The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  “Savannah’s pretty cool. Great art school there. Almost went to it. Guess we’ll just have to see where Beatriz lands on it.”

  “Speaking of Beatriz, it looks like she wants you to go with the Venice shot for Lorenzo and Renata’s book.”

  He regarded me for a moment. “Not one of Florence, eh?” His smile was subtle and knowing.

  My face grew warm. “Everyone knows my secret loves. Not fair.”

  Gabe gathered the two mock-ups and sat down at his desk. “Everyone thinks you should just go, Meg. What are you waiting for? Just go.”

  His candor stung a little. And I knew he didn’t mean for it to.

  “I want my dad to take me. You know that. He said he would. I’m not ready to give up on him. I don’t like giving up on people. Hey, want to join me and my mom at the Melting Pot tonight?” The invitation flew out of my mouth before I had a chance to consider it fully. But it was a safe enough request. Not a date. Not with my mom there.

  Gabe looked down at the folio in his hands. I had taken him by surprise. “I, uh, can’t do it tonight.” He looked up. “I’ve got plans, I’m afraid.”

  “Oh. Too bad.”

  “I’ve a date, actually.”

  Gabe had a date.

  “Oh. Well. That’s … that’s cool. Anyone I know?” My voice sounded distant in my ears, as if the question came from someone standing behind me.

  Gabe shook his head and smiled. “I don’t think so. I met her at my sister’s party last weekend.”

  A party Gabe had casually invited me to and which I had casually declined.

  “Sounds like fun.”

  Gabe’s smile widened. “Does it? I didn’t even say where we’re going.”

  Increased embarrassment warmed my face further. “Legoland, right?” Time to go. I turned to leave. “Have fun.”

  I heard him laughing behind me. “Another time, Meg?”

  “Sure. The Melting Pot with my mother and me. Round two. Check.”

  More gentle laughter.

  I chanced a look back at him, supposing he had returned his attention to the mock-ups on his desk. But he was watching me leave.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket, reminding me I had a voice mail waiting. The distraction was a welcome one. I pulled it out as I walked away. “Voice mail,” I said.

  Gabe nodded thoughtfully.

  Back in my office, I slid into my chair, annoyed that Gabe’s date bothered me. He had every right to go on a date. So did I, had there been someone I wanted to go on a date with. I pressed the button on my phone for voice mail, ready to hear my dad’s message and then get on with the business of the day. I began to read an e-mail message as I listened but stopped when I heard his voice. He sounded tired. Old.

  “Meg, it’s Dad. Sorry to bother you at work, but I need to talk to you about something. When you have a minute, can you call me back on my cell? Don’t wait until tonight. And don’t call me at the house. I mean, I’d appreciate it if you could call me back before I go home tonight. Okay. I guess that’s it. Talk to you later.”

  I replayed the message, listening to the tone of my father’s voice, the strange ache behind the words. I couldn’t remember my father ever sounding so … defeated.

  He was definitely not happy about something, and it was something he felt I needed to know about, something that would have some indirect effect on me.

  I’d been up to see him and his wife, Allison, only a few months earlier at New Year’s. Everything seemed fine. The last phone conversation my father and I had was three weeks ago. Nothing seemed amiss then either. Whatever it was, it was recent, and something he’d been able to mask in his earlier phone call to my mother. She would have said something if she’d detected something was wrong.

  I punched the button to call him back. When he answered, he seemed to exhale gently before saying my name.

  “Dad, what is it? What’s up?” I asked.

  He hesitated only a second. “Hey, I’m coming down to San Diego tomorrow. I know it’s really short notice, but I’d really like to talk to you. Will you be around? I won’t need more than an hour.”

  My father’s voice was calm but thin, as if he was saving the air in his lungs for nobler purposes than a quick phone conversation.

  “So you’re not going to tell me what this is about?” I laughed nervously.

  “How about I bring breakfast over to your place? Around ten?”

  He had ignored my first question and now my second. Something was very wrong. Maybe Allison had kicked him out. Maybe he was the one who’d had the affair. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  “Dad, I think I deserve to know what the urgency is, don’t I?” I asked tentatively. “If this is about you and Allison, it’s not like it’s any of my—”

  “I’d rather tell you in person, Meg.”

  He paused a moment, waiting for me to agree to his terms.

  “All right.”

  “So is ten okay? I’ll bring poppy-seed bagels. That’s the kind you like, right? The poppy-seed ones?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “Good. Okay. Then it’s all set.”

  “All right, I’ll see you at ten. And Dad, honestly, you could’ve called me on my work phone to ask me this. Beatriz and Geoffrey wouldn’t have cared.”

  “I … I wanted your new cell phone number. I know you gave it to me already, but I lost it.”

  I was about to tell him he could’ve called me at work to get my new cell phone number and I would have been happy to give it to him, but I stopped before the words came out of my mouth. He had wanted to talk to my mother. It’s why he called her before calling me. I’ve always been amazed that my father will still call my mother for advice and that she will still dispense it. But apparently he’d decided not to ask her opinion on whatever it was that was on his mind. Instead, he’d just asked for my cell phone number. The brief conversation with my mother had affected him somehow. Made him change his mind about what he wanted to say.

  Poppy-seed bagels were not my favorite. They were my mother’s.

  Sometimes when I visit my favorite of the country villas and I look at Master Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, I can imagine that before my mother was made to marry and the unraveling began, her life was like that of Venus arriving on her seashell at the dawn of her being. In the painting, the gods of the winds are pushing Venus to shore under a shower of blossoms, and a nymph stands ready with a cape to cover Venus’s beauty lest the viewer be undone by it. Venus doesn’t appear to know the effect she will have on us. She is unaware of how stunning she is. And if that were not enough, everything in the painting seems to be gently moving, beckoning, and inviting us to step inside the canvas.

  But in truth, it is only a painting. It whispers of a realm not meant for earthly eyes. The canvas is a window, not a door. But I thank God it is at least that. If we can’t step into that lovelier place, at least we can see that it exists. Sometimes that vista is the only thing that keeps us from collapsing into languid indifference under the weight of our circumstances, unable to appreciate anything truly marvelous.

  With my marriage to a man I barely know only hours away, being certain there is grandeur beyond what I can see just now comforts me.

  My grandfather chose a husband for my mother for political reasons, as all dukes must. Just as Ferdinando has chosen for me. But when my parents married, my mother did not want to join my father in Rome where his home was. I can’t blame her, though I feel badly for my father. She wanted to stay in Florence where she could live in her beloved palace, enjoy the Medici villas, and have my grandfather nearby. And my grandfather, who had what he wanted in my mother’s marriage—a useful relationship with the Orsini family—gave her what she wanted: her freedom to live where she wished.

  My parents saw each other infrequently. Sometimes my father came to Florence to see her. Sometimes she went to visit him.

  Some say that is the only miracle of my being born.

  4

  A few
minutes before seven, I stood on my porch with a cup of green tea. I saluted the sun as it clung coyly to the ocean’s horizon and wished Miles and Pamela a long and happy life. The day had been busy at work, and I’d not had time to muse much on the event that had sent Miles looking for another fiancée. Now as I stood watching joggers and surfers return to their cars from the beach two blocks away, the silence of my single life seemed shrill. I wondered what my life would’ve been like if I had ignored my instincts and married Miles.

  I’d been extremely fond of Miles, especially in the beginning. And when he asked me to marry him, his devotion awed me. It wasn’t until the multitude of wedding plans were finalized, and I had a distraction-free moment that I realized if Miles suddenly called off the wedding, I wouldn’t be devastated. I didn’t know what I would be, but I knew devastated didn’t describe it. Relief was the more apt word. At that moment I knew I couldn’t go through with marrying him.

  Telling him was an agonizing affair. He said little, but the look on his face communicated his hurt and surprise. It was a full week before he was ready to talk with me about how to put the brakes on the wedding machine.

  Kara, my best friend from high school, said I broke off my engagement because Miles wasn’t like my father.

  “Miles just isn’t like your dad, so deep down, Miles seems all wrong for you. Lots of women pick men who remind them of their dads,” Kara said the evening I called off the wedding. I had gone to her place after breaking the news to Miles, needing moral support and one of Kara’s famed herbal teas. Kara’s navy pilot husband, Tom, was on a two-week exercise, and their infant son was asleep in his crib. Her house was quiet.

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” I held the hot mug to my forehead to melt the tension headache that was swelling under skin and bone. “Why would I be looking for a man like my dad? He left my mother for another woman.”

  “But that’s just one of only a few things about him that disappointed you—”

  “That’s a pretty big thing.”

  Kara leaned in over the kitchen table. “Everything else about him, you kind of admire.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Okay, well, maybe it’s not admiration, but it’s what you are comfortable with.”

  I lowered the mug. “One of your psych professors tell you this?”

  “Doesn’t matter if one of them did. You measure every man against your dad. Even the not-so-great qualities you measure up against your dad’s not-so-great qualities. Miles isn’t anything like your dad.”

  “Which is a good thing.”

  “It actually shouldn’t matter, right? It shouldn’t be a good or bad thing how much or how little the guy a girl marries compares with her dad. Except for you, it does seem to matter. I’ve been watching you date since high school, Meg.”

  I had sat back in my chair, dumbfounded. “Not that I agree with you, but if you had doubts about me marrying Miles, why didn’t you say something?”

  Kara shrugged. “I thought it was a good thing you decided not to hold Miles to a standard he couldn’t meet. And shouldn’t have to. But if you don’t love him, Meg, you shouldn’t marry him. And that’s what you’re telling me, right? You don’t love him?”

  I took just a moment before answering, to reassess the reason I’d just called off my wedding. “I don’t miss him when he’s away. Shouldn’t I miss him when he’s on a business trip? Don’t you miss Tom when he’s not here?”

  Kara reached out to squeeze my hand. “Like my heart is missing from my body.”

  I winced now at the memory of those words and drained my tea to wash it away.

  I had done the right thing.

  I stepped back inside the cottage and set my cup on the kitchen counter next to files I had brought home from work. The printed pages of Sofia Borelli’s first two chapters peeked out of the Manila folder I put them in just before leaving. I had originally thought maybe I’d read the chapters before dinner. I stared at the folder now, though not truly seeing it, my thoughts in a jumble. Alex, on the oval throw rug by the back door, stretched and blinked, acknowledging my presence with a closed-mouth murmur. Then he curled back into a wheel of fur and closed his eyes.

  I grabbed my keys and purse and left.

  A cerulean twilight was falling across the coast as I maneuvered my car up North Torrey Pines Road toward the Melting Pot.

  As I waited at the traffic light by the university, I pondered whether or not I should tell my mother that Dad seemed deeply troubled about something. Maybe I should wait until I knew what it was and if he even wanted my mother to know.

  The light turned green, and I turned onto La Jolla Village Drive. A cascade of crimson taillights glimmered on the boulevard as it spread downward toward the interstate and the rest of upper La Jolla. As I joined the display of gleaming lights, I had the uncanny feeling that everything was about to change.

  My father never knew his parents. He was born Paolo Orsini, the first and only son, a few months after his father’s sudden death. When his mother remarried, as young titled women do, she left behind my father and his older sister. His mother died not long after her second marriage. An uncle, a cardinal my father barely knew, saw to his unbending upbringing as a future duke.

  Sometimes I comfort myself with this knowledge of where he came from. When I think of the life my father knew before he became a man, I can imagine why I seldom saw him smile.

  Anguish is a tutor, just as privilege is.

  5

  I handed my keys to the parking valet at the Melting Pot and pulled my linen jacket around my shoulders. A chilling breeze had cooled the air, and I couldn’t remember if I had closed the bathroom window. I laughed as I considered how my mother would react if I’d said that out loud and in her hearing. We’d be in the car and headed back to the cottage to make sure. An open window didn’t just let chilly air inside; it also provided access for a would-be burglar. Never mind that the window was only big enough for a six-year-old to fit through. A resourceful robber could easily finagle a six-year-old into crawling through the window and opening the front door for him for five bucks. Not that he would, but that he could, and that made all the difference. She’d be unable to enjoy her fondue until I had made sure the window was closed.

  Mom had become cautious after the divorce—about everything. And I guess I became a dreamer. There had been this secure life that I knew, where I lived in a house near my nonna and her Florentine echoes, where I had a mom and a dad, and custody was a word only policemen used. After the divorce I liked to dream about my old, safe life, and my mother liked to protect her new one. In that one tiny way, we were the same. At some point I stopped dreaming, but she never seemed to drop her caution. She wore it comfortably like a favorite hairstyle.

  My mother’s cautious life has kept her looking young; she eats sensibly, watches her weight, wears sunscreen even on rainy days, and gets a good night’s sleep every night. I have wondered more than once what my father thinks of how gracefully his former wife has aged in the years since the divorce. She is still very pretty. And they had been in love once.

  Inside the restaurant I told the hostess I was meeting my mother and that the reservation was under the name Elaine Pomeroy.

  “Yes. They are already seated. Right this way.”

  They?

  I opened my mouth to comment, but the hostess was already walking away. I fell in step behind her, ready to make a course correction. But then I saw my mother’s head at a booth near a wall. And another head across from her.

  A younger man.

  I closed my eyes for a second, incredulous. My careful mother was no fan of blind dates or online pairing. The risk of finding yourself being stalked by a psychopath—or at the very least pestered incessantly—was enough to keep her out of both camps and advising me to do the same. But she wasn’t above a little maternal matchmaking from time to time, since eligible men she deemed suitable had obviously already passed her scrutiny. She had offered a time or two
to introduce me to so-and-so’s nephew or son or personal trainer. I had declined. I don’t need or want my mother’s assistance in finding a husband, as she puts it. She knows this.

  So I opened my eyes to reward my mother with a dagger look before the man turned his head at my approach. But she missed it.

  I arrived at the booth, and the man looked up. He was nice looking, a few years older than me. Late thirties, perhaps. Dark hair fashionably cut and gelled into wavy submission. Tufts of premature gray at the temples. Nickel-hued, rimless glasses. Kind face. Ringless left hand. A bit stocky. He smiled at me.

  “Here we are,” the hostess said, turning her head to me, looking for direction as to which side of the booth to seat me.

  “Here, sit by me, Meg.” My mother scooted over and patted the empty space next to her.

  I hesitated, waiting for my mother to make eye contact and get the full effect of my wordless annoyance. But she just smiled up at me and again patted the seat. She looked calm and elegant in a silky Indian-print blouse and silver jewelry.

  I slid into the booth.

  “I’m so glad you could come tonight, sweetheart,” my mother said brightly. She turned her attention to the man across the table. “Devon, this is my daughter, Meg. Meg, Devon Sheller.”

  Devon Sheller reached across the table to shake my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Meg. I’ve heard so much about you.” His teeth were perfectly straight and glistening white.

  I took his hand and shook it lightly. “Uh, yes. Nice to meet you as well.”

  “Devon’s a pharmacist. He works at Rady Children’s Hospital. He’s been there for what, five years?” My mother raised a glass of water and took a sip.

  “Just about,” Devon replied.

  “That must be very interesting,” I said woodenly. Again I turned to my mother, but she was waving a waitress over.

  “Could you bring us a bottle of Pinot Grigio? The one from Australia? I liked that one last time.”