Louisa Meets Bear (15 page)

Inside the church, Richard shows Brianna the intricate tile work of the floor and points to the mosaic of the Madonna, her head encircled in gold, floating over the altar. Brianna gazes dutifully at the floor and then sinks into one of the pews. She leans back and stares at the ceiling. Her mouth relaxes, and for a moment she looks again like a child with a drooping lower lip, her newfound composure dissolving in the blaze of gold.

Richard first saw the mosaic four years ago, a few months after Guy was diagnosed with brain cancer. Although Lena had never forgiven Guy for abandoning Isobel to her swollen ankles and wrists, for fracturing Lena's until-then-unbroken childhood loyalty to her parents, leaving in its wake a coolness inside her, at base, a skepticism about the nature of love, she had been beside herself at the idea of Guy's welfare being in Frankie's hands. “I don't trust her,” Lena cried to Richard. “She'll have his will rewritten with everything in her name and then she'll tell the doctors to turn off the lifesaving machines. I
won't
have it,” Lena cried, pounding the pillow.

Perhaps because Frankie thought of Richard and herself as similar, both from families where no one talked about the Renaissance, perhaps because Richard watched sports on TV the two or three times a year when they brought Brianna to New Haven to visit Guy and Frankie, so that Frankie had the feeling that he wasn't “stuck up like that wife of yours,” Frankie had agreed to let Richard assume the guardianship for Guy. The papers hadn't been inked a week when the neurologist informed Richard that Guy had a new tumor in the frontal lobe of his brain. Each choice had been worse than the next. If they didn't operate, Guy's chances of living a year would be slim. If they did operate, Guy might die from the surgery. If he survived, he might be severely impaired—“impulsive, like a child of six or seven,” the neurologist said, “prone to fits of temper and unable to plan more than a day or two in advance.”

“Christ Almighty,” Richard responded.

“Yes, Christ Almighty,” the neurologist echoed.

A week later, the decision still unmade, Richard boarded a plane for Venice, where he was scheduled to present a paper at an international conference on the debt issues of African nations. He gave his paper the morning of the third day of the conference, then played hooky from the afternoon proceedings. Too distracted for museums, he took the vaporetto here to Murano, his first time to the island. He arrived at dusk, and as he descended the gangplank, the streetlights flashed on and patches of yellow haze infiltrated the gray mist. Uninterested in the glassworks, he wandered away from the stores toward San Donato. When he opened the heavy wooden door, he'd been stunned by the golden Madonna arched over the altar. Like Brianna now, he sank into one of the pews. Having lost religious belief long before he left Eureka, he'd been surprised to find himself praying:
Please, tell me what to do about Guy
. He heard a rustling and his heart turned wild like an animal caught in a cage as he imagined a miracle, the golden Madonna whispering a response, but then the wooden door squeaked and a blast of cool air hit the back of his neck and a group of Japanese students poured down the aisle, breaking the spell.

Brianna points to the mosaic of the Madonna. “Is it from the Renaissance?”

“No, from long before.”

“Then Mom wouldn't like this, would she?”

“No.”

“Barbaric!” Brianna whispers, in imitation of Lena.

“Crude,” Richard teases, pinching his nose and jutting his chin into the air.

Brianna giggles. “Kwo—what's that word Mom uses?”

“Quotidian,” Richard says in falsetto.

“Well, I think she's beautiful.”

Richard feels a surge of love for Brianna as he adds Byzantine Madonnas to the list of
b
's—backgammon, burritos, Bond movies—that he and Brianna enjoy without Lena. He leans back in the pew and gazes at the Madonna.

*   *   *

At five they return to the hotel. Brianna flops onto the cot that's been added to their room with
Franny and Zooey
. Watching Brianna sprawled on the couch lost in a book or playing soccer or singing with her school choir, Richard and Lena will sometimes look at each other with a secret smile of triumph: victory over the skeptics, or maybe some part of themselves, who had presumed an adopted child, without their genes, would never have their talents. The truth is neither of them believes they could have with their own genes produced such a magnificent child.

Richard opens the window and leans out. Without reservations, they had been unable to get a second room—hence the cot for Brianna—or a room facing the canal. He looks down at the courtyard fed by half a dozen passageways and festooned with clotheslines and clay flowerpots, then draws the lace curtain, the pattern casting a wobbly shadow over Lena's slender arms as she unbuttons her blouse and reaches for her robe. Lena plumps the pillows on the bed and lies down with the Uffizi catalogue balanced on her knees.

Richard lowers himself into the armchair by the window and unties his shoes. He is struck by the incompatibility between the exquisite scene before him—his wife and daughter resting on a late afternoon in Venice, Brianna propped on her elbows, Lena with her lovely limbs gracefully arranged atop the plum-colored bedspread—and the tightness in his gut as though a metal vise were squeezing his bowels.

Lena studies the catalogue plates one by one, fixing, it seems, each painting and the information printed beneath in her mind. Richard wants to shake her, to yell,
What the hell are you doing
,
you'll be in the Uffizi in two days, why are you studying the goddamned catalogue?
Then, abruptly, she gets up from the bed and goes to the sink. She fumbles through her cosmetics bag until she finds a bottle of Tylenol. Richard feels a cramp in his stomach. He watches while Lena swallows the caplets without water, then raises her eyebrows as though to ask,
Do you want one?
before putting the bottle back in her cosmetics bag. He shakes his head no, afraid that any utterance would pull the loose thread that unravels the entire garment.

*   *   *

Lena had refused to tell him what she wanted. By then, Guy—woozy and disoriented, with toothpick limbs and white wisps where only weeks before there'd been a head of thick, still mostly black hair—seemed to Richard only abstractly connected to the man who had once taught him how to transform thoughts in the head into thoughts on the page. “You're the legal guardian,” she said. “It's your decision.”

“But he's your father. I need to know how you'd feel if we operated and he then lived for five more years like the neurologist said—maybe with fits of rage, unable to plan ahead. Or if he died from the operation. Or if we don't operate and he then dies in a year.”

“I don't have any feelings about it.” Lena turned off the light. “Ask Frankie and Caitlin.” When Richard asked Frankie, she responded with a torrent of tears and then wiped her face on Richard's sleeve. Having moved from her parents' home in Waterbury directly into Guy's home in New Haven, having, Richard was alarmed to learn, never written a check and with no idea as to what assets Guy had or what debts they owed, Frankie was panicked by all of the alternatives. Richard didn't ask Caitlin, Guy and Frankie's then-eleven-year-old daughter, though watching Caitlin—whose resemblance to Lena (the same deep-set gray eyes; the same high forehead and pale skin) always caught Richard by surprise—scramble eggs for the three of them for dinner, warm rolls in the microwave, and wash lettuce for a salad, he had wondered if he should.

Richard had pled with Lena to come with him to the Venice meetings. “Brianna can stay with a friend. I know you don't like Venice, but it'll be good for us to have some time together.”

“I can't.” Under Lena's eyes, there were dark hollows—the telltale sign of the insomnia that wrecked her during bad times.

“Do you want me to cancel? I can do that. I can say there's a family emergency.”

“Don't be ridiculous. You've worked for months on the paper. It's only six days. I will be fine.”

Onstage with the other members of the panel, Richard had been overcome with a feeling of gratitude toward Guy, who, when Richard was five years out of law school and trying to find a way out of a transactional group at a big firm, had taught him how to write an article. Sitting at Guy's kitchen table, Guy had explained, “An article is like a painting. First and foremost, you have to get the audience's attention. Without that, all of your ideas will go to naught. That's the difference between a first-rate and a second-rate Canaletto. With the second-rate Canalettos, the canvas looks shadowy and uninviting. Most museumgoers will walk right by. Second, there has to be a central topic. Afterward, the reader has to be able to say in a sentence,
That was an article about such and such
. Similarly with a painting. Look at a Titian. Novels could be written about what's going on in the corners. But when the viewer leaves, he has a central image: Mary rising to heaven.” Two weeks later, Richard had taken the train back to New Haven with the first draft in tow. While Guy read, he'd wandered through the house, looking for the hundredth time at the Venetian art on the walls. Afterward, Guy rolled up his shirtsleeves and reached in his desk drawer for a blank pad of paper. “Very good, very good start,” he'd said before proceeding for the next two hours, the two of them seated side by side at his worktable, to cajole Richard into distilling the fundamental ideas while he scribbled reams of notes, all with such calm and good humor that it wasn't until Richard was halfway back to New York that he'd realized that the article had to be entirely rewritten.

His paper in Venice had been met with applause. It had been just hours later that he'd been foiled by the Japanese tourists as he prayed to the golden Madonna of San Donato for guidance about Guy. Afterward, he'd spent most of the night at the hotel bar getting drunk with the Nigerian minister of finance and two members of the Swedish delegation and then almost gone to bed with a young woman translator with bad skin but fantastic legs who had been flirting with the group of them. Standing at the door to her room, his hand on her hip while she dug through wads of tissues in her purse for the key, he'd felt his intestines turn hard with gas. In an instant, he turned stunningly sober as he realized what he was a hairsbreadth from doing. Unable to remember her name—was it Inghild or Ingvild?—he took her balled-up hand, inside of which was a clump of tissues. “I'm sorry,” he said, “I don't know what came over me. I have to go,” and then nearly ran to the elevator.

Back in New York, Richard called Dr. Bussmann, the psychiatrist he'd taken Lena to see when Brianna was an infant. Talking into Dr. Bussmann's answering machine, Richard had feared that the psychiatrist would not remember him, but when Bussmann called back to make the appointment, he'd said of course he remembered Lena and him.

“Now, is this an appointment for just you?”

“Yes.”

Richard's prior visit to Bussmann's office had been with Lena, who had come under duress, Richard having threatened to leave if she didn't. Brianna had been five months old. Once in the office, Lena had refused to talk. Furious and frightened, Richard had been beside himself. Bussmann had taken a long look at Lena, then terribly thin, with bruised skin under her eyes, and turned to Richard. “Why don't you tell me what is the problem?”

So, Richard had told the story. How they had tried for four years to conceive a child. How Lena had had five miscarriages. How they had decided to adopt and had been so lucky to get Brianna when she was just two days old, the mother a Yale undergrad who wasn't prepared to raise a child. How happy he and Lena had been with their beautiful, healthy baby—always smiling, easily comforted, sleeping through the night since she was one month old. Everything going so well until last week when Guy called to say that Frankie was pregnant and Lena—here, Richard looked over at his wife—“just completely fell apart.”

Lena had cried and cried, railing at Frankie and Guy “always trying to
ruin
whatever I'm doing—first, telling us they're getting married right before our wedding, now having a baby when we've just got Brianna.” She'd locked herself in the bathroom, turning on the shower to block out his voice, when he tried to get her to think about it from Frankie's perspective—that Frankie, four years older than Lena, would have been nervous about waiting much longer. Two days later he'd come home to find Lena in bed with the shades pulled and earplugs stuffed in her ears and Brianna with her diaper soiled, her room foul with the smell of a day's feces.

As Richard talked, Bussmann had taken notes, pausing on occasion to look over his bifocals at either Lena or Richard. When Richard reached the part of the story about how he had put Brianna in a warm bath, had cleaned her and fed her, and how during the entire time she just whimpered, “couldn't even cry, as though she was too worn out from hours of screaming,” Richard's voice faltered and Lena began to weep.

For nearly five minutes no one said a word, while Lena sobbed and shook and blew her nose. Then Lena looked up, first at Richard and then at Bussmann.

Bussmann had instructed Richard to arrange for a nanny. For the next two years, Lena had seen Bussmann on Tuesdays and Fridays. After a month, she had told Richard, “You can let the nanny go. I've discussed it with Dr. Bussmann and he agrees.” Richard had looked into Lena's eyes—sad but resolute. He closed his own to listen to the words in his head; what he heard was,
You have to trust her
. He had, and Lena had not broken that trust.

Richard hadn't seen Bussmann since that visit with Lena a decade ago. The office seemed unchanged—the same worn Oriental rug, the same smell of eucalyptus about which Lena used to say she couldn't tell if it came from the office or Bussmann's skin. His head felt filled with cotton as slowly, laboriously, he tried to explain the situation with Guy: how he'd been appointed the legal guardian, the neurosurgeon's claim that the operation might leave Guy with the knowledge of a professor and the temperament of a child. “Lena refuses to tell me what she wants. I can't figure out if she's refusing because she's furious about the whole thing or if she can't let herself even think about it. Guy's wife is so hysterical it's useless to talk with her. The only one who it seems I could talk to is their daughter, Caitlin, who's eleven but acts like she's eighteen.”