by Cynthia Hand
“I would love to see your paintings sometime,” I said right back at him.
He nodded. “After lunch, then,” he said, as if that settled it. “We’ll go back to my flat.”
His flat. I gulped down a glass of wine.
Once we were there, enclosed by the walls of his apartment, I was so nervous that I kept bumping into things. His flat was just as he was: tasteful and elegant but not old-fashioned, a mix of modern furniture and well-kept antiques. The art studio was at the back. He led me inside and turned on the lights. I wandered from painting to painting, from cityscapes of Rome to close-ups of flowers, to canvases crowded with people or stunning singular portraits. The subjects of his paintings were all different, but there was something similar about them, a unifying factor that marked them as created by the same hand. It had to do with the use of light and how he used it to show the life of the thing he painted, like there was something bright pushing out from inside a child’s body or a flower’s petals or from some particular archway of an ancient building, radiating outward, something that transcended the physical. He cleared his throat like he was embarrassed, exposed through his work.
“So. You’ve seen my paintings,” he said. “Now it’s your turn.”
From somewhere he produced a violin, a bow, then led me out to the living room, where he sat down on the sofa, his elbows on his knees, and waited for me to play. It was an old, gorgeous violin, so much nicer than the one I had at home. I tucked it under my chin gently, closed my eyes, and began to play a song I knew by heart from Bach’s Chaconne, a difficult piece but one that never failed to sweep me away. The music swelled around us, filling the room, and I poured all my longing into it, my desires, like I was telling my life story through the notes as they winnowed up and around me. Like I was telling Phen the things I didn’t dare to say out loud.
When I finished and opened my eyes again, Phen had tears on his cheeks. So did I.
“Beautiful,” he murmured, and I knew that he was talking about more than the song. He was gazing at me like I was a butterfly trapped in his net, like he was tempted to pin me up behind glass even though he knew he should let me fly away.
I swallowed. My heart was dancing, my head swimming, my body alive with sensation.
Finally. So this is what it feels like, I thought, to be in love.
I spent a great deal of time the following year thinking up ways to seduce Phen. I didn’t know how just yet, since I didn’t know anything about how one goes about seducing anybody, at that point. But I would learn. I would figure it out. I didn’t care if it was crazy. I was going to live my life without holding anything back, I told myself. I was going to taste those perfectly sculpted lips of his. I was going to feel his arms around me.
I was going to be his, and he was going to be mine.
I threw myself into the research of how one might tempt an angel, with the same kind of passion I used for all my other research. It was the painting, I thought. That was my way in. He liked beautiful things. I would become a beautiful thing. I would become a muse.
He emailed me a few days before I flew to Rome for the second summer. I’d given him a piece of paper with my contact information on it, but he hadn’t been in touch until now: this brief message from [email protected], no kidding.
It said, I am looking forward to seeing you.
I took that as a good sign.
For the first couple weeks back in Rome we fell into the same routine from the year before. Tuesdays and Fridays. We walked. We talked, although mostly it was Phen who did the talking. I was suddenly, inexplicably, tongue-tied around him. But he didn’t bring me to his flat again. He took me to museums and cafés and churches, always bringing me home at sunset. “See you next time,” he’d say. Next time.
“See you,” I’d answer. Plotting, plotting, how next time I would make my big move.
Then one day I simply worked up the guts and showed up at his flat. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I knocked. He answered, wearing a paint-splatted white T-shirt and jeans with holes in the knees, wiping his hands on a cloth. My head spun, seeing him like that, in the middle of his process. My heart felt like it would burst. I love you, I thought immediately, and it was embarrassing, the way I’d fallen so hard and he didn’t have a clue.
He looked genuinely surprised to see me.
“Hello,” he said in Angelic, our private joke.
Here goes nothing, I thought.
“I want you to paint me,” I said, jumping right to the chase. “Will you paint me, Phen?”
His eyebrows rumpled at my request.
“Please?” I asked, my voice wavering. I’d been planning this for months, but at that moment I was scared.
He nodded and stepped back to let me come into his apartment. He dragged his green sofa into his studio and told me to lay down on it. I had a flash of Leonardo DiCaprio painting Kate Winslet aboard the Titanic, the way she held up the diamond and said something like, “I want you to paint me in this. In only this.”
He went into the kitchen to clean out his brushes and prepare a new set, and I fumbled around getting into a slinky black nightie I’d brought for the occasion. It was too much, I knew immediately after I’d put it on. This whole thing was a huge mistake. He’d think it was lewd.
Too late. He came back into the room and stopped short when he saw me. I fought the urge to pull down the nightie, which ended at the tops of my thighs. Too short. Indecent. Improper. Crass. I’d screwed up. I’d messed up any chance I would have ever had with him.
I bit my lip.
“Sorry,” I said.
His eyes raked down my body almost critically for a few seconds before he glanced down at the floor. I braced myself to hear him tell me to put my clothes back on. He looked at his hands, where the backs of his fingers were smudged with red paint. Then he nodded.
“Take it off,” he murmured.
My throat closed.
“What, now?” I choked out.
“Now,” he answered with the hint of a smile, not looking up. He turned and picked up a crocheted afghan that was draped over the back of a chair in the corner. “Cover yourself with this,” he instructed, handing it to me without looking. When I’d done as he asked he set about pulling the fabric across me how he wanted it, revealing parts of me and hiding others. When he was finished he went to the window and opened the shades. The room flooded with light. He set a new canvas on an easel, spent a moment angling it just so, and then picked up a single black charcoal pencil and started to sketch me.
I held as still as I could. It was quiet. All I could hear was the rough scrape of his marks against the canvas. I almost didn’t dare to breathe, for fear of spoiling the moment.
Suddenly he laughed.
“Relax, Angela,” he said. “Talk to me. Tell me more about your life this year. I’ve been thinking of you all these long months.”
I sighed and spilled. That’s when I told him about Clara, how she’d stumbled around Jackson that past winter with what might as well have been a neon sign over her head that read ANGEL-BLOOD in flashing letters. I talked about how Clara was obsessed with Christian Prescott because she thought he was her purpose.
“Ah,” he said. “Purpose. I haven’t heard that word in a long time.”
I told him about the man in the gray suit.
“How mysterious,” he said with a smile. “Well, we’ll see how that goes, won’t we?”
He didn’t say anything else about purpose, and I didn’t press him. I was too busy feeling the strokes his hand made on his canvas like real touches on my skin. I stayed like that for an hour, maybe more, until suddenly he stopped working. He put his pencil down.
“Enough for today,” he said. “We’ll pick up tomorrow. I’m hungry.”
He stepped past me into the living room, leaving me to get dressed alone. My disappointment was a lump in my throat. He didn’t see me as anything but another subject. A way to pass the time. But then, he wanted me to come back tomorrow. I
hadn’t completely blown it.
I posed for him every day that week. He never let me see his progress, but when it was all done he announced that I should come to dinner at his place, and we’d celebrate my return to Italy, and he’d show me the painting. I stood next to him, fully clothed this time, and he pulled the cloth he’d been using to cover the canvas aside, and I sucked in my breath.
It was me—not just my body, my nose and my blue-black hair and my legs stretched out against the soft, green velvet of the sofa, but what was inside: the light in me almost seeming to pulse from the canvas, gleaming along my bare shoulder, shining in my eyes.
A woman, not a girl.
A shining woman.
He saw me.
“It may be the best piece I’ve ever done.” He turned to gaze at me with a warmth that spread all through me. “You are a wonder, Angela.”
Oh geez, I thought dizzily. I haven’t even kissed him yet, and I feel like my sky is full of fireworks. Lightning strikes. Magic.
“Kiss me,” I whispered in Italian.
Something in his eyes flashed, like pain and triumph at once. “Angela . . .”
“Kiss me,” I said again, and put my arms around him. I looked up into his face, his dark-with-secrets eyes, and I smiled. “Ti voglio baciare,” I said. I want to kiss you.
He lowered his lips to mine.
I was undone.
I was reborn.
This was actually happening. I was kissing him, my fingers in his hair, and it was like setting a match to gasoline. I couldn’t get close enough.
He pulled away, his breathing ragged. “Wait. I can’t do this, as much as I’d like to. As beautiful as you are. We can’t.”
“Why?” I wanted to know, my knees still quaking from the force of the kiss. “I’m not asking you to go steady or anything. I want you to be the first, is all.”
His eyes flashed up to mine at the word first. “Why?” he asked hoarsely. “Why would you possibly want me?”
“Have you taken a good look at yourself in the mirror lately?” I asked, and then, maybe because I didn’t want to come off as totally shallow, I added, “You’re the only person who really understands me, Phen. That’s why I want it to be you.”
And because I love you. I didn’t say out loud, but I wondered if he could see it on my face.
“Besides, I want to experience it with someone who really knows what they’re doing,” I said playfully, thinking of that lady in 1636.
He gave a small, disbelieving laugh. “Oh, I don’t know what I’m doing.” His dark eyes were dark with something like desire.
“I know you want me,” I said. I kissed him again. Slowly. Showing him it was all right.
He groaned, then pulled away again. “This isn’t supposed to happen this way. I was supposed to teach you.”
“So teach me.”
“I’m not good for you,” he said. “I’m not . . . good.”
“You’re not bad,” I protested. “You’re ambivalent, right?” Up to then I’d liked the idea of his ambivalence. If he’d been a White Wing, there’s no way I ever would have tried this. He would have been too good for me. Untouchable. But it was perfect like this. He was perfect.
I leaned in again, but he took me by the shoulders and pushed me away from him. Hard. I stumbled back.
“No,” he said. “Angela, please try to understand. I’m sorry if I led you to think . . .”
Rejection flared through me. Sudden tears sprang to my eyes. “You led me to think what? That you could be interested in someone like me?”
He sighed. “You are magnificent, strong-willed, smart. You’re amazing. Any mortal boy would be lucky to have you.”
“I don’t want a mortal boy,” I said, my voice silly and cracking and vulnerable. “I want you. It can be casual. I don’t care.”
He closed his eyes for a minute, his jaw tightening. Then he dropped his head, sighed again, and said, “I can’t be with you, Angela.”
“Why not?”
“You’re a child,” he said.
I stepped back like he’d slapped me. “I’m a child.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You . . .” I was shaking, I was so hurt and mad and utterly crushed. I couldn’t catch my breath. “Well, you’re a tease, then. Play me something on your violin, Angela. Take it off, Angela. You . . . you were toying with me.”
He looked up. Anger flared in his eyes. “No. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t need this.”
“Great. Fine. I don’t need you either. You . . . asshat,” I blurted out, and then I charged for the door. I couldn’t stand to be in his presence for another second. I ran. Out of his flat. Down the cobblestone streets, all the way back to my grandmother’s, where I flung myself down on my bed and cried harder than I’d ever cried before.
How stupid of me, I thought later, when I could form coherent thoughts again. How adolescent. I touched my lips where the memory of his kiss still lingered. How foolish. I should go back, apologize.
But when I did, he was gone.
CLARA
“So who’s the dead guy?” Angela asks.
We’re in the Sistine Chapel with Phen. There is so much here, so many different frescoes and murals and tapestries, that I don’t know where to look. It’s giving me a headache, to be honest.
“That’s Moses,” answers Phen. “It’s called The Discussion Over the Body of Moses.”
“Looks like a pretty heated discussion,” Angela says. “Who’s the angel with the spear?”
“Michael.”
I can’t help myself. I turn and look, and yep, there’s my dear old dad, wearing golden armor and some kind of feathered helmet, threatening to poke the devil. He even sort of resembles my dad, something in his face that reminds me of Jeffrey. I swallow. I haven’t seen either of them, Dad or Jeffrey, since the week of Mom’s funeral.
“So Michael’s kind of a badass,” Angela says, the side of her mouth hitching up in a half-suppressed smile. She meets my eyes, practically winks at me.
Phen scoffs. “He thinks so. He’s called The Smiter, after all.”
I quickly look away, struggling to keep my face neutral. I’m so going to strangle her later.
“And who’s the angel in green?” she asks.
Phen squints up at the fresco. “Hard to say. Uriel, probably.”
“Why, because Uriel is fond of the color green?”
He scoffs again. “Because Uriel is Michael’s bosom friend.”
Okay, bad idea or not, I have to admit this is interesting. We’ve been hanging out with Phen for only a couple of hours and already I’ve learned so much stuff I didn’t know before. Like my dad has a best friend. Uriel.
“So the left side is the life of Moses, and the right side is the life of Jesus, and the ceiling is creation,” Angela’s saying as I wander off a few steps. I crane my neck to see the famous depiction of God creating Adam on the ceiling. It’s always struck me as ironic, how the figure of God is reaching, his body almost fully extended in his effort to touch Adam, and there’s Adam all blasé about it, like he can’t be bothered to even lift his hand that far.
“What about this?” I hear Angela whisper as she and Phen make their way over to look at the back wall, Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment: a tangle of naked writhing bodies, some of them being lifted up toward heaven, some being dragged down.
“What about it?” Phen says after a long moment.
“Is this how it’s going to be?” she asks. “We’re all going to be sorted? In the end?”
I want to hear this. I move closer, hold my breath so I can listen over the shuffle of feet and quiet chatter of the tourists around us. For a minute Phen looks like he’s going to say something serious, impart some crucial piece of knowledge about the universe, life and death, heaven and hell, eternal rewards and everlasting punishment. Then he smiles.
“If I told you it’d spoil the surprise,” he says.
She whacks him in the arm. “Fine.
Don’t tell me.”
“Oh, I won’t.”
“You’re a jerk, you know that?” she says, but she’s laughing.
Phen wants to climb to the top of the dome at St. Peter’s. Good thing I’m wearing decent shoes, is all I’m saying. It takes us a while to get there. First we have to take an elevator and then climb something like three hundred and twenty-three steps in this claustrophobic, shoulder-wide spiral staircase. But then we’re outside, and it’s like standing on top of the world, Rome stretched out beneath our feet all ablaze in the setting sun.
It takes my breath away. Well, that, and I just climbed all those stairs.
“This is amazing,” breathes Angela.
“Yes,” Phen says, and I guess he should know amazing when he sees it. “It is.”
I stand at the rail and take a few pictures of the view, but I realize there’s no way that my camera will be able to capture how beautiful it is. Then I turn and impulsively snap a picture of Phen and Angela. I know the second I see it flash across my screen that I’ve taken a gorgeous photo of them, standing close together but not touching, Phen not looking at the sunset but at Angela, openly admiring the way she’s bathed in golden light, strands of her long, dark hair blowing around her face as she gazes out with a rapt expression. In that instant I get the sense that this might not be a one-sided thing, their relationship. He might like her, too.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. It seems wrong to me, an eighteen-year-old in love with someone who’s older than dirt—literally—but who am I to judge? My mom married an angel too, after all.
Age is only a number, right?
I should go, I think, slip away and let them have this romantic moment together.
But then Angela says, “I have to pee. I’ll be right back.”
I stare at her, baffled. “You’re going to go all the way down to the bottom? I’ll come with you,” I offer.
“No. You stay,” she says, and I recognize the no-nonsense tone. This isn’t about her having to go to the bathroom. This is about her wanting me to be alone with Phen.
“Wait,” I say, but she’s already gone.
