Free Page Turner Pa by David Leavitt Page A

being late. As for me, I had a little adventure myself today." And she told a story about an old English lady she'd met at the Bernini. Like most of her stories, it became, in the telling, both longer and more discursive than the actual event that had inspired it. Kennington had trouble following the details, in part because her disheveled narrative technique discouraged linear comprehension, in part because under the table Paul was rubbing the toe of his shoe against Kennington's ankle. From the very labor of having to keep a straight face, he seemed to be deriving a perverse thrill.
    After coffee, they did some more walking. It was turning out to be one of those gloriously bright Roman afternoons when the sunshine seems limitless. From a fruit seller's basket, scarlet peppers spilled out in obscene abundance. Two boys played soccer with an onion. A butcher's window displayed folded slabs of tripe and unplucked guinea hens, while next door, in a pasta shop, squat extrusion machines pumped out little tortellini like turds.
Italy,
Paul thought,
the country of which I am not,
while from a nearby bar (in Rome there is always a nearby bar) a waiter stepped out onto the street, bearing a tray on which rested three tiny cups of coffee, over each of which he had tucked a little paper napkin like a bonnet.
    "Isn't that wonderful," Pamela said.
    "Don't embarrass me by taking a picture," Paul said.
    "Oh, Paul," Pamela said, and peered at some Murano glass candies in a window.
    Â 
    They had another coffee, standing up, at Caffè Greco ("our caffè," Pamela called it), then split up briefly, Pamela to exchange a blouse at Max Mara, Paul and Kennington to look at CDs at the Ricordi on Via del Corso. In the Piazza di Spagna, masses of tourists were aiming their cameras at the boat fountain. Few of them looked very happy, however, and when they conversed, their dialogue verged inevitably into indigestion, lost luggage, bad exchange rates.
    Kennington was thinking that he had never much liked being a tourist. Tourism, in his view, was the apotheosis of an age of too much choice. Its anxiety was decision: where to stay, what to eat, whether to go by train or fly or rent a car. Which was ironic, when you considered that in the old Italy—the dust of which thousands of tourist feet unsettled daily—ordinary life offered a range of options so meager as to seem almost a parody of choice. In such a world, habit, not possibility, sustained human life.
    He had often remarked to Joseph that probably he would have been happier living in that old peasant Europe, where amid slow harvests and patient cultivations, he could have worked away at his lot of years, eaten bread with olive oil, and died old: the very opposite of a public life, to which he considered himself temperamentally ill-suited. (In this respect he was the opposite of Joseph.) Music provided something of a solution, in that through music he gained a glimpse of eternity, a different scale of time. Yet music also meant photographers, and hotel rooms, and the
Gramophone
awards: the feedback of fame, Joseph called it; you could not hear your own voice for all the voices. You could not hear your own music for all the music. And so he dreamed of a homeplace to which he might retreat, maybe with a friend, and play for himself and his friend.
A private rapture of the keys...
Now other minds judged (and in these, his middle years, judged harshly).
    Of course, he never actually fled to the homeplace. Vanity interfered—vanity, and terror. The furthest he ever got was failing to show up at dinners, and writing letters he never sent, and having affairs with young men he hoped would turn out to be "the friend," the most recent of these young men being Paul, who dreamed only of stages. And why not? Paul was eighteen, and ambitious, and craved
more
of the new: more adventure, more passion, more happiness, which he saw as a positive state, rather than merely the hiatus that comes when