The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  Love from me to you.

  And then my phone dinged with a new text from Poor David:

  ??? What new job? NYC trip not pharma biz?

  That settled it. I was definitely going to Florence. A food truck parked in my driveway would not be a perfect welcome home, but that was nothing compared to the prospect of Rachel parked on my sofa, ledger in her lap, forcing me to account for myself.

  The other email was an apologetic note from one of my only neighbors in Cambridge with whom I exchanged more than nods and waves. Anandi Roy and her podiatrist husband, Samir, had moved to Falcon Place a few months before Mitchell and I had purchased an almost identical Greek Revival across the street. The other homes on the small dead end were mostly tiny mansard-roofed cottages that attracted single women and a roundelay of childless couples who stayed as long as it took their noisy, round-the-clock contractors to knock down a couple of interior walls, replace the butcher-block counters with granite, and run an incessantly beeping back hoe through the old garden and lay down strips of golf-course-green sod. And then a sign would go up, advertising the availability of another overpriced, updated, open-concept bungalow for sale on a quiet street in Cambridge.

  Dearest Elizabeth,

  This note brings you my affection and the oddest of questions. Do you know someone who operates a mobile canteen? Hours after you departed, a most unlikely truck with the word “Stewed” painted on each side appeared in your driveway. It is outfitted with a stainless kitchenette. (Samir had a look inside after dark last night.) This morning, Melanie Monterosso stopped me in the street with concerns that someone is operating a business illegally from your home. She showed me something from Facebook that did look like an ad for that Stewed truck with a menu and a promise of “Cambridge Locations—Check Back Daily.” And now Samir claims he might have noticed a cot in the truck, and he worries we have a squatter in the neighborhood. I was hoping you might forward this to the truck’s owner as fair warning before Melanie takes action. Also, dear friend, I am afraid Samir will soon insist on my calling someone in City Hall.

  On a so much sweeter note, Samir and I heard the Bartok on Sunday at the Gardner Museum. Thank you for the kind gift of those tickets—magical and melancholy to occupy your seat and Mitchell’s.

  We miss you both.

  Yours, Anandi

  Melanie Monterosso was seeking revenge. She still blamed me for the raid on her unlicensed in-home hot-yoga studio a few years ago, just because I had dropped out after two classes. I should’ve turned her in for attempted murder—she was a tyrant on the mat—but I hadn’t reported her to the authorities, even after Mitchell’s umpteenth admiring comment about Melanie’s entrepreneurial spirit as she went power-walking by in a leotard.

  I knew it was Anandi who’d called the zoning board about Melanie’s unlicensed yoga studio, and before that, Public Works about neighbors dumping yard waste into storm drains on Falcon Place, and before that, Animal Control about a roving pack of coyotes, which, when captured, turned out to be a skittish mother fox and her two whimpering kits. Each time she lodged an official complaint, Anandi identified herself as Elizabeth Berman. Her rationale for this charade was both personal and historical.

  Anandi’s husband, Samir, was a tireless snoop, and an affable but unrepentant chauvinist, so whenever he spotted something amiss in the neighborhood, he commissioned his wife to contact the appropriate government agency. Anandi was compliant until September 11, 2001, after which she was convinced that she and all other Hindus in America were effectively Muslims, who were de facto terrorists, so soliciting public scrutiny terrified her, and she begged me to allow her to use my name. I suggested she should also probably use my home phone, in case such calls were traced. As her true friend, I considered it my duty to confirm her paranoia. It was only when Anandi suggested I might just as well lodge the complaints myself that I balked.

  I said, “Samir is not my husband.”

  Anandi said, “But I am pretending that Mitchell is my husband.”

  I said, “Who isn’t?”

  Anandi laughed.

  I’d made a joke, but it was inadvertent. This was just a few days after Dan-Dave-Don Ellenbogen had called to offer me filmed evidence of the affair between his wife, Rosalie, and Mitchell, and when Anandi knocked on my front door that day, I had resolved to tell her about the affair.

  I never did expose Mitchell. And, thus, I never exposed myself. Mitchell and I had a long history of being disappointed in ourselves and in each other, and early in the marriage that stabbing sense of what each other might have been, what we could have become, seemed to us both a genuine and poignant intimacy, and eventually became a substitute for it. Anandi made her call that day. Samir got Melanie’s yoga studio shut down, as he had got the storm drains flushed out. I didn’t regret any of these results any more than I regretted the idea of affable Samir and elegant Anandi replacing Mitchell and me at the Bartók and the upcoming Schubert and Mozart concerts.

  Instead of responding to the Stewed controversy, I Googled the Gardner Museum website. I clicked on a photo of the courtyard, and after several failed attempts to compose a message that I would not regret, I just texted the picture to T. under the subject heading, “Thinking of you, here and there.”

  T. didn’t respond immediately. I hoped he was in the chapel—he’d told me he was off to see the Virgin when we’d parted. I imagined he was disconnected from everything but Giotto, whose name I then appended to my original Google search of the museum’s website. I waited while my phone downloaded the gem of gems from the Gardner’s collection.

  This was The Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple—or, it would be when my balky Internet connection completed the transfer. It was my favorite painting in the Gardner, and it would have been easy to imagine T. staring up at the original, frescoed version of this very painting, Number 18 on Sara’s map, if only I had seen it. But I hadn’t seen the original.

  I had not yet checked out of the Hotel Arena, and I already regretted having left Padua without seeing the Presentation fresco. This was pure Old Me—an expert in emotional deficit financing, wallowing in my losses before they even occurred.

  Before the baby Jesus and the rest of the temple scene materialized, my phone dinged with a text. I ditched the download. I was certain T. was writing to invite me to join him in the chapel.

  Wrong again.

  I’m on the train. You’re on a plane? God spare us both!

  Love, Shelby

  I felt a familiar sense of something rising precipitously—something like my blood pressure. I should have done a few minutes of Pranayama to steady myself, but I was too busy telepathically sending myself a batch of alarming text messages.

  Shelby is gone. This means you will be traveling solo to Florence.

  Probably at night, even if you race through the chapel on your way out of Padua.

  Arriving in an unlaundered pastel shirtdress wrinkled as badly as balled-up wrapping paper.

  With no assurance that T. will be registered at the standard hotel and not one of the EurWay upgrade options.

  No one is waiting for you.

  No one even knows where you are.

  Florence suddenly seemed very far away. I knew that if I did nothing, my panic would quickly peak, and soon I would be rolling downhill toward a deep depression, gathering regrets and anxieties and self-recriminations until the avalanche was over and I landed on my couch in Cambridge to await the next thaw. Or I could lighten up, tell myself I had been resurrected for a reason.

  I wasn’t expecting any miracles. I didn’t try to fly or pass through the door without opening it. But I did have a free pass for the chapel. And I had a generous refund coming from EurWay Travel. So I decided to book myself one more night in Padua, spend the afternoon with Giotto, and then invite Ed to dinner to iron out all of the other wrinkles in my plan to join T. in Florence.

  AN UNFAMILIAR TUXEDOED MAN AT THE FRONT DESK NODDED as I approached, and then turne
d his attention to the front door and the street beyond.

  I said, “Pronto.” I wasn’t sure that was a polite opening.

  His face swiveled my way. He said, “Pronto?” He wasn’t thrilled. He tilted his head. “Prego?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Prego. I would like to stay one more night.”

  He said, “Just one night in Padua? Is too little!” He smiled and tore off a reservation form from the pad near the telephone. “Please sign all over the places required and see to me your passport, signora.”

  I said, “But I have a room already.”

  “We can see,” he said. He picked up the receiver, but before he dialed, he uttered a string of incomprehensible sentences, and for the first time, my inability to translate a single word of Italian registered as a character flaw, a moral deficiency, as if he couldn’t believe I had spent four months on my sofa watching soap operas and home-improvement shows instead of memorizing a few useful phrases. He shoved a pen toward me and pointed at the registration card. “And her passport is needed.” He dialed and spoke to someone in sharp, demanding sentences.

  Instead of risking his turning that voice on me, I filled out another reservation form. “I do have a room,” I said.

  “Si, si, si,” he said. “We have room for you.”

  I tried and failed to locate the key in Rachel’s bag. “Room 414,” I said.

  “Si, si, si. Room 707,” he said, and slammed down the phone. He checked a box on the reservation form and asked me to sign the form again. “And how will she like to pay?”

  Through the nose, I thought, looking at the price for my new room, which was exactly twice the rate for 414. “Is it a bigger room?”

  He said, “Bellissimo.” Even I knew he meant, Basta!

  I handed him my credit card and passport. After he disappeared into the back room, a mother and her very young daughter, dressed in matching lime-green sundresses and white sandals, strolled out of the elevator. I smiled at them both. As the desk man returned, the little girl said, “Is that her nightgown, Mommy?”

  “Ah! Pronto, Signora Berman!” The desk man handed me my credit card and a key for 707 and said, “We will take your bag to your room.”

  I didn’t trust this offer. A minute earlier, he hadn’t known I had a bag or a room. “I will get my bag,” I said. “I have a few other things to get together. And I would like to have something dry-cleaned. Is that possible?”

  He nodded.

  I was certain he had not understood. I said, “My dress.”

  “This dress needs help,” he said. “We can do this for you, signora. You will see. The ticket comes to your room with your bag.”

  A few minutes later, after I’d cleared out of 414, I wheeled my suitcase and Rachel’s bag into Room 707. I was delighted by the size—there was plenty of floor space for me to stretch out—and daylight was pouring in through two large sliding-glass doors on the far wall. And then a little boy ran into view, slapped the cement cap of the balcony wall, stuck out his tongue, ran away, and then reappeared a few seconds later and ricocheted out of sight again. When I finally figured out how to open the slider, I watched him do the balcony circuit once more, and then I stepped outside. He had run to the far end, and when he turned and spotted me, he stopped. I walked into my room, dragged the desk chair out to the balcony, and by then his father was standing beside the boy, pulling him into his thigh protectively.

  The father yelled, “Sorry.” He had on a khaki-green military uniform—American army, a captain, I guessed, only because I wasn’t sure I was up to squaring off with a general. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day with that kid poking his nose into my business.

  I walked halfway down the balcony. “It’s a strange arrangement,” I said. “No walls to separate us from each other.”

  “Very,” the father said. “The wife and daughter are having a girls’ day out on the town. I’m hoping if this one gets some exercise, he’ll conk out so I can get some work done. He thinks it’s his private runway out here.”

  “I understand. He’s just a child,” I said. “How old is he?”

  The boy looked my way.

  “Just turned four,” the father said.

  “And you?” I said.

  The father didn’t say anything.

  “So,” I said, “when I am in the room, I’ll put the chair out so we don’t bother each other. Otherwise, he can have the run of the place.”

  The father didn’t say anything.

  I said, “Does that sound fair?”

  The boy said, “Yes.”

  The father said, “Yes.”

  I placed the chair between my slider and the room next door, its back to the boy, and then I latched the door and drew the curtains. I pulled off the lavender shirtdress and tossed it on the bed. I rummaged through my suitcase. I didn’t remember balling up the other two shirtdresses when I’d packed, but they were unfit for human habitation and went straight to the bed for dry-cleaning, along with the Marimekko, in which I had felt rather smartly turned out. Had everyone else noticed that the black-and-white block print was embellished with a couple of big red blobs of soaked-in pizza sauce?

  A knock at the door was followed by an Irish brogue. I found a bathrobe in the closet, and as I tied the sash, a young man in a green vest wheeled in a suitcase and handed me a yellow slip of paper. “I can take the dry-cleaning now, missus, or you can call down to the front desk when you have it sorted. Where shall I put the case for you?” He had mounds of jet-black hair that had to be pushed out of his eyes constantly, giving off fleeting glimpses of his wide-open pale face. He couldn’t have been twenty-one.

  “That’s not my suitcase,” I said, honestly hoping he might accept this as a fact and take the Dante book away.

  He bent and read the tag. “Signora Berman. That’s you, right? And it says here, Complimenti di Ricardo.” He stood up. “That’s Italian. Compliments from Ricardo,” he said.

  “It is my husband’s suitcase,” I said, but I was thinking of Dante and his juvenile imagination of himself as a solo traveler with no luggage. How much truer and funnier The Comedy might have been if Dante had understood he was doomed to navigate his way through the circles of hell with the baggage of his failed marriage.

  The valet rolled the case to the bed and stood it beside mine, where they appeared to be identical. “A matched pair,” he said, evidently pleased by his role in this reunion.

  “We were never very well matched,” I said.

  “Either way,” he said, unfazed by my indiscretion. He probably stumbled into a lot of intimacies in his line of work, and most of them were probably a lot more intriguing than an unpleasant old woman in a borrowed bathrobe.

  “Should I fill this dry-cleaning form out while you wait, or just call down later?”

  “Either way,” he said. His hand was working like a windshield wiper on that hair. “But if you want them to go out today, we have to act quickly.”

  I glanced at the form. “I can’t read Italian,” I said.

  “You will find an English form in here.” He slid open the closet, pulled out a laundry bag, and held it open. “But leave it to me.”

  I grabbed the pile of dresses. “Four,” I said. “Three are linen.”

  He nodded at the open bag. “In they go, then,” he said.

  “One—the cotton one—it might have a spot or two,” I said, stuffing that one inside the others. It now seemed obvious that T., and maybe Shelby, too, must have noticed the stains and refrained from pointing them out. Out of pity? I deposited the clump into the bag. “Should all this be noted somewhere?”

  “Three badly wrinkled linens, one spotted cotton,” he said. “So noted. Anything else I can do to familiarize you with the room?”

  “I’ve stayed here before,” I said.

  “Welcome back, then,” he said. He backed up and opened the door. “To you and your husband,” he added, letting me know his professionalism made him impartial. He let the door slam beh
ind him.

  I collapsed the handle on Mitchell’s suitcase and slid it across the floor to the queen-size bed, which was set into a cozy alcove painted silvery blue and outfitted with built-in bedside tables—and a white-painted platform frame that prevented any under-bed stowage. I crawled across the room, shoving that suitcase ahead of me until it was nestled under the desk, in the space where a normal person might want to keep a desk chair.

  I rummaged through the closet and my suitcase, hoping I might turn up an alternative to my stretchy jeans, which seemed wrong for a long afternoon visit with Giotto—almost sacrilegious. I even searched the side pockets of Rachel’s bag, hoping she might have hidden something in there for emergencies, but all I uncovered was the blinking red message flag on my phone. I had missed two calls. I was certain at least one of them was from T. This almost merited a treat from the minibar, but when I saw the price of the tiny bottle of wine, I opted for a glass of water and then sat on the bed.

  My only voicemail was from Simon Allerby, the oncologist who’d diagnosed and treated Mitchell. He’d called twice and left one brief, cheery greeting, letting me know he had been at the hospital all night and asking me to call him back any time before midnight—“my time, of course, not Italian time,” he’d added with a laugh, though his knowing my whereabouts unnerved me. Simon had rarely been the bearer of good news.

  I drifted toward the sliding-glass doors as I dialed. In the time it took to walk those ten steps and pull back the curtains, I’d invented the discovery of a heritable genetic basis for Mitchell’s cancer, which had likely been passed on to Sam and Rachel, and maybe her two boys, too. I could have come up with something even worse, but Simon picked up on the first ring.

  I was so numb I could barely speak, which was precisely how Simon, like most doctors, preferred laypeople to behave during conversations.

  Simon was very grateful I had returned his call, and he hoped Italy was—well, Italy—and, frankly, at the moment, he was hoping I could do him a small favor and get a message to his colleague, Toby Harrington, assuming, of course, that by now Toby had made the connection, as promised, the prospect of which had so pleased Mitchell, who had wanted to show me the treasures of Italy himself but understood that his illness might mean I would be alone among strangers and unable to permit myself to fully embrace the—