Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

  Thank you, NM.

  Doors that push open, transparent doors, translucent doors, studded bastion doors, but not the flat images of Tuscan doors on posters. My doorways are entrances to, what, life, what life mostly is, the unconscious. And didn’t Kit say that about her poems, she’s mapping the unconscious.

  As she’d added her crabbed cuneiform writing, backward writing, mirror writing, the mosaic-inspired patterns, she felt herself slide into what she’d call an altered state, if that didn’t sound new agey. But it is a different kind of awareness, almost a suspension. She couldn’t explain it to herself and decided not to try but to pick up a heavy sheet of paper again and see what swung open next.

  This one began with a door within the door, as you see on some medieval gates for people to pass through while the huge outer fortress door remains locked. On only her second effort, she picks up the fine scissors and cuts out a shape for the light to appear from the next sheet of paper. The sun burns through above the small door and the writing above is crosshatched and illegible. What does it mean? It means color. Interaction of shapes. A ring of crimson around the sun, a shaft of letters. Another shaft of letters. Rays of writing in a private language whose meaning she might receive in dreams. The key to a desk; the iron key to the villa. A horse-head knocker from her house in North Carolina. She’s knocking there, knocking and knocking and wondering why she does not answer her own door. Yes, altered state.

  * * *

  —

  Rowan arrives late in the afternoon. They’re all gathering before the party to exchange gifts, since both he and Susan will take off tomorrow. “May I show you something? Actually it’s your present. I hope you like it.” He follows Camille into the studio where the lamp on the worktop shines down on #1 and the scattered materials for #2. “You were with me when I discovered paper, then we had that day in Bologna looking at artists’ books and more paper. You told me where to go in Venice. I can’t thank you enough.”

  Rowan slips his arm around her waist and leans over the paper door. He’s quiet for too long. What if he’s trying desperately to think of some tactful encouraging words to cover his embarrassment for her. But she looks sideways at him and sees the sweet tinge of a smile, how he looked when he was too pleased to speak. She’s seen that look three times, now four. He shakes his head slowly and pulls her close. “Brilliant. Brilliant. Let me say, I recognized you.” He lets her go and lifts the paper door, his arms outstretched. “Camille. Trust me. This is a one-off, there’s nothing like it. You’ve got to go with this all the way. You’ve nailed it. My Christmas gift! Ha! This is due for better walls than my yellowed office. Right now, let’s hang it over your worktop to inspire you. This is where you began the great work of your next decade! Honey, you’ve got it in spades.”

  “Wait, are you sure? I…” She starts laughing and stops.

  Rowan examines the new one she started this afternoon. “These have a quality of mystery but they’re also direct, strong. It’s like your dreaming mind is throwing out images for you to catch.”

  “That’s close to what I’m after. But some of this comes just from snatches of every day, phrases that seemed to require being written backward. And the bird. See his feet? The letters NM, that’s the nun I told you about. The mosaic, the shawl in the fresco. Things the day tosses out for me to catch.”

  “Just stay open. You are. That’s how the North Carolina clay formed you.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, you know, the creation myth that the gods slapped us into shape from local clay.”

  “True enough.” Camille feels alarmed by his extravagant appreciation. “Don’t go back! I need you here to cheer me on.”

  “You will be fine. More than fine. And I’ll be back with the swallows.”

  “So long from now. Will we forget each other? The last thing I expected was to find a boyfriend on this trip!”

  “Okay, girlfriend, give me some credit. We’ll stay in touch. I write actual letters. I’ll be back in late May.”

  Everyone brings gifts to the living room, where Susan has started a sputtering fire. Julia lights candles on both windowsills. “I’ve brought a special wine,” Rowan announces. “It’s a 2001 amarone. Chris would be proud. Let’s find the big-ass glasses.” Cleve winces at that. From his satchel, Rowan takes out his gifts, carefully wrapped in brown paper, tied with string and sprigs of rosemary. “Just pensieri,” he says, “little thoughts.”

  “Ever the fine press publisher,” Camille said. “Lucky I have another something for you, since my first gift was rejected.” She hands him a red box.

  He holds up a burly heather green V-neck sweater. “For the coldest day in Berkeley,” he says.

  Everyone toasts, unties ribbons, and exclaims. Julia has never seen a bone press but appears to be delighted. She passes a plate of walnut and Gorgonzola crostini. “Just a bite because Kit is throwing a huge dinner. I know the menu.”

  At Matilde’s bottega, Rowan designed and made blank books—perfect travel journals—he has brought for them. He used ochre handmade paper covers, each stamped with a vintage design of sailboat, bicycle, or biplane. Julia gives him a bag of her lemon biscotti for the flight back to California tomorrow. Susan has two small pillows stuffed with herbs for him. “They help you sleep,” she explains.

  Everything’s unwrapped and exclaimed over. The glasses of inky amarone catch firelight, the little tree shines with a bit of bravura, the crostini disappear. Cleve exclaims over gloves and socks: just what he needs. “Truly!” he says. “It’s a comfort to have just the right gloves and socks.” He sits down at the piano, which has yet to be touched. Oddly, he plays “Summertime,” the three almost-dead keys plunking. They gather around him and belt it out, the southern women all remembering the Janis Joplin version, the Ella version, and Rowan, whose cultural memory would be more the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” can only watch. Cleve pauses to take out three small boxes from his jacket pocket. “You girls, excuse the girls but you are to me. I don’t want you to forget where you came from. I had a feeling that might be easy from what Julia reports.” In the boxes each finds a thin silver chain with a white enameled Magnolia grandiflora pendant.

  Still sensitive to the jewelry heist, Camille holds hers in the palm of her hand as the others immediately clasp theirs around their necks. “Very pretty, Daddy. Someone in Savannah made them?”

  “Yes, that daughter of Alison. She’s teaching at the art college now.”

  Alison, Julia’s plump and lucky next-door neighbor. Julia feels a pang of anguish that Cheryl, a good ten years younger than Lizzie, is designing delicate jewelry while Lizzie falters…But no. She looks hard at the meticulous design, the waxy petals outlined in gold filament. “Oh, brava for Cheryl. Here, Camille, let me fasten it for you.”

  “You are too sweet!” Susan says. “This is so nostalgic—I have a giant magnolia in my front yard at home.” What a mess they make, she thought, with their leathery leaves falling constantly. But, oh, those few weeks of bloom when the scent blows through raised windows into the house at night and you know it’s the breath of the South. You breathe in that fragrance and think, Why live anywhere else, ever. She walks over to the window and stares out at small lights down the hills in the distance. Everyone’s at home. Everyone gathering. Not Aaron. Not barreling in with arms full of polka-dot wrapped gifts. At Christmas, his red silk bow tie, outrageous, his square college-fullback shoulders, how big and right he stands, building a fire. When the girls were little and excited. Now they’re soon boarding planes that will take them forty thousand feet in the air over the ocean to meet her in a foreign country. Where there are no family julep cups on the table. No carolers from the Methodist church. No annual open house, the cinnamon and clove scent of mulled wine, with toasted pecans and cheese straws on the coffee table, the fragrant long-leaf pine that touched the ceiling, had to touch the ceiling, the obscene piles of gi
fts and the windows fogged.

  She regroups and turns back to the different life, Cleve now thumping out “Angels we have heard on high…”

  Camille calls everyone into the kitchen. On the table sits a fancy new food processor. “Advance gift from Charlie! He couldn’t replace the jewelry but he could order this for us.”

  They scale the hill, turn at the top of their driveway, and then suddenly, they see Fonte, lighted candles flickering in every window. “This is your life, Susan Ware,” Julia whispers. She holds her daddy’s arm.

  Camille and Rowan bring up the rear. “Will you go back to my place after dinner?” he asks. “I’ve stashed another bottle of that amarone. We need to celebrate Paper Doors, #1. Celebrate in the best way possible.”

  “Sweep me off my feet,” Camille says. “Yes! I would love to spend a cozy night with you. No, not a cozy night but a scandalous night. I don’t want to think, but it’s the last for a long time.”

  “Ha. Too bad we’re too old to cause scandals.”

  Camille feels sad and excited. Tomorrow Rowan will be back in Berkeley for Christmas with his older sister and his ancient mother, while she will be delirious with excitement over seeing Charlie and Ingrid. “I know you hate leaving but are you also glad to go home?” I’ll have a whole day to recover myself, she thinks, erase all traces and put on my mother-face.

  “Yes. I adore my mother. My sister and I share the care. It’s not a burden.” Camille remembers her own mother saying, Any man who doesn’t like his mother has got to be damaged. Charles loved his mother. She knows Charlie does.

  What a good friend I found, she thinks. But you don’t have sex with a friend, at least not in my realm. So, what is he to me? Lover! She laughs out loud.

  “What’s funny?” he asks.

  “Life in general.” They step up the pace; it’s beginning to sleet.

  * * *

  —

  Can anything look more welcoming and warm than a rustic stone house in the country, all lit for Christmas? I’ve bought out the entire candle supply in San Rocco. In the whole house, even the bathrooms, no electric lights are on except in the kitchen. Stefano has let two of his kitchen staff help me tonight. (“My Christmas gift to you.”) Colin and I are not constantly getting up to clear plates. The table is set—snowy white cloth with huge linen napkins I’ve collected from the antique market, all with various monograms of long-lost women who set their tables for guests. My place cards I’ve pierced with twigs of holly, the only touch of red. Enough people are bilingual that I’m assured no dead conversation zones bog down the table dynamic. White roses (thank you, Susan), white hydrangeas (out of season) everywhere, giving their own light to the rooms. The closet-sized flower shop in town overflows with blooms someone trucks down from Holland greenhouses. No wreaths or sprays. Only cut flowers. Why? Because most are meant for the cemetery, which is heavily adorned for the entire holiday. Thanks to the dead, we have such abundance.

  Everyone arrives. Buona sera, hello, ciao, hello. They bear gifts and wine. Lovely to kiss cold cheeks. I especially wanted the Americans Wally and Debra to meet the three women. They retired here from Chicago and have thrown themselves into practicing stone wall building and helping, financially and hands on, with scuola materna, elementary school, cultural trips. (Those who really learn to live here.) Debra writes a bilingual newsletter that we all look at to find out what’s going on. Ah, the Villa Assunta contingent. Rowan’s last night. Tomorrow he returns to Berkeley for his last semester of teaching book arts at Mills College. I give them all big hugs. “All good sabbaticals must come to an end, amico,” I whisper. He hands me three of his publications, treasures. Susan looks terrific in a red velvet fitted jacket with a white satin shell. And this must be Cleve Hadley, what a southern name. I already feel protective toward him, sensing how he must have suffered with Julia over the slacker granddaughter. Our good friends Guido (oh, devastatingly good-looking in the manner your mother would advise you against) and Amalia, Nicolà and Brian, Stefano, and then witty Canadian expat Belinda and her German diplomat (retired) husband, Karl, also stamp in shaking off rain and sleet. (How to make it rain: plan a party.) Karl has scraped his fender on a stone wall when parking and steam seems to emanate from his ears. I hand him a to-the-top glass of prosecco. Belinda is wearing what looks like a Scottish kilt (“unfortunate,” my mother would say) and I see her eye my outlandish garb skeptically. I catch myself in the mirror and quite like this surprise version of me.

  Everyone heads toward the fire. Colin has created quite a blaze and seems proud of it, or of something. He is beautiful, my man. Lucky, he is. Colin looks, how to say it, he looks kind. You see his fringy long lashes (didn’t Elizabeth Taylor have a double row?), how his gaze lingers as his lips form an archaic upturn. You know he’s there, all present and accounted for. He doesn’t appear, as many men do, to hold back, reserve judgment. His vibe is You’re just fine, my honey. During dessert, he’s going to announce our late little straggler. I didn’t want to say anything early on because I thought the conversation would be baby, baby all night. I touch my middle to feel the slight, hard mounding, as when at the beach as a child I covered my feet with wet sand.

  Stefano’s waiters pass my antipasti platters: various salumi crostini of chicken livers (crostini neri, the one item no Tuscan party exists without), crostini of peas and mascarpone, bowls of baked spicy olives, prosciutto wrapped around bread sticks, cheeses, endive leaves stuffed with farro salad, mushroom pastries, and fried vegetable slivers.

  For dinner, I have scattered the three women among the guests so everyone meets new friends. For my right side, I’ve claimed the charming father of Julia, an old-school gentleman. He is wearing a paisley ascot, a camel blazer with horn buttons, and his polished wingtips look bespoke. Everything about him is neat and just so. (Heartbreaking what that family endures.)

  Fitzy leaps to the mantel. He’s snowy white, his plume of tail waving among the flowers. Imperial and impartial, he surveys all with startled citrine eyes, a lar familiaris, a family god crucial to the Roman household. He does blink at me, the one who feeds him, looks down at my dress, Margaret’s dress rescued from the suitcase, hung in the sun to air. When I tried it on, Colin insisted that I wear it. “You look exotic, like the favorite in a Turkish harem,” he claimed. Gold silk with drooping sleeves (watch out for sauces at the table), a sash of amethyst brocade, and a wide swath of ruched crimson velvet hem trailing the floor (she was even taller). I feel glamorous, like a woman in a D. H. Lawrence novel, or a Bloomsbury literata looking forward to a louche weekend in the country. I hope I don’t look like I’m wearing a thrift store bathrobe.

  Everyone here? No, not Riccardo. Late train? Luca and Gilda are coming, though it’s hard for them to escape their hotel and they usually dash in just as we sit down. We’ll wait. What’s the hurry?

  Many of the people I love most in San Rocco gather at our table. Julia, Camille, and Susan, only here for a season, have so naturally become a part of my days that I can’t imagine this hillside without them. Since they’re older, you’d think I might be responding to their maternal auras but, mothers all, they don’t seem to have them. Or perhaps they’ve shed them. Still, I feel a benevolence will fall on my baby by their presence. If I’m weepy and exhausted with a newborn, I’ll find solace at their kitchen table. I know I could call in the night, that we’ll sit in the piazza on late summer afternoons drinking lemonade and passing the baby around. Friends, I guess, but because they have had their big losses, they’re freed in some way that makes them vulnerable and open. We laugh. We’re bonded, too, by sharing this small patch of Tuscany.

  Guido is on my left. We always flirt. Amalia and Colin don’t care at all, knowing us well. Guido is a little younger than I, slim as a skewer, with tar-pot-black eyes. His family, settlers in the 1200s, owns the biggest villa in the province. They’re great winemakers and their castle is the attraction that makes San R
occo prosper more than other small villages. Amalia also comes from those tottering aristocrats who once minted their own money and never knew the extent of their land. Both are late and exquisite flowers on thorny old stalks. You wouldn’t think Amalia beautiful unless you know the Leonardo da Vinci painting of Ginevra de’ Benci. She’s a dead ringer for that enigmatic and remote portrait—but Amalia has better hair. Ginevra’s mien is somber but Amalia’s face often breaks into an electric smile. (Ginevra was said to be a poet. From her whole life, her only remaining lines: I beg your forgiveness. / I am a mountain tiger.)

  The bell jangles and Colin opens the door to Riccardo, Luca, and Gilda, who’re given a quick glass of prosecco and brought to the table. It’s nine, it’s time for the potato ravioli and the Collio wines Chris gave us. (Cin-cin, Chris, all alone in California. Come back soon.) Not that she ever cooked, but Margaret taught me this lobster pasta (a brief lover/chef gave her the recipe), easy and rich beyond belief. It occurs to me: Margaret is a household god.

  Leo and Annetta, my Italian family and always hospitable, help pass the platters and fill glasses.

  Riccardo, man of words and terrific translator of my poems and many others far greater than I, starts the toasts. I seated him beside Susan, garden maven, because he is a rosarian and also because he has a crocus field. He hand-gathers the stamens and dries them, augmenting his meager income with local sales of his saffron. (I have a vial for Julia.) I’m sure they’ll find common topics. That he is at the Vatican all week provides him with amusing or horrifying anecdotes. He rises to toast the pope, whether truly or ironically we can’t tell. He mentions the good future, then ends with some joke about America’s current politics, not all of which I get, as I’m overseeing the serving of the stuffed pork roasts, smashed potatoes, and vegetable bundles tied with chives. Cleve, I knew he was one to recognize a situation, rises and thanks all for receiving his daughter and her friends with such warmth. He responds to Riccardo’s digs about crazy American politics with a funny reference to Berlusconi’s bunga bunga parties, pretending that was what he hoped for tonight (a slight barb from Savannah, but smooth), and then, softly (sweet cane syrup, tupelo honey) toasting Colin and me, he says he would like to welcome all of us to Savannah, Georgia, whenever we can come. I see Julia’s eyebrows fly up at that, but she then stands and in a tremulous voice thanks us in Italian. Brava! She simply says how lucky she and her two friends are to have picked Villa Assunta, as it were, out of a hat. “Makes you believe in fate,” she concluded. “We are so happy to have this fate and to be here tonight.” Camille and Susan clamber up and clink glasses all around.