“The Emperor of Rome. I forget his family name but he was a nephew, I think, of Constantius, who was dreary too though not such a bore as Julian. Iris, try the asparagus. We get them from the garden.”
Iris tried an asparagus and Clarissa recalled that the Emperor Augustus’s favorite saying was: “Quick as boiled asparagus.” It developed that he had been something of a bore, too. “Hopelessly involved in office work. Of course it’s all terribly important, no doubt of that ... after all the entire Empire was based on a first-rate filing system; yet, all in all, it’s hardly glamorous.”
“Whom did you prefer?” asked Iris, smiling at me: she too was aware of our hostess’s obsession; whether or not she believed is a different matter. I assumed not; yet the assumption of truth is perhaps, for human purposes, the same as truth itself, at least to the obsessed.
“None of the obvious ones,” said Clarissa, squinting near-sightedly at the window through which a pair of yellow-spangled birds were mating on the wing like eccentric comets against the green of box. “But of course, I didn’t know everyone, darling. Only a few. Not all of them were accessible. Some never dined out. Some that did go out were impossible and then of course I traveled a good deal. I loved Alexandria and wintered there for over two hundred years, missing a great deal of the unpleasantness at Rome, the unstability of those tiresome generals ... although Vitellius was great fun, at least as a young man. I never saw him when he was Emperor that time, for five minutes wasn’t it? Died of greed. Such an appetite! On one occasion as a young man he ate an entire side of beef at my place in Baiae. Ah, Baiae, I do miss it. Much nicer than Bath or Biarritz and certainly more interesting than Newport was. I had several houses there over the years. Once when Senator Tullius Cicero was traveling with that poisonous daughter of his, they stopped....”
We listened attentively as one always did to Clarissa ... does? I wonder if she is still alive: if she is, then perhaps the miracle has indeed taken place and one human being has finally avoided the usual fate. It is an amiable miracle to contemplate.
Lunch ended without any signs of that revelation which Clarissa had led me to expect. Nothing was said which seemed to possess even a secret significance. Wondering idly whether or not Clarissa might, after all, be entirely mad, I followed the two women back into the drawing room where we had our coffee in a warm mood of satiety made only faintly disagreeable for me by that mild nausea which I always used to experience when I drank too much wine at lunch: now of course I never see wine, only the Arabs’ mint tea and their sandy bitter coffee which I have come to like.
A warm breeze fluttered the curtains: the noise of insects responding to the sun’s increasing heat droned all upon the same note, dry and insistent, a bass to the coloratura of birds, while the scent of flowers filled the airy room and I detected lilies as well as peonies, their odor almost too sweet, quite drowning the more delicate rose, the pale Hudson lilac.
Clarissa reminisced idly. She possessed a passion for minor detail which was often a good deal more interesting than her usual talks on currency devaluation.
Neither Iris nor I spoke much; it was as if we were both awaiting some word from Clarissa which would throw into immediate relief this luncheon, this day, this meeting of strangers. But Clarissa only gossiped on; at last, when I was beginning to go over in my mind the various formulae which make departure easy, our hostess, as though aware that she had drawn out too long the overture, said abruptly, “Eugene, show Iris the garden. She has never seen it before.” And then, heartily firing fragments of sentences at us as though in explanation of this move of hers, she left the room, indicating that the rest was up to us.
Puzzled, we both went onto the terrace and into the yellow afternoon. We walked slowly down the steps towards the rose arbors, a long series of trellis arches forming a tunnel of green, bright with new flowers and ending in a cement fountain of ugly tile with a bench beside it, shaded by elms.