The Chapel (36 page)

T. didn't say anything.

I knew he thought this vindicated his covering for Mitchell, as well, but he was wrong. Every Virtue had another life as a Vice. Humility in one instance was Vanity in another. Ed could have told him that Chastity and Lust are twins.

A young waiter in a white shirt came to our table and raised his hands in surrender, uncertain whether we were done. T. nodded. The waiter pulled a tray from a stack near the windows and cleared everything away. T. and I watched him, as if something might happen that would mean something to us, about us. I tried to turn the two of us into statues of ourselves, an opposing pair, a Virtue and a Vice, but with the blurry reflection of the empty steel tabletop between us, we most resembled those two fictive chapels, plausible looking but uninhabitable, lifelike but forever separated by the chancel arch, the altar below us, the space between us where our lives had been lived.

The waiter returned and handed T. a cash-register receipt. I dove toward my red bag, as if buying him a coffee would even things out, but T. said, “I've taken care of it.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You're welcome,” he said.

It seemed like we would soon be standing, shaking hands, and going our separate ways, so I said, “I need your professional opinion.” I pulled the Marimekko dress out of Rachel's bag.

T. said, “From here, I'd say the prognosis is not good.”

“It's the stains on the back that I'm wondering about,” I said. “And my back is sort of a mess.”

T. said, “Hand it over.” He expertly inverted it, as if he was used to dealing with women's garments, and he examined the stains on the inside of the back. He pulled the fabric very taut between his two hands and held it toward me. “Can you see the silver flecks in the blood lines? And what looks like lead or solder at the edge of each streak?”

The stains were shimmering.

“Cadmium, I think,” he said, inverting the dress again and neatly folding it as he continued. “Definitely some formaldehyde. A good lab would probably find some benzene. You are likely allergic to all three elements. Thus the bleeding.”

I said, “How do you know?”

T. said, “They're poisonous.”

I said, “How did they get there?”

“Same way they got on my back,” he said. “You were lonely.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

He handed me my dress, folded up as neatly as a flag. “Don't wear it again. Don't wash it. Get rid of it.”

“It's a relic,” I said.

“It's toxic,” he said. “As are the rosary beads, medallions, and shiny, framed pictures of the Madonna della Misericordia that Matteo
hands out to his mournful friends. Had I told you when you noticed the blood on my shirt, I could have spared your back. Forgive me. I was too embarrassed to tell you the truth. From the moment I put that rosary around my neck, I felt like a holy fool, and when I realized I'd done harm to myself, I took it as a sign.”

I said, “A sign from God?”

“A sign from my body reminding me that I am allergic to religion,” T said. “And a sign from my heart about how lonely I am.”

In the space of a few minutes, we had acknowledged that we were both lonely, we were both fools, and we were both limber enough to reach around and scratch the skin off our own backs. By our peculiar standards, this was beginning to resemble a first date. I said, “Someone should tell Matteo he's killing off his friends with kindness.”

“He claims I was the first to have a bad reaction. Which is unlikely, as he's been in the business of rosary beads for years. He employs a rotating cast of North Africans in his chapel. At night, they dip cheap souvenirs into vats of a silver shellacky goo, and then they distribute the stuff the next day, selling them to small shops and tourists on the streets of Venice and Padua.”

“But their hands,” I said.

“They wear gloves,” T. said. “There are more immediate concerns.”

“Their brains,” I said. “And their lungs.”

“Your loneliness,” he said.

Instead of bursting into tears, I said, “We should contact the police.” I was turning into Samir.

“Matteo employs two local cops as security guards for his chapel,” T. said. “It's entirely legal. He's proud of the whole operation. No one else is offering those people steady work. Matteo considers it an act of charity.”

I said, “He's a regular Scrovegni.” It could've been worse. I would've been worried about more than my back had I slept with
Matteo. This thought made me itchy all over, so I said, “Is there any residual effect?”

“The chemicals will have leached out by now,” T. said. “The loneliness may be chronic. When are you leaving for Cambridge?”

“This evening,” I said, and I realized it was still true. “And you will go to Florence.”

“I'm headed somewhere else,” he said.

This was a twist in the familiar story.

I said, “Anywhere in particular?”

“I'm leaving soon,” he said. “I have until September to decide where I'm supposed to be.” From somewhere beneath his seat he pulled out a thin, square box that was covered in faded gold leaf and embossed with black script, something you might get with a pair of nylons if you shopped for them in the closet of a Medici. “I was going to propose a car trip,” T. said.

The box itself was more elegant than anything I owned. Inside was an astonishingly pink silk scarf, a vintage Elsa Schiaparelli in its original box, something Gina Lollobrigida might have worn while being driven in a convertible to a film studio in Rome. I wanted to tell him it was the perfect gift, which it was. I wanted to tell him no one had ever given me something so delicate or pink, which was true. But I also wanted to tell him that even in a sleek little Alfa Romeo with the top down he could not drive fast enough, far enough, to cover the distance between me and the woman I imagined in the pink scarf in the seat beside him.

Before I said anything, T. said, “You can wear it on the plane.”

I said, “I'll stick my head out the window.”

“I'll keep my eyes on the sky,” T. said. “Or you could stay here tonight. The chapel opens to the public again tomorrow.”

“I have to deal with the bald man who's stealing stuff from my house,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “But your work is not done here.”

I didn't say anything.

“Someday, E.,” he said, “someday soon, you're going to have to deal with me.”

This was starting to sound like a genuine proposal.

T. said, “I have to be in Boston sometime before the end of the summer. I was thinking of coming next week.”

I didn't say anything, but I felt my eyebrows shoot up right across my forehead to my hairline.

He said, “I have to give a deposition. Simon Allerby is being sued.”

I said, “You'd be welcome to stay with me,” but every time I imagined him in one of those rooms, he seemed too tall by several feet, his head whacking against light fixtures, his elbows poking through walls. And I could already hear Rachel banging on the front door, demanding to know who was sitting in her father's favorite chair. Toss in Samir with his nose pressed to one of my windows, and I was prepared to book myself a hotel room on the moon. I said, “Who is suing Simon?”

T. said, “Some pharmaceutical company.”

Surely, it was Rachel's employer. That way, even if I didn't bring him home, she'd get to interrogate him.

“Simon is being targeted for publishing the results of a clinical study that was a bust. They won't win, but they will make him pay,” T. said. His face was giving off nothing.

I could feel my face reddening and sweating. I didn't relish the idea of his seeing me as I really was, as I saw myself every day in Cambridge. I wasn't eager to watch T. try to rectify his impressions of me here in Padua with the reality of the hermit in the housecoat who preferred the sunken-in cushions on her sofa to a bucket seat in a sports car.

He said, “I was hoping I could buy you dinner one night.”

“You don't owe me anything,” I said. I wanted to spare us both the embarrassment of the grim conclusion of that dinner, a shared
dessert neither of us wanted to eat, and after-dinner drinks we didn't need, and the other rituals that would follow on the realization that the promise of the evening had dried up before the appetizers had been ordered, that without the luster of Italy she seemed more opinionated than sophisticated, that she was a little older and a little heavier and a little more acerbic than he remembered, and that the door he had opened to her heart had since been sealed up and bricked over. I could live with myself in Cambridge, but I couldn't live with T. having to live with the truth of who I was. That's what I wanted to keep covered up. “I don't know, T.,” I said. I wanted him to politely withdraw the invitation. “I don't even know what I want.”

“Duck,” T. said. “When in doubt, order the duck.”

And we left it at that. He said he was going to have one more espresso. I said I was going to pack my bags. I knew it was likely I would never see him again. In characteristic fashion, we had made a date, but the date remained indeterminate. We didn't even shake on it.
Noli mi tangere.

W
HILE
I
PACKED
, I
REPEATEDLY FELT THE PRESENCE OF
someone outside, but every time I looked at the balcony, T. was not there. An Air France agent who spoke with a British accent offered to sell me a business-class ticket for a flight that would put me in Boston just after sunset, for almost as much money as Mitchell had paid for the blue-and-white CPOCH badge I'd stuck in the suitcase with the Dante book and my poisonous old dress. When I begrudgingly gave the Air France agent my credit-card number, she asked if I might want to take a later flight and use my frequent-flyer miles—another of Mitchell's secret stashes. I thanked her, and she offered me an upgrade to first class for a few thousand more miles.
Mais, oui.
I was playing with house money.

I couldn't find the scrap of paper on which Margaret had written her room number, but I was able to locate her last name on the conference agenda, so I headed down to the lobby to dispose of the suitcase and try to arrange for a ride to the Venice airport.

“
Signora Berman!
You check out at last!”

I tried to match his enthusiasm. “Ricardo!” We had already tangled once with Mitchell's bag, and it hadn't ended well. “I have looked for you at night, to thank you for the glue—
colla
.” This wasn't true, but I knew we were going to need a surfeit of goodwill to get through this transaction.

“He is a day man now,” Ricardo said. “And he brings the
portatile
from inside to here for you.”

I said, “A promotion?”

He said, “No,
signora.
Is true. I insist on
portatile
at desk. Is Ricardo we have to thank you.” The leather-bound ledger at the front desk had been replaced by a portable computer, which seemed to be the basis for his boast. He was already pecking at the keyboard. “Six days you been with us,” he said proudly.

Not even a week. I had to get rid of the bag and get a ride to the airport before he checked me out. As urgently as I could manage, I said, “
Prego, Ricardo
.”

“
Pronto, signora. C'è un problema?
”

“
Si, si, si
,” I said. “I need a ride to the airport.”

He started typing madly. “Taxi? Limo? Hotel shuttling services? Is cheap and comes—we see right here, she comes next time in almost one hour more.”

I said, “Okay.”

He typed something else and pulled out a ring of red paper tickets and tore one off, as if he were admitting me to a movie.

This seemed improbable. I said, “What time?”

“We call you when five minutes is arriving,” he said.

I said, “It's a van?”

“Automobus,” he said.

More than ever, I wasn't convinced it was real. I said, “How much does it cost?”

“Pay only the driver,” he said.

I said, “It goes to the airport?”

He said, “In Padova, the airport stays in Venezia, okay?”

I said, “Okay.” I could draw the next frame of this cartoon: I was seated in the backseat of a taxi to the airport, watching the meter flip over into triple digits.

Ricardo was typing again, and I knew I would soon be checked out and locked out without my luggage or passport. “Now, Ricardo, this is not my bag.”

He leaned over the desk and eyed the suitcase. I could tell he recognized it. He didn't say anything.

“I have to leave it here,” I said.

He said, “Is broken?”

I said, “No. You fixed it.”

He said, “
Certamente
.” His tone had cooled.