Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [99]
The truth is, my relationship with Hal turned out to be one of the least romanticized I’d ever had with a man. I didn’t imagine him or invent him, as I often did with men who attracted me. I liked him for the person he actually was. And when I noticed something about him I didn’t like, it was no big deal. As far as his feelings about me, well, I liked not having any of the bloated self-awareness that comes with romantic chemistry or the need to see myself reflected favorably in a man’s eyes. What I saw in Hal’s eyes was: Hal.
Sometimes I thought Harold Ladley was just the kind of man with whom I could share a life. But other times I suspected that I would miss the leap of the blood, as a friend of mine calls the physical chemistry between a man and a woman. It is the tension, as every woman knows, that gives a relationship its extra spring.
I felt it, the leap of the blood, one morning in Siena when a letter arrived from Paris. It was from Naohiro, suggesting we meet in Venice. Immediately I wrote back, agreeing. On my return from posting it, I stopped to look at some pottery in a shop window. In the glass I saw my reflection. Looking at my flushed face, I decided that the leap of the blood, among other things, was very good for one’s complexion.
On the day before I was to leave Siena for the Veneto, Hal suggested we visit the nearby town of San Gimignano. “It’s among the most remarkable of all the Tuscan towns,” he said. “Very well-preserved and quite haunting, I think.”
I agreed and we left within the hour, driving the short distance from Siena to San Gimignano through rolling farmland and air fresh with the scent of cypress trees.
As we drove, Hal explained that San Gimignano, once known as San Gimignano of the Fine Towers, had a savage past, one that included fighting and plunder by barbarians, and terrible plagues. At the end of the eleventh century, seventy-six towers were built, from which San Gimignano’s great families could wage war. As usual when Hal went into the history of a place, he made it quite entertaining.
Listening to him, I often was reminded of my father’s stories about the exotic places he’d visited. I’d been thinking about my father a lot lately. Sometimes when I came across a place that seemed unusually exciting and foreign to me—the kind of place I imagined he would like—it was as though I was seeing it through my father’s eyes as well as my own. More than once I found myself wondering if I was trying to, as an analyst might put it, “incorporate” my father. I knew it was a necessary emotional task I’d never been able to complete. It even occurred to me, on the way to San Gimignano with Hal, that of all the roles assigned to me in my lifetime, the one I’d never played to a mature conclusion was that of daughter. Daughter to a father, anyway.
I was about to ask Hal how close we were to San Gimignano when a skyline of tall buildings appeared on a distant hillside. The shapes, silhouetted against the sky, struck me as mysterious, almost ominous. If I squinted, they resembled giant warriors standing guard over the town.
“Those are the thirteen remaining towers of San Gimignano,” Hal said. “The most that are left, I think, in any of the hill towns.”
As we approached the walls surrounding the town, my excitement grew. I was attracted to the dark history that lay inside these ramparts, just as I had been drawn to the medieval pageantry of the parade in Siena. Why this was so, I wasn’t sure. But the minute I entered the walled city, where no cars are permitted, a little thrill of pleasure passed through me.
Hal had decided to search for a church fresco he wanted to see, so I walked alone up the steep Via San Giovanni. Halfway to the top I stopped and leaned against a doorway. I stood there imagining how, long ago, whole families living on this street were wiped out by the cruel