“Hello, Cristina.” Malory tried to maneuver himself off the bed without dropping the robe or ripping the netting. But at the sound of his voice, all of what Cristina had built to make Cristina Cristina gave way and she ran to the bed and grabbed Malory in a hug that was anything but controlled and photogenic. “Are you all right?”
Malory’s voice was unchanged from the first night she met him in Fatebenefratelli, when all she had wanted was to crawl onto Tibor’s lap in their claw-footed bath and have Tibor soap away all the longing while she scrubbed away all the guilt. She held Malory’s shoulders and looked past her own reflection at her old friend. There was something more formed about Malory, not exactly chiseled, but defined nonetheless. The universe had cooled in the past twenty years, and the softness of the young Malory had hardened into someone Cristina felt she could grab onto, small as he was, and not fall over.
“I’m happy you invited me,” Malory said, looking out the window for a moment towards the pasture. But her hand on his cheek was too present, the scent of Cristina — he hadn’t remembered it over the years, or it had changed, or his nose had simply gone into hibernation for two decades — too strong. It was the same scent, he was sure of it, that Isolde dabbed behind her Celtic ears when Tristan rowed over to Ireland and lost his mind. The smock she was wearing was of the same unbleached linen as Ottavia’s blouse and trousers, but softened and rounded in the places where Cristina softened and rounded, and led his eyes forgivably down to the breasts that sloped as gently as her nose and her chin, as dark and warm and inviting as the Pyrenees of Malory’s childhood. Malory was well aware of the vows of Perceval, Galahad, Roland, and all the other neo-Arthurian virgins who had, literally, lost their lives in just such a pass. But at this moment, with her hand on his cheek and his eyes deep within her cleavage, Malory was powerless to refuse her anything.
“Tibor couldn’t turn fifty without you,” Cristina said. But it was obvious — wasn’t it? — that Malory didn’t know the first thing about Tibor. About Tibor’s public successes, his public performances, maybe he did. But about Tibor’s private disasters, it was clear that Malory knew nothing. And she was glad. Not because she could still feel shame, but because, in some way, she wanted to protect the innocence in this strange Englishman who had brought Tibor back to her on that terrible day when she had the baby. The baby. The baby.
“It’s six o’fuck!” The shout came from outside, through the wall of the Blue House. “Is Sleeping Beauty awake?” Malory knew the voice, gone badly out of tune.
“Take your time getting dressed,” Cristina said. “Tibor can wait.” And Cristina was gone.
When he’d pulled on the trousers, shirt, and vest that Settimio had packed for him, Malory opened the door at the top of the outside stairs. Tibor was at the bottom, turned away, smoking. From the rear, he looked well-dressed at least, in a loose cashmere sweater the color of horse chestnuts, tight-fitting jeans, and kid-glove moccasins that Malory reckoned meant Cristina had burned the rest of his clothes. But as he turned, and the two looked at one another for the first time in twenty-three years, the view was different. Malory wasn’t surprised that Tibor had lost his hair, or at least enough of it to give him a vaguely Capuchin look at the crown, while the rest ran as long and gray as the Tevere after a bad rain, when plastic bags and bottles gargle in the eddies below the Isola Tiberina. It was the absence of Tibor’s beard that confused Malory. When had Tibor shaved? It was a face as smooth and round and devoid of life as any of the holy fools Malory had seen in the badly smoked portraits of saints beneath the organ lofts of Rome. It was the face of a man who had discovered either infinity or zero, when neither was an enviable choice — spooked, desperate, untuned.
But then there was Tibor’s palm. Malory descended the stairs, and Tibor’s palm landed on his shoulder. It pushed Malory up now, up the slope from the Blue House to the pond below the White House, the way the palm had guided him through the streets of Rome twenty-three years before. They walked in silence, slowly. But Tibor’s palm registered a real warmth. If the sum of the workings of Tibor’s brain no longer passed through his shaven and barren face, its heat still found its way somehow down a hidden channel in the neck and out the shoulder and arm to this one palm. Through this palm ran a trickle of confidence, a bond that had once been forged between them — if only to be fractured — twenty-three years ago.
“Tibor,” Malory began.
“Shh, shh,” Tibor waved the cigarette in front of his face, launching fireflies of ash and spark.
“Tibor,” Malory insisted. “How are you?”
Tibor stopped. He didn’t look at Malory, but he withdrew his palm.
“Is that a scientific question?”
“That morning,” Malory said, realizing that this might be his only chance to broach the inevitable subject. “That Christmas morning. Antonella.”
“Antonella?” Tibor repeated. “Who the fuck is Antonella?”
“My colleague from Cambridge? The Christmas party after the Dante? The redhead? The one you promised to protect, but instead …”
“The Pip, Malory,” Tibor said. “Did you bring the Pip?”
Malory stopped walking. And in one lung-squeezing moment of degutted breathlessness, Malory realized that what he had seen that Christmas morning — the image of Tibor making love to Antonella, an image of horror and beauty and infinite betrayal — didn’t exist, no longer existed, perhaps had never existed for Tibor. The stone that had lodged in the tightest corners of Malory’s intestines was rock of his own invention — or if not invention, then preservation. Tibor, or Tibor’s memory, or perhaps all the alcohol that Tibor had swallowed in the past twenty-three years, had excavated the memory of that night, that action, that betrayal as completely as ten thousand Dacian slaves had torn down a mountain of volcanic rock to create room for a column to the memory of their own defeat. Malory looked at Tibor’s face, a face that even in its bearded tangle once had a power and conviction that had made Malory feel safe and honored by its friendship. That face was blank, dry, begging for something from Malory. With the tip of his smallest fingernail, Malory poked the column of his twenty-three-year-old memory of betrayal, and it fell to the ground in ash and blew into the pines.
What it revealed was a light that shone back into his face.
“Stay,” Louiza had told him all those years ago as he left the maternity ward at Fatebenefratelli.
“Stay,” Antonella had told him as the Rumanians had carried her off to the Dacia.
Louiza had trusted him to return, Antonella had trusted him.
But Malory had been late. He had been curious. He had betrayed them both.
But that wasn’t it.
Gone was his anger at Tibor. Gone his disappointment with Antonella. Instead a vision rose up in front of him, behind him, refracted in all the shades of the rainbow as his memory fed freely on the months and the years. It was the vision of his own betrayal.
Malory had ignored the simple, he had slipped off the towpath. Malory had betrayed the obvious, the gift that had climbed the ladder to the steeple of St. George’s that March morning. Malory had betrayed the gift that Louiza had brought him, the vision of what he could become. He had committed that crime alone, without the help of Tibor, Antonella, or Settimio. He had hidden it behind a veil of red hair and Rumanian beard. And for that, he had served a sentence of twenty-three years in Septimania.