Free Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman Page B

his mother, reads it in bed, carefully unfolding the stationery. A lock of silver hair falls to the sheets. He scoops it up and places it on the bedside table.
    I’m hungry for you. Old you, new you. Do you remember the ways we used to make love? And how often? Do you remember the way I used to reach inside your gown in the back room of a party? Do you remember the things we did under the table, my hand between your legs, the other wrapped around a glass of wine? And how people thought we were smiling at them, that our ecstatic faces were for them, but they never were . . .
    The letter makes him feel—God, how does it make him feel?
    As though there is vitality in the world, and he does not have it, he has never even tasted it in his mouth. He has never lived the way he wants to live, never felt in control, or able to express his desire for people and things. For men in new leather shoes drinking wine at the hotel bar, or the boys standing outside the less reputable discotecas smoking cigarettes. He has never been explicitly himself.

    The next morning he makes his mother coffee and, with a newspaper over his head, runs to Villa Gaia to relieve the night nurse. Rain is rushing down the streets, clinging to the wisteria, washing over the empty Roman theater nestled into the hillside. Its circular steps have been there a thousand years and will be there a thousand more, he thinks. Everything is like that in this country. It rots, or it hardens and becomes an artifact, useless and revered.
    He finds Romaine hunched over a steaming cup of tea in her bedroom, wearing a pair of green-tinted shades to protect her eyes. She removes them and looks him over. Mario notices that the ribbon to her blouse has come undone.
    You’re late.
    Would you like me to fasten your bow? he asks, leaning in cautiously.
    You’ve been sweating, she says, wrinkling her face. I can smell you.
    He straightens up. I walk in the mornings, he begins. I didn’t want to be late—
    I’d like to go downstairs, she says, interrupting.
    Mario nods, but inside he is furious, because getting her chair downstairs is an arduous task. Some days he asks Enzo to help, but lately Enzo has been too unkempt and boisterous, and Romainewould fire him on sight. Which, Mario is starting to think, might not be bad. With no cook he could read novels or take bread home to his mother, steal naps on the expensive sofa in the parlor. It’s the only comfortable piece of furniture in the house. Everything else is so hard, so cold—
    Marco!
    Mario, he whispers.
    Are you daydreaming? My chair!
    Sí, signora.
    Twenty minutes later, his fingers and back ache and he’s drenched in sweat, but they are on the second floor. She is silent. He wheels her down the hallway to see her paintings, realizing that all he wants is for her to say Grazie, Mario. What would I do without you?
    He’s seen her private gallery before, but it still makes his throat close up when the soft lights go on and the velvet curtains are lifted, because it is evidence that she possesses greatness. Or has the greatness gone away?
    The canvases are enormous, and their frames are ornate. The paintings are dark: androgynous women in various brave poses or nude recline, their lithe bodies rendered in white, gray, and black. There’s a woman in a cheetah-skin dress, another with trousers, a monocle, and a dachshund. A woman with a sallow complexion and eyes hidden by a top hat.
    I painted this one in Paris, she says, nodding to a portrait of a woman in a fur stole with a commanding expression and the figurine of a black horse on the table in front of her.
    Natalie, he thinks.
    Paris must be beautiful, he says.
    Je déteste Paris.
    He’s quiet for some time because he knows that’s what she wants. He realizes that he’s jealous of the life she’s had, the money, the talent, the experiences. She calls herself American, but she’s not American, he