Free Hill Towns by Anne Rivers Siddons

met Colin during her freshman year, when he was a junior. There is no explaining chemistry; she is dark and dumpy and short and wild-haired, so large-breasted as to be a campus joke and so quiet that until she began to come to our parties with Colin I had never heard her say a single word. She said few even then. She is awesomely smart; her grades, undiluted with extracurricular activities, outshone even Colin’s, and she sailed through graduate school so easily that people still talk of it at the Faculty Club; and she is considered the best of Trinity’s young instructors. She cares little for clothes and wears no makeup, and though she has a sweet, rather medieval face and a really beautiful low, rich voice, she is remarkable for very little except her mind and her breasts. Colin absolutely adores her. Steam practically comes off him when he is with her, and off her with him, and they manage somehow always to be touching each other.
    It is either uncomfortable or amusing to be around them together, depending on your point of view. How can he? the campus says over and over. It would be like keeping your own cow.
    No one is crass enough to say she is common, of course, but the word somehow lingers in the air when she is in a group.

    HILL TOWNS / 59
    I like her, and I like Colin better for loving her. I have never managed to warm up to him all the way. Maria Condon is, I realized finally, me, only in a different skin. An outsider.
    “Because she’s no competition, basically,” I said once to Joe when he asked for the thousandth time why I thought Colin so adored her. “He’s a thousand times prettier than she is. Look what he gets: all boobs and food and bed and adoration forever, plus a mind he can show off whenever anybody gets too snotty about her. And best of all, she’s a pie in Mama’s eye. Can you see Lucy Semmes Gerard introducing her around to the post-Junior League crowd in Richmond? Don’t knock Maria, Joe. I like her enormously. She’s me, you know.”
    “What are you talking about?” he protested. “You’ve always been—elegant, a sprite, really lovely. A little Greek boy, an Athenian at Plato’s school. You are, even now. She’s an Athens saloonkeeper’s daughter.”
    “Sicilian, maybe. Don’t be precious, darling. It doesn’t become you. What do you care, as long as Colin is happy?
    And is he ever happy! I think they’d better get married immediately, before they get any happier. Would you like to ask them if they’d like to be married in our garden? I know he loves it, and it would probably get him off the hook with his mama.”
    But tonight Colin had announced that he and Maria had decided to be married in Rome, in Michelangelo’s beautiful Piazza del Campidoglio, over the coming Fourth of July.
    And, he said, grinning around the room, there was going to be a dinner the night before in Trastevere to which we were all invited, if we could manage it. Given by Sam Forrest, in his rooftop garden. We were all invited to that, too.
    There was a soft explosion of sound, as near to a 60 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    babble of excitement as we get on the Mountain. Sam Forrest! An American expatriate living in Italy for years, a painter of such renown and charm that hardly a glossy international magazine managed an issue without some mention of him and his beautiful Italian wife, Ada, of their legendary parties and his extravagant showings and openings. His huge canvases, flaming with bawdy color and a kind of elegant savagery, hung in every important museum in the world and most large private collections. The whole world knew about his affairs and his feuds and his brawls and his periods of reclusion, when he locked himself into his studio or retreated to a borrowed one and painted as if possessed by devils for months at a time, seeing no one, emerging thin and depleted with another show’s worth of work. Somehow he did not repeat himself and had not, so far, faltered in his trajectory.
    His talent