Listening to Billie by Alice Adams Page B

ruins. This is the Largo Argentina, in Rome, all overgrown with bright and thriving weeds, and overrun with cats: large and small, all colors, but uniformly scraggly cats, pirates, marauders; they sleep with one eye half open, one torn ear half cocked. Daria and the other woman are both watching the cats, but why? And what is she thinking and feeling, that other?
    Poor: she is obviously very poor. The black clothes are rags, and both brown shoes gape open to dingy black socks, below a short space of bare raw white legs. Blond hair makes her look not Italian; her hair is the color of Daria’s sister Eliza’s hair, but otherwise, my God—how different the two. Daria imagines that she, the other, has wandered down to Italy from some other country—Poland? Austria?—maybe looking for work, a husband, a supportive relative. And nothing has worked out for her.
    The woman turns to Daria and smiles, showing terrible teeth, and gestures toward the cats; she says something in her own language, which Daria partially understands; she has said, “… spaghetti.”
    And Daria turns to see that a reasonably well-dressed older man, perhaps a retired civil servant, in proper brown, has gone halfway down some steps and has set out a large platter of obviously cold and old spaghetti. Which several dozen cats gobble down in half an instant. The plate now is perfectly clean, as its owner retrieves it. He is smiling to himself, as though this were a favorite moment of his day.
    Ashamed of her own perfect, expensively maintained teeth, excruciatingly aware of expensive, impractical clothes, Daria smiles guardedly at the other woman. (After all, they have the cats in common.) And she thinks, I will give her all my money.
    Will
becomes
must
, an absolute imperative. It has the force of a superstition, or a charm. Since she had that thought—that directive, as it were—she must obey it.
    She is to meet her husband—“Smith Worthington, my husband”—for lunch in a place called the Casina Valadier. “It’s up on the Pincio; you’ll have to take a cab. Just remember the name—here, I’ll write it on a card.” On one side engraved “ SMITH WORTHINGTON ,” on the other, tidily printed in ink, “Casina Valadier.” “And here, you might see something you want—” She is handed a sheaf of lire, crisp pale notes. “Oh, well, you might need more.” More notes. “Don’t spend it all in one place.” He laughs.
    She has no idea how much money there is, no idea of the worth of all those notes, those large-denominated lire, folded inside her suede kid-lined bag. No matter; in fact, it is probably better not to know. Daria has been indulgently told for a long time that she has no head for figures: first by her astronomy professor at college, a kindly Dutchman; and later by her husband. But there are certain numbers that she remembers as secrets: for example, six million. Hitler killed six million Jews. And why does she remember this number, why think of it now, what happened when she was a small child? (This is in the middle Sixties, by which time Smith has made five million dollars and Daria has had four miscarriages; she does not think ofthese facts, neither being as real to her as six million Jews, dead.) She does think, Last night he fucked me four times—“Fuck,” a secret word that no one knows she uses in her thoughts, certainly not Smith, the exhaustedly proud fucker.
    Fucking: Daria senses that this is something that Smith must do; he must drive himself into her, as untouchingly and as often as possible. Often—that is very important to Smith. He counts; she has heard him mutter to himself, “Twice a night for a week, that’s pretty good for an old guy pushing thirty.”
    No matter, then, the amount, the numbers of the money. The essential, the necessary thing is to give it all, and then to run away. Daria stares around at the streets that bound the small square, streets thunderous with the tearing traffic of an