A Summer In Europe

by Marilyn Brant

  Thoreau got in the last word or, rather, the last gesture with a very rude hand signal.

  The group spent another forty-five minutes or so viewing many of the other pieces. At one point, her aunt cornered her while she was alone and looking at the Slaves sculpture. Aunt Bea whispered, “I like seeing you having such a good time, Gwennie. You should do more of this. Stay out late with Emerson. Have fun tonight.”

  Gwen tried to remind her aunt that she wasn’t really a late-night person and, besides, she’d spent several hours with the man already. If she stayed out late with him people might start talking.

  To this, Bea replied, “Eh, so what? They’ll talk whether you go out or not. Don’t come back before ten.” And she zipped away.

  With this familial edict in mind, Gwen didn’t object as she might have when Emerson suggested they skip the return trip to the hotel and go, instead, on a stroll down the Via del Corso. There was a trattoria he wanted to check out (“Thoreau raved about it, and if it meets his standards, it’s sure to be good. He’s dreadfully choosy... .”), and he was looking forward to a return to his favorite gelateria, too.

  “You will love this place,” Emerson assured her. “It has the finest Italian ice cream in the country. And they’re closed tomorrow, so we’d best get there tonight.”

  They eschewed the bus yet again, had a quick dinner at the little eatery Emerson’s brother had liked (it was good) and found themselves at an ice cream shop in downtown Florence called Festival del Gelato.

  Gwen had tasted several scoops of gelato since arriving in Italy, and she’d had to admit it was a particularly delicious treat, but there shouldn’t have been anything too different about the cone she had this time. It was one of their double scoops, which sat next to one another on their specialty cones—fragola (strawberry) on one side and cioccolato all’arancia (chocolate-orange) on the other—but the portions were generous and the company was captivating. Maybe that was why the flavor seemed even stronger, the texture even creamier, the sweet coolness even more refreshing. The burst of taste sensation when she licked the fragola was so powerfully fruity, Gwen was convinced it almost had to be healthy!

  And sitting across the small circular table from her, Emerson nipped at his cone and swirled his tongue in the flavors he chose— stracciatella (chocolate chip) and malaga (rum raisin)—mesmerizing Gwen with the attention he paid to the ice cream and the pure pleasure on his face as he consumed it.

  The oddest thought crossed her mind as she watched him: This was how making love should be. A rapturous feast. A whirl of delight. That a lover’s facial expression should reveal at least as much enjoyment in kissing her as Emerson’s did in eating his ice cream.

  And, of course, this reminded her yet again of Richard. She paused, trying to remember how he’d looked at her when they were in bed together. It was usually pretty dark—Richard preferred it that way—but, even so, she was having difficulty recalling a time when he had treated any part of her with the reverence Emerson brought to his gelato. This was troubling.

  “A euro for your thoughts?” Emerson asked. “You seem a light-year away, Gwen. Don’t you like your flavors?”

  She slowly let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Perhaps the time had finally come to tell him a little more about herself. About her relationship. “I—um, I was just thinking about my boyfriend at home. Richard. I don’t think he’s ever tasted gelato.” She studied the Englishman’s reaction to this disclosure.

  As he seemed to do with most things, he took the new information in stride. “Well, what’s not to like? You should tell your Richard to fly on over to Florence and give it a try. There’s another popular gelateria in the city, Vivoli’s, which is known the world over, although”—he pointed to the shop’s ice-cream counter—“this place is my favorite. Most definitely.” He then returned to lavishing affection on his cone.

  She mustered her courage and asked, “So, is there someone special for you back in England? A woman you, um, love?”

  “Yes,” he said without hesitation.

  Though Gwen had no reason whatsoever to feel the plummeting disappointment that followed these words, she was, nonetheless, surprised by her sudden resentment. She bit her lip and was about to press for further details on this mystery lady when Emerson swiped a paper napkin across his mouth, grinned at her and said, “My mum.”

  “What?” she said. Then it registered. “Oh! Your mother. Well, yes, of course you love her.” Gwen laughed, her emotions yo-yoing from uneasy to strangely hopeful. “But what I meant was—”

  “I know what you meant.” Emerson sucked the malaga side of his cone until it formed a perfect creamy peak. “I was just fooling with you.” He hesitated for several moments then added, “I date. A few women, actually. But there isn’t one that’s particularly serious now. There usually isn’t. I’m not like Thoreau.”

  She squinted at him. The two men may have been unalike in subtle ways—a handful of personality quirks, a few physical traits—but she found more similarities between them than differences. “In what sense?”

  “Despite his first messy divorce and consequent death spiral into self-destructive thought patterns, my brother still believes in getting married, settling down with one woman, having kidlets and, eventually, playing endless games of chess with his grandchildren.” Emerson shrugged. “I don’t.”

  Gwen shook her head, not sure she processed his comment fully. “You don’t ever want to get married? Not even if you meet the right person someday? The One?”

  He snorted. “There’s no such thing. There are many Ones ... plural, not singular. You think you can identify happiness in one person, but when you try to tie it down, it slips away. Like with electrons in quantum mechanics. You can’t know precisely where they are, and by trying to pinpoint their location exactly, you lose them. The scientist has a much better sense of where their properties and locations are in space if he doesn’t attempt to force the electron into a tiny box and tell it to stay there. If he honors and encourages the natural freedom.”

  She tried to wrap her mind around this theory, a difficult concept for somebody who’d spent the past two decades of her life hungering for attachment. “So, you’re saying happiness in a relationship is impossible unless both parties are essentially free radicals. That women are unknowable entities to you if a formal bond with them is required, and that trying to create the bond itself causes the problem. Did I get that right?”

  He met her eye and nodded—a determined, almost sad motion. “Yes, Gwen. That’s correct.”

  She felt the drip of gelato on her knuckles—she’d been neglecting her cone—and quickly wiped some fragola away. “I’m not sure,” she said, “that we could be more different in our opinions.” She licked the edges of her cone thoughtfully. “When it comes to relationships, we may not, in fact, even be the same species.”

  “Perhaps not.” Emerson laughed and cocked his head to one side, as if assessing her carefully. “But you don’t think that’s going to stop us from shagging, do you?”

  5

  Lying to Emerson and Aunt Bea and Cynthia and Thoreau

  Monday–Friday, July 2–6

  For a full five seconds, Gwen was left speechless by Emerson’s remark. So much so that it took the dripping of more gelato on her fingers to get her to close her gaping mouth and break eye contact with him.

  Oh, he tried to play off the comment as a joke, claiming his usual flippancy, but it was too late. The idea had already infiltrated her brain and forced a shift in her perception of him. Shagging meant sleeping together! That he’d even made a comment like that meant his attentions to her weren’t similar to those of Hans-Josef or even Thoreau—a kind of hoped-for friendship. No. Even if Emerson wasn’t serious about it and had no intention of following through with any plans of seduction, he had imagined her in bed with him. And he hadn’t hesitated to openly share that idea with her—however teasingly.

  To his laughing brush-off resp
onse of “Oh, relax, Gwen. I’m just teasing you,” she’d immediately shot back, “Of course you are. I’m practically an engaged woman,” and she’d had the satisfaction of seeing him look surprised and hold his palms up in a “hands off” pose before changing the subject to that of good vineyards in the Tuscany region. A subject he could speak of with some authority, it turned out (he claimed to have tried many local wines), and a topic she knew nothing about, of course.

  But, although she might’ve been an unsophisticated, uncultured schoolteacher from the American Midwest, she wasn’t that naïve. This British man, no matter how charismatic he might be, meant serious trouble. And, as soon as possible, she insisted upon returning to the hotel.

  She could not, however, rid herself of him.

  Their tour group spent the next two days immersed in Florentine splendors and, for almost all of these visits, Emerson was at her side, sticking to her with the rebounding tenacity of rubber cement.

  Monday, the major museums in the city were closed, so there would be no vast Uffizi to lose herself in, much as she would have loved the anonymity.

  Hans-Josef said, “We go there tomorrow” (or, rather, “Ve go ...”), “but today we go to places that are open to us. Starting with the Duomo.”

  The Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore was the famous church attached to the incredible cupola that defined the eternal Florentine skyline, and San Giovanni’s Baptistery next to it, with the glinting fifteenth-century gilded bronze doors, captured bits of sunshine and sent them into the piazza. If Lorenzo Ghiberti could see his gleaming “Gates of Paradise” today, Gwen suspected he’d be very proud.

  Guido dropped them off at the tourist-filled square where caricature artists were already lined up in hopes of snagging new customers. Crowds strolled in and around the vendors, but Gwen’s attention was fixed on the buildings themselves, particularly on that impressive dome, raised by Brunelleschi in the early 1400s. It was so large, so imposing, so ... high.

  “To climb to the top of the Duomo, it will take you four hundred sixty-three steps,” Hans-Josef informed them. “I will lead a group up, if anyone would like to go.”

  Thoreau nudged his brother. “Shall we race?”

  Emerson snickered and sent him a steely-eyed competitive look in return. “You’re on, brother.” Then he turned to Gwen. “Will you join us?” He paused. Quirked his lips. “As I recall, you’re fond of stairs.”

  She blushed, remembering him watching her in Capri. “I might,” she replied. And, ha! She’d beat him, too.

  He grinned.

  “Either of you ladies up to the challenge?” Thoreau said to their two British women friends. Louisa opted out on account of wearing strappy sandals, but Cynthia was definitely game.

  “Of course,” the woman said, already tightening the laces on her light pink sneakers and laughing girlishly.

  To Gwen, Cynthia seemed a formidable athletic opponent—trim with well-shaped calf muscles—but, however youthful she looked, she was forty-four to Gwen’s thirty. Gwen didn’t think it would be much of a competition. Why she even felt she had to compete with this unpleasant person perplexed her, though. In a strange way, she felt her honor was at stake or, at least, her reputation with Emerson. But, again, why she even cared about his opinion was a mystery.

  With a peculiar and unexpected bolt of realization, it occurred to her that she had spent much of her life preoccupied by the perceptions of others and that—for once—she shouldn’t care about anyone’s opinion. Not Emerson’s, Cynthia’s, Thoreau’s, Louisa’s, Hans-Josef’s, her aunt’s or that of anybody else on this tour. Nor should she be worrying about Richard’s thoughts or her teaching colleagues’ or her brothers’ or some other person, present or not present in Florence at the moment. She should climb the stairs if she wanted to or, just as freely, say no if she didn’t. Period.

  Emboldened by this insight, Gwen marched up to the entrance to the Duomo, waited until Hans-Josef procured the tickets and prepared to race to the top as fast as the other tourists and the site’s rules of safety allowed.

  Considering this was a pretty athletic undertaking, Gwen was surprised by how many of the older people seemed up to the challenge. Dr. Louie and Matilda were in line to walk up, as were the honeymooners, Sally and Peter. Zenia was raring to go, not letting Hans-Josef out of her sight.

  Aunt Bea, however, begged off the idea and told her niece she’d be spending the time wandering around the piazza instead with that elderly British man, Colin, who took pictures constantly and annoyingly.

  Emerson wedged behind her, though, with Thoreau and Cynthia trailing him. Kamesh and Ani joined in as well, and the climb to the top began.

  Hans-Josef talked about the interior frescoes as they started their ascent. “They were designed by Giorgio Vasari, but most of them were painted by a student of his named Federico Zuccari.” He paused suddenly on the walk up and Zenia very nearly ran into him. “Zuccari was not considered to be as talented as Vasari, but he was, at least, innovative with color.”

  “Enough talking,” Emerson murmured in her ear. “Let’s just go.”

  Gwen shot a look at him over her shoulder. “That would be rude,” she whispered. Much as she would have loved to race around their tour guide and zip to the top, Hans-Josef would consider it a personal slight, and it would be disruptive to the other people trying to listen to what he was saying. “Besides, you like to hear about art, don’t you? You certainly like to talk about it. At length.”

  Emerson frowned. “No call to get snippy.” He looked longingly up the stairs and, then, met her gaze. “Perhaps you’re right, but I’m not a patient man. Not in anything.” A specific message seemed to underscore his words.

  Gwen looked away. Even given the little she knew about him, she considered this statement a rather unnecessary one. Emerson had been eyeing her with continued interest that morning and, though she had been doing her best to discourage it, she had no experience with a man like him. They were poles apart. He was so extroverted, sophisticated and clever to the point of frightening. He’d said their differences shouldn’t keep them from having sex—just last night!—which was an incredibly forward thing to say to a woman he barely knew. She could only imagine what little tolerance he must have for everyday social niceties.

  Eventually, they reached the top, with Zenia surprising them all by being the one to move ahead of Hans-Josef on the final stretch and get there first. She may not have been a small woman, but she could move when she was so inspired. “Getting ready for the Eiffel Tower,” she informed Hans-Josef triumphantly. “You gonna be leadin’ us up that, too, right?”

  “She’ll probably force him to the top at knitting-needle point,” Cynthia remarked snidely to the Edwards brothers, but Gwen overheard her and hoped Zenia had not. Gwen’s dislike of the British woman intensified.

  To get away from her, Gwen bolted up the last flight of stairs, but Emerson was on her heels. “Nice strong level of cardiovascular fitness you have there,” he said, not remotely winded or bothering to disguise that he was studying her legs.

  She suddenly felt very self-conscious in her knee-length shorts. “Thanks,” she murmured, but she didn’t return the compliment, even though she could have with honesty. Emerson looked very healthy.

  Instead, she pivoted toward the view and scanned the panoramic vista below. It was pretty and brilliantly clear, but not tempting enough to entice her to stay longer in Emerson and Cynthia’s orbit. So, the moment Emerson had his back turned, she slipped away to the exit and skipped down to the ground level again, tapping each descending stair like the patter of raindrops on a roof. It wasn’t much by way of defiance, but it felt good to take a stand, however small.

  He looked at her inquiringly when he got back on the bus, but he didn’t comment. She thought, maybe, he was finally getting the hint to keep his distance.

  Next up were quick stops at Piazza della Repubblica and then Palazzo Vecchio, where the outdoor replica of the David was located,
before they headed to see the Santa Croce.

  “It’s a bit like an Italian Westminster,” Thoreau commented as they walked in the church. “The best artworks are the Giotto frescoes over there.” He pointed ahead. “Some of them were shown in the film A Room with a View. The one Merchant and Ivory did. Familiar with it?”

  She shook her head. She’d read the E. M. Forster novel the film was based on years ago, but her recollection of the plot was vague and she’d never gotten around to seeing the movie. However, if this place had been one of the settings, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have liked it. To her, the church looked overly Gothic on the inside. So gloomy and imposing. And it seemed unusually depressing to her with its dim cloisters, dark graves and wall monuments to the dead.

  Hans-Josef took them first to see where the bones of Michelangelo were laid to rest. The renowned artist had died of a fever in Rome at age eighty-nine, but the Florentines snuck his body back here, despite the Pope’s wish to bury him in Rome. Dante Alighieri, the poet who wrote The Divine Comedy, was also given a memorial, as was Niccolò Machiavelli, sixteenth-century Florentine statesman and author of The Prince. As a group, they saw the floor tomb of Baptistery-door sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, a famous altarpiece by Giorgio Vasari and a nineteenth-century piece honoring the remains of Gioachino Rossini, composer of The Barber of Seville and The William Tell Overture.

  Then, as if that weren’t enough of a focus on death, they also were taken to visit the grave of the legendary Galileo Galilei, who’d lived from 1564 to 1642 and who’d figured out everything from the law of bodies falling at the same rate regardless of weight to the discovery that the Earth revolved around the sun. Although Italians still brought fresh flowers to his grave, Gwen didn’t think any tribute could be more solemn than Emerson’s, who paid his respects to the scientist in several long and uncharacteristically somber moments of utter silence.

  For a few minutes, he seemed so serious that, to Gwen, he almost appeared to be another man. He wasn’t mocking, winking or dramatizing anything. Hardly the Emerson she’d come to know over these past several days. And when he looked in her direction next, it was with a demeanor so subdued and free of his typical smirking that she literally took two steps back. He’d pierced her with the sadness of his gaze, and then looked through her and away.