Andre said, “There has been a mechanical failure, and the humidity in the chapel has reached a critical level, so I must ask you to reach under your chairs, collect your handouts, and follow me outside.”
A woman said, “Is there a fire?”
A man said, “Nothing works in this country.”
I didn’t move until the room was almost empty. I didn’t see the hand of God, but this emergency evacuation was an answer to my prayer. I would see the Presentation fresco in my own way, on my own time.
When I finally made it to the edge of the crowd gathered by the benches, Rosalie had disappeared. Andre emerged from the chapel with two men in suits, whispering furiously, and his arrival cleared the benches, so I sat down and scratched. Over the rumbling and grumbling of the paying customers, Andre said that the guard had informed him that air-quality issues were typically resolved in a few hours, and he assured us that the CPOCH staff had already agreed to give our group additional time in the chapel on Friday.
I had seen enough. I was itchy everywhere, but I decided to wait till I got back to my room and lined up the best of the minibar on the bedside table before I scratched out my eyes.
TWO HOURS LATER, I RAISED MY HAND AND WAVED UNTIL one of the young white-shirted men weaving through the tables in the Piazza del Something with a tray in his hand nodded. Like Giotto, I was getting good at the language of gestures. I pointed to my empty glass, and about fifteen minutes later, the waiter swooped by with my third Aperol spritz and a fresh bowl of kale crackers. I was sitting at the outer edge of his territory, where I could see the yellow awning on the other side of the crowded piazza. Despite the steady parade of thirsty Paduans shopping for an open cocktail table on their way home from work, I occasionally spotted Matteo’s gleaming head under that awning as he nodded at potential customers, whom he greeted as old friends, most of whom he had surely never seen before—business as usual.
After a few cool slips, I was near enough to being drunk that it was no longer an effort not to think, so I read the new email from Rachel.
Dearest World Traveler—
I wanted you to be the first to know: I accepted an offer today. Am feeling dizzy (champagne in the boardroom, and again with David’s parents). Maybe I was drunk when I agreed to spend at least one day a week here (and weekends) till I begin, and which I am sure to regret, but the kids will stay at the lake for the summer (happily), and David (sweetly) agreed to collect a bunch of stuff they can’t live without (videogames) and drive it all up in that truck. He is either going to give the food truck a try at the lake this summer (his idea) or (my suggestion) park it in the South Bronx so it is stolen and we can collect on the insurance.
Daddy’s gift. What can I say? (The money will come in handy. The boys have decided they want to live at the top of the Empire State Building.) I miss him beyond words. How did he do it on an academic salary? A scholar and a gentleman, that man. I know you must be missing him like mad over there, but I hope you are allowing yourself to have the fun he so wanted you to have. He’d have a ball reviewing the details of my offer, not to mention the reaction from my old boss in Cambridge. I’m rambling. This weekend is looking nutty, so call when you can or I will call you next week (in Rome, I think?) when I know where I am.
The little mess you made by leaking my job news to David—let’s just forget it. I have. I forgive you.
Sending love from me and the boys your way.
This all went down rather easily with a couple of sips of the spritz. My second email was from Shelby. As I opened it, the henna-haired woman I’d seen with Ed outside the chapel tapped her knuckles on my table. She was even shorter and rounder than she’d looked at a distance, or else my perspective was less charitable after my last session at the chapel. She was still dressed like a sailor, but instead of Ed on her arm, she was wearing the handle of what looked like a little umbrella on wheels.
She said, “Marimekko.”
I didn’t say anything.
She said, “Vintage, yes?”
I said, “It’s a relic.” I knew she must be Caroline, Ed’s sister, but she seemed so unlikely a wife for T. that I briefly wondered if maybe she was a nun on vacation. Either way, with that dye job, a veil would have come in handy.
“I saw you earlier today,” she said, “or else there’s a ’70s revival in this town. I gave away dozens of dresses like yours, and curtains. Are you in the middle of a telephone call? I’m so relieved you’re American. When we saw you earlier, I was going to tell you how much I liked your dress, but my brother said you might be Italian. I speak Spanish well enough. Or I used to. I am positively determined to learn some Italian while I’m here. I wish I’d learned more languages when I was young. It’s meant to be easier for children for some reason, but I never found Spanish so easy in school. Latin—forget it. My brother knows enough Latin for both of us. He’s a priest. Anyway, you finish your call.” She didn’t move.
“It’s an email,” I said. Now that I was certain she was T.’s ex-wife, I didn’t know if I should run away or offer to buy her a drink.
“Go ahead and read it,” she said. “I’d check my email, but I packed away my phone. Mine has a stylus, which is annoying. I should get one like yours. Read, read. I honestly don’t mind.”
I really thought she might wander away, so I opened Shelby’s email. The subject was “Our Hero, Outside the Uffizi.” There was no text, just a picture.
I had never seen a likeness of Giotto before, and I didn’t like what I saw.
Caroline said, “Is it bad news?”
I tried to relax my face into a casual smile. “Just a photograph of a statue in Florence.” I held the screen her way.
“I’m going to Florence this evening,” she said. “My name is Caroline, by the way.”
I said, “To Florence with your brother?” I didn’t give her my name. I knew I was inching into dangerous territory, digging around in T.’s past behind his back, but another sip of my drink sweetened the prospect of getting even with someone. “Have you ever been to Florence? Wouldn’t you like to sit down and join me for a drink?” I swiped Rachel’s bag from the chair beside me.
“I can’t stay. I have a train to catch,” she said. She lifted up the cane of her umbrella with both hands and shook it several times. Finally, it opened into a little stool—a tripod topped off by a white plastic disk. “Voilà! A chair for the lady,” she said, though she didn’t sit down. “Ingenious golf fans invented this thing because there are no bleachers near the greens.” She slurred a few words, as if she had a slight lisp or a toothache. “It’s a godsend in museums if you can convince the guards you have a disability.” She turned the stool in a circle and nodded her approval. “Truth? I’ve never loved, loved, loved paintings, which seems to be about the best explanation for my daughter suddenly announcing she wanted to be a painter. I was a nurse a hundred years ago, and her father is a doctor. Could be she just wanted to prove that she had nothing in common with either of us.”
I said, “Children are mysterious,” which was as bland a rejoinder as I could come up with on the spot.
“I don’t think so,” Caroline said fiercely. “Children, divorce, death—there are no mysteries involved with any of them, just secrets people keep from you, things they could have told you and didn’t.”
This sounded like earned wisdom, something I could usefully apply to Mitchell’s attachment to Rosalie if I understood the distinction better and how to make it stick. But I knew I had already gone too far with Caroline, and something about that crazy stool made me want to protect her, protect her from me, stop her before she went too far, before she said something she would only want to have said to a total stranger. “Since you wouldn’t let me buy you a drink, please at least take my seat and enjoy your last hour in Padua. I have to be somewhere else.”
Caroline said, “Is your name really Mitchell? If you don’t mind my asking.”
I looked down at my name tag. My cover was blown, even if Caroline
didn’t know it yet. “I ended up with my husband’s badge,” I said. “Long story.”
“All marriages are,” Caroline said. She was about to say something else when a phone rang—an old-fashioned ringing-bell tone—somewhere nearby. “That’s my daughter’s phone,” she said, slapping her thighs. Finally, she pulled a white iPhone out of the pocket of her pants. She read something on the screen. “An Italian boy who calls every day,” she said. “He listens to Lily’s voicemail message and hangs up. Some of her old friends from back home leave sweet little goodbyes, but most of the Italian ones just don’t seem to know where she is or why she isn’t returning their calls. That’s the way Lily wanted it. Keep it secret. Keep them guessing.” She pocketed the phone, and then she collapsed her portable stool and leaned on the cane end with both hands, surveying the crowd around us. Maybe it was the phone call, or maybe a pill she’d taken earlier had just kicked in, but she looked entirely at ease, becalmed, and, judging by the glances she was getting from passersby, a little loopy. “We’ll both miss our trains,” she said wistfully. She was fading, and she seemed pleased to be sinking beneath the surface of herself.
I said, “Good luck in Florence, Caroline.”
She said, “Yes, you too,” and started rolling in the general direction of the train station. I stood up to see how she was faring against the incoming tide of table-seekers. She was not looking steadier as she went, and I felt I owed it to Ed or T. to make sure she got to the train station. But as I pulled some cash out of Rachel’s bag to pay for my drinks, I saw Ed rush out from under the yellow awning and angle his way through the crowd to his sister’s side. He put his arm around her shoulder, and they veered off to the left, up an alley and out of sight. Maybe Caroline and Ed were supposed to meet up at Matteo’s pizzeria, or maybe she had left him there when she spotted my dress again. Either way, Ed had to have seen me, and he hadn’t wanted me to see him.
One more mystery, or one more secret, depending on your perspective.
I forwarded Shelby’s picture of Giotto to Rachel and Sam without any comment. By the time I was back in my hotel room, I had a reply from Rachel.
As my boys would say—OMG.
As Nana B. would say—that statue of Giotto
looks more like Daddy than Daddy did.
III
I must have fallen asleep soon after I read Rachel’s email. I didn’t remember waking in the middle of the night, but when I rolled over in my bed at eight o’clock on Friday morning, I saw my dress puddled on the carpet, and my bra was on the bedside table, so I had to have sat up for long enough to pull them off. I hadn’t pulled the curtains closed. Whoever had been out there on the balcony had seen more of me than even I considered essential viewing most mornings, and he had also shoved the desk chair back toward my end of the balcony and balanced a tall glass of latte macchiato on the seat, with a saucer on top to keep it warm. And he had left a note on Arena Hotel stationery beneath the glass: Metro @ 10.
This raised a number of questions, beginning with why T. was still in Padua, and why I was still there, and it also brought to a boil the simmering issue of his exchanges with Mitchell and why that history had been kept secret from me. But as I drank the cool coffee he’d delivered earlier, I mostly wondered exactly how much of me T. had seen from the balcony. When I went back out there in a bathrobe, I was encouraged by the distorting glare of the morning sun glinting off the glass doors until I realized I was able to read the green numerals on the clock radio beside the bed, which probably meant T. had enjoyed a clear view of all of my digits and dials.
In my prior life, this sort of exposure might have been reason enough not to show my face at the Metro, but I realized that the decent pastries at the hotel buffet would be long gone by the time I got dressed, and I was hungry. I finished my coffee and took all of my many questions for T. into the shower, where they were almost immediately washed away in a stream of blood that ran down the back of my legs and turned the water around my feet pink as it swirled down the drain. I got out and examined my back in the mirror. It was a little bumpier than normal from all of my scratching, but there were no gashes or scars. I did lather up with facial scrub back there, just to be sure, and after I dried off, I dug through my arsenal of unguents and applied a film of antibacterial salve and some moisturizer.
My three linen shirtdresses were hanging in my closet. This little surprise was bittersweet. I could spare T. the sight of me in stretchy jeans, but the return of my dry cleaning also meant I could pack up and leave at any moment. I had been cleared for takeoff.
My shoulders and back were still slick with moisturizer, so rather than risking damage to one of the shirtdresses, I convinced myself I could squeeze one more day out of the Marimekko, which I spread out on the bed and ironed with my hands. This worked reasonably well on the front, but when I turned it over I saw that the block print on the back was bisected by three thin streaks of my blood. It looked exactly like T.’s bloodied pinstripe shirt, which either meant we were both dying and didn’t know it, or we were both saints who’d been selected for stigmata. Or T. had picked up some dread disease while he was out catting around at night and kindly passed it on to me.
I stuffed the dress into Rachel’s bag and pulled on the navy blue shirtdress, which seemed least likely to show any leaks. The whole time, I just kept telling myself, He’s a doctor, he’s a doctor, which somehow made sense of my bringing the bloody dress along for his inspection. As I left the room, my phone dinged. While I waited for the elevator, I read another email from Anandi.
Forgive me even as I begin, dearest friend, to intrude a second time on the peace and (so I hope on your behalf) joy of Italy. The truck did disappear, and as I said to Samir, is it not enough that she has managed to move vehicles around the East Coast of America while she is away? But Samir insists he saw a man in your house last night, and when Samir went across the street a second time and rang the front bell, a light upstairs did flick off. I don’t want to call the police if you have a guest or a workman in there, but I did see a bald man enter and leave carrying something in a box just before midnight. I did not report this to Samir, who will be, gracious gods, going to the office today, so I will not have to act until this evening, at the earliest. I have been awake most of the night, not exactly on patrol but kept alert by the raging, roaring snarls of Samir’s snoring. I have not seen the bald man again. There is a remedy for the snoring man upstairs—tomorrow, I will make rosewater. But the bald man across the street is why I have bothered to bother you. Perhaps you will waste a moment to assure me that no remedy is required?
I was exhausted by the time I got to the lobby. The only bald man I knew was Samir, and though I doubted he was robbing my house, I knew he was insulted I’d not left him a key, and I didn’t doubt he was planning to spend his free time making me pay for that lapse in judgment. Rachel and Sam had keys, but Sam hadn’t responded to my last two emails, and Rachel would not be sympathetic to my plight. She had urged me to have an alarm system installed after Mitchell died, and when it became clear I was not going to obey, she resorted to deception and purchased two signs warning burglars that they were entering an electronically protected property, and instead of sticking them in the lawn, I’d stuck them in the garage.
Someone should have arrested Samir, whose obnoxious snoring was audible well beyond his property lines every spring. Years ago, I’d tried to sell Anandi on my theory of sleep apnea, and I’d even downloaded a picture of a fantastically elaborate gas mask that was meant to cure the disease. Anandi said she thought his problem was allergies. I didn’t really think it was either—I considered the snoring classic male territorial behavior.
Another woman might have left Samir. I liked the idea of stuffing his head into a big muzzle every night. Anandi made rosewater every year when her backyard came into bloom, put it in a dehumidifier, and the snoring stopped.
When I made it to the Metro, the bar was empty, and T. was standing near a table at the dark end, star
ing through the glass wall at Paduans passing into the arcaded path to the piazza. He was as crisp and blue as ever, and as I approached him, a young waiter delivered two espressos, two latte macchiatos, two bottles of fizzy water, and a heaping plate of cornetti.
T. orchestrated all of our encounters in advance. It was a charming habit. It made me feel he had been bearing me in mind. But this morning, the setup had a cartoon quality—not Beetle Bailey, more in the manner of Giotto, as if T. had already sketched the scene he imagined we would play out when he wrote that note and left it on the balcony. What actually happened at that little table would surprise us both—that was the art of him—but our scenes never exceeded the frames he had established, the vast stretches of life that passed between our meetings went unaccounted for in our conversation, and by his design our deep and complicated pasts never intruded into our time together, which stood apart from everything and everyone else, the memorable adventures of T. and E., a series of incidents involving two strangers, which resembled a story of intimates if you strung them together in sequence and filled in the blanks with a fictive architecture that appeared strong enough to support a genuine relationship.
After we sat, I sampled a cornetto filled with something that involved mascarpone and lemon, and then added two plain brioches to my little plate.
T. said, “I have a proposal.”
I said, “I hope you have a pot of jam under that pile of pastries.”
He dug around and found two little ramekins—strawberry jam and orange marmalade.
I slathered some of each on my plate for dipping. “Some bald man is carrying boxes full of something out of my house in Cambridge,” I said.
The Chapel Page 23