by Whitney Otto
In Europe she could return to that state of grace.
But between the time of the nude photo and her request to spend the summer in Italy, painting, her life was one that had people talking. There was her appearance, dazzling even by metropolitan standards, and her wardrobe sense, which allowed her to clip her hair and dress in trousers with the effect of being more female and more desirable than if she had worn the current dropped-waist dress fashions. There were the schools that threw her out, and the smoking, and the sneaking off to New York City every chance she got and not even bothering to hide these frequent day trips.
And those boys she slept with and didn’t care if they courted her or not. Nor did she care if they talked about the experience.
Some she liked more than others—one in particular, her “first love”—but she always liked the ones she slept with (otherwise she wouldn’t sleep with them). They were fun. They would boat on the lake in the middle of the night, under the stars and the moon. Or drink in someone’s empty summer home. There were car rides, and lying on a beach somewhere, listening to the lapping of the water. There were dances at clubs, coffee in cafés.
Sometimes she laughed off their suggestions, while other times she would cut them off, midsentence, and suggest they “go lie down somewhere.”
“I feel there is an angel in me,” she’d say, “whom I am constantly shocking.”
It took a lot of convincing, cajoling, and playing on her father’s favoritism to finally be allowed to travel with a chaperone, a Miss MacMurray, to spend the summer visiting museums and painting. Miss MacMurray was a single woman who taught at a local girls’ school. She came across as prematurely mature, a spinster of a certain stripe who believed that when she was ferrying girls to Italy to gaze at art she was fulfilling her own destiny. She thought that offering up Michelangelo’s David for the girls’ viewing pleasure was transgressive and daring. She relished telling them that, in London, there existed a detachable plaster fig leaf that had been used to cover David’s genitalia when the queen arrived, the anecdote making clear that Miss MacMurray would have no need for such modesty.
And parents trusted her. And she was, at heart, a trusting person, a nice woman who genuinely cared about art and about the girls.
It was on the ship, as it crossed the Atlantic to dock in Genoa, that Ellen decided to go by her father’s nickname for her: Lenny. The androgyny of the name suited her.
Then, having arrived in Florence, along with the other seven girls in the group, she decided, standing in the Uffizi Gallery, that everything great to be painted had already been painted. She would have to find another art form.
Lenny snuck out of the museum into the piazza to smoke. As she stood watching the activity of the public space—vendors hawking their souvenirs, people drinking coffee as they sat at tiny tables, crowds spilling out onto the adjacent streets—she noticed a man was noticing her.
He was attractive, maybe thirty years old.
She threw her cigarette to the pavement, crushing it as she walked over to the man, who was sitting on a step in the shade, a small crowd of statues behind him, under one of the arches of the Loggia dei Lanzi, a camera in his hands. He smiled.
“Che tipo di fotocamera e . . . e . . .” Lenny allowed her poor Italian to lapse into hand gestures as she pointed toward the man’s camera.
“Leica.”
“Leica? In inglese?”
“It’s Leica in English too.”
As she stood there, she realized that she had misjudged the man’s age; he was probably closer to forty. “You don’t have an Italian accent, by the way.”
“That’s because I’m from Scotland. Though, to be fair, I don’t have a Scots accents when I speak Italian because my mother’s from Florence. You know, in case you’re writing a personal history.”
“May I see it?” Lenny extended her hand to take the Leica. It was the smallest camera she had ever seen, and surprisingly light. “What is this?” There was a metal piece that attached to the top of the body like a submarine’s periscope.
He took the camera from her, removing the metal piece. “It’s a removable range finder. And look.” Here he collapsed the lens. Then he handed the camera back to her.
“My father would love this,” she said. Then, “Where did you get it?”
“In Germany. They’re very new and not inexpensive.”
Lenny held the camera up to her eye, panning the piazza, taking in the arches that shaded the café tables, the tourists, the fiorentini, the vendors of souvenirs and sweets, and when the facade of the Uffizi was in the viewfinder, she saw her fellow students and Miss MacMurray newly emerged from the museum.
“Oh, merde,” she said, quickly returning the camera to its owner as she hurried back to the group.
“Wait!” called the man, now standing.
Lenny kept going.
“American girl!” he called again. Now he was following her.
Lenny stopped, waving at Miss MacMurray as the man caught up. She half turned around without taking her eyes off the chaperoned group, which was advancing toward her. “Boboli Gardens. Tomorrow at eleven. I’ll find you—” This last she said as she rushed to join the others.
Lenny didn’t think anyone would blame her for allowing herself to be romanced by the man from the Piazza della Signoria. Though she understood that no one she knew would consider a sexual encounter in an allée in the Boboli Gardens (while the other girls were touring the sculptures) to be any sort of courtship. Flushed and still slightly out of breath, she caught the scent of his perspiration on the shoulder of her blouse.
“I thought adventurous American girls were a myth,” said Alessandro, a little out of breath himself.
“I’ve had a tendency to bore easily since I was seven years old.”
“What happened when you were seven?”
She said nothing as she studied his face. “How old are you?”
“How about, ‘How old are you, Alessandro Ross?’ ” he said, pretending to be her and introducing himself at the same time. “Thanks for asking,” he replied as himself, gesturing toward her to offer her name.
She sighed. “Lenny.”
“Lenny,” he said. He smiled. “Lenny, I’m forty-two years old.”
“We’re going to Fiesole tomorrow.”
“I’m not sure I can make it tomorrow.”
“Bring the Leica.”
And then she was gone.
Fiesole is a few miles north of Florence. It has a piazza (Mino), a cathedral (di San Romolo), an archaeological area (zona archeologica) with an Etruscan temple, medieval artifacts, and an amphitheater and Roman baths. There is a convent (di San Francesco) and, in nearby Monte Ceceri, a hilltop where a stone commemorates Leonardo da Vinci’s 1505 experiments with flight. It was in Monte Ceceri that Lenny and Alessandro arranged to meet, and Lenny posed naked for Alessandro, before the view and the blue sky and the whitest clouds. She stood with her back against the stone honoring da Vinci’s flying machine, her face in profile, gazing downward, her hands behind her as if bound by rope.
When Alessandro was on his knees before Lenny—her very coolness and startlingly beauty causing him to tremble at her feet—he said, “You are so different. I can’t believe my luck in meeting you.”
Lenny said, “Jesus. Luck.”
As Alessandro returned to Florence on the train that night, to his wife and child, he remembered thinking that having photographs of her, naked and shining and looking like something purely chimerical, was perhaps a bad idea. But then, when he thought about destroying the film, he couldn’t bring himself to do it, if for no other reason than to prove to himself that she really had happened.
“You think you won’t get sent home, but I assure you, Miss Van Pelt, you think incorrectly.”
Miss MacMurray believed that when Lenny had stepped outside during the trip to Santa Croce she had snuck off for something more than a smoke. Not that she could prove it; call it intuition. And when she discovere
d Lenny sitting, alone, at a small café with an empty cup of espresso and the remnants of cigarettes, she knew her suspicions to be true.
“I’m so sorry that I can’t provide anything to your liking,” said Miss MacMurray.
In truth, the church was Lenny’s favorite place of all their stops in Florence: She loved the high contrast of the black-and-white facade, which reminded her of a photograph, and the incongruous Star of David. She loved the simplicity of the interior, the Giotto frescoes, the sixteen chapels, and Michelangelo’s tomb with its three statues, which were meant to represent painting, architecture, and sculpture but which looked to her like a weird little dinner party.
“You think,” said Miss MacMurray, “you’re so much smarter than everyone else.”
Lenny took a last sip of her coffee. “It’s funny that for someone so interested in what I think you get it so wrong.” She dropped some coins in a dish as she picked up her bag.
“Where do you think you’re going?” asked Miss MacMurray.
“With you. Right? Isn’t that what you want?”
“Don’t patronize me,” said Miss MacMurray.
“I wasn’t.”
“You must think I was born yesterday.”
Lenny sighed. “Can we stop talking about what I think?”
“I am wiring your parents today to tell them they can expect you home on the first ship to New York.”
Lenny began walking away.
“Stop!”
“Look,” Lenny said, “do you want me on the first ship to New York or not? Because if you do, then I have to pack. And if not, then I need to get back with the other girls.”
Miss MacMurray was startled to see the seven girls watching them, which made her self-conscious and angry. Lenny’s patiently waiting to be told what to do made her even angrier. “Fine!” she said. “Now I have your attention!” Then, instead of elaborating on what she wanted to say to Lenny, whose attention she now possessed, Miss MacMurray stormed off in what she hoped was an attitude of power: She was leaving Lenny, not the other way around. Only to realize that, because she was their chaperone, it really wasn’t in her best interests to leave any student to her own devices. In fact, wasn’t that the very essence of the problem with Lenny Van Pelt in the first place?
Why was that girl so maddening? Miss MacMurray thought it was because she turned heads with her slender figure, her boyish haircut, parted on the side, so neatly tucked behind her perfect ears. Or maybe it was the blue eyes, with their slightly heavy lids, which showed intelligence and amusement and seemed to be a little secretive, and more than a little seductive.
Some would say that she resented Lenny for her moneyed family, her exquisite aspect, her youth, her lack of concern, but it wouldn’t be true. What Miss MacMurray envied, like any teacher on a teacher’s salary who has watched her own extravagant dreams diminish with each passing year (and those students who never seem to age), was Lenny’s freedom. The freedom that beauty (yes) affords but, more than that, that money can buy. This was the reason Lenny didn’t get upset when Miss MacMurray threatened to send her home.
Miss MacMurray was aware of how Alexander Van Pelt indulged his daughter, and somehow she knew that sending her home would actually brighten his world instead of throwing it into a tailspin over what to do about Lenny.
For all these reasons, Lenny was not on the next ship home to New York.
And so, for the remainder of the trip, Lenny continued slipping away from the arranged tours of museums, gardens, and monuments to meet Alessandro. Then sometimes disappearing quickly after her sexual encounters to stand before a painting, a fresco, a statue, a sculpture, a door, an altar to take in alone what she was supposed to be learning about in the moving classroom led by Miss MacMurray. Not only had Lenny decided on her first day at the Uffizi Gallery to eschew painting but she had realized that she enjoyed looking at the various artworks only if she could do so in silence and solitude. Miss MacMurray’s voice, no matter how informed the lesson, grated and distracted.
In this way, Lenny had visited the Uffizi (meeting Alessandro in the Piazza della Signoria); the Boboli Gardens (Alessandro in a copse near the allée); Santa Croce (Alessandro in an alley); the Ponte Vecchio (where a shopkeeper argued with a customer and Alessandro and Lenny slipped into the back room); the Duomo (behind a rather large pile of seemingly forgotten building materials on the upper platform, near the roof, as tourists trudged by, unaware of the lovers); the Gallerie dell’Accademia (in a janitor’s closet); and the Battistero, with Ghiberti’s gorgeous Gates of Paradise, so named by Michelangelo (very late at night, against a wall, where they were sure they were seen but didn’t care).
When it came time to leave Florence, Alessandro casually brought up the possibility of returning with Lenny, who caressed his face—the only tender gesture she had ever displayed toward him, which made their parting even more fraught. He watched her board the train, saw her sit down next to a boy who looked about her own age. And when she smiled at the boy without even a glance out the window at him, he saw himself as just one more thing she did on her summer vacation; he was a memory that would last only as long as the Atlantic crossing. This realization made him understand that he would be slow to forget her no matter how hard he tried, and he would try.
The Girl in New York, 1927
Lenny Van Pelt spent the rest of the summer on her parents’ farm; her pet pony had changed its alliance and now favored her twin brother. Boredom read in her face, her figure, and her short conversations with her mother and father. Mrs. Van Pelt, frustrated from trying to spend a day with her daughter, shopping and having lunch in the city, blurted out, “What is it you want, Ellen Van Pelt?”
At first Lenny thought that taking classes at the Art Students League and working on theater design would somehow quell the restlessness and dissatisfaction within her. New York wasn’t Paris, but it wasn’t Elysium either, and that was something to be grateful for.
The times when she felt both agitated and at rest were times spent with her father. When she posed for him, or when she stood next to him in the red-hued, intimate space of the little darkroom, or maybe when they discussed something one of them had read, or when he was explaining his latest health interest, such as having the gardener put in an organic garden (“no chemicals,” he said, “getting into the plants and the soil and us”).
They would repair the miniature train together, with Alexander replacing parts and tightening bolts as Lenny handed him the tools. She had been trained to be by his side, and, in exchange, he shared all his knowledge, enthusiasms, and worldview with her. They, as her mother often said—a statement that would be bemused or wistful or a little sad, depending on to whom she was speaking—were a world of two.
If asked, Lenny would say the only person who understood her was her father. She trusted him. How else to explain her willingness to remove her clothing and place her hands behind her beautiful back while he made her image on film in three dimensions?
Still, she longed to get back to Europe. In Europe, she believed she could relax. She could calm that restlessness that propelled her from place to place, person to person. She needed to put miles between her and her home, because home for her wasn’t like home for other people; home for her was the reason for her flight and her rebellion. As long as she remained in New York, she believed, she would never be free.
It was an exceptional spring day in the city. Lenny had been dutifully painting the stage flat of a play set in Heaven (which, in this case, resembled a room in Versailles) when her thoughts were so far from where she sat painting that each stroke slowed, slowed, slowed until she stopped. There she stood, no longer seeing the wall in front of her, her hand poised over the tray of paint.
Her memories and dreams were crowding in, including the one thing that she didn’t want to think about; that one encounter, undiminished by all the years, that she always had to keep at bay.
She dropped the brush into the tray. As she fished for her cigarett
es in the pocket of her paint-spattered overalls, she was already rushing out the door of the art school. Someone called her name, but all she could respond to was that one thought, that one moment that had shaped her life, and from which she was so often running.
Outside, the warm day had her unzipping her overalls, letting them drop to her waist, revealing the fitted, sleeveless white cotton undershirt that left little to the imagination. She smoothed her hair, tucking it behind her ears, exposing her long, elegant neck to the sun.
It was when she briefly closed her eyes (inhaling the passing scent of someone’s expensive perfume, so expensive it was barely in the breeze at all) that she was bumped in a way that caused her to lose her footing and sent her into the gutter.
Pitching into the street wasn’t such a momentous occurrence in sleepy Elysium, but in New York, finding yourself flailing into traffic could be fatal. And with Lenny’s usual luck, someone threw an arm across her upper chest, hauling her back to the safety of the sidewalk as if she were a mythical creature drawn from the deep.
“God, I’m sorry,” said Lenny, who was face-to-face with a man dressed with the precision of someone who had a valet; that is, his appearance was too elegant and too extravagant to look like the result of one person’s efforts. He was tall, and had a face that resembled a drinker’s, with a slightly enlarged nose and the faintest broken capillaries. Or maybe what she was seeing was the gourmand in him, the results of a life of fine dining and drinking for the past (she guessed) sixty years, if his midsection were any indication.
“Don’t be. No reason, actually.”
As she tried to collect herself, she was suddenly aware of her dirty, multicolored overalls hanging from her hips, revealing her skinny white undershirt. Without a word, she yanked the overalls up over her body.