The Lost Diary of Venice Page 11

  “I think this might be useful.” He was beaming down at her, holding a large box. He set it on the desk, then unsnapped the lid. Inside was a thick black book, worn gray at the corners. “It’s just pictures for the most part, but I think it’s along the lines of what you’re looking for.” He lifted a few pages to flash ink drawings, then without further comment withdrew to his desk.

  He was right. Inside, gorgeous illustrations revealed Venetian life in the late 1500s.The opulent attire of courtesans that prompted laws against excess, the elaborate robes of the doge. The yellow badges forced upon the Jews to identify them as “other”—hundreds of years before the Holocaust. Detailed sketches depicted the exotic visitors brought in by trade agreements with Istanbul and North Africa.

  As she read, the light aged, and the shadows of the sculptures bent and swung across the courtyard in an afternoon procession. Finally, Rose looked up, blinking like a mole emerging from its burrow, to discover with some disappointment that there’d been a shift change. Instead of Lucas, a kindly older woman with heavily rouged cheeks and a floral blouse wished her a very good evening as she left.

  * * *

  The house was quiet when she got home. It was always quiet. Rose went to the kitchen and put the kettle on for tea. As the water heated, she unwound her scarf and tossed it on the counter. From the corner of the living room, her father’s chair observed her emptily.

  “If you were still here, I could tell you what I did today.” Rose stared back at the chair. It remained impassive, leathered wingback, blanket folded neatly on its seat. “Guess I’ll just talk to myself.”

  The kettle whistled at her; she tore open a sachet of peppermint tea and filled her mug with hot water. There was a chill to the air that night. Normally, she would have lit a fire in the fireplace—her father had loved to sit by the hearth, listening to the crackle and hiss of the wood as it flamed. Instead, she flicked the thermostat on and took a seat at the dining room table by the vent. She’d lived in that house since elementary school; she could remember barreling down the stairs on winter weekends clutching a book in one hand, a blanket in the other. Turning up the heat, then positioning her chair so that the hot air blew directly into her blanket. The morning would pass with her huddled over the vent, inflated with warmth, inhabiting fantastic new worlds courtesy of C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, L’Engle.

  There’s my bookworm. Her mother, blissfully unaware of the hostile cells that would begin dividing relentlessly in her body, making pancakes in the kitchen. Concerto music trembling out from her father’s study.

  Rose sometimes wondered how Joan’s mother, Aileen, had felt, moving through a home she knew had belonged to another woman. Evidence of a previous identity wherever the eye landed: in the Spanish tiles of the kitchen counters, the pendant lights dangling above the dining room table, the table itself. She’d traced the same routines of daily life as her predecessor: kitchen to living room, up the twelve wooden stairs ribboned by carpet. Tugged on the same cupboard door in the second-floor hallway with its stubborn, squeaky hinge. Aileen had been respectful—a framed photograph of Rose’s mother had remained on the mantel. Still, she’d added her own signature, updating all the pots and pans, introducing an absurd number of pillows to the couch, all hand-embroidered with flowers and leaves.

  In fact, Rose was the only one who hadn’t altered anything, unless she counted swapping out her high school bed for a new one sold by an Internet start-up. Even though she owned the home now, she couldn’t bring herself to sleep in the master bedroom. Joan had gently suggested selling, but the reality was that the property was a treasure: situated in the best neighborhood, with a charming bay window and a leafy maple in the lawn out front, a façade of limestone and brick. Rose said she’d just needed time. But over six months had gone by and she still hadn’t changed rooms. She was adrift, and she was smart enough to know why: because until now, she’d never not had a clear and present goal. For years, it’d been school, earning one degree, then the next, and the next. After that it’d been her father: working to ensure each day was marked by as little pain as possible, reaching the inevitable end as slowly as they could, together.

  Now…what was she doing? Didn’t milestones arrive on the horizon for most people, like road signs indicating how to proceed? Earn the degree, land the job, get the promotion. Marriage, children. What do you do when no next step is offered? No partner in sight, no promotion to be had. She had only herself now, and Rose wasn’t sure she knew who that was anymore. Joan advised her to reach out to university friends, but what would she say? My movie got put on pause while yours kept running. Yes, your children are adorable, aren’t they? Yes, it’s wonderful that you work for the Smithsonian.

  Now she felt the gaze of both her mother and Aileen from the mantel, Aileen having gained her own spot at the opposite end. She imagined that they were watching her with some concern, Rose’s mother in her feathered Princess Diana haircut, Aileen sporting a practical bob that was very similar to Joan’s current style, though Rose would never say so out loud. Both of them observing as Rose stayed in every night, chatting idly with an empty chair.

  She finished the last few sips of tea, trying to remember how her father had acted with each wife. Her mother had been a researcher; together they’d made a cozy family, reading quietly every evening, separate but together. Aileen, on the other hand, couldn’t make it through the grocery store without stopping and talking to at least five people. She’d coaxed Rose’s father out to lectures, to movies. She’d even gotten him to stomp his feet at bluegrass concerts. Both versions had been him—each partner just brought out different patterns in his woodwork. Rose liked to think that he’d loved her mother the most, but she knew he’d loved Aileen also; he’d have done anything to make her happy, including listening to bluegrass. She knew exactly what her father would have said on the matter too, quoting Heraclitus: “No man steps in the same river twice.” To which Rose would have replied, obligingly, “For it’s not the same river, and he’s not the same man.” After Aileen had died, Rose and Joan had gone through her things while her father sequestered himself in his study, with Brahms furious on piano. They’d found small slips of paper in her coat pockets: one-sentence love notes he’d tucked away for her to find.

  Rose set her mug in the sink, then climbed the stairs. That past Christmas had been the first time in memory that the banister hadn’t been strung with a spruce garland. Would she have it in her to hang one next year? How long would she stay in the house, truly? She tried to imagine raising a child in the same rooms she’d played in as a girl. After she’d crossed the threshold of thirty, those sorts of thoughts had begun bobbing to the surface. She could picture a little redhead diving into a pile of raked maple leaves in the lawn. Learning to run the cash register at the bookshop. Then, like a new frame spliced into the film, a sudden image of William—his silhouette in the truck when he drove her home, the outside world flashing greenly past behind him. The weight of his hand on her back. Unconsciously, Rose pressed her own hand to her stomach: flat and firm, hips as sharp as a teenager’s.

  “Don’t get carried away.” Tired eyes looked back at her from the bathroom mirror. She ran the tap until the water turned warm, then bent to submerge her face.

  * * *

  William’s studio crouched in the shadows near the back fence, dwarfed by white poplar and magnolia trees. A single red oak stood sentry in the middle of the yard, thick-trunked and venerable; he’d hung a swing for the girls from one of its branches when they moved in. Now the rope stirred slightly in the dark air, the leaves making a gentle shushing sound high overhead. He stepped down the three deck stairs and into the yard, met up with the narrow stone path that licked out through the grass. The clouds had retreated enough for him to see star spatter in the blackness above, a sharp crescent moon.

  Inside the studio, he turned the lights on and stood, squinting, until his eyes adjusted. Then he we
nt to the window, raising the blinds just enough to crank open the glass, a cool breeze whispering in to shift the still air. Within seconds, moths arrived to flutter at the screen, chafing their bodies against the mesh, struggling toward the light. William tugged the blinds back down.

  Shelves lined the far wall, custom made to store his paintings. Methodically, he began pulling out each frame, lining them up in sequence. These were the ones he’d refused to sell. A few landscapes where he could spot the beginnings of the style he’d become known for. Two painstaking self-portraits that made his stomach drop: a younger version of himself sitting at the kitchen table in his New York apartment. Him in the desert on that first solo trip. He’d wanted to go somewhere, see something new, and someone had said Mojave. So, he’d sold a painting and bought a ticket—just like that. He could still recall the vast patience of the desert: great rock formations, a bone-deep stillness in the stone and dirt and heat that had settled something down inside him. At night, searing red skies doming over the darkening Martian terrain. He’d done a self-portrait to remember what it’d felt like there, what it’d been to just go—because he’d wanted to. Because he could. Less than two years later, Sarah would be pregnant. He stared at his own face in the painting, through a distance of more than a decade now. The full measure of his naïveté reflected back in his open expression, the gleam in his eyes.

  The newest sketch sat on a drawing table to his left. Only the earliest suggestions were edging to life, but already it was so different from the others. The curves of a face, the tumble of hair. Elongated proportions in a late Renaissance style. He’d begun blocking out a palette with pastels, choosing deeper hues: the rich tones of a Venetian painter.

  The outline of Rose’s eyes central on the page.

  He’d discovered himself incapable of not thinking of her, no matter how he tried—in fact, the harder he tried, the more she flooded his attention, as if someone had spilled coffee on the circuitry of his mind. A cruel joke of the psyche. After a week when each day ended with a headache that responded to neither pills nor whiskey, he’d decided to direct his energies into art. He’d already been experimenting with elements of Giovanni’s style, filling pages with loose figure studies. It was a simple trick to use Rose as a model, to focus on a portrait. Plenty of painters had muses, why should he be any different? Now, the image emerging was an unexpected blend of mannerist technique and his own impressionist style. It excited him with its difference, but it scared him too: he sensed the path curving ahead in a new direction but couldn’t quite see what lay beyond.

  Yet what would he do, in the end, with a portrait of a local bookshop owner—especially one painted without her knowledge? Perhaps he’d finish the piece, then keep it hidden, the way Andrew Wyeth had concealed all the paintings he’d done of his neighbor’s wife. It could be a quiet inspiration meant for his spirit alone. William thought of Wyeth’s portraits, the wife’s hair always parted in braids, her face pale and impassive. How many hours they must have spent together in secret. And there was the rub: working on the sketches sharpened, not dulled, his desire to see Rose again. He wanted more time to observe her face, the folds of her eyelids, the point of her chin. Was one nostril higher than the other? Did her eyebrows really arch the way he remembered, and at what angle exactly did her clavicle slope? He thought he’d captured the curve of her lip, but now he was second-guessing his own lines.

  He wanted answers, he needed to know, with an insistence that felt like compulsion.

  Three hours later, William turned off the lights and waded back out into the shadows, pastel chalk buried under his nails. Upstairs, he paused to peek through the crack of Jane’s door, then Lucy’s. Their bodies made soft shapes in the weak glow of night-lights—one owl, one mermaid—the sound of their breathing labored in the way only sleeping children’s breath can be. He turned, heading down the hall toward his own room, the wood floor cold and smooth under his bare feet. Inside, Sarah lay still on her side of the bed.

  He undressed in the dark and slipped in under the covers. Pale moonlight threaded through a gap in the curtains, illuminating the outline of her back, the rise and fall of her shoulders. Uninvited, a memory surfaced: an afternoon outside, in the park by their old apartment. It’d been summer; they’d been drinking. Grass prickled and crushed under the weight of his thighs, his back. He remembered watching her hair sway in the light, how the sun sifted through that blond curtain. There’d been nothing more he’d wanted then, but to lie in the heat, half-drunk, with her at his side. He remembered how that’d felt.

  Then he thought of the portraits, Rose’s face sketched over and over. The urgency with which he wanted to see her again. The way he’d started singing out loud to teenage pop songs on the radio.

  Had it been like this for you, Sarah? He wanted to ask her. Or is this worse?

  Sarah turned to lie on her back.

  William traced the outline of her face in the imperfect darkness. Her strong jawline, curved upper lip—features she’d gifted their children. The profile of the woman he’d fallen in love with, once, that afternoon outside when they’d both been drinking. Her blond hair swaying in the light. He moved his hand beneath the sheet, up onto her hip, recalled feeling the gradual shift of her body making space for the bones of their children. Still asleep, she twisted away at his touch, shifting his hand aside.

  William turned to face the darkness.

  10

  HE WAS IN THE CLEARING. Again.

  The long march toward it, snow crust breaking open beneath his feet. He walked out in front, ahead of his father. Before them, a copse of trees. A shadow twitched behind the boughs. His knees burned frigid in the snow. His blood swept wide around the expanse of his station, flecks and swaths and founts. So very red against the very white. So very elegant in its arcs, in the measured time it took to mark the snow after every leaden-handed hit.

  “You are nothing.” His father’s voice, suspended in the icy air. “You are nothing.”

  The shadow hopped. It was a crow, watching him. Tilting and retilting its head with cruel patience. Double-checking each angle with a liquid stare.

  Waiting.

  Corvino opened his eyes and lay still as the dream receded like fog and his clenched fists released. He turned to face the window. A sparrow perched on the sill, feathers twitching in a mild breeze, claws gripping the stone. Corvino eased himself to standing, then lunged at it. With a jolt and chirp, the creature winged away, became a dun blot receding in an otherwise empty sky. Corvino rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands; his head throbbed, as if he’d been struck. Using his fingertips, he traced small circles at his temples.

  The clearing had been his father’s favorite place for punishment. Any excuse had been enough. A chore completed too slowly, a spilled mug of milk, a forgotten line of prayer and Corvino would hear that sound he dreaded most: the scrape of his father’s chair as he pushed back from the table, turning to the wall where the whip hung waiting. He could still see the instrument, curving limply, waiting to take on vicious life. Its knotted cords and leather-bound handle, caked over with Corvino’s own blood, dried black. If he wanted, he could reach a hand behind him even now, feel the uneven map of his skin. His father’s enduring signature.

  Were the dreams coming because he was approaching the same age his father had been when he fled? Corvino had often imagined that scene: the man arising to discover his only son gone, along with all the silver. Leaving him alone and wretched, with his rages and whip, the rest of the family reduced to markers in the weeds out back. Before he left, Corvino had wanted to confront those women at church who’d doted on his father, to tear his robes away and force them to look at what their soft-spoken widower did to his son. To behold what sort of Christian he truly was.

  Corvino knew it was the Devil, not the Lord, that had worked through his father—just as surely as he knew his real Father, his shepherd and redeem
er, would always provide for him. It had been deep in prayer that Corvino had been shown the gift of his abuses. There was a lesson hiding in the pain of the clearing: that every man has a shadow self, every man has secrets. After poaching and thieving from Mantua to Rome, Corvino began to put his gift to use. He’d learned which bribes worked best on servants, how to follow someone without being noticed, what price a nobleman might pay to keep his reputation intact. Soon, he was wearing the velvets and furs he’d only dreamt of as a boy. And why shouldn’t he? The scriptures gave fair warning: For nothing is hidden that will not be disclosed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light. The sins of others were not his doing, nor his fault; why shouldn’t he benefit from them? He was devout, he was clever, and handsome. Yet still society kept him from any real power, simply because his blood lacked the proper lineage, his name lacked any title. He deserved prestige as much as—no, more than—the plodding, dim-witted noblemen who hosted him for dinners. They wouldn’t have survived a week alone in Mantua without recourse, yet he had thrived. All without ever missing Mass.

  His one true Father would see to it that he was rewarded. Of this Corvino was certain.

  Now he opened the shutters wider to look out over the city as morning rose in shades of blush and coral. In the distance lay the harbor, where the masts of Bressan’s new boats cleanly intersected the horizon. Corvino leaned toward them, taking in a great lungful of sea air. This was the opportunity he’d been waiting for, the chance to carve a new destiny for himself. Soon, he’d be pacing one of those decks, as the fleet thrust east. He could picture it now: the stinging wind, ocean spray misting his face while the sturdy hull cut through waves. He would make his name at sea—he knew it, he could taste it, sharp as salt on the tongue. If only Venier would confide in him more he could even help strategize the attack.