by Jerry Cole
“Hey!” Christine said, nearly fumbling her cigarette to the ground. “We were, um… We were wondering when we’d get started today?”
“The model’s coming at nine,” Mario said, tapping his expensive shoes across the cobblestones to tower over her. According to her application, something he’d allowed his eyes to glance over months before, her mother was an acclaimed painter in her own right. Back in—where was it? Ohio? Missouri? One of those lackluster American places, surely, with a cesspool of wasted people with wasted talents. Perhaps Christine, with her ill-suited technique, would find a home with a plumber back there. Become a housewife. Daydream about her long-ago-year in Venice, Italy, where she’d learned she wasn’t up to snuff.
“I wondered if you could take a look at some of my sketches from last night,” Christine continued, her voice high-pitched, almost irritating. “I went for a long walk to the piazza, ate some gelato, just people-watched before diving in. There’s such a magic to this place. I can’t believe you grew up here.”
Mario focused his eyes, straining not to roll them back in his head. “Yes,” he tried. “It was a remarkable thing. Um. Where was it you grew up, Christine?”
“Chicago,” Christine said, batting her eyelashes. She whipped her brown hair behind her shoulders, highlighting the shadow of her collarbones. “It’s a really strange place to be from, since it’s just the middle of everything. It’s not the big brother, New York. It certainly doesn’t have the arrogance of Los Angeles…”
“I’ve never been to America,” Mario said, hearing his own brash arrogance bleed through. “Haven’t had a single care about it, to be honest.”
Christine’s eyes sparkled. It was clear this was precisely why she was here, to learn from a man with these full opinions, with this sheer distaste for all she came from. At nineteen, of course, she hated it, too.
Everyone hated where they came from, Mario marveled.
“It’s just a simmering cesspool, isn’t it?” Mario continued, leaning his nose closer to hers. Her lips sparkled, clearly aching for his touch. “Just a large mass of land, where everyone’s copying everyone else. Everyone’s waiting to be the next internet star or the next gung-ho politician at one of those riots. That means the rest of the world, like Europe, can continue on, making good art. Actual, proper films. As far as I’m concerned, we should just forget that big old continent of yours even exists. Don’t you agree?”
Christine nodded, her nostrils flared. Mario had never seen anyone more in-tune with his words. It was like he was singing, and she hung to his every note. With a flash, he whipped his feet back toward the studio, feeling Christine’s eyes upon him. If she wanted to be some kind of protege, an alien life-force that followed him around for the next year—taking in all she could—perhaps there was hope for her, after all. At just nineteen, maybe she was easily sculpted to become someone worthwhile. True, her talent didn’t move mountains.
Lately, neither had Mario’s.
“Class,” Mario said, strutting toward the front of the studio space. The eight students, along with Christine—who shuffled in, gliding back toward her easel—gazed up at him, their cheeks ruddy and red from what he could only guess was one too many glasses of Italian wine the evening before. It was always the same, it seemed to him. Americans, British people, Australians, and Canadians: they all sped toward Venice, paint brushes pointed high, waiting to alter the course of their lives with a year at the art school—first, Mario’s father’s, now his. Nearly every night devolved into one of drunken debauchery along the canal. Just a bunch of rich assholes, with daddy’s checkbook burning back home.
“As you know, today, we’re having our first session with Monica, the model. She’ll be sitting for us in ten-minute installments, just to get our hands warmed up. Then, she’ll sit with us for first one, then another, hour-long pose. She’s an incredibly experienced model, and will give you a strong sense of line, to lend you better ability to contour and actually sculpt your portrait. I want you to really fall away from your personal thoughts, this morning. Really lean into the pencil. Draw. Expand the shading we were working on last week. Remember that yes, we have an entire year together to learn. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use each and every day to our advantage.”
Mario’s eyes flickered across Christine’s. He marveled at her wide-open face, her parted lips, the way she tilted her head as he spoke. He sensed that if he snapped his finger, said to do it, she’d march into the canal water just now and not come up for air till he gave the signal. It had been a fucking long time since someone had cared so much for the sound of his voice. Been a fucking long time since anyone had evoked even a single symbol of love for him.
He hadn’t allowed it. Of course, with Christine, he hadn’t asked for it.
He watched as his class slid their pencils across their papers, crafting small dots at the point of breasts and creating a small smudge at the model’s belly. The model, Monica, was a Spanish woman who used to sleep with Mario’s old best friend, from childhood. They’d met at a party years before, when she’d plopped her head into Mario’s lap, blinked up at him while rolling a cigarette. “You’re not like the other guys, are you?” she’d asked.
Mario made his way back toward his corner office, listening to the sizzle and clack of the classical music station, coming in from another island. He perched at the edge of his chair, his eyes flicking toward his own painting against the far wall. He’d slid a paintbrush along the edges of it several times, over the previous weeks, yet hadn’t even completed the nose, the forehead. It was all a chaos of yellows and oranges, without rhyme or reason. It reflected the chaos of his brain. “You’ll never be truly great again,” it seemed to echo back to him, over and over again. “You’ll never be what you thought you wanted to be.”
It seemed a long blink happened, and then, suddenly, it was lunch. The classmates ambled from the studio into the sunny Venice canal-side streets, whipping scarves around their necks. Christine hung back, her green eyes finding Mario’s through the window in the office door. The sunlight caught against her porcelain skin, creating a half-moon crater along the edge of her cheek. She was the very portrait of someone in love.
Suddenly, she bolted up from her chair and swept toward him. Her dress whizzed from her knees, creating a view of the soft white of her thighs. She swung open the door, her large eyes blinking at him. She felt like an explosion.
“Christine? What is it?” Mario asked, never one to give anything away. He wouldn’t dare show that she shocked him. He was a world-renowned artist, for God’s sake. He’d sold his paintings to rock star gods.
“I know I’m not my mother,” she stuttered.
Mario hadn’t thought that Christine would have such self-understanding. He shifted in his chair, allowing his chin to rise. Their gazes were steady, creating a line between them. “You’re not,” he stated.
“I don’t want to be her,” Christine said, her nostrils flared. “I don’t want to make art like hers. Yes, I know. It’s beautiful. It’s gotten, I don’t know, a zillion awards. Mario, my mother had a safe life. She got with my dad about a zillion years ago, and then kind of stopped pushing all boundaries, you know? She has the talent. The skill. She doesn’t have the…”
“Bravery,” Mario said. He bolted up from his chair, raising his left eyebrow high. He felt the wrinkles forming, becoming caverns across his forehead. “You think you have it?”
“I think I want to have it,” Christine whispered. She flashed her hands across her thighs, smacking the skirt. “I want to have it like you.”
God, how little she knew. Mario wanted to sweep his hands across those doll-like cheeks, grip the soft fat—still from childhood—and tell her to turn back. To tell her there was nothing waiting for her, there in that strange world of “want” and “desire.” Better to become a plumber’s wife.
“What does your dad think about all of this?” Mario asked. He knew nothing of the guy. Surely he was some business developer,
a Chicago-man with a fast-talking Chicago accent and no great appreciation for art. Mario had long heard of Christine’s mother, Amanda; had gazed at a painting she’d done of a Midwestern field for nearly an hour, his heart aching at the colors.
“We don’t really talk,” Christine said. “He’s even less brave than my mom, I think. I don’t know. He’s—"
“Why don’t you come back here tomorrow night?” Mario said. “After class. We can start on something outside of the curriculum. Something that could help you—see—where you want to take your art, a bit more.”
Christine’s perfect lips tweaked at their edges, drawing into a small smile. Outside, a boat purred past the studio, with its captain’s head bucking up from beneath the wooden body. To anyone else, it might have looked like mid-1800s, a different era entirely. That was the magic of Venice, Mario knew. Although he wasn’t quite sure if the magic worked on him any longer.
Perhaps, if he could push himself to help this girl, this Christine…
Perhaps if he could feel that burning passion within her, and find his own…
Perhaps he could be that artist again. Perhaps he could do what he’d come back to Venice to do: create.
“I’ll see you then,” Christine whispered, her voice raspy. She spun out of the room, her brown curls whipping around with her. “I will, and I’ll be ready.”
Left in the silence of his studio, Mario walked his stick-like legs back out toward the edge of the Venice canal, watching as another round of boats stirred across the water. The water was impossibly turquoise, contrasting the rusts and the browns and the ancient bricks. A long, long time ago, Mario had felt something when he looked at beauty. Now, perhaps, he had to leech that beauty from people like Christine, a girl still too pure to comprehend how tired you became, when you got older. A girl who still knew what it meant to be free.
Chapter Three
Max
Max’s black suitcase whizzed around the little airplane luggage cart, its handle upright and shining in the light of the Venice airport. Around him, Italians squabbled, their words raucous and angular. Everything smelled of coffee, of baking bread. After an eight hour flight from Chicago to Paris, and then an additional hour from Paris to Venice, his stomach ached with hunger and his brain was foggy, straining. It was like, each word he thought was very nearly correct, but just a few shades off. Like he was painting a portrait with a brush that was far too wide. Or trying to hammer a large nail with a very small hammer.
He was going to Venice to visit his daughter, Christine. Amanda was still prepping for her art exhibition, which would begin in the middle of October, and neither of them wanted the divorce news to come to Christine through other mouths than their own. Over the phone felt stunted, unpoetic for a family that prided itself on beautiful things. So, Max had volunteered to go; to face the daughter who’d spent much of the previous ten years hating him, and explain to her that he’d had to end his marriage with the mother she loved, because he’d never been able to face the truth of himself. Until now.
Jesus, it felt like a lot.
“You really need to go as soon as you can,” Amanda had written via text a few weeks before. “Because I’m already seeing someone. That sculptor from Old Town, we had for dinner that time? An absolute dreamboat, Max. I know you had the biggest crush on him, when he ate with us. You laughed at each of his jokes with that laugh you always use when you want to impress someone.”
She was already seeing someone. She “wasn’t done living yet.” Yet, all Max had done over the previous weeks was hole up at his penthouse apartment—newly picked for himself, his “bachelor pad”—and marvel at the weight of the passage of time. He’d picked up the phone several times to dial his daughter, to ask about the water in the canals and the techniques in which she was learning to paint, and if she really thought going into the arts was the best idea…
However, he held back, frightened; not for a second the brave, sparkling man many revered him to be. His architecture firm was in the midst of several jobs over in Europe, including ones in Berlin, Vienna, and Venice—the sinking beast herself—and he took this as an excuse to send his daughter an email, explain that he “just had” to dart over the ocean that week. He “might as well” see her.
“I wasn’t a good father to her,” Max typed out to Amanda, his thumbs fumbling over the screen. Then, he immediately deleted the words—not wanting to admit defeat to a woman already getting screwed by some sculptor he’d apparently lusted after five years before. Already, there had to be a divide between them. He had to stride forward. Develop his own truth.
That meant he couldn’t rely on the woman he’d leaned on for so long.
Max took a taxi, slapping a 50-euro bill into the driver’s outstretched palm and leaning his head back against the leather seat. Italy. He hadn’t been there since about five years before, when he’d opened a large hotel in Rome—one that was now frequented by several rock stars, billionaires, artists and actors the world-over. The party had been a luxurious affair. Amanda had donned a long green dress, making her eyes sparkle in a way that had pleased him, at least aesthetically. Christine had worn something a bit too short, a bit too low-cut for his taste. At fourteen, she’d begun to test the limits of womanhood, and he’d scorned her, declared that she needed to “look the part” of the daughter of Max Everett. She’d just sneered. Told him he’d never understand her. That already, her thoughts and mind were bigger than his could ever be.
His brain had itched with recognition, knowing she was exactly right.
It had been the gala opening for the hotel that had first put the burning desire in Christine to head to Italy after high school graduation. “Why would I waste my time at some shit college here in the states, when I can broaden my life out there?” she’d said, her arms crossed and her bottom lip bobbing. “Why the hell would I do that to myself?”
Amanda had shrugged, digging herself deeper beneath the sheets when they’d discussed it, maybe a year or so before. “If she wants to do it, she wants to do it. It’s not like we don’t have the money, Puppy,” she said to Max. The money had been a constant, something they rarely talked about—given the fact that it had all initially burned down from Max’s father. A different era, a different world. Dirty money from Detroit.
Christine had sent him a text, via some sort of messaging service she was “into” right now, with an address for a cafe she wanted to meet him at. It had been over two months since he’d last seen her: her legs up on the leather couch that had cost him far too much money, her teeth chewing at a piece of green gum. “Aren’t you going to get ready for dinner?” he’d asked her, poised to take them out for a final family thing—before she left them. Already, he and Amanda had begun sleeping in separate rooms. Conversations had occurred. But the word—divorce? That hadn’t been verbalized. Not yet.
The taxi dropped Max at the train station, where he fumbled with the machine to purchase a train ticket that would take him across the water. The tourist season had more or less finished, and he found himself on a train with mostly Italians, squabbling and eating and snapping their fingers. When he’d been a younger man, he’d thought he’d have this kind of life: a single man on a train through Italy, through France—surging with curiosity about his surroundings. The impending doom of meeting his daughter on the other side of this train ride made his brain fizz out.
“I’m sorry. We love you a lot,” were words that he assumed he should say, at some point. Words that so often were said by parents, when informing their children that they were divorcing. “It’s not you. It’s us. It’s really—it’s really just me,” he imagined.
When he stepped from the train, sun scattered out from the clouds and smeared over his face. He blinked into it, feeling sweat form at his hairline. Back in Chicago, autumn was falling, leaves shivering up into browns and reds. In Italy, it still felt oddly Mediterranean. At least, at this stage of the late morning.
Cafe degli Artisti was at the corner, just
south of a large church with a name like all the rest, St. Peter’s. Max sat at the edge of the line of chairs out front, ordering himself a glass of wine and waiting, his shoe atop his knee. He watched the people as they passed, their shoes clattering over the cobblestones. Christine was already ten minutes late, something he sensed she was doing on purpose. Of course she was. She would have never done this to her mother.
After fifteen minutes, Max attempted to call his daughter on the app. After it rang two times, she declined it and texted—“nearly there.” Great. He snapped his phone back on the table, his nostrils flared. His heart pumped wildly as he waited, but he pressed against his anxious thoughts. He couldn’t allow himself such raucous anger. Not right now. Not before he was going to explode her entire world.
As he waited, a tall, arrogant-looking man with wild curls bolted around the corner. His jean jacket flung back in the wind, and his dark eyes glittered with anger, or volatility, or something equally passionate. He looked just a bit younger than Max, but very much a man—he didn’t have the hopeful eyes of a more youthful person. He brought his fingers through his beard, scrubbing at the dark curls. Italian, through and through, Max thought. For a moment, he allowed his brain to fill with thoughts of making love to him. As if “making love” to a man, to an actual man, was anything he understood. Sure, he’d fucked. He’d fucked madly, like an uncaged rabbit. He’d never allowed his heart to go.
The man paused just in front of Max’s table, slipping a cigarette between his lips with an impossibly cool motion. He pulled at it, allowing smoke to swirl from his mouth just after. He turned his eyes toward Max, slipping them up and down his frame. Was he checking him out?
“I don’t suppose you have the time, do you?” he asked.
Max spun his wrist up, checking. Of course, he already knew; it was just after 12:20, a full twenty minutes after his daughter had been meant to meet him. He said the time to the man, grateful that his voice was sturdy, masculine. Strong.
