The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  When they’re gone I turn back to Mark. “Orlando looked wild when he ran onto the balcony. Are you sure he didn’t push Robin?”

  Mark shakes his head. “I know it’s difficult to accept when a young person we’ve been close to—whom we think we’ve helped—gives up on himself,” Marks says, slowly and deliberately. I feel myself blanche under his gaze. He’s afraid, I realize, that I’ll blame myself for Robin’s death. The idea that I may have been partly to blame effectively silences me.

  “There’s going to be a lot of denial surrounding this boy’s death,” Mark continues, turning to the police officer. “Everyone expected so much from him.” The film isn’t going to be what everyone expects, Robin had said. Had Robin been that frightened of disappointing people that he’d chosen to kill himself? Had I been one of the people he’d been afraid of disappointing?

  “You say he won first prize in the contest tonight,” the police officer says, shaking his head. “It seems a strange time to kill himself.”

  “Sometimes success can be the worst kind of pressure,” Mark says. I glance at Mark, surprised that he would voice this sentiment. Mark is one of the most ambitious and driven men I’ve ever met. He wouldn’t be a college president at forty-five if he weren’t. “And many people were jealous.”

  “Like this Orlando fellow, right?” the officer asks. “Did he tell you what he wanted, President Abrams?”

  “There was apparently some dispute about credit for the film. Mr. Brunelli seemed to think he deserved credit as a collaborator on the film, but of course he wasn’t a Hudson student, and only works by Hudson students can be entered in the film contest.”

  “Everybody wants a producer credit.” The remark comes from Leo Balthasar, who has come up behind me. He’s taken off his white jacket, and his immaculate black T-shirt has come untucked from his trousers. He looks a little yellow under his tan.

  “Is that what the two young men were arguing about on the balcony?” the officer asks.

  Balthasar nods, but he’s looking at Mark and not the police officer as he answers. “Yes, that seemed to be what the argument was about. Robin was pretty drunk and was very upset at this other boy’s attack—”

  “Attack?” the police officer asks, looking up from his notebook. “Did you see Orlando Brunelli push Robin?”

  Leo Balthasar glances at Mark and then back at the police officer. “Excuse me. I meant verbal attack. From where I was, it looked like Robin jumped. But you were closer to him and Orlando, President Abrams. Is that what happened?”

  Mark nods, his jaw so clenched that his lips look white. “I’m afraid so.” “And what about you, Dr. Asher? Where were you when Mr. Weiss jumped?”

  “I tried to follow President Abrams out onto the balcony, but the guard stopped me. I couldn’t see what was happening because I was behind the door…Maybe if I had been able to talk to Robin…” My voice falters and Mark takes a step toward me, putting a protective arm around my shoulders. I sink into him, relieved that he’s not angry with me for not telling him about the earlier plagiarism incident with Robin.

  “I think we all feel that we somehow failed this troubled boy,” Mark says. And then, looking at the police officer, he adds, “Dr. Asher takes her responsibility to her students very seriously. I’ve often had to chide her for being too emotionally involved. This is particularly hard on her. If you don’t have any further questions, we really should let her get home.”

  The officer closes his notebook and says he’s done for now anyway. Mark gives my shoulder a squeeze and then takes his arm away to shake the officer’s hand. As they walk toward the elevators together, I turn to Leo Balthasar. “What exactly was Orlando saying to Robin?” I ask, but before he can answer, Balthasar reaches into his trouser pocket to retrieve a vibrating cell phone and, glancing at the caller ID screen, says to me, “I’ve got to take this,” and turns his back on me.

  I wait until Mark’s seen the police officer onto the elevator to approach him to explain the plagiarism incident, but before I can reach Mark, the young blond lawyer appears with Gene Silverman, who’s helping a heavily sedated Mara to the elevator. She leaves Gene and Mara at the elevator door and then comes to stand very close to Mark, cups her hand over his ear, and whispers something. Mark nods and then she joins the Silvermans. By the time I’ve reached him, they’ve already disappeared into the elevator.

  “You look exhausted,” I say. “You should go home.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m going to work in my office tonight. I’ve got press releases and e-mails to write. I’m calling an emergency faculty meeting for ten a.m., so you’d better get home and get some sleep yourself.”

  “But tomorrow’s Saturday,” I say, remembering that I’d offered to meet Robin in my office. I’d thought I was acting generously—I hardly ever offer Saturday office hours—but now I realize that “until tomorrow” had been too long for him to wait. I should have offered to talk to him right then and there.

  Mark shakes his head. “By Monday the story will be all over the campus. I don’t want our teachers going into their classes unprepared. I’ll e-mail the faculty myself. I’m sure they’ll see the importance of taking a little time out of their weekends for this.”

  “Mark, I want to explain about the incident with Robin, the reason I didn’t tell you—”

  “It’s not important, Rose, although I wish you’d shared the information with me before—” He stops, seeing how devastated I look. “It really wasn’t your fault. I should have gotten that Brunelli boy out of here sooner.”

  “You couldn’t have known how badly Robin would take his accusations—” I stop, alarmed by a flickering of doubt in Mark’s eyes. “Mark, are you sure Orlando didn’t push Robin? You would have told the police if he had, wouldn’t you?”

  Mark shakes his head. “No, Rose, I’m sorry. I know it’s hard to face the fact that Robin killed himself, but that’s what happened. But I do think that Orlando shares part of the responsibility for Robin Weiss’s death.” The way he emphasizes the word “part” makes it clear to me who he thinks shares the other part of the blame for Robin’s suicide. If I’d reported the first plagiarism case…if I’d referred Robin to the counseling center…?

  I open my mouth to say something—what I’m not sure—to apologize? to explain why I didn’t tell anyone about the plagiarized paper?—but the elevator door opens and the slim blond lawyer steps out.

  “Are you going down, Dr. Asher?” she asks. “Shall I hold the door for you?”

  I look at Mark. He nods and gives my shoulder a squeeze as he guides me through the doors. Then, before I can turn around, the doors are closed again and I’m alone in the elevator. The first time I’ve been alone all night. The downward motion of the elevator pushes the acid in my stomach up into my throat and I’m afraid I’m going to throw up again. Or start crying hysterically.

  The bright lights of the lobby feel like a dousing of cold water. I navigate the polished marble floor as if it were an ice-skating rink and give the security guard a nod so brittle I feel like my head might fall off. I step outside and see the yellow police tape cordoning off the pavement on the east side of the building, but I keep moving. Across the street the park lies deserted and white under the streetlights, the ground covered with white pear blossoms, which drift across the street—carrying my gaze with them—and over the dark-stained sidewalk where Robin fell. I close my eyes and see Robin walking through that drift of petals and scooping up a handful to toss at Zoe Demarchis.

  The memory of that gesture mixed with the sight of his blood on the pavement is too much for me. I double over as if I’ve been hit in the stomach. I manage not to fall only by grabbing the edge of a bench and half falling onto it. I take deep breaths until the pain in my stomach subsides, staring off into the distance at the white arch across the park, which shivers and shakes in my vision. After a few minutes the shape of the arch comes into focus and my breathing begins to even out. It’s then that I notice the
white figure in the center of the basin. It’s as if the park has grown another statue. Nothing near as gallant as Garibaldi wielding his sword, this one seems to be a personification of grief. A beautiful young man, his skin gleaming like old marble in the lamplight, sits with his knees drawn to his chest, his head resting on his knees. I can tell from the dark curls that it’s Orlando.

  I look for a police officer on the street, but there are only the yellow crime scene tapes, flapping in the freshening breeze. I wonder whether I should go back inside to find a security guard or approach Orlando on my own, but when I turn back I see I’ve already wasted too much time. The figure in the fountain is gone. It’s as if he’s melted into the dry basin.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  THE NEXT MORNING THE STORY OF ROBIN’S SUICIDE IS ON THE FRONT PAGE of the New York Times Metro section. As soon as I see his picture—a blurry shot of Robin standing in front of a view of hills, his hand shading his face from the sun—I know I have to get out of my apartment before reading the article. I dress quickly—in a navy blue skirt and white button-down shirt that make me look like a nun—for the emergency faculty meeting and shove some papers for grading into my leather messenger bag. I slip my laptop in as well, just in case I get a chance to enter the grades later. I doubt, though, that I’ll get any grading done today; it’s just that a stack of paper-clipped themes is the best protective camouflage at these meetings. I look around quickly to see whether I’ve forgotten something and spy my evening bag from last night, half open, a wad of pill-encrusted tissues spilling out. I vaguely remember taking one of Mara’s Valiums before going to bed last night, which might explain the clotted sensation in my brain and the feeling I have that my normally comfortable—beloved, even—apartment feels like a prison this morning.

  Though small (the only bedroom is really more of a sleeping alcove, the kitchen a compact galley off the living room), the apartment’s been a haven to me since I returned from Italy and found that my aunt Rosalind, whose death had brought me home, had put my name on the rent-controlled lease. It meant I didn’t have to move back in with my mother on Long Island even though I was going to have to stay in New York. Since Roz was gone, there was no one else to take my mother to doctor’s appointments, to the hospital, to chemo. Most of those appointments, though, were in the city (my mother had never gotten over the prejudice of a native New Yorker who believes the best doctors and hospitals are in the city), so I could ride the train out to get her and then take her where she needed to go. I could stay overnight on the island when she needed me, but as she grew sicker and spent more and more time in the hospital, I was conveniently nearby. I was even grateful for the apartment’s smallness and the building’s lack of an elevator. It meant my mother couldn’t move in.

  And so, through the last years of my mother’s life—and the decade of my twenties—I was able to go to NYU (not the University of Bologna or Cambridge as I had hoped) and get my doctorate in comparative literature. It wasn’t the life I had envisioned when I left for Italy in my junior year of college—the life of writing and travel and romance that had seemed to open up briefly like a sunlit view of the Tuscan hills—but it would have been churlish of me to complain. It wasn’t me who was dying; it was my mother, of lung cancer, which she blamed (as she blamed most everything) on my father, who had smoked a pack of Lucky Strikes a day before walking out on her when I was twelve and moving to Los Angeles with a twenty-five-year-old secretary to “start a new life.” The fact that my father had quit smoking and was in perfect health, jogging five miles a day on the beach in Ventura, was only one item on my mother’s list of life’s unfairnesses—a litany that she would recite to every doctor, nurse, lab technician, and fellow patient we en-countered. I swore to myself that I would not become the sort of person who complained of “missed opportunities.”

  Instead I counted my blessings, Aunt Roz’s apartment being on the top of the list. It wasn’t just that it was rent-controlled and convenient to NYU—and then Hudson, when I was hired there—it was that in leaving it to me, my aunt Rosalind bequeathed to me a piece of the life that she had led. A talented artist, she had moved to the city from Brooklyn over my grandparents’ objections and taken classes at the Art Students League. She’d supported herself as an illustrator for women’s fashion magazines, but in the summer she and two other women artists had banded together to rent a farmhouse in upstate New York, where they painted and swam naked in the backyard creek and made love to artists and folk musicians from the nearby artists’ colony Byrdcliffe.

  When I came back from Italy, I brought with me a watercolor—a view of the Tuscan hills from La Civetta—and a few pieces of Deruta pottery whose colors reminded me of Italy. And my books, of course. Otherwise the apartment is much as I found it. The walls are covered by oils and watercolors, sketches and woodcuts of the world my aunt lived in. Views of the Catskill Mountains from the farmhouse, shaded wood trails, nude figures bathing in the Esopus River, tiny botanical studies of flowers and ferns. Many are by my aunt’s roommates and friends, but my favorites are the small domestic still lifes that my aunt painted. A china cup and a glassful of wildflowers beside a window looking out onto a windswept meadow, a woman’s hand parting a lace curtain to reveal a snowy orchard, a Morris chair, its green upholstery cracked and scarred, the sun soaking into a rich red shawl tossed over the chair’s back, its colors echoed in the autumn foliage glimpsed through a window behind the chair. Each scene seems invested with a kind of contemplative joy. There’s peace—but also a hint of wildness in the outer landscape. The paintings expand the horizon of my tiny apartment, providing windows into distant landscapes and other rooms.

  And so I’ve never felt cramped here until this morning when I looked at the picture of Robin standing in front of the same view that’s in my little Italian watercolor. It’s the view from the stone arch at the end of the lemon walk. I remember standing there one day, looking out at the hills of the Valdarno for so long that I felt that the landscape was imprinted on my heart. When Bruno had found me there I told him that I felt a part of myself would always be there. He had smiled and touched my hair and said, “I hope you’ll leave more than your ghost here.” This morning when I saw the picture of Robin standing beneath the same arch, I suddenly felt that I had left my real self behind at La Civetta and that the person here in my aunt’s apartment is the ghost, an empty shell. It’s that emptiness I feel now pressing on the walls of my apartment. I take down my raincoat from the hook by the door, grab an umbrella (I can see the rain misting the windowpanes), and close the door on all those places.

  Fortunately, another blessing in my life is Cafe Lucrezia, which is a block north of my apartment on MacDougal Street and owned by one of my aunt’s old friends. Camille is there this morning, seated at a green marble table by the window, peering through tiny gold-framed glasses at an adding machine and a stack of receipts. The minute she sees me, she takes off her glasses and opens her arms.

  “Cara Rosa,” she croons, pressing me into her crinkled silk blouse, “I read about that poor boy this morning. Wasn’t he that pretty boy who used to come in here with you?”

  I nod, blushing at Camille’s description of Robin. But then, Camille calls half the young men in New York “pretty boys,” and she usually has one or two dancing attendance on her. I lean into her embrace, breathing in the lilac scent she wears, and kiss her cheek. Her skin feels thin and papery, and I can see, as I pull back from the kiss, the fine lines around her eyes—but they’re the only sign of her fifty-something years. Her figure, clearly visible in pencil-thin jeans and her clingy blouse, is still girlish, and her masses of tightly kinked hair are tinted the same shade of Titian red-gold she wore when my aunt first brought me here during my freshman year of college and got me a job waiting tables.

  “Francesco,” she calls to the dark-haired young man behind the espresso bar, “due machiati, per favore.”

  As I sit down at Camille’s table, I steal a quick glance a
t the boy, who looks like he comes from one of the outlying suburbs and not Italy. Chances are his name is Frank. Camille always rechristens the help with Italian names (when I worked here I was “Rosa”) and blithely throws out orders in that language whether they know it or not. They either catch on quickly or are replaced by a seemingly endless supply of Giannis, Tommasos, and Marcos.

  “Why ever would a sweet young thing like that take his own life?” Camille asks, her curls trembling as she shakes her head.

  “I don’t know. Someone accused him of plagiarizing a part of his film.”

  “Pshaw!” Camille says, pursing her mouth. “What kind of reason is that?”

  I shrug and Camille narrows her eyes. “Are you sure he did kill himself?”

  “I wasn’t on the balcony when it happened…” My voice falters and I close my eyes to calm myself, but the image I see is of Orlando’s wild eyes as he fled the room. I open my eyes. “Mark said he jumped. He was very upset just before—”

  “Carissima.” Camille lays a beringed hand on mine and leans forward. “You hadn’t just had a lover’s spat?” I can feel a slight quiver in Camille’s hand. This is the kind of romantic drama that Camille thrives on.

  “Millie,” I say, using the name her Polish immigrant mother christened her with. Roz always said that when you need to get Camille’s attention, just remind her where she grew up: Greenpoint, not Montmartre. “He was my student, nothing more.” I pause as Francesco delivers two steaming cups of coffee. Camille lifts her hand from mine and briefly pats the waiter’s cheek, calling him by the same endearment she just called me, only in its masculine form. I take a deep breath and remind myself that if I sound too scandalized at her suggestion I’ll offend her and she won’t tell me anything more. And whatever I might think of Camille’s…hobbies…, there’s no doubt that she has her ear to the ground. “Besides,” I say, “he had a girlfriend. A girl with pink hair named Zoe Demarchis. A boy who came here from Italy yesterday seemed to be jealous of Robin.”