Dinner is catered by Maxim’s of Paris and lasts seven courses. I’m able to sleep a good six hours in my berth before being awakened by the happy, muffled cadence of the honeymooners consummating their union in the berth below, the darlings. I put on my robe and grope my way through the dimmed corridor to the ladies’ dressing room. When I return and part the curtains to peer through the little window, the first gray-green streaks of dawn have appeared on the vast dome of sky outside, and I think what a miracle it is that this disappearing sun should reappear so soon, and how clever of man to rush east to meet it. Then I suppose I fall asleep, because I wake to a series of hard bumps, followed by the sensation of falling, like you feel on the downslope of a roller coaster. I sit up in my berth. The heavy drone of the engines continues without interruption. Another hard bump nearly sends me flying. Somebody screams. I hear the stewardesses hurrying down the aisle, hushing everybody with nice calm melodious phrases. One of them attends to us nervous souls in the sleeping area, sticking our little heads out between the curtains, all panicky.
“Is something the matter?” asks a woman across the aisle with the voice of Brünhilde. I believe it’s the grande dame who boarded in Boston, all bosom and quivering neck—the one who will probably help pass out the life vests and prop up morale with her steadfast refusal to give her heirs the satisfaction of her passing.
“Just a little bumpy air, ma’am!” chirps the stew. “But I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to return to your seat and fasten the belt.”
Everybody groans—we’ve paid extra for the berths, damn it, and I imagine those honeymooners were counting on another hour or two before breakfast is served—but we put on our slippers and trudge obediently to our seats.
The next hour is almost the most harrowing of my life. We pass through a storm, one of those North Atlantic gales, and I imagine the wind will surely rip the engines from the wings—will rip the wings from the fuselage. The man sitting next to me just turns the pages of his newspaper, utterly unconcerned. At one point, when the stews come through to pass out chewing gum and ginger ale—I take both—he asks me if I’m a nervous flier.
“Not usually, but I’ve never flown through weather like this.”
“Don’t worry,” he replies. “The pilots are highly trained, and the airplane itself has endured numerous tests in weather far worse than this.”
He’s what you might call an ordinary man, so very ordinary that you wouldn’t even notice him unless he spoke to you. Five foot eight, dark, neatly trimmed hair, unexceptional suit, unexceptional face—you know the type I mean. He seems to affect a trace of an accent, but I can’t place it and don’t want to be so awkward as to ask. We exchange a few more observations. He asks if I’m flying for business or pleasure, and I tell him pleasure. I say I’m visiting a friend in Rome and turn back to the window. When we land in Paris, he takes his briefcase from the luggage cabinet above our heads, tips his hat, and wishes me a pleasant stay in Italy, and I think no more about him. I don’t think I could even recognize his face if you showed me a picture of it.
We land in Rome at the most beautiful moment of the evening, just before the sunset. By the time I make my way through immigration and customs and hail a taxi to take me to Orlovsky’s apartment on the Palatine Hill, it’s twilight. He’s expecting me. I sent a telegram on Saturday night, and though I hadn’t received a reply by the time I left for the airport, I didn’t need one. He can’t possibly refuse me.
All right, so those extravagant lies I told the nice lady on board the Antigone weren’t entirely truthless. I first met Valeri Valierovich Orlovsky only a couple of weeks after arriving in Rome in 1939. He was, in fact, a Russian émigré. He could have styled himself a prince, if he chose to, but in his professional life he was simply Orlovsky. He’d arrived in Rome twenty years earlier, young and penniless, and apprenticed himself to a tailor. Now he was head of one of the great fashion houses in Italy. He had married a beautiful Roman aristocrat who went into rages whenever he got a new mistress and could only be mollified by diamonds of the first water, and his atelier was the most beautiful building I had ever seen. He kept a private studio on the piano nobile, decorated—he said—by those Carracci frescoes I mentioned earlier, although as I knew nothing about frescoes, then or now, I can’t say whether he was telling the truth. They were mesmerizing, however. Whenever we slept together, I would stare for ages at those entwined nude figures that so mimicked our own and thought how erotic Rome was, how you simply couldn’t do this back in New York City—sprawl with your lover on a studio couch in the middle of the afternoon and gaze at some ancient, obscene painting that was part of the wall itself.