A Visit From the Goon Squad - Jennifer Egan [87]
He spent the rest of the day upstairs among the Pompeiian mosaics, but his mind never left the Orpheus and Eurydice. He visited it again before leaving the museum.
By now it was afternoon. Ted began to walk, still dazed, until he found himself among a skein of backstreets so narrow they felt dark. He passed churches blistered with grime, moldering palazzi whose squalid interiors leaked sounds of wailing cats and children. Soiled, forgotten coats of arms were carved above their massive doorways, and these unsettled Ted: such universal, defining symbols made meaningless by nothing more than time. He imagined the slightly different version of Susan beside him, sharing his wonderment.
As the Orpheus and Eurydice relaxed its hold, Ted became aware of a subterranean patter around him, an interplay of glances, whistles, and signals that seemed to include nearly everyone, from the crone draped in black outside the church to the kid in the green T-shirt who kept buzzing past Ted on his Vespa, grazingly close. Everyone but himself. From a window, an old woman was using a rope to lower a basket full of Marlboro packs to the street. Black market, Ted thought, watching uneasily as a girl with tangled hair and sunburned arms removed a packet of cigarettes and placed some coins in the basket. As it swung upward again, toward the window, Ted recognized the cigarette buyer as his niece.
So acutely had he been dreading this encounter that he felt no real surprise at the staggering coincidence of its actually taking place. Sasha lit one of the Marlboros, brow creased, and Ted slowed his pace, pretending to admire the greasy wall of a palazzo. When she began walking again, he followed. She wore faded black jeans and a dishwater gray T-shirt. She walked erratically and with a slight limp, slowly, then briskly, so that Ted had to concentrate in order not to overtake her or fall behind.
He was sliding into the city’s knotty entrails, a poor, untouristed area where the sound of flapping laundry mingled with the bristly chatter of pigeons’ wings. Without warning, Sasha pivoted around to face him. She stared, bewildered, into his face. “Is that?” she stammered. “Uncle—”
“My God! Sasha!” Ted cried, wildly mugging surprise. He was a lousy fake.
“You scared me,” Sasha said, still disbelieving. “I felt someone—”
“You scared me, too,” Ted rejoined, and they laughed, nervous. He should have hugged her right away. Now it felt too late.
To fend off the obvious question (What was he doing in Naples?), Ted kept talking: Where was she going?
“To—to visit friends,” Sasha said. “What about you?”
“Just…walking!” he said, too loudly. They had fallen into step. “Is that a limp?”
“I broke my ankle in Tangiers,” she said. “I fell down a long flight of steps.”
“I hope you saw a doctor.”
Sasha gave him a pitying look. “I wore a cast for three and a half months.”
“Then why the limp?”
“I’m not sure.”
She had grown up. And so uncompromising was this adulthood, so unstinting its inventory of breasts and hips and gently indented waist, the expert flicking away of her cigarette, that Ted experienced the change as instantaneous. A miracle. Her hair was not nearly as red as it had been. Her face was fragile and mischievous, pale enough to absorb hues from the world around her—purple, green, pink—like a face painted by Lucian Freud. She looked like a girl who a century ago would not have lived long, would have died in childbirth. A girl whose feathery bones did not quite heal.
“You live here?” he asked. “Naples?”
“A nicer part,” Sasha said, with a tinge of snobbery. “What about you, Uncle Teddy? Do you still live in Mount Gray, New York?”
“I do,” he said, startled by her recall.
“Is your house very big? Are there lots of trees? Do you have a tire swing?”
“Trees galore. A hammock no one uses.”
Sasha paused, closing her eyes as if to imagine it. “You have three sons,” she said. “Miles, Ames, and Alfred.”
She was right; even the order was right. “I’m amazed you remember,