The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  Shelby put her hands on mine. “You know what might be fun?” She had shifted her voice into that higher register usually reserved for babies and the elderly. She even tilted her head, so I could see she was thinking very hard. “What if I mailed them for you? Right in order?”

  “They’re not worth the trouble.” I was talking about the postcards, but it occurred to me that Shelby might think I was referring to my children. “They’ll be happy even if I hand-deliver them.”

  “I insist,” she said, and she pulled the two piles to her side of the table. “It will make me think of you. Please. Maybe it will even inspire me to send a few to you! What do you say?”

  “I’m just going to say thank you,” I said. I was saved from having to say more because Shelby’s phone began to blast a brass-band version of “Close to You.”

  Shelby said, “That’s Allen!”

  I stood and blew her a kiss. Every patron in the restaurant was staring at her, all but begging her to answer that phone.

  Shelby was in no hurry. She held up the little boom box and said, “This is our away-from-home theme.”

  “It’s perfect,” I said.

  Shelby said, “I know,” and then turned her attention to her faraway husband.

  T. WAS WAITING FOR ME AT A TABLE AT THE METRO WITH two tall latte macchiatos and a heaping plate of eight little pressed sandwiches—prosciutto and Gruyère, salami and something green and garlicky, mozzarella and roasted red peppers, and chocolate-hazelnut spread—each about the size of a ladyfinger. We were silent for a long while.

  Finally, he said, “I thought you might be hungry.”

  I said, “Apology accepted.” As usual, I had no idea exactly how much he knew or precisely what he meant. He might have been referring to our botched dinner date or my late-night run-in with Matteo. Either way, he was right. I was hungry. I was already selecting my second sandwich. He was wearing a fresh white shirt and his blue linen blazer, wrinkle-free. I said, “I have to make a telephone call to an Italian man, and I was hoping you would make it for me.” I fished Pietro’s car-service card out of my pocket.

  T. picked up the card and turned it over several times, as if he were examining the facets of a gemstone. “Illiterate in two languages,” he said.

  “Umberto Eco was all booked up,” I said. I handed him my phone.

  “If you had come to Florence, do you suppose we might have run out of things to not talk about?” He checked under the hood of his second sandwich. He seemed pleased by what he found.

  I said, “There’s always my hair.” I could tell the situation up there had not calmed down.

  T. said, “Speaks for itself.” He made the call. After a while, he held the phone away from his ear, and I could hear a woman screeching. Finally, T. said, “Mille grazie. Ciao—si, si, si, ciao.” He handed me my phone. “If you locate Pietro, please let him know someone at home is hoping to castrate him.”

  I said, “At least he has an answering service.”

  T. said, “I think that was his wife and maybe his mother, too—in Italy, they operate as tag teams.”

  “I love the train,” I said, “but I will need another coffee.”

  T. stuck his hand in the air and whirled it around. The bartender nodded.

  T. slid Petro’s taxi-service card back to my side of the table and said, “This was a sign from God. You are not supposed to leave today.”

  But he was leaving today, and I knew he was going to Florence for the same reason I was going to Cambridge—to touch the wound, to press the tender, swollen tissue of the past until the dull but steady sadness throbbed and throbbed, almost like a pulse. I said, “What were we not talking about? Just before you made the phone call?”

  T. said, “Had you asked me to recommend a dry cleaner in the neighborhood?”

  He was right. My dress looked like a topographical map. “I’ll tell you a secret about linen shirtdresses,” I said.

  He said, “If it has something to do with the problem of having so many buttons, word is out.”

  I was going to repeat Shelby’s false claim about linen dresses looking good in any condition, but I looked down and saw that the two halves of the front of me were misaligned. “I must have missed a button,” I said.

  “Or two,” T. said.

  I said, “I can see something is off at the hemline, but is it wrong all the way to the top?”

  T. said, “Your collar is occupying two different time zones. Maybe it will sort itself out on the plane.”

  “I can’t walk back to the hotel like this.” I felt my eyes well up, and as foolish as I felt for that unbidden burst of melodrama, I knew I couldn’t speak without bawling.

  T. stood up, leaned over the table, and said, “Permesso.” He undid and redid one button just above my sternum, behind which I kept my heart. He sat back in his chair. “Now you can work your way down.”

  I bent my head and began the long descent. I was still on the verge of tears, so I said, “I do wish you would hum something vulgar. This show may take a while.” It was not as tedious as I’d imagined—Matteo had considerably widened the buttonholes with his big fingers—but it did require concentration.

  T. said, “What did you do for dinner last night?”

  I said, “Matteo.” I looked up.

  T. nodded.

  I said, “And you?”

  “Sara.”

  I nodded. This almost made sense. She had fingernails that could draw blood.

  Our coffees arrived, and when I attempted to pay for everything on our table with my room key, the young waiter said, “No problem,” and backed away.

  Maybe T. had prepaid, or he had a running tab, or else I looked like a charity case.

  T. said, “Are you all packed?”

  I nodded. My phone buzzed with a message alert from somebody.

  T. said, “The future is calling.”

  “We’re not on speaking terms,” I said. But since T. and I had a policy of never speaking about the past, this didn’t leave us with much to say.

  T. said, “You don’t want to take the train. Trust me.” He pulled his phone from his blazer pocket. “You’ll have to negotiate a transfer from the train station in Venice to the airport with those two suitcases.”

  “I got rid of one,” I said.

  He looked genuinely surprised, as if he had heard Matteo’s version of the suitcase story.

  I was momentarily delighted, but the pleasure was short-lived, like a shooting star you see when you are alone.

  T. made a call, and in the midst of an impressive barrage of Italian, he turned to me. “Soon? The airport, I mean.”

  I said, “Soon as we’re done here,” daring him to say that we would never be done.

  T. nodded.

  When we were fully caffeinated, my phone buzzed again, and I turned it off, but T. took this as a cue. He stood up and led me back to the door of the hotel. A black Limousine Venice town car was already idling at the curb.

  T. stuck his head into the passenger-seat window and said something to the driver, and then he turned to me and said, “You have an hour if you need it. He’ll wait. His tip depends on it.” He backed away a few steps from the door of the hotel and said, “I have to pay a visit to a virgin. Did we ever decide if it is the Scrovegni Chapel or the Arena Chapel?”

  In that moment, all I could remember of the chapel was a blue blur that slowly came into focus as a patch of sky I could see through a windowpane from my sofa in Cambridge, and even that little square got smaller and smaller, farther and farther away, as I realized that T. and I were not standing still on that sidewalk, that we were moving away from each other, that I was already gone, and all I could see was the little disk of lapis lazuli Shelby had plucked from her knitting needle, something compact and dense, something I could hold in the palm of my hand, the essence of it all. I wanted to be sure we were prepared to leave it right there—everything unasked, everything unsaid. I said, “Shouldn’t we say something?”

&
nbsp; “Annunciation time?” T. said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  But neither of us spoke. Eventually, the limo engine raced, and as I turned, the driver shrugged apologetically, and then he slid the passenger window smoothly up and turned off his engine. Even he seemed to know this was not going well.

  I looked up at T.

  “Uncle,” he whispered. He was weeping.

  “Oh, T.”

  “You mustn’t,” he said, shaking his head, no, no, no. He turned his shoulder to me and raised one hand defensively, keeping me in place. “I can’t. It will do me in.”

  I was already bawling, and I couldn’t catch a breath to say his name.

  He wiped his shiny face and said, “You know I have to—I need to be in Florence,” and then he bent his head and heaved out a terrible breath. He raised his gaze to mine, tears still streaming down his face. “Home,” he said. “You want to go, I know.”

  I said, “I know you know,” and then I just sobbed until I could get ahead of my sadness long enough to explain why I was going home, why I was not going on to Florence, why I still hadn’t spoken his daughter’s name, but all I managed was to stammeringly say, “I can’t just do the next thing and the next thing every day.”

  T. said, “Your work is done here.” He wiped his face and smiled.

  It was a few seconds before I could see clearly enough to see that he was offering me his handkerchief. I took it. “That bad?”

  He nodded and said, “We’ve made a mess of each other.”

  I didn’t bother to wipe my eyes because I could already feel him pulling away, pulling his sadness and some of mine back into himself, leaving me with a little puddle of our mixed-up sorrows and regrets to absorb, and then a tour bus slid in behind the limo and flung its door open with an exhausted sigh, and I just kept telling myself it had only been three days, barely three days since T. and I had met, and before the first passenger emerged, T. nodded, and I nodded, and we turned away from each other.

  WHEN I GOT TO MY ROOM, I FOUND AN IVORY ENVELOPE addressed to E. leaning against the door. Once inside, I opened it and found a delicate silver strand of rosary beads. It was at least two feet long, and at the juncture of the loop, where a few additional beads and a small cross were attached to the strand, there was an embossed medallion of St. Somebody, though I soon realized I would need a desk lamp, and a magnifier, and probably Wikipedia to identify her.

  Sunlight was streaming in through the window, illuminating a wedge of dusty air and cutting a shiny swath through the tangle of sheets where I had slept. And then I saw my little solitary black suitcase on the red chair beside the door, and I saw just how small my life was, how little there was left of me. Three days, I thought.

  I looked at the envelope again. Only three people knew me as E. I tipped it upside down, and out slid a business card with an address and telephone number I didn’t recognize, but a printed sketch of a yellow awning that I did. On the back, Matteo had written instructions for making the most of his present.

  She is Madonna della Misericordia. Hang on the neck, keeping the Holy Cross on the backbone, to be curing the lonely nights.

  I really didn’t know if the rosary was a parting gift or a parting shot. I also didn’t know if I was sad because I was already missing T., or if missing T. was my hedge against some deeper sadness ahead of me.

  I didn’t know what to feel. I had not felt like myself for three days. I was astonished by my readiness to watch my children slip away into their far-off futures, a little appalled that not a single neighbor or former colleague had called to ask how I was faring, a little more embarrassed to admit that no one in my fading constellation of friends in Cambridge had crossed my mind, and genuinely bewildered by the attention and interest and amusement I had stirred up with strangers, especially men, which was especially delightful and entirely unfamiliar.

  But those three strange days were over. And I didn’t know who I would be if I walked out of the tomb. Mitchell was dead. My marriage was done. I had no reason to be anywhere. There was no one left to take attendance, no one to mark me present.

  Most people came to Italy and came to life. I had come to Italy to die.

  PART II: PADOVA

  I

  There is, for each of us, an afterlife. The problem is, we’re not dead enough to enjoy it. I think that Mitchell’s afterlife began long before he died, sometime soon after we returned from Paris, when he gave up on his idea of himself as an academic, a man of letters, and settled into the long twilight of his fondest hopes and unfulfilled ambitions. My own sense of possibility, what might become of me, was much less well defined, and so it survived as long as the marriage was intact, as dust survives in even a well-kept house, momentarily roused from overlooked corners and spun into the air from uninspected ledges when a window is flung open or someone unexpected rushes into a room. But when Mitchell died and my marriage ended, there was nowhere for the bits and pieces of that nebulousness to cling, nothing to contain the scattered sense of what I might have been.

  I had not come to life in Italy. I had come into the afterlife in Italy. I knew it when Matteo’s hands could not hold me. I knew it when Ed’s overtures did not persuade me to stay. I knew it each time I conspired with T. to keep the past at bay, to sweep our conversations clean of what had really brought us together, to be sure that we had between us none of the dust that living people gather into their cupped palms, breathe warmly on, and try to shape into the selves they had always meant to be.

  T. had rolled the stone away from the entrance of my tomb and awakened something in me, but it was not a desire for life. He had looked inside and recognized my situation. He countenanced my sadness. He made no effort to deflect or discount my disappointments. He offered me a way back into the world that required nothing of me.

  I had not returned the favor. His former life was chasing him down, chasing him to Florence, where he had only his dead daughter before him and his ex-wife hot on his trail. He needed nothing but the company of someone who wanted nothing from him, someone who could tolerate his being out of reach.

  I could do that. And there was nowhere else I had to be. So I decided I was not going to Cambridge. I was going to Florence.

  Admittedly, I had a few moments of difficulty deciding whether the resurrected me would call T. and tell him to expect me for dinner in Florence, or if I should just turn up and offer to buy him something fizzy. I was also not sure about the rules of the afterlife. For instance, was the new me allowed or not allowed to call Shelby and ask for help navigating the Italian trains? I was breathing way too rapidly, excited to the point of exhaustion at the prospect of moving forward, and so I decided the new me would definitely need some open floor space for yoga every morning. I dug out the EurWay itinerary to call the hotel in Florence and book myself a double room.

  When I turned it on, my phone yipped in its maddeningly indiscriminate way, as excited by a hang-up or an ad for anti-aging cream as it would be by a message from the dead. The text that popped up was from my ex-son-in-law, Poor David—the name inadvertently bestowed upon him by Rachel. After the divorce, she prefaced every response to a question about David’s work or well-being from Mitchell or me with a sigh—Poor David. He’d been hired as a line cook by one of Boston’s celebrity chefs, who then closed her new waterfront restaurant after six months, and though one of the principal investors offered Poor David the helm in the kitchen of a small bistro meant to be the first of a franchised chain, that venture went bust about a month before opening night, so Rachel fronted Poor David the down payment on a refurbished mail van, which he intended to launch as a stew-themed food truck as soon as he could get the cold storage areas to stay cold. These days, Poor David was microwaving nachos and jalapeño poppers for late-night room-service customers in an extended-stay hotel ten miles south of Boston. This rotten job had only one real benefit—he was available for chauffeuring his two boys to their many afternoon arts and athletic programs and cooking dinner fo
r them in the van, which he and the boys had taken to calling their clubhouse.

  mrs b! was at yr house sunday hoped to say hello etc but no you!! hows rome?! yr roses r MAJOR this yr but 2 days of rain since this pic so maybe this was best day of season?? can we talk soon or sometime? call when yr in mood anytime fine no pressure!!

  I was sure Poor David hadn’t dropped by to admire my garden. I figured he was looking to commiserate with someone about Rachel’s career move. I pecked out a response:

  Beautiful. So sorry to miss the blossoming—but nothing compared to how we will miss those 2 sweet boys if Rachel takes that new job in NYC.

  I also had several unread emails, and at least two were from human beings, so I cracked open the complimentary bottle of mineral water on my bedside table and read Rachel’s latest missive.

  Dear You—

  The idea of being in New York is not the same as being in Midtown on a humid day.

  Grueling three-hour interview today. I did manage to make them do most of the talking (Daddy’s rule). More surprising: they think they have to woo me. Evidence: Insanely expensive lunch with one partner and three associates from the firm and one woman (paralegal with hair extensions). Her only contribution came in the powder room (her term): “Two kids? What are you going to do with two kids and no husband when you’re working every weekend?” (She nannies on weekends, btw.)

  I checked the Florence hotel website and saw this:

  Do you have a view of the Arno from that balcony? (If not, complain—it was promised.) Mostly, I’m worried that you are stuck in a closet with a tiny bed just because we changed you to a single room.

  On the home front: I had a text from David with a question about parking his food truck in your driveway for a couple of weeks while you are gone. I think he might be trying to sell it (my only hope of a return on that investment). But do not feel obliged. He has a parking space (rental) and I can tell him to keep the truck where it is—not a problem, especially compared to telling him I am moving with the boys to NYC. Maybe we can talk this weekend?