The Sonnet Lover (20 page)

“Our bed awaits thee, strewn with wisps of rose,” Bruno recites, “my longing more than any the wind knows.” I feel an answering throb in the wind as it picks up the scattered rose petals and blows them toward the villa. One petal catches in Bruno’s hair and my hand moves toward it as if it, too, had been lifted by the wind, but before I reach it, the wind blows back from the house, carrying with it the sound of voices coming toward us.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

B
RUNO’S ARM TENSES BEHIND ME, BUT HE DOESN
’
T PULL IT AWAY IMMEDIATELY
. He takes a moment to lift his hand to my hair and smooth back a lock that the wind has blown across my face. Then he turns toward the approaching voices and leans against the rim of the fountain with his arms folded across his chest, his head tilted down as if he were studying the tips of his soft leather loafers. I turn, too, and try to adopt as casual a pose as he has assumed so effortlessly. Is it just his innate elegance, I wonder, or practice at dissembling, that gives him such an air of nonchalance, whereas I feel as if I’ve been caught pillaging the garden?

I make out a girl’s voice as it comes closer to us on the path. “But isn’t your father, like, working on the movie? Can’t he get us something better than extra work?”

“My father won’t do a thing,” a boy’s voice, young and petulant, answers, “because my mother doesn’t want me to be an actor.”

I recognize the voices as the same two I’d overheard playing Romeo and Juliet in the
teatrino
—only now instead of advancing through a web of metaphor toward their first kiss, they are, apparently, bickering over the politics of family and influence. As they come in to the clearing, I recognize the boy as Ned Silverman, Mara and Gene’s son. He’s got his father’s height but his mother’s pale skin, dark hair, and delicate bone structure. The girl I recognize by her raspberry-colored hair as Zoe Demarchis. She startles when she sees Bruno and me and drops something on the path that she screws into the ground with the sole of her rubber flip-flop. The smell of pot and burning rubber joins the hundred varieties of roses, and I wonder what the Dominican friars of Santa Maria Novella would make of that addition to their line of perfumes.

“Professor Asher.” Ned turns as bright pink as the rose petals that litter the ground. “Wow. I didn’t know you’d arrived. Are my mom and dad here, too?” Ned’s eyes dart back and forth as if he expected Gene and Mara Silverman to jump out from behind the fountain and yell, “Surprise!”

“I’m sure they’re up at the villa resting. Which is what I should be doing, only I was so excited to be back at La Civetta after twenty years that I had to come out and look at the garden and I ran into Professor Brunelli.”

Zoe widens her already dilated eyes—I think, for a moment, at my explanation of how Bruno and I happen to be here together in the most secluded part of the garden, but that isn’t what she finds incredible. “Twenty years! Man, that must be so weird coming back after all that time.”

She’s made it sound like centuries, but I’m forced to agree with her. “Yes, it is strange, but what’s strangest is how it feels like it could have been yesterday—” I realize I’m stroking the rim of the marble fountain. Bruno is looking at me, remembering, I feel sure, that this was where we first kissed.

“Do you all know each other?” I ask, my voice a little high and brittle sounding to my ears. “Professor Brunelli, Ned Silverman and—” Before I can say her name, Zoe steps forward and does it for me.

“Zoe Demarchis,” she says, extending her hand to Bruno. “You teach that poetry class, right? I was going to take it because I write poetry all the time, but then I got the part of Juliet and realized that I wouldn’t have time”—she gives Bruno a flirtatious smile—“but maybe you could give me a private tutorial?” Zoe catches my eye and her smile fades as if I’d scowled at her, although I hadn’t been aware of doing so. She quickly adds, “I really liked that sonnet you recited, Dr. Asher…you know, at the thing for Robin in Washington Square? I remember that it had something in the last lines about black ink and love lasting.”

“‘O, none, unless this miracle have might,’” Bruno recites, “ ‘That in black ink my love may still shine bright.’”

“Yeah, that’s it. I thought it was cool because Robin was always talking about being remembered for what he wrote. You must have really liked him, huh? Was he, like, your favorite student?” She slides her eyes toward Ned and then, looking back at me, widens them in an attempt to look sincere. It’s always amazed me how young people—especially stoned young people—think adults don’t notice when they’re being laughed at. Ned, though, looks pained at the insinuation in her voice. Poor Ned. Mara was unfortunately right about the effect of roughing it on his physique and complexion. He looks too thin and his skin is mottled and rashy—what I’d taken for a blush at first being a permanent strawberry blotch on his cheeks.

“I’d be saddened by the death of any of my students,” I say in my best prim schoolmistress voice.

Zoe and Ned nod seriously and I think I’ve gotten away with my evasion, but then Bruno says, “Yes, but you haven’t answered Ms. Demarchis’s question. Was Robin your…
prediletto
?”

He chooses the Italian word that means “dearest” or “pet,” giving it an inflection that makes it sound vaguely dirty, maybe because of that
letto
at the end, which means bed. Zoe giggles and Ned turns so pale that the rash on his cheek stands out like the angry mark from a slap. I turn to Bruno and meet his gaze. Does he really think I was having an affair with one of my students? And if I were, who is he to call me to task? He’d had an affair with me when I wasn’t any older than Robin. At least I’m not married.

“I suppose he was,” I say coolly. “Who could help but take an interest in a young person of such talent? I think he would have become a great writer. If he kept to it.”

I’ve meant only to make Bruno a little jealous—to let him see that I haven’t spent the twenty years since I left him in mourning (despite that suitcase full of black clothing back in my room at the villa)—but the look of hurt in his eyes goes beyond jealousy. It’s the jab about Robin’s potential as a writer that’s gotten to him. But only for a moment. He shrugs and lifts his hands, palms up, to the sky. “But now we’ll never know. What a shame, eh?”

“Maybe it’s better,” Ned says. “Now everyone will remember him as this beautiful guy with all this promise and he’ll never get old or fat and give up his dreams and take some awful job he hates and live in the suburbs. He’ll never have to be a failure.” Ned finishes in a gasp that makes him look like an angry fish.

“Yes,” Bruno says, pushing himself away from the fountain, “there is a beauty in that. Some flowers are more beautiful as buds than full blown. And memories are often best left as memories. I hope you don’t regret coming back to La Civetta, Professor Asher. Reality so rarely measures up to our memories.”

“No,” I say, looking down at the ground strewn with scattered rose petals, “I guess not.” I look up too quickly, and the heat-struck garden seems to blur around me, dark, petal-shaped blotches superimposed over the thicket of green. I feel myself swaying, and Bruno touches my elbow to steady me.

“You’re not going to faint…?” Bruno asks. I think we both hear the echo of the word
“cara”
at the end of his sentence and remember it’s what he asked me after the first time we kissed.

“No,” I say, pulling away from his touch. “It’s just jet lag. I’d better go back to my room and rest.”

“Yeah, you don’t want to miss the big party tonight,” Zoe Demarchis says. “It’s to celebrate the summer solstice and officially open the summer term. Mr. Graham’s had a crew of chefs cooking for a week and we’ve been rehearsing day and night to get the entertainment ready. The theme is the Capulets’ masked ball from
Romeo and Juliet
with a little bit of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
thrown in—those are the two plays we’re doing here this summer. I’m playing Juliet and Ned’s Romeo. We’ve been rehearsing day and night for two weeks and we’ve only got three more days before opening night, so we’d better get back to it, right Ned?”

“Oh, right.” Ned shakes himself as if waking from a dream. He is still, I think, imagining poor Robin, frozen for all time in the moment of youth and promise like a figure on Keats’s vase. There’s a strange light in his eyes that makes me uneasy, but then maybe it’s just the pot he’s smoked. “I’m her Romeo…” He starts to laugh and Zoe pulls him away, heading down the path toward the villa, first shushing him and then giggling herself. Bruno and I follow a few steps behind. At first I think Bruno’s slow pace is to give them time to get ahead, but even when they’re out of sight he keeps his eyes on the ground and loiters a half step behind me. I can think of nothing to say to break the silence until we reach the gate that leads out of the rose garden.

“What you said just now about me regretting coming back to La Civetta…” I begin. “Is there any reason why I should?”

He turns to me but instead of looking at me he tilts his head back, his hands in his trouser pockets, and looks up at the sky. I remember that this is what he’d do in class if you asked him a difficult question. Perhaps I learned my evasion tactics from him. After a long moment he looks at me and smiles.

“I suppose it depends on why you came. If your plans are strictly academic—”

“Of course they are,” I say perhaps a little too quickly. Let him think my interest in the poems is scholarly and not that I’ve begun to suspect he might have been the one who sent his son to New York to get the poems.

Bruno gives me a long look—the same look he’d give a student in class if they’d sounded unsure of their answer. I almost expect he’ll ask, as he would then, “Is that your final answer?” but instead he says, his mouth curving into the same secret, mysterious smile I saw once on an Etruscan funerary statue (“My ancestors,” Bruno had said when I pointed out the resemblance), “
Bene,
if that’s why you’re here, I can’t see that you’re in any danger at all.”

Back in my room I close the heavy wooden shutters on my windows to block out the afternoon sun so that I can take a nap. Otherwise, I reason with myself, I’ll never get through tonight’s reception and dinner. Clearly I need to keep my wits about me. For a moment there in the garden when Bruno recited the lines of poetry on the fountain and the air had filled with the scent of roses, I’d been close to falling into his arms. What had I been thinking? How could I possibly trust a man who deceived me twenty years ago and whose son might have killed someone dear to me, let alone fall in love with him again? I had forgotten his power to charm and dissimulate. When I asked him whether he’d ever seen any of the poems, he had hesitated and then offered that lame explanation of hearing his mother talk about a poem Sir Lionel had given her. Wasn’t it far more likely that Orlando had shown him the poems that Robin found? No, I couldn’t trust Bruno, and I’d better get some rest before jet lag and exhaustion compromised my judgment once again.

Before I climb into the old four-poster bed, I roll the rug back over the
pietre dure
pattern of scattered rose petals. I can see now why Lucy Graham chose to keep the floor covered. In the dim half light the pattern really does look like splotches of blood rather than wind-scattered rose petals.

When I close my eyes, though, I see the rose petals in the garden drifting over Bruno’s hand and see myself turning to him. I open my eyes and stare at the faded frescoes that line the walls, counting the repeated pattern of arch and tree, bird and flower, that marches across the cracked and faded plaster. Only the stiff medieval figures change in each scene, and they seem to move in jerks and stops in the wavering bands of light that creep in through the slatted shutters. A young man and woman part from one another in a garden, the youth wanders through a grove, a knight appears on horseback, a young woman runs naked through the woods, there’s a flurry of activity with dogs in the foreground in the painting between the two windows that’s partially blocked by the heavy curtains, and then they’re all back in the garden again, seated at a banquet table. The scenes seem vaguely familiar, but I can’t follow the story or remember its source. Each time I close my eyes I’m back in the rose garden with Bruno and our movements have acquired the same jerky quality. We turn to each other as if to kiss and then turn away, over and over again, like windup dolls.

I’m not sure whether I sleep or not. I notice after a while that the strips of light from the shuttered windows have moved across the room, stretched, thinned, and, finally, faded into the painted walls. I check my travel clock, but since I haven’t changed the time yet I can’t make any sense of what it says. I can hear, though, from the creaks and groans of La Civetta’s ancient pipes, that preprandial preparations are going on around the villa. So I get up, splash water on my face, and start to get dressed, cursing at myself for not hanging up my clothes before my so-called nap so the wrinkles would have had time to fall out.

Luckily, one of the dresses I packed is made from a wrinkle-proof jersey. It falls straight from shoulder to knee, and I thought, when I bought it in New York, that it was the height of elegant simplicity. As I slip it over my head, though, I can’t help but think of what Bruno said about New York women dressed in black, and I feel suddenly as though I were dressing for a funeral instead of for a party. Worse, when I turn to look at myself in the mirror, the dress’s straight cut reminds me of a nun’s shift. I notice, then, that draped over the back of one of the chairs is a black silk shawl embroidered with red rosebuds and green vines. I pluck it off the chair, the fine old silk moving like water through my hands, and tie it low around my waist. Instantly my plain black shift is transformed into a flamenco dancer’s costume. When I move I can feel the silk hugging my hips and the shawl’s fringe brushing against my bare legs like a caress. Before I can change my mind, I twist my hair up into a knot, baring the dress’s one daring element—a low-plunging back—and step out onto my balcony.