Blood Orange (9 page)

They walked back toward the Arno through the imposing colonnade of the Uffizi Palace Gallery. “I love this city,” he said. “Everywhere I look I see something beautiful.”

His words awakened her. Until that moment she had been seeing Micah as Lexy’s eccentric and impertinent little brother, as a wild
driver and a source of restless energy who would not let her sleep.
But in the amber twilight of the colonnade she shed her resistance
like a snake its tired skin. She saw that he was like an angel in a
Renaissance painting, with his dark and curly, untidy hair, his large
blue-black eyes and sensual, sulky mouth. Micah’s high energy and
enthusiasm had made him seem boyish at first, but in the half shadows she could see the sadness in his face. The lines around his eyes
had not come from laughing. She felt an instant empathy, and
vaguely remembered Lexy saying her brother suffered from depression and had been unhappy as a boy. Happiness and grief were both
written in his face along with something renegade she could not
classify. As she stared at him, half mesmerized by the contrasts, she
lost her footing and stumbled. He steadied her with his hand on the
small of her back. His touch excited her, and she jerked away. She
had not been prepared for that.

They crossed the Arno at the Ponte Vecchio, where most of the
gold- and silversmiths had closed their shops for the night. It was
the middle of the week and not quite tourist season. Though there
was plenty of foot traffic on the ancient bridge, it did not feel
crowded to Dana. They walked up the hill past the hideous facade
of the Pitti Palace until they came to the little Piazza Santo Spirito
and a first-floor restaurant just large enough for six tables. Micah
had to duck his head as they walked in. He was perhaps six-three or
four and slender; but he moved like an athlete, which surprised
Dana. Jock-artist was not a common type. David was smart, but he
had no interest in art.

Micah and the owner, Paolo, played together on a recreational
soccer team; they greeted each other with an embrace. Their conversation was incomprehensible to Dana, but she guessed the subject was soccer because the body language of men talking sports is much the same in any country. The heads turn from side to side, the
shoulders and arms pump.

At dinner Dana and Micah talked about the city and art, and she
went on about her thesis topic until she felt she had to apologize for
talking so much. He said he was interested and asked more questions, informed questions that started her off again. Explaining, explaining: her thesis had never seemed more real than it did that
night. It was thrilling to be in Florence on her own, talking art,
without Bailey tugging on her, or David looking at his watch, never
telling her where to go exactly but always with his hand on her
elbow steering and supporting like she might fall over if he did not
hold her up. She felt guilty for her thoughts.

It was after eleven and cold when they left Paolo’s and walked
toward the river through the almost empty streets.

Micah put his arm across her back. Tired and a little drunk after
sharing two bottles of wine, she leaned into him and resisted his
suggestion they find a taxi.

“Let’s walk,” she said.

In less than a day, this city has seduced me.

She woke up feeling headachy and slightly nauseated but ignored the symptoms, blaming jet lag and too much wine the night
before. This was the day Micah was taking her to the Uffizi.

They walked past the tourists waiting in line and entered the
gallery by a side door because Micah knew the right people. They
made their way backward through the gift shop to the marble stairway where the guard waved them through with more jock body language. Her stomach dipped as they entered the first rooms, the
walls covered with iconic art in blue and gold and umber dating
back to the early centuries of the second millennium.

After the third room she went into the long passageway and sat
on a bench, dropping her head between her knees.

“I’m going to be sick.” She looked around for a sign directing
her to the rest rooms.

Micah blinked and pointed over her shoulder, through the window and across the colonnade where they had walked the night before and into the corner of the gallery farthest from where they were
standing.

It was more than half a mile away.

When it was all over and she sat in an easy chair in Micah’s apartment wrapped in a duvet, Dana was able to laugh as Micah described in graphic detail how much worse it might have been. True,
she had not made it all the way to the rest rooms, but at least she
had gotten as far as the stairs leading down to them. And the line
could have been worse. In the summertime there might have been
fifty people staring at her while she threw up.

They talked of art and life, and Micah fed her dry crackers and
soda water. As the afternoon waned, the light streaming through the
tall, uncurtained windows of the palazzo changed from white to yellow to red-orange. Across the river, the bricks of Florence, absorbing the light, turned to rose gold. The room filled with long shadows
and the dank smell of the river. Dana yawned and closed her eyes.

She sat up. “Do you have something I can wear back to the
hotel? I need a nap.”

“Sleep here,” he said. “Later we can go out again. Nothing starts
in Florence until after ten anyway. On the other side of town there’s
a jazz club. You’ll like it.”

“You don’t have to babysit me, Micah. You have a life-“

“Is that how you see me? As a babysitter?”

“What about clothes?”

“Give me your key. I’ll go back to the hotel while you sleep.”

His back was to the window; the falling sun outlined him like gold encircling a medieval icon. She held her breath. He turned,
and they looked into each other’s eyes. He held out his hand, then
led her to his bed.

She knew exactly what she was doing. She was in a threehundred-year-old palazzo owned by an Italian princess. She had
been transported to a fairy-tale world, and she did not once think of
David and Bailey or stop to ask if this was the way normal people
behaved. In the Kingdom of Florence none of the old rules applied.
Later, she recalled what Lexy had once said about life being full of
crossroad moments, opportunities taken or lost forever.

Late that night, after jazz and slow dancing, he leaned her
against a crumbling garden wall draped in wisteria, unzipped her
Levi’s, and entered her with his fingers. She cried in the dark from
the thrill of it. Night and the city sounds, a few feet away the voices
of men and women coming out of the club where they had been
moments before. And Dana impaled on her lover’s hand, crying because she had never had an orgasm like that, never knew it was possible.

She inhabited a small world that week. In the mornings Micah
brought her hot chocolate and a croissant from the coffee bar at the
corner. They made love amid the crumbs and might not eat again
until dinner; but she felt full all the time. In mirrors and shop windows she saw the difference in herself, a look of slightly blurred and
puffed fatigue, a languor in her arms and legs. Her hair was heavier,
thicker, and darker than it had ever been; and she wore it loose, not
tied as usual at the nape like a convent girl.

They went back to the Uffizi three times so Dana could study
paintings rich in visual subtext. Da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi
transfixed her. In the faces of the crowd-suspicious, venal, goodnatured, Mary’s sly and gossipy attendants-she saw the emotions
of living people. She walked through rooms full of two-dimensional medieval virgins holding infant saviors with the wizened features of
old men, but in paintings of the Renaissance she saw faces as modern as those in the cafes and shops of Florence. This was the great
breakthrough of Renaissance art. It brought mortals into art where
before there had been only saints and gods.

One morning as she put her hairbrush down on the table in the
bathroom she knocked a vial of pills to the floor. She picked it up
and tried to read the label written in Italian, but the only word she
recognized was depression. Hard to believe, easy to dismiss. During
the short time she’d known him Micah had been ebullient and lighthearted. No one who was depressed could have so much energy.
She thought about mentioning the pills but told herself it was none
of her business. Besides, these days doctors prescribed mood-altering
chemicals to almost anyone who wanted them.

In the afternoon they bicycled out of town to the Villa Reale di
Castello, a sixteenth-century garden laid out with checkerboard formality. Descendants of plants gathered centuries before from countries as distant as China filled the garden with the scents and colors
of spring.

They sat beside a fountain and ate a lunch of fruit and bread and
cheese; and afterward they found a secluded spot and fell asleep
until an ill-tempered guard rousted them and they hurried off, giggling like teenagers. Micah seemed so happy; she could not help
asking him if he still got depressed.

“You know about that?”

“Lexy told me.”

“Thank you, sister dear.”

“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Did I say it was?”

“Look, it’s none of my business-“

“Hey, I’m glad you brought it up.” He did not sound glad at all.
“What else do you want to know? Do I hate my mother? Am I constipated?”

She backed away from him, hands flattened in a “stop” gesture.
“I asked a simple-“

“Yeah, well maybe it’s not so simple; maybe it’s so fucked up no
one can figure it out anymore.”

She had no idea what he was talking about now.

“Come on, Micah, I’m getting hungry. Let’s get some of that hot
chocolate at the bar… .” She held her hand against his cheek. “I’m
sorry I pried. I never want to make you angry.”

“I’m not angry. Do I look angry?” He smiled, and she didn’t
know what he was thinking. “I used to take pills for depression, but
I don’t need them anymore. You make me happy, Dana. You make
me happier than I’ve ever been.”

Another day they wandered through the Boboli Gardens in the
rain giving names to the feral cats, getting soaked, playing chase and
sliding on the wet grass. She remembered Lexy saying her brother
was not a laugher. How amazing it was that now Dana knew him
better than his own sister.

And every day, when they were not in galleries and churches and
gardens and restaurants, they were in bed. Her vagina ached, and
walking from one gilt-framed painting to another, she felt her clitoris as if it had permanently grown.

They made plans to visit Venice and Rome, Siena and Milan,
where Dana had to see, must see, Bellini’s The Preaching of St. Mark
in Alexandria.

“There are camels,” Micah told her, almost bouncing with delight. “And a giraffe and all these guys in fancy hats, and you hardly
notice Saint Mark at all.”

With his knowledge of Italian art, and his increasing under standing of what she was looking for, he plotted a trip that would
take them as far south as Palermo, where he told her about a beautiful little museum and an extraordinary painting, loaded with subtext, called The Triumph of Death. She had to see it.

“Tell him about me,” Micah said.

Not yet.

“Waiting won’t make it easier on him.”

It was Saturday. Her flight home was on Monday morning.

“It’s not one of those things I can just say.”

“What can’t you say? That you love me?” He held her face in his
hands. His palms were hot and dry, and she imagined she felt his
lifeline mark her cheeks, making her his forever. “You do love me.
You know you do. Say, `I love you, Micah.”’

She whispered it.

“Tell him.”

“Let me do it my own way.”

“You want to leave me? You want to go back to that?”

That.

She would starve without Micah, dry up and blow away like
sculptor’s dust.

She thought of a painting she had seen yesterday or the day before. Her days streamed together like watercolors. Or maybe it was
a story she had read, or maybe she was making it up right now to explain how she felt, because only metaphor could make her emotions
comprehensible. A maiden wandered into a dark and beautiful
wood. She danced with a satyr and fell into a swoon. When he bent
over her and asked for her will, she gave it to him.

Before they fell asleep that night Micah said, “Say it.”

“I love you.”

“Louder.”

She laughed.

“I mean it. I want to hear you yell it out.”

“I’ll wake up the princess.”

“Get up and go over to the window. Stand there and yell it
across the river.”

She sat up and stared at him.

“Do it and I won’t ask you again.”

She was tired, too tired to argue. She got out of bed and fumbled
for her nightgown that had fallen off the end of the bed.

“Go like you are. Don’t put anything on.” He folded his arms
beneath his head. “There’s moonlight.”

“What if someone sees me?”

“You have a beautiful body. Don’t be ashamed of it.”

“Micah, I’m not ashamed. I just don’t like to make a public-“

“I’d like to put you on display in the piazza.”

The gooseflesh rose on her arms.

“The women would envy you and the men would all want to
fuck you. They’d offer me money.”

She got back into bed. Pulling the blanket around her shoulders,
she said, “I don’t want to do this.”

“Do what?” He bit her earlobe gently. “What don’t you want to
do?”

“Stand in the window.”

He poked her gently in the ribs. “I was only kidding.”

For years Micah had sold his drawings in the Piazza del Duomo
marketplace on Sundays. These drawings were much less fine than
those for sale in shops around the Old City but still better than
most. If the weather was good he might make several hundred
Euros selling his pictures. While he was doing that Dana would
have the palazzo to herself. She could not talk to David with Micah in the room listening, feeding her lines, fluttering his tongue up her
inner thigh.