Tom Foran Clark

Irene had given Emery to feel that anybody daring to put anything in writing should appear to know plenty, and have an opinion on just about everything. Who admits not knowing, do not knock here. But Emery didn't feel driven to that pretense. When he awoke, there she was, Irene, so splendid just lying there. Was this an opinion? Did he have an opinion about how the early morning sunlight streamed in through the one little window in the room? How it illuminated her body almost lovingly? How the whole gorgeous breadth and length of her, asleep, saying nothing, touched his heart? Here was the sacred feminine, human and divine. Emery had no other opinion. He was a pair of eyes.

On the nightstand by the bed was a note from Pike. He must have come and gone on little cat feet in the night. "Enjoy the day," he'd written. "I'm at the youth hostel tonight, hobnobbing with crumb bums. I'll catch up with you tomorrow, in the afternoon or evening. Be good."

"Good," Irene spoke out loud -- as if she'd been reading over his shoulder. Did Emery have an opinion about how that happened? What were the chances? But there it was. Emery was amazed. "Good morning," he said.

Irene opened her eyes, and it had the same effect on him as if the shades in the room had just been lifted. He sat down on the bed. He gently touched her perfect shoulder. Her radiant eyes, twin stars, searched the room. It was not a dump. Emery was happy to see no disdain in her expression. "How are you?" he asked.

"Actually," she said, stretching her long legs, lifting languidly her Australian peaks and valleys, "it's so nice just to be somewhere in Italy that's kind of nowhere, if you know what I mean."

He knew what she meant. They were everywhere and nowhere in this room. They were everybody -- and just themselves.

Irene sat up and wrapped her warm self around Emery. His hands traced the sweet contours of a work built for eternity.

The next thing he knew, Irene now was knocking on his forehead with her knuckles. "Hello? Hello? Anybody home?" she was saying.

Emery opened his eyes. "Welcome back," Irene said. She grasped his pelvic handles and physically removed him from her person. Then she clasped his shoulders and over they rolled, Irene astride him. She lowered the florid aureoles of her perfect breasts onto his eyes. "Do you love me?" Irene asked.

"I love you," Emery said.

"What makes you love me?

"Your loveliness."

"My loveliness?"

"Yes."

"What has my loveliness to do with you?"

"You are love's own lips," Emery said. "Soft swelling, sweets of honey - till I deny that ever I was mortal."

"Keats," Irene recognized.

Keats indeed, he thought. Kant, Copernicus, or Bruno this was not. Emery only wanted, in the moment, to climb inside her and disappear like a dwarf star swallowed by a black hole. But she rose from him, and from the bed, and put on her now dry underthings. "I'm going to take a shower," Irene said, and went out of the room and down the hallway to the only shower on our floor.

He lay there contemplating her words: I'm going to take a shower. A shower I'm going to take. To take a shower, I'm going. I listened to the idle patter of the water on her body. Emery could not believe how mad for her he was.

He joined Irene. They heard the soft patting of feet coming up the hallway. Lathered in soapsuds, they made sweet talk -- and then much commotion, capped with a cry of pleasure from Irene. This sent those feet pounding back down the carpet in the other direction in haste.

The two dressed in silence and emerged from the pensione smiling. The world greeted them. Irene's luminous vitality opened up this day to him. Anyone who's ever been in love for the second time will know how intoxicated he was.

They took a bus to the youth hostel, where she got her things. They then checked her out of there. In the meantime, Pike took his things from the hotel and checked back into the hostel. He insisted he was having a riotously good time.

Irene and Emery must have sat in a hundred different cafes over the next four days. They sipped Campari with soda or had cappuccinos and wrote postcards, exchanging loving glances, gazing blankly at all the pigeons, enjoying the colorful parade of international passers by. What health! What cheer! What Irene lacked in innocence, she made up for in beneficence.

They went to the hilltop Boboli Gardens, with a view out over the red roofs, Duomo, Campanile, Palazzo, and all -- the whole grand, exuberant spread. They were on top of the world. With a 2H pencil, in his notebook, Emery drew ebullient Irene. Everything was richly vital in her presence. And in his heart, already, he knew that this would fade. This too would pass. It existed now, but soon it would be a memory. Emery wanted to consume Irene, or be consumed by her. He would love her forever -- if only that one day. How he desired her! Alas, farewell.

On the fifth evening after Pike and Emery's arrival in Florence, they and Irene again sat together for a duke's repast at the Habakkuk ristorante. Just about the whole original gang, and many more, were there. The Swede was there -- Sven. He was bragging about how he'd talked the waiters into letting him and them all back in again. That must have taken some smooth talking. Pike had picked up the money pouch from the police station, and generously treated everyone to a free round of what may well have been the best wine in the house. It, and the food, were superb-- if not the company. Irene unlinked her arm from Emery's and went around the table making sure everybody's chalices were filled to the brim.

Irene gave a toast: "Not meat or drink, but justice and peace!"

"And joy in a jest!" another of the several radiant girls pitched in. But the most radiant was Irene. Her eyes fell on Emery, but it was not now a look of endearment. It cut him.

"The animus in a man sees the sacred feminine through smoke. But there is a fire in the human soul that is stronger than this smoke, and a grace more precious than the rain."

Keats? Bruno? Ruskin? Habakkuk?

Now Emery stood and boldly made a toast -- if not a loud or boisterous one, still one that had its own subtle power and just seemed somehow appropriate: "Nobody ever was carried up an Alp through talking!" It was something Irene had admitted her Melbourne carpenter friend had boldly told her, quoting Ruskin. Emery would not soon forget this.

"You are all fair, my loves," Irene said, filling glasses. "There are no flaws in you. What is art for? What literature? What is it to be a man? To be a woman? To be a man loving a woman? A woman loving a man?" This ribald gang gobbled that right up. They loved it! Did Irene need their applause? Praise? Vanity, vanity -- all was vanity. It was a disaster.

"What is heaven? Are you sure there is a hell?"

What about purgatory? And what about Echinacea, and cholesterol? She had failed to mention cholesterol! What about alternative medicine? Mythology? Shaker furniture? Irene failed to mention Haeckel, Froebel, Darwin! Did she have an opinion about Anthroposophy? What? Had she completely forgotten Steiner?

Every now and then, one of the jolly fellows would make a grab for her. Or one of the girls would push her away. One of the guys put his paws right on her and she showed pleasure. That hit Emery like a pile of bricks. Did he have an opinion? At this point, he was of a mind to get the hell out of there -- and Irene could stay or follow, it did not matter.

Emery went out. He did not look back. He knew what he would see: the big grinning Swede, Sven, bouncing Irene on his knees. Sven had put the index finger of a fat and calloused hand smackdab on the long and narrow bridge of her delicate nose, so beautiful. Now an uproar of delighted howling rose within.

Pike came out and put his arm around Emery's shoulders. "You don't want to know," Pike volunteered, but Emery wanted to hear the truth. "She's standing on the dog-gone tabletop, Emery, shaking her knockers, talking up a storm about astronomy, the moon, and the tides."

Emery walked away.

Pike seemed torn, too. He seemed not to know which way to turn, then ran and caught up with Emery. He got a map out of a pocket, jotted down a note, arranging the two should meet the following day at a certain juncture out on a certain road going out of Florence. Then he slapped Emery on the back and went back to the Habakkuk to party hearty. Emery retreated to the pensione. It wasn't long before large Sven, blushing, showed up to fetch Irene's things. He was very good about it, also slapping Emery on the back, as Pike had done, when he went out.

How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the bittersweet wreckage of a love affair?

The next day, Emery took leave of the Pitti Palace, the Palatine Gallery, the Piazza Signoria, the Palazzo Vecchio, and the rest. He got crackers and fed pigeons out front of the Cathedral. After visiting the Strozzi Palace, he treated himself to an ice-cream cone. Then he went back to the pensione to get his stuff, which he'd left that morning with the desk clerk, and loaded up his bike.

It was late afternoon when, chastened and abject but with perverse resolve, Emery pedaled up a steep hill road going out of Florence in the direction of Sitna. Then down into valleys, and up more hills again. He passed through a quaint medieval village, Barberini, and rolled down a hillside road through a gorgeous golden Tuscan valley as night began to fall.

Abbeys on the tops of hills were jutting silhouettes, circled in ragged silhouettes of trees. The orange sky turned crimson, then purple. Lights blinked on throughout the valley -- a sea of lights. But still no sign of Pike. The temperature plunged. Emery put on an extra sweater, and another, and his coat; and still he was shivering. And still there was no Pike. Emery began to get worried. Where was he?

Emery stood at the appointed place an hour. It was one of the loneliest hours of his life. Had something gone wrong? Perhaps Pike had joined his lot with Irene's and Sven's? -- Emery could just see the three of them, slapping each others' fronts and backs. Emery flapped his arms against the cold. He will be here, Emery I told himself. He will be here.

And then Emery saw him: the dim light of his headlamp. Pike was walking up the steep hill with his bike. Emery could have kissed the holy ground.

Seeing Emery, Pike waved in the air a big bottle of wine with a basket woven around it. Emery grasped a head of lettuce he had with him, and some bread rolls in a paper bag. Jubilantly, Emery waved these back at him.