The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  A waiter with a tray of miniature quiches approaches us, but Mara waves him away as if he were a homeless person begging for money. No, that’s not fair. Mara would give money to the homeless person way before she’d allow dairy to pass her lips. “So far, though, Hudson’s been relatively lucky in that department—” I begin.

  “Imagine not knowing your child was in that much trouble. I bet they’re mostly children of divorce.”

  I’ve heard Mara’s views on divorce before. On our girls’ day out she talked of little else. She told me she “didn’t believe in it,” as if divorce were a figment of the popular imagination like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

  “What if you knew your husband was cheating?” I’d asked, knowing full well that Gene was infamous for sleeping with his students.

  “Men,” Mara had said, crossing her legs and nearly kicking the pedicurist in the head. “What can you expect from them? They think with their penises. The trick,” she said in a stage whisper that only the women under the hair dryers would miss, “is to never let on that you know.”

  I had stopped feeling sorry for her, but it was too late. By then I was the only professor or faculty wife who had spent any time with her and so she always latched on to me at college functions. I resign myself to spending the next quarter hour with Mara and ask after her son, Ned. She treats me to a rundown of Ned’s college application procedure, which sounds as if Mara herself had been the one actually applying. After she has recited his application essay to Cornell verbatim, I remark that it’s a shame he hadn’t wanted to go to Hudson, as he would have been eligible for tuition reimbursement.

  “Yes, well, he was interested in the acting program, but I helped him to see how impractical that was. He has to make a living, after all, and he always did so well in science, so he agreed to be premed if he could do the theater program in Italy this summer. Besides, I didn’t think Hudson would be right for Ned,” she says, and then adds, in a throaty whisper, “Too many gays.” Mara’s eyes dart nervously around the room, as if on the lookout for homosexual predators. But again I re-alize I’m being unfair to Mara. She’s not exactly a homophobe—she loves her gay hairdresser, for instance, and La Cage aux Folles is her favorite musical—she’s just a little overprotective when it comes to her Ned.

  I follow her gaze around the room, which is filling now with men in crisp suits and women in summery cocktail dresses. The lights have been dimmed to show off the glittering skyline beyond the windows. Votive candles in blue and gold glass bowls are scattered about the room, echoing the lights of the city. The room feels more like a garden party than an academic reception on the tenth floor of a Manhattan building. I see Robin and the girl Zoe talking to Mara’s husband, at the center of a cluster of men in white suits. As no self-respecting New Yorker would wear a white suit before Memorial Day, I conclude that these must be Cyril Graham’s friends from Hollywood. Robin himself is wearing the Versace tweed over a white T-shirt and faded jeans, but he looks every bit as sartorial as the Hollywood clique—and he doesn’t look a bit like he needs saving.

  “There’s Robin Weiss, the one whose film won first prize,” I tell Mara. “He’s talking to Gene.”

  Mara wheels around and scans the room to find her husband. When she does, she undergoes a sea change, not so much in her expression (she’s had far too much Botox for her face to give away anything) as in her posture. Her shoulders hunch up to her ears and she wraps her bony arms over her flat chest as if defending herself from an attack. I look back to see what’s brought on this bout of anxiety and notice that Zoe’s standing very close to Gene, one slim bare hip cocked against his leg. Poor Mara. She must be afraid that Gene’s found another conquest.

  On our girls’ day out Mara had devoted a good half hour to extolling Gene’s good looks. He’d been the handsomest boy at Tufts, she’d assured me; all the girls were after him. She’d even shown me a picture she carried in her wallet of the two of them at their senior prom. “Yes, quite handsome,” I’d said, trying not to inject too much enthusiasm lest Mara decide that I, too, was after her husband. The truth was that I’d never found Gene’s type—wispy blond hair cut in a seventies shag framing a babyish face and grazing footballer’s shoulders—that attractive. And two decades had done nothing to improve his looks, which have gotten softer rather than sharper. He still wore his hair longish—often pushed back by sunglasses on the top of his head even at an evening event like tonight’s—and his face had gotten pudgy around the eyes and jawline. His shoulders still strained the expensive Tommy Hilfiger jacket he wore over black jeans, but much of that muscle had turned to flab. He still managed to attract enough student admirers to keep Mara on her guard, though. Clearly she now thinks that Zoe is a threat.

  Just when I’m feeling sorry for her again, she points across the room to a cluster near the east door to the balcony. “Who’s that lovely young woman President Abrams is with?”

  I turn and see Mark talking to a slim blond woman in a tailored dove gray suit. “I think she’s the new lawyer working on the Graham bequest,” I say, my voice neutral. I can guess what Mara’s up to. On our girls’ day out I’d stupidly confessed that Mark and I were involved. Now she must think that if she has to feel jealous of her husband, she would like company. I swallow the last sip of my champagne cocktail, making a silent promise to myself not to get sucked into Mara’s games again, and hold up the empty glass between us. “Can I get you something from the bar?”

  “No,” she says, “I can’t mix alcohol with the medication I’m on.”

  Her eyes are darting back and forth nervously. In addition to her fear of heights and flying, Mara admitted to me at the salon that she’s an agoraphobe—clearly panicked to be left alone in the growing crowd.

  “I think I’ll get some air.” She edges away from me toward the door on the west side of the balcony.

  “President Abrams has ordered the doors to be locked…” I begin, but Mara has already summoned a security guard (the one posted, in fact, to keep people off the balcony) to open the door for her. It doesn’t take long for the guard to yield to the incipient hysteria in Mara’s voice. She slips out onto the balcony, keeping her back pressed up against the window and staying as far as she can from the railing. The folds of her yellow knit suit creased against the glass make her look like a rare butterfly specimen splayed between sheets of wax paper—caught between her warring fears of the crowd inside and the sheer drop from the balcony.

  When I turn from her, I feel curiously flattened and exposed as well, as if my motives for putting up with Mara Silverman were as transparent as the glass itself. “Just because you slept with a married professor once upon a time doesn’t mean you have to make up for all the wronged faculty wives of the world,” my friend and colleague Chihiro Arita has told me. I wish Chihiro were here tonight, but she’d opted to take her twelve-year-old niece to an anime film instead. “Give me katana swordplay over faculty politics any day,” she’d e-mailed me last night when I asked whether she was coming.

  I look for Robin and see he’s still in his crowd of admirers, but when he sees me he waves for me to come over. As I approach the group, though, one of the white suits peels away—like a petal falling off a chrysanthemum. I’m so pleased with the image that I’m reaching into my purse for pen and paper when I realize that the man is headed straight for me.

  “Dr. Asher, isn’t it?” he asks, thrusting forward his hand.

  “Yes,” I admit, submitting my hand to his firm grip. Everything about this man looks firm, in fact, from his flat stomach and well-developed chest muscles under a close-fitting black T-shirt and gleaming white cotton jacket to his tanned bare skull. “I’m sorry,” I ask, when he releases my hand, “have we met?”

  “Leo Balthasar,” he says, as if I’m supposed to recognize the name. He draws a business card from the breast pocket of his jacket. Leo Balthasar, I read, Producer, Lemon House Films.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, “I don’t get to the movies
much.”

  He throws back his head and laughs as if I’d said something very witty. The top of his skull shines in the yellow candlelight. Without turning his head, he reaches out to intercept a passing waiter’s tray of champagne flutes and procures us each one of the orange-tinted cocktails.

  “Have you had one of these Goddesses, yet? Cyril Graham claims to have invented it on a cruise with Jackie Onassis in the Greek isles.”

  “Ah, so you’re a friend of Cyril’s…”

  “That’s who told me about you. He said you were the one to get on board the sonnet project. Said no one had a better feel for Shake-speare’s sonnets.”

  “That’s hardly true,” I say, sipping my champagne. “There’s Helen Vendler, for instance—”

  “You,” Leo Balthasar says, leaning in closer and holding his glass of champagne up to my face like an orange exclamation point, “are the one Cyril Graham wants on the project.”

  “And what project is that?” I ask, trying not to appear as clueless as I feel.

  “The Shakespeare project. A film based on the sonnets of Shakespeare. The whole Dark Lady–slash–beloved boy–slash–famous poet triangle. It’s your boy’s idea.” Balthasar looks over his shoulder toward Robin Weiss. My boy?

  “Robin’s my student,” I say, instantly hating how prim I sound. A Miss Jean Brodie in the making. “Do you mean the film we just saw? The Lemon House?”

  Leo Balthasar laughs his full-bodied laugh again, which seems to require leaning his head far enough back to draw in air from the upper reaches of the ceiling. “What we saw tonight was a sweet student effort, but what I’m interested in is a script Robin Weiss sent me two weeks ago. I don’t usually pay attention to student work, but this project has potential—and backing. Cyril Graham has interested some of his rich friends in making the film at La Civetta. Picture Shakespeare in Love, only steamier. And set in Italy, of course.”

  “Italy? There’s no proof Shakespeare ever went to Italy.”

  “There’s no proof he didn’t, eh?” he asks, winking at me. “According to Robin, there’s a legend at La Civetta about a woman poet who lived there in the sixteenth century who some people believe was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.”

  “He must mean Ginevra de Laura,” I say, finishing my Greek God-dess in an unwisely large swallow and looking around for an exit strategy. In a minute he’ll be telling me that Shakespeare didn’t write the sonnets. “I’ve heard of her. She was the mistress of Lorenzo Barbagianni, the villa’s owner, and said to be a great poet, only all her poems were lost, so that’s really just speculation. I’ve never heard this rumor about her being the Dark Lady, though.”

  “But, see, at least you know who she was,” Balthasar says, waving his glass in the air. “That’s why we want to get you aboard as a writer on the script. With your credentials—”

  “There are plenty of academics with better,” I tell him.

  “But none,” he says, clicking his half-full champagne glass against my empty one, “who also writes sonnets. You see, we want the poet’s sensibility, not one of these dry-as-dust academics’. Of course, the money will be a little better than what your average academic publisher pays.” He leans in even closer so that I can smell the sweet orange liqueur on his breath and mentions a figure that’s roughly ten times larger than the advance I’d gotten from the university press that’s publishing my book on the Renaissance sonnet.

  “And that’s just for six weeks’ work this summer,” he says rocking back on his heels. “All expenses paid, of course, and first-class airfare.”

  “Airfare?”

  “To Italy. I’m doing the preliminary location scout in July and then, if everything checks out and we’ve got a script, we’d start shooting at La Civetta in August.”

  It’s the second time today I’ve been invited to La Civetta, and although I have no intention of accepting this offer either, I suddenly have the uneasy feeling that, like a hero in a fairy tale enduring some test of will, I will find the third time the offer is made the hardest to resist.

  “Thank you, but no thank you,” I say, putting my empty glass on a table and holding my hand out to shake his. He takes my hand, but instead of delivering the firm shake he’d greeted me with, he pulls me in closer to him.

  “You’ve got my card,” he says. He makes it sound almost like a threat. Like I’d taken something that belonged to him. “We’ll be in touch.” Then he lets me go and turns away. I see him go out the door to the west side of the balcony, which—once breached by Mara—has now filled with cigarette smokers. I turn back to look for Robin. The nucleus of white-suited men has acquired an outer ring of film students in their uniform of black jeans and black T-shirts. Robin, at the center of this circle, is beginning to look a little wilted. If the movie people around him are anything like Leo Balthasar, I’m surprised there’s any air left to breathe in the room. When he sees me he throws me a desperate look. I see him mouth the words “save me.” A bit dramatic, I think, reminding myself that Robin is one of the drama crowd now—a group well known for their histrionics. I’m worried, too, that Robin has been talking about me to these film people. What impression must he have given for Leo Balthasar to refer to him as “my boy”? But still, I can’t leave without at least congratulating him.

  As I head toward Robin, I tell myself that once I’ve fulfilled my promise I can go home. I pick up another Greek Goddess on my way and pause to listen to the comments of some nearby partygoers. I overhear two young men condemning Robin’s film as overly sentimental and a girl with lime green hair earnestly explaining to three other girls, who, like this girl and Zoe, have dyed their hair in various fruit shades (tangerine, pink grapefruit, kiwi), why the winning film wasn’t by a woman. “It’s a boy’s club at Graham’s villa,” she complains. “They get all the best equipment and first pick of the prime locations. And the best rooms. The girls were all stuck in an old convent with bars on the windows and no ventilation. It was like an oven.”

  I’m tempted to stop and commiserate with the girl—I’ve been in the “little villa,” as the old convent is called—but I intercept another desperate look from Robin and I’m afraid that if I don’t get to him soon he might begin calling my name aloud. As I get closer to Robin, the comments I overhear grow more favorable, but there’s still an edge of resentment to many of them. Near the center, a skinny boy in torn jeans, cowboy boots, and an Invader Zim T-shirt asks Robin whether he didn’t feel as if his film was derivative. “I mean, the words weren’t your own, man. You were just quoting some dead white guy.”

  “Finding images to evoke Shakespeare’s sonnets is no easy feat,” I say, feeling I’ve arrived just in time to speak up for Shakespeare as well as Robin. Of course, it’s only Robin who can reward me with those bow-shaped lips curving into a smile. “I thought the film was lovely,” I say, raising my glass to Robin. “Worthy of the Bard.”

  A few people join me in the toast, including Gene Silverman, who calls out, “Here, here,” and claps Robin on the back. His hand slides off Robin’s shoulder and somehow manages to find its way onto Zoe’s arm. He’s probably just drunk, but I find myself wondering whether there’s anything to Mara’s suspicions. I take a long sip of champagne to drown out the thought, and as I’m lowering my glass, Leo Balthasar, returned from the balcony, turns to me.

  “And what did you think of the last sonnet, Dr. Asher? Worthy of the Bard, as well?”

  “It’s hard to judge on a single hearing, but I found the last sonnet”—I pause and stare past Balthasar’s amused smile to the windows as if looking for the right word in the lights streaming along Fifth Avenue, but really I’m remembering again that final image of the lemon trees behind glass—“moving. The comparison between the lemon trees surviving the winter and the endurance of a betrayed love was…” I stop because I see Orlando Brunelli entering the room. How in the world did he get in? I’d thought for sure that Mark would alert the security guards to his presence. “Um, very nicely developed. The rh
ymes were exact and the iambic pentameter consistent,” I finish lamely, glancing around the room to locate Mark. Orlando has spotted Robin and Zoe and is walking straight toward us. “Although I’d have to see it in print to make a more considered evaluation.”

  “But could it have been written by an Elizabethan poet?” Balthasar asks. “By Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, perhaps?”

  I laugh. “I don’t see any reason to think so. The poet seems to be offering his or her beloved the gift of a limonaia—which is sort of an Italian greenhouse for lemons. And if we take the limonaia as a synecdoche—”

  “Oh, I know what that is,” Zoe calls out. “It’s when a part of something stands for the whole thing, right?”

  “Very good. So here the limonaia might stand for the whole villa. In which case, the poet intends to make a gift of the entire villa to the beloved. If Shakespeare had inherited an Italian villa, I think we would have heard about it.” A few people laugh and I’m glad to have diffused the situation with a joke. Glad, too, to see that Mark has managed to intercept Orlando and is talking to him now—until I see Robin’s expression. His pretty lips are curving downward and he looks stricken—just as he had when I’d accused him of plagiarism. And yet in this case I’m not saying that I don’t believe he wrote the poem. In fact, I suddenly realize that the opposite is probably true, that Robin wrote the last poem of the film and is claiming that it’s a poem he found. In our little talk about plagiarism, the focus was all on taking credit for someone else’s writing, not pretending something you wrote was written by someone else. Is that what Robin’s up to—presenting his own poems as the lost poems of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady?

  “Did you write the poem?” I ask Robin gently. “I’d like to see a copy of it.”

  Robin stares at me for a moment, his eyes glassy, his skin an unhealthy color. He takes a step toward me and stumbles. I reach forward to catch him and he presses something into my hand. “Here it is,” Robin says, beginning to stutter, “w-w-watch.”