Free Hill Towns by Anne Rivers Siddons Page B

you’ll have every man in Italy pinching you. Look at you. Like a little willow tree, and blond all over except for those wicked black eyes—”
    “ Basta ,” I said huskily into his neck. “I’ll show you priorities.”
    We made love a great deal in those days just before we left. I still don’t know why. It was not the slow, deep, honey-thick love of our settled married life but the intense, fevered, searching love we had made when we were first learning each other’s bodies. We did it many places we had forsaken since the first prodigal flush of total license: the kitchen table, the rug before the fire in the big room, the garden, the bath.
    Joe seemed to me insatiable, and I felt nearly so. It was as if we sought to imprint one another’s bodies, inside and out, on our minds and hearts and visceras. It felt as if we had a time limit to do so. It felt as if we were going to be parted and wanted to be sure we did not forget each other….

    64 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS
    “We really ought to cut this out for a little while. We’ll be jet-lagged before we ever see the jet,” I said, a few days before we left. We were lying on the sofa under the window wall that faced the Steep and the blue summer air beyond it. We were stark naked and sheened with sweat, and guests were due sooner than I liked to contemplate. Colin and Maria were coming for a last American supper; they were leaving the next morning, to try and wade through some of the seemingly impenetrable red tape that surrounds foreign marriages in Italy. Corinne was coming too. I had Tuscan bean soup simmering, and as near as I could devise to the crusty dark bread of Italy baking in the oven.
    “I just want to make sure that when some strutting Roman stud comes on to you, you’ll remember me and sneer in his face,” Joe said.
    “I can’t imagine ever wanting to do this with anyone but you,” I said honestly, feeling swift, inexplicable tears sting my eyes. I hugged him hard. I thought once more how totally wonderful his attenuated body felt under my hands, each long, subtly defined muscle sliding beneath the pads of my fingers, oiled with our mutual sweat. I thought that any other body, especially a dark, stubby, tightly packed one, would make me physically ill. I loved all of Joe: mind, heart, soul, spirit, flaws, eccentricities, but it was his body and his beautiful narrow, carved face that weakened my knees and thickened my tongue. I had often wondered what would happen if he were to be altered in some essential way: a bad accident or a wasting, disfiguring illness. Could I still feel this simple, joyous lust for him that had lasted all the years of our marriage? I thought I could now, but it would take effort, and perhaps closed eyes….
    “I’m not programmed to run off with Italians, unless HILL TOWNS / 65
    they happen to look like Ichabod Crane,” I said, running my fingertips down his back to where the cleft in his narrow buttocks started. “No, don’t, really. If we don’t get dressed Corinne will come in and turn the hose on us.”
    I think Joe was almost totally happy in those last few days.
    He whistled, he sang in the shower, he broke into small silly dance steps when he went about his daily business. He filled notebooks with things he wanted us to do and see in each city and kept a separate list of places to eat and drink. Almost everyone we knew on the Mountain had been to Italy at one time or another, and everyone had suggestions. Joe listened avidly, and jotted and noted and culled his lists, and cheerfully ignored the jibes of his more traveled colleagues when they made indulgent references to innocents abroad and ugly Americans. Joe was neither innocent nor ugly and knew it.
    In his mind, I believe he had already conquered Italy as surely as he had the Mountain, from the moment he knew for sure that we were going. The stranger who had taunted me, however lightly, on the night of our spring party, was gone, and the man I had loved and