The Girl in the Glass

by Susan Meissner

  “Florence is in Tuscany; this you probably know. Many vineyards in the countryside. In the city you can take your empty bottle to any local vino sfuso, and they will fill it for you. You have to remember what you have them put in or make your own label. Vino sfuso wines are made from grapes that are what you might say, common. Not fancy, yes? Ordinary. You have to drink it soon after you buy.”

  She placed a plate of sliced bread and basil-flecked mozzarella balls before me. “A little snack for you while I make us supper.”

  I sipped the wine, and its robust warmth was soothing.

  Sofia opened a fridge no taller than either one of us. “So I have some pancetta and onions. Tomatoes. I throw together with some pasta and pecorino. Some basil. You will like it?”

  “Sounds wonderful.”

  Sofia poured olive oil into a skillet and tossed some chopped garlic into it. Then she began to brown the pancetta and onions. The little kitchen began to smell like a corner of heaven. She turned from her cookstove, a spatula in hand.

  “I am just so pleased you are here,” she said. “I have to pinch myself to know I am not imagining this, that I am talking to you in my kitchen.”

  “I can hardly believe it myself.” I took another sip. “Yesterday—I think it was yesterday—I thought it would be next year before I’d finally see Florence.”

  She stirred and then stopped. “Next year?”

  Perhaps it was the wine or the length of time I had been up, but I told Sofia exactly how I came to be at her doorstep.

  “He didn’t come,” Sofia murmured when I was finished, speaking of my father, her voice soft with compassion.

  “No. No, he didn’t.” I popped a mozzarella ball into my mouth. Smooth and creamy as butter.

  She set a pot of water on the stove. “We will have to talk about something else, Marguerite. I do not know what to say to that.”

  Fine with me. I didn’t know what to say to that either. My phone vibrated next to me, and I thought for sure my mother had just read my text.

  But it was Lorenzo, at last. “Cara! Where are you?”

  I knew it would cost me a buck a text probably, but I decided to have some fun with him.

  “Where are you?” I texted back.

  “At home! Where are you?”

  “You always ignore people you call ‘my treasure’?”

  “Playing bocce ball! Left phone at flat! Just got home. Where are you?”

  “Was alone on your doorstep. In the dark.”

  “I looked up and down the street for you!”

  “Not on the street anymore.”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  “Your polizia cars are smaller than police cars in America.”

  “You torture me!”

  I’d had my fun.

  “I am next-door. At Sofia’s.”

  I looked up at Sofia who was slicing ruby-red tomatoes. “I think we might be hearing Lorenzo knocking on your door in about two seconds.”

  But I was wrong. He didn’t knock. He just came swooping into the room.

  I’d seen Lorenzo only in head shots and Skype screens where I could see his upper body. Geoffrey and Beatriz had met Lorenzo and Renata in person at a conference in New York a couple of years back, but I hadn’t been on that trip. Lorenzo had been mostly a floating head, five o’clock shadow, tanned skin, coffee-brown eyes—for four years. For some reason I was unprepared to see him with legs, moving toward me. I stood slowly from the table as he barreled into the little kitchen and swept me up in his arms to kiss me on both cheeks.

  His muscled arms, the scent of his cologne, and his height and physical strength covering my body overwhelmed me. I had not been hugged by a man since I fell into my dad’s embrace on Poppy-Seed Day. I was tired from jet lag, from suppressing my odd feelings toward Devon, from the emotional duress of the last twenty-four hours, from yet another crushing disappointment from my father. There in Lorenzo’s strong arms, the brave front I had constructed crumbled. As he laughed his way through our hug, my defenses evaporated and traitorous tears began to ooze out of my eyes.

  I wanted to stop them, but they wouldn’t be stopped. He started to pull away after he had planted his kisses, and I would not let him.

  I drew my arms tighter around his neck, wanting to squeeze the manly strength out of him, wanting to feel safe and wanted. It seemed I couldn’t hold him tight enough, and my skinny arms were like a cheap vice around him. I was aware of the second he understood that something was wrong about why and how I was there. He startled at that moment of clarity, but then a second later, he brought his hand up to the back of my head and began to stroke my hair, whispering soothing Italian words. I buried my head in his chest, refusing to cry out loud but letting the tears fall since I couldn’t stop them anyway.

  After a moment he began to sway with me, like a parent might comfort an addled infant, and I was surprised at how quickly that lullaby motion coaxed my tears into submission. It was like a dance with no steps, and soon I was swaying too. He was still whispering something. And I was vaguely aware that Sofia had turned her attention back to what she was cooking.

  “I’m sorry,” I muttered.

  “You do not need to be sorry about anything. What happened, cara?”

  I would’ve liked to have had a one-sentence answer for that question. When someone sees a bandage on your arm and they ask “What happened?” usually you can answer in a sentence how you got hurt. I cut myself in the kitchen. I fell playing soccer. My neighbor’s dog bit me. But I didn’t know how to tell Lorenzo what had happened to make me fall apart in his arms.

  It wasn’t one thing; it was everything.

  I could sense him looking at Sofia. She said something softly to him that sounded like this: Suo padre ha rotto il suo cuore.

  The only two words I knew were suo and padre. Her father.

  Lorenzo stayed for dinner. Sofia added more pasta to the pot, and the three of us crammed around her little table, eating from wide ceramic bowls and finishing off the anonymous bottle of wine.

  When we were done, Lorenzo grabbed my hand and told Sofia he would have me back pronto, that he just wanted to walk me to the river and back.

  “The Arno by moonlight is the only time it looks pretty,” he said.

  Sofia said she’d clear away the dishes while we were gone and she’d make coffee to have with some anisette cookies she had made the day before.

  I could barely keep my eyes open, but I left with Lorenzo.

  On the stairs, with my hand firmly in Lorenzo’s, I told him I didn’t want to talk about my dad.

  “I don’t want to talk about him either,” he said.

  We emerged onto the street, calmer now than it had been earlier but still electric with motion.

  “Did you see the Duomo when you came in?” he asked as we turned west onto the narrow street.

  “My taxi driver didn’t exactly point out any highlights.”

  He laughed and pointed behind us. “It’s just over there. I am sure you will see it tomorrow. Very pretty in the sun.”

  The night air was fragrant with exhaust, warm stone, and dinner plates from open kitchen windows in the flats above the stores. I could close my eyes and pretend for a moment that I was back in San Diego, except that in the distance, I could hear the seesaw siren of a European ambulance. “Sorry to spring this trip on you like this,” I said.

  “No matter. You are here at last. Renata is gone until Tuesday. But we will take you to dinner. She will want to take you to her favorite place.”

  Tuesday. Did that mean I wouldn’t see either one of them again until Tuesday evening? “You have a busy week?”

  He pulled me across the street. “Not too busy for you, cara. We make time for you.”

  We turned down a second street lined with shops all shuttered for the night. A sandal-maker. Stationers. A pharmacy. A clothing store for children. A candle shop. A little store that seemed to sell nothing but olive oil. A sweet shop. Cars and scooters z
ipped past us as we crossed another street, and then another and another. Then suddenly we were at the river. A line of Vespas, parked like dominoes ready to fall, lined the street that overlooked the water. Bridges stretched across the Arno at well-placed intervals, looking like bracelets.

  Lorenzo pointed across the water. “The Pitti Palace is just on the other side, and the Boboli Gardens. Very beautiful. And that”—he pointed to a bridge with windowed-structures all along its length—“is the Ponte Vecchio. Old Bridge. The Germans didn’t bomb that one. Long ago, butchers had their shops there, and they tossed all the carcasses into the Arno to drift down to Pisa, a place no one liked. Funny, no? The Medicis didn’t like the smell, though. Tossed the butchers out and put goldsmiths on the bridge. They are still there.”

  I waited to see what it was that Lorenzo had wanted to tell me by bringing me out to the river’s edge. I thought maybe he’d ask if I was all right staying with Sofia since I had only just met her. Or if I thought her memoir had a chance. Or if I’d changed my mind about why I had cried like a schoolgirl in his arms and did I want to talk about it after all. Because all those things were on my mind, and I was surprisingly ready to talk about all of them.

  But apparently he really did just want to show me the Arno under moonlight.

  We walked back to the flat, me at a sauntering pace, and I nearly gave in to Lorenzo’s laughing offer to carry me up the stairs when we returned. Sofia’s coffee was the best I’d ever had, and there were no worries that it would keep me awake. I could barely finish my cookie, my eyelids were so heavy.

  “Ha bisogno di dormire,” Sofia said to Lorenzo, as we sat in her living room and my head kept lolling back on the cushions behind me.

  I didn’t understand all the words, but dormire meant sleep. I knew that from my nonna.

  It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t packed a nightgown. And I guess I said this out loud. Sofia told me not to worry, she’d loan me one. She stood, took our cups to the sink, and then disappeared down the hall.

  Lorenzo leaned in and kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Have fun with Sofia. I’ve a photo shoot during the day, but I should be home in the evening. We can sit outside on my balcony and have a drink.”

  I snuggled into him like a child and he laughed. Then he leaned in closer, as if to kiss me again, somewhere different than on my forehead. I was too tired, too emotionally bankrupt to process why Lorenzo would want to kiss me and would I want him to, but his lips brushed against my ear nonetheless, and I gasped.

  But he was not kissing me. He was whispering something in my ear.

  “It is good you are here with Sofia. Do not think you need to get a hotel room. She will love having you here. She’s a kind soul. But be careful with her book and with what matters to her, eh? She is a bit fragile.”

  My response was lightning swift. “Aren’t we all?”

  Then he did kiss me. At the curly place on my ear. “Ragazza buffa,” he said, laughing.

  He sprang up from the couch and yelled something to Sofia. I caught the word domani. Tomorrow. And she yelled something back.

  He turned to me and winked. “Ciao, cara mia.”

  Then he was out the door.

  Sofia appeared a moment later, and in her arms was a pink cotton nightgown frothing lace everywhere.

  I was too tired to ask for just a pair of sweats and a T-shirt. I stood and took it from her.

  “Thank you, Sofia. For everything.”

  Her eyes glistened. “It is my pleasure.”

  As we walked down the hall, I asked her what ragazza buffa meant.

  She grinned. “Funny girl.”

  Lorenzo thought I had been kidding.

  I have some of my parents’ letters written when they were away from each other, which was nearly all the time. They spoke of missing each other and wishing the time would pass until they were reunited again. I read those words, and I hear what is said about my parents, and I wonder if it is truly possible to live two lives.

  I know what people say happened to my mother when I was five. And I know what I want to believe happened to my mother when I was five.

  If life is a series of choices and consequences of what you choose, then shouldn’t I choose carefully what I will believe?

  When nothing else about your life is yours to orchestrate, shouldn’t you at the very least decide to believe the good that is possible? Especially if that is all you remember?

  16

  I awoke in Sofia’s childhood bed, disoriented, disheveled, and desperately thirsty. A brilliant sun was streaming in through a slender opening in the curtains like a knife blade, and I knew before even looking at my phone that it was late morning.

  I sat up slowly, rubbing sleep from my face. I reached for my phone at the bedside table and saw that it was ten thirty and that I had two text messages from my mother and one from a number I didn’t recognize. I opened that one first, instantly hopeful that it was my father wondering where I was.

  The text was indeed from him, but his short message was not the explanation I had hoped for.

  Please forgive me, angel. Someday I will explain. I am borrowing someone’s phone. He doesn’t know it. Please don’t text. I won’t have his phone anymore when you get this. Plenty of money for you on the card. Enjoy Florence. Pls don’t come home until after Friday. Love you.

  Enjoy Florence and don’t come home until after Friday? Don’t come home until after Friday? It was the most inexplicable thing my father had ever said to me. I read the message three times and finally switched to read my mother’s texts to see if she had also heard from him. But her first text was an angry lament about my being epically stood up in a place I’d never been before. The second was a rant that Allison had contacted her yesterday and she now assumed I was again protecting my father’s whereabouts by pretending I hadn’t met up with him in Florence. I was going to have to e-mail my mother not to text me unless it was an emergency.

  I could certainly manage to stay in Florence well beyond Friday, but why should it matter? Unless he was going to drop another bombshell on Allison she’d somehow blame me for.

  I rose from the bed, listening for any sounds in the flat. I heard nothing. I opened the door and stepped into the hall. From the hallway I could see Sofia’s bed, freshly made.

  “Sofia?” I called out. No answer.

  I headed into the little bathroom and then made my way to the kitchen for a glass of water. On the kitchen table was a note, a plate of knobby rolls and round slices of blood orange, and a brown file folder.

  Dear Marguerite,

  I am canceling my tours this week so that I can show you Florence! I am just making arrangements for us, and then I will be back. Then this afternoon, I am taking you to the Accademia to see the statue of David. Lorenzo popped over this morning, but I told him to let you sleep. He will stop over later tonight. I printed some more pages of my book for you, if you would like to read them while you have your breakfast. And maybe after the Accademia, you can tell me what you think? You can use my bathroom to shower if you want.

  Help yourself to anything in the kitchen. If you need to use the Internet, the wireless network password for the building is topo27&.

  See you soon. I hope you didn’t have other plans for today!

  Sofia

  P.S. My little balcony is a lovely place to drink coffee and read!

  I didn’t have other plans for the day.

  I found bottled water in her fridge and unashamedly took one, downing the whole thing in one long guzzle. She had made coffee earlier, and I touched the carafe gingerly, hoping it was still warm, and was overjoyed that it was. I poured a cup, grabbed a slice of bread, and headed to her bathroom first and then to her balcony.

  To study the history of my family is to acquaint yourself with the best and worst that mankind has to offer. Nora told me at Genga’s painting of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian never to spend too much time thinking about how terrible some people can be. Most a
re terrible not because of who they are; they are terrible because of what they had or did not have. I’ve heard it said that love drives people to jealousy. But I don’t think that can be true. Fear drives people to jealousy, not love, Nora said. Fear drives people to do a lot of things in the name of something else.

  There are but a few reasons that people kill one another. Revenge, of course, is one. Greed, a second. Jealousy, a third. Envy and jealousy are not the same thing. Envy sets you to obsessing about the thing you want; jealousy sets you to obsessing about the person who has it. And jealousy like that can lead to murder. It did. Within my own family. What I learned about Nora’s parents, I learned from Papa and the history books. It is not something Nora ever speaks about. And why should she?

  I don’t know if it was jealousy or revenge or greed that drove Nora’s father to kill Isabella, her mother. Some say it is because she refused to move to his home in Rome when she married him. Some say his longtime lover in Rome wished to take Isabella’s place as duchess. Some say he was jealous of Isabella’s longstanding affair with his cousin. Some say her older brother, Francesco, wanted her out of the picture after their father died. Nora was just five and her little brother four when their father murdered their mother and then abandoned them. So little is written about Nora; she all but disappeared when her mother died. History books tell us that when she grew up, Nora married a man named Alessandro Sforza, that she played music, and that she bore him several children. But history does not tell us how she coped with losing her mother at the hands of a father who cared nothing for her. That is of more interest to me than anything. And while Nora speaks to me in ribbons of whispers, we do not have conversations. It’s not as if she hears anything I say back to her. It’s more like her words have been pressed into the stone and paint and have been waiting for someone like me, all these years, to bend to hear them.

  I asked my parents once how a little girl so young could survive what Nora Orsini survived. Mama never knew what to say when I asked the hard questions. But I know this bothered her, too, what happened to little Nora. Because her eyes welled up with tears, and she looked at my father so that he could answer. My mother was always tender-hearted that way.