by A. R. Taylor
“Go away, you traitor.” He closed the door, but she was already out of the car, marching toward him waving the Scotch. He peered out again, recognizing the bottle and simply could not refuse her. The kind of drunk that ensued, Jenna had never experienced before in her life. Even though Matthieu covered the table in dishes of olives, cheese, and thick country bread, mainly they drank. It was all Scotch for hours afterwards. What had tasted like medicine at first began to warm and excite her until she swam in good cheer and a kind of preternatural sense of power, as if drugged.
“He’s a thief, he must be,” she leaned in to Matthieu proclaiming over the count.
“International criminal or moron, who can say? Whenever I ask him about one of those paintings, he says he’s not sure where it comes from. I still have some in the studio. Yet more cows.”
Jenna fell over laughing, thinking about the long days she had spent perfecting the brown on those animals, so tiny in the background. “But he could be anyone. Why is he a count, or maybe we should investigate him?”
“How?”
“I might hire someone.”
“You could hire me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“But I must thank you again and again for the wonderful gift you gave me, all that land. You must be very, very rich. I know you are, I know you are. Don’t tell me how much.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
“Don’t. Have a piece of cheese, no, no un calisson.”
“Maybe one more Scotch.”
“Oh yes.” As night fell the two of them ceased to speak. They drank water now and watched the land around them, Matthieu’s land, in the darkness. She slept on the couch, the fluffy comforter over her head and snuggling into it.
Jenna did not hire anyone to investigate the count. She resolved to do something that she had never managed before, to forget. Inti and everyone else in New York were preoccupied with what had happened and had no doubt passed quickly over an article on some small-time art theft. A rich hedge fund divorcée’s problems with two paintings would slide off into nowhere. Of her own involvement with Vincent Hull, probably no one cared anymore except a small cadre of people, and no more Champagne showed up in the mail.
EIGHT
Over the next two years she became a confirmed, if highly critical, Italian, mired in the present and in the material. Each morning she had espresso for breakfast at the café, along with a hard roll and quantities of butter. Sarani did not allow the usual Italian long lunch, so they had French baguettes with ham and cheese and a carafe of red wine. The biggest meal was dinner, pasta to start, a steak or piece of veal, and then perhaps a little gelato, only enough to satisfy her craving. She developed a small circle of friends—one writer, another, a young woman who worked in her mother’s tailoring establishment, the owner of a T-shirt shop, and a man with a guided tour business of the Roman ruins in the area. They met every Thursday night for dinner, and the two who had spouses refused to include them, since they all liked to drink and swap scandalous stories. Jenna adopted a jogging course through the hills and over onto the beach, so her weight never became quite the problem she expected. In fact, she grew much leaner, and she became a student of Italian style. She dressed with significantly more flair, always wearing silver bangles on her arm, and even while price was no longer an object, she stuck to dark skirts, slim pants, fitted tops that showed off her breasts and shoulders.
Finally Jenna’s hair began to make sense to her, and she no longer stared unbelieving into the mirror. She liked this young woman who looked back at her; she had a different personality altogether. Her life resembled a masquerade party at which she was the only guest. Other people thought it all real, while she could feel the thrill of being hidden. In some respects, anything she wanted to do was fine, since she was no longer her real self. Perhaps the best, most promising aspect of her life was that she learned to laugh, a lot. Watching Italian women day after day, she saw that they had a quality of joy that came from within. It was aggressive, relentless charm, and she decided to imitate them. They smiled all the time and laughed at the silliest things. It seemed like a system to live by, to pretend to be some way, and then she would become that way. To a certain extent, she did.
Inevitably romance entered her life, first in the form of a young professor of mathematics in Turin who came often to visit his aging parents. He spoke beautiful English because he had taught for some years at UCLA, quite the brilliant young man, and she enjoyed him very much, enjoyed the unfettered sex too, but he was occasionally unfaithful, and she did not like that. He talked endlessly about Mama, which bored her, then infuriated her. She could see the fat grandmas always presiding over their broods of grandchildren, especially at the beach. Older women would sit in a round heap of clothes, parceling out bread and sweets to the humming little bodies plopping toward them, until at last corralling them for an even bigger lunch. When did the eating stop? The grown sons would hover there, and she grew to detest the infantilizing process going on all around her.
If there was one thing she became expert on, it was the juvenile Italian male, led first and foremost by the boys at the atelier, who schemed endlessly over their pranks. One day they strung a tarp across the door to the studio, and because they knew Sarani walked always with his head straight toward the ceiling as if thinking higher thoughts, never really looking where he was going. He ran straight into the thing and almost fell down. No angel himself, Sarani lied to his wife and his mistress and was always trolling for women on the side, to whom he lied as well. None of this ever fazed him and when caught out in one of these lies, he began to lie some more, often in front of Jenna. Then he would wink at her in complicity and light up another cigarette.
Jenna’s more important affair began with a lawyer in town, Stefano, who also had a Mama, but he kept her in check somehow. In his late forties, he was really too old for her, at least that’s how she thought of him, but he had the fatal Italian charm, seemed faithful, and told her every piece of gossip worth knowing in the town. At some point marriage became an issue, but Jenna couldn’t even contemplate such a move. Though she spoke good Italian and lived an entirely Italian life, still in her penthouse apartment in the hills looking down at the Mediterranean, she hungered for all things American, not the least of which was a hamburger. Her one extravagant habit became many a weekend jaunt to Venice to eat at Harry’s Bar, specifically to consume their hamburgers and drink their martinis. She loved that meal, the perfect juicy burger with cheese and lettuce and tomato and the straight up icy cold vodka. Weird how it satisfied her, as if a bit of her life in New York existed right here in her adopted country. She took Stefano with her often on these jaunts, and he seemed amazingly content to be kept in such style at the Gritti Palace, continuous meals at Harry’s. Another manifestation of Mama, she knew, and one that would no doubt worsen the longer they stayed together.
The four years she’d been absent from her native country had passed by quickly. Though her life in Italy had a routine, a smoothness, without many worries, only small ones, still, the larger ones loomed. She very much perceived herself as a person in hiding. Even though she visited Matthieu once every few months, and he continued to do work for the count, nothing further was said regarding art theft, no investigators from either France or the US appeared, undoubtedly consumed with bigger international worries. In the dark as to Inti’s doings, Jenna was nevertheless grateful that more serious issues must now occupy him.
In the later days of December, just before Christmas of 2003, Jenna and Sarani sat before a late nineteenth-century oil painting by a minor painter, Giametto, but the beauty of the piece enthralled them both. A young woman sat at a small table, her head bent down as if in sorrow. On the table rested a teacup and a bowl of flowers, red and yellow. The girl’s hand brushed her cheek, and the other clutched at an astonishing blue robe, deep, dark blue with tiny flecks of golden paint. Therein lay the problem, the texture of the robe. Small bumps, like grains of
sand, popped up all over the blue paint, a texture not evident in any other part of the work and obviously not intentional.
“I just saw a paper on this. It’s the lead soaps, a reaction of the paint to fatty acids in the oil binder,” Sarani said.
“Not altogether unattractive though.” Jenna and her “maestro” talked often about the chemistry of oil painting, and by now she had mastered a number of aspects of the subject, but this new intersection between art and science posed a problem for both of them.
“Shall we try to change what’s happening? There are many things that happen to a work over time, and the cracks and bruises and movement of the paint, they constitute the life of the piece. What we call ‘inherent vice.’” He smiled over at her. “A facelift is nice, but should we do it?”
“I need one of those.”
“You’re young, you’re beautiful,” and at this he placed his hand lightly on her back and rubbed it slowly in small circles. Out of the cool darkness of the studio, Sarani’s wife advanced upon them. “Oh, Sylvia,” he started and jumped up. “Ciao, Bella, mi amore.” He rushed to kiss her, but the tall, elegant, black-haired woman had already frowned at her husband and glared at Jenna.
Jenna stood up, feeling helpless and ridiculous in a situation made, of course, much worse since the man beside her engaged in chronic philandering, how much known to the wife she had no idea. But she tried to smile several times at the irate older woman, getting nothing but a cold stare in return. Sarani gathered up his coat and moved as if to guide his wife away, but Jenna stepped in front of him. She took the angry woman by the arm and led her onto the patio outside. “Please, Signora Sarani.”
“What do you want?” The woman looked down at her watch and then shook her wrist at her. “I am late.”
“Please, what you saw, there was nothing to it. We were only looking at the painting. I’m just a student here, and he was trying to make me feel better about my work. I need you to know this. There is nothing else going on.” Jenna spoke in excellent Italian.
The still flustered older woman softened, and a smile broke across her face. “Oh, thank you, my dear. I worry, you know, I worry.”
“Yes, we all worry.” Signora Sarani bent down and kissed her first on the left, then on the right cheek, and this was what the Maestro saw as he walked outside to find them. He wondered if his assistant, his best student so far, had actually told his wife something of his doings, but when he saw the smiles all around, he thought no, neither one would betray him, not ever. It was the first article of faith in his own private canon without which all restoration would stop, including the personal.
NINE
At the end of 2003 change came to Jenna’s small, self-contained world. She received three Champagne labels, but no more actual bottles. The labels arrived at the doorstep of her Ventimiglia penthouse, wrapped in a purple box, a gold lace ribbon tied around the outside, no shipping stamps, as if dropped off by a mystery messenger. Each label rested one on top of the other, surrounded by a cascade of purple tissue. The first, another Veuve Clicquot exactly like the one Jenna had saved, the second from G. H. Mumm, Reims, just like the label she herself had sent to Jorge, the third read Champagne, Taittinger, Nocturne Sec, identified as in Reims yet again, this one with a purple background and gold letters that matched the packaging. Jenna sat on the floor, placing the labels in a row to puzzle them out.
Okay, so whoever sent these, and this time it certainly had to be Jorge, already knew she had once lived near Reims but had moved south to this specific address. What was he trying to tell her? “The widow was mum,” a very bad pun but just like him, and she herself had meant something like that when she’d sent him the same clue. But now perhaps it referred to herself. “Mum” Jenna certainly was and would remain so for the duration. She was one of those “if it’s written down” people. Anything in writing was sacred and true, right down to the instructions on the side of her vacuum cleaner, and she had signed an astonishingly thorough agreement with the lawyer, listing every possible contingency. Taittinger, a sec nocturne, dry dreamy nighttime something? Sex accompanied by slow music? No idea about any of this, though this last label suggested florid, mysterious sexuality.
A dry night would be a bad one, in her view, sexually speaking, but she couldn’t picture Jorge ever alluding to something so personal. He had always been a wink-wink, nudge-nudge kind of guy, even in the face of Vincent Hull’s depredations. How to get in touch with her old time buddy became the immediate problem. She could just call him, but this absolutely did violate her contract. Could she speak to him without there being any trail or record? She now possessed a cell phone, sleek, just the right size for her pocket.
Not knowing what else to do, she opened a bottle of local white wine, straight from a nearby vineyard, very raw and fresh, and wandered out to her balcony to contemplate the meaning of the labels. But her mind wandered. A young mother hauled her basket full of vegetables up the steep steps, while her son skipped beside her, sometimes tugging at her skirt. Having grown up alone in the house of an old woman, without any brothers and sisters, Jenna had no experience of children running around and did not know whether she wanted any. Still, as she watched the little family below, she felt that at least she could think of wanting them.
Jenna fingered her new little phone. What a shock it would be to call him. The time in New York, six hours behind her, so she’d have to pick the moment carefully. Who had taken over for Vincent Hull? What would it be like to work near a room where that extraordinary man had actually expired? Ghostly, macabre, his soul must fill every corner of one very tall building. In the end, Jenna did nothing, too depressed at her options and wanting to be absolutely one thousand percent sure that what she did would accomplish the goal. But what was that, to find out who sent the Champagne labels and what they meant? A trifling mystery and one she probably could live with. After all, she lived at the very heart of a number of mysteries, not the least of which was herself.
Just after midnight two weeks later, after a long, hilarious New Year’s dinner celebrating the advent of 2004 with her small group of Ventimiglia friends, Jenna arrived back at her doorstep to find a Federal Express envelope. She threw down her shawl and sat in a chair, holding onto it, looking out through the window onto the Gulf of Genoa. Blue and white yachts bobbled on the water, and their rigging tinkled all the way up to her perch. It was a cold night, and she wasn’t warmly enough dressed, but still she sat without opening the envelope. At last she went into her small kitchen and pulled out a bottle of the local red wine. She poured herself a glass and went back to deal with whatever this was; she feared to open it, and since she had no more family members left alive, assumed that it had something to do with Hull.
Of course his New York lawyers knew where she lived, but they never liked any sort of paper trail, so they only phoned, but rarely. She tore open the tape and a heavy white envelope fell out. It resembled a wedding invitation and in bold black handwriting summoned her to New York. “Cate Myatt, please report to the New York Children’s Hospital on February 15th of this year to meet with the head art curator for the conservation and restoration of Marc Bélange’s Diver, 4 p.m. sharp.” Diver, the name didn’t mean anything to her, though it did sound sexy, at the very least. But then she thought back to her inventory and the large painting in Sag Harbor with just a small signature, Bélange, yes, that was indeed the name. The girl standing in water, holding her wet hair behind her head, the very picture of what she and Hull had done together, in the dark pool, in the warm night, and then more, later above him, beneath him, cold, gone.
So she was wanted to restore this painting that belonged to Vincent Hull, at a hospital for children? “They,” whoever they truly were, needed her back in New York for some reason, and she suspected not really to fix it. The painting was not at all suitable for children, so why would it be there? Was this note a threat to take back the money, to kill her? To what?
But didn’t they have bigger probl
ems now? Surely the New York of 2004 would be utterly changed, since every person in that town who had experienced the terrorist attack would never recover. Those who had jumped; they rose up in her mind yet again. She could almost feel herself falling into the air just as they had. Of the sculpture Tumbling Woman by Eric Fischl, rejected by the authorities because of protests at its intensity, she was deeply aware. The Italians had sympathized with the American plight and had demonstrated in the streets in solidarity. But now, the horrors of the Iraq War ongoing, America had become like a vengeful, murderous friend off on a dangerous tear. From her own standpoint, nobody cared any more how Vincent Hull died; no one, perhaps, except Jorge, Tasha, and his family.
Later that night she rummaged through the chest of drawers in her bedroom, where underneath a gaudy blue-and-red scarf, she found the box holding the Champagne labels. Fingering the beautiful, archaic looking collection, little works of art on their own, she decided that once back in New York, no matter what her instructions or the dangers to her fortune, somehow she would meet up with the two important living men in her past, Jorge and Inti. Remembering that Manhattan was, in essence, a small town in which every street corner or bar or restaurant held the promise of a chance meeting, still she would take charge to make absolutely sure these meetings happened.
“When will you come back?” the two boys at Sarani’s cried in Italian. “We cannot live without you.”
“Somehow I think you’re going to make it,” she laughed. Twenty-seven and yet complete children, as she herself had been. At twenty-nine she felt old enough to be their mother.