The Ghost of Hannah Mendes (43 page)

Her bags were already in her room. She pulled back the heavy drapes and looked down into the sea. The soft sound of the anchored gondolas tapping their pointed prows against each other drifted up to her. It was a sound that would forever bring back to her this particular place, this particular time, she thought.

They sat facing each other in the exquisite dining room, sipping tall, cool drinks in lovely colors, watching the boats drift by on the Grand Canal. She ran her fingers through her curly hair, realizing that it had grown since she’d left home. It was past her neck, almost touching her shoulders in a thick mass of uncontrolled curls.

He reached across the table, taking the lock from between her fingers, rubbing it tenderly.

“I’m not good at this. I take these things seriously,” she said, shaking her head.

“I mean it and have meant it seriously from the very beginning. From the first moment I looked at you. Francesca, you must know how I feel.” He leaned back, looking away from her out to where the sun had begun its slow, golden fall into the sea. Then he leaned across the table, taking her palm tenderly in his. “I think I’m in love.”

The words went through her like a crack of thunder from a clear sky. Could this really be happening, she wondered, their palms electric and warming against each other. Or was it simply a strange dream? “But why me? We’re such opposites!”

He shook his head and began to protest. She covered his mouth with her hand. “Don’t deny it! Of course it’s true! I was meant to have the kind of life where the most exciting thing that happens is that my treasury bonds go down two percentage points. I’m a homebody. If I ever did travel along with you, all I’d ever do is hold the ladder and scream: ‘Be careful! Be careful!’ Trust me, you don’t want me.”

He looked at her, enclosing her hands in both of his. “Oh yes,” he said. “I do.”

“But why?”

He grinned. “Because I think you’ll do a very good job holding the ladder.”

“Seriously!”

He stretched out his legs and put both hands into his pockets, his gaze shifting from her face to the fading light blushing over the horizon. “A few years ago, the day I decided to break up with my first love…”

Francesca swallowed. “You had a first love?”

“Oh, yes, indeed. She was a doctoral candidate, studying archaeology at Oxford. She was dark, like you. But she was very adventurous. She liked to jet off weekends and disappear, joining digs in Iraq or Turkey. Summers were always spent in the hottest climates, in the worst possible conditions. She took her work very seriously.

“With her schedule and mine, we could never make plans—and there was this constant competition. She constantly asked me to prove things to her, and I don’t think I ever did. She wanted the kind of freedom I knew I could never give her, not if I wanted a family.”

“Do you? Want one?” A surge of strange warmth passed through her stomach.

“Of course. Anyway, one weekend we went away together to a lovely old hotel in the Lake District. I’d gone down to breakfast and she’d decided to sleep late. I was sitting there with my coffee and hot rolls and marmalade, feeling forlorn, when I looked across the room. There was this couple, a man and his wife. The man had gray hair and looked about fifty, and the wife was pretty and small, about the same age. And as I was watching them, I saw her reach across to him and smooth down his hair. You could sense they belonged together. And in that instant I just knew that Christina and I didn’t.”

“So,” she said, exhaling deeply, as if having surfaced from beneath the sea, “what next?”

“It’s up to you, Francesca. It’s all up to you.”

She didn’t protest.

She had wanted this to happen, she realized. But now that it had, she immediately felt herself backing away, filled with doubts. Could she really envision a life together with this man? The “what do you want for breakfast, have a nice day, ’bye honey, don’t forget to pick up the dress at the cleaners” kind of life?

Nothing about their relationship had been ordinary. It had all been a kind of magic: exotic places, hotels, foreign languages. Was there really a place with an address on the firm landscape of the reality she knew that would take them both in? And when it did, how long before either one of them began to feel like moving?

She waited for him to press her for some kind of answer or declaration, and wondered—almost frightened—what she would say.

He didn’t.

Instead, they ate in almost palpable silence. When they had finished, he took her by the hand and led her down the winding old stone steps to where the gondoliers had gathered to wait patiently for tourists.

They climbed in. “
Lentamente
,” Francesca heard Marius whisper to the gondolier.

They sat side by side in the softly rocking boat as the gondolier swept the immense oar slowly through the water, sending them into the lazy current of the Grand Canal. The fog had lifted, and in its place was the softly glowing reflection of the pink and lavender sky.

The light, Francesca thought, was like a stage set in a Christmas matinee of
The Nutcracker;
a wondrous pink glow that turned even the most ordinary prop into a thing of enchantment. Even I, she thought, must look enchanting.

She turned around, leaning back into his arms, and felt the brush of his lips against her forehead, so sweet it could have been almost fatherly if her own body had not responded with such unfilial passion.

“Marius…” Francesca began, but the gondolier began to sing a lively Italian song with much more enthusiasm than skill, winking and grinning at them in pure delight.

“
Amore, amore, amore
,” he sang.

“
Amore, amore, amore
,” Marius repeated in a whisper she could almost feel entering her ear and mind and heart.

Slowly, like some fragile plant seeking out the sun, she turned her body toward his. Trembling with fear as she felt the cast-iron shields encasing her melt, she placed one hand on his shoulder and the other into his thick, dark hair. Looking deep into his startled and delighted eyes, she kissed him.

His whole body moved up to meet hers, his arms catching and holding her close to him, creating a magic circle of connectedness that she had never before experienced, nor even imagined possible. All her senses suddenly woke up and laughed with a vigorous new joy of life. His body, his smell, the texture of his warm skin against hers, it was all so precious, so new, and yet so very familiar. It was as if she had always known him, and he had always been a part of her.

Because an old woman had changed her mind at the last minute, Suzanne had gotten a seat on standby on the first available flight out of Malaga. It happened to be going to Rome. It was as good as any other place, she’d told herself.

Listless and with no real plan in mind, she spent a few days wandering around the Colosseum, the Roman Forum, and the Vatican Museums, detaching herself from the Italian guide who spoke three languages, all incomprehensibly. There was a sinister echo in the silent stone seats of the great amphitheater, and the irradicable sense of cruelty, blood, and pain, both human and animal. If she closed her eyes, she could almost hear the echo of long silent screams.

The Forum, with its broken stone reminders of the fleeting nature of power, was even more depressing. Rulers of the world! Reigning now over a landscape of crumbling old marble, their heirs purveyors of fashionable leather goods and well-designed furniture.

Feeding Christians to the lions, burning Jews at the stake. There was no place in Europe you could wander joyously once your ears insisted on hearing the echoes, and your eyes persisted in seeing ghosts. Depressed, she abandoned the idea that had flitted briefly across her mind of retracing her epiphanous college trek with Renaldo. It all seemed so different now, so changed. On the spur of the moment, she decided to take a train to Florence, to the one exhibit she and Renaldo had missed that summer, either because it had been closed for renovations or on tour—she couldn’t recall which. Only the image of Renaldo’s disappointed face as he stared at the locked gates was clear in her mind. “We’ll come back here many times,” he’d promised. A promise he hadn’t kept.

Galleria dell’Accademia. She walked through the gates into the vast room.

And there it was: Michelangelo’s statue of David.

She staggered to a spot where she could sit down, shocked by the otherworldly, almost crushing immensity of the encounter. Whatever reproduction or photograph of it she’d seen had done nothing to prepare her for it; quite the opposite. They had been outright lies that made the revelation of truth that much more astonishing.

You
could
believe in G-d, she suddenly realized. For here, truly, she thought, was proof positive that man was created in His image. How else could you explain the touch of Divine in Michelangelo’s hands that had allowed him to release such incredible warm beauty from the cold stuff of marble?

She tried to analyze its power. It was not classically beautiful. The proportions were off, the powerful arms and shoulders far too large for the boyish, short legs. The neck and the face, the epitome of male beauty, were filled with courage, fear, and doubt.

Michelangelo had been twenty-six when the Cathedral Works Committee tossed him a ruined piece of marble abandoned by another artist, she’d read. As she looked into David’s face, she could see clearly reflected the young sculptor’s own courage and doubt as he flung his masterpiece in the face of the Goliath of established powers like some slingshot stone.

That night, she dreamed of David, his hard, cold body suddenly thawed into flesh, the blank, stone eyes warming as they looked at her, all fear and hope gone, replaced by longing. And suddenly she felt herself enveloped by the strange creature, part stone, part man, whose icy-cool cheek she touched with warm hands.

She awoke in the dark and cried until daybreak.

In the morning she called Paris. Renaldo wasn’t there, they told her. Professor Barrie had unexpectedly received an award and flown to America, and Renaldo had taken over his graduate seminar in Venice.

Venice.

Can I stand it? she wondered.

34

They walked arm in arm back into the lobby, lost in each other’s eyes. Francesca looked at the elevator that would take them upstairs, wondering how and where they would spend the rest of the night. It seemed to her that now a decision had to be made. She felt on the verge of making it.

“
Signor
.” A clerk respectfully cleared his throat.

Marius looked up, dazed, his eyes moving from Francesca’s face and back into the everyday world.

“There are some messages for you,” he said, handing Marius some white envelopes.

Francesca wondered at the sudden rush of color that bathed his face as he read them.

“I knew my hunch would pay off!” he kissed her hand hurriedly. “I’ve got to go.”

“What?!” she caught his arm and shook her head in disbelief. “You’re leaving me? Now? After everything that we’ve…”

“You don’t understand, my love! They’ve found it! Part of the manuscript! In the Bodleian Library, mistakenly attached to a fifteenth-century manuscript of de Camoes
The Lusiads
! Imagine! It’s taken months for my graduate student to go through this stuff, but I didn’t give up!”

“That’s fantastic! But, Marius, why can’t he just copy the material and fax it?”

He looked pained: “Francesca, they don’t let you photocopy rare fifteenth-century original manuscripts. And there’s something else, some notes in the margin, hardly readable. I’ve got to see it before anyone else does.”

“When do we leave?” She shrugged.

He touched her shoulder gently: “Listen to me, my love! I’ve got to leave immediately. And you’re going to stay behind and follow up the lead from Caceres.”

“But, Marius, all I’ve got is a name and an address! We don’t even know if the person is alive anymore. And even if she is, how will I speak to her? I don’t know Italian!” she protested.

He kissed her. “You’ll do just fine! Besides, I’ll be back in a few days.” He took her suddenly cold hands, warming them between his own. “Trust me?”

“What’s a few days?”

“Two. Four. Maybe less.”

She sat down heavily, sinking into the down pillows of the sofa in the lobby. They sucked her in like quicksand. Her eyes darted to the elevators, dull with disappointment. She felt immobilized. “I can’t believe that tonight, of all nights, you’re going to abandon me!”

“Darling Francesca, I’m doing this for you, for your family!”

“For your own unmatched reputation,” she added sullenly.

He grinned, holding her chin in his palm, caressing her cheek lovingly with his thumb. “Actually, I’m afraid you’ll take advantage of me in this romantic setting. I don’t want to be seduced in the moonlight only to be abandoned in the sensible light of day over bran flakes and the
International Herald Tribune
. I want to give you time to think about all this.” His eyes grew serious as he laced his fingers through hers. “But when I come back, I want an answer.”

“What’s the question?” she said flippantly, scared.

“You know,” he whispered, rubbing his knuckle along her cheek.

What he was saying was not only right, but admirably sensible, she tried to convince herself as she watched him pack, ride down the elevator, and climb into the
vaporetto
. But as she lifted her arm to wave goodbye, she felt a sense of stunned disbelief that bordered on physical injury.

He was gone.

That night, sleep felt like a deep, dark hole. She awoke feeling heavily drugged, or like someone who’d spent too many hours on the beach. She literally dragged herself out of bed, struggling with the unbearable idea that her life had finally returned to normal.

Breakfast for one.

The stock page.

Bran flakes.

She pulled back the curtains. The fog had vanished, taking with it all mysteries, leaving behind the mundane light of day. She took out her day planner, checking her schedule, feeling the day stretch out before her like a long, hard road.