofa), its baronial walnut headboard carved with a scene from the Palio di Siena, the famous horse race held in the main plaza, a tight phalanx of charging horses and riders thundering to the finish, the town’s huge clock tower serving as the background. The Palio was held in July and August, but in some years (like this one) there was also a special race in September; this was to be run tomorrow. He had parked their car in a lot on the northern end of the old city walls and taken a taxi toward the center. The only reason they were able to get a room at all was an unexpected departure due to illness by a Swiss couple at one of the most expensive lodgings in town, which the driver knew of because he’d driven the couple less than an hour earlier out to their parked car. The cabdriver, named Bruno, was a brightly garrulous young man who spoke a distinctive English and told them all about the “garish” and “anomalous” Palio tomorrow, about the history of the race and the contrade, groups from different wards of the city, each of which backed a horse. After he delivered them to the hotel and spoke to the owner (they would pay only twice the printed rate, normally tripled because of the race), Hector gave him fifty dollars and explained he was looking for someone and asked him to come back in an hour, to be their translator and guide.
June had planned to accompany them after a quick bath. But when she was done she called weakly for him and he had to help her once again from the tub, this time blotting her wet skin and hair with the towel. She wavered there before him like a terribly sick child, barely able to stand upright. She was partly revived by the warm water but perhaps altered, too, and she spoke with a breathy delirium about how deeply grateful she was to him, saying again that her lawyer would ensure he was well compensated. She wrapped her arms around his neck and fell into him in her full nakedness and murmured that he could do whatever he wished to her, kissing his ear, his neck. He could feel the cling of her damp legs about his thigh and although he could not in a lifetime accede to so wrong an invitation, the barest instinctual shiver crept up from his groin to his chest, momentarily rousing him before a flood of shame clogged his throat. She collapsed into him and he wrapped her in a robe and helped her to the bed. She said she would just rest for a moment, but after lying down she asked him for a shot of morphine. He opened her kit and prepared the shot, unable to quell the thought of doing the same for Sylvie Tanner, to numb and pleasure, too.
“Where are we, now?”
“In Siena.”
“Oh yes, yes. Will you go find Nicholas?”
“I’ll try.”
“Bring him back here soon,” she said, a waxy veneer dulling her eyes. “Very soon.”
He rolled her onto her side and injected her in her rump and she drifted off to sleep. It was easier for him to do it for her, of course, rather than watch her struggle with the vial and syringe, to twist and try to find a good spot. When he did it her breathing would quicken and she might even reach out and hold tightly to his shirt and then softly exhale with a certain ripe agony when he finally injected her. In her overly grateful euphoria she once said she loved him. He didn’t know how to answer.
Sometimes he may have jabbed harder than necessary, or in a spot that wasn’t fleshy enough, and she’d cry out sharply, gritting her teeth. He did so because a part of him was afraid of her, because he wanted to get away from her but couldn’t force himself to do so. But in guilty compensation he now gave her more of the drug, drawing down a few more lines on the syringe. She was no longer insisting she needed to keep her mind clear. What was left of her body was in charge of her and as such she somehow seemed a bit stronger, fuller, her cheeks not so drawn and wan; she was suddenly eating more, having a butter cookie along with the gelato she had him buy her every other hour or so, which was the only regular thing she consumed, save water; maybe it was all the sugar that was plumping her up, propping her. Earlier they had stopped at the big highway cafeteria and she’d had an anise cookie and lemonade, and she surprised him by rising from her chair like any healthy, sprightly woman and walking out to the car for the Italian phrasebook in order to ask the girl at the register what the best route would be to Lombardy, after leaving Siena. But her exertions had now left her like this, and when it was clear she would sleep for a while he drew closed the heavy draperies, the place as shrouded and hushed as a mausoleum.