The Sonnet Lover (10 page)

CHAPTER
SIX

I
AM GLAD WHEN WE ENTER THE CONFERENCE ROOM THAT
C
HIHIRO MADE SURE
I wasn’t late to the meeting. Not only does my appearance cut short several whispered confabs in the corners of the room (confirming her suspicion that people would have used my lateness as a chance to talk about me), but I also get to take my favorite seat: at the far end of the table next to my favorite monkey.

I’ve never quite understood how the monkeys got here. The fresco on the ceiling of this room—originally the formal dining room—is modeled on the one in the formal dining room at La Civetta. It depicts a lemon-covered pergola in a garden. An assortment of birds—doves, sparrows, and long-tailed peacocks—roost on the wooden struts. In the original fresco, fat cupids also frolic amidst the greenery, their chubby feet dangling precariously from their perches. In one corner a plaster foot even protrudes from the frescoed surface. In this New York version of the fresco, though, there are monkeys instead of cupids: monkeys peering out between leafy branches and monkeys dangling by their tails from the wooden slats of the pergola. If you look carefully (and I have had ample opportunity through long and tedious budget reviews to examine every inch of the palatial room), you can even find a few monkeys that have climbed down from the pergola and found their way into the formal dining room to perform rude and unspeakable acts. There’s one painted in the china hutch defecating into a Meissen teacup and two copulating behind a Ming vase in the entryway. My favorite monkey, though, is the little one who peers out from behind the leafy fronds of an aspidistra, making an obscene gesture that I have seen only on the streets of Italy. I always sit right next to him. He gives me some relief for the sentiments I am unable to express in the course of departmental meetings.

Chihiro sits down next to me, bringing us both coffees and a napkinful of Mint Milanos from the spread set up on the sideboard. “The director of the counseling center has your name on his agenda,” she says, spewing Milano crumbs in my direction. (When I once asked Chihiro not to talk while eating, she told me it kept people from being able to read her lips. “And it drove my mother crazy,” she’d added.) “You come right after ‘extended hours for counseling’ but before ‘dorm discussion groups.’”

“Were there any other teachers’ names on the list?”

“Not that I saw, but I only saw the first page.”

“His agenda is more than one page?”

Chihiro nods. She’s just crammed two cookies into her mouth, a quantity that prevents even her from answering. “
Legal size
pages,” she finally says. “I think we’re in for a long meeting. I better get more cookies.”

While Chihiro is laying in supplies, Mark comes into the room. He catches my eye but doesn’t smile. Everything about him this morning bespeaks gravitas: the slightly rumpled gray suit, the dark circles under his eyes, and the faint suggestion of unshaven beard that shadows his face and brings out his cheekbones to advantage. He’s never looked handsomer. I imagine him working through the night, preparing press releases and e-mails.
Poor guy,
I’m thinking when the young blond lawyer comes in wearing the same suit she was wearing last night, only very slightly rumpled, her hair scraped back into an unlawyerly ponytail, the result, I’m sure, of not having access to her blow-dryer and flatiron this morning. She takes the seat next to Mark’s and opens a robin’s egg blue leather portfolio filled with legal-size sheets in the same shade of blue, which also matches her eyes. Of course he’d need the lawyer to advise him on such a sensitive case, I tell myself. There’s no need to be jealous. Still, I feel an uncomfortable sensation spreading in my chest and I find myself unable to take my eyes off this pretty blond woman.

“Thank you all for coming in on a Saturday,” Mark begins, his eyes traveling around the table and seeming to greet each one of us separately. I’m not the only one who feels the spark of warmth when his eyes settle on mine, but I may be the only one who knows he’s taking roll. He told me once that when he taught economics he never had to take attendance—he could tell in a lecture hall of a hundred students who was missing. His gaze does seem to stop a little longer when he reaches Gene Silverman, but that may be because Gene, slouched low in his seat and wearing opaque Ray-Bans, looks like he might be asleep. He straightens up when Mark’s gaze stays on him, but doesn’t remove the sunglasses.

“I realize you all had family obligations and better places to be this morning,” Mark says, his voice a little hoarse, “but it was my hope that in the midst of our own blessings we could come together to make this tragedy more bearable to our larger family, as I have come to think of our college community. The death of a young person is a deep tear in the fabric of the community…and when that death is a suicide, the tear may spread even wider to those who may be wondering if they could have done anything to prevent that death.” I feel Mark’s gaze rest on me and know he’s thinking of my relationship with Robin. “It’s natural, too, for there to be anger at someone who has committed suicide. I’d like us, though, to start with a moment of silence to honor the memory of Robin Aaron Weiss and also to forgive him and to forgive ourselves for not being able to do more for him.”

The low rumble of background noise, the shifting of papers and whispered conversations that accompany all such meetings, comes to an abrupt halt as we all bow our heads. The only sound in the room is the wet hiccups of the coffee urns. I lower my eyes to better think about Robin, but my gaze falls on the monkey in the aspidistra.
Not now,
I think, and close my eyes. I see the picture of Robin from the
Times,
standing at the end of the lemon walk, but he’s turned away from the camera and is facing the Tuscan countryside, a patchwork of green and umber and gold laid out like a cobblestone road to the future. Had he, as I had, felt that a piece of himself would always remain there? Had he felt, as I once had, that he’d left the best part of himself behind and despaired?

I hope you’ll leave more than your ghost here.

I flick open my eyes, sure for a second that someone has said the words aloud, and find Mark staring at me in the silent room. It’s only then that I feel the tears on my face.

Chihiro reaches across me as if reaching for one of my cookies and knocks my cup of coffee onto the floor. “I’m sorry,” she says. We both scramble to the floor to mop up the spilled coffee, and Chihiro passes me a tissue to dry my face. Is it really so shameful, I wonder, to cry for a young boy’s death? But when I finish with the tissue I see that it’s black with mascara and I’m grateful that I won’t spend the rest of the meeting looking like a deranged raccoon.

By the time we surface, the director of the counseling center, Dr. Milton Spiers, is giving his report on the steps the counseling center is taking to handle the impact of Robin’s death on the student body. Hours at the counseling center have been extended, and additional staff have been borrowed from neighboring hospitals.

“By the time your students show up to class on Monday morning, they’ll have heard about what happened and they might want to talk about it. I would suggest making a brief statement about the event and posting the counseling hours on the blackboard. It’s up to you if you want to open your classroom up to discussion—”

“Isn’t that likely to get out of hand?” Lydia Belquist, the classics professor, asks, nodding her long patrician face up and down (“Lydia Equinus,” Chihiro calls her).

Normally I find Lydia’s comments in meetings irritating, but I’ve been mentally counting down Spiers’s agenda and know I’m next, so I welcome Lydia’s interruption.

“After all, we’re not trained at
counseling,
” she says, pronouncing the word as if it represented an arcane and slightly suspect skill, like dousing or feng shui. “Isn’t it better to keep their minds on their studies? It’s when they get distracted that these kinds of things happen. I plan to give my students extra passages of Tacitus to translate.”

Someone tsks so loudly and explosively, it sounds like one of the urns has boiled over, but when I look in that direction I see it’s Frieda Mainbocher, the women’s studies professor and Lydia Belquist’s bête noire. Frieda is a social historian whose work relies on statistics and other quantifiable data about the ancient world and the Renaissance. Her enmity with Lydia Belquist dates from an APA panel they both served on during which Frieda proclaimed that it was more important to know what the prostitutes in Rome were paid
per noctem
than what Caesar wrote in that silly book on Gaul. Lydia accused Frieda of having her mind in the gutter. Frieda accused Lydia of being a misogynist elitist. These are the two, I recall, that Mark has paired up to teach the Women in Italian History class. I can just imagine what fireworks that collaboration will produce.

“Sixty-five percent of suicides or suicidal attempts are made by students who have reported feelings of stress over academic performance,” Frieda drones (I’ve heard students complain that her lecture style could put a meth addict to sleep). “Giving them more work is not the answer.”

“I had Mr. Weiss in Latin 101, and he did not strike me as a scholar who subjected himself to pressure of any kind whatsoever. A shame, really, because he had a good mind.” I could swear I hear a slight quiver in Lydia’s voice, but then I remember that she has Parkinson’s. “He was planning on majoring in classics before he went to Italy and got involved with all those film people.” Lydia sends a purposeful look toward Gene Silverman, who is slumped in his chair sipping coffee from a Star-bucks cup, but if the look penetrates behind his opaque Ray-Bans, he doesn’t let on. Instead, Theodore Pierce, the English chair, responds to Lydia’s comment.

“Really? He told me he was planning on majoring in English,” Ted says at the same moment that three other professors attest that Robin was interested in majoring in their fields.

Mark holds up a hand to silence the commotion of wounded academic egos. It’s not that unusual for a freshman to run through several majors before settling on one, but I’ve never seen so many professors so invested in that choice. Each sounds personally wounded by Robin’s abandonment of his or her field.

“Clearly he was a confused young man,” Mark says when the commotion has died down. “A compelling young man, charismatic even. He had a unique ability to draw people into his orbit.” There’s a reproving note in Mark’s voice that I’m afraid is directed toward me, but when I look up I see that he’s looking at Gene Silverman, who remains impervious to Mark’s gaze behind his Ray-Bans.

“I’d like to ask if any of you encountered any irregularities with Mr. Weiss’s written work—any cases of plagiarism.” Now Mark’s gaze does come to rest on me.

I raise my hand and describe the incident of the Oscar Wilde paper freshman year. “He seemed quite chastened, and he never gave me any reason to suspect his work again,” I conclude.

“Did you continue to submit his papers to ithenicate.com?” Frieda Mainbocher asks.

“Periodically,” I answer, not adding that I stopped after the rest of his papers that semester checked out okay.

“Did anyone else encounter any issues of plagiarism with this young man?” Mark asks.

Lydia Belquist, looking uncharacteristically abashed, clears her throat. “He handed in some Virgil translations that clearly had been cribbed from the Robert Fitzgerald translation, but that’s not all that unusual…”

“He failed to attribute a few quotes in one of his papers,” Ted Pierce volunteers, “but it seemed to be a confusion about MLA citation practices instead of a deliberate attempt to steal.”

“He submitted a story to a workshop that sounded a lot like some-thing by Bret Easton Ellis,” our writer-in-residence says, “but to tell you the truth, so do half the things I get. Kids that age are so impressionable…”

A silence descends on the table. Another moment of silence for Robin, only this time I imagine we’re all wondering whether we ever knew the boy we’re mourning at all. I know I am.

Mark breaks the silence with a long-drawn-out sigh. “I think we can all see the necessity of reporting such incidents, however minor they may seem. Each on its own may appear innocent, but taken together they present a disturbing pattern. If this young man from Italy publicly accused Robin of plagiarizing this script that he’d just sold to Hollywood, all these other stories would have come out, and so he chose to take his own life instead.”

“But are we absolutely sure it was a suicide?” Ted Pierce asks. “I was inside and couldn’t see everything, but it looked to me like the Italian boy was running right at Robin and would have rammed into him hard enough to knock him off the railing.”

“He would have if Mark hadn’t gotten in the way,” Gene Silverman says, pushing his sunglasses up onto the top of his head and turning his bloodshot eyes toward Mark. No wonder he’d worn the sunglasses; his eyes look ravaged. “Maybe if we hadn’t been distracted by the other boy we could have kept Robin from falling. I know that I was paying more attention to him than to what Robin was doing. Even if he didn’t push Robin, I think Orlando Brunelli has a lot to answer for.” When he’s finished speaking, Gene lowers his sunglasses, retreating behind them as if behind a stage curtain.

“Brunelli?” Lydia Belquist asks. “Isn’t that the name of the family who is suing Cyril Graham for control of half the villa?”

At the mention of the lawsuit, a palpable ripple of excitement sweeps through the room. There have been rumors that Cyril Graham’s ownership of La Civetta was being contested in the Italian courts, but this is the first I’ve heard the name of the other party in the suit. I can hear the words “illegitimate heir,” “Sir Lionel Graham’s mistress,” and “slept with his wife’s secretary” in the general melee. I turn to Chihiro and see immediately by her wide-eyed look (she always looks like an anime princess when she’s trying to hide something) that she knew.

“Why didn’t you tell me it was the Brunelli family that was suing Graham?” I whisper.