Celebrating 10 years in print!
Praise
for
A
CAGE OF BONES
“I really enjoyed A Cage of Bones. It hits British culture and speech beautifully.”
DM Thomas, author of The White Hotel and Lady With a Laptop
“You can gauge the depth of my admiration when I tell you that my reaction to A Cage of Bones was simply envy.”
Douglas LePan, author of The Deserter and Macalister or Dying in the Dark
“Sexy and intelligent novel mixing fashion with politics.
A Cage of Bones is A Room with a View for the gay 90s. It is hilariously funny but its social and political philosophy is astute.”
Kamal Al-Solaylee, Toronto Star Online
“Good bone structure!”
Kate Barker, Xtra!
Jeffrey Round is the author of The P-Town Murders, Death in Key West, The Honey Locust and Vanished In Vallarta. He worked briefly in the fashion industry and was the artistic director of Best Boys Productions, an independent theatre company. He was also the founding editor of The Church-Wellesley Review, Canada’s first annual journal for LGBT creative writing. His short film, My Heart Belongs To Daddy, won awards for Best Director and Best Use of Music.
Visit his website:
A CAGE OF BONES
Jeffrey Round
A Cage of Bones
World Copyright © 1997 Jeffrey Round
All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This book is a work of fiction. In the interest of verisimilitude a number of actual organizations, periodicals and public figures have been mentioned. All have been used fictionally throughout. Any statements or situations ascribed to such are purely works of the imagination.
Smashwords Edition © 2010 Jeffrey Round
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Round, Jeffrey
A Cage of Bones / Jeffrey Round. —
ISBN 978-0-9810606-0-6
I. TITLE.
PS8635.O8625C33 2008 C813’.54 C2008-904847-4
In memoriam: Gianni Versace
1946-1997
Cover design: Shane McConnell
Cover Photograph: © 1985 Author’s Collection
Back Cover Photograph: © 1991 Author’s Collection
Interior text design: Shane McConnell
For John James Davison, who showed
me that love is a gift, on his 33rd birthday
Here is my secret. It is very simple: only
with the heart can you see well. That which
is essential is invisible to the eye.
The Little Prince — Saint-Exupéry
A foreword by the author
As with many writers, the call to rewrite has always been strong in me. It’s the urge to perfect that haunts us and keeps us up at all hours—what Michael Chabon calls “the midnight disease.” When you think of it, though, are there any really perfect novels? Possibly not. While there are many great books and writers, the candidates for perfection—like sainthood—are few.
What is it about this sprawling, essentially rule-less genre that defies perfection? Perhaps it has less to do with the writing and more with how we as readers change over time. What we love today can just as easily bore us tomorrow. And while that shouldn’t change their “perfect-ness,” if they possess such a thing, a book that doesn’t engage us fully can’t really be called perfect even if everything about it is technically right.
Having said that, I’ve never thought A Cage of Bones was anywhere close to being perfect, but on its initial publication by The Gay Men’s Press in 1997, I was pleased with a great deal of it. And then I changed, as I am wont to do.
When I wrote (and lived) much of the book, I was in my twenties going on thirties. At the time, I was smitten with two writers: Marcel Proust, whose long-winded sentences dazzle with their construction, and Sylvia Plath, a pithy wordsmith whose poetry affected me more profoundly than any other poet except Shakespeare. Heady company—and in my youthful ambition I tried hard to measure up.
Reading A Cage of Bones now, more than ten years after its publication, proved illuminating. In the space of seconds I might pass from pride at what I’d accomplished to utter embarrassment at the book’s stylistic excess, not to mention the rigidity of its moral outlook.
You can’t erase the past, as my youthful protagonist Warden Fields discovers on his journey from pop icon through social pariah to liberated spirit. You can, however, edit books to conform to a greater sense of stylistic rigour, which is what I’ve attempted here.
On re-reading the book, two things were clear—my initial vision of the characters and their story still held a certain charm, and the basic writing was essentially sound, if a trifle flowery.
Nevertheless, I resolved not to edit so much that the book lost its appeal. It’s a story about young love, and I didn’t want it to lose its simplicity and directness. If the book was flawed, the flaws lay in its overly descriptive passages and a tendency to editorialize on the writer’s part. A description of a landscape is only valid inasmuch as it relates to the story. A moral note is only going to ring true when it’s dramatized effectively, not presented as a platitude.
Thus this descriptive passage from the first chapter of the novel’s original version:
Jagged peaks brooded in the distance among broken patches of cloud, resurrected out of their gothic existence. Sun glinted on powdery peaks in the thin air as the plane’s shadow rolled across a great sea of silver and black.
becomes this in the second edition:
Jagged peaks brooded among broken clouds, resurrected out of a gothic existence. Sun glinted on powdery crests as the plane’s shadow rolled across a sea of silver and black.
Thirty-nine words are reduced to twenty-nine words in the new version—roughly three-quarters of the original length—and that’s probably still too much poetry for some people.
When I got to the final chapter, I had a moment where I thought I might not be able to re-publish the book without substantial rewriting. It just seemed too flowery and I couldn’t see any way around it. For comparison, I re-read the ending of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, another book about the liberation of the spirit. To my surprise, I discovered Joyce’s ending was far more flowery than mine! With that in mind I pruned the last chapter but left it mostly as it was, hoping future readers would be more tolerant than me.
Apart from the stylistic trimming, the only major change in text concerns an event in the final chapter. In the book’s first edition, the character Rebekah Wentworth dies in a car accident (she’s noted as a risk-taking driver early on.) I included this at the urging of a well-meaning story editor who felt it would add emotional heft to the story, but it now reads to me as maudlin and melodramatic. The event as it occurs in this version is the one I wrote all those years ago and am happy to reinstate. It makes far more sense dramatically to me.
The only other change I made for the new edition was the cover. I was never happy with the GMP cover—not because the boy wasn’t sexy or attractive—he’s certainly that. My discontent lay in the fact that he didn’t look anything like the Warden I’d described in the book. An author’s qualms, of course. No one else seemed to mind.
And if the new cover raises cries of narcissism or egotism, I remind myself that those very qualities have made a career for more than one pop star. For that reason, I’m happy to use a photograph from my modeling days. And if I could edit myself to look like that now, I would.
July 2008
PART I
THE GEOGRAPHY OF DESTINY
~~~~ ~~~~
1
From the windows of the plane he watched the coast of Europe spread below like a patchwork quilt—this region here, that mountain range over there. Blue mists and silver waters covered the earth. Warden checked his watch. Seven hours out of Toronto. The mid-Atlantic at dawn had been a lonely place. Now, craning his neck, he could make out hilltops and towns cradled in valley basins newly crowned by daylight. It was all fitting together piece by piece.
Up and down the aisles, passengers stretched tentative limbs as though unsure of the bodies they’d just awakened to. A bevy of blue-capped stewardesses dispensed steaming trays to anyone alert enough to want breakfast. It was remarkable to think he was on the other side of the Atlantic. He’d never left home before and suddenly he was halfway across the world. It occurred to him that life as he’d lived it—quiet, ordered and safe—no longer existed.
The previous summer Warden had been snagged from a beach full of rowdy volleyball players to portray the all-Canadian boy in a TV commercial. At the time, he’d had vague moral qualms over the superficiality of the pursuit. Still he went ahead, scoffing at the idea anything would come of it.
When the advertisement aired, he was amazed how his image took on an identity of its own, like an alien twin peering back from another dimension. Along with a rise in requests for dates, he also received offers from several established model agencies. One, Toronto Male, arranged a photography session for him, but school had started by then and he didn’t pursue it beyond that.
A few weeks later someone called to say his photographs were being sent to an affiliate group in Italy. The Italian agency contacted them to ask about his availability. He wrote to the head of the Italian group, a Sr. Calvino, thanking him for his interest and explaining he’d just started his second year at university and wasn’t available.
There was no reply. Then at Christmas Sr. Calvino telephoned him personally, urging him to come to Italy to work with his agency, Maura’s Models. Warden snickered at the name, thinking it someone’s awkward attempt at North American-casual. He refused, thanking Calvino again for the offer.
“But, darling—I want to make you rich and famous,” the voice oozed from the phone.
Warden laughed. The man’s accent was strange.
“Why do you laugh when I say that? Don’t you want to be rich and famous?” the voice asked petulantly.
“Right now, Sr. Calvino, I have to think about school.”
“But you have your whole life to read and study. Come to Italy. You would do so well here. Your face is very European.”
Warden wasn’t sure what he meant.
“You could have the entire continent at your feet!”
“I’m not sure I’d have room for it,” Warden joked.
The voice on the other end didn’t seem to catch the humour.
Warden relented. “I might have time in the summer,” he said, “but I’ll probably be working to make my tuition for next year.”
The voice exploded. “But, darling—work here! That’s what I’m telling you! You could be so rich. Why are you playing these games?”
“I’m not playing games, Sr. Calvino.”
“Well, then come by February at the very latest so we can work you in. In the summer it’s no good here—everyone goes to the seaside. Lazy, lazy,” he chided.
“I’ll be writing my mid-term exams in February,” Warden replied.
The voice sounded as though it had been stung. “Darling, you’re making things very difficult for me. Call me when you are ready to talk. I’ll be waiting.” Italy clicked off at the other end.
Warden went to the hallway and stood before the mirror. He turned his face this way and that, examining his features as though they belonged to someone else—sandy hair, high cheekbones and deep-set almond eyes. He could see nothing that would make anyone want him to travel all the way to Italy. Or anywhere else for that matter.
At supper he mentioned the call to his parents. It was one of the rare evenings his mother had come down to join them for supper. Beatrice looked hesitantly at her husband. Warden’s father thought it frivolous and said so. His sister, Lisa, however, declared it “most excellent” that someone from so far away should actually phone to ask him to join an agency.
“That’s so cool!” she said, her adolescent eyes flashing defiance. “Let geography be your destiny, Ward. Or you’ll always wish you’d done it when you had the chance.”
January passed. At reading week Warden came home with a bewildering pile of books. Another set of exams and papers and two more months of school lay ahead. Then another two years starting in the fall. He’d spent the last year and a half trying to convince himself the career path he’d chosen under his father’s tutelage had been a good one. He was no longer sure.
He tried studying at the dining table, but found it impossible to concentrate. Meaningless words danced on the page in front of his face. He closed his book and went for a walk. It was a typical February day, the ubiquitous greyness stretching on forever. The land and sky hovered between winter and spring, a dry rattling time of great opposition wearing through the winter-weary heart like tire tracks across fresh snow. People hurried by, clutching coats and hats to keep out the slicing cold. A bus tottered along with a cargo of pale discontented faces returning from the workday world like conscripts in a battle.
Warden cut across the park. Dead leaves hopped about in the wind like mischievous drunken birds where the snow had lain recently. He crossed a patch of brown matted grass and felt a twinge of loss. A chance forsaken. With the money left over from his commercial, he mused, he could probably go to Italy for a few weeks in summer. He might be able to afford it.
He thought of returning to school the following week, going back to his cramped dormitory room and the over-crowded lecture halls. He pictured the uneventful days that stretched ahead while a chill wind blew him across the field. A leaf fluttered in the air.
Warden looked over his shoulder. The sky lay in tattered rags along a dark horizon. Clouds were mounting over the lake, closing in with the night. Here and there daylight leaked through at the seams, small flashes of light at the edge of the sky like phantom gunfire.
Something moved inside him, looking for a face, a name. What was he yearning for? Whatever it was, he longed to grasp it and wrestle it to earth, far more than attending school or staying safe and secure within the confines of this, his home and native land.
He felt a shifting of forces, the tectonic plates of his being coming into play. Something had been calling him and at last he understood—it was life itself, that faceless, nameless desire urging him not to wait in hope or anticipation of a tomorrow that lay forever out of reach. He looked up and laughed. He would go to Italy. He’d have been a fool to miss it.
He ran all the way home, tearing into the house and bounding up the stairs to the room at the top. It had once been his room, a secret place where space invaders left blue powder stains on his pillow at night as evidence of their earthly visits, sustaining him through hours of fantasy. But when he moved into the dormitory, his mother had begun to spend more and more time there until they came to think of it as her room. He knew she’d be there.
Beatrice wasn’t sure precisely when she began to feel the pangs of fear and doubt that led her to withdraw from the world. They’d crept up on her gradually. At first it was only a desire to remain at home when the others went out. She liked the strong silence that invaded the house when she was alone—a silence replaced by a jumble of sounds from outside when the others returned from the skating rinks and movies and the million other worlds people belonged to momentarily when they left their homes and went out of doors. To prolong it when they returned, she retreated to the attic room under the eaves. Eventually the space between each succeeding trip to the outside—for that’s what they’d become, no longer did Beatrice take simple walks to the post office or supermarket—became wider and wider. Sometimes the family didn’t see her for days at a time. They knew she was behind the door at the top of the stairs.
Warden knocked and went in. A canopied bed occupied the space along with a desk, a bookshelf, and a bearskin rug spread across the floor. His mother stood by the window overlooking the city skyline. What had she been watching? The lights scattered across the valley, perhaps, or the lines of cars snaking over the bridge in the twilight or possibly her own reflection pressed like a cloud upon all these things.
“I’ve come to tell you I’m leaving, Mom.”
“You’re going back to school tonight?”
Neat hair framed her oval face. Though still beautiful, her youthfulness had long since vanished, the features becoming more distinguished and isolated with time.
“I’m going to Italy.” He said it quietly.
She stood very still, as though inwardly folding and unfolding a fan. “But dear...when did you decide this?”
“Today. I mean, I think I’ve known it all along, but I made up my mind just now.”
The look she gave him wasn’t one of disapproval or objection, but simply concern that her child—or anyone’s child—might make a rash decision and live to regret it.
“Don’t you think you might take more time to decide, if you really want to go?” That wasn’t what she’d meant to say. Of all children, this one knew his mind before he spoke it. And once spoken, it was made up. “What about school? Have you given it proper consideration? I know you’re not happy with it…”
Warden put his hand on hers. “I have thought about it. It’s what I need to do. I know that.”
“How long will you be gone? A week? A month?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Will you be back in time for school next fall? Maybe if you take a break now you’ll be ready to settle down and study when you come back.”
“Maybe.”
She shook her head at the unknown chasms opening before him, preoccupied by bewildering thoughts and mothers’ worries. “I knew you’d go one day. I always knew it.”
Her emotions turned quickly. She stepped outside of her anxiety. Somehow she’d got beyond those minor peaks, like new snow blanketing old, covering the emotions with a fresh layer of hope for this son with the flush of excitement spreading across his face.
“Does your father know?”
“Not yet.”
“He’ll be upset when he finds out you want to leave school. It was his highest hope for you. You really didn’t like it very much, did you?”
Didn’t. It was already of the past.
“There’s still plenty of time to be an engineer, Mom.” He hugged her. “Or anything else I choose.”
Warden’s father sat next to the gas fire in his den. He put down a book as Warden entered, folding his hands across his belly. A cat padded around the room looking for a place to sleep, settling in a corner away from them.
“Hello, Ward. How’s the schoolwork going?” the deep voice asked.
Warden stood in the doorway. “Fine, thanks, Dad. Do you have a minute?”
“Of course—come in.” His father indicated a decanter on the sideboard near the shelves of books extending along the wall. “Would you like some sherry?”
“No, thanks.”
“This looks like it’s going to be a father-son talk. Well, have a seat. What have I done?”
Warden stayed standing.
The older man regarded his son, waiting for him to speak. Suspended from the ceiling behind the desk was a set of model airplanes he and Warden had carefully constructed when Warden was eight. They spoke of hours of cautious deliberate labour, Walter guiding his son each crucial step of the way.
“I’ve…come to ask your permission to leave school and go to Italy.”
Walter studied his son’s face. “I don’t really know what to tell you,” he said at last. The voice was brusque, but not off-putting. “You want permission to leave school—since you paid for it, I can’t tell you not to.”
He paused, balancing his thoughts with what he might have hoped to hear in such a situation.
“Do you think you’ll find things easier or better in another country? Or are you simply going in search of excitement? I think on the contrary you’ll find it more treacherous in a land other than your own.”
Warden tried to explain how he felt about school and how the offer from Sr. Calvino had made him aware of the opportunity he might be passing up.
“I feel there’s something out there for me and I’ve got to find out what it is.” He was aware how pitifully naïve that would sound to his father.
“For you to leave school and go off in search of adventure is the last thing I’d wish for you. My own father, who you never met, was a drunkard and a petty criminal. I spent every ounce of energy I could to educate myself so I would lead a decent life and not turn out like him.” He paused for a moment, as though a memory had unsettled his thoughts. “Education is the one thing that will lead you up in this life, Ward. It’s the thing that will bring you what you want.”
They remained—the father sitting and the son standing—like Phoebus and Phaëton, the boy asking for the one thing he must have, the older man wishing he would ask for anything but the freedom to choose that one thing.
“What if my happiness depends on it, Dad? If I stay through another two-and-a-half years of school and became an engineer I still might not be happy.”
“Happiness isn’t everything you think it is right now. You won’t find that out till later, unfortunately. I just hope it’s not too late.”
Walter looked at his son. What did he know of this boy, barely a man, standing before him asking for his freedom? No more than his own father had once known of him, thinking that to beat a boy into submission would obscure the corners of the unknown from his personality, driving the shadows from the face of fact.
“Don’t think I don’t have your happiness at heart, Ward. The proof is in my fear for you. Look around you. Whatever is most precious is to be found right here, at home. You have everything you could possibly need in front of you.”
Warden looked at the smooth walnut bookshelves extending floor to ceiling. He thought of the thick banisters running along the stairwell and the staid Palladian design of the house itself—all lending an air of peace and security to the family home.
“I won’t say ‘no’ to you,” his father said, “but I ask you to choose carefully. The years go fast enough of their own accord; the trick is to hold them in.”
Walter thought the conversation was over. He hoped his son would go away and think about what he’d said and, if he were truly wise, change his mind. Warden remained standing before his father, whose life was solid and secure. He belonged there in the home he’d created for himself. Warden’s course was just begun.
“I want your permission, Dad.”
Walter looked at the young man standing before him. The bough had broken.
“Even when you were a boy you always did exactly what you wanted, no matter what you were told...and sometimes it turned out to be the right thing. All right—I’ll leave you to your choice and hope your plans work out for you.”
Warden sprang to the door, pouring out his thanks and delight to his father before flying off. Walter looked after him for a moment, then reached for his book and settled back into the chair by the fire.
Despite Warden’s maturity, his parents’ concerns weren’t altogether unfounded. Both Walter and Beatrice were aware their children had been raised in a gilded cage, albeit one of modest proportions. Warden’s social experience was average for a boy just turned twenty, raised on MuchMusic, Letterman and the generic wisdom of Macintosh computers. His sexual score card, though, even self-admittedly, was somewhat less impressive.
In high school he’d been the first love of a dozen adoring schoolgirls. At university he was popular with his classmates and within a week everyone knew him by name in the dormitory where he lived. Other boys sought his advice on love matters as much as on the tedium of schoolwork, though they seemed to Warden more capable than him. Girls flirted with him openly during class lectures, hinting they were willing to be intimate with him, though he never took up their transparent offers.
Except for the odd bit of inquisitive kissing in junior high school, he’d never been intimate with anyone. The only time he experienced anything like it was with another boy in his first year chemistry class. From the first, there was an undeclared attraction between the two boys, though neither ever spoke to the other.
Warden and the other boy—John—always sat in close proximity during class. To anyone watching, the pairing would have seemed almost accidental, like the casual attraction of sympathetic elements. Occasionally, Warden would glance up at the blonde seated languidly at a nearby desk. At the same time, as though bored with the lecture, John might turn and catch Warden’s eye, lingering for just an instant before looking elsewhere. That was all.
One night Warden dreamed he stayed late after class and he and John were the only ones there. They talked and laughed openly together as they’d never done in real life. When it came time to leave, they walked up the street arm-in-arm until they reached a large dark building. John stopped and looked about.
“Where are we?” Warden demanded.
“African Studies,” John replied in a mysterious undertone, as if that told all. He smiled. “We can go in back.”
Warden looked up at the building, unsure of what it held.
“It’s safe,” John added in a conspiratorial whisper.
Warden wasn’t sure why they were going behind the African Studies building or what it was safe for, but he followed like a puppy on a leash. In the dream, it was nearly dusk. The other buildings were hidden behind tall trees. A thick carpet of leaves covered the ground. John turned to face him. Warden could hear his soft breathing in the liquid darkness.
Warden reached out to John, who lifted his hands at the same instant as though in a mirror. Their palms touched and Warden felt a jolt of energy. His body expanded, streaming outwards as it divulged secrets of exquisite pleasures: of beautiful birds nesting on white cliff tops, the arcane knowledge of moonbeams and blizzards, and the joy of swimming naked at midnight. Warden fell headfirst onto a leaf-blanketed lawn, oblivious to everything. He lay there a long time watching the planets whirl in their mysterious circular configurations to the sound of tinkling glass and dying leaves.
The day he left, it was cold and clear. It had snowed lightly during the night. Beatrice came downstairs in her nightgown and slippers. She sat perched on the front step, as though that were the farthest bounds of safety of her world. She watched as they took his luggage to the car.
She hugged him. “Please be careful, Warden,” she said. “We’ll miss you, so write. Have you got everything?”
“Yes.”
“Money?”
“Yes.”
“Have you packed enough clothing?”
“I think so.”
She released him. He moved to the car door.
“Warden…”
He turned to her.
She wanted to say something—to warn him against something—but what? The nebulous, unformed dangers that haunted a mother’s mind. And life itself, she imagined. She smiled at the handsome young man standing patiently before her. It seemed as though he were someone else now.
“Bye, Mom—see you sometime. Try to get out a bit.”
“Goodbye, Warden—send us some pictures of you when they show up in the magazines.”
Unknown countries floated below him now. He tried to imagine what they were. He was waking with the taste of rich hot coffee and a somewhat premature celebratory glass of champagne he’d ordered to the surprise of a sleepy-eyed stewardess. This was followed by a piece of bitter chocolate, affecting him with the collision of competing substances in his bloodstream. At that altitude he felt an enviable freedom.
It was in this state that he caught his first glimpse of the Alps. Jagged peaks brooded among broken clouds, resurrected out of their gothic existence. Sun glinted on powdery crests as the plane’s shadow rolled across a sea of silver and black. It was as though the rag ends of creation had been dispersed over a staggering emptiness, ringing the horizon in a colossal granite disguise.
A stewardess wandered down the aisle picking up empty trays and discarded napkins. Outside, the sky seemed to be lowering.
“Where are we right now?” Warden asked as she picked up his tray.
“We are almost in Milano,” she said. “Ciao, bello. Welcome to Italia!”
~~~~ ~~~~
2
At customs, the lethargic guard didn’t bother to feign interest when Warden offered his passport. He asked the duration of Warden’s stay and whether he intended to work while in Italy. Warden was about to say “yes” then thought he might require a work permit. Perhaps the agency had arranged one. Was his name on a list somewhere? If so, Calvino hadn’t mentioned it. In any case, he didn’t want to have to explain all this to the guard whose recalcitrant cap had crept down over his forehead and whose accent was barely decipherable. Warden hesitated then finally said, “No.” He heard a quiet thunk as his passport was stamped and returned.
The airport lobby was nearly empty. He purchased a city map at a kiosk then picked up his bags and walked to a bus stop where others were waiting. The bus arrived and they all climbed aboard. As it pulled onto the highway, Warden turned to watch the tail end of the Alps go by, the sky blue and seamless beyond.
The bus driver was a garrulous man given to shouting the names of landmarks in a tortured though not unrhythmic English. He turned the radio up full to provide a background for his animated narration. Outside the window the landscape was full of light, imbued with a magical richness common to foreign lands.
Across the aisle, a dark-haired girl smiled at Warden. “Hi! Where’re you from?”
“Toronto.”
She sighed. “I’m from Boston. It’s been so long since I’ve been home.”
The pack under her seat bulged. She wanted to know what was happening “back home.” He told her what he could recall of current North American domestic affairs. She seemed lost in nostalgia. When the ride ended outside a massive stone fortress in the middle of the city, he said goodbye and debarked with his bags.
From the station, a driver took him to the address scribbled in his date book. The cab pulled up outside a four-story stone building. Warden paid and got out. He heard voices coming from inside. American voices. Footsteps pounded down the stairs.
“What’s happenin’, dude?”
Six or seven energetic young men in sweaters and jeans bounded past him through the doorway and scattered like minnows. Warden shouldered his bags and climbed the flight of stairs. A small boy crouched on the landing with a plastic truck, zooming it back and forth while making sounds appropriate to small boys playing with trucks.
“Ciao,” said the boy, looking up briefly.
“Ciao,” Warden said, and continued upwards.
On the next landing he came to a desk sporting a rack with dozens of pigeon hole slots. The wall behind it was covered in a collage of four-by-six cards featuring the eager faces of dozens of young men like the ones he’d just passed. Warden set his bags down and rang a bell. A dark-haired woman emerged from a doorway, drying her hands on a towel. She scrutinized him without coming to any conclusion as to his presence before her.
“Ciao.”
“Ciao,” he said. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes. How may I help you?”
“Is this the Albergo Sirtori?”
“Yes.”
“I’m from Maura’s Models. Sr. Calvino sent me.”
Her face registered scepticism as she flipped through a register in search of something that might verify his statement. She looked up.
“You are Sr. Fields?” she asked cautiously.
“Yes,” he said.
“May I see your passport, please?”
He handed over the document.
“We were expecting you tomorrow,” she said, frowning as she studied it. “Sr. Calvino is not very precise about his arrivals.”
Warden shifted nervously. He wondered what he would do if she told him to come back in the morning.
She looked up. “Never mind. It cannot be helped,” she said, her voice softening. She offered him her hand. “I am Irena. Come—I will show you your room.”
She scooped a key off its hook and led him down the hallway past rows of numbered doors. He heard music coming from some of the rooms.
“I have put you in with another American boy. You will have to share for now. His name is Jimmy. He has gone to Firenze for a show, but he will be back tomorrow.” She clucked her tongue and looked him in the eye. “There are no girls allowed after 10 o’clock in the rooms.”
She opened a door and switched on the light. The room was small and unadorned, but clean. Two twin beds took up most of the space. A set of wooden doors opened onto a balcony. Warden thanked her and put down his bags.
“I hope you enjoy your stay,” she said simply, and went out.
Warden examined the room. A night table divided the beds. At the far end, a sink and portable wardrobe took up most of the space. A suitcase peeked out from under a collection of shirts hung hastily beside an assortment of dress pants. A pair of worn running shoes waited expectantly at the foot of one of the beds. Discarded T-shirts were draped everywhere.
On the table sat an inexpensive lamp. A book of Italian phrases, a Bible and a romance novel leaned against it. A handful of pop music cassettes lay scattered nearby, some of his favourites among them, he noted, while an ashtray on a lower shelf contained a smattering of unusual coins. Beside this, a stack of modelling cards presented a freckled face with a friendly grin. The name “Jimmy Caitlin” ran across the top and the logo of a famous New York agency on the bottom. Real American stock, Warden mused.
Following his absent roommate’s example, he unpacked and stored his deflated bags in the wardrobe. He stepped out onto the small balcony overlooking a courtyard in the low light of afternoon. Rooftops connected to neighbouring buildings with courtyards of their own. By summer they would offer an abundant greenness. Right now the branches were barely in bud, red tips of hope.
He stared at the view, wondering what lay concealed behind it waiting to reveal itself. He wanted something to offer a hint of why he’d travelled so far. It had all happened so fast. It wasn’t hard for him to believe he was there. What was hard to believe was that this place was any different from the one he’d just left.
Warden stepped back in and closed the doors. He washed his face and hands at the sink then lay on the bed, staring up at the cracked ceiling and trying to recall the events that led him there. His eyes closed. When he opened them again the light at the window was almost gone.
The air was cool where it drifted in from an open window. He got up and put on a sweater then went out into the empty hallway. The aroma of fried garlic and onions met his nostrils. He heard children’s voices as he approached the reception desk. Inside a well-lit room, he saw the boy who’d greeted him on the landing earlier, now sitting at a table beside another boy and a girl. They waited expectantly as Irena ladled a steamy broth into bowls. He passed the simple gathering and continued down the stairs.
In the streets he listened to voices murmuring in the falling darkness. The words were unfamiliar, yet they held a comforting rhythm. Twilight overtook him as he drank in the sights of the city, its newness engraving on his consciousness more deeply than the half-habitual memory by which he knew his own home.
He wandered a while, arriving eventually at a crowded piazza at the city’s heart. The space opened before a giant cathedral. Warden gazed up at the massive shape dominating the square. A greenish glow illuminated the stiletto spires of its stonework. Across the piazza, contrasting the old world with the new, a neon billboard gleamed with electric intensity. It struck him as he stood there that in the whole country there wasn’t a single person who knew him. Loneliness touched him with its cool hand.
Back at the albergo, which had been empty when he left, he found a gathering of young men surrounding the parlour TV, their figures draped and folded over sofas and chairs. He wondered if they all spoke Italian well enough to understand it, but it turned out to be a program of English music videos.
Other young men wandered in and out of doorways he passed on the way to his room. Heads nodded in greeting. Warden lay on his bed. It was just 10 o’clock. He wondered what to do. Too early for sleep, he thought. With the time change and the excitement, he’d lie awake for hours. He went and sat at the edge of the room where the faces crowded listlessly around the TV, too tired or too vacant to turn their gaze away.
Not all of them were American, he soon discovered, though most spoke English. There was a Norwegian boy named Jörn and a French boy named Jean-Luc, as well as boys of other nationalities. They were all varied and all good looking. Warden felt as though he’d landed in a roomful of specimens of the prototypic male. He watched their wan faces in the light of the TV screen. They accepted him freely, without curiosity as to his presence among them.
Someone conquered inertia long enough to change the channel. Warden chatted a bit, then said good night and went back to his room. He put on his sweater and took paper and pen out onto the balcony. He sat with his arms pulled inside his sleeves, so that the pen point protruded in the cool air, and began to write his mother a letter. A low, salty moon hung on the horizon like a stepping stone into the galaxy.
~~~~ ~~~~
3
He woke from a sleep that was deep beyond any remembrance. The albergo was empty except for a maid going from room to room, cleaning and changing the linen.
Warden showered and shaved, then dressed to meet Sr. Calvino. His roommate still hadn’t returned. He left a note on the bed opposite: “Howdy, neighbour. I hope you like company, because you’ve got some.” He signed his name on the bottom.
He tried phoning the agency to find out when they expected him. Once he made his travel arrangements, there’d been little communication except for an odd exchange with Calvino urging him to “Come soon, baby,” though he couldn’t have come any sooner. He tried calling several times from the room phone but the line was busy. He was getting restless. At the reception desk, Irena told him there was a payphone in the café downstairs. He could also get breakfast there.
The café was filled with morning sunlight. A handful of customers sat around drinking coffee. Warden chose a seat near a window and stared at a menu written in Italian. At the far end of the room a jukebox spewed current American love songs. When the waiter came he asked for “un cappuccio” and hoped he was getting some variant of a cappuccino.
He found the phone and attempted to call again. Still busy. He dialled the other two numbers he’d written in his daybook with the same result. He kept trying until the waiter arrived with a steaming cup piled high with stiff white foam. A pungent whiff of coffee hit his nose.
“Grazie,” he said, one of a handful of words he’d memorized from the phrase book the night before.
“Prego,” the boy said, and wandered back over to the counter.
Warden drank his coffee and listened to the music. In a few minutes he tried the phone again. This time it rang. A woman answered.
“Maura’s Models. Can I help you?”
“May I speak to Sr. Calvino, please?”
“But he is on another line. You will please have to call again very soon. Thank you. Grazie.”
The voice hung up. Warden tried several more times in the next half hour. Busy again. He ordered another cappuccio and managed to indicate to the waiter to bring him some pastry. When he finished eating, he tried calling again. Finally, it rang. A different voice answered.
“Maura’s Models. Hold, please.”
The line clicked to a hollow hum. He could hear ghost voices talking faintly over the wires. On the jukebox, a country singer was drawling something about a lost dog. The waiter wandered among the tables, clearing up. The voice returned.
“How may I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to Sr. Calvino, please.”
“He is very busy. Can you call back?”
“No!” Warden shouted before he realized the voice wasn’t going to hang up on him. “I’ve been calling for nearly an hour,” he said, trying not to whine.
“He’s very busy right now,” the woman insisted.
“Would you please tell him Warden Fields from Toronto is calling and I’d like to speak to him before I have a caffeine attack.”
“One moment.”
The line clicked off. In seconds it was picked up again.
“But, darling...you should have told me it was you!” gurgled the warm salty voice he’d first heard over the line at Christmas. It sounded much closer, no longer drowned under an ocean of water.
“I’ve been trying,” Warden said. He visualized an overweight middle-aged man sinking into a plush office chair in a spacious boardroom in the middle of the city.
“Where are you right now?”
“I’m downstairs at the hotel you sent me to.”
“You’re not at the American Hotel?” Calvino asked suspiciously.
“No, why?”
“Never mind—it’s not a good place for you.”
An odd answer. Warden didn’t pursue it. “I’m at the Albergo Sirtori.”
“Well, get here as quickly as you can.”
“Where?” Warden interjected, still afraid of being disconnected.
Calvino gave him the agency address along with a command to appear soon. “Ciao, baby. And take a streetcar—the taxis will take you the long way around and charge you too much.”
He hung up abruptly before Warden had a chance to say anything more. Italians were a hurried race, he thought, as he left the booth.
He looked around for a streetcar, wondering how he’d know which one to catch. He wandered for several minutes, aware he was incapable of asking even the most basic directions in Italian. He couldn’t even see a taxi. Finally, he recognized a face from the albergo walking toward him. He asked how to get to the agency.
“Turn left here and take the number five streetcar at the end of the street,” the boy said, pointing.