The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  “You don’t seem to understand. I have a friend up there who will be most angry with me if I don’t say hello,” a woman is complaining in haughty tones to, I can only assume, a flight attendant. “If you don’t let me by, I will complain to the management of the airline and see to it that you are fired.”

  The curtain bulges and parts, and Mara Silverman slips past a beleaguered flight attendant into the empty seat next to me. When the attendant shows up at her side, Mara smiles sweetly, as if she didn’t recognize her as the same person whose job she just threatened, and asks for a glass of orange juice.

  “The fresh-squeezed kind you have up here,” she says, “not that bottled stuff they gave me back there.”

  I exchange an exasperated glance with the flight attendant, who brings back a glass of orange juice for Mara, spilling only the tiniest bit on Mara’s Juicy Couture jogging suit. If she’d planned the move as revenge, she miscalculated, because Mara then requests a bottle of club soda, towels, and some of the shower gel that she’s sure must be in the toiletry cases the airline provides for its first-class passengers. Only when Mara has restored her velour hoodie to its pristine state and pocketed the toiletry case does she turn to me.

  “Really, Rose, I’m surprised you’re in first class. On your salary. Of course, you don’t have children so I suppose you get to spend it all on yourself, but I’d think you’d want to be putting some away for your retirement. You’re, what…forty now?”

  I’m not sure what flaw to respond to first: my extravagance, my barrenness, or my age. I could, of course, tell her that Lemon House Films is paying for my seat, but then I realize that Mara’s husband, Gene, is also working for them, and clearly they haven’t provided him with first-class accommodations. Mara will be furious if she realizes that I’m being treated better than Gene.

  “I had some extra frequent flier miles that were going to expire, so I upgraded,” I say.

  “Ah, we used all ours taking Ned around to colleges this year. Of course, the film company’s paying for Gene’s ticket, but not mine. Or Ned’s.”

  “So, Ned’s traveling with you?”

  “No. The students had to go two weeks ago to start rehearsals. Ned insisted on going with this group who got budget tickets to Switzerland. They planned to hike in the Alps for a few days and then take the train to Florence. I’ve been going out of my mind worrying about him. They weren’t even going to get sleeper compartments on the train! Can you imagine, wanting to sit up all night on a filthy Italian train eating salami sandwiches and drinking warm beer! That might be all right for some, but with Ned’s asthma and psoriasis, he’s bound to be a wreck.”

  I can, actually. It’s how I first entered Italy, and after the cramped flight to Brussels I’d been happy for the legroom of a train compartment, even if it was occupied by three Mount Holyoke juniors who took up all the overhead luggage space with their matching pink duffel bags, which I later learned were stocked with six-packs of Tab and multiple cartons of Playtex tampons (I’m not sticking anything foreign in there, one of the girls confided to me later over a dinner of, yes, warm beer and salami). I’d woken up that morning surrounded by the pink light of dawn reflecting off the snow-topped Alpine peaks and the plains of Lombardy spread out below us. “Fruitful Lombardy,” I’d remembered from Romeo and Juliet, “the pleasant garden of great Italy,” and felt as if I were entering the illuminated pages of a medieval manuscript.

  “You don’t mind sitting up all night when you’re young,” I tell Mara, “or wearing the same clothes or sleeping in crowded hostels.”

  “Yes, well, easy to say from the comfort of first class,” Mara says, reaching over and patting the fleece blanket I’ve got tucked around my legs and letting her hand linger on the pile of typescript in my lap. “Is that the script you’ve got there? The one that boy wrote? Is it really any good? Gene says he’s sure it needs a lot of work. You really should let Gene have a look at it so he could do some work on it. You know he’s been hired as a script consultant on the film by Mr. Balthasar.”

  She pronounces the producer’s name loudly enough to wake up the man himself, and I see him stir a bit under his blanket, but if he’s awake he chooses not to reveal that fact. I imagine he’s waiting until Mara leaves. He’d told me last week on the phone that he’d given Gene the job of assistant script consultant. “It was either that or have him pop up in six months with a lawsuit claiming all Robin’s ideas were stolen from him. I wouldn’t put it past that shrew of a wife of his to goad him into a lawsuit to feed her designer-clothing habit. But I’m giving you first crack at the script; you decide when to give a copy to Gene Silverman.”

  “When we get to the villa I’ll have some copies made,” I tell Mara without mentioning that I’ve already scanned Robin’s screenplay into my laptop. “I’m afraid this is my only copy right now.”

  “You really ought to have made copies in New York. What if the plane goes down? What if one of the stewardesses steals this copy while you’re sleeping? If you like, I’ll hold on to it when you go to sleep. I never can sleep a wink on planes, even after a couple of Xanaxes.”

  “That’s all right,” I tell Mara, looking past her to the flight attendant who’s approaching with my dinner tray, “I’ll be sure to put it securely away before I fall asleep. Right now I think you’d better get back to your seat or you’ll miss the in-flight meal.”

  “Hm, maybe they can give me a tray here,” she says, casting an appraising eye over my Chilean sea bass and braised endives served on real china with real silverware. I can hardly blame her for preferring this to the Saran-wrapped insta-meal that awaits her in coach, but if I let Mara stay now, I’ll be stuck with her for the rest of the flight. And I wouldn’t put it past her to wait until I fall asleep to take the screenplay for Gene. I catch the flight attendant’s eye as Mara makes her request and shake my head. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we have only enough meals for our ticketed first-class passengers.”

  I almost feel sorry for Mara as she wilts at the emphasis the flight attendant puts on “ticketed,” but not sorry enough to want her company for the rest of the flight.

  “Well, then,” Mara says, gathering up her toiletry case and free slippers and sleeping mask, “arrivederci until Italy, then. Maybe we can share a cab to the villa.”

  I nod noncommittally as Mara leaves, hoping that my proximity to the exit will get me through customs and immigration early enough to get my own cab. I’ve waited twenty years to see La Civetta again; Mara’s the last person I want for company when I go through those gates. When I finish my dinner and the flight attendant has removed my tray and given me a scented hot towel and a handful of after-dinner mints, I pull out the screenplay again. As soon as I’ve got the pages in my lap, though, Leo Balthasar, as if awakened by the rustle of screenplay pages, slips his eye mask up onto his gleaming forehead and peers over at me.

  “Oh, good, you’re looking at Robin’s script. Why don’t we run through it together?”

  Before I can protest that I’m still making notes, he’s making himself comfortable in the empty seat by my side: adjusting the tubular pillow he wears like a pet boa around his neck, summoning the flight attendant for a pot of freshly brewed coffee, and angling the reading light on the pages in my lap so that I feel like an actor in the spotlight.

  “So, what do we think?” he asks. “Does our boy have something here?” At least Robin’s “our boy” now instead of my boy.

  “Well, I’m very impressed with the language,” I say, taking a sip of coffee, which is, to my surprise, nearly as good as Cafe Lucrezia’s, “especially of the poem that he’s included.” I’d found when I read the script that only one poem was actually included: the limonaia poem that Ginevra sent to Shakespeare to invite him to the villa. There were numerous places in the script for other poems, but instead of the poems Robin had written in brackets, “Poem to come.”

  “And I like the characterization,” I continue. “Robin has—had—a real feel for Shakespe
are as a young poet and dramatist. I can’t help but think he put a lot of himself in these scenes—”

  “Yes, yes, but the plot line? What do you think of that?”

  “Well, I have to admit that he’s created a fairly plausible premise for what is essentially a fantasy. He has Shakespeare traveling to Italy in the summer of 1593 when the London theaters were closed because of an outbreak of plague. True, Shakespeare’s company would have been touring then, but there’s no way of knowing whether Shakespeare was actually with the company—”

  “Aha! So, you admit it. Shakespeare could have gone to Italy.”

  “He could have gone to Timbuktu for all we know. It doesn’t mean he did.”

  “Yes, but Romeo and Juliet isn’t set in Timbuktu, is it? It’s not The Merchant of Timbuktu or Two Gentlemen of Timbuktu, is it? All the writers I know are always writing off research trips. Why should Bill Shakespeare be any different? Wouldn’t he want to scout out locations, gather material, check out Juliet’s hometown to pick a good balcony for Romeo to scale?”

  “Well, Romeo and Juliet was based on an Italian poem by Bandell, which was translated into English by Arthur Brooke, so Shakespeare could easily have written it without traveling to Italy. Besides, there’s nothing in Romeo and Juliet that reveals a firsthand knowledge of Italy, nothing he couldn’t have gotten out of Italian sources available to him. As for The Merchant of Venice, yes, some scholars have found the Venetian setting fairly convincing, although there’s certainly no hard evidence in that. There’s the scene at the ferry on the River Brenta in which Portia sees Balthasar off, but the fact remains that there’s no evidence that Shakespeare ever went to Italy.”

  I’d thought Leo would like the reference to his Shakespearian namesake, but he only shakes his head angrily. “Tell me, is there a shred of evidence that he ever made the trip from Stratford to London? Can you show me the ticket stubs? But does anyone doubt that Shakespeare traveled back and forth between Stratford and London?”

  I have to admit that there aren’t any ticket stubs documenting Shakespeare’s travels between Stratford and London that I know of.

  “Right. So he could have gone to Italy—and what better reason to travel than to visit some beautiful Italian poetess living in a villa who’s been writing him these sexy love poems. The Dark Lady is a great role. I’ve got top talent interested in playing her.”

  “Really?” I ask. “Have you actually ever read the Dark Lady sonnets?”

  Leo Balthasar smiles at me as if I’d just asked him if he did his own laundry. “Honey, I’ve read the treatment.”

  “Um…well, did you notice that they’re not exactly flattering? In the nicest poem to her, he calls her hair black wires and her breasts dun. He accuses her of promiscuity and betrayal.”

  “Yes, yes,” Leo says, excited. “It’s just what we want. It was obviously a tempestuous relationship. She must have done something to enrage the Bard. What do you know about this Ginevra de Laura woman?”

  “Not much,” I admit. “She lived in the late sixteenth, early seventeenth century, was rumored to be the mistress of Lorenzo Barbagianni, who brought her to live at La Civetta, and some diarists of the period said she wrote sonnets, but none have survived—”

  “But they could have been hidden at the villa, right? I was there last summer and the place is a rat’s nest of paper—stuff crammed in every nook and cranny. An enterprising boy like Robin could have found them somewhere—”

  “Did Robin ever show you these poems?” I ask.

  “Well, not the originals,” Leo admits. “He said he found the poems at the villa and hand-copied the one he used in the film because he couldn’t remove it and if he took it down to the office to Xerox he’d attract attention. But he said he still had access to the poems and that if I needed the originals he could get them for me.”

  “You didn’t encourage him to steal from the villa?” I ask, summoning all the outraged zeal of the scholar. A scholar who has in her carry-on luggage a possibly rare Renaissance manuscript page.

  “Of course not!” Balthasar says, shaking his head reprovingly as if I had suggested that the Academy Awards could be bought. “But,” he adds, lowering his voice conspiratorially, “I think someone thought he had taken something from the villa.”

  “Orlando Brunelli?” I ask and then, remembering something, add, “You met with Orlando the day of the film show, didn’t you?”

  Balthasar looks taken aback briefly but then smiles and taps his finger to his shiny skull. “Ah, I knew there was a reason I hired you. I’m never wrong about people. You don’t miss a beat! Yes, I did meet with the boy at a cafe…uh, were you there? I don’t remember seeing you until that night, and I never forget a beautiful woman.”

  “I wasn’t there,” I say, trying not to feel too pleased at Balthasar’s flattery. “But I know the owner, and one of the waiters told me the next day—”

  “Oh, yes, yes.” Balthasar bobs his head up and down. “Orlando asked me to meet with him about Robin’s script. He wanted a writing credit because he said he had helped Robin with the research. I told him that made him a research consultant, not a writer.”

  “Did he say anything about the poems?”

  “What he said was…now let me make sure I’ve got this right”—Leo screws up his face in concentration—“he said that Robin had taken all the papers; yes, that’s it. Tutti i papiri. My Italian’s not so great, but I got that. I thought he meant that Robin had taken the only copy of the script. When he crashed the party, yelling at Robin for stealing something, I thought that’s what he meant, but he couldn’t have thought Robin had the whole script on his person; he must have thought Robin had the poems on him.”

  I nod, thinking that Orlando had been right. He just didn’t know that Robin had already handed the one poem he had over to me.

  “So, he could have been trying to get the poem from Robin on the balcony. He might have pushed him while trying to get the poem.”

  Balthasar widens his eyes at me. “Really? Do you think so?”

  “Well, you would know better than I would,” I say, exasperated. “I wasn’t on the balcony.”

  Balthasar shakes his head. “I was busy with that girl—the one with the pink hair. She was between us and she was hysterical. I was afraid she was going to jump! And Mark had his hands full with Orlando Brunelli, who was demanding that Robin give him back something he’d stolen from him. If Robin did have one of those poems on him when he jumped, it would have been bloodstained pulp by the time they scraped him off the sidewalk.”

  I wince at the image and Balthasar shrugs apologetically. “Sorry. I know you were close to the boy.”

  I find myself unable to speak for a moment, my throat suddenly parched in the canned air of the airplane cabin. I look away from Leo Balthasar, out toward the vacant blue of twilight that is fast fading as we cross the Atlantic. I feel a wave of warmth steal over me and realize that it comes from Leo Balthasar’s hand, which he has laid over mine on the armrest. I’m surprised more by the jolt of the physical contact than by the unexpected intimacy of the gesture. “I liked him, too,” Balthasar says, squeezing my hand. “That’s why I’m so damned set on doing this film. He’d have wanted his words immortalized on screen. You do whatever you need to, to make that script viable—I don’t care if we’ve got to put Shakespeare in a time machine to get him to Italy—and keep an eye out for those sonnets. And I’ll keep an eye on Orlando Brunelli. I’ll tell you one thing. If it turns out he really pushed Robin off that balcony, I’ll make damn sure he doesn’t get a writing credit!”

  Balthasar releases my hand after giving it another bone-bruising squeeze and goes back to his own seat. I feel suddenly overcome by fatigue, the effect of the stress of these last few weeks. I put the screenplay away in my book bag, cinching shut the brass toggles and tucking the bag under my other carry-on. I tilt my seat back and slip a pillow between my cheek and the cabin wall. When I close my eyes, though, the scene Leo Balthasar
described rises up in my mind: Robin perched on the edge of the balcony and Orlando rushing toward him…accusing him of stealing from him…Mark trying to hold Orlando back…Robin’s body falling, his body hurtling through space…The sensation jerks me awake. I must have fallen asleep, because outside my window the sun is cresting the curved horizon, limning a jagged line of mountains. I keep my eyes on the mountains as the cabin fills with the sounds of passengers yawning and the aroma of coffee and fresh-baked croissants. The mountains seem to spring out of the sea, massive and cragged and still peaked with snow in the heights. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could ever have traveled over them on foot or by horse. Fynes Moryson, an English traveler, described travelers creeping over the Alps on their hands and feet with nails in their gloves and shoes, while their guides warned them not to look down into the deep abyss.

  A good idea, I think, looking away from the beautiful, but bleak, scenery and toward the awakening cabin. Still, I can’t quite dispel the notion that while my journey doesn’t require crawling hand and foot over the mountains, it’s likely to have its own perils and that the more I try to find the truth behind Robin’s fall, the closer I bring myself to the edge of a precipice.