“I have no control over that moth, Albert. Besides, I’m not your wife or your colleague or even your page turner. Even if I knew what to do, it’s not my job to take care of these things—or anything!—for you.”
Albert glared at her.
Margaret felt that she had gone too far. Better to pacify him, she thought. She got up, and standing behind the back of his chair, put her arms lightly around his chest.
“Dear, dear Albert, I’m sorry. I’m so grateful to you for inviting me. I don’t mean to argue with you. But I simply don’t know what to do about the moth.”
That apologetic tone, tacking into the wind of his ego, usually mollified him.
She returned to the sofa and sat down, facing him. Both of them looked toward the brilliant sunlight now streaming through the windows of the solarium. No moth, no girl, no mist. The light had chased away all nocturnal moths and phantoms. And, as if catching the phantom of an interrupted thought, Albert broke the silence.
“Move to Teversham and marry me.”
This statement, so soon into their time together, disconcerted her. Typically this speech occurred as they said their goodbyes in telephone conversations, or as postscripts in his e-mails and letters, or last year, as she drove him to LAX. On their first date he had announced he was homosexual, but qualified that status as “seventy percent gay,” by which he meant that he slept only with men but was attracted to, and sometimes fell in love, in an unattainable troubadour sense, with women of her English rose type, fair-skinned and blue-eyed.
“But you know it’s impossible.”
“Of course it is possible. The marriage would be patterned after an Enlightenment model. The logic is impeccable, the path well-trodden.”
“I remember the first time you asked me to marry you. Five years ago, when I visited you in Cambridge, and we went sightseeing, and wandered around the ruined Roman villa. I vaguely knew the Romans conquered Britain, but that day it really hit home, the extent of their empire.”
“And we got caught in a preternatural cloudburst, very like the cyclopean storms that rage here.” Albert chimed in, his face softening into a smile.
“Of course no sex, you said. I said maybe, I’d think about it, after all, sex wasn’t that important. And I’ve thought and thought, and of course sex is important.”
“As I say, you could have your own lovers, and I will of course have my own lovers. Neither need know. An elegant solution.”
“I don’t want a marriage where I take other lovers. And if you had other lovers I would be so hurt.”
“Mimi, you understand that my real love would always be you! Only you. The others, this one and that one, what are they but primitive biology, the lesser common Eros? Not so important, certainly not true love, not the greater philosophical Eros.”
“The answer has to be no.”
“The offer is always open, darling. If only you were a British countess, you would understand, you would say yes. We would have Tuesday at-homes, all the Booker Prize winning writers and world-class academics would be regulars.”
“We’ve been through all this before. Besides, there must be countless countesses in Cambridge. Haven’t you found someone to replace me?”
Albert’s voice was soft, barely audible.
“I enjoy living as an expatriate. British sophistication suits me. But I can never replace my Mimi. Of course, you are incomparable, you know that.”
“And you are ruining me for other men. They’re never as perfect as you.”
Margaret had kept secret from Albert something that happened during his last Christmas in Griffith Park. He was preparing for the “great transplantation,” as he termed his impending move, and had hired a broker to put his house on the market. Six months had elapsed since her visit to Cambridge. She had assumed the proposal was simply a playful suggestion made during that carefree afternoon exploring the Roman ruins, so it surprised her to find, back in Los Angeles again, that the idea had solidified in his mind, and that he often mentioned it. She protested, but in fact, she was smitten, crazy in love, and ready to succumb.
Albert had decided to give a formal Saturday night Christmas dinner party, a “swan song” for the California phase of his life. The elaborate preparations had taken three weeks. The hostess role reminded her of setting her doll-tables with doll-teacups when she was a little girl. She was aware of being used by him, yet what delightful servitude. She treasured the refined milieu she had always dreamed of. What matter that she was the downstairs maid rather than the maiden in the tower? Two exhausting hours of clean-up followed after the departure of all the guests except Edward, whom Albert characterized as “a well-respected professor, and a dear friend.”
It was midnight. Returning into the hallway from the pantry where the cutlery was stored, she glimpsed the raw truth, glossed over for the four years they had known each other, the physicality of Albert’s hidden life. The two men stood entwined in the living room. Albert’s words were distinct: “Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get rid of her,” and Edward replied with a low moan of urgent physical desire. She froze. The two men disengaged and stepped back a discrete two feet. Pretending that nothing was amiss, she walked into the living room, retrieved her coat from the closet, murmured a polite good-bye, and closed the front door, careful not to slam it.
Once outside, the hysterics began. A private grief, although in public view by the light of the streetlamps, if a neighbor happened to be walking a dog or watching out a window. She stumbled down the hillside to her clunker Datsun. The ancient car squealed and barreled away from the curb. And now screaming and pummeling the steering wheel all the fifteen miles to her tiny apartment in Palms, the wasteland on the fringes of Westwood. A miracle that there was no accident on that dark night. She flung off her ruffled black satin dress, collapsed into bed, and sobbed.
Her sleep was blessedly comatose, and she awoke the next day at noon with a throbbing headache. What would archetypal women do? Ophelia would find a convenient nearby stream in which to drown. But the dry concrete bed of the LA River would hardly suffice. The Hebrew heroine Judith would saw off the heads of both men and impale them on poles outside the gay bar Rage on Santa Monica Boulevard. But the boys inside would probably point and laugh, thinking the heads were campy Halloween masks. What was a sensible modern woman to do? She downed two ibuprofens, and stayed in bed brooding, getting up twice to brew chamomile tea. In the afternoon the telephone rang. It was Albert, thanking her for her help with the party. She told him, in singsong: “I can’t see you anymore, it’s over, don’t call me.” And, his puzzlement genuine, she knew, “Why, whatever is amiss with my Mimi?”
An excellent question, for which she couldn’t find the words to answer. It had taken her until May to allow him back, a cautious distance between them, coffee at a neutral meeting place, a quiet bistro near his home, which was now in escrow. They began a tentative rapprochement, attending a few concerts together, though Albert by this time was in the final throes of all his complicated moving arrangements, and had little time to socialize. In early August, the weekend before his departure for Cambridge, he suggested marriage again. She had not refused outright as she should have, but had listened, and skimming over the agony caused by that kiss with Edward, had begun to fantasize once again about the delight of a married life together in England.
A clatter in the hallway, and a baritone male voice calling. “Albert, are you here?”
“That must be James.” Albert rose from his chair and hurried toward the voice. Margaret watched the tall, thin newcomer place a brown leather portfolio on a sofa. The two men embraced. She stood up for the introduction.
“This is my friend Margaret Stine. All the way from Los Angeles, to listen to us play.”
“Welcome. Albert has told me wonderful things about you. We love our audience.”
James’s handshake was firm.
“I’ll get out of the way of you two.” Margaret picked up the diary, walked over to the solarium, and
settled in a chaise longue near where the girl had lain.
James brought a music stand out of a closet. Immediately, the sounds of an intense practice session, the “start here, third page fourth measure from the top,” the “let’s do that again” the “no, no, this is a little slower,” James swaying from the waist as he blew into the embouchure hole of his flute, Albert bracing against the piano bench, sometimes almost raising his body up, as he leaned toward the score, his hands flying over the keyboard, feet pumping the pedals. Every few minutes, the music broke off in a jangle.
“James, it needs to be melancholic right here. The water sprite is calling out her sorrow.”
“For crying out loud, pay attention to the tempo. Stop the melodrama, please.”
The solarium was warming up in the sunlight. As the two men worked and squabbled, Margaret turned the pages of the diary. The story was heartrending. On what date would Julia die? Only a lucky few of the thousands of tubercular patients seeking a rest cure in these mountains had recovered. And what had been the connection between the diarist and the doomed girl? He sounded like a young and anxious husband.
19 July 1888. An altercation with Harold last night. He insists that my visits to J are ill-advised, and demands that I cease them. Her own family is responsible for her care. But I cannot abandon her—I cannot. We grew up together, in our own secret world, we pledged to cherish one another all our lives. She is so frail, so like the pale goddess of the moon, the marble sylph who reclines on her pedestal out in the garden, near the lake. My dearest inspiration, my Naiad, my peerless friend.
The diarist was not Julia’s husband. What then? She read the rest of the entry.
The entire Brotherhood is perturbed. What have our kind, we happy few, to do with women? Other than our sacred duties to protect our mothers and sisters, we have no commerce with the feminine sex. Are H’s words an ultimatum? Or is his message as yet only a warning? I explained to him—J’s demise is near. My few months of vigilance at her sickbed are not reasonable grounds for my exalted and intimate friends to sunder me from our fellowship. Ah, what a catastrophe if they should desert me. I could not survive.
An epiphany. Victorian authors were discrete, but this diarist, writing out his distress on a covert page, was frank enough to be understood plainly.
“Albert, no, no, we’re not in sync. What’s the matter with you today? Start again at the letter M.”
The letter M, for Margaret, for Mimi. And so, in every generation, these identical feelings, this same dilemma. Only in the 1880s there was the urgency of incurable disease, the poignancy of early death. The diarist and his Pre-Raphaelite beloved were young and innocent, their motives untainted by self-interest. By contrast she and Albert crawled at a tortoise pace, both in middle age, their game in play for the better part of a decade. Albert dreamed of her as hostess, protectress, muse. She was to him a possession to display, like a fine statue or a painting. But did she feel only a selfless ardent affection? No. He promised deliverance from her banal life—the boring repetitive work as a librarian at the Culver City library, the inane chit chat of her colleagues, her dilapidated neighborhood and down-at-heel apartment, the blind dates with sports-obsessed men. She valued him for his erudition, for his stellar academic connections, for the way he stage-managed glamour.
She lay back and closed her eyes. What a privilege to listen to these two artists struggle to create glorious music in this enchanted setting.
The Carpaccio Dog
THE RAIN BEGAN in the hours before dawn. By six o’clock the city of Venice was waterlogged. Black night gradually turned to gray morning. Fog shrouded the Byzantine domes of Saint Mark’s Basilica and the ogival arches of the Doges’ Palace. Waves from the canals slapped at the retaining walls, and the swells spilled over and wetted the cobblestones. At one moment the rain poured forth in torrents, in the next it eased to a gentle patter.
An hour after daybreak, Charlotte Wilde, who lived in a small town in downstate Illinois, plodded along in the Piazza San Marco, splashing through shallow puddles, but sidestepping the deep standing pools of water. A black nylon umbrella wobbled in her grasp from gusts of wind. Her damp brown hair had fluffed into a nebula around her face.
She had checked into the Saturnia Hotel the night before, after a transcontinental limbo of twenty-four hours. Exhausted and restless, and having slept not at all, she arose and set out at first light, with no cappuccino to warm her or pane dolce to fill her belly.
She consulted the Fodor Companion Guide cradled in her left hand. A gilt bookmark was clipped to a page in the chapter titled “The Renaissance Dawn.” The author discussed the Saints George and Jerome cycles painted by the artist Carpaccio in the first decade of the sixteenth century. The panels remained in their original setting, mounted on the walls of a salon in the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni. Professor George Koppel had etched these masterworks in her psyche, could it already be a quarter century ago? He had shown slides of the paintings during a required core curriculum art history course. Her young self, that bewildered college freshman, had hunkered down in the rear of an enormous tiered lecture hall, an anonymous face in a crowd of two hundred students. How like a god was this handsome cocksure professor, flourishing his hands to emphasize his points. Only imagine, the genius Carpaccio, lost in plain sight until Ruskin described the paintings in 1884. In a deep-toned, reverberating voice, the professor recounted the artist’s depictions of the noisy pageantry of Venetian regattas. His voice then dropped to a whisper, as if in the hushed corridors of the Marciana library. The master painter had also captured the opulence of tranquil Renaissance reading rooms.
Since that faraway time, Charlotte had ached to see this fabled city. The years had been filled with the responsibility of tending to her ill and aging parents. Her father had died six years ago, and then her mother had suffered a fatal stroke last April. A modest inheritance afforded her the opportunity to travel. What splendid luck to visit in late October, well after the throngs of summer tourists had departed.
How far was the scuola with its treasured Carpaccios? According to the Fodor, the distance was short. She set out on the recommended path, along the Grand Canal, up and over several bridges, and then leftward.
Alas, the thread of the directions soon became tangled. The hotel map folded in her canvas tote bag was of no use. The sinuous curves of the Grand Canal were clear enough, but the rest of the city was a Rorschach blot of pink spaces and black squiggles. In the convoluted logic of these islands the streets were never straight, but twisted and turned and crissed and crossed. They narrowed into alleyways opening into the irregular public squares called campos, once green fields, but for many centuries paved over. Four or more of these alleys branched off from every campo. At odd junctures, little bridges materialized. She trudged up the bridges and then down, turning right, then left, in the general direction of the scuola. No other living soul passed her.
All was silent, save for rain thrumming on the umbrella and plashing off the cobblestones. Water cascaded from the brick facings of houses and from the marble arches of churches. Through the mist glowed the yellows and ochres and rosy pinks of four-story facades, punctuated by dark green shutters. High above, red geraniums dotted the gray stone balconies. A strong odor of finny, dankly fetid marsh-water penetrated even through the fresh scent of rain.
Affixed to many doors were bronze door knockers, heads of the St. Mark lion, scowling exactly at eye level. Graffiti was scrawled next to one of these knockers. Was there crime in this district of the city? Shivering, she pulled her scarf around her neck and mouth. Her raincoat lay plastered to her arms, and was soaked through to the wool lining. Her flannel shirt was damp, and her blue jeans were sodden. Her teeth chattered, and her hands felt numb. As she walked out of an alley and into a campo, she slid on the slick uneven stone pavement. Her body went flying feet first. Landing flat on her back, she lay sprawled, helpless, the ribs of her umbrella broken, the pages of the Fodor soused, her tot
e bag seeping water.
The storm intensified. Water pounded on her face and drenched her clothes. She tried to get up, but a searing pain shot up her right leg, and she found that she could not move. She shut her eyes, and began to sob. Perhaps bitter cold would set in. She might pass out. Many hours would go by before someone discovered her lying unconscious. She could die of pneumonia in a hospital somewhere, at the mercy of strangers who spoke no English, where a stash of fifty euros tucked in her money belt would buy only a few days’ supply of amoxicillin.
The rain slowed. Soon it was only a sprinkle, a gossamer mist. Muffled campanile bells tolled. And now, as if in a dream, a wet tongue licked her face. She opened her eyes. A small white dog with a chest of off-white fluff nuzzled her with his black nose. He woofed, and tugged at her coat with his teeth. Why did he seem so familiar? Where had she seen him before? She could not think where.
To her astonishment, her body felt healed. She jumped up without effort. The mutt circled around her. He barked, and ran off down an alley. She thought she heard a soft male voice crooning, “Bellissima Carlotta, this way, and you will be safe. Come out of the wet cold, and into the dry warmth.”
She followed the dog. He trotted along a fondamenta parallel to a tiny canal, and turned left. He bounded over a bridge, and sat wagging his tail just outside the titanic bronze door of a gray stone Renaissance building. “Okay, pup, I’m coming,” she said aloud, and after clambering across the bridge, she halted in front of the door. A yellow plaque identified the building. Carpaccio. Orario 10–16. Chiuso il lunedi. How silly of her not to realize that the scuola was closed to the public this early in the morning. What day was it, could it be Monday, and closed all day? She had left her home at midday on Saturday, and yes, counting on her fingers, it must indeed be Monday. Any visit must wait until tomorrow.
Curious Affairs Page 16