They turned onto a side street. Though the boys were no longer in sight, Phoebe clung to the sounds of their play, the tinny thung of ball against brick. Flowers tumbled from overhead boxes. Wolf stopped at a curved wooden door marked 4 and fiddled with the key. He seemed lost in these practicalities, as if he’d forced from his mind all thoughts of where they would lead. Phoebe felt a kind of vertigo. Wolf held open the door and reluctantly she went in. The dark house smelled of dust and something sweet, ashy, like old flowers. Wolf found a light switch, and an archaic, medieval-looking entry hall sprang into view, cast-iron fixtures, throne-sized chairs. Heavy curtains extinguished any suggestion of sunlight. At one end of the hall was a room filled with covered furniture heaped into teetering piles. Phoebe glanced fearfully at Wolf. He seemed to her now a man of the world who had lured her here by some trick, like Karl in Amsterdam. Yet the situation was her own doing, entirely her own. She could easily have stopped it.
“Is this a hotel?” Phoebe asked, anxious for voices.
“More or less.” Wolf sounded odd, strained. “A lot of times there aren’t hotels per se in these little towns—you just go to the bartenders and they have access to rooms.”
Thick burgundy carpeting covered the stairway. Phoebe swallowed and looked at Wolf, startled and relieved to find her panic mirrored starkly in his face. Man of the world he might be, but Wolf hadn’t counted on this. He was out of his league. Hesitantly he approached her, placing a hand on each of Phoebe’s hips. They kissed at the foot of the stairs, deep pulling kisses that shuddered through Phoebe, emptying her mind of every thought. Wolf’s mouth tasted fresh, sweet almost, like a child’s. He pulled Phoebe against him and buried his face in her neck until she jerked back and cried out. Wolf’s hands shook; she felt the pulse of his erection near her hip.
“Come on,” he said. Hand in hand, they took the carpeted stairs in twos. The door was right at the top. Wolf opened it quickly with the key. The room smelled of cedar. There was a large bed with a window beside it overlooking the courtyard. The tangled colors of sunset flooded in, indecently bright after the quiet gloom of downstairs. Phoebe heard the slap of the boys’ soccer ball against the stones. She shut the door behind her and locked it while Wolf lowered the blind.
They undressed in the dim light with an urgency suggestive of disaster. Phoebe was afraid to look at Wolf. Naked, they held each other, breathing. His skin was hot. Suddenly he lifted Phoebe into his arms and carried her to the bed, where he laid her gently down, then set upon her like someone starving. Missing was any sense of choice. Phoebe closed her eyes. When she opened them, Wolf was staring at her face, as if forcing himself to see what he was doing, as if that might stop it.
She hadn’t expected the pain, such a jagged tearing pain at the pit of her stomach. Phoebe winced and cried out, and Wolf knew then, though she couldn’t tell if it surprised him. He yelled himself a moment later, his face frozen in a look of anguish, then he fell upon Phoebe, as if barely conscious. For a long time after, the pain was all she could think of.
As darkness fell, Phoebe listened to the tables in the square below being set for dinner. Distinct sounds arrived through the window: dishes, silver, chairs scraping brick. Torrents of Italian, each conversation like an exchange of passionate ultimatums. Noises echoed slightly, ricocheting off the surrounding miles of emptiness.
The bedsheets were stiff against Phoebe’s skin, as if they’d been dried in the sun. She lay on her side facing the window, only her feet touching Wolf’s. She thought he might be sleeping. An image of herself as a little girl riding his shoulders kept invading her mind, and the memory filled her with horror.
“Hey,” he said softly. “How you doing?”
Phoebe turned to look at him. Wolf lay on his back, facing the ceiling. The sheet was pulled to his neck.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I feel weird.”
“That seems reasonable.”
There was a long silence. Phoebe grew panicky. “So, what are you thinking?” she asked, wanting Wolf to talk.
He exhaled the ghost of a laugh. “I’m thinking I’ve lost my mind.”
“Is it bad?” she whispered.
Wolf turned on his side, facing her now. The tenderness in his eyes was unexpectedly calming. “I’m not sure good and bad quite figure here,” he said.
Below, people were sitting down to eat. Phoebe heard laughter, caught a whiff of someone’s cigarette.
“It felt unavoidable,” Wolf said, as though thinking aloud. “There just seemed to be no way around it. I tried to find a way but I couldn’t.”
“That’s true,” Phoebe said. “I tried, too.”
“You did not.” He was grinning.
“I did,” Phoebe said, indignant. “I tried to leave.”
“That’s true,” Wolf reflected, serious again. After a moment he said, “I was so afraid something would happen to you.”
The remark seemed to echo. Something had happened, all right.
“Look,” Wolf said, lifting himself on his elbows, “we can get up and leave right now, all our stuff’s in the car. It’ll be one of those things we just had to get through, since we couldn’t seem to get around it.”
Phoebe nodded intently, as if taking directions. “Okay,” she said. “That sounds good.”
They lay still, watching each other. Get up and leave? Wolf’s eyes moved anxiously over Phoebe’s face, and abruptly she felt it again, a stirring right through the pain, through it, around it, until the pain seemed only to sharpen her longing. She moved to Wolf and he kissed her, tentatively at first, then deeply, her head in his hands. He was hard again—perhaps had been the whole time they were talking. The thought of Wolf wanting her again but holding back, letting Phoebe make the choice, overpowered her. Fearful, curious, she reached down and touched him. She knew nothing at all of men’s bodies. The effect of her touch was awesome: it seemed to stop Wolf’s very breath. He lay back, eyes closed in a wince. Reluctantly his hand encircled Phoebe’s, guiding it in a kind of agony, as if he were caught in a lunatic dream he could not burst out of. Sounds issued from deep within him, as if Phoebe were touching his very soul. Soon he began stilling her hand, keeping it there but not letting her move; for whole minutes they wavered in thick silence, Wolf’s hand on hers, his heart beating so loudly she could hear it. Phoebe sensed him teetering at the brink of an excruciating pleasure, his fear of tumbling into it. She moved her hand. Again Wolf stopped her. But after a moment she resumed, gently, resisting his pressure. “Stop,” he whispered, eyes still closed, then again, hoarsely, “Stop!”
nineteen
Phoebe tried in vain to keep track of the days. Her time was measured now in journeys between longing and fulfillment, the pace of which might vary from merciless speed to agonizing stillness. The resulting calm was always short-lived. Eventually the trip would be repeated, often so many times in a day that the day itself became meaningless. After four, Phoebe lost count.
Time compressed. She felt herself aging telescopically, older now than she’d been last week, or yesterday, even this morning, before the sun made its lazy arc across the bed.
She and Wolf left the room only rarely. When hunger drove them out, they ate ravenously at one of the town’s three restaurants, eyes fastened together across a white cloth, feet buried in each other’s laps. They ate mushrooms big as steaks, melting gnocchis in pesto sauce; they washed down lamb and veal and osso buco with bottles of Chianti. Phoebe grew fond of Tuscan bread, rough and saltless, perfect with the dry, tart cheese they were often served. When they’d eaten their fill, they walked straight back to their room and undressed.
Often it was too much trouble to eat. Phoebe lost weight, hips and ribs prodding from under her skin. Every part of her ached, legs and back and abdomen, her raw flesh. Yet far from quelling her desire for Wolf, the tinge of pain seemed to heighten its fevered pitch. At no time in her life had Phoebe felt so entirely her body’s citizen, yet at the same time her detachment had never
been greater. She felt like a spectator, observing her physical self in baffled amazement as if it were a violent, stricken creature she were nursing through a fit.
Phrases she had heard or read would float to mind: “I melted at his touch,” “couldn’t keep our hands off each other,” “consumed by passion,” clichés that still provoked Phoebe’s scorn, but not her skepticism. From the depths of sleep she reached for Wolf; mornings they woke to each other’s caresses, afterward collapsing back into sleep without having spoken. Their appetite sharpened with the days, until sometimes it seemed only minutes since they’d crumpled helplessly on the four-poster bed that was their home before Phoebe found herself turning again to Wolf, half-ashamed until he pulled her to him with equal readiness.
At first she’d been timid. She knew nothing, absolutely nothing of sex, had always assumed it required certain requisite skills, like golf or tennis. But Wolf seemed aroused by Phoebe’s very inexperience, knowing she was feeling these things for the very first time—with him. The hardest thing proved to be letting herself not think, not feel ashamed, and here the sudden compression of time was a help. Soon Phoebe no longer minded lying uncovered in front of Wolf, would not cringe anymore if she made an embarrassing noise or cried out. In moments she felt a kind of madness fall on her, obliterating all traces of self-restraint. She wanted more, anything; she wanted to die. Afterward these spells appalled her. That wasn’t me, she would think.
So consuming was their erotic life that everything else seemed circumscribed within it. Thought, conversation—these began in the physical realm and led inevitably back to it. Phoebe assumed Wolf’s engagement to Carla was over, but he never said so and she never asked. Their physical urgency drowned out everything else—even Faith seemed faint beside it. Phoebe found herself not thinking of her sister for whole hours, sometimes even a day. At night she would lie awake listening to the echoey silence of empty countryside, thinking how nothing beyond this room seemed even half-real compared with what was inside it.
The purest moments between herself and Wolf were those of repose, recuperation. Lying perfectly still, they would gaze at each other in thick exhaustion and nothing would seem to divide them: they could float inside each other freely as fish drifting through windows of underwater castles. But desire reawakened the distance between them, teasing, irksome, piquing them both to begin again the excruciating journey toward communion.
They kept their window open, filling the room with sunlight, fresh air, sounds from the courtyard below. Still, there were times when they needed to get out, “be vertical awhile,” as Wolf put it. A ruined tower stood on the edge of the town, and from its moss-padded heights they gazed down at the sprawl of boisterous landscape. Seeing Wolf clothed, out in the world, Phoebe often was shocked at how unmarked he was physically by all that had happened between them. Their flesh seemed ready at times to fall apart limb from limb, yet here they both were, intact. Somewhat creaky, lips faintly bruised, but unmarked in any permanent sense. If they went their separate ways, there would be no proof. This troubled Phoebe.
During interludes in the outside world they were careful not to touch; in their present state the smallest thing was enough to arouse them both. A kiss was certain doom. It happened more than once that having left their lair only minutes before, they would lose heart and turn back, quickly retracing their steps. These false starts always left Phoebe feeling moody, exiled from the buoyant, carefree world that wafted in from the windows.
“How abnormal is this?” she asked on the third day, lying among bedclothes they’d made up carefully not fifteen minutes before. Outside, it had started to rain. They were still clothed, for the most part. Phoebe’s stomach chewed away at nothing.
“It’s one extreme,” Wolf said, sounding sleepy. Soft hair covered his legs; Phoebe loved how the woodlike bones were encased in such softness. When she touched his knee, Wolf flinched.
“Let’s eat,” Phoebe said, sitting up.
“You couldn’t live this way, that’s for sure,” Wolf said, turning on one side to face her.
“I guess you’d have a lot of kids.”
He laughed. “That would put an end to it.”
They’d made love twice that first day before Wolf had even thought to ask about birth control. “What if I’d said ‘no’?” Phoebe teased him later, and he’d been embarrassed, perplexed himself by the lapse.
“I would’ve just dealt with it, I guess,” he’d said.
Phoebe lay back down. The restaurant felt so many steps away; an eternity would pass before the food was actually before them. Rain spattered the bricks below, sending a fresh wet smell through the open window.
“It’s not abnormal,” Wolf said. “It just never happens.”
He touched her hollow stomach. Phoebe moved near him. She could wait until morning to eat, she guessed. Each morning Wolf went down to one of the restaurants and returned with cappuccinos and brioches still warm from the oven, which they ate in bed. They were comfortable here, Phoebe thought; she would wait. The smell of that rain was a meal in itself.
The next morning, their fourth day, they awoke determined to visit the tower, and arrived there well before noon. Usually there were tourists up here, but today, cloudy, still wet from the rain, there was no one. Phoebe and Wolf sat side by side on a ledge upholstered with damp moss, and looked down. Without sunlight the hills appeared brown, toasted almost. Phoebe was pleased by the abundance of cypress trees, which Vincent van Gogh had painted so well. She found herself describing to Wolf the first sexual feeling she could remember in her life; it was part of the blown-openness of their situation that any topic, barring Carla or Faith, felt perfectly natural between them. She’d been eight or nine, she said, climbing a pole in a playground during the afternoon phase of someone’s sleepover party. The sensation seemed unconnected to her arms. She’d dangled from the pole in a kind of rapture, minutes at a time. She’d urged the other girls to try and they’d all taken turns, enjoyed it so much they’d demanded of the birthday girl’s bewildered mother that she bring them to the playground first thing next morning, before their parents picked them up. But that day was foggy, the pole cold to the touch, and nothing happened that time. The spell had worn off.
Wolf listened with great curiosity. “Was it like coming, the feeling?”
“I can’t remember. It went on as long as you could hang there.”
“You had strong arms.”
Phoebe laughed. “They got tired,” she said. “But when I started climbing more, I think they got stronger.”
“When was the last time?”
“Oh, a long time ago. It would’ve looked weird after a certain point,” she explained. “I mean, by sixteen your feet would touch the ground.”
“At sixteen you graduate to the real thing. The real pole,” Wolf said, laughing.
Phoebe swung her legs. Wolf took her hand, touching it to his lips. “We’re being very good,” he said.
Because the place was deserted, they allowed themselves to kiss. They were shy, kissing in public, as if someone watching would know everything. “Let’s go back,” Wolf said.
They stood up. Before them the brown hills swayed and dipped. “Why not here?” Phoebe said.
Wolf laughed, not thinking she meant it. But Phoebe liked the idea. She was wearing her long skirt, which should make it easier.
“Forget it. Someone could show up any second,” Wolf said.
“Maybe there’s someplace hidden.”
“We’d be thrown in jail. They’re all Catholics.”
“I’m Catholic, too.”
He laughed. “Well, that’s a relief.”
Phoebe ignored him. A flight of narrow, half-decaying steps led down to the other side of the wall. At the bottom, beyond a wedge of scrubby grass, the hill dropped suddenly away. Where the wall turned, Phoebe saw what she’d been looking for, a nook invisible except from the top of the wall or looking up through binoculars from the hills below.
Wolf
followed her down. “We’d be back in the room by now,” he said.
Phoebe took his hand and led him into the nook. Tangled in the ivy at their feet were wine bottles, a pair of blue socks. As they kissed, Phoebe felt the responsibility drain off Wolf like an actual substance and it thrilled her, having that power. Wolf leaned against the wall while Phoebe unzipped his jeans—he’d joked about his permanent erection—now he gasped at the touch of her cool hand. The act itself was more awkward than Phoebe had imagined; being taller, Wolf had to bend his knees, but this didn’t seem to bother him now that they’d begun. Phoebe’s skirt virtually covered them—only the front was lifted. Wolf threw back his head, bracing it against the wall. Afterward he stayed like that, eyes shut, baring his throat while his breathing calmed. After a while he put his arms weakly around Phoebe’s shoulders and leaned there. “I’m gone,” he said.
And he was. Gone. Lost—in her. In bed he gathered Phoebe’s long hair in his hands and moved close to her face, watching the movement of her eyes. “You do what you do” was the nearest Wolf came to explaining all he’d jeopardized to be with Phoebe now. But it was less an explanation than an assertion of the pointlessness, the self-indulgence of attempting one. At times a certain wry fatalism would overtake him, a brooding ill humor whose basis, it seemed, was the belief that everything was lost. These moods terrified Phoebe at first, but their only effect was to drive Wolf back to her with even greater abandon, as if, by surrendering to Phoebe anew, he were proving that this—she—was worth the loss of everything else.
Asleep, he thrashed beside her, often yelling out in terror, but Phoebe had only to gather him into her arms to deliver Wolf from these agonies into far more exquisite ones. Afterward, still clinging to her, he would slide into a deeper, drenching sleep, one hand clutching her finger like a tiny child, and Phoebe would stay awake as long as possible, guarding his sleep, secure in the knowledge that she alone had the power to save him.