The Girl on Paper (23 page)

‘I… I’m going to die, aren’t I?’ she asked, her voice shaking.

‘Given the size of this myxoma, if we don’t remove it very soon, you are at great risk of cardiac embolism and sudden death,’ Clouseau conceded.

He turned off the screen, switched on the lights and sat down in his armchair.

‘It will require open heart surgery. There are, of course, risks involved with such a procedure, but as things stand it would be more dangerous to do nothing.’

‘When can you operate?’ asked Billie.

The doctor called out in his booming voice, instructing his secretary to bring him his diary. It looked pretty full already, with operations lined up months ahead. I was afraid he would pass us over to one of his colleagues, but since we were friends of Aurore he agreed to push back another appointment so that he could operate on Billie a fortnight later.

I was really getting to like this guy.

The first few passengers were beginning to come off the FlyItalia flight from Berlin. Among them was the famous painter and designer, Luca Bartoletti, returning from a short trip to the German capital. He had spent the past three days giving interviews to mark a retrospective of his work being put on by the Hamburger Bahnhof, the city’s modern-art museum. Seeing his canvases hanging alongside the likes of Andy Warhol and Richard Long, he felt he had finally arrived, gaining recognition for a lifetime’s work.

Luca didn’t waste time waiting for a suitcase to turn up on the conveyor belt. He hated having to lug things around, so he only ever travelled with a carry-on bag.

He had hardly touched the in-flight meal of rubbery salad leaves, a revolting shrink-wrapped pasta omelette and a
rock-hard
pear tart. Before going to pick up his car, he stopped to grab something to eat at Da Vinci’s. The café was about to close, but the owner agreed to take one last order. Luca went for a cappuccino and a toasted mozzarella, tomato and prosciutto sandwich. He sat at the counter to finish reading an article in
La Repubblica
that he had started on the plane.

When he put down his paper to take a sip of coffee, he
caught sight of the blue leather book that the pilot had left on the counter earlier. Luca was a big fan of the bookcrossing scheme. He bought a huge number of books but held on to none, leaving them instead in public places for others to find.

To begin with he thought the novel had been left there on purpose as part of the scheme, but there was no sticker on the cover to indicate that this was the case. Luca flicked through the book as he bit into his sandwich. He wasn’t into mass-market fiction and had never heard of Tom Boyd, but was taken aback to find that the novel was incomplete, with one of its readers having used the missing pages as a photo album.

He finished his sandwich and left the café with his find under his arm. In the underground garage, he found the old maroon Citroën DS cabriolet he’d bought at auction not long ago. He put the book down on the passenger seat and headed towards the south-west of the city.

Luca lived behind Piazza Santa Maria, on the top floor of an ochre-coloured building in the vibrant, photogenic Trastevere area. He’d turned it into a loft-style apartment and set up his studio there. When he entered his den and turned on the light, the room was flooded with the harsh brightness needed for his painting. Luca fiddled with the dimmer switch.

The place was so sparsely furnished it didn’t look lived in. It was arranged around a huge central fireplace, with round windows on either side. The room was filled with trestle tables, paint rollers and brushes of all shapes and sizes, scrapers, spatulas and dozens of tins of paint. But there was no bookcase, no sofa, no TV.

Luca looked over his most recent canvases. They were all monochrome, variations on the colour white, with slashes, grooves, raised areas and brush strokes to catch the light in different ways and create unique effects. These works were
very popular, with collectors paying significant sums for them. But Luca was under no illusions. He knew that commercial success and critical recognition didn’t necessarily go hand in hand with talent. In this age of consumerism, tainted by noise, speed and superfluous possessions, people felt somehow purified by buying one of his canvases.

The painter took off his jacket and slowly turned the pages of Ethel Kaufman’s photo album.

It had been a long time since Luca had acted on any kind of impulse. But tonight he had a real craving for chocolate soufflé…

In spite of the shadow cast by Billie’s illness, the two weeks leading up to her operation were some of the best days of our ‘relationship’.

My book was coming along well. I was enjoying writing again and worked through the night, carried along on a wave of enthusiasm and creativity. My aim was to lay the foundations of Billie’s future happiness. With every page I wrote, I carefully constructed the existence she had always dreamed of: a calmer way of life, free of demons and disappointments, healed of the traumas of her past.

I usually worked until dawn, heading out in the early morning when the sidewalks of Saint-Germain were being cleaned. I had my first coffee of the day at the bar of a bistro on Rue de Buci, before nipping into the bakery in Passage Dauphine to pick up some melt-in-the-mouth glazed
chaussons aux pommes
. I’d return to our little nest on Place Furstemberg, turn the radio on and make two
cafés au lait
. Billie would stroll in, yawning, and we’d eat breakfast together, sitting at the
counter of our open-plan kitchen overlooking the little square. She’d hum along to the radio, trying to understand the words of the French songs. I’d brush away flakes of pastry from the corners of her mouth, while she closed her eyes against the sun shining on her face.

While I got back to work, Billie spent the morning reading. She’d found an English-language bookshop near Notre Dame and asked me to make her a list of essential reading. From Steinbeck to Salinger by way of Dickens, over the course of two weeks she devoured the novels that had shaped me growing up, making notes in the margins, asking questions about the lives of the authors and copying her favourite quotations into a notebook.

After a few hours’ sleep, I’d go with her in the afternoon to a little cinema on Rue Christine that showed classic films she’d never heard of, but which were a revelation to her:
Heaven Can Wait, The Seven Year Itch, The Shop around the Corner
… Afterwards we’d discuss the movie over hot chocolate, and every time I referred to something she wasn’t familiar with she’d make a note of it in her book. We were happy.

Back home in the evening, we set ourselves the challenge of cooking some of the recipes from an old cookbook we’d dug out of the little bookcase in our apartment. With mixed results, we tried out dishes like
blanquette de veau
, duckling with pears, lemon polenta and – our biggest triumph –
slow-cooked
lamb shanks with honey and thyme.

And so, during those two weeks, another side of her personality came to light. She was revealed as an intelligent, complex person, determined to improve herself. I found myself unsettled by the feelings I had for her now that we’d called a truce.

After dinner, I got her to read over what I’d written that day, which sparked off long discussions. We’d found a half-drunk
bottle of pear brandy in the living-room cupboard. The label had been partly rubbed off, but what we could read assured us the spirit had been ‘distilled according to age-old methods’ by a small producer in the northern Ardèche. On the first night, we found it undrinkable: it scorched our throats like paint-stripper. Not that that put us off having another swig the next day. By the third day we’d decided it was ‘actually not that bad’, and by the fourth ‘pretty damn fantastic’.

After that, the liquor became part of our routine and, as the alcohol made us less inhibited, we talked more openly. Billie told me how her childhood, her miserable teens and her fear of being alone drove her toward the wrong kind of men. She told me how hard it was never to have met anyone who loved and respected her, and confided her hopes for the future and for starting a family some day. Usually she would end up falling asleep on the couch, listening to old records the owner had left behind, trying to translate the lyrics of the white-haired poet on the sleeve, who sang, cigarette in hand, that ‘As time goes by, everything comes to an end… You forget the old passions and the voices that once whispered those simple words: don’t be back late, be sure you don’t catch cold.’

After taking her up to bed, I’d come back to the living room and sit in front of my screen. A night of lonely work lay ahead, sometimes fulfilling but often painful, since I knew the good years Billie had in store would be spent far away from me. She’d go back to a world I had created, but in which I didn’t even exist, and be with a man who made my skin crawl.

Long before Billie burst into my life, I had dreamed up the character of Jack as a pretty repellent figure. He embodied
everything I hated or that made me uncomfortable about men. Jack was my exact opposite, the kind of guy I couldn’t stand and hoped never to become.

In his early forties, good-looking, with two kids, he worked in Boston as vice-chairman of a large insurance company. He’d married very young and cheerfully cheated on his long-suffering wife without a second thought. He was sure of himself, smooth-talking and knew a thing or two about female psychology. When he first met a girl, he could instantly put her at ease. He went around acting just macho enough to seem like a real man, but he’d make sure he was sweet and affectionate to the girl he had his eye on. It was this contradiction they fell for, the thrill of the idea that he was showing them a side of himself he kept hidden from others.

But once he had them where he wanted them they’d soon see his true colours. Self-obsessed and manipulative, he’d take on the role of the victim to turn situations to his advantage. Every time he felt insecure, he’d put his lover down, sussing out her weak points so he could play on them.

It was into the destructive clutches of this smarmy,
self-centred
slime ball that I had gone and thrown my Billie. He was the one she’d fallen in love with, and the one she’d asked me to build her life with.

So now I found myself in a mess of my own making. You can’t suddenly give a character in a book a completely different personality; I may have been the author, but that didn’t make me God. Fiction goes by its own rules and that rotten bastard couldn’t just turn into perfect son-in-law material from one volume to the next.

Each night I’d try to subtly backtrack, slowly making Jack a little more human, a little more likeable as the book went on. But even once this rather false transformation was complete, to me Jack was still Jack: the guy I hated most in the world
and into whose hands, by a strange twist of fate, I had to deliver the woman I loved.

‘Police! Open up, Mr Lombardo!’

Milo struggled to rouse himself. He rubbed his eyes and got out of bed, swaying unsteadily on his feet.

He and Carole had stayed up long into the night in front of their computers, scouring message boards and shopping sites to try to track down the missing book, without success. They left messages and set up email alerts wherever they could, extending the tedious search to every Italian site they could find with any kind of link to bookselling or literature.

‘Police! Open up or—’

Milo half opened the door to come face to face with a woman from the sheriff’s office. A petite brunette with green eyes, she had an Irish-American look about her and liked to imagine herself as a glamorous TV cop.

‘Good morning, sir. Karen Kallen from the California State Sheriff’s Department. We have an order to evict you.’

Milo came out onto the porch and saw a removal van pulling up in front of the house.

‘What the fuck is this?’

‘Don’t make this difficult, sir,’ warned the officer. ‘You’ve been sent several formal notices from your bank over the past few weeks.’

Two removal men were now standing either side of the door, waiting for their instructions to clear the property.

‘Oh and this,’ continued the cop, handing him an envelope,
‘is your summons to appear before court for removal of goods threatened with seizure.’

‘Are you talking about—’

‘The Bugatti you pawned, that’s right.’

She nodded to the two heavies to get to work. In less than half an hour they had stripped the house of all its furniture.

‘And this is nothing compared to what the IRS has in store for you!’ Karen shouted cruelly as she got back into her car.

Milo was left alone on the pavement, with nothing but the suitcase in his hand. It suddenly struck him that he had nowhere to spend the night. He staggered one way and then the other, like a boxer who’s been stunned, with no idea where to go. Three months ago he’d had to let his two employees go, along with his downtown offices. So there he was, no job, no roof over his head, no car, no nothing. He’d refused to face facts for too long, always sure that things would work out all right in the end, but this time his luck had run out.

The morning sun gleamed on the tattoos on his upper arms. Scars from his past, they took him back to life on the streets, the fights, the days when he didn’t have a penny to his name … everything he thought he’d left behind.

The wailing of a siren recalled him to the present. He turned, ready to run, but it wasn’t someone coming after him. It was Carole.

She could see right away what had happened and launched straight in, grabbing hold of Milo’s suitcase and throwing it on the back seat of her patrol car.

‘I’ve got a very comfortable sofa bed, but don’t go thinking for one moment that you’re going to squat at my place without lifting a finger. There’s some wallpaper I’ve been wanting to take down in the living room since for ever, plus the kitchen could use a lick of paint and the seal on the shower needs fixing. I also have a tap that drips in the bathroom and some
mould on the ceiling that needs seeing to. In fact, it looks like you getting chucked out is going to suit me pretty well.’

With a little nod of the head, Milo thanked her.

OK, so he didn’t have a job, a house or a car, but he still had Carole.

He had lost everything. Except the thing that mattered most of all.

Luca Bartoletti walked into the small family-run restaurant down a quiet back street. You came here to sit at scruffy tables and tuck into typical no-fuss Roman cuisine. You ate your pasta on a checked tablecloth and poured your wine from a jug.

‘Giovanni!’ he called out.

The dining room was empty. It was only 10 a.m., but the smell of warm bread already wafted in the air. The restaurant had belonged to his parents for over forty years, though it was his brother who ran it these days.

‘Giovanni!’

A figure appeared in the doorway, but it wasn’t his brother.

‘What you shouting for?’

‘
Buongiorno
, Mamma.’

‘
Buongiorno
.’

No kiss. No hug. No warmth at all.

‘I’m looking for Giovanni.’

‘Your brother isn’t here. He’s out buying
piscialandrea
at Marcello’s.’

‘OK, I’ll wait for him.’

A heavy silence fell, as it did every time they found
themselves alone together. The atmosphere was thick with blame and bitterness. They didn’t speak often and saw each other more rarely still. Luca had spent many years in New York. When he returned to Italy after his divorce, he’d lived in Milan for a while before buying an apartment in Rome.

To break the tension, Luca went behind the bar and made himself an espresso. He wasn’t much of a family guy. His work often gave him an excuse to skip christenings and weddings, and avoid going to Mass and those never-ending Sunday lunches. But, in his own way, he loved his family, and it upset him that he didn’t know how to get through to them. His mother had never really understood his painting, or why he had been so successful. She couldn’t see why people would want to spend tens of thousands of euros on plain white canvases. Luca felt she thought of him as a kind of crook, a clever rip-off merchant who managed to be comfortably off without ever doing a proper day’s work. It was this lack of understanding that undermined their relationship.

‘Heard from your daughter lately?’ she asked.

‘Sandra’s just gone back to school, in New York.’

‘Don’t you ever see her?’

‘I don’t see her very often,’ he admitted. ‘You know her mother has custody.’

‘And when you do see her it doesn’t go very well, does it?’

‘Look, I didn’t come here to listen to this,’ he said, raising his voice and getting up to leave.

‘Wait a minute!’ she said.

He stopped in front of the door.

‘You look worried about something.’

‘That’s my business.’

‘What did you want to talk to your brother about?’

‘Some photos. Whether he’d kept them or not.’

‘Photos? But you never take photos! You’re always saying
you don’t like getting bogged down in memories.’

‘Thanks, Mamma, that’s a real help.’

‘Who do you want pictures of?’

Luca dodged the question. ‘I’ll come back and see Giovanni later,’ he said, opening the door.

She held him back by his sleeve.

‘Your life has ended up like your paintings, Luca. Cold, empty and colourless.’

‘Well, that’s your opinion.’

‘You know it’s the truth though, don’t you?’ she said ruefully.

‘Goodbye, Mamma,’ he said, closing the door behind him.

The old lady shrugged her shoulders and went back to the kitchen. On the worn wooden worktop a copy of
La Repubblica
lay open at a glowing article about Luca’s work. She finished reading it, then cut it out and added it to the file where for years she had collected everything that was written about her son.

Luca got back to his apartment. He used his paintbrushes as kindling to light a fire in the large hearth in the middle of his studio. While the flames took hold, he went around the room picking up all his canvases, his latest finished pieces as well as works in progress, spraying them one by one with white spirit before throwing them into the fire.