* * *
—
Camille hopes for a silver lining. The jewelry will be returned in a paper sack by the front door. The police will turn in to the driveway, siren jubilantly blaring. They’ve recovered everything! The thieves are in jail! Every time she gets dressed she wishes for the necklace with the crystal box of happy diamonds that Charles gave her for a big birthday, or the dangly amethyst earrings the color of Tuscan grapes. She thinks of when her old (Mother!) pearls once broke in a restaurant, sending waiters and Charles to scurry under tables. I won’t replace the jewelry, she thinks, not even if I could. I’m sorry I won’t be passing it on to my granddaughter, but so be it. Now that I know what it’s like to lose it, I won’t experience that again. Charles—lost. All his gifts—lost; this loss attaching to the loss of him, loss on loss falling through me, a cement-filled box thrown into the ocean. She remembers something from the dream of him on the woodland walk. “Cyclamen.” He’d turned, and, smiling, said, “More precious than jewels.”
* * *
—
At first he did not come to Italy. Now he again can walk around in her mind. She had not expected this roaming ghost. When her parents, her older sister, cousins, friends died, and there have been many by now, they all retreated after the period of fresh grief, surfacing when she was reminded that Sophie adored anemones or Mother’s house smelled like this pine oil and brownies or Billie Holliday was singing that night when Ralph…Her parents, much loved, never visited her dreams. Her mother comes closest to her when Camille searches her yellowed and brittle recipes for cornmeal fried okra and caramel cake or brown sugar muffins and grits soufflé. Her father comes back when she hears someone whistle as clear as a bird, or she passes a golf course, or sees someone nip back a bourbon in one gulp. Her sister, Sophie, whose breast cancer metastasized radically, appears only in quick images: skipping rope, falling off her horse, fainting in a soft heap at her wedding. Immortality, she’d always thought, is how you live on in the memories of those left. She’s saddened to find that so little remains on a day-to-day basis. But she’s beginning to feel heartened that the force to move it pushes strongly through her.
If she’d stayed home, she muses, she would have revived her book club, picked up Ingrid at school, kept up with colleagues, attended art department lectures, maybe opted for Cornwallis Meadows—a lucky end unit with hummingbird feeder and swing on the porch. That nice Catherine at the orientation, moving down from the north, would come over for tea in the afternoons. Nothing wrong with that. But. What if I’d missed Villa Assunta? A thousand images rush in: Venice, her studio, the paper workshop, Rowan’s beard rough on her breasts, Julia laughing in the kitchen, everyone toasting and sharing all the new experiences at dinner, Susan’s joyous and maniacal maneuvering in their blue Fiat, countless explosions of taste, amazement at markets, sweet San Rocco, and the light crossing the piazza like a sundial at all times of day, the three damn thieves’ cats cavorting about the house and weaseling into their hearts. Oh, yes, they have names: Bimba, Ragazzo, and Vino, the latter bestowed after dinner when the minx jumped on the table from Susan’s lap and licked her glass.
To unpack the crate that might have arrived during the robbers’ dinner and ransacking, Susan asks Leo for help. Maybe one of the thieves ambled to the door, wineglass in hand, and signed for it. Cheeky bitches. Nailed and constructed as though it contains the Mona Lisa, the crate holds instead an astrolabe and a stone statue heavy as the rock of Gibraltar.
* * *
—
As Susan was leaving the Peggy Guggenheim sculpture garden in Venice, she passed an antique shop filled with things you wouldn’t think mortals could own for mere money. Amid immense baroque paintings, complicated reliquaries with marble angels, and ornately gilded, carved, and brocaded furniture, she spotted a rusty astrolabe—she wasn’t then sure of the name but knew it was some sky-charting instrument—mounted on a curlicued iron base. Beside it, a stone garden statue, a pedestal surmounted by the slim figure of Mercury with a tight smile, almost a smirk. Small, maybe in total four feet tall. She thought, That’s the size gods should be. Quick and nimble moving among the clouds, earth, and the underworld. Didn’t Mercury go to the underworld? Seduce someone on the way down? She loved his pointed helmet with wings that looked blown back, and the winged heels of his sandals. It would be marvelous to have such clip-on wings, just lift off and cross the Grand Canal. The shop owner opened the door. “May I be of assistance, Signora? You are admiring my Mercury? He is the god of travelers like you, you must know.”
“I did not,” Susan answered, “but he could be the god of a beautiful garden.” She shook his hand and stepped inside.
“Sono Renzo Sciavonni,” he said, introducing himself. His tight suit shone like sterling silver and his waxy slicked-back hair required such ample products that Susan found herself trying to imagine peering into his bathroom cabinet. She told him her name and that she has a garden in Tuscany that needs a god. “Obviously your garden already has its goddess.” He smiled. Always the polite flirtation in Italy, even in overrun Venice.
“Grazie, Signore.” Susan laughed very loudly. The globular bronze instrument intrigued her. “Tell me about this, I know it’s not a sundial. I know it somehow plots the heavens.” She leaned to examine the intersecting spheres pierced through by a long arrow, the angle of earth’s inclination, she assumes.
“Brava. You’re admiring a spherical astrolabe, also called an armillary sphere. See how good my English is! The ancients were smart. This device gave them the ability to calculate altitudes of stars, positions of the moon and earth, positions of themselves.”
They were hers. Susan mentally placed them in the garden at Villa Assunta. A garden thrives on punctuation marks and a place to be drawn to. She imagined Mercury greeting her and her friends as they alight from the car. How mysterious the astrolabe would look in a bed of artemisia and yarrow. Are those two plants as ancient as the Roman gods? Did the astronomers calculate and cavort amid patches of lambs’ ears and dianthus?
The prices were astronomical, too. Renzo was ready to negotiate politely up to ten percent off, but he had not reckoned on dealing with the top-selling real estate agent from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, who combined inquisitiveness, charm, and plain savvy to bring him down thirty percent including shipping. He couldn’t help but admire her.
* * *
—
Leo pries open the boards but calls for Colin and a dolly to haul Mercury out of the box. There he stands, sentinel of the front garden. The astrolabe Susan places in front of a stone terrace wall near the iron benches she’d dragged out of the limonaia when they first arrived. What a perfect place to sit and contemplate those brilliant ancients who invented such an instrument. Nerds, they must have been, like her daughters and their associates in Silicon Valley.
Susan is thinking of the garden in spring and summer, but her thinking is like this astrolabe—in intersecting rings. She’s projecting: that moment when a single thought stretches out into an arc that lands in the future. (Ah, you’re spinning out, how marvelous, Aaron used to say.) On impulse, she’d given Signor Sciavonni her card. “Please email me when you acquire other garden antiques,” she said. “I love sundials and iron trellises and stone lions raised up on their haunches. Even those—I know they’re common—four seasons statues.” She left the shop with lights strobing in her head. She’d seen iron fanlights, lion-face fountains, and fanciful gates at the Arezzo antique market and had paused to look without seeing beyond each.
Now she connects the dots.
Walking back to the hotel, avoiding tourists’ elbows and shopping bags, she dialed Molly Dodge in Chapel Hill. On houses that Susan had listed for sale, they’d worked together many times staging the properties by taking portraits, sideboards, and lamps from Molly’s barny antique store and giving character to lackluster interiors, or even completely furnishing a house whose owners had mo
ved out. She’d especially loved setting tables for imagined guests and creating serene bedrooms in pale teal toiles.
“Ciao, bella,” Susan almost shouted over the din of tourists. “I’m calling you from Venice!”
“You are kidding,” Molly shouted back. “I am so envious I can’t even speak.” They talked about home news, with Susan’s eyes welling up, a fierce attack of homesickness right in the middle of Campo Santo Stefano. Then she remembered the bleakness of her office after Aaron died, how the company felt like a deflated blimp. How she felt like a deflated blimp as well.
“I’m extra good. My friends are just incredible. It’s like a college apartment but no one’s messy or drunk or failing out. We’re having one adventure after another. But I’m calling because I have a super idea. I just bought two special garden antiques for the house we’re leasing in Tuscany. You just cannot find anything remotely like these things anywhere else.”
Molly knew. She has a furniture and bricolage picker in France, and less and less for more and more seems to be the rule.
They decide that Susan will buy half a container to ship back to Artful Dodge Antiques. Fountains, fanlights, gates, garden furniture, statues, railings, convent sinks, table bases—endless! They’ll see how it goes.
“Then you come home, girl! We miss you. Wasn’t it terrific when we played house—and we got all those babies sold for top dollar, too!”
“We did. Now southern gardens will be transformed. This will be fun!”
* * *
—
Julia pours red wine into her braising pan, and the comforting smell of sizzling onions draws everyone over to see what’s cooking. “Time to start celebrating again,” Susan tells them, “and I have news to share.” She finishes setting places for six, then takes out prosecco glasses and pours. She guides them out into the cold, shining light on her treasures. “They’re now guarding our house, and the astrolabe will help in case we lose our bearings in the universe.”
* * *
—
Just then, Colin and I walk down the hill toward them swinging our flashlight. Susan beams light on the archaic smile of Mercury and the mathematical markings on the astrolabe’s bands. “These are for us but they’ve sparked an idea that I am now in hot pursuit of. More later!”
Rowan arrives and we all move inside around the fire. He has brought over a few of his publications and he, Camille, and I pore over them before dinner. Rowan has his fame, if not fortune. Rare-book librarians buy his books, from Berkeley to Oxford, as do collectors of first and rare editions.
I’m beguiled by his offer to publish a limited edition of my work; he’s tops. I’m thrilled that he follows my latest poems in literary magazines, difficult poems—quick moments from my unconscious. (Impossible for the conscious, writing mind, to truly represent the unconscious. Built-in failure, but I try.)
He also brought some Sardinian pecorino called Fiore di Monte that Julia raves about and keeps slicing and piling onto a board with slivers of focaccia, olives she baked with hot peppers, and lemon peel. They’re in no rush for dinner. Rowan keeps the kitchen fire stoked and the music of Ennio Morricone playing. When the track from The Mission comes on, Julia says, “Oh, please play that at my next wedding, funeral, whatever.”
At the table, Susan tells them about calling Molly from Venice and their agreement to try their luck as importers. “This business works well for me because I can find stunning garden antiques and ship them home. Molly pays my bank in North Carolina when she sells them, so I am not earning Italian money. I do not want to get mixed up in Italian taxes. I can’t ever earn money here but I can import from here—totally legal.”
“You are amazing! Always coming up with the unexpected. Ha, you got us here with two flicks of your computer screen.” Susan pours and Camille’s glass catches a tilting convex reflection of a kitchen full of warmth.
“Yes, and you’re right,” Julia says. “Chris has explained that as his consultant, I am paid in the U.S.” Chris! Now he’s gone. Julia took him to the train for Rome this morning. He’s called from his hotel, already missing San Rocco and Julia. Tomorrow, he’s back in Napa, back to business, to his son home for holidays, and to planning for the next trip.
“Not likely to be a problem for me,” Camille observes.
Julia has made a beet salad with burrata, followed by stracotto, which just seems like good beef stew to Susan.
* * *
—
In San Rocco’s four antique shops, Susan finds two vintage terra-cotta sphinxes; a stone trogolo, a trough for animals and charming as a planter; a Liberty (art nouveau) gazebo that unhooks its parts and lies flat; a wrought-iron trellis small enough to fit in a pot of climbing clematis. This is too much fun. Villa Assunta becomes a temporary exhibition garden for Susan’s trove. She realizes she will have to rent a storage room as her collection grows, otherwise the property will begin to look like a bizarre junkyard.
A fondo is what she needs. On side streets, she’s seen a couple of FOR RENT signs on the stone storage rooms at the bottoms of houses, usually too small for a car. Laden with iron locks, hand-wrought through successive ages, their wide doors open to the street. Inside, the heaviest beams support the house above. The dank rooms look as though green demijohns of wine and amphorae of olive oil still should line the walls. She walks all over town but now sees no sign saying AFFITTASI.
At the end of San Rocco’s elliptical piazza, tucked into a storefront no wider than two arm spans, she’s passed a real estate office with beveled and wavy oval glass in the paired walnut doors. Along the side of one door, a case displays notices of houses for sale. Naturally, Susan has perused the mansard apartments and the noble farmhouses marred by garish turquoise swimming pools. (What she could do with a pool at Villa Assunta!) She stares at one seemingly Olympic monster, imagining a stone surround, various sizes of boxwood balls at the end and, umm, how should some falling water be incorporated?
Before she inquires about a fondo, she pauses for a coffee and to look up several words that explain what she’s looking for. Best not to appear totally unprepared. Recently all three women have been studying with a tutor Grazia recommended. Signora Perruzi comes after lunch for two hours twice a week. And there’s homework. The language seems daunting, endless.
When Susan orders a coffee, Violetta suggests instead una cioccolata calda, a hot chocolate. Sì, Susan nods, and soon her idea of hot chocolate explodes—this is dense; her spoon could stand up. What a revelation. She’ll surprise Julia with this tomorrow.
* * *
—
Susan rings the bell. Inside the office, she meets Nicolà Bertolli. She’s at the front desk but is not, as Susan first assumes, the receptionist. She’s it. Petite, all voluminous curls, chic Prada-ish suit and red lips that only slightly stain her big smile. “I’ve heard of the three American women. It is lovely to meet you,” she says in perfect English. She gestures toward the cushy pecan-colored linen sofa and chairs squeezed into the back of the office, and they sit down. She tells Susan that her husband, Brian Henderson, is English. They have the office in San Rocco together, but he also has an office in Florence as the Tuscan representative of Lloyd Bingham Estate Sales and Rentals. Brian fell in love with Nicolà and Tuscany when he was in study abroad and found at the end of his term that he couldn’t leave. “He’s still very English,” Nicolà says, “but he has an Italian soul and four Italian children, all grown now and living in Tuscany. We still spend a lot of time in England. I love London and he has family in Sussex.”
Susan knows the famous British company but had no idea there was a branch nearby. Nicolà may be her age. They appraise each other, both fashionistas who could be competitive, but decide that they are friends. “I love your hair,” Nicolà says, tossing her own loose locks. “It’s a statement, saying, I think, Don’t mess with me.”
“Well, I would kill for those sh
oes!” Susan replies. How does she even get them on, all those gladiator straps and the long expanse of leg up to the English-looking tweed skirt. At our age, in an almost-mini! Maybe I’ll get one, Susan thinks. My legs are just fine except for that small explosion of broken veins behind my knee.
Nicolà talks about local villas for sale, about property listings for rent all over Italy. About how hard it is to manage houses that people rent to foreigners. She knows about the robbery and asks if Susan is the one who lost her jewelry.
“Mine was hidden under the toilet scrubber,” Susan says. “I tried to give Camille a necklace of mine but she said she doesn’t want jewelry ever again. Thanks for asking. Back to the backstory, my husband Aaron and I owned a pretty large real estate firm in North Carolina. Not at all in the league of Lloyd Bingham, but, yes, we did amazingly well. Aaron died three and a half years ago, and I’ve eased out of the company. We loved it. I’m house obsessed. One of my favorite parts was staging the houses. You must come to Villa Assunta. We’ve had a good time bringing it back to life. My two friends and I are in love with it.”
“I know the property. Quite undervalued. It has a superb perspective out on that flat extension of land. Do you expect to buy it?”
“We just arrived in October. We three are at crossroads, so we’re just taking it day by day. Who knows!”
“Are you here to look at other houses, to compare?”
“Ah! No. Oh, now I’m embarrassed. I’m only looking right now for a fondo. A lowly storage unit! Probably not at all what you represent.” She glances at the sleekly produced brochures on the coffee table.
Women in Sunlight Page 21