The Lovers (8 page)

The next morning when he came to her door to say good-bye he looked like a person who had been relieved of a lie. Staring at him, Yvonne thought of an amateur painting she had once seen in which the seated figure cast no shadow, bore no relationship to the ground beneath him.

“I’ll write to you,” he said.

“I’m not going to keep staying here,” she said, gesturing to the rug of the hotel room behind her, as though the small rug was where she spent her time.

“Then I’ll write to you care of
poste restante.
”

“Okay,” she said, as though she knew what this meant.

“It’s a box they keep at every main post office, anywhere you go. Since you don’t know where you’re staying…”

“Okay,” she said again.

They parted without touching. He left her a purple purse with a gold clasp, a farewell present. She was not surprised when, later, she opened it and found money inside. Enough to last her three weeks in Florence.

She informed the front desk she would be staying another night and set out to find other, less expensive, accommodations. The next day, she found a flat above a bakery, shared by two women her age. They were art restoration students, German and Italian, serious but warm. She paid for a month’s stay in advance.

There remained the question of what to do with herself. For the first few days, she planned small trips—to Bologna, where she bought green peppers at the outdoor market, to Arezzo, where she walked up the steep hills and ate a picnic of salami and focaccia in a garden overlooking the town’s clock towers, none of which chimed the hour at the same time. But after three days of trips, she felt tired and stayed in the apartment, the smell of flour wafting up from the bakery below.

On the fifth day she accepted her roommates’ invitation to visit them at school to see their work. She arrived in the morning and observed them in the large windowless room, seated before various canvases. It was not engaging work to watch; after two hours, she could detect little progress. But she loved the room with all the women—the students were primarily female—restoring paintings that had been damaged by dampness or smoke or transport.
This is what women do
, she thought vaguely,
we restore things, we make them right
.

After leaving the school in the late afternoon, she walked to the main post office to see if Lawrence had written.

“Poste restante,”
Yvonne said to the woman behind the counter. The woman brought out a large tin box and instructed Yvonne to stand to the side and search through it while the next customer was helped.

The box was cold to the touch, its surface like a watering can, and not as well organized as Yvonne would have expected. Inside were at least a hundred envelopes and postcards, many folded or torn at their corners, from all parts of the world. She sorted through postcards from Tasmania and Newfoundland, letters postmarked from Amsterdam and Stockholm, Atlanta and Cape Town, but found nothing from Lawrence addressed to her. It had been almost a week and she should have heard from him by now. Even if it was another apology.

When she reached the back of the box she turned over the final postcard, hoping it was for her. It was addressed to a woman named Frederica, and was written in English. The
handwriting, tilted far to the right, was the most unusual Yvonne had ever seen. She read the note:

Yvonne turned the card over. It was a picture of the library at Alexandria, Egypt.

Yvonne left the post office, the smear of ink and the damp metallic smell of the box still on her hands. She walked past the tourists following guides carrying brightly-colored parasols, past the bored salesgirls standing by store windows.

The next afternoon Yvonne returned to the post office. Another postcard written in the slanted handwriting had arrived from Peter.

Yvonne turned the postcard around—another photo of the library at Alexandria, this one taken from within. Her fingers ran through the rest of the mail in the box. She was less interested in seeing whether Lawrence had written than she was to see whether Frederica had retrieved Peter’s last correspondence. It was still there. Yvonne read it twice, before placing it in the front of the box, where it would surely be discovered if someone was looking for it.

That week she could think of nothing but the post office. Sunday, when it was closed, seemed interminable. She walked around Florence, staring at the watermark lines on the buildings that showed how high the river had risen during the flood of 1333.

On Monday, she forced herself to take a bus to Fiesole before going to the post office. If she checked the mail first thing in the morning, the rest of the day would be too long. She happened upon a string quartet playing inside a small church, and closed her eyes and tried to listen. When the concert was over, she caught the first bus back to Florence. A scooter almost hit her as she raced to the doors of the post office.

She quickly flipped through the more recent arrivals, in search of any mail from Egypt. The box was emptier today and she noted that Paolo had finally retrieved the letters that
awaited him from Spain, that Ann and Erica had picked up the birthday wishes sent from America. Toward the middle of the box was a new postcard from Peter, the writing more slanted, as though it was on the precipice of tumbling off the edge.

Tomorrow Peter would be waiting at the Grotta del Buontalenti. Yvonne’s heart raced. She knew she would go watch him from afar, and she too would wait to see if Frederica showed up.

Yvonne awoke Tuesday morning to the sound of pigeons fighting outside her window. She planned out her day carefully—allowing an hour to shower and choose her clothes, an hour for breakfast. She could easily dress and eat in the span of fifteen minutes, but that would leave too much time for waiting.

At half past eleven she walked to the Boboli Gardens. She knew from her dictionary that
grotta
meant
cave
, but she had never seen or heard of the Grotta del Buontalenti
before and had difficulty finding it. At noon she began to panic. She asked everyone she could if they knew where it was. But she was surrounded only by tourists carrying the same guidebook, which failed to show the Grotta on its map. She was sweating as she walked quickly from east to west of the gardens, then north to south. Then she zigzagged, until finally, near the edge of the gardens, close to the entrance, she saw a sign for the Grotta del Buontalenti. She was so stunned she paused in front of the arrow, as though the direction itself was all she’d been seeking.

Her steps quickened as she approached the cave. No one was in sight, and for a moment she feared she had missed Peter. But even more, she feared that she had missed them both, that Frederica had visited the poste restante box that morning, and had come here to be reunited. She had missed it all.

Yvonne walked closer to the Grotta, access to which was prohibited by a railing. She read on a sign that the cave was a man-made creation, designed by Buontalenti in the sixteenth century. It consisted of four chambers, only the first of which was immediately visible. Yvonne looked up. From the muddy walls of the cave, sculptures of slaves were fighting to emerge. Behind the first chamber of the cave was another, in the center of which stood a sculpture of a man and woman, their bodies entwined. Lovers.

She was thinking of how she could come back at night and go inside, travel deeper into the Grotta, to the other chambers, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She jumped. A
guard, she imagined, was reading her trespassing thoughts.

But no, it was a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five, only a few years older than she. He was tall, his hair blond and his skin tan, with a spray of freckles the color of sand gathered around his squinted green eyes.

“Excuse me,” the man said in English. “I thought…”

“You thought I was someone else,” Yvonne said.

The man nodded, and as he did so he stared at Yvonne and she saw something peculiar wash over his face. Instead of being disappointed, he looked relieved. His eyes remained squinting—she understood this was their permanent state, which lent him the air of constantly observing something through a microscope—but his hand, still on her shoulder, relaxed.

“Sorry,” he said, and removed it from her body.

“It’s okay,” she said.

“I’m Peter,” he said.

She nodded. She knew this.

“And you are?” he asked.

“Yvonne,” she said. “From New Mexico.”

He turned then and looked at the Grotta del Buontalenti. “I wish I could step over and go to the second room.”

“I was planning on coming back at night,” confessed Yvonne.

“I’ll join you,” he said, surprising them both. “I’m sorry if that was forward. I’ve just traveled from Egypt and I’m a bit…discombobulated.”

Yvonne bit her lip. She was afraid of saying something
too knowing. She made note of the fact that he had not mentioned Alexandria. She would have to make sure not to bring it up herself. They sat down on a bench placed before the Grotta.

“What were you doing there?” she asked. “In Egypt?”

“Teaching English,” he said, and smiled with one side of his face. “What have you been doing in Florence?”

“Learning Italian.”

They spoke easily, without pause, and she admired him for not looking around, for not telling her he was waiting to meet someone there, at this very spot. If he was discouraged, he didn’t show any sign.

When three hours, maybe more, had passed, he stood and took her hands, bringing her to her feet. “What do we do now?” he said, though he had brought her so close their lips were almost touching.

When Yvonne arrived at the main road that would take her to Datça, she pushed down on the accelerator, relieved to be free of turns and hills. But everyone around her was driving well below the speed limit, as though they were lost and looking. Soon she was driving faster than the other cars, which had started pulling off onto the shoulder of the road to let her pass. They honked their horns at her and flashed their lights as though saluting her speed. She felt bold, strong. Colors and shapes splashed against her windshield.

She rolled down the window to feel the air rushing on her skin, and immediately smelled something bitter and burnt. Tar.

Yvonne slowed the car enough to see tar had recently been poured on the road. Only now did she remember the tar trucks she had trailed that morning, the ones that had slowed traffic. She pulled to the side and hesitated before stepping out. When she did, she was more shocked than she expected to be. The white car was now a brown so deep it was almost black, purplish in the sun. She put her finger to the hood. The tar was thick, the top layer still malleable, while the bottom layers appeared to have already dried.

Now her mind was full again, this time with practical questions:
How would she remove the tar? How much would it cost? How would she get the tar off her finger? How could she be such an idiot?

Yvonne drove back to the house slowly, which was unnecessary when she thought about it; the damage was done. But she didn’t want to face the blinks of headlights or the honks of horns now that she knew what they were really saying:
Lady, are you insane?

She pulled the car up to the front of the house. Leaving the motor running, she stepped out to the garage. She tried to lift the garage door by its silver handle. It wouldn’t budge. She tried inserting each of the keys on her ring into the lock. Nothing fit. She would have to park the ruined car on the street until she figured out what to do.

The maid and her family had left—a relief. She didn’t want the woman to see the car and attempt to clean it. Yvonne wandered through the rooms—the clean floors had been mopped, the clean dishes washed. Upstairs, new sheets had been put on the master bed; the pillowcases, propped against the headboard, were blue with yellow birds. The maid had no reason to think Yvonne wouldn’t sleep in this room. The sheets on the twin bed where she had slept had not been changed.

Yvonne washed her hands, and then opened the laptop Matthew and Callie had given her. Since arriving in Turkey she had resisted checking her e-mail; she was trying to avoid any news from Aurelia. At any given time Aurelia was bound to have been insulted on the street or fired from a job, or be suffering from an incurable earache, migraine, eye inflammation, or food poisoning.

The wireless signal was strong—Yvonne now remembered “Internet” had been listed as one of the features of the rental—and she did a search for
tar
and
car
.
A children’s rhyme
, she thought.
A child’s mistake.
There were a number of solutions, the first involving applying peanut butter to the car and waiting twenty-four hours to remove it. If that didn’t work, WD-40 was recommended, though with it came the risk of damaging the paint.