The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  “A curious juxtaposition,” T. said. He scooped some foam out of his macchiato with a spoon. “The boxes mark him as benign, but the baldness seems sinister.”

  I said, “I really don’t know if I should call the police or send the guy a thank-you note. There’s so much in that house, so much I don’t want.”

  T. said, “People sell houses.”

  I said, “Those people end up buying another house.”

  “Not all of us,” he said. He scooped up some more foam.

  I drank most of my espresso. Suddenly, we were both not talking about Lily, who hanged herself in her father’s home. I wanted to tell him how sorry I was his daughter was dead. I wanted to tell T. he should join Ed and Caroline in Florence. I wanted to tell him I was going home to Cambridge. I also wanted him to know I knew about his secret conversations with Mitchell, with whom he had apparently never run out of things to say. Instead, for no reason at all, I said, “I met Caroline yesterday.”

  T. said, “Was she with Ed?”

  This was not a gratifying response, which surely proved I had been aiming to unsettle him. I tried again. “He was with her the first time I saw her. I waved to them, and Ed acted as if he didn’t recognize me.”

  “Maybe he didn’t,” T said. “Everybody thinks you’re in Cambridge.”

  “Not everybody. People in Cambridge think I’m in Florence,” I said defensively, as if my efforts to maintain two entirely separate lies ought to register in my favor. “Ed didn’t want to see me.”

  “There’s a lot Ed doesn’t want to see,” T. said. “He doesn’t want to see what’s become of his sister in the last twenty years. He doesn’t want to see that no matter how often he conspires to bring us together, Caroline and I will never regret our terrific three years of marriage or our divorce.”

  I said, “You and Caroline were only married for three years?”

  “Seven,” T. said.

  I nodded and finished my espresso—and two tiny cornetti filled with syrupy hazelnuts. “I still don’t see why he wouldn’t want to see me. But I think you do. After that lecture he gave—”

  “That crazy lecture.” T. lit up and took a big swig of his macchiato. “He wanted to impress you, I think.”

  I said, “Ed only has eyes for you.” I hadn’t ever formulated the thought so succinctly, but it seemed absolutely true. Ed was in love with T. This made Ed seem hapless and hopeless, which made him familiar, which almost made me like Ed again.

  “After that lecture, instead of being mad at himself for making a mockery of his own amazing scholarship, he got blasting mad at me for compromising his immortal soul.” T. paused to poke around in the pastry pile, and while he dithered I found it increasingly difficult to restrain myself from making a selection for him and shoving it into his mouth so he could get back to Ed, whom he’d left dangling between heaven and hell. Finally, T. chose a plain brioche, dipped it into my stash of marmalade, and ate it in one bite. And then, nothing.

  “Meanwhile,” I said. Still nothing. I took a swig of fizzy water. I said, “Does the story of Ed’s immortal soul only come in weekly installments?”

  T. said, “When I told Ed I was bringing you along to his lecture, he asked me a question about you, and I inadvertently revealed something I had meant never to tell anyone. And I exacted from him a promise never to let on that he knew. And he decided I had got him tangled up in a terrible lie, and that may explain why he didn’t want to see you yesterday, or why he couldn’t let himself see you.”

  I said, “Mitchell.”

  T. and I turned away from each other for a few seconds, as if the name were a comet shooting through the arcade.

  I said, “Simon Allerby called me a couple of days ago, trying to track you down, and he mentioned that Mitchell had prevailed upon you to be kind to me. Which you have been.”

  T. didn’t say anything.

  “You made good on your gentleman’s agreement,” I said. “Well done.” I was surprised by the force of my anger. I said, “Ed was right, of course. You should have told me.”

  T. said, “Really, E., he wasn’t right.”

  I said, “I’m just trying to decide whether I want to know what Mitchell said about me, what he warned you about, how he described me so you could pick me out of a crowd.” Whatever had erupted on my back in yesterday’s heat was now roiling away in my gut, a toxic stew I wanted to expel. “I’ve been through most of Mitchell’s correspondence, even his Harvard email, and your name never came up. Four months you were on the phone with him?” I couldn’t control the volume of my voice, so I just let it go all the way up. “Did he take your calls in the bathroom?”

  T. said, “Let’s take a walk.”

  “You already took me for a walk,” I said. “Your work is done here.”

  “Neither of us seems to know when to quit,” T. said. “I had two telephone conversations with Mitchell, both initiated by him, and he wrote me three emails, one of which I responded to. The others I ignored. I’m sure I can dig them up for you.” He downed his espresso and didn’t say anything else, as if we’d have to wait until we were in front of his computer to continue the conversation.

  I said, “We’re here now.” Admittedly, a very T.-ish thing to say.

  “That’s been hard to prove most days,” he said. He repositioned our water bottles several times and finally left them standing next to each other very near the edge of the table. Significant? I’d already assigned those precariously perched bottles any number of identities—T. and I, T. and Ed., T. and Caroline, Mitchell and I, Ed and Caroline. T. said, “I had seen the workup on Mitchell’s cancer in November, but I don’t remember why my name came up again with Simon and Mitchell in December.”

  “This tour of Italy we’re not taking,” I said.

  T. nodded. “That’s it. And that’s what Mitchell told Simon he wanted to talk to me about, though he really wanted to talk to me about Simon. Mitchell called me in December and again in late January, I think, or maybe it was early February. Both times, he slipped into paranoid fantasies about Simon and one of the male nurses in the office performing experiments on him, and I remember a recurring insinuation that Simon had forged the diplomas on his wall—none of it quite explicit, and none of it extraordinary. You give a man enough cancer cells and enough of the drugs Mitchell was absorbing, and his brain function gets a little unsteady and unpredictable. I did tell Simon he might want to dial down some of the dosages, and I think he did.”

  This made sense of what I had seen and heard at home. I also remembered waiting for the elevator after our first visit to Simon’s office together, and Mitchell wondering aloud what kind of person would hang diplomas from a state school on the wall as a boast. Of course, this marked him as a pompous ass, not a paranoid madman. But I could see how such pomposity might have fueled a bout of real insanity, as it had in me. Mitchell’s diplomas and citations were plastered on the walls of his home office, and mine were tucked into a box with Rachel and Sam’s grade-school report cards. I didn’t blame Mitchell for this. I could have hung my diplomas. But not hanging them separated me from normal graduates of not-famous colleges, a distinction both Mitchell and I understood as a sort of honorary summa cum laude. I said, “The emails?”

  T. said, “The emails.” He pulled a pastry from the plate and regarded it as if it might yield some wisdom. “They were fantasies. If he lived, where he wanted to have dinner in Padua, what kind of wine he’d want to be sure they stocked. One long passage I remember was devoted to his finally being able to complete the book he was writing about Dante.”

  I said, “And Rosalie?”

  T. said, “Rosalie?” It sounded like a genuine question.

  “Half-gay, redhead.”

  T. said nothing.

  I said, “Beatrice?” I really thought Mitchell might have referred to Rosalie as his Beatrice. After all, he’d almost got the perfect ending to our romantic comedy. Before he got sick, he was planning to dump me, his ancient, blind guide t
hrough hell and purgatory, and waltz into Paradise with his beloved.

  “Mitchell never mentioned a woman,” T. said. For a few seconds he didn’t say anything. “I didn’t even know he had a wife.” He wasn’t looking at me. He was staring at the two little water bottles, which he pulled in a few inches from the edge.

  I was still angry, but the righteousness was draining away, like paint fading from the scenes I had imagined, the story I’d invented in which Mitchell clumsily conspired with T. to orchestrate my time in Italy and make me feel at home when I was not. Instead, when Mitchell imagined Italy, I was not there. “He did have a wife,” I said, but when I tried to come up with an image of myself in that house, a scene of Mitchell and me together that would anchor me in that marriage, I kept circling through a series of blank white walls, occasionally interrupted by the sight of that vast black TV that hid the hole Sam had made when he tried to make his father happy.

  Maybe I hadn’t been there—maybe that’s why Mitchell couldn’t see me, not since Paris, not since I’d first worn that black-and-white Marimekko dress that was crumpled up in Rachel’s red bag, stained with my blood, the shroud I had put on when I first felt the life draining out of me, when I didn’t object to Mitchell’s betrayal of the life we had imagined for ourselves, when I let Mitchell trade our shared devotion to research for a bag of coins from Harvard’s coffers. Maybe I had been dead long before I knew it.

  T. said, “It was a month or more after Mitchell died that Simon called about something else and mentioned that he’d just had a great note from Mitchell’s wife. Simon admired you.”

  I said, “Simon never actually spoke to me. He gave me orders. He considered me a serviceable nurse. Maybe Mitchell did, too.” She is not insignificant, Andre had said. She’s unidentified.

  T. said, “It wasn’t pity that drew me to you when I spotted you sitting at the back of that conference room, all alone. I wasn’t trying to do you a favor. I had been drinking myself down all afternoon—”

  “Gin and tonic and lemonade,” I said. “The Perfect Marriage.”

  “You remember,” he said.

  I remembered every word the man had ever said.

  “You were sitting there, but you weren’t there, and that was the space I wanted to occupy,” T. said. “I was poaching on your territory. I can’t do what you do, E. I can’t stop pretending I’m here. And it’s exhausting.”

  “It’s also exhausting pretending you’re not here,” I said. “I’m just warning you. It’s very hard to remember everywhere I’m not every day.”

  “You’re here now,” he said. “With me, you’re always here.”

  Instead of passing out with joy or leaning across the table and kissing him, like a normal person, I said, “Still, you should have told me—about Mitchell.”

  “I should have told the police that Lily was naked when I found her hanging from a beam above my dining room table.” T. nodded. “I should have told them she had just taken a bath, which is why her hair was wet, not from sweat caused by the strain and stress on her upper body as they speculated.” His gaze was fixed on mine. “When I found her, she had a towel wrapped around her bent head, and there was another damp white towel on the mahogany table. Probably, she had wrapped that second towel under her arms but the fold that was holding it above her breasts had come undone when the rope jerked tight around her neck. I should have told them. Right?” He wouldn’t look away. “Lily took a bath, and then she hanged herself. I had to take the towel off her head to get her into the scrubs. She was naked, and I wanted her body to be at rest, not dangling above me, and most of all I wanted her covered. For most of her life, I wasn’t there. That day, I was there,” he said. He nodded. “I was her father,” he said. He pulled the two water bottles apart, stood them at either side of his little white plate. “I didn’t understand what the scrubs would signify when the story got out. She’d often worn my scrubs as pajamas. Significant? Lily was young and beautiful and talented and rather popular, and we were having a wonderful week together, and she took a bath and killed herself.”

  I said, “What’s in Florence?”

  T. said, “Nothing. Not Lily. Not the time I didn’t spend with her. Not my house in Houston a few minutes before she got out of the bathtub. Just a house in the hills Lily shared with three young art students who are all still alive. Nothing. A big installation of blown-glass microorganisms she invented that no one seems to know how to disassemble without destroying. Surely, Ed or Caroline can make something poignant of that. I’ve made the whole city of Florence into something poignant, significant, the somewhere else I have to be, the one place I cannot go.” His handsome, taut features had gone a little soft—the dark under his eyes sagging a bit, the skin of his cheek thickening at the sharp line of his jaw.

  “Lily,” I said, and I couldn’t think of another word to say.

  T. said, “Lily.” He poured the dregs of his espresso into his macchiato and drank it down. “Now when you say her name, she’s naked, right?”

  I said, “She is.”

  T. didn’t say anything.

  I knew he thought this vindicated his covering for Mitchell, as well, but he was wrong. Every Virtue had another life as a Vice. Humility in one instance was Vanity in another. Ed could have told him that Chastity and Lust are twins.

  A young waiter in a white shirt came to our table and raised his hands in surrender, uncertain whether we were done. T. nodded. The waiter pulled a tray from a stack near the windows and cleared everything away. T. and I watched him, as if something might happen that would mean something to us, about us. I tried to turn the two of us into statues of ourselves, an opposing pair, a Virtue and a Vice, but with the blurry reflection of the empty steel tabletop between us, we most resembled those two fictive chapels, plausible looking but uninhabitable, lifelike but forever separated by the chancel arch, the altar below us, the space between us where our lives had been lived.

  The waiter returned and handed T. a cash-register receipt. I dove toward my red bag, as if buying him a coffee would even things out, but T. said, “I’ve taken care of it.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You’re welcome,” he said.

  It seemed like we would soon be standing, shaking hands, and going our separate ways, so I said, “I need your professional opinion.” I pulled the Marimekko dress out of Rachel’s bag.

  T. said, “From here, I’d say the prognosis is not good.”

  “It’s the stains on the back that I’m wondering about,” I said. “And my back is sort of a mess.”

  T. said, “Hand it over.” He expertly inverted it, as if he was used to dealing with women’s garments, and he examined the stains on the inside of the back. He pulled the fabric very taut between his two hands and held it toward me. “Can you see the silver flecks in the blood lines? And what looks like lead or solder at the edge of each streak?”

  The stains were shimmering.

  “Cadmium, I think,” he said, inverting the dress again and neatly folding it as he continued. “Definitely some formaldehyde. A good lab would probably find some benzene. You are likely allergic to all three elements. Thus the bleeding.”

  I said, “How do you know?”

  T. said, “They’re poisonous.”

  I said, “How did they get there?”

  “Same way they got on my back,” he said. “You were lonely.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  He handed me my dress, folded up as neatly as a flag. “Don’t wear it again. Don’t wash it. Get rid of it.”

  “It’s a relic,” I said.

  “It’s toxic,” he said. “As are the rosary beads, medallions, and shiny, framed pictures of the Madonna della Misericordia that Matteo hands out to his mournful friends. Had I told you when you noticed the blood on my shirt, I could have spared your back. Forgive me. I was too embarrassed to tell you the truth. From the moment I put that rosary around my neck, I felt like a holy fool, and when I realized I’
d done harm to myself, I took it as a sign.”

  I said, “A sign from God?”

  “A sign from my body reminding me that I am allergic to religion,” T said. “And a sign from my heart about how lonely I am.”

  In the space of a few minutes, we had acknowledged that we were both lonely, we were both fools, and we were both limber enough to reach around and scratch the skin off our own backs. By our peculiar standards, this was beginning to resemble a first date. I said, “Someone should tell Matteo he’s killing off his friends with kindness.”

  “He claims I was the first to have a bad reaction. Which is unlikely, as he’s been in the business of rosary beads for years. He employs a rotating cast of North Africans in his chapel. At night, they dip cheap souvenirs into vats of a silver shellacky goo, and then they distribute the stuff the next day, selling them to small shops and tourists on the streets of Venice and Padua.”

  “But their hands,” I said.

  “They wear gloves,” T. said. “There are more immediate concerns.”

  “Their brains,” I said. “And their lungs.”

  “Your loneliness,” he said.

  Instead of bursting into tears, I said, “We should contact the police.” I was turning into Samir.

  “Matteo employs two local cops as security guards for his chapel,” T. said. “It’s entirely legal. He’s proud of the whole operation. No one else is offering those people steady work. Matteo considers it an act of charity.”

  I said, “He’s a regular Scrovegni.” It could’ve been worse. I would’ve been worried about more than my back had I slept with Matteo. This thought made me itchy all over, so I said, “Is there any residual effect?”

  “The chemicals will have leached out by now,” T. said. “The loneliness may be chronic. When are you leaving for Cambridge?”

  “This evening,” I said, and I realized it was still true. “And you will go to Florence.”

  “I’m headed somewhere else,” he said.