The Lovers

by Vendela Vida

  “What?” she said.

  The boy pointed to her face. Then he dug down until he reached the darker patch of sand a few inches below the surface of the beach. He dipped his index finger and raised it and, with the wet sand, drew stripes on his face that started at his eyes and extended downward.

  Yvonne understood. She took the edge of her towel and wiped away the sand on her cheeks. “All gone?” she said. “Better?”

  The boy nodded. She was fine.

  “Thank you,” Yvonne said. The boy switched his grip on his towel and lifted the makeshift sack to the other shoulder. He waved to Yvonne and continued walking. Don’t leave, she thought. She stared at his back, his small, narrow shoulders, and wished he would turn around. But he continued walking, and Yvonne was left alone.

  She pressed a finger to the skin of her arms. Pink, like the inside of a shell. It had been a long time since she had exposed herself like this, and for so long. After taking a final dip in the ocean to cool her skin, she dried off carefully and completely, and made her way toward the parking lot.

  A waiter at the restaurant gave her what seemed to be an unkind look as she walked past. Was that possible? No, she told herself. She drove back through Yakaköy, and this time stopped at the side of the road where an old woman sat on a low stool, hammering nuts on a small tree trunk. Yvonne rolled down the window and the woman stood and held out a large plastic bag of almonds. Their hands met as they made the exchange, and then they each nodded before Yvonne drove off. She bit into a large almond and could taste sun and dust. She ate another, and another, and vowed that each day she returned to Knidos—for she already knew she would spend the remaining days of her vacation in Knidos, her nights in Datça—she would buy almonds from a different woman standing by the side of the road.

  Soon there was no one on the road, and the mountains around her seemed both taller and farther away. She felt loneliness seeping into her stomach, her chest, and she tried to stop it from spreading. It wouldn’t be long before she saw Özlem and Deniz again, she told herself, and she was promptly rewarded with the small thrill that came with nascent friendship, with sharing life stories. Peter had been the one who got to tell the good stories and now, suddenly, Yvonne longed for the opportunity to tell them herself. Or rather, she longed for the opportunity to see if she would tell them differently.

  “Yvonne and I fell in love through the Italian postal service,” Peter would say to anyone who asked. And, for the first fifteen years of their marriage, people asked all the time. How did you meet? They wanted to believe the secret to a happy marriage could be passed along like a recipe or remedy. Yvonne couldn’t remember the last time she had told her version of how they met. Maybe this was what happened to any couple over the years: the anecdotes and family histories and jokes were divided up, much like household chores, and Peter had assumed the role of telling their story.

  Yvonne was twenty-one and had been with someone else. Lawrence. Peter often left this name, Lawrence, out of the narrative. In fact, he left out everything to do with Lawrence, and just started the story midway through—after Yvonne and Lawrence had ended their relationship. If she had a chance to tell the story, Yvonne would start at the beginning.

  Lawrence and Yvonne met at Stanford. Yvonne was there on a scholarship, the first in her family to go to college. He was there because all his relatives were Stanford alums, two of the buildings bearing his family’s name. They met while working at the student radio station—he had a slot from four to six A.M., when he would play Latin dance music, and she read news from the AP wire at six. She started coming in to the station earlier and earlier, and he began waiting for her to finish her half hour of news so they could have breakfast together afterward.

  A few times, they had gone away to his parents’ second—or third—home in the wine country. They had exchanged kisses, but always stayed in separate rooms—that was part of the story. Details of those weekends at the country house were coming back to Yvonne now. All the newspapers: the family had six subscriptions to each Sunday paper, local and national, so no one would have to fight over copies. And the old stale Cokes in the kitchen cabinets. It was as though they had stocked up for a party ten years before. All the sodas were flat, their cans bearing a previous design incarnation that no longer existed.

  Lawrence invited her to go on a trip to Europe together after they graduated. Europe! Her sisters had never been there, and spent months picking out outfits for her to wear along the Champs-Élysées, at the Prado, at canal-side dinners in Venice. She wrote postcards to her sisters from each city they visited. “Having a great time!” she’d scribble. That was all she said—anything else would reveal she was lying. She spent most of the days alone. Lawrence wanted to go off in the afternoons by himself—“It’s good for us to have our space,” he’d say. And strange things started happening. He came back to the hotel later and later, always with an excuse for his tardiness: he had been mugged, he had gotten lost, he had run into an old friend of his from Andover.

  Yvonne would listen to his excuses, express her frustration, her worry, her concern, and then he’d say, “Darling, let me take you to dinner.” And there they would drink red wine or white wine or champagne and eat three courses and talk and discuss and laugh and flirt—and then, before parting with her at her hotel door, he’d give her a firm but not unloving kiss.

  Oh, she supposed she should have been thankful that he was a gentleman. Her sisters had told her she would owe him for the trip, that every night he would expect something from her. But the truth was Yvonne expected it too. She loved Lawrence for not fully wanting her, because it made her desperate and confused—all the things that in her youth she mistook for passion. And so one night in Florence, in their hotel by the Uffizi Palace, she washed herself with a pink shell-shaped soap he had bought her that day and dressed in the negligee her sisters had given her. With a hotel robe draped around her body and hotel slippers on her feet, she walked down the hall to his room. She wanted to believe she was playing the part, a woman unveiling herself to her intended for the first time.

  She heard something behind the door, music and laughter, and took a step back to check that she had the right room. Room 19, his room. She knocked lightly and then more assertively—a strange panic was growing like a vine up her legs. Lawrence opened the door, his shirt off, and Yvonne forgot to adjust her plan. She let her robe open and drop to the floor behind her. And then she saw Lawrence was not alone. She should have known by Lawrence’s face—he was not happy to see her. But behind him she saw a man pulling a robe around his naked body. The same hotel robe—the Florentine flower stitched in gold on the pocket over the heart—that Yvonne had just let drop from her shoulders. A sound escaped her throat, passing through her lips before she could stop it. She ran back to her room, where she splashed her face with water and sat on the balcony for an hour, repeatedly counting the bridges of the Arno River, until the knocking at the door had finally stopped.

  In the morning she saw him at breakfast.

  “I’m sorry you found us,” he said.

  “You’re sorry I found you, but not sorry about what you did.”

  “We could have had a great trip.”

  She did not tell him her parents expected that the European trip, for which his family was paying, meant they would return engaged. Yvonne and her sisters had shared the same room growing up, and when they had reunited in Albuquerque the previous Christmas, they’d spent the night in their old beds, in their old room, with their photos of prom nights and roller coaster rides, and invitations to high-school graduation parties still thumbtacked to the large, porous corkboard on their wall. It was there in that room, among these photos, that her sisters had planned her wedding for her—the ice with the mint leaf frozen within each cube, the dahlias, the million tiny silver stars that would be thrown instead of rice. She was surprised by how eagerly she greeted their conviction that she and Lawrence would marry.

  She checked his face for sign
s of regret, and she saw it there in his eyes and his cheeks, which had slackened into jowls overnight. He had plenty of regret, but all of it for himself. He regretted bringing her. Some other girl would have accepted the bargain, and gratefully.

  “How I pity you,” she said, and only a moment later, when he began to cry, did she realize this was true.

  They spent the rest of the day in their separate rooms, writing notes to each other on hotel stationery. She would write three pages of a letter, fold it into quadrants, and slip it under the thick door to his room. Then she would pace around her bed, run the bathtub and fill it with bubbles (as though she could actually sit in a bathtub when waiting for his response) until his reply slid beneath her door. His letters were unfolded single sheets.

  At the end of the day a decision had been reached. He would continue on the trip without her and she would remain in Florence until her scheduled flight home, in three weeks’ time. She didn’t want to return early because she didn’t yet know what explanation she would give to her family. Nor did she have any interest in continuing on their planned itinerary, as he suggested. He could see Switzerland and its mountains and Austria and its white horses with out her.

  The next morning when he came to her door to say good-bye he looked like a person who had been relieved of a lie. Staring at him, Yvonne thought of an amateur painting she had once seen in which the seated figure cast no shadow, bore no relationship to the ground beneath him.

  “I’ll write to you,” he said.

  “I’m not going to keep staying here,” she said, gesturing to the rug of the hotel room behind her, as though the small rug was where she spent her time.

  “Then I’ll write to you care of poste restante.”

  “Okay,” she said, as though she knew what this meant.

  “It’s a box they keep at every main post office, anywhere you go. Since you don’t know where you’re staying…”

  “Okay,” she said again.

  They parted without touching. He left her a purple purse with a gold clasp, a farewell present. She was not surprised when, later, she opened it and found money inside. Enough to last her three weeks in Florence.

  She informed the front desk she would be staying another night and set out to find other, less expensive, accommodations. The next day, she found a flat above a bakery, shared by two women her age. They were art restoration students, German and Italian, serious but warm. She paid for a month’s stay in advance.

  There remained the question of what to do with herself. For the first few days, she planned small trips—to Bologna, where she bought green peppers at the outdoor market, to Arezzo, where she walked up the steep hills and ate a picnic of salami and focaccia in a garden overlooking the town’s clock towers, none of which chimed the hour at the same time. But after three days of trips, she felt tired and stayed in the apartment, the smell of flour wafting up from the bakery below.

  On the fifth day she accepted her roommates’ invitation to visit them at school to see their work. She arrived in the morning and observed them in the large windowless room, seated before various canvases. It was not engaging work to watch; after two hours, she could detect little progress. But she loved the room with all the women—the students were primarily female—restoring paintings that had been damaged by dampness or smoke or transport. This is what women do, she thought vaguely, we restore things, we make them right.

  After leaving the school in the late afternoon, she walked to the main post office to see if Lawrence had written.

  “Poste restante,” Yvonne said to the woman behind the counter. The woman brought out a large tin box and instructed Yvonne to stand to the side and search through it while the next customer was helped.

  The box was cold to the touch, its surface like a watering can, and not as well organized as Yvonne would have expected. Inside were at least a hundred envelopes and postcards, many folded or torn at their corners, from all parts of the world. She sorted through postcards from Tasmania and Newfoundland, letters postmarked from Amsterdam and Stockholm, Atlanta and Cape Town, but found nothing from Lawrence addressed to her. It had been almost a week and she should have heard from him by now. Even if it was another apology.

  When she reached the back of the box she turned over the final postcard, hoping it was for her. It was addressed to a woman named Frederica, and was written in English. The handwriting, tilted far to the right, was the most unusual Yvonne had ever seen. She read the note:

  Dear Frederica,

  Only two weeks until I see you. You don’t know how anxious I am. After you left, teaching, once a pleasure, as you know, became a burden. The students are good. “Where is Ms. Frederica?” they said. They tease me about being in love, and what can I say? I can’t lie to them.

  Love, Peter

  Yvonne turned the card over. It was a picture of the library at Alexandria, Egypt.

  Yvonne left the post office, the smear of ink and the damp metallic smell of the box still on her hands. She walked past the tourists following guides carrying brightly-colored parasols, past the bored salesgirls standing by store windows.

  The next afternoon Yvonne returned to the post office. Another postcard written in the slanted handwriting had arrived from Peter.

  Dear Frederica,

  I received your letter just today and I’m so confused. What do you mean that I’m a distant fixture in your life? It has only been a month. You don’t know the state you’ve left me in. I will stay awake until I see you. Please, if you misspoke or were just in a strange mood when you wrote, please write again as soon as possible. My heart can’t take this wait, these words.

  Love, Peter

  Yvonne turned the postcard around—another photo of the library at Alexandria, this one taken from within. Her fingers ran through the rest of the mail in the box. She was less interested in seeing whether Lawrence had written than she was to see whether Frederica had retrieved Peter’s last correspondence. It was still there. Yvonne read it twice, before placing it in the front of the box, where it would surely be discovered if someone was looking for it.

  That week she could think of nothing but the post office. Sunday, when it was closed, seemed interminable. She walked around Florence, staring at the watermark lines on the buildings that showed how high the river had risen during the flood of 1333.

  On Monday, she forced herself to take a bus to Fiesole before going to the post office. If she checked the mail first thing in the morning, the rest of the day would be too long. She happened upon a string quartet playing inside a small church, and closed her eyes and tried to listen. When the concert was over, she caught the first bus back to Florence. A scooter almost hit her as she raced to the doors of the post office.

  She quickly flipped through the more recent arrivals, in search of any mail from Egypt. The box was emptier today and she noted that Paolo had finally retrieved the letters that awaited him from Spain, that Ann and Erica had picked up the birthday wishes sent from America. Toward the middle of the box was a new postcard from Peter, the writing more slanted, as though it was on the precipice of tumbling off the edge.

  Dear Frederica,

  I’ll be in Florence next Tuesday. I have no other way to reach you so I hope you receive this in time. I’ll wait for you from noon on in front of the Grotta del Buontalenti in the Boboli Gardens. I saw a picture of it in the library here. I hope that you’ll come to meet me—even if it is to say good-bye.

  Love, Peter

  Tomorrow Peter would be waiting at the Grotta del Buontalenti. Yvonne’s heart raced. She knew she would go watch him from afar, and she too would wait to see if Frederica showed up.

  Yvonne awoke Tuesday morning to the sound of pigeons fighting outside her window. She planned out her day carefully—allowing an hour to shower and choose her clothes, an hour for breakfast. She could easily dress and eat in the span of fifteen minutes, but that would leave too much time for waiting.

  At half past eleven she walked to the Boboli Ga
rdens. She knew from her dictionary that grotta meant cave, but she had never seen or heard of the Grotta del Buontalenti before and had difficulty finding it. At noon she began to panic. She asked everyone she could if they knew where it was. But she was surrounded only by tourists carrying the same guidebook, which failed to show the Grotta on its map. She was sweating as she walked quickly from east to west of the gardens, then north to south. Then she zigzagged, until finally, near the edge of the gardens, close to the entrance, she saw a sign for the Grotta del Buontalenti. She was so stunned she paused in front of the arrow, as though the direction itself was all she’d been seeking.

  Her steps quickened as she approached the cave. No one was in sight, and for a moment she feared she had missed Peter. But even more, she feared that she had missed them both, that Frederica had visited the poste restante box that morning, and had come here to be reunited. She had missed it all.

  Yvonne walked closer to the Grotta, access to which was prohibited by a railing. She read on a sign that the cave was a man-made creation, designed by Buontalenti in the sixteenth century. It consisted of four chambers, only the first of which was immediately visible. Yvonne looked up. From the muddy walls of the cave, sculptures of slaves were fighting to emerge. Behind the first chamber of the cave was another, in the center of which stood a sculpture of a man and woman, their bodies entwined. Lovers.

  She was thinking of how she could come back at night and go inside, travel deeper into the Grotta, to the other chambers, when she felt a hand on her shoulder. She jumped. A guard, she imagined, was reading her trespassing thoughts.

  But no, it was a young man of twenty-four or twenty-five, only a few years older than she. He was tall, his hair blond and his skin tan, with a spray of freckles the color of sand gathered around his squinted green eyes.