“All.” He paused. “I’m sorry if I offend you.”
“I don’t offend so easily. I like people with opinions.”
He hadn’t even noticed that Andrew was missing.
“Forgive me,” she said. “But I feel as though I’ve seen you somewhere before.”
“Well, I’ve been in Florence almost a week,” Henry said, as though that were sufficient. “I’m staying at the Pensione Ricci.”
“That explains it,” she said, tucking the book under her arm. “Well, perhaps I’ll see you at home base.”
Henry got a home base too?
“So you’re also staying there? At the Ricci?”
She nodded.
“The terrace is a nice place to have a drink,” Henry said.
“One of the nicest in all of Florence.”
“It’s particularly lovely around seven o’clock.”
“Yes, it is.”
“Maybe our paths will cross there this evening.”
“Maybe they will.”
Andrew pulled back from the doorway. After two beats Costanza walked by the opening to the cell in which he had been hiding. Even in profile he could see that her face had light in it. Light that, it appeared, this brief encounter with Henry had brought on.
Andrew waited a moment, then rejoined his father, who was staring ruminatively off into space.
Henry looked up and smiled. “It’s such a fine afternoon. Let’s go spend some time out in it.”
* * *
Henry and Andrew wheeled past the Duomo and Orsanmichele, through the straw market and across the Ponte Vecchio, where windows full of gold captured and deepened the late-afternoon sunlight and looked like the embers of dozens of tiny, slowly fading fires. Their fires were fading; Henry’s was picking up. They’d been here, or in a place similar to here, before. Henry, buoyant. Henry fueled by an almost manic energy, which was high and rising higher, along with the stack of shirts that, as soon as they’d found the shop he’d been looking for, he had piled up on the counter. Six or eight were in Henry’s stack, the same number set aside for Justin. Andrew had half-heartedly picked out a single one. Pale blue. He didn’t need or want it particularly, but he knew it was prudent to take part.
Andrew’s choice disappointed Henry. “My son here needs color,” he said to a compact gray-haired man, Signor Zubarelli himself. “He needs pattern. He needs help.” Henry waved his hand at a blue-and-yellow-checked shirt. “Let’s see one of those.” To Andrew he said, “Humor me. Put down your camera for a moment and try it on.”
In the dressing room, as Andrew changed into the shirt, he had a fleeting glimpse of how his life might look to someone who regarded it from the outside, someone who was not yoked and bound into it: here was a young man being shown the world by a father who wanted him to know things and experience things and have things, and all that he, the son, could do was chafe at his confinement and dream of his escape.
But to see Andrew in such a light was to have no real idea what it was like to be alone with Henry for these long, unbroken stretches. To be alone with Henry … to be alone with Henry meant being awakened at two in the morning whenever he felt a need to vent. It meant having the imperfections of your admittedly imperfect mother raked over for the thousandth time while you listened to a pretty much idealized view of your older brother. It meant being found wanting for not having an opinion about fifteenth-century religious frescoes. It meant having to anticipate, and provide ballast for, his mood swings. It meant having the spontaneity hurried out of you when Henry was feeling up and your independence squashed when he was down. It meant having your girlfriend (well, your former girlfriend) treated as a non-person. It meant knowing his love, yes, but it meant knowing that love to be sometimes consuming and selfish—self-interested.
Andrew stepped out of the dressing room. “I feel like I’m wearing a tablecloth. And the sleeves are too short.”
Henry pulled back the collar and looked at a label. “Equal to fifteen and a half, thirty-five, American, sì?” When Zubarelli nodded, Henry said, “Arms can’t grow a full size in three months.”
Zubarelli measured Andrew’s arms. Apparently they could.
Alas, nothing other than solid blue or solid white was in stock in Andrew’s size, Zubarelli reported after consulting his inventory; if Henry could be patient, he added, a shirt could be made up. But Henry could not be patient.
“Dad, it’s all right,” Andrew said from back in the dressing room. “The blue one is all I want.”
“You could find that at Bloomingdale’s.”
“Bloomingdale’s serves its purpose,” said a voice from across the room.
Andrew, rejoining his father, saw that the voice belonged to a tall man in an impeccable linen summer suit, a white linen shirt that was surprisingly crisp for so late on a summer afternoon, and a delicately patterned orange silk tie.
“Isaac,” said Henry. “What are you doing here?”
“The same thing you are, Henry.”
“But how do you know about Zubarelli?”
“Zubarelli is known. And Zubarelli and I”—Isaac nodded in the direction of the proprietor—“go way back.” Andrew watched this man take in Henry’s stack of shirts with a quick if subtle glance. “Though of course mine are made for me.” Isaac gestured upward with one hand to indicate—it seemed—his height.
In his other hand he was holding a shopping bag. Two shirts were in it. One was pale blue, like Andrew’s. The other was gray with thin white stripes.
Henry put his palm on Andrew’s shoulder. “This is my son Andrew. Andrew, this is my—colleague, Isaac Schoenfeld.”
Schoenfeld gave Andrew a nod so princely it looked like a bow. Everything about the man seemed formal, almost regal. His clothes, his speech, his elegantly formed face. “This is the second one?”
Henry nodded. “Justin’s at college, doing a composition intensive.”
Schoenfeld gave Andrew a slow evaluative look. “Seventeen and a half, yes?”
“Actually, it’s just a third,” said Andrew.
“A mathematician,” Schoenfeld said dryly.
“Math is more his brother’s specialty,” Henry said. Then: “What brings you to Florence, Isaac? Other than shirts.”
“Eileen and I are on our way to visit friends at a villa in the Marche. Florence is a nice point of transition. And I was able to hear a very interesting medical talk today besides.”
“Really? Whose?”
“Yours, of course.” To Andrew, Schoenfeld said, “Your father is a gifted speaker. He never loses his audience’s attention. I myself have never been very good at lecturing. I’m too shy.”
“You sell yourself short, Isaac.”
“The presentation was really very well done, Henry. Even without that lively PowerPoint, a layman might have understood.” Schoenfeld took a pair of dark glasses out of his breast pocket. “How much longer are you in Italy?”
“The conference finishes on Friday. Then we’re driving through Tuscany.”
“Ah, a working vacation. I suppose there are still some corners of Tuscany worth exploring—up near Volterra maybe, where things get a little ragged and wild.” Schoenfeld placed the glasses onto his well-shaped nose. “Nice to see you again,” he said to Andrew. “Happy shopping, gentlemen,” he added, and was off.
See you again? Andrew looked to Henry for an explanation, but Henry was busy handing his credit card to Zubarelli. Henry seemed to have forgotten all about Andrew’s boring, Bloomingdale’s choice of a shirt. In brooding silence he waited for his receipt.
Andrew watched this Schoenfeld through the window. When he stopped at the corner to allow a car to drive by, Andrew stepped closer, raised his camera, and framed a shot. As he was about to press the shutter, Schoenfeld turned back and looked in Andrew’s direction. It was as though he sensed that he was about to be photographed. Elongating his already long torso, he almost seemed to pose. After Andrew took the picture, Schoenfeld nodded at him, then
moved on.
Andrew walked back to his father. “What did he mean about seeing me again?”
Henry hesitated. “He met you when you were small. Isaac and your mother and I used to be—closer.”
Henry didn’t say anything else until he and Andrew were in the street. “I can’t abide that man. Shirts specially made. Friends at a villa. Who specifies villa? And working vacation—he made it sound like I was a traveling salesman. He called me a verbose simpleton who pours out language that even an imbecile can understand.”
“I heard him call you a ‘gifted speaker.’”
Henry slowed down for a moment, then turned to Andrew. “I appreciate your trying to make me feel better, Andrew. Really I do. But—no. Schoenfeld is pretentious and patronizing—to me.”
The sun, lowering in the sky, was sending out long golden fingers of light that tapped the surface of the river and set it sparkling. “It looks like we’re going to have a dramatic sunset,” Henry continued. “Why don’t we head back to the pensione and have a drink on the terrace? Angelo could bring us a bowl of those funny potato chips they serve, the ones that nestle together like poker chips.”
The ones that nestle together like poker chips. A tiny coaxing detail, the sort of enticement you’d offer a child, like a lollipop after a checkup. Henry could have just said Pringles. They’d talked about how odd it was that they were served in all the bars in Florence.
“It’s so nice being out,” said Andrew. “Let’s go sit in a piazza.”
“But the terrace is up high—it’s bound to attract a breeze. And those views.”
Andrew persisted. “Isn’t Santo Spirito near here, the one without the façade? Didn’t you say it was your favorite church? I’d really like to take some pictures over there, see how the light hits it as the sun is going down.”
Henry’s glance lingered on the lowering sun, the coloring sky.
“Santo Spirito it is then,” he said with a sigh.
* * *
The next morning when Andrew appeared at the door to the salone, Costanza was again sitting at the desk, again reading through a stack of typewritten pages. Her face looked less worried, somewhat less worried, than it had the day before.
He stepped on the dry parquet. It creaked. He took another step, produced another creak.
With her finger holding her place, Costanza glanced at his damp hair. “Back from a run?”
He shook his head. “Just a late shower. I didn’t sleep very well.”
“Insomnia can be a beast.”
“It wasn’t my insomnia. It was my father’s. He gets up in the middle of the night and wants to talk.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” Costanza said.
Andrew approached the window. He raised and lowered his camera. Nothing on the street engaged him.
Every minute or so she turned another page. Generally there was something soothing about the way paper sounded as it was shifted from one place to another. Yet the expression on Costanza’s face was once again the opposite of soothed. Whatever she was reading was now causing her eyes to narrow. She read a few more pages, then sat back and rubbed her neck.
“What time does your father finish today?”
“Sometime after four I think. But he always stays to answer questions.”
“So you’re free for a while?”
Andrew nodded.
“Have you seen the other David?”
“The other David?”
“By Donatello. It’s in the Bargello.”
* * *
Her dress was pale green this time, and her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail that fell down the center of her back. Her hat was the same and her oval sunglasses were the same, and the warm sunlight brought out her scent, which was something floral and floated off her as she moved.
They reached the narrow, shadowy via Condotta, walking the whole time in silence. As the sidewalk could accommodate only one of them, Andrew fell back and studied her from behind. He noticed the way she walked, how her hips, rising and falling, caused her body to swing back and forth gently on an invisible axis as she made her way down the crowded street. He noticed too how remote she was, how withdrawn.
Stepping into the street so that he could walk alongside her, he said, “You’re kind of quiet this morning.”
She hesitated for a moment before saying, “I suppose I’m wondering why you hid from me yesterday at San Marco.”
Andrew’s face reddened.
“I glimpsed you out of the corner of my eye as I was walking out, after I spoke to your father. You looked … tortured.”
Andrew buried his hands in his pockets. “How did you know he was my father?”
“He mentioned the pensione. And something about him reminded me of you.”
This, when he tried so hard to be different from Henry.
“I wasn’t hiding from you.”
She lowered her sunglasses and gave him a look.
Reddening, now flushing, burning. How was it possible for skin to have a mind, or behavior, of its own?
“The thing is,” he said, “I was so glad—I was so glad to have something … for myself.”
Costanza pushed her sunglasses back up in front of her eyes. “I get that,” she said.
* * *
Upstairs at the Bargello not one but two Donatello Davids were on display, the early statue in marble, stiff and with oddly blank eyes, the later one in bronze. It was the bronze David that Costanza had brought him to see. Donatello’s version wasn’t like the Michelangelo David, the one even the laziest of tourists flocked to. He wasn’t mighty, but soft and beautiful, in an almost feminine way. He stood with his left hand on his hip, which was cocked. This David wasn’t about to kill but had already killed. Even though his left foot was planted squarely on Goliath’s severed head, he looked young and vulnerable. He wore a floppy hat and leather boots but was otherwise naked; locks of hair wound out from under the hat and onto his shoulders. From behind it wasn’t at all clear if he was a boy or a girl or some amalgam of the two. The statue may have been made out of bronze, but his body seemed pliable, alive in its stillness, and quietly sensual. A youthful, ambiguously gendered, sexy Old Testament hero? It made no sense, and the feelings the statue stirred in Andrew unsettled and confused him. But then many things he felt around Costanza unsettled and confused him.
“The first thing most people say is that it marked the return to the classical nude,” Costanza said. “But that’s not what I think about when I look at it. I think that, when you finally slay your demon, you ought to appear more—more rattled, to say the least.”
“Whereas he seems so calm.”
She stepped closer. “Maybe it’s because he’s so young and doesn’t understand that even after you do away with your demons, they can go on living inside of you.”
“You don’t have to be old to understand that,” Andrew said.
Costanza circled the statue. “Do you want to tell me about her?”
He gave her a confused look.
“A simple guess,” she said with a shrug.
Did he want to tell her? He wasn’t sure. “Her name is Charlotte,” he said experimentally. “For Charlotte Brontë. She’s a year ahead of me at school. Her parents are English professors, and they live on the Upper West Side.”
Costanza nodded. The nod was like a floodgate lifting. It came pouring out of him. The sister, who was named Emily. The dog, Branwell, and Anne, the bird, a parrot they kept in a brass cage. The books, everywhere. Four, five thousand of them, probably, on shelves, on tables, in the dining room, the hall, the living room. The living room with its peculiar arrangement of furniture, six comfortable armchairs in a circle: four for family, two for guests. They lived in those chairs. They ate in them, they napped in them, mostly they read in them. Which was what he and Charlotte did the first time they had what you might call a date. After thinking about it for months, he asked her if she wanted to go see a movie. She said she didn’t like movies t
hat much. He asked her if she would like to go for a walk. She said she got enough exercise on the swim team, which was where they had met. Instead she invited him over to read.
“Very romantic,” said Costanza.
“Well, not at that point it wasn’t.”
“No, I mean it. The books. The parrot.” Her eyes sparkled with interest.
“I don’t think anyone said more than three words the whole night. Oh, her mother offered me a cookie. It was like biting into cement. Anne, the parrot, said, ‘Don’t eat the cookie! Don’t eat the cookie!’ Afterward Charlotte asked if I would like to see her room. Her parents didn’t even look up from the page. We got up and walked down a long narrow hall and we went into her room and we … talked.”
Costanza widened her eyes. Instead of continuing, though, Andrew simply blushed again.
“That’s the whole story?”
He sighed. “For nine, almost ten months everything was okay, actually everything was great, between us. At least from my point of view. Then last week, just before I came here, we went for a walk in Central Park, and she told me she couldn’t see continuing to go out with me after she left for college. Even though we still had the summer ahead of us, she felt it was time to—to be free.”
Costanza considered for a moment. “She was afraid.”
“Of what?”
“What she felt for you.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I was once an eighteen-year-old girl, myself.”
“I really cared for her. I even grew to like that stupid squawking bird.”
Andrew’s eyes had begun to sting. He averted them from Costanza.
“Birds have no business living in New York apartments,” she said. “A double cage is too heavy-handed a metaphor for my taste.”
He was on some sort of unprecedented automatic pilot: all this talk, all this feeling, all of it told and shown to someone he scarcely knew. He hadn’t even told his father what had happened with Charlotte.
Andrew and Costanza headed toward a pair of wooden chairs. Surrounded by statues frozen on their plinths and pedestals, they sat for a few moments in silence, then Costanza reached into her purse. “I almost forgot, I have something for you.” She gave Andrew a small bag, the bag from the day before, the one Henry had knocked out of her grasp. The one with the book, the Vasari.
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