Our Woman in Moscow(28)
Iris loved going for drives in Harry’s convertible. She loved the wind in her hair and the sensation of speed, and the snug, fateful feeling of hurtling down some stretch of highway in a vehicle beyond your control. She loved it more than ever now that Sasha was at the wheel, and she sat next to him, and somewhere ahead lay a crumbling house on a sunbaked hillside where she and Sasha would spend the weekend.
If she had to confess, Iris would’ve told you that she rather enjoyed carrying on a secret love affair right beneath Ruth’s sharp, perfect nose. (Iris’s nose was decidedly snub, although Sasha called it adorable.) The secret was part of the fun! They’d go out to dinner, for example, the four of them, and Iris and Sasha would carry on a little flirtation of the feet under the table; or else Sasha’s hand would slide underneath her dress, and Iris had to keep her face absolutely straight while he fondled her right there in the restaurant in front of everybody, while Harry told some story about the Swiss consul. Or they’d meet at some diplomatic party—those officials and their wives, all they ever did was meet and drink—and Sasha would flirt outrageously with some woman on one side of the room, to keep up appearances, while Iris did her best to flirt with someone on the other side, until by some prearranged signal they’d steal out separately to meet in the fragrant, darkened corner of a courtyard or a hallway and kiss the daylights out of each other, or worse. Or they’d bump into each other quite by accident in the Vatican museum, say, or the ruins of the ancient Roman agora, or even the Villa Borghese again, and experience all the riches of Western civilization, which they later discussed over coffee or lunch or the pillow of Sasha’s bed.
Best of all were the times when Sasha rang the telephone around eleven o’clock in the morning and asked whether the coast was clear, and Iris would say yea or nay, depending on the proximity of Ruth. If yea, then Sasha arrived in a taxi fifteen minutes later, and they spent the next hour or two in bed, or on the sofa, or really anywhere a person wearing a plaster cast on her leg can have sexual intercourse with another person without discomfort or outright injury. Iris learned to speak up boldly and ask for a pillow or a change of position or a load off, for God’s sake. Sasha always complied. He was terribly considerate, if also insatiable. After the first hasty bout, he liked to stalk naked around the apartment, mixing drinks for both of them, while Iris lay back and watched him happily. She told him he was like a cat, always prowling except when he was sleeping. He’d drink a couple of gin and tonics, maybe three if he was especially thirsty, while they talked about everything, the state of the world, capitalism, communism, Spain, East Hampton, Schuylers and van der Wahls and Digbys, where they would go on holiday.
In fact, that was how they devised this weekend—Sasha lifted his head from the pillow one afternoon and announced he wasn’t just going to hang around his apartment with Iris from Friday to Sunday, or run the risk of bumping into somebody should they venture outside. He had a friend who had a villa in Tivoli, he told her on the twenty-second of April—a friend willing to let Sasha spend the weekend there with whomever he pleased. Nobody at the embassy would know. He could borrow Harry’s car without raising any suspicions, because so far as her siblings would know, Iris had already gone off on her drawing holiday with some friends from the American Academy in Rome. Why, it was airtight! Not even Agatha Christie could have devised a better plan.
Even the weather conspired with them. Seven consecutive days of rain dampened Iris’s spirits in the last week of April, but when she walked out of the doctor’s office on the second of May a free woman, except for a cane, which was really rather stylish, the clouds parted and the sun poured down, and Iris spread out her arms and knew that everything would work out perfectly.
The next day, a Friday, she packed a small valise with sundresses and toothbrush and Pond’s cream and said good-bye to Ruth. Ruth stopped her at the door and asked if she was forgetting something?
“No, I don’t think so. What am I missing?”
Ruth made a cynical smile and nodded to the desk in the corner. “Your sketchbook and charcoals, maybe?”
The cynical smile worried Iris all the way over to Sasha’s apartment on Via Terrenzio, near the Vatican. She let herself in with the key he’d loaned her and fretted until he met her at the small trattoria around the corner for dinner at half past seven.
“You’re worried about a smile, darling?”
“You’d have to know Ruth. It’s this particular smile she wears when she knows something you don’t.”
“But she doesn’t know something you don’t.”
“Be serious.”
“Well, who cares, anyway? It’s about time she knows about us, if you ask me. Harry, too. We can’t go sneaking around forever.”
“Oh? Just when do you plan on telling them, then?”
He reached across the table and took her hand. “We’ll know when it’s time.”
Now it was Saturday, the fourth of May, and they were hurtling around some hairpin turn toward this ancient yellow-brown town nestled into the neck of the Sabine Hills. Behind them, the Roman countryside spread out in a quilt of new green fields. The sun beat down on Iris’s head. The draft streamed through her hair and filled her lungs. The land was so beautiful, her eyes ached with it. She would remember this drive forever. She’d remember the smell of exhaust and of asphalt, and the delicate green scent of spring.