Michelangelo's Notebook

by Paul Christopher

  “May I ask what it is you think you’re doing, Miss Ryan?”

  Finn jumped and turned in her seat. Alexander Crawley, the director, was standing directly behind her, the Michelangelo drawing in his hand and a furious expression on his face.

  3

  Crawley was a handsome man in his early sixties, his hair thick and gray, his face square, the eyes intelligent. He was no more than five eight or nine, and Finn was fairly sure he wore lifts in his expensive shoes. As always, he was dressed in a three-piece suit, but this afternoon he seemed even more dapper than usual, probably because of the fund-raiser tonight—the one she hadn’t been invited to. She also noticed there were no white gloves on his hands even though he was handling a piece of the museum’s inventory. Maybe when you got to be director your hands no longer had oils or potential pollutants on them. She commented on it to Crawley. His complexion went from red to purple.

  “Whether I’m wearing gloves or not is none of your concern,” he said. “What I am concerned with is your removing this drawing when you had no business to.”

  “It was in the drawer I was working on, Dr. Crawley. At first I thought it was just part of the regular inventory.”

  “At first?”

  “I think it’s been mislabeled.”

  “How is that?”

  “According to the inventory number it’s a drawing by Santiago Urbino, one of the minor Venetian painters.”

  Crawley looked professionally pained. “I know who Santiago Urbino was.”

  “I think it’s a mistake. I think it’s by Michelangelo.”

  “Michelangelo Buonarroti?” said Crawley, astounded. “You’re insane.”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” said Finn. “I’ve examined it closely. It has all the earmarks of a Michelangelo piece.”

  “So we’ve been hoarding a page from Michelangelo’s lost notebook for the past sixty-five years without knowing about it, and suddenly a young intern who is still cramming for her master’s degree pops up with it out of the blue.” He let out a little hollow laugh. “I don’t think so, Miss Ryan.”

  “I looked on the inventory listings,” said Finn, refusing to give up. “The museum doesn’t have any other pieces by Urbino. Why this one?”

  “Presumably, my dear, because Mr. Parker or Mr. Hale decided that he liked it.”

  “You’re not even willing to consider that it could be Michelangelo’s work?”

  “And let you write a paper on it that would eventually lead to a great deal of embarrassment to the museum, and to myself as well? I prize neither your work here as an intern nor your ego that much, my dear.”

  “ ‘My dear’? It’s Finn, or Miss Ryan,” she said angrily, “and my ego has nothing to do with it. The drawing is not by Urbino, it is by Michelangelo. Whoever inventoried it was mistaken.”

  “Whom is the inventory of the piece credited to, and when?” asked Crawley. Finn tapped a few keys on the keyboard and tapped the space bar to move across to the end of the inventory line.

  “AC, June 11, 2003.” Whoops. A little political incorrectness could take you a long way.

  “Alexander Crawley. Me. Not too long ago.”

  “Then perhaps it’s your ego that’s in question,” said Finn.

  “No, Miss Ryan, not my ego, but your competence—and, I might add, your arrogance.”

  “I studied Michelangelo’s work in Florence for an entire year.”

  “And I have studied the masters all my working life. You’re wrong and your refusal to admit that you’re wrong and defer to a more educated judgment on the matter shows me that you’re not the kind of person we need here. When your own ego gets in the way of the work, any professional sense goes out the window. I’m afraid I’ll have to terminate your internship at Parker-Hale.”

  “You can’t do that!”

  “Of course I can.” Crawley smiled blandly. “I just did.” He smiled again. “I suggest that you gather up whatever personal belongings you have and leave now to avoid any further embarrassment.” He shook his head. “A shame, too. You were a very pretty addition to our little department.”

  Finn stared at him for a long moment, not quite believing what the man had said, then walked out of the niche, grabbed her knapsack and ran off. She knew she was going to start crying and the last thing she wanted to do was show any weakness in front of that arrogant little son of a bitch. Five minutes later she was on her bike again and headed south to Alphabet City.

  4

  Once upon a time Alphabet City was the address heard crackling out of police radios on TV crime shows; now it’s more likely to be the latest rap-per’s address or the place to find the newest edgy restaurant. The fact that the city built a brand-new precinct house on the other side of Tompkins Square Park might have had something to do with it. But it probably had more to do with New York’s never-ending quest to renew itself as neighborhoods got hot for no particular reason, were gentrified, and then settled down to a comfortable, if boring respectability.

  Finn’s place was a small five-story brick apartment building on the corner of Fourth and A that only rated as a walk-up because the single elevator was so cranky. To the left of the building were the shops, bars and restaurants that made Alphabet City fun, and to the right lay Houston Street, the southern border of the Lower East Side, which was the hot new neighborhood du jour. Directly behind her was Village View, one of the old slab-sided, high-rise, 1960s-era urban renewal “projects” that used to stain the neighborhood like giant crime-infested cancers.

  Still furious, she pulled up in front of her building, keyed herself in and locked up the old bicycle in the dark alcove behind the stairwell. She punched the Up button and was surprised when the elevator lurched into view, its round mesh-glass window making it look like some Stephen King one-eyed monster rising out of the building’s depths. She climbed in and endured the slow jerking ride up to the top of the building.

  The apartment was tiny by anything but New York standards. The extra-wide hallway leading from the front door was a living room at one end and a kitchen at the other. The kitchen looked out toward the Lower East Side, and had a table by the window big enough to accommodate a maximum of two guests for dinner. To the left was a small bedroom that looked out onto Fourth Street, complete with a chain lock on the window even though it was the fifth floor.

  To the right of the kitchen was an alcove the super referred to as a “study” when he’d rented it to her. At the time it had looked like a walk-in closet or a nursery for an especially small baby, but she got a friend at school to build in some simple pine bookcases, then installed a drawing table that fit snugly and she had a place to work. Beyond that was a bathroom with the smallest sink, tub and toilet in the world. When she was sitting on the toilet, her knees were under the sink. If she wanted to she could put the lid down on the toilet and soak her feet in the tub. An actual bath meant tucking her knees up under her chin.

  When Finn had taken the apartment, everything had been painted a sullen nicotine yellow, but now she’d brightened things up with pink in the bathroom, forest green in the bedroom and a fawn color in the living room/kitchen. The study alcove was a workmanlike flat white. In her spare time she’d torn up the swamp green linoleum tiles and had a sanding party for the old hardwood floors.

  Her computer was a used Sony laptop she’d picked up for peanuts from a sale at her mother’s faculty office and was stored under the ratty red velvet couch in the “living hall” just in case a junkie had the energy to make it up five flights of stairs to steal it. To Finn, the cramped apartment was a palace and a magic doorway into her future. From here she could go anywhere—even though she couldn’t really imagine herself being anywhere else at the moment.

  Unlocking her door, fury unabated, she stormed into the apartment, threw her backpack on the couch and then began to undress, leaving a trail of clothes from the couch to the bathroom. She soaked herself in the minuscule tub for the better part of an hour, shaved her legs even though
they didn’t really need it and washed her hair as well, which didn’t need it either.

  Still furious after all that, she let the tub drain, ran a freezing cold shower and stood under it for as long as she could, counting her blessings and imagining Crawley wandering around Central Park waving a white cane in front of him, screaming, “I’m blind! I’m blind!” Serve the creep right. She pulled her worn terry-cloth bathrobe off the hook on the bathroom door, grabbed a towel and padded into her bedroom, looking for something to wear while drying her hair. She flopped down on the bed and stared blankly into her cupboard.

  She groaned. This was her night of reckoning with Peter, her boyfriend of almost two months now. She was supposed to meet him and a few other friends at Max’s Garden on Avenue B for dinner. There was an unspoken agreement that “tonight would be the night” at last, with most of the agreement coming from him and her getting tired of putting him off. Peter was handsome enough and smart enough and nice enough but Finn had always been very careful about who she went to bed with.

  In Columbus, at sixteen, Finn had already been wonderfully beautiful and dreadfully shy. It was a deadly combination. Boys her own age were terrified of the beautiful dream and bolstered their own feelings of inadequacy by calling her the Red-hot Iceberg and the Red Snapper. The result was she never went out on dates and by the end of her sixteenth year she hadn’t been so much as kissed on the cheek by a boy.

  Eventually she’d thrown caution to the winds and told her problem to a young junior professor she babysat for, a widower in the English department at OSU who had a little two-year-old boy. She’d had a secret crush on him from the time they first met over a diaper change, so in the end she didn’t have trouble believing that in one night she’d gone from never-been-kissed to not-a-virgin-anymore, and she’d never regretted it for a minute. It might be the kind of thing Oprah would have called sexual abuse, but she hadn’t felt that way about it then, or now. To her it had been a miracle. On the other hand it wasn’t the kind of thing you talked about very often.

  The man had been kind, gentle and by later comparison, an astoundingly good lover. He’d also been smart enough to limit the relationship to a few months, not long enough to make her feel obligated to something beyond strong friendship. But he gave Finn enough time to gain the experience and the confidence she desperately needed, and taught her a few things about teenage boys.

  He’d also given her a firm, practical grounding in condoms and how to use them and told her every excuse a guy was likely to come up with for not using one. By now she’d heard them all and more besides. She had a few condoms in her bedside table just in case, and there was always one tucked into one of the secret pockets in her wallet. Neither AIDS nor pregnancy was in the cards for her future, and somehow she didn’t think Peter was either. Of the five men she’d been to bed with since the professor, only two had been worth all the complications and the emotional ups and downs; the others had been clinging, needy or jealously possessive—and in one case, all three.

  She’d long ago come to the conclusion that sex and love got confused far too often and this time she was pretty sure she was confusing it with Peter. Right now he was looking for both sex and love, and she wasn’t really looking for either. If she was looking for a relationship now it would be with a man to give her strong friendship as well. What she wanted was give-and-take; Peter was looking for all take and no give.

  She reached out, grabbed the telephone on the bedside table and sat there with it in her hand, doodling on a little notepad. She could always beg off the date by telling him she was feeling under the weather, but he’d probably want to come over with chicken soup or something. She saw that she’d drawn a rough sketch of the Michelangelo drawing on her pad and grimaced. Who’d have thought finding an old master could get her into trouble? She still couldn’t figure out why Crawley had gotten so angry. She started drawing in as many of the veins, organs and ligaments as she could remember and then gave up. She hung up the phone without dialing. The least she could do was tell him in person. She sighed, got up and started to dress. Tonight, she feared, was not going to be Peter’s night after all. So how does one dress to tell a guy he isn’t going to get lucky?

  5

  They walked back to her apartment, strolling slowly down Avenue A, listening to the music coming up out of the little basement clubs, smelling the aromas from a dozen different cuisines from around the world. Finn was in no hurry to get home from Max’s but she could feel the tension coming off Peter in waves.

  He had his arm around her waist, his hand slipped into the tight pocket of her Levi’s and about every third step his hip would bump into hers. In high school she would have cut off her left boob to walk down a street with a boy like that but now it just seemed . . . high school. Like a guy going out and finding a street sign with your name on it and stealing it for you. She sighed. Maybe that was the point; Peter was just too damn high school.

  “You okay?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You sighed.”

  “Sometimes people sigh, Peter.”

  “You’re not getting your period or something?” He sounded nervous, as though menstruating was some kind of disease.

  “Or something? Something like what? The clap? A yeast infection? Vaginal warts. Herpes maybe?”

  He flushed, hurt at the hardness of her tone. “No, no, I didn’t mean anything like that. It’s just you’ve been down all evening and I thought maybe . . .”

  “Thought maybe it would screw up your evening or something? Make things a little too messy for you? Blood and gore on the sheets?”

  “No,” Peter answered a little distantly. “I didn’t mean that either.” He took his hand out of her pocket and moved away from her side a little. He smiled tightly. “Where I come from girls don’t talk like that.”

  “Yes, they do, Peter. You just never listened.”

  She sighed again. She was treating him horribly and it wasn’t really fair of her. She was being a bitch and that wasn’t her at all. It was one thing to let a person down easily, it was something else to shoot him down in flames.

  “Look,” she explained, “I just got fired from my job for no reason. I was pretty sure I’d done something good and it turned out to be bad and I got into a fight with someone and wound up looking like an idiot. On top of that, Alexander Crawley is the biggest inflated-ego chauvinistic prick I’ve ever met in my life!”

  “Gee,” said Peter. “And I was worrying that it might be me.” He gave her a boyish grin and her resolve wavered briefly. They reached the door to her building and she got out her keys.

  Somehow a few seconds later she was kissing Peter. After the day she’d had at the museum she could feel her decision beginning to weaken even more. His lips felt soft and warm and his tongue poked coolly and insistently between her teeth. She could feel that little space right underneath her stomach begin to melt.

  Then she tasted cinnamon Tic Tacs and realized he’d somehow popped one into his mouth a little while back, already planning his attack. His hand went up to her breast and she gently removed it. She broke the kiss.

  “Not tonight, Pete. Really. I’m too tired.”

  “At least let me see you to the door of your apartment.” He turned on the grin again. The grin and the Tic Tac seemed to go together.

  “You don’t need to do that.”

  “But I want to.” He shrugged. “God knows what might be waiting for you in the elevator.”

  “The elevator monster,” said Finn. “And you’re it.”

  “Then I’ll protect you from myself,” he said. She laughed and turned the key and the two of them went inside.

  Peter started kissing her again on the way up in the elevator and by the time the long jerky ride to the fifth floor was over she knew she was probably going to make a mistake and invite him in after all.

  She also knew that she was just looking for comfort and distraction from the events of the day and Peter would try to turn it into
much more than that, but right now she really didn’t care. She wanted his taste and his smell and the feel of him. Maybe it was time she allowed herself to be the selfish one. After all, it wasn’t her job to protect him from the realities of life. She wasn’t his mother, for God’s sake! She giggled at the Freudian implications of that thought and turned her door key in the lock.

  “What’s so funny?” asked Peter.

  “Nothing, just a stupid thought. You might as well come in if you want.” She stepped into the darkened apartment and Peter followed her.

  “Gee, sound a little less enthusiastic, why don’t you?” Peter muttered.

  A man appeared out of nowhere like a soundless black shadow. A light flashed briefly in Finn’s face and she lifted one arm to cover her eyes, her heart pounding in her chest as fear clutched at her throat.