Twenty-one

GARRETT TOOK ANNA TO Italy after the first New York exhibition.

Other than England, she had never been abroad before, and was loath to leave Rachel. But James wanted to introduce her to Italy; it was important to her, he said. “You can’t live in one place all your life, and bring anything fresh to your work,” he told her.

She had her doubts. “Other artists do it all the time,” she’d said. “A place becomes their trademark.”

“If you don’t want to travel with me, that’s fine,” he’d replied.

They arrived in the spring, to a cold Milan. The city looked pale to her, the buildings faceless. They stayed in a hotel whose restaurant James favored and, on the first night, James insisted that they eat there.

“Are we going out?” she asked. It was still only nine when they had finished eating.

“Aren’t you tired?” he asked.

“Not really.”

“We have a meeting in the morning,” he told her. “I would rather rest.”

She went up to the room with him, and sat on the edge of the bed, watching him in the bathroom. He undressed and showered. On the TV above her head, fastened to the wall of the otherwise opulent bedroom, a satellite news station rotated endlessly, like Groundhog Day, in the corner of the room.

“How many times have you been here?” she asked, when he was combing his wet hair. “In Milan?”

“Eight, nine,” he said.

She looked at his spare, tall body. His slim frame showed the first, faint signs of blurring slackness in the muscles of the arm above the elbow, and in the small of his back, and on the skin just below his shoulder blades. He was twelve years older than she was. Out of his clothes he looked, if anything, more contained, almost ascetic. His skin tone was unusual: blemish free, and uniformly the color of very pale coffee. He had long fingers, long joints, long calves, like a runner. He ought to be, she thought, a very attractive man. But he was, even with the first hints of age, still so curiously flawless.

He had caught her glance through the mirror, and stopped what he was doing.

She stood up. “I’m going out for a while,” she said.

“Now?” he asked. “Alone?”

“Yes.”

He frowned. “I’ll get dressed,” he told her.

“No,” she said. “It’s all right. I’ll only be a few minutes.”

“You can’t go out on your own,” he protested.

But she had already closed the door, softly, behind her.

She walked down the nearest street on a dark pavement thronged with crowds. It was January, and the air was icy sharp, almost taking her breath away. The orange trolleybuses and the ubiquitous, swarming motorcycles swept past. She followed the direction of the crowd and suddenly found herself in a widening space. Under the Palazzo Marino and the statue of da Vinci, tourists were standing, drifting, gazing. She turned to the right and saw La Scala and, as the lights changed, she was propelled forward with the stream of pedestrians, crossing in front of the opera house toward the center of the square. She let herself go with it. She liked the crowds, the noise, the seemingly self-assured, sociable Italians, and the men who looked directly at her with interest and approval, as they looked, she noticed, at every woman who passed.

She walked past the front of the town hall and into the Galleria Vittorio, over the mosaic floors, past the seductively lit windows, and under the great glass roof, lit blue against the night sky. In the arcade, diners were still sitting at café tables, their cups of espresso, cell phones, and packs of cigarettes laid out before them like icons. She walked down the central aisle, and suddenly saw before her the next square, the front face of the cathedral, looking like a spun sugar wedding cake. Far above the Duomo, the gilded figure of La Madonnina, with her halo of stars, looked up to heaven, away from the world.

When Anna got back to the hotel, James was still awake. With his dressing gown wrapped around him, he was sitting on the bed. He looked up from his book as she came in.

“I’ve seen the Duomo,” she told him.

“Good,” he remarked, noting his page and putting down the novel.

“Could we go back tomorrow?” she asked. “It must be wonderful inside.”

He smiled at her. “It has three thousand five hundred statues, the Trivulzio Candelabrum, five aisles, and a door relief by Ludovico Pogliaghi,” he said.

“But I would like to see inside,” she told him. She had a picture in her head that they might walk down the Galleria, in front of the gleaming, gold-accented shop fronts with their high arches, and stop at one of the coffee shops, and be like the Italians, and watch the world go by.

He walked up to her, took off her coat, and kissed her.

“I want to be a tourist,” she said. “I want to look.”

“But I’ve already told you everything a tourist needs to know,” he said.

They were up at eight the next morning, but not for the Duomo, or to sit at café tables. James had ordered a car that took them to the northwest of the city near the Castello Sforzesco. But they were not to see this fifteenth-century palace, either, and the gardens of Parco Sempione and the Arco della Pace passed them by through the car’s windows, a haze of stone and statues and a lake glimpsed through the winter trees. They drew up outside a peeling façade, a five-story apartment building.

“Where are we?” she asked. “What have we come for?”

He handed her out of the car with his usual delicacy. “This is something you will never quite see again,” he told her. “This is not for tourists.”

They rang the bell, and were admitted to an inner courtyard. High windows were masked by drapes; verdigris coated the sad little fountain in the center. As they mounted the inner stairs, there was a funereal air to the black marble steps and gold handrail, inlaid with a black pattern.

A man was waiting for them at the top. Anna glanced at him with a smile. He nodded at James, and ignored her. He walked ahead of them, opening high brass doors to a dark hallway.

Anna blinked as she accustomed herself to the light. They were standing in a drawing room of classical proportions: high ceiling with ornate plasterwork, a vast marble fireplace, a stone floor with one large rectangular rug in shades of ochre and blue. In the center of the room, with her back to the light, sat an elderly woman, who must have been at least eighty. She was overweight, with a patrician face—the kind of face that Anna had seen about her many times in the last twenty-four hours: once beautiful, with full lips and hooded eyes. She wore an air of frigidity, as if the world, and her disapproval of it, were a burden.

She held out her hand, and James lowered his lips to it, only barely brushing her skin.

“James,” the woman murmured.

He stepped back, and held out his hand to Anna. “I’ve brought someone to see you, Countess,” he said. “This is Anna Russell.”

“Hi,” Anna said.

The countess paused, then nodded. “Your assistant?” she asked James.

“My friend,” he said. “An artist.”

She raised her eyebrows. Closer to the woman now, Anna could smell the unmistakable, heavy cloud of scent that she wore. Expensive and old-fashioned, it drenched the air.

“If you are an artist,” the countess murmured, “you will appreciate what I have to show you.”

She got up, and took James’s arm. Anna followed behind them, feeling rather like the lowly assistant that the woman had taken her for.

They passed into a long, narrow corridor. It had no furniture in it, and only one window, as thin as an arrow slit. The only light that it afforded fell on the painting on the wall directly in front of it.

The woman dropped James’s arm, and motioned him forward to inspect the painting. He did so, approaching it slowly. He stood before it, considering it for some time. Then he took out the kind of lens favored by jewelers, and looked very closely at the canvas from several different directions.

The countess turned to Anna. “You paint?” she asked.

“Yes,” Anna said.

She felt herself under even closer scrutiny than James was giving the picture. The countess’s gaze had lingered first on her shoes, then on her hands, and, finally, on her face, from which she did not now take her attention.

“What kind of paintings?” the woman asked.

“Abstract. Seascape. Watercolor. Acrylics.”

The woman nodded. “So many things,” she said. Anna couldn’t tell if this were sarcasm or not. “And for long?”

“All my life,” Anna said.

“You are a protégée of James,” the countess observed. It was exactly that: an observation, a statement, and not a question. Anna was suddenly certain that she was not the first protégée that James had brought to Italy.

James came back to them. “Very fine,” he said. “My compliments.”

Anna caught his glance: his color was heightened. He stared at Anna with intensity, an almost sexual look.

“You recognize?” the countess asked Anna.

“I’m sorry?” Anna asked.

“You recognize the painting, naturally.”

Anna looked along the corridor in confusion. That it was an eighteenth- or early-nineteenth-century picture was obvious. But the artist was beyond her.

“Do you like it?” the countess persisted.

She couldn’t in all honesty say that she did. It was a religious subject, a Nativity scene in a very mannered style. What drew her eye were the infinitely badly drawn angels that festooned each corner of the canvas. “It’s very striking,” Anna at last said.

There was a moment of complete silence.

“It is a masterpiece,” the countess told her.

They sat together in the salon for twenty minutes, and were served tiny cups of the bitter espresso that Anna had so craved the evening before. As Anna sat in her chair, however, it was James, and James alone, who was given the tour of the room. The countess’s voice murmured in lilting tones over her treasures as she pointed them out. “In the style of Ramanino…rumored to be from Grotte di Catullo…Reni…from Villa Sirmione…” At each introduction, James, following a half-pace behind, bowed his head in appreciation. You’re like a courtier, Anna thought.

Eventually, they rejoined her.

“Are you fond of antiquities?” the countess asked.

“I do like old things.”

Somehow it came out as something of an insult. Not to the woman, but to the house. It sounded like condemnation by faint praise, which had not been Anna’s intention. She blushed.

The countess rang a handbell, and the manservant who had first shown them into the room came again to the door.

Once they got to the street, Anna took a deep breath. “Oh, my,” she said, fanning her face with her gloved hand. “The smell!”

James looked at her as they waited for the car. “What smell?” he asked.

“The perfume, the damp.”

“It didn’t seem damp to me.”

“You could see it on the walls!” Anna said. “How on earth does she live there?”

“She lives there because her family has lived there for six generations,” he told her.

Once in the car again, she glanced at him. “You’re angry with me,” she said.

“Not at all.”

“You’re angry, but I don’t understand why.”

“I’m disappointed at losing the purchase,” he said. Then he picked up her hand and pressed it to his lips. He was looking at her with that same sensual, disturbing gaze he had given her in front of the painting.

“But I thought you were interested in the picture,” Anna said, her eyes running from his face to their hands, and back again.

“I am. But she won’t sell it to me now.”

“Why not?”

He said nothing. He smiled, and dropped her hand, and sat watching the streets go by, the fingers of one hand tapping his knee.

“Something to do with me,” Anna said.

“She’s an eccentric woman,” he murmured. “She can be difficult.”

“You think you’ve lost the picture because of me?”

“Don’t worry about it.” He smiled again, almost secretly, to himself. “I won’t.”

She snorted. “I’m not worried,” she said. “I’m outraged.”

He looked at her. “Why?” he asked. “I’m the one who lost the painting. There was a considerable profit in it.”

“Listen to you,” she said. She shook her head. “I’m not outraged you’ve lost the sale. I’m outraged that you think it’s my fault. Or worse still, you know that it’s my fault, and accept it.”

“I don’t accept it,” he said. “I already told you she is a difficult woman.”

“Just because I didn’t know the artist,” Anna said.

“It wasn’t that.”

The car came to a halt in the traffic. She glimpsed a group of women going by—the wonderfully supercilious-looking, beautiful, sensual, Italian women.

“Well, I wish you’d told me I needed a degree in fine arts to come with you on this trip,” Anna remarked.

“It wasn’t that,” he repeated.

“What then? What?”

He shrugged. “One does not simply say ‘Hi’ to a countess,” he murmured.

For a second, she stared at him.

Then, she began to laugh.

He turned to her in the car, put his arms around her, and, to her discomfort, pressed his mouth to hers. It was the first time she had seen him even come close to losing control of himself. For a moment, he seemed possessed by passion. His breath was hot; his hands moved on her. Then, just as suddenly, he drew back. She stared at him, strangely threatened by his look. Threatened at an instinctive, visceral level.

“You are my own Madonna,” he told her.

A week later, they went to Rome.

It was not a city he enjoyed as much, he told her. The Romans were too relaxed, he said; they wore their heritage badly. He said this as they were walking from their hotel one night. She looked in his face to see if he were joking, but he was not.

“I expect if you pointed it out to them,” she said, “they would line all the monuments up in an orderly display for you.”

She warmed to the Romans more than the Milanese. She liked the restaurant where they had lunch, on the edge of a street, under a yellow awning. The cars and motorcycles edged close to their table, and the wall bore a green tattoo of ancient advertisements; tables were crammed up against each other. She liked the pushing and shoving, the expressiveness of people, their gesturing hands. She drew a neighboring family on her paper napkin: the wriggling child in a blue-and-white-striped dress, the mother talking to the waiter, two faces almost intimate above the red paper menu.

“We’ll buy you some clothes,” James said.

She looked up from her drawing, distracted. “Sorry?”

He was peeling notes from his wallet to pay the bill. “Clothes.”

She put down the pencil. “I’ve got clothes.”

“Do you see anyone in jeans?” he asked.

She bridled. “Yes, I see plenty of people in jeans.”

“Teenagers,” he said.

“Jesus Christ, James,” she said, affronted. “I live in jeans at home.”

He smiled at her. He was getting up. She stared at him angrily. He took her arm and persuaded her to her feet. “I had no idea I was such an embarrassment to you,” she said.

He started to laugh. “Don’t you know how I worship you?” he asked, as he pulled up the collar of her coat.

He looked at her now, all this time later.

Sunlight had been streaming into the ICU until the blinds had been drawn. Now the faint thin lines of light ran down the length of Anna’s body. She seemed much smaller now, much thinner than the woman who had come with him to Italy. More childlike even than the woman who had been in Paris, and cried so pitifully and so much.

His face fell in an unconscious grimace of failure. A failure to secure the whole Anna, heart and soul.

A movement distracted him; he concentrated on her fingers. As he watched, he saw them flex. Once, twice.

The seizure began slowly, as slowly and concentratedly as the first steps in a dance. She might have been turning her hand back on the wrist to test its slenderness; then the tremor passed up the arm, and, at the same time, her back arched. With their own peculiar staccato music, the machines at her side, wired to her system, began to accompany her.

He listened to their alarms for a moment, and then got to his feet, and walked to the door. Here, the two nurses who had run along the corridor and into the room glanced at his face as they rushed past.

“It’s no good,” he murmured to himself. “It’s no good.”