“Welcome,” she said. “I did not know what hour to expect you. But expect you I did.”
“The journey was . . . demanding,” I said.
“How so? I always found the scenery between here and Baiae quite lovely.”
“The scenery, yes, the scenery was striking.”
She looked at me, puzzled, tilted her head the way the sibyl had done.
“But much of my trip was in darkness,” I hastily explained.
“Come,” she said, taking my hand and leading me through the large room. “We will dine together, although it is late. The dinner is all prepared.”
She led me into the triclinium, the dining room, where the couches were covered in plump shining pillows and a gray-veined marble table awaited the food. Slaves appeared out of nowhere and washed my feet, dusty from the travel, and my hands. I was handed a napkin of the finest Alexandrian linen. More lamps were lit around the room, brightening it and showing the wall paintings, their colors vibrant even in the yellow light.
There were only the two of us. The guards melted into the shadows in the corners. Where was Otho? I should ask. Or shouldn’t I? It didn’t matter. If this was a trap to embarrass me, I would do nothing to warrant it. Let him lurk in the next room. Let him hear every word I said.
The silent slaves brought in the platters, heaped with enough food to serve a cohort.
“In the morning when we have light, I will show you the villa and all its treasures,” she said. “But for now, we can be content with just this room.”
All I wanted and desired was in this room. Here I could stay forever.
We spoke little, as if to do so would shatter the perfection of the moment. The light played on her features, caressing them. The clink of the spoons on the silver serving platters made its own music; the steam from the baked ham and figs in pastry loosed a succulent culinary perfume. Our goblets were refilled with different wines as the dinner progressed, each fitted to the proper dish: sweet, tart, slightly smoky for the finale of hot African sweet-wine cakes with honey.
When it was over she rose, wordlessly, and took my hand again. She guided me out through a labyrinth of passageways and turns, coming at last to a doorway. “This is your room,” she said, stepping into it. A slave following us quickly lit several lamps and the room opened up before my eyes. But it was dark, a cave, lightened—like the passage to the sibyl’s—only by thin ribbons of yellow, in this case painted on. The room itself was utterly black.
“Am I in Hades?” I blurted out. The shiny black of the walls was erotic and threatening at the same time.
“Don’t you like it? I had it decorated especially for you,” she said.
“Why would you decorate a room for someone who might never come, and decorate it in such a . . . a singular style?”
“I knew you would come,” she said. “I willed it.”
I was not stupid enough to ask, Why? “Then your will is very powerful. For I was drawn here. Remember, I first asked to see it.”
“If you did, it was because I willed you to ask it.”
The slave withdrew. “Stay with me,” I said. “Tomorrow is time enough for you to seek your own rooms.”
• • •
I held a goddess in my arms in the midst of Hades, and this time there was no subterfuge, no mistaken identity. It was deliberate and knowing; the only discovery was that a goddess is no less a goddess for being fully human as well. The blessing of the black room—for we extinguished the unhelpful lamps—was in hiding her beauty so I was not blinded by it, as Anchises was by Aphrodite.
She truly was wise in the ways of Aphrodite; the goddess herself must have tutored her, how to please in ways beyond the mortal. But I did not need such extraordinary skill; her mere touch was enough.
In the begetting of Hercules, Zeus made one night into three, and this night felt like three as well. There was no way of measuring how the hours passed; they seemed to stretch and stretch, pulled lengthwise by invisible hands, holding us warm within them. All my life I had contended against boundaries, the forbidden, but only in public actions—not wearing a toga, singing before an audience, growing my hair long—but I had never transgressed the code of the body that Romans obeyed, the sex rules about who could do what to whom, and with what, all having to do with rank and power. But she taught me to surrender all that and throw aside the artificial restrictions that told us what we could and could not do.
“There is nothing forbidden to the emperor,” she whispered, “but likewise nothing forbidden to his lowest subject. In the garden of Eros, we are all equal and all free.”
The garden of Eros . . . we chased one another through it, tumbling, turning, caressing, clutching, exhausting ourselves, then resting under its perfumed branches, only to awaken and drowsily begin again while the threefold night enveloped us.
The black room kept the morning at bay, and the sun was flooding the rest of the villa when we at last emerged, blinking. I shielded my eyes.
She sighed. “But remember there are no boundaries. We need not obey the rule of the sun.”
I pulled her to me. Truth to tell, after such a night I was content to let the daytime restore me. The sun would set again; we need not be impatient.
After a quick breakfast, enchantingly served in the small enclosed garden with its dwarf trees and frescoes of birds and flowering plants, she said, “I will show you the rest of our villa. It has been in my family for many years.”
For all her talk about the lowest subject of the emperor, she came from a prominent and aristocratic family. Perhaps she identified with the poorest subjects, as someone whose safety, like theirs, was always provisional, but she was hardly one herself. Her family had been buffeted by winds that blew only through the aristocracy. Her father had been convicted and executed with the purge of people associated with Sejanus and his plot against Tiberius, and her lovely mother had been forced into suicide by Messalina. Such was the stain on the family name that she had taken her unsullied maternal grandfather’s name, Gaius Poppaeus Sabinus.
The villa was stunningly huge. It would seem to belong to a king or pharaoh, not a citizen, even an aristocrat. It was larger than the palace on the Palatine and boasted an enormous swimming pool some two hundred feet long. She proudly led me into her favorite room, on the west side of the villa, which had a spectacular view of the Bay of Naples. Exquisite frescoes made the walls an art gallery, set off by the contrast of the white mosaic floor.
“It is here that I like to spend my time,” she said.
I walked around, inspecting the frescoes with their brilliant golds, sea greens, and reds. One wall had a depiction of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, with the tripod of the oracle on the upper section.
I started to tell her about my visit to the sibyl the previous day, but something stopped me. Instead I said, “Have you ever visited the oracle?”
“No,” she said. “I do not really want to know my fate.”
“Are you or your family especially devoted to Apollo?” I asked.
“Yes. Why do you think I see Apollo in you? I know him well.”
“Although you enacted Daphne, who would have none of him, I assume you do not feel that way?”
“Obviously,” she said. “I spent last night with him.”
We walked through other rooms. The original atrium in the back side of the villa had frescoes of magnificent architectural structures, in a city that never existed save in the artist’s imagination. Two small rooms on either side had depictions of tragic masks. The gaping sad mouths and heads with their weary ivy leaves spoke of despair.
“I saw another tragic mask off to the side of Apollo’s temple,” I noted.
“We are fond of drama,” she said.
Oh, everything she said mirrored my own self.
“Come,” she said, “we must go to the baths!”
; There was a bathing complex incorporated into the villa, and after the previous day I was yearning for the baths. Silent slaves stood by to assist us as we shed our clothes in the first room, then went to the cold room and plunged into the pool there.
November having arrived, the water was cold enough to leave me gasping. I hurried into the next room, the tepid one, and jumped in. Poppaea followed, and the warm water felt even warmer after the chill of the first bath. From there it was into the hot bath. The walls here, with a background of yellow and red, were adorned with frescoes of Hercules in the garden of Hesperides. A gloomy-looking Hercules was clutching a tree trunk and gazing upward. Two recovered apples rested on a rock nearby. Above this dominating fresco was a deep orange-red panel with a citharoede in the center. He was framed by two wreaths and seated, holding his instrument on his lap, gazing out at us. He was utterly alone, but composed.
It was me. It was me sitting there, looking at myself.
“Yes, it is you,” she said. “But you are much better looking.” The citharoede himself was rather forgettable, but perhaps his music was not.
We swam toward one another and entwined our bodies in the hot water, turning and turning, trying to find our footing on the slippery mosaic and laughing as we twirled and splashed.
Out of the hot bath, we returned briefly to the warm one and then onto the tables to be massaged and oiled by the still-silent slaves. As they poured the warm oil over my back and pressed their skilled fingers into my muscles, my skin and body sang with the pleasure of it.
Poppaea turned her head and looked at me. There was in that look a yearning and a promise of disclosure, as if at last we had come to that point where all distrust had fled. She reached her hand between the two tables and took mine.
We hurried back across the passageways to the black room, where the sun’s rays could not follow us. We threw off our robes and embraced, our freshly oiled and slippery bodies pressing together.
“I told you we need not wait for the sun to go down,” she whispered. “I knew I could not wait that long.”
In our absence the slaves had brought fresh linens for the bed. We slid into them, everything clean, reborn, and hungry.
• • •
We have outlasted the sun,” she said, as we emerged just in time to see the purple stain of the departing sun on the horizon.
Now it was time to return to the triclinium for dinner. But how different from the night before. There were more lamps lighted, and this time the slaves spoke. The enchanted day and night were done, the spell broken. The food was not a seeming apparition but solid fare. We could talk normally. But although we could freely chat, it was not until the dessert of fricassee of roses in pastry had been served that I said, “Where is Otho?”
“I sent him away. To Rome to attend to our house there.” She twirled a stripped stem of grapes in her right hand.
“Did he know why you were sending him away?”
“He didn’t ask.”
“If he had, what would you have told him?”
“The truth.”
“And what is that?”
“That I like to be by myself sometimes. Does not everyone need that?”
Her answer disappointed me. “And if he asked you now?”
“I would tell the truth.”
“And again, what is that?”
“That I have entertained Apollo.”
“That is hardly the truth.”
“It is to me.”
“But not in reality.”
“What is reality? Only what we believe.”
I shook my head. “There is a concrete reality, and the reality is that you have been copulating with the emperor for a night and a day.”
“You put it in crude terms.”
“I am putting it in the terms Rome will put it in.” No mythology now, no poetic license, but in the coarsest words, the words our critics would use.
She looked distraught, and goddesses are never distraught.
“I’ve upset you,” I said. “I did not mean to.”
She stood up and made her way to the door. She did not look back at me or ask me to follow. But I did, catching her arm as she left. A slave standing in the corner eyed us. “We cannot have this conversation here,” I said.
“Very well, we will go elsewhere.” She walked to her own room on the other side of the triclinium, avoiding the black room.
Her own room was painted in greens and blues and featured landscapes. Her bed was draped with silk and was so high it required a footstool to mount it. A dressing table, with many glass perfume bottles and polished silver hand mirrors, stood in a corner. She sank down on a chair, gripping the arms, and looked at me.
“Poppaea,” I said, “we must decide where we go from here. I was only pointing out what awaits us when we leave. What of Otho? You told me once that you loved him.”
She bent her head. “I do. But I am . . . enthralled . . . taken . . . with you. Ever since you danced that practice ballet with me. I knew we were made of the same stuff, that we understood one another in a way beyond the ordinary, on many levels. It sounds so . . . fanciful, but that is what I felt. And I believed you felt the same way.”
“I did. I do. But you teased me. You and Otho together.”
“It was because I thought if I could just have one experience with you I would be released from my . . . my obsession with the idea. I told Otho about it and he agreed. Dear Otho. But the opposite happened after the boat episode. The desire grew, rather than withering away.”
Here she was before me, baring her soul. Impulse took over and, ignoring caution, I said, “There is only one thing for us to do. We must marry.”
“We are both already married,” she said.
I laughed. “Don’t pretend to be so innocent,” I said. “You have been divorced once already.”
“Otho is a good man.”
“So was your first husband, Rufrius Crispinus, as I recall.”
“But what about Octavia?”
“I have already asked her for a divorce. I wanted to be free, regardless of anyone else.” I hadn’t pursued it, though, and I didn’t mention that. I leapt up, came over to her. “This conversation is not as it should be. These things are trifles. I have just asked you to marry me. What is your answer?”
“You should have asked in a more loving way, not ‘We must marry’ as if I were a pregnant farm girl.”
“You are right. I did not mean to sound so pragmatic. But it is hard to speak the words I would really like to, for they sound like those of a besotted schoolboy, not an emperor.” I began again. I looked at her breathtaking face and said simply, “Poppaea, I have waited all my life for you. You know all the sides of me, I can feel it, even the sides I keep secret, that you haven’t seen yet. At last a person I can truly show myself to, can be at one with. I want you beside me every day, every night, for the rest of my life. Come with me.”
She sighed. Then smiled. “Ah, that’s better,” she said. But she gave no answer.
“You cannot not give an answer to such a request.”
She stood up, pulled me toward her couch. But I refused to budge.
“Not in a bed you have shared with Otho.”
So we went back to the black room, and as soon as the door closed, she threw her arms around me and said, “Yes, yes, I will.”
And we spent the rest of the night celebrating it, a night more magical and erotic than the one before, for we were no longer strangers.
LXIII
The air the next morning was ringingly clear and crisp. After our restorative breakfast in the enclosed garden, she said, “Now I can show you the rest of the villa, the grounds, and gardens.”
I rose. Would we mention our intentions of the previous night, or were they so firm they need not be spoken of? While I was pondering this, she said, “
We are resolved in our decision?”
“I am,” I said. Never had I been more resolved in anything.
She took my hand. “As am I.” She glanced around the private garden. “I will send for Otho. We will tell him.” She breathed deeply. “Until he comes—at the soonest, some six or seven days—we have the villa to ourselves. Perhaps our last privacy.”
I nodded. “There is no privacy in Rome,” I agreed. “And I will want you there with me.” Suddenly I could not bear the thought of being without her nearby, something I had never felt before for anyone, not even Acte.
“Then let us bask in our seclusion for now,” she said.
• • •
The villa was even larger than I had thought the day before. It faced the bay on the west side, its grounds almost level with the shore, so the expanse of water spread out like a plain before us, and a salty breeze tinged the air.
On the other sides extensive gardens and orchards spread. Rows of bare fruit trees stood in orderly formation on the east side, awaiting the spring to burst into bloom. “They bloom in order,” she said. “First the plums, then the cherries, finally the apples. If spring is late, though, they bloom all at once. And their perfumes mingle and scent all the rooms inside the villa.”
“We can certainly leave Rome to be here then,” I said. I would not want to miss it.
“But they make me sad,” she said. “For they last such a short time. And if it rains and strips the petals just after they have opened, they are barely here at all. The ground is littered with the fallen blossoms that never got their allotted days.”
“Like some people,” I said. And what were a person’s allotted days? How could you know? “You must write a poem about it.”
“I have,” she said.
How many more things would I find us alike in? I marveled. “I should like to read your poetry,” I said.
“It is mostly about the passing nature of things,” she said. “I find it almost unbearable that beauty must perish, and yet I must bear it.”