An iron fence kept viewers a couple of feet away, but the reliefs were spotlighted, and we could see them perfectly, practically reach out and touch them. I knew the sculptor Ghiberti had won a competition to decorate a first set of doors at the age of twenty-four, then these, his second set, which took him the next twenty-five years of his life, and how Michelangelo had declared they were as beautiful as the gates to heaven, which gave them their name. I peered through the iron bars for a closer look at the artist’s astonishing handiwork, some of the figures almost freestanding, along with the illusion of space, reality, and perspective that defined the early Renaissance.
I leaned over to tell Alex another fact and was surprised when she wasn’t there; I had felt the presence of someone beside me. I found her a few yards away reading yet another plaque, this one about the flood of 1966 and how Ghiberti’s reliefs had fallen off and almost washed away. I reassured her the actual reliefs were in the cathedral museum, that these were casts. But I had not shaken the feeling of being watched. I looked around, taking in the nearly deserted square, noted how the spotlights illuminated the buildings but left the streets in darkness.
“It’s so empty,” I said.
“Well, it is winter.”
I said I was hungry, and Alex chose a restaurant in a small elegant hotel, dark wood, velvet-covered banquettes, and dim lighting. We settled into a booth, and Alex ordered wine. Me, sparkling water. I told her I’d been glad she caught me, and she said, “Did I…catch you at something?” I knew she was kidding but couldn’t help thinking about the stolen page in my backpack.
She gave me an odd look, head tilted, assessing. “Are you growing a beard or mustache?”
“Mostly out of neglect.” Rubbing a hand across my chin and cheeks, I added, “I’ll shave if you don’t like it,” then said I had missed seeing her at the library.
“I missed it too,” she said.
It? The library? Not me?
“How’s your research going?” she asked.
I thought about the things I’d read and what I still didn’t know. “Okay,” I said.
“Is it so top secret that you can’t talk about it?”
I told her it was nothing like that and admitted I was a little tense, worried about my teaching job, how I would have to come up with something to ensure my tenure.
“Publish or perish?” she asked.
“I guess—or get a show.” Saying it aloud made my worry take shape and feel tangible. I switched the topic to the Brancacci Chapel and Masaccio’s frescoes. Alex said she’d never seen them in person and wished she had.
“We could go together,” I said, and she smiled without saying yes or no.
She switched from wine to grappa.
I stayed with sparkling water.
She seemed to relax, asked questions about my life, which I didn’t mind. I was glad she wanted to know more about me. I told her how I’d been a terrible student but had “found myself” in art school, where I worked in the cafeteria to pay off my scholarship. “Nothing you ever had to do, I’m sure.”
“What? You think I’m a spoiled rich kid with a perfect life?”
Before I could say I was sorry, she said, “You have no idea,” pouted a moment, then stopped just as quickly and asked me more about art school.
I told her it was the first time I had ever really cared about anything, which got me thinking about all it had taken to become an artist—the studio visits and gallery hunting, all the rejections, how I’d balanced three adjunct teaching jobs while working as a studio assistant to a successful artist, everything I had put at risk by coming here.
We shared a bowl of pasta, most of which I ate.
When Alex finished her grappa, she said she had to go, but this time, I reached for her hand and held her there.
“It’s late,” she said, a mix of emotions I couldn’t read traveling across her face like fast-moving clouds. “There’s the library tomorrow, and my apartment still needs organizing and—”
I leaned across the table and silenced her with a kiss.
She pulled back, and I got ready for the protest, possibly a slap.
“Your mustache,” she said, “it scratches.”
“I’ll shave it off tomorrow. I promise.”
“No, it’s okay,” she said, then leaned in for another kiss.
46
The longest twenty minutes of my life, getting up from the table, finding the front desk, getting a room. But the moment that hotel-room door shut behind us, the two of us were locked in another kiss. I swept pillows and bedspread aside, stripped off my shirt, watched Alex shimmy out of her lace bra and panties, my lips on her breasts, the sound of breath catching in her throat. Rolling around on the bed, hands, fingers, lips slowly gliding over skin. Fumbling with a condom.
“Wait—” she said, pushing me back on the bed and getting on top, leaning down, her lips at my ear, whispering, “Tell me about your secret project or else.” She laughed.
I didn’t. The spell was broken, and I knew it showed on my face.
“I was kidding,” she said, crushed, a little girl scolded.
“It’s okay,” I said, taking a moment to get back in the mood, and it didn’t take long. I moved back in for a kiss.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was just—”
“Shh, doesn’t matter,” I said, my tongue in her mouth to end the conversation.
Afterward, Alex’s cheek against my chest, I took in the room for the first time, noticing the same old-world charm as the hotel’s restaurant, flocked wallpaper, a cut-glass chandelier, our clothes strewn across the polished wooden floor.
“Oh God,” she said. “Tell me this didn’t happen.”
“It didn’t happen,” I said and laughed.
“I don’t do this, you know. Damn that grappa!” She tugged the sheet up to her neck. “I hardly know you.”
Did she really feel that way? I had told her things about myself I rarely told anyone. Maybe it was that I didn’t know her, though right now, I felt as if I knew enough; the rest I’d find out.
I put my arm around her, kissed her lips, her forehead. She traced the tattooed words on my arm, Kill Van Kull. I tried to cover it, but she pried my hand off and asked what it meant. I explained it was something I had done when I was fifteen, “just one of the stupid things I did when I was young, going along with my friends, a group thing, all six of us getting the same tattoo.”
“Were you a gang or something?”
I used the excuse that it was a long time ago, tried to change the subject, but Alex was now tracing the chain-link tattoo that circled my other bicep.
“Are you studying anatomy?”
“Just yours,” she said, which I liked. “So you were a bad boy?”
I sighed. “We told ourselves we were doing good, regular Robin Hoods.”
“Robbing from the rich to give to the poor?”
“Sometimes. Other times, we just sought revenge.” I growled the word to make it funny.
“For what?”
“Anything or anyone we thought was wronged.”
“A regular knight in shining armor.”
“Not everyone would agree, definitely not my parents or teachers—or the police.”
She asked if I’d ever been arrested and I admitted to once, omitting the times I’d come close.
“For what? It wasn’t murder, was it?”
“God, no!”
“Did you go to prison?”
“No! Can we stop talking about this? It’s embarrassing.”
“Everyone has something they’re embarrassed about.”
“Do you?”
She hesitated, as if thinking it through. “The usual…you know, bad dates, wrong choices.”
“At least they’re not tattooed on your body.”
“I think they’re hot… Your tattoos, I mean.”
“Are you kidding?”
“No. I was always such a…good girl. I’m impressed. Did your gang stick up gas stations and things like that?”
“Please. Stop. I beg you!” I tossed the sheet over her face.
She pulled it down, went back to my Kill Van Kull tattoo. “What’s this above it?”
“A bridge.”
“I can see that. What bridge?”
I didn’t want to talk about my background anymore, but she wouldn’t let it go.
“The Bayonne Bridge,” I said. “Happy?”
“I don’t know. Should that make me happy?”
“You don’t even know where it is.”
“Bayonne, I imagine.”
“Right,” I said.
“Where you’re from?”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “You like the idea of slumming with a Bayonne boy?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Alex propped herself up on an elbow, narrowed a look at me. “Are you trying to pick a fight?”
“No. Sorry. I’d rather not talk about it, that’s all.”
“I’m just interested in knowing about you. Is that so bad?”
“No,” I said and kissed her. “One day, I’ll tell you the whole story of my misspent youth. It’s right out of Dickens.” Something about her made me want to open up, expose my well-defended vulnerability.
“How’d you get this?” Alex drew a finger through the scar that bisected my eyebrow.
“A fistfight,” I said. “One I obviously lost. Are you finished with my physical exam, Doctor?”
“For now,” she said.
I started to get up.
“You’re not leaving, are you?”
“Just going to the bathroom.” I leaned over to give her another quick kiss, took in her blue-gray eyes, the slight down just barely discernible on her cheeks. I held her face in my hands. “I’m not going anywhere. Anyway, I’ve already paid for the night, and this place is expensive! Sorry—that came out wrong.”
“I’ll say.”
“I want to stay,” I said. “Though how come we didn’t go to your place?”
“It was you who got the room,” she said. “You didn’t ask to go to my apartment, though I’d have said no. It’s a mess. Suitcases exploded, clothes everywhere. We’d never have found the bed!”
“I think I would have.”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“You mean my place?” I pictured my tiny hotel room, the worn chintz bedspread, the shower without a curtain. No way I’d have brought a woman like Alex to my no-star hotel. “My place is even more of a mess, like a teenage boy’s bedroom.”
“God, I hope not.” She made a face.
I dragged my hand slowly across her cheek before I headed to the bathroom. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”
“Wait—” she said. “Stop. Your back… Let me see that!”
I’d almost forgotten, or tried to, another mistake that felt prescient at the moment. I kept trying to turn around, but Alex stopped me, her fingers already tracing the Mona Lisa tattoo that filled most of my back.
“When did you get this—and why?”
“I was eighteen, drinking at the time.” The latter was true, the first part a lie. I’d been twenty-five and knee-deep in research about Vincent Peruggia and the painting. But I wasn’t ready to talk about my obsession.
“It’s so well done,” she said.
“Is it? I don’t see it very often. Guess I lucked out and got a good tattoo artist. Are you finished looking? I’ve got to pee.” I made my way to the bathroom but got back to bed fast, suggested we stay in it for several days.
Alex pointed out that was going to get expensive. I said it was worth it, then remembered my appointment. “Oh, wait… I’m going to see…a friend in Paris, but that’s not until the day after tomorrow.”
“You’re going away?”
“I won’t disappear.” Not like you did, I thought but didn’t say. “I’ll just be gone a couple of days.”
She asked who I was going to see, and I made it up as I said it: “A French friend, an artist, someone I’ve known since art school.” I put my arms around her, wanted to stay that way forever, and might have had I not already made the call and bought the ticket.
47
Alex listened to Luke’s breathing grow deep and even. The sheet was down around his waist, and she watched the rise and fall of his chest, her eyes lingering a moment. She studied his face, the sharp angle of his cheekbones made stronger by the shadow of his beard, his slightly thickened nose and full mouth. She couldn’t take her eyes off him. How long had it been since she’d felt so attracted to a man? She laid a hand, as gently as possible, on his chest, felt the warmth of his flesh and the beating of his heart. Luke stirred, a smile playing at the corners of his mouth. Then he rolled onto his side and she pulled her hand back; she hadn’t meant to touch him but couldn’t help it. She felt embarrassed, conflicted.
This was not the way it was supposed to be.
What was she doing, sleeping with this man she hardly knew? She couldn’t lie to herself and pretend it was the first time, but she hadn’t lied when she’d said I don’t do this. She did not sleep around. Though that was only half of what she’d meant.
She waited a few minutes until Luke’s breathing grew steady again, then slipped out of bed. She had the sudden urge to flee—the room, Florence. But it felt too late.
Bare feet on the carpet, she picked her clothes off the floor and folded them onto a chair. Then did the same with Luke’s, a moment to check his jeans, then shirt. In the outer pockets of his leather jacket, she found his sunglasses and an old-fashioned-looking tin of tobacco. A surprise—she had never seen him smoke. In his wallet, a driver’s license, credit card, Metro card, twenty-seven American dollars, thirty-two euros. She closed the wallet and slipped it back into his jacket, the whole time watching him, making sure he was asleep.
She noted his short black boots, one near the front door, the other upside down a few feet away. She was arranging them neatly at the edge of the bed when she spotted his backpack under it. A moment to slip it out, another moment to make sure Luke had not awakened. Backpack under her arm, she tiptoed to the bathroom and shut the door behind her.
Inside the backpack, a laptop and notepad. Crumpled between them, a slightly yellowed paper, which she eased out and unfolded.
Cool light filtered in through the window, just enough for her to read the handwritten page, her Italian rusty but good enough, the whole time her heart beating fast.
48
Alex was already out of bed, the sheet wrapped around her. “Checkout time is noon,” she said. “Get up. You don’t want to get charged for another day.”
She headed for the shower, and I told her to hold on, that I’d join her.
Jets of hot water pounded against her forehead while I kneaded her neck. A hangover from that “damn grappa.” She shampooed her hair, and I helped her rinse the suds. I could have stayed in the shower all day, but she was out quickly, toweling off, telling me not to look at her, that she must look awful, which wasn’t true. With her hair wet and face clean of makeup, she looked eighteen and beautiful.
I leaned in to kiss her, and she handed me a towel, told me to cover up. I watched her drag a comb through her hair, dab her lips with gloss, tug on rumpled clothes, all in a hurry. I kept trying to stop her, slow her down or bring her back to bed, but every time I tried, she’d push me away. “Don’t you need to get to the library, more of your secret mission?” she said, flashing her first smile of the day, a mischievous one.
“Oh sure, top secret stuff.” I tried pulling her close for a kiss, and when she stopped me, I asked if she was sorry this had happened.
A moment of uncomfortable silence,
Alex drawing her still-wet hair into a ponytail. “No,” she finally said, “it was just…unexpected. I need to get…used to it.”
“How about getting used to it tonight?”
Another hesitation, then looking away, she said, “Okay.”
I took hold of her shoulders and turned her to face me. “You sure you’re all right?”
The briefest eye contact and a nod. “The room charge, remember?”
I told her it didn’t matter. I’d have been happy to pay triple if she’d stay or at least not appear like she was dying to escape. I asked what she was doing today, and she said she had things to take care, evasive as always, but I didn’t pry. I had things to do I hadn’t told her about either.
49
“I’ve been waiting for your call.”
“I’m calling now.”
“How is Florence? Are you enjoying yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“It was an innocent question.”
“Your questions are never innocent.”
“I want you to have fun, darling, as long as you don’t get too distracted.”
“Florence is a distracting city,” she said. “It has the best art in the world.”
“Some of it,” he said, glancing at a wall of his spotlighted paintings.
“I need more money.”
“Fine,” he said, examining the surface of a sixteenth-century oil on panel, The Holy Family, an elongated baby Jesus, the Madonna, Joseph behind her, the paint cracked badly over part of Joseph’s face, something that would surely affect the $15 million value attached to the painting, which, a decade ago, had been taken off the wall of Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome during a Madonna concert, the irony not lost on him. He turned away from the damaged Holy Family to look at his prize. “Same account?”
“Yes.”
“Same amount?”
“Yes.”
He moved closer to the painting, ran a finger run over the half-smiling lips, wondered if they were the real lips.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. “I’m meeting a friend.”
The Last Mona Lisa Page 15