The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  This was a twist in the familiar story.

  I said, “Anywhere in particular?”

  “I’m leaving soon,” he said. “I have until September to decide where I’m supposed to be.” From somewhere beneath his seat he pulled out a thin, square box that was covered in faded gold leaf and embossed with black script, something you might get with a pair of nylons if you shopped for them in the closet of a Medici. “I was going to propose a car trip,” T. said.

  The box itself was more elegant than anything I owned. Inside was an astonishingly pink silk scarf, a vintage Elsa Schiaparelli in its original box, something Gina Lollobrigida might have worn while being driven in a convertible to a film studio in Rome. I wanted to tell him it was the perfect gift, which it was. I wanted to tell him no one had ever given me something so delicate or pink, which was true. But I also wanted to tell him that even in a sleek little Alfa Romeo with the top down he could not drive fast enough, far enough, to cover the distance between me and the woman I imagined in the pink scarf in the seat beside him.

  Before I said anything, T. said, “You can wear it on the plane.”

  I said, “I’ll stick my head out the window.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes on the sky,” T. said. “Or you could stay here tonight. The chapel opens to the public again tomorrow.”

  “I have to deal with the bald man who’s stealing stuff from my house,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. “But your work is not done here.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Someday, E.,” he said, “someday soon, you’re going to have to deal with me.”

  This was starting to sound like a genuine proposal.

  T. said, “I have to be in Boston sometime before the end of the summer. I was thinking of coming next week.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I felt my eyebrows shoot up right across my forehead to my hairline.

  He said, “I have to give a deposition. Simon Allerby is being sued.”

  I said, “You’d be welcome to stay with me,” but every time I imagined him in one of those rooms, he seemed too tall by several feet, his head whacking against light fixtures, his elbows poking through walls. And I could already hear Rachel banging on the front door, demanding to know who was sitting in her father’s favorite chair. Toss in Samir with his nose pressed to one of my windows, and I was prepared to book myself a hotel room on the moon. I said, “Who is suing Simon?”

  T. said, “Some pharmaceutical company.”

  Surely, it was Rachel’s employer. That way, even if I didn’t bring him home, she’d get to interrogate him.

  “Simon is being targeted for publishing the results of a clinical study that was a bust. They won’t win, but they will make him pay,” T. said. His face was giving off nothing.

  I could feel my face reddening and sweating. I didn’t relish the idea of his seeing me as I really was, as I saw myself every day in Cambridge. I wasn’t eager to watch T. try to rectify his impressions of me here in Padua with the reality of the hermit in the housecoat who preferred the sunken-in cushions on her sofa to a bucket seat in a sports car.

  He said, “I was hoping I could buy you dinner one night.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” I said. I wanted to spare us both the embarrassment of the grim conclusion of that dinner, a shared dessert neither of us wanted to eat, and after-dinner drinks we didn’t need, and the other rituals that would follow on the realization that the promise of the evening had dried up before the appetizers had been ordered, that without the luster of Italy she seemed more opinionated than sophisticated, that she was a little older and a little heavier and a little more acerbic than he remembered, and that the door he had opened to her heart had since been sealed up and bricked over. I could live with myself in Cambridge, but I couldn’t live with T. having to live with the truth of who I was. That’s what I wanted to keep covered up. “I don’t know, T.,” I said. I wanted him to politely withdraw the invitation. “I don’t even know what I want.”

  “Duck,” T. said. “When in doubt, order the duck.”

  And we left it at that. He said he was going to have one more espresso. I said I was going to pack my bags. I knew it was likely I would never see him again. In characteristic fashion, we had made a date, but the date remained indeterminate. We didn’t even shake on it. Noli mi tangere.

  WHILE I PACKED, I REPEATEDLY FELT THE PRESENCE OF someone outside, but every time I looked at the balcony, T. was not there. An Air France agent who spoke with a British accent offered to sell me a business-class ticket for a flight that would put me in Boston just after sunset, for almost as much money as Mitchell had paid for the blue-and-white CPOCH badge I’d stuck in the suitcase with the Dante book and my poisonous old dress. When I begrudgingly gave the Air France agent my credit-card number, she asked if I might want to take a later flight and use my frequent-flyer miles—another of Mitchell’s secret stashes. I thanked her, and she offered me an upgrade to first class for a few thousand more miles. Mais, oui. I was playing with house money.

  I couldn’t find the scrap of paper on which Margaret had written her room number, but I was able to locate her last name on the conference agenda, so I headed down to the lobby to dispose of the suitcase and try to arrange for a ride to the Venice airport.

  “Signora Berman! You check out at last!”

  I tried to match his enthusiasm. “Ricardo!” We had already tangled once with Mitchell’s bag, and it hadn’t ended well. “I have looked for you at night, to thank you for the glue—colla.” This wasn’t true, but I knew we were going to need a surfeit of goodwill to get through this transaction.

  “He is a day man now,” Ricardo said. “And he brings the portatile from inside to here for you.”

  I said, “A promotion?”

  He said, “No, signora. Is true. I insist on portatile at desk. Is Ricardo we have to thank you.” The leather-bound ledger at the front desk had been replaced by a portable computer, which seemed to be the basis for his boast. He was already pecking at the keyboard. “Six days you been with us,” he said proudly.

  Not even a week. I had to get rid of the bag and get a ride to the airport before he checked me out. As urgently as I could manage, I said, “Prego, Ricardo.”

  “Pronto, signora. C’è un problema?”

  “Si, si, si,” I said. “I need a ride to the airport.”

  He started typing madly. “Taxi? Limo? Hotel shuttling services? Is cheap and comes—we see right here, she comes next time in almost one hour more.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  He typed something else and pulled out a ring of red paper tickets and tore one off, as if he were admitting me to a movie.

  This seemed improbable. I said, “What time?”

  “We call you when five minutes is arriving,” he said.

  I said, “It’s a van?”

  “Automobus,” he said.

  More than ever, I wasn’t convinced it was real. I said, “How much does it cost?”

  “Pay only the driver,” he said.

  I said, “It goes to the airport?”

  He said, “In Padova, the airport stays in Venezia, okay?”

  I said, “Okay.” I could draw the next frame of this cartoon: I was seated in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, watching the meter flip over into triple digits.

  Ricardo was typing again, and I knew I would soon be checked out and locked out without my luggage or passport. “Now, Ricardo, this is not my bag.”

  He leaned over the desk and eyed the suitcase. I could tell he recognized it. He didn’t say anything.

  “I have to leave it here,” I said.

  He said, “Is broken?”

  I said, “No. You fixed it.”

  He said, “Certamente.” His tone had cooled.

  “Thank you,” I said. I was prepared to grovel. “Grazie.”

  Someone in the lobby yelled, “Elizabeth?”

  I turned. I saw a man in shorts, a woman in a blue suit
, and a doorman in a green vest. I didn’t recognize any of them. I did see T. I was sure it was T., just outside the glass door. He was turning away as I turned to him. I said to Ricardo, “The doctor—” I could not recall T.’s surname. “With the silver hair.”

  “Harrington,” Ricardo said.

  “That’s it.”

  “Harrington, T.,” Ricardo said. “Fantastico. Generoso.”

  “Is he still here?”

  “Elegante, eh? Cosi generoso.” I had never paid Ricardo for the glue, or tipped him for fixing the bag I hadn’t wanted him to fix, and I think he was letting me know that a thank-you wasn’t going to win me any big favors at the front desk. “He likes to check out already.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  “Estramamente generoso.”

  The woman in the blue suit waved. “It’s Lisa,” she said as she approached. “From the conference. Is that the bag for Margaret? She’s going to be so pleased.”

  “She told you about it,” I said. I don’t know why I felt betrayed, but I did, as if Margaret and I had shared a secret about the fate of the Dante book that we had both vowed to take to our graves.

  Lisa grabbed the handle of the suitcase. “I’ll take this to our room, Elizabeth,” she said.

  Ricardo didn’t say anything. He was eyeing Lisa as if she were a troublemaker.

  I said, “I’m feeling silly about this now.” Suddenly, I didn’t want to give Dante up, not this way. “I’ll take the bag from here. It’s my problem.”

  Ricardo didn’t say anything, but he did nod his agreement.

  “Elizabeth, it’s not a problem.” She kept saying my name, as if she were trying out a new rhetorical trick for sounding more personable. “Really, Elizabeth, I’m tossing it right out the window.” She turned to Ricardo and said, “All full! Full house! I know, I know. No room at the inn except the room with a dumpster under the window.” She whizzed away to the elevator.

  When I caught up to her, Lisa said, “They back in a big truck and empty the thing—at four in the morning, Elizabeth. Right outside our window. Margaret and I begged for a quieter room, but no dice.” The elevator door slid open, and we both stepped inside. “I’m moving fast because I really have to pee. But we’re thrilled—really, Elizabeth, thrilled—to have something good come of this ridiculous room.” Lisa was only going up one floor.

  I pressed 7.

  Lisa said, “Top drawer.”

  I said, “Thank Margaret for me.”

  The doors slid open. Lisa said, “No problem, Elizabeth,” and ran down the hall, pulling my past behind her.

  Ed was wrong. T. was right. I could have lived without the gory details, with Margaret’s way of covering up the grim truth of what she planned to do with the Dante book. While I waited for a phone call from Ricardo, I got an email from Shelby. The subject was “Worlds Colliding.”

  Dear friend—

  I think of you everywhere in Florence, so much so that just now I squealed in delight when I saw this portrait of Dante in the Bargello—as if it was you standing next to me and not the very unpleasant young German thug with a nose ring who just snarled when I said, “He looks exactly like my husband!” (He does.) The German moved away in a huff. My pleasure, frankly. He smelled like a car air-freshener, but probably he can’t tell because it all goes right out that hole in his nose. Giotto painted this portrait just before Dante was exiled from Florence. (You knew probably.) You couldn’t know it from the tiny faraway picture of him I showed you on the bus the day we met, but Dante is a ringer for my Allen.

  Truth? I sort of feel like an exile myself this morning, and I miss everybody, but it cheers me up to find another connection through Giotto to you.

  Shelby had forgotten to attach the portrait of Dante. I was happy to let him disappear like that, to be replaced by Shelby’s devoted husband. I sent her a brief thank-you. I almost attached a picture of the courtyard of the Gardner Museum, but I couldn’t remember if I’d already rerouted that to her. This was another reason I was going to Cambridge. If I didn’t get home soon and take some photos, I’d have to cut off our correspondence. Instead, I downloaded a copy of the Gardner’s Giotto panel, The Presentation of the Infant Jesus in the Temple, and sent it her way.

  IV

  My phone dinged with a text from T. at noon on Saturday. I’d been awake for hours, but I hadn’t made it past the bathroom yet. Before I went to sleep late Friday night, I’d drawn the blinds to prevent any surprise intrusions from nosy neighbors, so I was still feeling confused about whether it was day or night wherever I was and wasn’t. And the Valium I’d saved all week for my return flight, the last of Mitchell’s icebox stash, might have contributed to my grogginess. I was wearing nothing but my pink scarf. It was gossamer thin but not transparent, even when I held it up to the lamp, and it was big enough to cover most of the territory between my shoulders and my thighs. I had experimented with it as a sarong, and a bra, and a head scarf, which really was how it looked best. But I was feeling sorry for myself, and indulging a little Juliet thing, which is why it ended up as a kind of shroud.

  T.’s text was brief.

  Giotto @ 11:00

  For a few seconds, I couldn’t type. Sweat was pouring down my arms and legs. I blew the scarf to safety on the far side of the bed and got a towel to dry myself off. I finally managed to tap out a sentence.

  I am in Cambridge.

  Within seconds, I had his response.

  Me too. Charles Hotel.

  This was hot yoga, and I was sweating right through the towel. I turned off my phone. I got a bathrobe, and then I turned on the phone. I couldn’t steady my hand enough to aim a finger at the tiny keyboard, so I put the phone on the bedside table and tried to poke out another sentence, but T. was much quicker.

  8 blocks from your house.

  Gardner Museum @ 11?

  I needed air, all the air in Italy, so I shoved back the curtains and wandered out to the balcony. I was madly calculating how much time it would take to get to Venice, and then fly to Paris, and then on to Boston, and when I subtracted six hours, it seemed almost plausible. The sky was blue, and there was a dry breeze blowing in from somewhere, and that may have contributed to my optimistic math. When I started from scratch, I realized it was six in the morning where I wasn’t, not where I was, and even if I got lucky I would not be in Boston until very late in the evening, hours after the museum had closed. And then T. upped the ante.

  Or you could make me breakfast.

  I was still half-hoping I might discover him in one of the other rooms along the seventh floor of the Arena Hotel, but I had walked the length of the balcony and back and spotted only a maid in one room, and then an elderly woman watching television, who waited with her slider open when I made my return trip to ask if someone had locked me out of my room. After I convinced her I was not a damsel in distress, I balanced my phone on the concrete rail and typed.

  I’m not dressed.

  T was relentless.

  Just put on a scarf.

  I was so utterly confused that I honestly could not remember if I had stayed in Padua because I expected him to know that I was never true to my word, or if I had stayed put so that I wouldn’t ever have to see him again, especially not in Cambridge. So instead of typing something sensible (Forgive me.), or true (I am in Padua.), or provocative (What happened to your car trip?), or self-serving (I’ve been kidnapped.), I played for time.

  Give me an hour.

  T. was okay with that.

  OK

  “Okay,” I said. That helped. I said it again when I went back into my room. “Okay.” I folded up the scarf and put it back in its beautiful box. “Okay.” I turned on the shower and waited for the water to warm up. “Okay, okay, okay.” It got me into the shower, but I could tell it wasn’t going to make it okay for much longer.

  I found it unnervingly easy to imagine T. in Cambridge. He was precisely the man most Harvard senior faculty imagined themselves to be. But as the steam rose
up around me, it was not so easy to see myself there. I just couldn’t see it, see myself back in Cambridge, in that house, in that life, because I had never been fully there.

  This was a secret I had kept for more than thirty years, a cover-up I’d masterminded from the moment Mitchell and I returned from our delayed honeymoon in Paris. I did it. It wasn’t easy, but I persuaded myself every morning that the woman in the mirror bore a reasonable resemblance to the woman I had meant to be.

  The hoax was elaborate and exhausting, often ingenious, and sometimes it even seemed virtuous. And I understood now that it had probably been a failure. My secret was out, almost from the start. I was the only one who didn’t know. Everyone, almost everyone—second-grade teachers, wives of deans, next-door neighbors, the entire sales force at the Ann Taylor shop in Harvard Square—could not see me, did not remember me, would’ve bumped into me had I not moved out of the way. Everyone knew what Mitchell surely knew.

  Finally, I saw the truth. I was never there in Cambridge.

  But for three uncanny days, before my past and my marriage caught up with me, before Simon Allerby called and called me back to my old ways, I was here. I had been visible. I had been seen—beheld. I had died and woken up in Padua. And then I had the bad luck to rise from the dead, wander into the world in some indeterminate moment between my past and future, someplace where I was and where I wasn’t, uncertain whether I was half-seen or lost.

  Seven hundred years ago, Giotto painted two versions of the Presentation in the Temple. I had stood for countless hours before the panel that was housed in Boston, the version of this prophetic painting whose final resting place was only minutes from my home. But until I responded to Shelby—sweet, sweet Shelby—I had never seen what wasn’t there. I had known since Andre’s lecture that the Angel of Death above the head of the prophetess was not present in the Boston panel. This made sense. Death did not enter the picture until I got to Padua. But more was missing than a heavenly herald. I had always known the Gardner painting was a revision of the fresco in the chapel, but I had never fully understood what was not there in Boston.