Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

  * * *

  —

  What comes to mind is a quote from Wallace Stevens: The world is ugly and the people are sad. I refrain from throwing it into the fray. I’m thinking maybe the woman is in love. Rose—speaking of names, that one predisposes her toward innocence. Maybe she’s thrilled. “Who knows what she’s been told?” I say. “Handsome dude, Wade, even at sixty. I’ve looked him up online at his marine store. Hair blown back, strong hands on the rudder, shirt open. Looks like he stepped out of GQ. I’d turn my head to look at him. I’m sure Rose is projecting and part of that involves a filmy Can’t we all be friends. He does sound opaque.” Or, as Margaret said, If they’re not sleeping with you, you’re history.

  Julia plops down with a huge sigh. “Two steps forward. Three back. Now that it’s sinking in, I’m glad he’s going to look for Lizzie. And he’s acting stupid but I know he also has a big hole in his heart. Now that Sweet Thing is with child, he’s feeling huge guilt over Lizzie again. What a freaking train wreck. She’s the lining in a coat I can’t take off.”

  “Julia.” I laugh. “Can I use that line? Now, seriously, I think something might happen. Allow yourself a sliver of hope.” I say this because of the baby in question. I know what a powerful reordering takes place as soon as that swab turns pink. Sometimes change engenders more change. This I don’t mention. Not the time. “You know,” I do say, “now he’s on a set path away. This frees you. Even if it’s still painful, it cuts you loose.”

  Wide-eyed Julia looks at me. “Umm. Right. True. But how impossible to think, and I know this is irrational, that he could make a life without me. I’m the one he once drove twenty-two straight hours to see.” She doesn’t say, I’m the one he licked from little toe to ear. He, who many times cried after sex. “I’m always waiting for the scattered pieces to re-form into the shape they should have. I have this recurrent dream that I’m on a busy corner waiting for him to pick me up and we’ll go home. I feel like I’m falling into a big relapse.”

  “No, that is not happening,” Susan says. “He can’t throw you like this. We just won’t allow it. Why didn’t he go to San Francisco and let you know later? He still wants you to suffer with him. And maybe he didn’t mean to, but the whole pregnant-girlfriend info shouldn’t have been part of this conversation. He’s a man without borders.”

  Camille brings in a pot and pours big cups of American coffee. “Decaf,” she says. “Drink up. Julia, you’ve been thriving. Keep at it. Right now, try to focus on what moves you forward. You’ve walked over coals for Lizzie. What happens to her now is her call. And Wade?” Her voice softens. “What you had, you don’t have anymore.”

  “You are right. Now all I have to do is believe you.”

  “Let’s move onto another square,” I say. “Tomorrow, I want to take you on a walk that leads to a Roman bridge hardly anyone ever sees. We walk out from the spur of your land and straight down a rocky path across the valley into an overgrown area where this arc of a stone bridge crosses a torrente that must have once been wilder and more ferocious. This time of year it will be running.”

  Julia looks up. “Yes, get back on the horse. Shall we take a picnic? Are you sure you can walk on rough terrain?” She feels thrown from her gelding when she was twelve; she and horse flying over the jump, that moment in the air and then the fall. Lucky she only had a dislocated shoulder.

  “Yes. There’s a path out to the valley road. We can get Colin to pick us up. The walk back up isn’t easy. Good night, you three. A domani.”

  Yes, see you tomorrow. And I hope Julia sleeps.

  Not without trepidation, after completing eighteen paper doors, Camille packs them to show to Matilde, who takes a break when Camille comes in holding two large boxes. She’s teaching a small group of African nuns who want to repair damaged texts in church archives. Leaning over a single sheet, the five starched white habits look like petals of a large flower, their heads almost touching in the center. Matilde’s students all fall in love with the process of papermaking and, as a bonus, some adore the more important work of her restoration projects, which are the bottega’s raison d’être. Stepping into the work in progress, Camille feels awkward. Shouldn’t her own paintings dissolve into oblivion?

  Matilde and Serena have dismantled the five-panel altarpiece from the San Rocco Duomo and spread the pieces on tables. Camille looks through the microscope at the intricate incised gold work around the figures. Matilde then shows her what a swipe of cleaner reveals about the color of Saint Jerome’s garment: murky pond green turns bright viridian. “Humbling,” Camille says, “that you can save this work. It feels like an operating room here. What’s the brown mark?” She’s fascinated enough to forget her own meager paintings.

  “Candle damage. That’s hard. Not only wax, but see this?” Matilde shines the lamp onto the blackened spot on the saint’s shoulder. “This damage goes down to the wood. I must repair the gesso. I use mordants, ugh, you smell them? Rabbit glue and fish glue.” She recaps the odorous elixirs. On the wall is a large photograph of the altarpiece with name tags pinned to various sections. Serendipitously, the students of papermaking, who see her painstaking and loving work, are also saving this crucial piece of the Italian patrimony. Matilde has devised a plan so that a single person can sponsor a sector of the restoration. She stands in front of the photo, pointing to Mary’s cloak. “Who wouldn’t want to save that blue? Expensive ground lapis lazuli. See, only twenty-five hundred dollars for restoring a minor saint, but sixty-five hundred for an accompanying angel, and much more for a major saint. A class could go in together for a section. They’re thrilled that their names will be listed on a plaque when the altarpiece is at last restored to its hallowed place above the altar.” All this in Italian, which Camille somehow understands.

  “Enough! What’s in your boxes? You came not for a restoration lesson!”

  “I wanted to show you what I’ve been working on. What becomes of all the paper I lug home. But you’re busy…”

  “Not at all. Let’s look!”

  At an empty table, Camille lays out her paper doors around the periphery. After only a glance Matilde’s eyes widen. She walks around, examining and repeating, “Dio mio,” and “Madonna!”

  Serena, coming downstairs, stops short as she sees the doors on the table. “Camille, what have you done? Where did these come from?” The nuns gather around, too, nodding, chattering in their language. Matilde stops swearing. Camille, arms crossed, frowning, stands to the side.

  “These are marvelous. In the real sense. Marvels. Small miracles. I’m dazzled.” Matilde keeps gliding around the table, murmuring and smiling. “I’m not sure how to think about this work because I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  Camille feels equally thrilled and wanting to disappear. She’s unaccustomed to attention. Matilde is saying in English, “We must cause a show.” Camille shrugs and looks shocked. For all his virtues, Charles never insisted that she pay attention to the work she was intensely engaged with when they met. Mutually, they fell into a lifestyle. Lovely it was, but how could she have displaced her own interests? Before Charlie was born, there were the trips to New York when she was newly wed and still determined. Oh yes, Cyrus. A classmate, former boyfriend at UVA, up there doing well. His friends, all committed and living in roach-infested cold-water dumps. The shock of shame she felt in every corpuscle after his show, when they went out to bars and then to his bare loft; Charles at home in their two-bedroom apartment, going over briefs at the folding table where they ate. What was she thinking? They laughed, smoked weed, and even though she privately thought his work was superficial, she praised his huge white canvases with slashes of built-up white impasto. He was selling to all the cool collectors. Mattress on the floor. The sex was inspired. Much more than his art. She went home. She felt she’d been on a moonwalk. She ran a fever. Charles’s big hug and smile. He had made spaghetti and wanted to hear about her weekend
. How could she?

  Later, she knew she was pregnant. She did not know if Charles was the father. Agony. Cyrus calling. Come back! She never told him. And outrage—the IUD lodged inside her. Could she let a stupid night’s indiscretion govern her life and the life of a child? He/she would be born, and she would be scanning the features? Who’s the father? No. On her own, through a sorority sister who was a nurse, she arranged an abortion. She went alone to Charlotte, ostensibly to visit a college roommate. After the procedure, she spent the night at an airport hotel, crying and watching movies and eating nuts from the minibar. How could she betray Charles? She was untrustworthy.

  She became trustworthy. All that tennis. Lavish attention to her classes. She barely could look at her own corner area of canvases and paints. She strove for perfection in her home, her marriage, her job.

  * * *

  —

  “April,” Matilde says. “When the tourists return. The little gallery on the piazza. I will talk to them. Can you leave the doors here for a few days?”

  “Yes, and I want to give you one. Please choose.”

  “No,” Matilde answers. “You cannot give these away.” Just the same response Rowan gave at Christmas. Rowan. Too long until he’s back. Rowan had seemed transfixed. Matilde, too.

  “Matilde, grazie. I’m kind of stunned. I’m totally excited that you like them.”

  “Camille, you have no idea how much. And I see a lot of original art.”

  * * *

  —

  Camille walks home slowly. There will be a show! Julia will throw a celebratory dinner. Susan will fill the house with flowers and maybe Rowan will be back. If I’d stayed, she thinks, nothing, nothing would have happened. She imagines her paper doors hanging on the walls all around the gallery off the piazza. People will wander in and out, sign a guestbook, opinions will form, someone may want to buy. But could I sell? How do artists let go of something so intimate? Or maybe the five nuns and my teachers at the bottega are anomalies and no one else will like the work. They’ll be polite and I’ll know. Wait, Rowan loved them, my friends do, Charlie did, even Lara. Why, when the goodies were passed around, did I not get a fucking ego?

  How do I repair that? she mused. From the road, she looked out over the valley flushed with early spring greens, ripples of shadows like gray pleats in the hollows, and the fast-lowering sun falling into its own sifted gold light. She tries to pick out the secret Roman bridge Kit showed them, but she can detect only the white rush of falling water downstream. Kit has moxie. Kit presses on regardless. The others, too. Everyone feels more confidence in their new paths than I, she thinks. Regardless, I have moved into my art. I’m exhilarated. I just have to get used to the public part. Put it out there.

  When she arrives home, she checks her messages. Matilde already has scheduled the local gallery, and she’s contacted Rowan with jpegs of all the paper doors. He responded immediately that he will prepare a catalogue. He wants Kit to write an intro. She has three messages from him.

  Julia meditatively stirs a pot of ragù while Susan has gone momentarily insane playing with the kittens and a piece of string. “Momentous news,” Camille announces.

  There’s no one she’d rather celebrate with than Susan and Julia. After, she tells them what snagged her art. The easy abortion. Oh, yeah. The already dead embryo clutching the IUD. Going home to her sweet marriage. And, of course, about sex on Rowan’s sofa.

  These warming days, Susan attacks the garden. She’s been waiting to approach the limonaia, the lemons’ wintering-over house, though there are now no lemon trees. She intends to remedy that as soon as she cleans out the long stone room. Grazia said to throw away everything, but Susan will keep the rusty round table, the battered tin watering cans, the arches that appear in the dining room fresco, and the faded green metal chairs. She takes “before” pictures for the garden design blog she’s started. Lightly sanded and given a clear opaque coat of protection, the vintage furniture will look natural for summer dinners under the pergola. Leo says the wooden table, rather rickety, easily can be fixed up for dining among the lemons and oranges. Susan wipes down the surface, deciding to coat it later with a light gray wash. Grazia has no idea these things, even the watering cans, cost a fortune in French antique markets.

  Leo, who remembers how glorious the limonaia was when he was a boy, volunteers to help. “I used to walk in just to breathe the perfume. There must have been thirty lemons back then, all in the old-style pale terra-cotta pots. Tito and my father moved them outside in early May, took them in before hard frost. In summer, they stood along the drive.”

  “Facciamo ancora,” let’s do that again. Susan hopes her Italian isn’t atrocious because it has a sexy sound.

  Also, Susan will not toss out the green glass wine demijohns still covered in woven osier. She slices off the rotten baskets to reveal sensuous emerald globes, curved like Kit’s new belly. Leo shows her how to clean out the grotty inside. He puts in a couple of handfuls of small stones with soap, then squirts in water. The tricky part is sloshing the bottle around without it slipping out of your hands as the rocks scour the glass. He rinses several times. Susan will make one flower bed featuring these bottles. Some raised on stone bases at different heights, she decides. She sweeps, de-cobwebs with a broom, lugs dirty flowerpots outside and hoses them off. In her business, Susan has been on the hiring end of whipping property into shape. Oddly, she finds that she’s loving this work. The three cats pounce on dust balls and sniff the corners of the limonaia. “Ah, you can move out here for the summer,” Susan tells them. “You, too, Archie. Get out of that trash pile!”

  Here’s the worst job: she attacks the filthy stone floor, first with a push broom, then with hose and scrub brush. The cats run into the bushes. At this point, Camille and Julia, watching from the kitchen, take pity and change into jeans and rubber boots. Cleaning the limonaia’s front of iron and glass doors uses all the rags, window cleaner, and vinegar they have. The wavy glass shines. With the three of them working over three days, and Leo repairing a side wall of sagging shelves, the limonaia takes shape. The glass-fronted building becomes a garden room, potting shed, rainy-day spot for lunch. Susan points to the end section. “Camille, there’s all this room. We could close off that last third for studio space. You could work with the doors open and step out into the garden when you want. The light is spectacular.”

  Camille opens the doors. “Are you serious! I will die and go to heaven!” Immediately, she has a premonition of working on large canvases.

  Julia scrapes open the door of the pizza oven close to the kitchen. “Leo, do you think this works?” It was so overgrown with ivy they’d hardly noticed it until Susan had two men clearing last week.

  “Certo!” Leo shines his phone light inside, pokes his head in to inspect the intact brick dome and the smooth floor of the oven. “Luisa used to make bread. We must build a fire to season it again before we start shoveling in the pizza. No one has used it in years but spiders.”

  Susan already has arranged for the delivery of three large, potted lemon trees, a kumquat loaded with fruit, and two oranges. They will live inside around the wooden table until all chance of frost is over. More citrus must come, she knows.

  * * *

  —

  “Unbelievable,” Julia says, as the nursery men arrange pots around the table. “This is just fabulous.” Now the air is suffused with the divine fragrance of white, waxy blooms. “It’s sixty degrees. Let’s eat out here tonight. We can plug in a couple of our bathroom space heaters. I’ll line the back ledge of the wall with candles. Leo, can you and Annetta come? I’ll make the lemon pistachio pasta we all love.”

  “In that case, I need to fix that wobbly table leg.”

  * * *

  —

  From the upstairs storage room in the house, Susan, up early, hauls down four mismatched dining chairs, handmade baskets, and wooden wine b
oxes to the limonaia. She stacks the boxes to make shelves for small pots, and hangs the baskets around the new outdoor dining room. Three green demijohns catch the light along the glass doors. Last night, she ordered an outdoor rug from an Italian website—wide gray and white stripes—to go under the table. The whole middle of the limonaia stays free for her workspace. She needs a potting table. She’ll buy a new shovel, and shiny new clippers and trowels. Time to start seeds.

  * * *

  —

  “Julia, let’s go to town. Market day,” she calls.

  “Coming,” Julia answers from the open window. She’s talking to Chris, catching him up on the Wade development. “That’s off your agenda. But thanks for setting this in motion. I’m glad he’s going, and I’m not. Hope that doesn’t sound selfish. I just can’t. I’ve put my hand down on that hot burner too many times.”

  Chris texts his flight details. He’ll land in Rome in three weeks, stopping in San Rocco for a couple of days en route to Venice, where he’s meeting the Friuli group. “We’ll reconfirm all the Friuli reservations and get some time to talk about the Sicily tour for next year,” he says. “Mostly, I want to sit in the piazza with you and look around at those mellow buildings and hear you laugh.” After Friuli ends, he’s back in Tuscany for a few days before the usual Tuscany group arrives.

  “It’s been ages. Will we recognize each other? I’ll take care of all the reconfirming—that’s what you hired me for!” Julia is putting on her shoes. “I’ve got to go. Susan is dying to go buy a shovel.”

  “A shovel?”

  “You will not believe what she’s done with the limonaia. That woman is formidable. Talk later? Can’t wait.”