And so it was that I returned to the Free Lunch, gay as a lark, and walked into a most painful episode.
By the time I got back it was very late. Gwendolyn was sitting at the same table, but the crowd of the day was gone. Only one person was sitting there with her. I did not pay much attention to him, so happy was I to see her again. A general impression of great height—obvious even seated—and a luxuriant beard, was all that initially registered. Gwendolyn glanced at me as I approached, then looked back to the man. Something in the set of her shoulders—a rigidity, perhaps—stilled the affectionate greeting that I was about to utter.
“Have a seat,” she said. Her voice seemed distant. She motioned back and forth. “Roach, this is Benvenuti Sfondrati-Piccolomini. Benvenuti, meet The Roach. He’s an old friend of mine, just got here. I wasn’t expecting him.”
The man stood up politely. A large, long-fingered hand reached out. I shook it. For the first time, I looked at him closely. Extraordinarily tall, he was. Middle-aged, rather slender, although obviously sinewy. His face was difficult to discern, so covered it was with an immense beard. His hair and beard were streaked with gray. I got an impression of a great prow of a chin buried somewhere beneath the hair, but I was more struck by his eyes. Somewhat deep-set, light-colored, and very hard to read. His clothes were those of a workman, very nondescript except for the most immense and striking set of boots that I ever saw in my life. The Boots, I was later to learn.
“Which branch?” the man asked, after he resumed his seat. His voice was a pleasant tenor.
I began to explain where my immediate family line fit on the complex hereditary tree of the Sfondrati-Piccolomini clan, but before I got very far into it he began nodding his head.
“Yes, yes, I know it.” A look which combined amusement and a certain respect. “An odd lot, not at all like most of those pedants. When I was in the Ozarine, I spent some pleasant afternoons quaffing ale with an Idomeneo Sfondrati-Piccolomini. A cousin of yours, he must be.”
“Second cousin. I’ve only met him once. My uncles sent me to bail him out of jail.”
The Roach emitted a great baying laugh. “I can believe it! He never had the proper respect for his patrons, that lad. ‘Rich slobs couldn’t tell a work of art if it bit them on the arse,’ he’d always say.”
My initial warmth toward the man, however, began ebbing as the night wore on. Soon enough, I came to view him with a great coldness. The fault was not his, actually. Indeed, it was part of the growing horror of the scene, that I knew him to be a man whose acquaintance I would have enjoyed, perhaps even cherished, under other circumstances. Under that rough and bristly exterior I could detect a great, somehow gentle, self-confidence—a quiet dignity, a sense of his place in life that it is given to very few people to possess in this world.
But the fact is, the circumstances were as they were. Nothing was said, neither by he nor by Gwendolyn, and they never so much as touched each other once. But I am not a fool. I will admit I stayed at the table well past the time I should have made a graceful exit. The Roach seemed oblivious to the situation. But I am an artist, with an artist’s eye, to whom the tension in Gwendolyn’s posture was obvious. So stay I did, trying to forestall the inevitable, until my stern upbringing came to my rescue.
“When it comes to romance and heartbreak and all that,” my uncles had told me more than once, “try not to be a complete jackass.”
And so I finally rose from the table, bid them goodnight, and made my way to my room. Sometime later, I heard Gwendolyn and The Roach moving through the corridor and into her room. The indistinct murmur of their voices came through the wall for a few minutes, followed by silence, followed, some minutes later, by sounds which I did my best to ignore. Eventually, I managed to fall asleep.