by Kwan, Kevin
At the same time, Lucie felt terribly annoyed with herself. Ever since she had been with George at Casa Malaparte, she hadn’t been able to stop obsessing over her actions. She was mortified that she had allowed herself to sob in his arms like that. She had never cried so dramatically like that in front of anyone, even her mother, and she wondered what he must think of her now.
After her fit of tears on the rooftop had subsided, she had pulled away from him quickly, embarrassed, and they had walked back to the hotel in silence, George maintaining a respectful few paces behind her. He always seemed to be behind her. When did he first see her on the piazzetta? How was he right there when she fainted? Had he been sitting behind her the whole time? He probably saved her from cracking her skull on the ground. Just like he had saved that man’s life when everyone else just stood there staring as they sucked on their Aperol spritzes. His quick heroism, tirelessly giving the man mouth-to-mouth, was what made the difference between him living or dying.
The palm grove opened onto a hilltop garden overgrown with wild barley and poppies. From this summit, the panoramic views of Positano and the sea beyond were breathtaking to behold, but Lucie found her eyes focusing on something else: the figure of a man standing on the precipice of a crumbling stone wall. Lucie cursed herself silently. Six villas, seven terraces, and thirty acres of grounds, but of course she would run into George. Lucie’s first instinct was to turn around and head back down to the lower terrace. The last thing she wanted to do was face him again, risk speaking again.
She was about to flee when George glanced around, his face inscrutably in half shadow. Against the deep blue sky and the intense white of the midafternoon sun, his skin glowed like alabaster. Inexplicably, she found herself walking slowly through the swaying barley toward him. He jumped down from the wall, and all of a sudden she imagined it was still yesterday, and she was still lying on the cold volcanic cobblestone of the piazzetta, George leaning over her, his mouth pressed against hers, blowing into her urgently, exhaling that warm breath of life.
Before she knew what was happening, she felt her lips pressing against his.
“Lucie! Lucie, are you there?”
Charlotte emerged through the palm grove just as Lucie jolted away from George.
“Lucie! I’ve been trying to find you for ages! Mordecai wants us down at the dock immediately. He says we have to go right now if we want to take the yacht back to Capri!”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Hotel Bertolucci
Capri, Italy
“When did you paint these?” Auden asked.
“Over the past two years. This one’s the most recent, it’s not really finished. I worked on it until I had to leave for Italy,” Lucie replied, pointing to an image of overlapping swaths of deep purple.
They were sitting in the salon of the hotel. Auden leaned forward from his armchair and stared at the iPad in astonishment. When Lucie had first told him about her paintings while they were swimming in the cove at Da Luigi, he thought he’d be seeing the pleasant abstract paintings to be expected of a nineteen-year-old—the sort of faux Franz Kline pieces one could find at Restoration Hardware that would go perfectly with your new curved velvet sofa and your fiddle-leaf fig plant.
Auden had led plenty of creativity workshops in his time and witnessed the artwork that came out of them from his artistically frustrated clients; most of it ranged from amateurishly angsty to downright awful. He would never have called himself an art expert, but the work flashing before his eyes seemed precociously accomplished. In looking at the canvases soaked in restrained monochromatic al nero di seppia tones, brushstrokes infused with a Dionysian physicality, he sensed an unresolved Lacanian tension that juxtaposed the lyrical gestures of early Helen Frankenthaler, the bold symbology of post-Los Angeles Judy Chicago, and the visceral fury of pre-Madonna Basquiat.fn1
“Lucie, I’m absolutely floored by this work. I’m so impressed.”
“Really?” Lucie looked up at him blankly.
“You’ve only been painting for a year?”
“No, I’ve been doing art since I was very young, and I took art classes all through high school.”
“Your work is … dare I say … sui generis. It’s original, sophisticated, and fresh, and more importantly, I feel that you are channeling your soul into these paintings. I can’t wait to see the real canvases. Why, I’d love to buy one of your works and hang it at the new studio in East Hampton!”
Lucie’s eyes widened. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I never kid about stuff like this. You already know what I think—you should be in art school and not wasting time studying semiotics or whatever at Brown. You have a true gift, and I think you could really be at the forefront of a new generation of artists. Think about it.”
“Thank you. I will.” Lucie nodded politely, not wanting to challenge him. She didn’t want to prolong this little vernissage any longer; she just wanted to get back to her room.
As Lucie strode across the lobby toward the elevator, Auden stared after her, even more intrigued than before. Seeing these paintings was like witnessing the work of a girl possessed. The girl who had just been seated before him with the perfect posture and her hair in a tight ponytail, so composed as she swiped through her artwork, did not for one second resemble someone who would be able to create those canvases. Where was the real Lucie Churchill hiding? Or better yet, why?
Auden could not have known that even before Lucie had boarded the Murphys’ super yacht, cruised back to Capri while being held hostage to another design tour by Mordecai, crammed into a taxi with the Ortiz sisters, waded through the wall of tourists on the walk back to the hotel, and placidly sat there presenting her artwork, pretending to listen politely, her mind was somewhere else entirely, and it was playing this over and over on a constant loop:
Did he kiss me or did I kiss him? Fuck, I think I kissed him first. Why did I kiss him? Why oh why oh why? Did it really happen? How much did Charlotte see? Why did she show up at that very moment? Where is George now? What is he thinking right now? What must he think of me now? Did he kiss me or did I kiss him?
Returning to her room at long last, Lucie closed the door behind her, fastened the security latch, and transformed into the girl whom Auden Beebe had sensed in the paintings. As she lay on her bed with her phone, she became a girl possessed as she searched desperately for anything and everything she could find about George Zao online.
First up was his Instagram account, which was easy to locate because he had liked Isabel’s first post from Capri. His account name was @zaoist, and Lucie immediately recognized the image that he used as his avatar—the rocks arranged in a spiral pattern was unmistakably a photo of Spiral Jetty, a sculpture created in the middle of a lake in Utah by the artist Robert Smithson. She had read all about it in her art history class last semester.
Curiously, there wasn’t a single photo of himself or any other person on George’s account. Did he not have a single friend? Actually, that wasn’t true. He had 4,349 followers! That was 3,000+ more than her. How in the world did he have so many followers when he was following only 332 people? He obviously wasn’t very active on the app, since there were only eighty-eight posts. Scrolling through his feed, she saw that it consisted of perfectly composed architecture, food, and travel images. If all he did was post photos from other travel and design sites, why was he getting so many likes? Lucie started to scrutinize the images in his posts more closely:
A chapel in Ronchamp. Okay, it’s that chapel designed by that famous architect.fn2
Char siew bao in a bamboo steamer. Yum.
Dominique de Menil’s house in Houston. Is that an Yves Klein on the wall?
The swimming pool at the Amangiri resort. Take me there.
A vintage Airstream trailer in Marfa. Cool.
Zion National Park at sunset. Wow.
Spam sushi. Yuck.
A copy of Learning from Las Vegas on an empty desk. What’s this book? Lucie quickly
googled it: “Learning from Las Vegas created a healthy controversy on its appearance in 1972, calling for architects to be more receptive to the tastes and values of ‘common’ people and less immodest in their erections of ‘heroic,’ self-aggrandizing monuments.” George sure is an architecture geek.
A wooden shack in the middle of the desert. Whatever.
A bacon cheeseburger between two doughnuts. Yuck. Why are guys into gross foods?
A humpback whale breaching in Sydney Harbor. So cool.
The Faraglioni rocks. Been there.
A blue lizard. How cute. Is it that species that’s only found on that rock?
The stairs at Casa Malaparte. Of course.
The silhouette of a figure standing on the roof at Casa Malaparte.
Lucie gasped as she realized it was a photo of her. She zoomed in on the image. Yes, it was definitely her, taken yesterday right before she had her meltdown on the roof. For a moment, she got annoyed. Why did he take her picture like that without her consent? What a creep! Was he one of those guys who went around taking pictures of girls when he knew they weren’t looking? As Lucie stared at the picture longer, she began to calm down. It was a beautiful shot. And with the sun against her, turning her figure into a black silhouette against the golden light, it wasn’t as if she was recognizable. It could have been anyone. She made a quick screen grab of the photo, and it dawned on her that all the perfectly composed pictures on his Instagram weren’t reposts from other accounts. Every single picture had been taken by him. George had a good eye, and she found herself grudgingly impressed.
Shifting from Instagram to Twitter, Lucie found twenty-three George Zaos, but after some detective work she realized that none of those accounts was his. It made sense that George wouldn’t be on Twitter. Since he hardly spoke, why would he ever want to tweet? She went next to Facebook, where she located him quickly since they were both “friends” with Isabel and Dolfi. However, his account was set to the highest privacy settings, so it didn’t give much away. She couldn’t see how many friends he had; she couldn’t see any of his posts. What she could see was his Facebook profile pic and his banner photo, which was a black-and-white image of a gorilla sitting on a beach. Standing nonchalantly off to the side was a man with a surfboard, looking out at the waves and completely ignoring the gorilla. Was it meant to be funny?
George’s profile picture was another black-and-white shot of him grinning into the camera. It looked like one of those pictures purposefully chosen to be casual, as if he just put up whatever random photo was available. It wasn’t perfectly composed and he didn’t look too posed or too cute in it. In fact, he looked a few years younger—his face rounder and less chiseled—and he was wearing a nondescript black T-shirt and a cap. She tried to make out the logo on the cap but it was blocked by a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers tucked over the brim.
Frustrated that she wasn’t finding much on his social media, Lucie tried googling his name. There were hundreds of other George Zaos, of course, but only one decent hit—a headline from the Daily Telegraph in Australia in 2010:
MOSMAN SURFER GEORGE ZAO EARNS SPOT AT WORLD JUNIOR TITLES IN TAIWAN
To the right of the headline was a small picture of George at around fifteen in a wetsuit, standing against a backdrop with Surfing NSW and Quiksilver logos. His hair was down to his chin, and there appeared to be blond streaks in the front. Lucie clicked on the story excitedly but came up against a paywall that only revealed a short excerpt:
… Mosman surfer George Zao has secured after taking a break from his HSC studies to compete at a surf event in Victoria. Whether he wins or not, George will be a contender for …
To read the rest of the article, she would have to pay twenty-eight dollars a year for full digital access. Lucie tossed her phone to the side with a groan. How had she wasted so much time? She had spent the past hour searching online and had learned nothing new about George Zao except that he was a good photographer, liked disgusting high-calorie foods and gorillas, and had been a champion surfer when he was younger. Where were the silly random tweets, photos of ex-girlfriends, or posts about whatever he happened to be passionate about?
There was a quick series of knocks on the door, which Lucie immediately recognized as Charlotte. “Lucie? Are you there? Can you help me?”
Lucie climbed out of the bed reluctantly, undid the security latch, and opened her door.
“Lucie! Why aren’t you dressed yet? The concert starts in twenty minutes!” Charlotte exclaimed.
“I fell asleep,” Lucie lied.
“Can you help me with the hooks? This dress is absolutely impossible,” Charlotte said as she fussed with the fasteners along the back of her vintage silk brocade cocktail dress.
“You look very pretty in it, though,” Lucie said, making fast work of the hooks.
“Thank you, dear. Mainbocher. It was our grandmother’s, you know. There’s a picture of her somewhere wearing the dress at El Morocco, sitting in a booth with William Holden.”
“Who’s William Holden?”
Charlotte shook her head with a sigh. “Millennials! The first thing I’m going to do when we get back to New York is sit you down and make you watch The World of Suzie Wong. Now quick, quick. Get ready. You haven’t even done your hair!”
“I’m just going to put it in a French twist. It’ll take me two seconds.”
“Chop, chop! Get to it! We don’t want to be late!”
“It’s not going to start on time, Charlotte, and we’re going to be so unfashionably early as always. We’re in Italy, remember?” Lucie said.
“Well, Olivia and the Ortiz sisters said they would be in the lobby at six forty-five sharp, and I haven’t been brought up to keep anyone waiting. Now, are you sure you don’t want me to help you with your hair?”
“I’ll be fine,” Lucie said as she herded Charlotte toward the door. After her cousin had left the room, Lucie plopped down on the sofa with a sigh. A memory began to surface, and for a moment she was transported to a beautiful beachfront house in Hobe Sound.
She was six years old, squinting in pain as the sour-faced Irish maid pinched her right shoulder to steady her, while with her other hand she brushed Lucie’s hair forcefully, stinging her scalp each time with the hard wire brush. Lucie sat there quietly, her eyes brimming with tears. She knew better than to make a sound.
“It’s no use, ma’am. I’ve given it a hundred strokes and it’s still frizzing up like a French poodle.”
“Good God, you’re right, it is just like a French poodle.” Lucie’s grandmother laughed dryly. “Lucie, did you not wear your swimming cap like I told you to before going into the pool? Did you get chlorine in your hair?”
“I wore it, Granny.”
“Ugh, what impossible hair! I’ve never seen anything like it. Okay, change of plan, Oonagh. Why don’t we use some coconut oil to slick it down and get rid of the frizz that way? It’ll give it some gloss. Then we can give her braids on either side, and she can wear my Lacroix dragon jacket like it’s a robe. If we can’t make her look like the other girls, let’s give her the china doll look. Lucie, remember how we used to play china doll? You’re going to be my precious little Chinese empress at the party tonight!”
Lucie stirred herself from the memory, wondering how she was ever going to face George tonight. He probably thought she was a total freak. Why in the world did she kiss him? She didn’t even like him. What came over her to make her lunge at him like that back at the villa? Over and over, she was doing nothing but making bad decisions and embarrassing herself. Ignoring him, crying on him, kissing him. What would her grandmother think if she saw her behaving like this? Maybe she had Stendhal syndrome, being surrounded by so much beauty at that spectacular villa overlooking Positano. She had heard of people arriving in Paris or Rome for the first time and bursting into tears uncontrollably, overpowered by the exquisiteness of everything. No, she blamed Charlotte and Olivia. It was all that kissing talk between them after lunch that stirred
her up and confused her.
Just then, she heard a strange shuffling sound on the floor. She looked down and saw that a little envelope had been slid under the door. Jumping off the sofa, she rushed to the door and opened it, peering out to see who was there.
The hallway was empty.
Lucie tore open the envelope and found a folded sheet of beautiful Italian parchment paper. Unfolding it, she let out a quick gasp. Written on it in prep-school cursive was one line:
In one kiss, you’ll know all I haven’t said.
—Pablo Neruda
CHAPTER TWELVE
Certosa Di San Giacomo
Capri, Italy
As luck or Murphy’s Law would have it, the one time that Lucie and Charlotte were a few minutes late in Italy was the one time the event started early. From Via Pizzolungo, the Certosa di San Giacomo looked smaller than when one actually passed through the narrow iron gates and entered the monastery. Here, the cousins discovered that they had to walk for what seemed like miles through a complex of ancient buildings, passing magnificent cloisters and expansive gardens that overlooked the sea. Arriving at the chapel at long last, they found the space packed and the concert about to commence.
“I’m sorry, I tried to save seats for you, but the Queen of Sheba wasn’t having it,” Olivia told Charlotte in a hushed voice, darting her eyes at the elderly Italian lady with the enormous shellacked beehive festooned with emeralds seated next to her.
Charlotte forced a smile. “That’s perfectly fine. There are a few seats left at the back, I believe, otherwise we can just stand.”
