The Sonnet Lover (40 page)

I stay in the tub until the water grows cold and longer, not caring that my skin shrivels and puckers and that the dinner hour comes and passes. As soon as I get out of this tub I’ll have to dress and decide what I’m going to do. If I go to Bruno, how can I not tell him what I know about Orlando? But if I tell him, I know that he’ll never forgive me for being the one to tell him the truth about his son. Our last chance to be together will be lost.

If I were a girl in a myth, I’d melt into this water and slip down the pipes. I’d become a spirit made of vapor, haunting the ancient plumbing and circling the drains of La Civetta. But since I’m not a girl in a myth, I eventually get out of the tub and towel myself off. I get dressed in the black dress I wore the first night, its long, straight lines seeming appropriately penitential now. I walk out onto my balcony and see that there are lights on in the
teatrino.
The grassy arena is full—everyone must be there. I could, I realize, pack my bags and walk down the
viale
to the gates, and no one would see me go. I could call a cab from the
tabaccheria
and go to the airport and wait for the next available flight. I could run away; it’s what I did last time.

So deeply immersed am I in this picture of leave-taking that when I hear a voice rising out of the garden say, “Wilt thou be gone?” I half think it is talking to me. But then I recognize it as Zoe Demarchis’s voice and the lines are Juliet’s reluctant farewell to Romeo after their wedding night.

Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:

It was the nightingale, and not the lark,

That pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear;

Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree.

Believe me, love, it was the nightingale.

I’m impressed with how Zoe’s pulled herself together since I saw her in the archives, but I’m even more surprised when I hear Romeo reply in Ned’s surprisingly strong contralto.

It was the lark, the herald of the morn,

No nightingale. Look, love, what envious streaks

Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east.

Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day

Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.

I must be gone and live, or stay and die.

His voice has none of his usual hesitant and apologetic air. Somehow he has taken his grief over his mother’s death and harnessed it into an in-strument of great power. When Juliet answers him she sounds as if she knows that her pleas will be ineffective.

Yond light is not daylight, I know it, I.

It is some meteor that the sun exhales

To be to thee this night a torch-bearer

And light thee on thy way to Mantua.

Therefore stay yet. Thou needst not to be gone.

I can just make out the figures of Ned and Zoe on the makeshift balcony. Ned is perched on its very edge, one leg thrown over the railing but still clinging to Zoe, torn by the need to be gone and his desire to stay. I can’t help thinking about the last scene I saw played out on a balcony and it’s hard not to think about Robin as Ned says his next lines.

Let me be ta’en; let me be put to death;

I am content, so thou wilt have it so.

I’ll say yon gray is not the morning’s eye;

’Tis but the pale reflex of Cynthia’s brow.

Nor that is not the lark whose notes do beat

The vaulty heaven so high above our heads.

I have more care to stay than will to go.

Come, death, and welcome! Juliet wills it so.

I imagine that everyone in the audience is thinking of Robin—at least those who still think he killed himself—but the line that has spoken to me is “I have more care to stay than will to go.” I can’t possibly leave La Civetta without seeing Bruno first—even if it means that by telling him the truth about Orlando I’ll lose him forever. I hurry down the stairs of the rotunda, through the library—empty but for the reek of bitter wormwood and the painted yellow eyes of the owl on the ceiling—and across the
pomerino,
out onto the lemon walk. I can see the lit stage of the
teatrino
from here and the groups of teachers and students sitting on the lawn watching Zoe and Ned finish their scene. I scan the audi-ence for Bruno, but I don’t see him anywhere. Then I look up and see a light on in his apartment above the
limonaia.
I wonder why he wouldn’t be at the rehearsal to watch Orlando perform. Has he gotten a hint of something wrong with Orlando’s story?

As I arrive at the door to Bruno’s apartment, I hear Juliet’s premonition of Romeo’s death—

O God! I have an ill-divining soul!

Methinks I see thee, now thou art so low,

As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.

Either my eyesight fails or thou look’st pale.

And then the door opens and Bruno is there. Although our positions are the reverse of the actors’ on the stage—he is above me and I am below—I hear Juliet’s fateful premonition echoing in my ears. I feel as if Bruno is already a long way off from me and that I am looking at him for the last time. My expression must give away what I’m thinking, because he says, “Rose why do you look at me like that? You look—what is that quaint English saying? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“Bruno, there’s something I have to tell you—”

“Come in,” he says, pulling me in through the doorway. “Why, you’re cold—and on such a warm night!”

It’s true, I’m shaking. He leads me upstairs and gets a bottle of brandy and two glasses from his kitchen. He pours some in each glass and sits down next to me on the couch. I take a small sip of the brandy and look around me, stunned at how little the apartment has changed in twenty years. The same terra-cotta floors and faded rugs and couches, the same view of the hills of Valdarno, over which the moon is just beginning to rise.

“I hear Orlando came back,” I say, trying to think of a way to begin.

“Yes, I was very relieved,” he says, taking a long sip of the brandy. I notice that he won’t look at me.

“And I heard that Claudia said he was with her in town last night.”

“Yes, that’s what they’ve told the police, and the police seem in-clined to believe them.” He gets up and goes in the kitchen and comes back with a bottle of mineral water. He adds some to his brandy and asks whether I’d like some in mine, but I grab his arm until he puts the bottle down and looks at me.

“You know it’s not true, don’t you?” I ask. “Orlando wasn’t with Claudia last night.”

He sighs and sits back down on the couch beside me and bows his head. I move closer and snake my hand behind his neck, massaging the tight muscles there.

“You knew, didn’t you? You found something at the top of the stairs last night.”

He lifts his head and looks at me, then caresses the side of my face with the back of his hand—a gesture so familiar I feel an ache deep inside me, as if he’d touched a spot that had been numb for so long that when the nerves reawaken they sting. I reach up and grab his hand and allow myself to hope. If Bruno’s figured it out on his own, then I won’t have to be the one to ruin his world. All I have to do is ask him what he thinks the right thing to do is.

He brings my hand to his lips and kisses it. “You always see everything, don’t you, Rose?”

“Well, not everything,” I say, and then instantly regret it because I’m referring to the past—to me not knowing that he was sleeping with Claudia all along. But Bruno doesn’t seem to notice. He gets up and brings back a box from a side table and puts it down between us. It’s a little wooden chest, painted blue with gilt fleurs-de-lis, that I instantly recognize as the one I bought for him on the Ponte Vecchio for Christmas the year I was here. I remember realizing on my way back to the villa what a silly gift it was, that it was the sort of souvenir of Florence that tourists bought to bring home, not something a native Florentine would keep. I’m touched to see that he
has
kept it.

He opens the box. On top of a stack of letters is a gold necklace. He lifts it up so I can see the medallion dangling from its broken chain. It’s a medal of Saint Catherine—the same one that Claudia has always worn.

“This is what I found at the top of the stairs last night. I was afraid immediately that Claudia had something to do with poor Mrs. Silver-man’s fall. She’s very protective of Orlando.”

“Enough to kill Mara?” I ask, incredulous. Bruno doesn’t realize, though, that I’m shocked because I believe it was Orlando, not Claudia, who killed Mara.

“There’s something else going on, I think. Claudia’s been hard at work making some kind of deal with your President Abrams to settle the lawsuit out of court, and something Mrs. Silverman knew was threatening that. At any rate, I don’t believe Claudia set out to deliberately kill the woman, but that they fought and they must have struggled—why else would the necklace break?—and then Mrs. Silverman fell down the steps. Claudia must have left the villa immediately so she could say that she was in town, and then she made Orlando say he was with her. I’m afraid that Orlando would do anything she asked…. Healways has.”

Bruno lets the necklace drop into the box, and then he closes the lid. I’ve been trying to imagine the scene that Bruno’s described, and I find that I can—only too well. Mara and Claudia were both emotional women, fiercely devoted to their sons. And I know one thing that Bruno doesn’t—that Mara might have told Claudia that she was going to openly accuse Orlando of killing Robin.

“You have to tell the police,” I say.

Bruno sighs. “
Cara,
I’ve already promised I won’t. I’ve made my own little deal—”

No!” I say, louder than I’d meant to, “no more deals! Can’t you see? All the secrets just add up to more deaths. Mara might not have been the nicest woman in the world—she might have seemed like a silly woman—but she didn’t deserve to die.” In my anger I ball my hands into fists and pound my legs with them. Bruno grabs both my hands and holds them in his. I feel myself weakening at his touch, but I look at him and ask, “What could she possibly give you that’s worth lying for?”

“She’s agreed to give me a divorce,” he says, “finally, after all these years.”

I don’t say anything for a moment. In the silence Zoe’s voice from the
teatrino
—proclaims, “Love give me strength, and strength shall help afford.” “Oh, Bruno,” I say, “I think that’s what she was planning all along. Mark Abrams says she’s settled the lawsuit out of court for a lot of money—”

“I know all that,” he says, pulling me closer to him, drawing his arms around my shoulders. “It doesn’t matter. All that matters is we can be together finally. Don’t you think we’ve had to wait long enough?”

It’s the one question he’s asked that I know the answer to. I answer it by pressing my mouth against his and then pressing my whole body against his. He responds just as eagerly, pushing me back on the couch until I’m stretched out beneath him and I can feel every inch of his body along mine, can feel his knee slip in between my legs and nudge them open and feel him press himself against me until I think I’ll faint with wanting him. Then he lifts himself up and kneels between my legs, and I sit up, wrapping my legs around his waist and arching my hips up even as I unbutton his shirt and unhook his slacks. I’m afraid of losing contact with him for one second. Afraid that if we move ten inches apart to take our clothes off, one of us will say something that will break the spell of this moment. Above the sound of our breathing I catch a single line from the
teatrino
uttered in Zoe Demarchis’s piercingly clear voice—“Farewell! God knows when we shall meet again”
—
and it only fuels my urgency.

Bruno peels my dress off and I’m half afraid that in the split second of darkness as it passes over my head I’ll lose him—that he’ll realize that this frenzy to have him inside me comes not just from all the years we’ve been apart but from all the years apart I know may still lie ahead of us. Because I know, even as I slip down beneath him again and allow myself one long lingering stroke of the smooth dark hairs on his chest (some of those dark hairs going gray now!) before I arch up to meet his own eager thrusts, that this could be our only time together. I can keep the voices in my head—the knowledge of what I’ll have to do—at bay only so long, but I silence them now. I enter the rhythm of his body, the steady measure of his hips moving against mine—a meter that will come, like the fourteen lines of the sonnet, to its resolution all too soon, but that also, like a sonnet, feels like it contains something of eternity within it. I can see it in his eyes, in the way he holds my gaze as we both come, that he’s seeing the same thing.
All any lovers have is this,
he told me in the garden the first day we kissed.
This moment.
And for this moment, it feels like enough.

Our moment of eternity together has lasted only as long as it’s taken Juliet to deliver her soliloquy over the bottle of sleeping potion given her by Friar Lawrence. I hear, as Bruno shifts his weight to lie beside me, her plaintive cry. “Romeo, Romeo, Romeo! Here’s drink—I drink to thee.”

Bruno strokes my damp hair out of my face and blows on my collarbone to cool the sweat that’s pooled there. I touch the furrow that time has carved between his eyebrows and brush my fingertips along his brow. I wish at this moment that we could both swallow Friar Lawrence’s magic sleeping draught and sleep here, our naked limbs entwined together on the couch, forever. At least, I think, I can wait until the morning before telling him why Claudia might have murdered Mara. Who could begrudge me one night?