The Night Villa, Page 5

  Now when I open the study door I half fear that I’ll find that black room again. It took five coats of heavy white latex enamel to cover the walls and still when the moonlight comes into this room I can make out the glimmer of stars and planets revolving in their orbits. I see a flash of them now, as if my absence had drawn them out again, as I switch on the overhead light, but then they vanish. Instead I see my mission library table standing under the window, warm sunlight turning the cloth shade gold and striping the Navajo rug with long slanted bars. On the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves my Loeb Classics in their green-and-red bindings, the reassuringly thick spines of lexicons and dictionaries, the leatherbound set of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that M’Lou gave me when I got my Ph.D., and even the brightly colored modern paperbacks are all arrayed like sentinels against the dark.

  I sit down at my desk and touch the pile of printed pages stacked to the left of my laptop and the sheets of handwritten notebook paper pinned beneath a chunk of fossiliferous limestone on the right. I’ve been writing a book on a first-century woman slave slowly, but steadily, these past five years. Perhaps I’ll just do a few pages now, I think, to calm myself and get me into the rhythm of being home. I lean across the desk to draw the shade up—a ritual that starts my workday every morning—but when I look out the window I’m confronted by my overgrown lawn. I can’t possibly do any work with that lawn reproaching me. I go back to my bedroom, change into a T-shirt and shorts, and go outside to mow.

  I have the feeling right away that this isn’t what the pulmonologist meant by light activity. I’m drenched in sweat within minutes and my arms and back feel as if I’m pushing Sisyphus’s rock and not a ten-pound manual-reel mower. Still, it feels amazingly good to be doing something physical and to see the results in each freshly mown path I clear. For the first time in weeks—since the sky exploded over my head in the conference room—I feel firmly tethered to the earth. Each time I reach the edge of the lawn and turn I can see where I’ve been and I know what to do next. It’s only when I’ve finished and put the mower back in the shed and set the sprinkler on that my spirits sag. My lawn is a field of scorched stubble, like the fields of Carthage, which the Romans sowed with salt so that nothing would grow there for a hundred years. Watering it is little more than anointing the dead.

  I go in through the back door and open the fridge, leaning gratefully into its cool white depths. M’Lou’s not only cleared it, but wiped the whole thing down with bleach. It smells like a swimming pool. Thankfully she’s left a couple of Shiner Bocks. I open one and roll it across my forehead before taking a long cold drink. When I put the bottle down on the kitchen table it makes a clunk that echoes through the empty house, and I decide to drink the rest of it out on my front porch. Maybe by the time I finish it the house will stop feeling so empty. I take an extra one in case one’s not enough.

  I realize halfway through the first bottle that I’m not going to need it. Between the pain medication I’m on and the exercise, I’m quickly anesthetized. I let the glider gently sway and watch the gentle arc of the sprinkler make rainbows in the late afternoon sun. This will be just fine, I tell myself, a summer nursing the lawn back to life, swimming at Barton Springs, working on my book…. By the fall I should be able to walk back onto campus without looking over my shoulder for invisible gunmen.

  I’ve rocked myself into such an agreeable stupor that when the yellow Porsche pulls up in front of my house for a minute I don’t realize who it is. But then there’s only one person I know in Austin, home of hybrids and rusty old pickup trucks, who drives such a flashy car: Elgin Lawrence.

  He unfolds himself from the low-slung car and drapes a jacket over his shoulder in one fluid movement. I have time to wonder why he needs a jacket when it’s over ninety in the shade, and also to ponder the leather laptop case he’s carrying, while he crosses the short patch of burned grass and looks down to see that he’s ruined his delicate-looking loafers in the run-off from the sprinkler. I ought to be wondering what he’s doing here, but my beer-and-OxyContin-bathed brain doesn’t seem able to wrap itself around the question. Elgin makes a quick dart when he realizes that the sprinkler is heading his way and is up on my porch before I can think of an excuse to get rid of him.

  “Sophie!” he exclaims, holding out his arms. “I came as soon as I heard you were discharged from the hospital. Look at you! You’re glowing! I knew you’d bounce back from this a hundred percent. You can’t keep a good woman down.”

  I start to smile in spite of myself; Elgin’s charm is insidious. “If that were true,” I say, suppressing the smile, “Odette Renfrew would still be alive.”

  Elgin bows his head and shakes it, clucking his tongue just once. “That’s exactly what I said at her funeral. I said her memory would stay with us forever. I said”—Elgin lifts his head and lays his right hand over his heart, striking a pose reminiscent of Cicero addressing the Roman Senate—“I will think of her every day of my life and try to make my life worthy of her saving it. I tell you, I’m a changed man.” Elgin lowers his head again, this time noticing the unopened beer on the floor. “Mind if I…?”

  “Go ahead,” I say. “I probably shouldn’t be mixing alcohol with my painkillers anyway.”

  Elgin swoops down on the beer and then seats himself on my porch railing. “That’s for sure. Last year after I twisted my ankle playing racquetball I made the mistake of going out drinking with my Tacitus seminar—” Elgin stops himself, no doubt realizing that a ribald drinking story is at odds with the elegiac note he’d struck a moment ago. “But that’s another story. I came here to see how you are.” He trains the full intensity of his blue eyes on me and—God help me—I feel a little woozy. It must be the drugs, I tell myself, I got over Elgin’s charms a long time ago.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say, carefully picking my tense. “I just need some peace and quiet, which I’m sure to get plenty of during the summer in Austin.”

  “You’re going to stay here? All summer?” Elgin points his beer bottle at me so suddenly that I flinch. For a second I’d seen Dale Henry lifting up his arm with the gun in it. “What you need,” he says, “is to get away. Someplace near the sea, but not some mindless beach resort. You need something to really take your mind off what happened. Something intellectually stimulating…”

  “Elgin, you’re not talking about the Papyrus Project, are you? I mean, are you still even going ahead with it? You had a hard enough time getting funding in the first place. I’m surprised that Catholic organization—”

  “PISA.”

  “Whatever—I’m surprised they haven’t pulled out.”

  Elgin jerks his head back as if I’d thrown something at him. “Why on earth wouldn’t we go ahead? What happened had nothing to do with the project. And not only hasn’t PISA pulled out, but we have a new benefactor: the Lyrik Foundation.”

  “Really? I thought the Lyrik Foundation had turned you down, and considering that Barry was half the project—”

  “Please. Biddle was a deadweight on the project—no disrespect to the dead intended. You were always my first choice. Admit it, you only turned me down because of our personal history.”

  Elgin’s blue eyes are fixed on mine like a snake transfixing its prey; I find it impossible to look away. I don’t generally like to admit even to myself that I had an affair with Elgin Lawrence my second year of graduate school, and when I do think about it I tend to lump it together with that blurry period after I lost the baby and just before Ely left. Blurry because I was crying so much my eyes were perpetually swollen, and blurry because I was drinking a lot. I remember that Elgin’s attentions were flattering and that his cynical attitude toward New Age fads, health food, and yoga seemed bracing. He was the perfect antidote to Ely, I thought. Unfortunately, it was an antidote with side effects as toxic as the original poison.

  “My decision not to join you on the Papyrus Project had absolutely nothing to do with our…personal history. I didn’t, and stil
l don’t, want to commit to a project that’s dependent on technology no one knows will work for sure.”

  I’ve delivered this little speech in as cold a voice as I can muster considering I can feel sweat dripping down my back, but Elgin greets it as if it were a declaration of undying love.

  “Well, then, if that’s the only problem, I think you’ll be very pleased with what I’ve got in here.” Elgin zips open the soft leather case and spills out a sleek silver laptop. It powers up with a musical chord that sounds like wind chimes. Elgin slides onto the glider next to me and slips the laptop into my lap. Out of the pale gray screen—like an early-morning mist—shapes slowly emerge. It takes me a moment to realize that they’re letters. I haven’t done that much work with original inscriptions, but the scribe who penned these letters had a beautiful hand. I make out a few words right away.

  “Having been tossed across sea and earth…” I read aloud, translating the Latin.

  “Here.” Elgin leans over me, his hand grazing my bare thigh. “There’s a higher resolution level available that picks up the metals in this particular ink…there, how’s that?”

  All the letters are momentarily surrounded by a bright red halo, as if they were burning a hole in the screen, and then they sharpen and appear to rise off the page so abruptly that I blink at their brilliance.

  “Wow,” I say, awed in spite of myself. Out of the corner of my eye I see Elgin smile. “Sounds like you have a bad imitation of Virgil here,” I say, scanning the next few lines. “Having been tossed across sea and earth, a plaything of those on high…Someone’s got a hero complex.”

  “Keep reading,” Elgin tells me. “I think you’ll be interested in this.”

  I continue translating the Latin lines and quickly see what he means. “Having been tossed across sea and earth, a plaything of those on high, and having survived shipwreck, I believe my life has been spared for some divine purpose. Why else would I have been plucked from the sea and borne aloft upon the waves as if held up by the arms of sea nymphs, and brought to not just any shore, but this, the same shore that received the body of that lovestruck unhappy siren, Parthenope. And whereas she met with an unhappy fate, I was rescued by the slaves of a great man and brought, unharmed…even my baggage intact…” I skip over an illegible section and pick up again a few lines later. “…. therefore, it seems clear to me that my life has been spared so that I may finish my life project, The History of Religion, which I began with my little book, Athenian Nights….” I lookup and see that Elgin is trying to hide his smile by taking a swig of his already finished beer.

  “By Phineas Aulus,” I say, identifying the first-century Roman historian who wrote two works on mystery religions, Athenian Nights and Alexandrian Nights. A third book, Italian Nights, was lost when Phineas died at sea while sailing from Alexandria to Rome in AD 79. “But this sounds like it was written after the shipwreck…”

  “Exactly! He didn’t die at sea. He escaped in a rowboat and came ashore at Herculaneum. Notice he says his baggage was intact…”

  “So Italian Nights…”

  “Saved. But not just Italian Nights. Do you remember what Pliny said about Phineas Aulus?”

  “That he was a thief. He plundered his way through Greece, Egypt, and the Middle East stealing scrolls from temples and oracles. You think those scrolls were in his trunk…but if he was shipwrecked…”

  “Read the next line.”

  I scroll down. “It is indeed another sign of the providence of the gods that I took the precaution of lining the inside of my trunks with wax against the moisture of a long sea journey. Not only have the first volumes of my third book, Italian Nights, been preserved, but also several other remarkable sources which I have borrowed to aid in my research… Ha! I’ve heard that line from students who’ve plagiarized their term papers. Borrowed my ass!…have also survived completely intact. It is seemly for a historian of religions to be alert to any signs and omens the gods might send and so I dedicate this final volume of Italian Nights to the spirits of this bay…to Apollo whose prophetess abides here at the Cave of the Sibyl, to Dionysus and Demeter who have so endowed this rich land that it is said they vie over its dominion, and finally to that unlucky nymph whose body was washed ashore here and who is said to haunt these shores. And so in her honor, I name this final volume of my work, Siren Nights.”

  I lean back and look at Elgin, who’s still grinning at me as if he knew something I didn’t—the same look he’d had on his face when he knew I’d gotten the assistant professorship at UT.

  “Hey,” I say, spurred to generosity by recalling that Elgin probably had a lot to do with me getting my current job, “this is great for you, Elgin. I know Phineas is your specialty and another book of his would be a major discovery. But, as you may remember, I’m not wild about him myself. This isn’t my area.”

  “Uh huh,” Elgin says, grinning even wider, “let me show you something else the multispectral imaging can do. You see that line you skipped over? The one you couldn’t read?” He drags the cursor to the illegible section and highlights it. Then he pulls down a menu that offers different resolution settings. “This part’s water damaged—frustrating, because it would be nice to know whose house Phineas arrived at. The house where this scroll was found is called the Villa della Notte now—”

  “Because of the statue of the goddess Nyx in the courtyard, right?” I ask, remembering the austere face of the Roman personification of Night that I saw on my one trip to Naples.

  “Right. But no one’s been able to say who originally owned it until”—Elgin clicks on a new setting—“now. Ecco! Mystery solved!”

  I lean forward to look at the screen. The previously illegible words are now clear. “…not just to any house, but to the house of a man not only renowned for his hospitality but also for his fine library, and his discriminating tastes as a collector of rare works, Gaius Petronius Stephanus.”

  “It may not be the same one,” I say, trying hard to keep emotion out of my voice.

  “Two Gaius Petronius Stephanuses in Herculaneum at the same time period?” Elgin asks, lifting an eyebrow. “That’s what I love about you, Sophie, you’re a skeptic. You don’t accept any data without proof. It makes you a rigorous scholar. Most people would be jumping up and down right now overjoyed that the subject of their thesis and the book they’re working on had just showed up in a lost document, but not you.”

  “Even if this is the Gaius Petronius Stephanus who owned Petronia Iusta, what are the chances that she’ll show up in Phineas’s book? I’m sure Phineas Aulus had better things to do than notice a slave girl.”

  “You underestimate your girl Iusta,” Elgin says, clicking on another file. “This portion comes a few pages later. We haven’t found the right resolution to make it perfectly legible yet, but a few words stand out…here”—he points the cursor to a word in the upper-right-hand corner—“and here”—and to one in the middle of the page—“and here.”

  Iusta. Iusta. Iusta.

  Her name repeated three times like a charm.

  “My theory for why her name is clearer is that each time Phineas wrote it he pressed a little harder with his stylus. I bet he was quite taken with her.”

  “She would have been seventeen…” I begin, batting Elgin’s hand away from the touchpad and trying to scroll down to the next page, but the cursor blinks stubbornly at the last occurrence of Iusta’s name.

  “I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got so far. You have to go with me to Italy to read the rest. So what about it? You know you want to.”

  As usual Elgin overplays his hand. It’s unfortunate that he’s using the same words he used five years ago to seduce me. I’m tempted to say no outright, but then Iusta’s name fades from the screen, replaced by a screensaver of turquoise water, and I find myself frantically tapping the touchpad to bring her back.

  “I’ll think about it,” I tell Elgin.

  After Elgin has gone I go back to my study and take out my thesis
and notes on Petronia Iusta. Of course Elgin had known how intrigued I’d be by the references to Iusta—after all, he’d been my thesis adviser.

  I had first encountered her story in Elgin’s class on Roman slavery. I look for and find the paper I wrote on her—the one I turned in on the day I found Ely at the Tetraktys house and went into premature labor. On top of the first page Elgin had written: “You have a real feel for this material. Petronia Iusta comes alive in your handling of her story—come talk to me about expanding this into your thesis. A+” I remember that the paper had been waiting for me when I got home from the hospital and how absurdly grateful I’d been for those few simple words of praise. I’d thrown myself into the research then, finding out all I could about this girl who had lived and died almost two thousand years ago.

  There wasn’t a lot to go on. What we knew about her came from eighteen wax tablets found in a small house buried in Herculaneum in AD 79. I remember that one of the first details that drew me to the story was the stroke of serendipity that had preserved those tablets—wax tablets! It was the nature of the pyroclastic flow that covered Herculaneum that while it instantly killed anyone who hadn’t already escaped and buried the city under sixty-five feet of volcanic matter, many fragile things were preserved: a crate of newly purchased wineglasses, eggs, bread, wooden beds and door frames, and delicate papyrus scrolls, charred on the outside but preserved inside, only awaiting a modern technology capable of reading the words within. But Iusta’s story hadn’t needed multispectral imaging; the bones of her story were in the eighteen law documents.