A Winter in Rome

by Francis Gideon

  "Why did you kiss my ear?"

  "Because I like it. I don't want you to cut it off like Van Gogh. None of that."

  "You know it's actually pronounced Van Hoff? Not Van Go. I didn't even fucking know that until I got to class when I was eighteen and my prof got on his high horse."

  I laughed with him as we made fun of his first art teacher. I encouraged him to keep talking, keep telling me stories. I listened as he went on about his grandmother and his sister, the two people who really made him concentrate on art. His sister, because she also liked to paint, and his grandmother, because she gave him a bet. If you can paint me an exact replica of The Last Supper, then I will pay for your art school. He did, and she let him go—so long as he kept writing her letters with drawings inside.

  "What about your sister?"

  He got sad then, and told me she had died in a car crash seven years ago. "Right around when I met Rebecca."

  I didn't ask him anymore about that, but merely listened to him. I was good at listening. He told me more about the sad and happy parts of his life, slowly collapsing the ten years between us. He told me about the lectures he had to give, then what he wanted to make for brunch. In an instant, we went from life stories to the minutia of a daily living. Daily living that, I reminded myself, I was now sharing with him.

  "I will make you pancakes. Or something. What do you like?"

  "Eggs?"

  "Sure. Done. I can do that."

  He got dressed, tossing on a new white t-shirt from a drawer and then into his pair of black skinny jeans. I picked up my old stuff, but he insisted I could wear his clothing. I did, only because I still didn't want to leave. Not yet.

  "Are you okay?"

  "I'm great."

  He smiled again, pulling me up from the bed. As we moved into the kitchen, I took a place at the counter and watched him cook. There was more talking, talking, talking. I was amazed at how much he had inside him—and at how little I could contribute. I was a good listener. Maybe that was enough. I could listen to him, I could watch and document all of his paintings, and that would be okay.

  Then I saw the cover of Just Kids and I remembered Patti Smith. Watching him was not a life, not a real one for me, especially if I had other things I could be doing. Other dreams to follow.

  "I think…" I said, my voice trailing off. He looked up from the eggs, adding salt to each of our plates.

  "Yeah?"

  "I think I should drop your class."

  He smiled, but it was slightly saddened. "I know. Okay."

  He sat across from me at his kitchen island, placing our food down with more coffee. He understood; I knew he did, because if I dropped his class, it meant I got to stay here a little while longer.

  "Cheers," he said, holding up his mug.

  I held up my own and echoed, "Cheers."

  Chapter Three

  When I dropped out of Alan's art class, there was only one other left that I could enroll in: Italian. Just before reading break, I sat inside a small, cramped classroom across the campus that I had never been to before, and held my used textbook as the professor barely acknowledged me or anyone else in the class and spoke in a haze. I blinked and realized I was completely out of my depth. Since I had already vaguely mastered high-school French, I had thought another Romance language would be easy.

  But shame on me, I thought. Nothing is easy anymore.

  I was about to get up and leave during the break, maybe do a summer English course instead, when I saw a small woman near the front of the class. She stayed at her spot while everyone else moved to grab a coffee, a drink, or stretch their legs. She had the entire page of verbs conjugated and a few stray sentences written at the bottom of her homework. Around the margins of her notes, though, she'd drawn small flowers.

  I liked her immediately.

  "Hi." I sat down next to her. She recoiled slightly, surprised that someone had noticed her. She put her phone down under the desk where she had been texting, her blue eyes wide.

  "Yeah?"

  "You seem to know what's going on here."

  She laughed. "It's pretty easy as soon as you realize the prof's not actually teaching us stuff. Well, what he writes on the board is good. But his talking? He's just ranting. Just getting us 'exposed' to the culture." She used air quotes and rolled her eyes. "It's kind of like how some Spanish teachers make their classes watch telenovelas. They say it's because the dialogue goes fast and it's fairly simple, so the show is easy enough to follow along. But they really just want to watch their shows. This guy just wants to rant."

  I grinned. She talked too fast, even for English, but I liked her. I couldn't articulate what it was, but she seemed competent and helpful. At that moment, it was what I needed the most.

  "I'm Craig. I'm new. I have absolutely no idea what's going on."

  "I see that." Her hands touched the edge of her notepaper, and her eyes moved to her phone. She seemed to be considering something heavily, as if she was assessing me to see if I was a threat. I was relieved when she turned back with a smile. "I'm Sybil. Do you have time to meet after class?"

  *~*~*

  From then on, every night after Italian, she and I would walk to the local coffee place around the corner called Rotunda Bar. We passed at least four Tim Horton's and Starbucks as we walked, but she insisted on this place. Since she was doing me a favour, I never argued. As soon as we sat in the back, she would pull out her huge Italian text book with flowers drawn on the inside covers, I would buy her a latte, and we would try to understand one another through a flurry of mixed English and Italian.

  After I got through my first assignment with a low A and caught up on the work I had missed, I had felt more secure and offered Sybil a way out. She merely shook her head.

  "Where else would I get lattes?" she asked. "It's not like I work here and can get free ones. Maybe I should work here…"

  I laughed and grabbed her book, but missed and brushed her fingers. "Don't work here. You don't need to."

  "Does that mean you'll keep buying me lattes?"

  "Of course, if you'll have me around."

  "Yes. You're fun… but I still may work here later. I like the vibe."

  "Maybe in the future, then."

  "Maybe," she said with a wink.

  Sybil and I kept going to the café to work together on our assignments after class in between lattes. One night, though, she found my email on the back of an assignment I gave her to proofread and suggested we switch our study time to Thursday. We had a big composition assignment due the next day, so I chalked up the day change to that.

  "Thank you so much for helping me," I said, after we had been at it for nearly two hours and four drinks. "I don't know what I'd do without you."

  "You'd survive," she said without looking up from her paper. "But it would be harder."

  "That's exactly what I mean."

  She smiled, her eyes flitting down. "It's okay, really. I never pass up a learning experience."

  "But you're the teacher in this scenario. Or tutor, at least."

  "Yes, but you're much better now."

  "So what exactly are you trying to learn?"

  She lifted her eyebrows playfully, but didn't say a word as she turned back to her work. Professor Moretti had wanted us to do a passage assignment, something to summarize our biographies and families. During class the week before, Sybil had raised her hand and asked, in near perfect Italian, if she could write about something else. She did not like biographies, no stories about her. But she was careful with how she worded it; she didn't want to talk about herself not because she thought she was boring. She wanted to talk about other people because they were interesting. A learning experience, I reminded myself.

  I tilted my head as I looked at her—and I realized I was trying to study her the way Alan sometimes studied me. I looked down and felt my face flush. I wasn't sure about Sybil, and my feelings for her, mostly because she was still a complete mystery to me. Even with Italian acting
as a barrier, she refused to expose herself. I had no idea who she was beyond her name.

  "Sybil," I said.

  She looked up again, her blue eyes wide.

  "Why are you here?"

  "Pfft," she let out a low breath. "This isn't philosophy. We don't need to get all dramatic."

  "How do you know I was?"

  "Oh, please, Craig. I can see it in your eyes."

  I paused. "What do they look like? I don't know what you're talking about. I've never seen my own eyes—at least, not how you describe them. The mirror flattens the experience."

  She took in another deep breath. Her nostrils flared, but I could tell by the small micro-expression of a smile that she liked me. She was having fun. "Your eyes get wide. You have this dopey, oh-God-the-world-is-beautiful-and-life-is-so-meaningful expression on your face when you ask me questions like that."

  "And?"

  "And what?"

  "I have a feeling there is a judgement there."

  She narrowed her gaze before she went back to conjugating verbs. "Nothing, no judgement. I just don't always think life is beautiful."

  "Okay," I said. I could see that. Alan and I sometimes watched the news together in the morning if we were up at the same time, and there was a lot of death and destruction and unhappiness. But I was convinced that Sybil had a specific reason, a way in which the world had hurt her. "Can I ask why life sucks?"

  "Thank you for at least phrasing that like a question," she said. "And not a demand."

  After a few sips of her drink and a quick survey of the café, she told me in hushed words why she was learning Italian, even though it was much, much easier to learn French. "I got a phone call from a woman I couldn't understand. I work at a crisis line—I probably should have mentioned that. It's more of a volunteer position, but since it's probably going to be a career for me in some way, I think of it like a job. Over Christmas break, I was working the lines and got that call. I wanted to understand the woman so badly, especially since I could hear she'd been crying, but I couldn't. After she hung up, I Googled some of the phrases that I remembered, and realized it was Italian."

  "So now you're learning it? For some stranger on a phone?"

  "I'm all those strangers have sometimes. I may be just a disembodied voice to them, but it has to mean something. That woman tried to tell me her story, and I couldn't understand her. So I wanted to try. I have to."

  I nodded and realized why I had liked Sybil when I first met her. She was a listener, like I was with Alan. Though Alan's stories were far more rambling and dreamy than the voices on a phone line or Professor Moretti's rants in class, Sybil was still there, providing meaning to something that could so easily be lost.

  "Have you talked to her again?"

  "I think so. They block most numbers from us at the crisis centre, but I think she did call back, because I recognized her voice and accent. It's hard to tell if I'm speaking properly and if she's understanding me. But I think she did feel better—her tone was different. Not as scared as it was over Christmas."

  "That's good," I said. Our homework was nearly done and abandoned in front of us. I picked up my latte at the same time she did, sipping it in a careful, but deliberate, silence. "Who do you call?" I asked.

  "What?"

  "Who do you call when you need help?"

  Her lips poised, trembling almost as if she was about to say I don't need help. And then, fuck you for asking. But she folded slightly, her shoulders less tense. "I have ways of coping."

  I was about to ask what those ways were—not to interrogate her, but merely for advice. I had been having a few moments myself lately, especially around my roommates, and if I had known there was such thing as a crisis line for me to call for someone to listen to my meagre worries of David being a dick to me, then I might have reached out. If I had known there were people out there willing to learn Italian for a random stranger, just to make them feel better, then I may have called, too. Before I could say anything, the lights at the front of the café began to flicker. The Muzak that was usually played over small speakers cut out, and instead, the slightly screechy feedback of a mic stand echoed through the area.

  "Sorry," a guy at the front said. "Sorry, sorry. We're just setting up now and then we will have a good show for you."

  "Show?" I asked, turning to Sybil. Her eyes were bright, as if she had known this would happen all along.

  "A poetry reading," she said. "They do one every Thursday."

  "Oh, okay."

  I looked around the café, towards the corkboard across from the specials by the front window, and finally noticed a pattern in the array of flyers. Between bright pink pages for a revival of the Riot Grrrl meetings, and next to a blue one advertising a yard sale back at the university, there was a schedule for the poetry slams. Every Thursday Night, it read, come one, come all, and come as you are. I had no idea that Rotunda Bar was into this type of thing—but it really shouldn't have surprised me. We were right next to the art school in downtown Toronto. Of course kids and hipsters would gather here and try to recreate the Beat Generation.

  I glanced at Sybil, who had completely folded away her Italian homework and swung her legs around towards the makeshift stage near one of the window seats. The owner who had made the mic screech from before shuffled away some of the chairs, adding them to the front row that soon filled with participants. I was about to ask Sybil if she was going to get up there, when the mic made noise again. Fingers brushed against it, and a new person—another guy, but dressed in an old grandpa sweater—took over as the MC.

  "Welcome, welcome. We've already gathered names for the participants this week. We will have three readings, then take a vote. After a break, we'll have three more poets and another vote. The final two will then compete for the prize."

  "Prize?" I asked, leaning closer to Sybil.

  "I'm pretty sure it's just a gift card for more lattes."

  "Well," I said, "at least there's that. You may get to fall back on that plan if I ever run out of cash."

  She narrowed her eyes at me. I was unsure if she was upset that I could suggest that I'd one day stop buying her lattes, or if she would be upset to have me leave. There was no time to wonder, since the first contestant came on stage.

  A small person, dressed in baggy jeans and a skater t-shirt, cleared his throat before saying his name in a cracked, almost puberty-ridden voice. I was unsure how old he was—his face was soft and he looked almost fourteen. And his hands—as he gripped the mic, I realized how tiny they were, just like Sybil's. I was about to ask her, as if she would know the answer to all the strangers I suddenly found myself surrounded by, when I listened to the first few lines of his poem.

  "The wrong body / no, not even the wrong mind / I was just born breech / and then took some time / to catch up to the rest of you all / and begin a new life." He paused again, voice cracking. "So here I am, a foot taller / wearing men's briefs instead of kitten shoes / my name may be different / and my language a little lost / but this is not the time to wake up / because my dreams are no smaller / than the day I was born upside down."

  The crowd cheered, one person off to the side in particular raising up her arms. I watched as the poet got off stage and walked over to his girlfriend. My eyes stayed with them, curious and questioning. Not judging, not at all. I understood what was happening after a few moments—he was a transgender guy—and I wasn't weirded out. Instead, the whole thing reminded me of something that Alan had told me about the nature of art. People always thought their imagination was limitless, and when given a blank canvas, they could draw anything they want. But that was never wholly true. People repeated what they saw in everyday life. The important part of art wasn't to think you were limitless, but to realize you were limited—and to seek out knowledge in order to expand your repertoire. I had never seen a trans guy before. I should have known they logically existed, because I had heard of trans women. But I had never given it much thought. I realized now, after seein
g him perform, how limited I had once been—and really, still was.

  "Craig," Sybil said. She tugged on my shoulder, pulling me close to her again. "You're staring."

  "It's not bad," I said, turning away slowly. "I've just never seen anything like this before."

  Her lips were pursed. "Don't cause a fuss, okay?"

  "I'm not," I said again, trying to smile. "It's really good."

  She examined me again, then turned towards the stage, her eyes alit. As the next person came up, I didn't focus as much on the words or what happened. I didn't even look over at the poet and his girlfriend. I watched Sybil instead. This place and this night in particular was an escape for her. She liked to be surrounded by words and people who were brave enough to speak up. When she was in class, she would doodle on the margins and also write notes at the bottom of her page, too. I used to think it was her following along in class, but now I knew better. Those had been poems. She was trying to find rhyming words in Italian so she could write her poems, too.

  The next poet was a tall woman with bright red hair like a fire hydrant. Then, there was a guy with a scraggly goatee. When the voting happened, Sybil and I both voted for Andrew—the trans guy—but the woman with red hair won by a landslide. Sybil seemed really disappointed, and finished her latte in one swoop.

  "Well, my favourite contender is out. I may skip the next bit. Unless you want to stay?"

  "Maybe…"

  "We can if you want. I was just worried you were bored."

  "Not at all."

  She sat back down and then flagged one of the servers. She bought me a latte this time, and we watched as the next session of poets came out. There was more back and forth, more people who looked eerily similar, and then suddenly, the woman with red hair had won.