The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  “Some of Cyril Graham’s Hollywood cronies are coming and they’re sure to report back to him. It wouldn’t hurt to make a good impression.”

  “That will be good for Robin Weiss,” I say, ignoring the idea that anyone from Hollywood would be interested for two seconds in a fortyish English professor, “to have his film seen by people in the industry.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s why they’re here. Graham told them the film was done on the grounds of the villa and he expected from what he saw of the filming that it would be quite interesting—and there’s even talk of a major film being made at La Civetta based on a screenplay Robin’s written.”

  I frown into the mirror—instantly aging my face several years—remembering what Robin had said. The film isn’t going to be what everyone expects. “Well, I hope it’s not too much pressure on Robin,” I say. “He looked ragged in class today.”

  “Don’t you think that you’re perhaps too emotionally involved with your students?” Mark asks.

  I angle my mirror so that I can see Mark’s expression—or rather, more important, to see whether he’s watching my expression. To see whether what he’s really concerned about is my emotional involvement with this particular student. Three years ago, when Mark and I first found our way back to my office after that faculty party, Mark had expressed his professional concern that I’d become overly familiar with Robin Weiss. I’d been seen having coffee with him at Cafe Lucrezia and he spent a lot of time in my office.

  “I wouldn’t worry,” Mark had said then as we climbed the back stairs to my office, “except that it would be natural for a boy to have a crush on a such a beautiful woman.”

  The compliment had taken me by surprise. Not because I didn’t think a man could find me beautiful, but because Mark Abrams had struck me as too serious a man to bother with compliments. I knew he was very ambitious for the college, that he planned to transform Hudson College into a premier liberal arts institution. Like a lot of my colleagues, I had not always been happy about how he was going about achieving that goal—deferring money from more traditional academic departments to the more high-profile film department, for instance. I had become so used to thinking of him as an adversary in departmental meetings that I hadn’t considered him as a prospective suitor.

  When I had let myself into the office I crossed to the window ledge, where I sat down and lit a cigarette (I still smoked then). Instead of reminding me of the no-smoking rule, he crossed the room and, letting his hand rest on mine for a moment, took the cigarette out of my hand and raised it to his lips.

  “Maybe,” I said, watching him inhale. His lips were a trifle thin—no Cupid’s bow—but he had a strong jaw and the kind of clean-cut features that aged well. An undeniably handsome man. “But would it be natural for a woman my age to be interested in a boy?”

  He didn’t answer. I’m sure he thought it was a rhetorical question and that the way I pronounced boy was meant as a disparaging comparison with the charms of an older man. He tossed the cigarette out the window and kissed me, pushing me onto the windowsill until I felt the cold glass at my back. He never asked me about Robin Weiss again, but I’ve often wondered whether it’s ever occurred to him that I never answered his question, that I merely turned it back on him the way I did with my students.

  He doesn’t appear to be thinking about that now as he stands at the window, one hand in his trouser pocket rumpling the line of his good gray wool suit, one hand still holding the cigarette, which has nearly burned down to the filter. He’s looking out over the park, toward the NYU buildings on the east side, their violet flags glowing in the late spring sunshine. He looks like a general surveying a neighboring kingdom and planning his attack. He doesn’t appear to notice that I haven’t answered his latest question, either. He flicks his cigarette out the window and comes up behind me, resting his hands on my shoulders. “You need a vacation,” he says, massaging the tight muscles.

  I glance at my own reflection in the mirror to gauge my expression. The last time Mark and I discussed the summer, we decided (or rather, Mark suggested and I agreed) that we should spend it apart. After all, my tenure review was coming up in September. Why risk anything now? Had he changed his mind? Did I want him to have changed his mind?

  “I’m taking one,” I tell him as I apply a coat of mascara to my eyelashes. “Six weeks at the cabin in Woodstock, where I plan to finish the sonnet book.”

  “That’s not a vacation,” he says, “that’s hard labor.”

  “Surely you’re not discouraging a faculty member from publication, President Abrams,” I say teasingly.

  But Mark doesn’t laugh. “Actually, I have a better place for you to work, a place a little closer to the birthplace of the sonnet…”

  “Sicily?” I ask. “If you mean the court where Giacomo da Lentini was employed—”

  “I meant Italy in general,” he says, sounding impatient, “and La Civetta in particular. Graham says he’s got some very important sixteenth-century manuscripts—”

  “Cyril Graham is a crank, Mark, you know that. He’s spent the last twenty years dangling the promise of ‘very important’ manuscripts in front of half a dozen different academic institutions to raise interest in that moldering old villa of his so that he’d be sure to spend his twilight years surrounded by eager young scholars.”

  “That moldering old villa, as you call it, has been estimated to be worth nearly a billion dollars,” Mark says, “and crank or not, Graham is on the verge of bequeathing it to Hudson College…unless he changes his mind and chooses another institution. There’s a rumor he’s been talking to one of the SUNYs—”

  “Ah,” I say, swiveling in my chair to face Mark. “Cyril’s playing coy with his will again. I thought all the papers had been signed—”

  “Some complications have come up and it looks like I’ll have to spend the summer—along with one of our lawyers—at La Civetta.”

  “Poor baby,” I say, pursing my lips. “Most of the professors are fighting tooth and nail to spend the summer there. I hear Frieda Main-bocher in women’s studies had a fit when she learned Lydia Belquist in classics was going to teach the Women in Italian History class this summer.”

  “I solved that by making them co-teach the class,” Mark says. “So that’s who I’ll have for company over there if you don’t come: Lydia, Frieda, and the drama department. I thought that if you could work on your book there we’d get to spend some time together, but if you’d rather be alone…” The look of hurt on Mark’s face makes me instantly regret teasing him. Clearly he wants us to spend the summer together, and I would, too—just not at La Civetta.

  “I don’t think I’d be any help with Graham,” I say. “He wasn’t happy with me when I left.”

  “Really? He speaks quite fondly of you. He said he’s been reading your sonnets in The Lyric and was quite impressed.”

  “Oh, please,” I say swiveling back to the mirror to put on my lipstick—and to hide the blush of pleasure the compliment has caused. “Cyril hasn’t read anything but Debrett’s Peerage and Town Country in decades.”

  “Then someone must have shown them to him,” Mark says, rubbing my shoulders again. His right hand drifts from my shoulder down the front of my dress, but I’m finding it hard to focus because I’m replaying the professors Robin Weiss said were in residence at La Civetta. There’s only one whom I can imagine subscribing to The Lyric.

  “No,” I say, laying my hand over his before it reaches my breast, “I’m afraid you’ll just have to make do with Lydia and Frieda. I can’t possibly go.”

  CHAPTER

  TWO

  MARK LEAVES BEFORE ME, TAKING THE BACK STAIRS TO AVOID ANY LINGERING secretaries in comp lit. We’ve joked that those stairs have probably accommodated any number of Graham men after clandestine visits to the maids—but we don’t joke tonight. He’s not happy that I haven’t agreed to his idea of going to La Civetta. He must have thought I’d be happy to spend the summer with him. A
nd I would be if he had chosen anyplace else. Unfortunately, I can’t explain that to him.

  I exchange the flats I wore for teaching for a pair of high-heeled sling backs and the conservative suit jacket I wore earlier for a cashmere wrap. I take the main staircase down, three grand curving flights that always make me feel as if I’m a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel. Tonight I feel like Lily Bart in The House of Mirth when she finally decides to accept Sim Rosedale’s offer of marriage only to discover that the offer’s been downgraded to mistress. I feel, in other words, as if all the compromises I thought of as desperate measures have turned out to be made to no avail.

  Half the park is already in shadow as I cut across it, but when I reach the center I find a patch of sun warming the statue of Garibaldi just past the fountain and decide to sit there for a moment on its base to collect my thoughts before going to the film show. There are more comfortable benches close by, but I’ve always been fond of the statue—a reminder of the neighborhood’s Italian community. Besides, the granite, having soaked up the day’s sun, feels comfortingly warm. Leaning against it, I remember that when the statue was moved in 1970 a glass vessel was discovered in the base containing newspaper clippings about Garibaldi and the dedication of the statue. Another thing I like about the statue. It reminds me that hidden messages may be embedded in impervious stone.

  I wonder how many of the students gathered in the dry basin of the central fountain even know who Garibaldi was. The girls, who had unpacked their thrift store summer dresses for the first time this year, are shivering now under denim jackets and college sweatshirts, many of them in NYU’s violet, but quite a few in Hudson College’s blue and gold. Hudson’s not entirely a newcomer to the neighborhood. The Graham brownstone has housed a small portion of the college since the sixties, when the college opened as an alternative liberal arts college. Along with the New School, the School of Visual Arts, Pace, and Baruch, it’s carved out a small niche for itself in the downtown landscape dominated by NYU, often taking the overflow of artistically minded students drawn to the city. Then, five years ago, the college received a large donation from Cyril Graham to start a film program and a promise that at his death Graham’s Tuscan villa, along with its valuable art and rare manuscript collection, would be given to the college as a center for film and the performing arts.

  Such an influx of wealth into a small academic institution was bound to create friction as well as opportunities. I myself have wondered what place a specialist in the Renaissance sonnet would have at Hudson among the glittering new cast of film directors and acting teachers who had swept into the school. I also couldn’t help noticing that the type of student drawn to Hudson College was changing. I had more drama majors than English majors these days, more actors than scholars, and more would-be screenwriters than would-be poets.

  Of course, college-age kids are dramatic to begin with, but it has seemed to me lately that there’s an element of performance in everything this latest crop does. Right now my eye is drawn to a girl with long frizzy hair streaked with bright raspberry dye who is balancing on the rim of the fountain as if it were a circus tightrope while she narrates a story to a group of admirers crouched below her. She’s dressed in the standard navel-baring jeans, but hers ride so low that I can make out her bare hip bones. When a particularly expansive gesture offsets her balance, several boys are there to steady her. I notice that one of the boys is Robin and that the girl manages to time her fall so that she lands, shrieking, in his lap.

  I find myself smiling at her exuberance and then sighing. Perhaps I’m concerned about the direction Hudson is moving in because it seems to be moving away from me, because I’m beginning to feel old when I look at my students. Maybe I’m just jealous. I glance once more at Robin and his pink-haired girlfriend and resolve to enjoy the sight instead of resenting it, but then I notice that I’m not the only one watching them—and this observer is definitely not watching them with a friendly eye. He’s leaning against a fence on the far side of the fountain, his long dark coat merging with the late afternoon shadows. It’s the same boy I saw talking with Robin earlier. Again I think he seems familiar and yet surely I’d remember that Greek profile and that full, mobile mouth (shaped now into a pained grimace) if I’d seen him before. As he pushes himself off the gate and walks toward Robin I feel a sudden urge to move forward to intercept him before he reaches the fountain, but it’s the pink-haired girl who jumps up and places herself in between Robin and the stranger.

  “What are you doing here, Orlando?” I hear her ask.

  “I am here to talk to Robin, Zoe,” he answers in an accent that might be Italian or Spanish, “about something he’s stolen from me.”

  I can see from here—without realizing it I’ve left Garibaldi and moved closer to the fountain, drawn by the scene being played out by the three young people—that Robin’s face has turned as pink as his friend Zoe’s hair, but when he opens his mouth to answer the charge, he’s not able to get past the first syllable.

  “Th-th-th-,” he sputters.

  Zoe reaches her arm behind her to stop Robin from coming closer and answers for him. “You’re just jealous, Orlando.” Turning to Robin, she adds, “Ignore him; no one will believe him for a second. Come on, the film show’s about to start and you’re the star.”

  Robin and Zoe turn and start walking toward the auditorium on the south side of the park, leaving the boy—Orlando, I think, what a perfect name for him!—staring spitefully at their backs. They look like such a perfect image of young love—moving through a drift of petals fallen from the park’s Bradford pear trees—that I can’t blame him for feeling jealous. I feel a pang myself, watching Robin stop and stoop to the ground, scoop up a handful of petals, and toss them at his companion, who playfully careens into him, clutching his jacket for balance. Orlando pauses on the same spot and kneels to the ground as if he wanted to absorb that moment, but then as I pass by him he stands up, slipping a few petals into his pocket, and calls to me.

  “Scusa,” he says, his accent now clearly recognizable as Italian, “you are the professoressa of Robin?”

  “Yes,” I tell him, trying not to smile at his name for me. Leave it to the Italians to make a dry academic title sound like the honorific of nobility. “I work here at Hudson. Are you a student here?” As we approach the south side of the park I’m looking around for a police officer or campus security guard. There’s something unnerving in this boy’s manner that has set my nerves tingling.

  “No, I go to university in Florence. I met Robin there at the American school at La Civetta, where my father teaches. I think you may know him, my father, Bruno Brunelli?”

  I stop three feet from the sidewalk and turn to face him, searching for the resemblance to Bruno in his face, but while this boy looks like a statue of a Greek god, I’d always thought his father’s profile was a little craggier—more like that of a Roman senator. No, the reason Orlando looks familiar is because he looks like his mother. “Yes, of course,” I say, “I took your father’s class on the Renaissance sonnet when he was still a graduate student. He was a wonderful teacher…and a wonderful poet. Does he still write?”

  Orlando laughs and his face is transformed from the mask of anger he’d assumed a few minutes ago while watching Robin and Zoe to something so much softer that I wonder whether I’d imagined the previous look. But then his father was also very good at assuming a mask. “Not so much anymore. My father always says, oh, how do you say it in English? Non vale la pena?”

  “Not worth the pain,” I translate. Yes, I remember Bruno using that expression, but I had never imagined him using it about poetry. “And how is your mother?” I ask. “I heard she was the hospitality coordinator at the villa.” A misnomer, Robin had said, but of course I don’t repeat that.

  “Yes, she took over the job when my grandmother died.”

  “I was sorry to hear about your grandmother. It’s hard to imagine La Civetta without her.” This is true. Benedetta Brunel
li, Bruno’s mother, had no academic standing, but she had come to La Civetta during the war when she was a young girl, first as Lady Graham’s private secretary and then, when the villa was turned into a school, as the hospitality coordinator. She’d managed everything, including the vegetable gardens, where she grew the tomatoes and herbs for the kitchen, and the olive groves, which still produced the villa’s cooking oil. I remember that her hands—she would often give you a little pat on the face, cooing “Que facia bella!”—felt like satin, softened by years of pressing olive oil. She had made the villa feel like a home. It’s hard to imagine Claudia in her place.

  “Sì,” Orlando answers, his expression turning dark again, “she was the real mistress of La Civetta, but like most Americans Cyril Graham takes what he wants and never thinks to share. Like Robin. All the time I work on the film with him and I never guess what he is doing…that he is stealing…”

  “Are you accusing Robin of plagiarism?”

  Orlando shakes his head, making his dark ringlets tremble, and furrows his brow. “Plagiarism?” he says, pronouncing the word with difficulty. “I am not sure what this means. Does it mean to steal?”

  “Well, it means to steal someone else’s words.”

  “Sì, sì, he’s stolen words and told lies. Someone must help me…” Orlando’s voice is agitated again. I look around for help and see with relief that Mark is standing at the entrance to the auditorium, just across the street.

  “The president of the college is right over there,” I say, putting my hand on Orlando’s arm to steer him across the street. “If you have any concerns about the eligibility of Robin Weiss’s entry in the film show, he’s the man to talk to.”

  I’m relieved to see that Mark has caught sight of me, but then I see his face darken as he notices my companion. I’ve only wanted to make him aware of a potential disturbance to the show, but I’d forgotten how jealous Mark can get. It’s flattering in a way, but right now I just want Mark to know that this boy isn’t some lovestruck student of mine—he’s potential trouble.