PARTISAN REVIEW
touched one theory or another, cruising in his shaft like an elevator.
And, as the young man said, you could not blame Mr. Sciarappa
for wondering: was it in the character of a rich man or a poor that
they stayed in the best hotel, which was slightly less expensive than
an auto-camp?
The obscurity of their financial position justified Mr. Sciarappa's
anger. Nevertheless, though sympathetic, they grew tired of spending
their evenings with a stranger who was continually out of sorts be–
cause he could not make up his mind whether they were worth swind–
ling. "We did not come to Italy to see Mr. Sciarappa," they would
say to each other every night as they rode up in the elevator, and
would promise themselves to evade this time, without fail, the meeting
he had fixed for the next day. Yet as noon came on the following
morning, they would find that they were approaching the Galleria. He
is waiting, they would say to each other, and without discussion they
would hurry on toward the cafe with the orange tablecloths, where
they were late but never quite late enough to miss Mr. Sciarappa.
He was never glad to see them. He rose to acknowledge them
with a kind of bravura laziness of his tall, "English" figure, one shoul–
der lifted in a shrug of ennui or resignation. He kissed the young
lady's hand and said to the young man perfunctorily, and sometimes
with a positive yawn, "Hello, sit down, my dear." One of his odd
little tricks was
to
pretend that they were not together. The young
man's frequent absences of mind he treated literally, when it suited
him, as
if
they were absences of body, and once he carried this so far
as to run his fingers up and down the young lady's bare arm as the
three of them rode in a taxi, inquiring as he did so, in the most civil
tone imaginable, whether she found her friend satisfactory. His con–
versation was directed principally to the young lady, but for all that
he had no real interest in her. It was the young man whom he
watched, often in the mirror of her face which never left her friend
as he talked wildly, excitedly, extravagantly, with long wrists flung
outward in intensity of gesture: did Mr. Sciarappa see beauty and
strangeness in
him
or the eccentricity of money? Or was he merely
trying to determine which it was that she saw?
It was irresistible that they should try to coax Mr. Sciarappa
(or Scampi, as they had begun to call him, after fried crayfish-tails,
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