The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  Ed said, “Are you thinking we will never meet again?” He pressed his hand to my back and led me around a corner, and the Hotel Arena sign appeared a few hundred yards ahead of us.

  I said, “No.” I was actually thinking I might never see T. again. “The manuscript—my husband’s notes and speculations—I don’t know what else to do with them.”

  Ed said, “You could read them.”

  “I could also clothe the hungry and feed the naked,” I said.

  “Or vice versa,” Ed said.

  “The point is you’d be doing me a favor.”

  “I don’t think now’s the best moment for making big decisions,” Ed said. This was precisely what people said whenever I threatened to sell my too-big house. I didn’t admire how easily he seemed to slip into his preachy tone. A little more cheerily, he added, “I’m thinking we will meet again. You have a house in Cambridge. If you can’t be bothered to read it, stick the manuscript in a closet and save it for me. You never know when I might turn up. Harvard has a library or two a person might want to consult.”

  Harvard had ninety libraries, and I was surprised at how much self-discipline was required to prevent me from repeating this boast. “You’ll be welcome any time,” I said. I knew I owed Ed something more than a promise of clean sheets, but I was a little loopy from the wine, and more than once I almost asked him straight out about the crazy hand-rolled cuffs on his blue jeans. Finally, I said, “T. will be all right on his own, right?” I felt myself tearing up, so I pretended I’d dropped something. “Without you, I mean. Won’t you miss him?”

  “He’ll be back. Caroline is arriving later this week.”

  “The ex-wife?” It was spontaneous combustion—my interest was ignited. This was why I hadn’t allowed myself to turn on the television. Ten minutes of any soap opera, even in a language I didn’t understand, and I was in. “Caroline,” I said calmly, hoping to tamp down my prurient reflexes. “Your sister.”

  “The first ex-wife,” Ed said. “T. and Caroline both married again, and both divorced again, and soon they will meet again, though they are both pretending that this won’t happen, as if no one has yet invented a train to connect Padua and Florence, and I cannot begin to tell you how desperately I need a friend.” Ed pulled me across the street to a bench on the tiny slice of greenery across from the hotel. “There is something I should tell you, something T. should have told you—oh, E., if you would just stay, we’d have time for everything. And T. would happily foot the bill for you to go to Florence—in case he hasn’t mentioned this, he’s rich as Croesus—and then you and I could go back to the chapel while T. and Caroline lick each other’s self-inflicted wounds.”

  I didn’t sit beside Ed on the bench. I said, “I don’t want to know about T.’s marriage,” which surprised me as much as it seemed to surprise Ed. I wanted to say more, but I honestly couldn’t remember exactly what Ed had just said. I just knew I felt suddenly defensive, not of T. but of my fondness for him, the comfort of knowing he had recognized my sadness and confusion and wrapped it all up in his protective nonchalance, so instead of having to explain it, or apologize for it, or pretend it wasn’t there, I could safely stuff it into Rachel’s red bag and carry it with me, even occasionally check it at the door and spend an hour or two without it. I hoped maybe I had done as much for him. I surely didn’t think he wanted me to do much more. I said, “You know, I don’t even know his first name.”

  Ed calmly said, “So ask him.”

  He had a point. “Apparently, I don’t want to know.”

  Ed said, “It’s rewarding to mystify the obvious. It’s called religion.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was adrift, in danger of drowning in the stew of affection and confusion T. and Ed had served up for lunch.

  Ed looked exasperated by my silence, or deeply bored. He stood up. “Sermon over,” he said, handing me my umbrella as we headed across the street. “The chapel opens at nine o’clock tomorrow morning,” he said.

  I didn’t know if this was an invitation or a point of information. I said, “This lamb is headed home tomorrow.” With the handle of the umbrella hung over my arm, I felt like Little Bo Peep.

  Ed suddenly grabbed my arm and pulled me back toward him. “Don’t wander away just yet.”

  “Oh, Ed.” I didn’t want to hurt his feelings, but I really didn’t want a tearful good-bye. “You’ll be fine.”

  “It’s you I’m worried about,” he said, tugging me back toward him again.

  “I’m going to be fine, just fine,” I assured him, struggling to escape his grip. “So fine I will surprise everyone.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, but he would not let me move forward. “Right now, though, you’re sailing past your hotel. I think you might be drunk.”

  A few typically fixed items—the hotel sign, the parked cars, the cobblestones—were spinning.

  Ed steered me back ten feet and opened the door to the lobby. He held on to my arm until I was inside. I steadied myself on the stairs, using the umbrella as a cane. By the time I was in the elevator, I was sober enough to know I hadn’t even said good-bye.

  AS I OPENED THE DOOR TO MY ROOM, MY PHONE RANG, AND by the time I found it, most of the rest of the contents of my red bag were scattered on the carpet. I said, “If I drank that much at lunch every day, I’d probably have more friends.” I was relieved T. had kept his promise to call. It had seemed just as likely we would never speak again. “I think Ed might have just confessed to me, but I already forgot his sins.”

  “Mom?” Rachel sounded unnervingly nearby. “Hello? Is this Elizabeth Berman’s phone?”

  I didn’t want to say anything because I couldn’t remember where in Italy I was supposed to be according to her itinerary.

  Rachel said, “Hello?” This was not a question. It was a demand.

  Finally, I said, “Rachel? You’ll never guess where I am.”

  “Mom? I know you’re in Vicenza today, but who were you just talking to?”

  It took me a few seconds to realize I had international immunity—I didn’t have to answer every question she asked. “Are you at the office already?”

  Rachel said, “It seems like you’ve been gone for ages, and your trip is barely under way.” I heard birds singing in the background. “Still having a good time? Still happy to be there?”

  I said, “Are you in the woods somewhere?”

  “We’re in Mohonk. At the lake house. With David’s parents.” She sounded like someone dictating a telegram, holding back the bad news. “We drove up last night. The boys and I. They’re going to stay. Just for a week. Or two.”

  The other grandparents were a little younger, a little richer, and a little sloppier than Mitchell and I, which were unfair advantages in the long-standing competition for the affection of the two young boys. Just the mention of David’s parents made me want to buy a couple of new bikes or a pup tent for camping out in the backyard. They had a deepwater lake with a dock and diving board, for god’s sake. I said, “Was this your idea or David’s?”

  Rachel said, “It’s just for a few days. I’m staying through the weekend, and we can see how long after that. I just woke up and realized I hadn’t told you about this before you left—or did I?”

  If Sam was this vague, I’d figure he was high. “Is everything okay, sweetie?”

  “Exhausted from the drive last night,” Rachel said. “The birds woke us. There’s something else.”

  It had just occurred to me that Rachel didn’t know I was flying home tomorrow. When I woke up in Cambridge on Thursday morning, I would really be alone. I heard one of the boys yelling from far away.

  “Willy says hello. I have an interview in the city next Monday.”

  “In New York?”

  “It’s actually a second interview. I think they’re serious about me. I’m not really talking about it yet. David’s parents think I’m here on a business trip.” Rachel had moved to within a few feet of Willy. I heard him say, “Grandpa sa
ys I’m allowed,” and then Rachel said, “Not out of the box. Get a bowl and a spoon.”

  This was a typical breakfast at the lake house. Surely, no one had thought to buy milk, so if Willy got lucky, he might find some crème fraîche to dump onto his dry cereal. I said, “New York.”

  Rachel said, “New York, New York.”

  I said, “Sam will be happy to be near you and the boys.”

  Rachel said, “He’s already asking if the firm has season tickets for the Yankees.”

  So Sam knew.

  Rachel said, “It’s all still up in the air. For starters, I don’t even have an offer. I haven’t told the boys, of course. Nothing is settled. David and I would have to figure out what this means for his time with the boys, for starters.” Other voices filtered through the long silence. “I’ll call again soon so we can talk more. It might all come to nothing, but I really want to know what you think.”

  I said, “New York!”

  Above a rising din of voices, the last I heard from Rachel was, “Is that chicken skin he’s eating?”

  WHEN I WOKE, MY FACE WAS PRESSED AGAINST RACHEL’S red bag at the wrong end of the bed, my head was throbbing, and my feet were propped up on the pillows. The evening sky had cleared, and the last light of day angled up from somewhere well below the tile rooftops in the streets beyond my window. By the time I managed to leverage the lower half of my body off the mattress to send some blood to my legs, I could see my bedside alarm, and after a few seconds of immense concentration, I could make out the illuminated dial. It was almost eight-thirty PM. My mouth seemed to be lined with glue and sand, but I didn’t trust my balance enough to venture forth for a glass of water. From my perch, I could see that I hadn’t even bothered to collect the spill of coins and brochures and pens on the carpet before I’d passed out from my drunken lunch. I found my phone underneath my thigh and listened to two messages, both of them from T.

  He had recorded the first at five. “Matteo tells me that the group that went to Vicenza today is eating a last supper in Padua under his yellow awning tonight, so if you are not feeling like a member of that club, find me in front of the Church of San Clemente at seven-fifteen. I’ll be the one dressed in sheep’s clothing.”

  This instantly ignited a panicky sense of despair (I was already an hour late) and hope (I was only an hour late).

  At seven-thirty, T. had recorded a second message: “So, I think Enrico Scrovegni was entirely in earnest when he built the chapel. Surely, he was hoping for forgiveness. Who isn’t? But I think he got more than he paid for, maybe more than he wanted. You know he had a spiritual advisor, Altegrado de Something? Sort of Enrico’s own personal Ed. This priest was some kind of bookkeeper for Boniface VIII, the pope who ruined Dante’s life and then up and died. And then Altegrado became a papal notary to Pope Benedict IX. That priest probably dictated what scenes Giotto had to paint, but he couldn’t have imagined what Giotto would make of that assignment, right? I mean, Judas kissing Jesus—why is that moment memorialized right beside the altar at the front of the church? Isn’t it out of sequence? What was Giotto really up to in that chapel? I have a lot of questions, and I had intended to lean on you for the answers. For instance, what am I doing right now? Why am I not standing in front of San Clemente? Oh, forgive me, E. I am nowhere near enough to where I promised I would be to rectify my error. Where are you? Don’t answer that. In my imagination, neither of us is where we wanted to be, where we intended to be, where we wish we were. We’re lost lambs. It’s enough for me—more than I deserve—that you know I cannot speak about what I’ve lost. All I can do is return that singular favor. So, let’s not talk about everything one more time. Please wander over to the Metro café tomorrow morning at nine o’clock and let me buy you something foamy.”

  I was not prepared to think about breakfast. T.’s first call had raised my hopes and resurrected my appetite. But every time I thought about dinner, my hunger was mixed up with humiliation. I had managed to get stood up in absentia.

  It was just like being married to a dead man.

  I PACKED UP EVERYTHING BUT THE LAVENDER SHIRTDRESS, the espadrilles, and the odds and ends I figured I could jam into Rachel’s red bag in the morning. I called Air France. A woman with a growly voice refused to sell me a twenty-dollar reservation for a plane that departed in less than twenty-four hours. I persuaded her to check the available flights, and she ticked off my options, one by incomprehensible one, each time stating a takeoff time in French, followed by “Zees cannot be,” or “Zees one oui.” There seemed to be a lot of ouis in the afternoon and early evening. I hung up. My intrepid resolve to take a train to Venice was flagging, so I decided I would hire a taxi in the morning and take the earliest available flight. It did occur to me that the additional cost could easily be deducted from Sam’s inheritance. The Shaker chair was worth that much, at least, plus an in-flight movie with a little bottle of wine.

  I paged through my abortive Journal of Discovery and then sorted through the mess on the desk, hoping to turn up something worth pasting in. I took a picture with my phone of the two-euro Dante coin, which seemed better than having no record of T. at all. Beneath my folded-up copy of the itinerary for the rest of the EurWay tour, I found the three packs of postcards Pietro had purchased for me at the Venice train station. They seemed promising, but after I had torn apart the three pleated sets along the perforations and separated them into piles, I discovered that the sets were identical, somebody’s idea of ten iconic Italian images arranged in three different sequences—somebody else’s scheme for stretching the truth.

  I opened the desk drawer and pulled out the printed labels Mitchell had prepared. I tagged ten cards with ready-made addresses for Rachel & The Boys, ten with Sam & Susie labels, and though I thought of sending the other set to Mitchell at his former home in Cambridge, even by my miserable standards that seemed just too maudlin, so I left them blank, hoping I could come up with ten living people who might want to know where I had been.

  The top of each pile was a postcard of a solitary sheep standing at an odd angle on a verdant hill. Above the crest of that delicious meadow, unseen by the happily grazing sheep, lay the red-tile roofs and noble domes of Florence. That was as close as either of us would get. I turned over all the sheep, and on those three cards I wrote, “Padua seems perfect to me. Much love. E.”

  The rest, if I ever sent them, would all be postmarked at the Venice airport, or else in Cambridge, but maybe Sam and Rachel wouldn’t notice; maybe I could really hide out in my house until July and get used to life alone while the boys jumped off that diving board, and Sam shopped for real estate, and Rachel commuted between her once and future homes. In any case, the challenge of matching the remaining postcards to my imagined destinations seemed more promising than dragging Mitchell’s Dante business from underneath the bed.

  I wrote single-sentence greetings from Florence, Pisa, Sienna, Rome, Naples, Pompeii, Assisi, Rimini, and Ravenna. Some matches were easy—the Colosseum and the Leaning Tower. Others required a little more imagination. Which city was southerly enough to merit a photograph of meatballs and spaghetti?

  By ten-thirty, I was wide awake and ravenous. The restaurant downstairs closed at ten, but I was hoping someone washing dishes might be willing to slip me a salami sandwich or direct me to a nearby store where I could buy a bag of something salty.

  When I made it to the lobby, the glass door to the dim restaurant was open. The dining room was empty, but I spotted Sara sitting at the little bar. She was wearing an oversized violet V-neck sweater, skintight white jeans, and a pair of navy blue sandals with high heels so spiky that just staring at them almost gave me stigmata. Her long pink fingernails were spread out along the wide rim of an old-fashioned martini glass. And then I noticed the crisp blue linen blazer hanging from the back of the empty barstool beside her. I backed away.

  For a few minutes, I got marooned in the lobby, where an oversized gilt-framed mirror made me look even more pathetic than I
felt. I didn’t know if it was the unnecessarily bright light in the lobby, or if the rough canvas of Rachel’s bag had impressed itself on my skin, but the contours of my face were unfamiliar, washed out and wrinkly. I thought, She has started to drink in the middle of the day. I hope she soon has the good sense to put a noose around her neck. Then the elevator dinged down, so instead of killing myself, I made a beeline for the front door.

  I wandered in widening circles around the almost empty piazzas, smiling at the couples who stood aside to let me pass in the narrow alleys, young people huddling close to each other, unmindful of my admiring gaze, of my turning around to watch them amble down into darkness, envying them their immediate and far futures. When I turned into a long and unfamiliar alley, I spotted a reassuring brightness at the other end and two-way traffic zipping back and forth along a main street. I paused because something in front of one of the dark doorways near the other end started moving, and as I stood there, a group of several men, maybe six or seven, disaggregated themselves, spreading out like a squid in the darkness. Each of them was dragging a little suitcase on wheels. From the far end of the alley, a much taller man approached the others, and then he bent toward the door and, a moment later, led the men inside. Before I moved, the latecomer reappeared and bent again to lock the door, and then he walked right toward me.

  I recognized his head, backlit and shiny. It was the pizza man who’d lent me his eyeglasses. I remembered from T.’s message that his name was Matteo, and I had the absurd idea that he might think I had been following him, but instead of backing away or simply walking past him, I stood right where I was, where nobody but a stalker would stand alone in the middle of the night.

  He was holding his black eyeglasses in one of his hands. When he was near enough for me to see him smile, he said, “Are you following me?” He sort of purred when he spoke, as if he’d studied English by watching American movies with Dean Martin and Tony Franciosa playing Latin lovers.