“Oh, that’s great,” Grace said.
“I couldn’t reach Danaro, either.” He looked at the list in his hand. “I guess I’ll try this last one.”
“What?”
“I said I’ll try this last one.”
“All right.” She paused. “This water is brown,” she said. “Ick, it smells like sewer water.”
He dialed the last number on his list and got an answering service that told him Signor Casoscorso had gone with his family to Positano for their yearly summer holiday, could she take a message? He said, “No, thanks, no message,” and hung up. “Well, what the hell do we do now?” he called to the bathroom.
“What do you mean?”
“None of them are here. Why’d we bother coming to Milan?”
“There must be things to see here,” Grace said.
“This leg of the trip was supposed to be business. We didn’t have to come to Milan if we wanted to sightsee.”
“Didn’t you write ahead?”
“Of course I wrote ahead. Damnit, they knew we were coming.”
“The Paris leg was business, too,” Grace said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, what are we supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know,” Grace answered, and then very softly said, “I guess we’re stuck with each other.”
They ate lunch in the hotel dining room and then napped away the afternoon. The air-conditioning system was repaired before they went out for dinner, but not before the sun glaring through the hotel window had partially melted the rubber roller on his typewriter. That evening, they ate green noodles and chicken cacciatore in a restaurant near the Galleria. The city seemed deserted. They had very little to say to each other during the meal.
In the middle of the night, Grace woke up screaming.
“What is it?” he shouted, alarmed.
“The man,” she mumbled, “the man.”
He put his arms around her and held her close. “What man?” he asked gently.
“In the wheelchair,” she said. “He’s looking under my raincoat.”
“All right, honey,” he said, “try to get back to sleep.”
“Why didn’t he let me?” she said, and then rolled away from him, and buried her face in the pillow.
On Sunday they went to see the cathedral.
The roof of Il Duomo was a tangle of intricate arches and buttresses, a sculptured maze that challenged the eye with its interwoven complexity. The sun was dangerously hot, baking the roof of the cathedral, each carving arc of stone fringework casting a narrow unprotective shadow. They walked the roof heavily as though caught in the sticky strands of a giant spider-web. When Grace peered over the edge of the roof to the piazza below, she suddenly swayed back dizzily against him, and it was then that they decided to find a cool bar someplace.
The streets of Milan that Sunday last summer were virtually empty. Every now and then, a lone automobile would cruise past, but for the most part they seemed alone in a city that had been rendered mute and inanimate by the heat. They wandered into the wedding reception by accident, hearing music at the back of a trattoria and entering only to discover that a private party was in progress. Then, because they were Americans and because the heat had generated a desperate sort of camaraderie among those who were foolhardy enough to challenge it, they were invited to sit and have a drink. The bride’s father was an immense sweating man in a black morning coat and striped trousers. He told them he had a brother in Los Angeles, and that he considered their sudden arrival at the wedding an omen of the highest possible good fortune. “Un ottimo augurio,” he said. He introduced them to his daughter, a radiant dark-haired beauty in a satin bridal gown with wet circles of sweat under the sleeves. She was clutching the arm of her groom, a pale smiling youth who continually wiped beads of perspiration from his brow.
They were so young. They were so very young, and chattering in high excited Italian, passing candied almonds among the guests, drinking toasts, listening to the coarse Italian honeymoon jokes, laughing, brimming with plans for the future, shining with youthful dreams. Buddwing and Grace sat at the small table in the outdoor garden of the trattoria, surrounded by festivity. They watched the newlyweds, and an unsettling gloom began to spread over them, a gloom they could not understand until later, when they were back at the hotel.
The air conditioner was working, it hummed serenely, it filled the room with purified, cooled air, it immunized the room against the world outside, providing a sterile cubicle in which they could face each other at last, and see each other.
They had taken off their clothes and Grace was standing in front of the mirrored wall when he padded up beside her. They looked at each other in the mirror, and he said, “You’re really very small,” and she did not answer for a moment because she was staring at this man who had always thought of her as being tall, staring at this man in the mirror and not recognizing him, either. And then, because they both felt simultaneously that the mirror images were lying, that these two people who peered back at them were not really themselves but some falsely distorted representations, they turned from the mirror and faced each other, and looked.
It ended in that moment, he supposed.
Whatever had existed between them until now, whatever thin thread of hope held them to each other, whatever memories of a small park or a crowded French restaurant or a cloistered automobile or a deserted sunny beach or a wedding ceremony in a huge stone church vibrating with the sound of organ and violin, whatever crushed dreams, whatever forgotten youth, all vanished in that moment.
They were staring at strangers.
They stared in shock and surprise because they were naked to each other at last, and embarrassed by their nakedness, and filled with the terrible mutual knowledge that these two people, who looked out of unbelieving eyes at strangers, were strangers to themselves as well.
“Oh, Jesus,” Grace said.
“Grace,” he said in sudden panic, “do you remember—”
“Oh, Jesus,” she said.
“Grace, the times we—”
“We met a million years ago,” she said flatly. “We’re dinosaurs. We’re extinct. We’re dead.” Her voice lowered. “We’re dead.”
“No,” he said.
“We’re dead,” she repeated.
“No,” he said, refusing to accept the words. Who the hell were these pale and naked strangers staring at them from the mirror, crowding into their lives? No, he thought, we’ve come too far for this, we know each other too well, we’ve fought too hard for whatever tiny shred of life we’ve managed to grab, no! This isn’t happening to us, he thought. Grace, there is still something for us.
His eyes met hers in the mirror.
I know you, he thought.
Please. I know you.
Please, we have been through so much together.
Let me see your eyes.
The eyes were pale, drained of color, drained of emotion, drained of hope. He had seen these eyes on a night long ago when they had hoarsely shouted accusations to each other, had seen these same pale and frightened eyes the next day as she sat at the kitchen table in her white raincoat, Grace, what are you doing with your raincoat on?
I tried to kill myself, she said.
Don’t be ridiculous.
Yes, I tried to kill myself.
Honey, honey, and he took her in his arms, and gently she wept against his shoulder. Is this what life means? she asked. Is this what life is about? He did not know, and so he could not tell her. He comforted her, kissing her tear-stained face and holding her close, and putting his cheek against her hand, and like conspirators they whispered the afternoon away and made love afterward and found a strength somewhere. Her eyes came slowly back to life. The color returned, and with it a determination and then something more than that, a resignation, a burning intensity.