The Conversion

by Joseph Olshan

  Yet Marina believes Stefano’s novels are brilliant. I wonder about this. I wonder if her opinion of his work has been tainted by the same “romanticism” that she claims has bedeviled me. But to insist that he is the greater writer of the two of them is ludicrous. Conversion, in comparison to Emilien, is consistently captivating. The narrative never stops churning, each twist of the plot expertly wrought. There are so many astonishing set pieces, moments of great hilarity illuminating what is, for the most part, a dark tale. The ending is haunting and ambiguous and, in my opinion, perfectly executed.

  And though I know it’s fruitless to even consider it, I can’t help but imagine what Marina might have done with the story of Emilien—now, in light of Stefano’s attempt, forever off-limits to the scope of her lively intelligence.

  I decide to give another of his novels a go. Selecting a volume from the bookshelf, I am initially relieved to find a more contemporary story. However, even to a foreigner such as myself, it’s pretty clear that he’s dealing with a rather shopworn subject: the publishing scene in Milan and, specifically, a love affair between a graphic designer and a magazine fashion editor. Once again, the novel is written in an open, accessible style. Once again, I find the reading tedious.

  What will I tell Marina? How will I convey to her that in my opinion, even if I am to translate some sample chapters, that these books will have a hard time being taken on by an English-language publisher? Perhaps I should be polite and just do the work on spec and let nature take its course. Then again, Marina was honest in her assessment of my little novella and no doubt would demand the same of me. But I worry that the truth might actually insult her and even jeopardize my welcome at the villa. After all, anyone’s generosity has its limits, especially now that it has become clear there will be some sort of expected quid pro quo.

  Suddenly there is a knock on my door. At my bidding, Marina pokes her head in with a discomfited look on her face. “You have an unexpected visitor,” she says flatly.

  I gape at her, wondering if it could be Lorenzo dropping by impromptu. “It’s not who you think,” she warns me. “It’s the Frenchman. He’s in the library.”

  I’m mystified. “Michel?”

  “Correct.”

  “But, I don’t know how he—”

  “I don’t either, but we can’t just leave him standing there. So do I send him away, or do I say that you’ll join him?” she asks impatiently. I hesitate, now worrying that she’ll be bothered by yet another unannounced guest. Luckily Marina adds, “Well, I don’t see that you have much choice, really, but to go and speak to him.”

  “Okay, I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  Without even knowing what I’m doing, I kneel down next to my bed, resting my forehead against the sheets, my heart clattering, my mouth sticky and dry.

  Eleven

  Facing the glass doors that view the villa’s sweeping front lawns, he’s gazing up toward the convent where Puccini’s sister was a long-term resident. He’s grown his hair longer, and the broad back of his neck, my favorite part of him, is now totally covered by loose ringlets. He’s in his standard-issue white T-shirt and pale blue jeans that are probably new and expensive and are manufactured to look as though they’ve been in circulation for years. He’s become more muscular, almost too much so, and I wonder if it’s because he’s been living more of a single lifestyle and feels, as do many men, that bigger size makes him more desirable.

  Sensing my arrival, he turns and without hesitation approaches and snakes his arms around me. The familiar smell of his leather riding jacket and the open road carries no trace of Laurence’s Chanel; I have to remind myself they no longer live together. I allow the embrace to last for a moment, battling back the surge of all the old feelings. A fleeting thought: I’m glad to have met Lorenzo; it takes some sting and punch out of this unexpected reunion. When I attempt to break away, Michel begins trembling and keeps me close by holding both my elbows.

  Finally, I pry myself from his embrace. “Did Laurence tell you I was here?”

  He looks perplexed. “Laurence?”

  I explain that she’d called me here at the villa twice since my arrival.

  “Why did she call you?” Michel asks.

  “Why? You know exactly why … you’ve been out of touch with her.”

  His look of anticipation now glazes over, as though with the idea that I’ve momentarily joined the forces that are harping at him. “I’m riding, okay? I’m trying to think. Trying to make sense, trying to make some decisions.”

  I’m afraid to ask what these decisions may be about.

  “Look, I ride a long way just to see you.”

  “Why do I doubt this?”

  “Well, then, why else do I come?”

  Watching his eyes, I say, “You suddenly track me down and show up here? Without even calling to announce yourself? Then why couldn’t you have contacted me in Paris, or even called me that time I went to see Laurence … when I left you that message?”

  He throws up his hands in frustration. “Because the day you just show up at my apartment, I don’t know what to think. I don’t know if you’re trying to cause difficulties with Laurence, and therefore with me.”

  I forgot just how annoying I used to find Michel’s clinging to the present tense when he spoke in English. Now I can blame Laurence for failing to help him master the past tense.

  I continue, “Well, you should have found out by calling me. I left the number. But you never did. That’s why I don’t trust you.”

  Michel shakes his head and rubs his head with his fingers. “Then you don’t understand yet. I try to. I wait a few days, no, a week, and then I call you. But he answers the phone. He says you are not there and that he will give you the message. But then he tells me that you just get the result of your antibody test. That he believes he has passed the virus to you.”

  “So that’s when he told you. In his memoir he implies that he actually told you in person.”

  Michel shakes his head. “No, it was on the phone.”

  I shake my head, hating these conflicting facts. It only makes me doubt each man’s version of the truth. Who knows, they both could be lying to protect themselves. One thing is certain: Ed knew exactly what to say to make Michel stay away. “But you still should’ve checked to see how I was, at the very least to see how I was feeling.”

  Michel insists, “After he tells me your news, I ask him for you to call me back.”

  Ed had never told me Michel had called to begin with. “Well, when you didn’t hear from me, you should have tried again.”

  “You are right. I am sorry.”

  I now explain that Ed had lied about my status. That my last test results were actually negative.

  Michel jolts his head back, his eyes blazing, and then lurches forward, attempting to hug me. This time I push him away. Hands intertwining with nervousness, he cries, “My God, so all this time it’s a lie? I can’t believe … but, no, it’s okay, it’s obviously good because this is the best news, after all.” Then his expression falls into bewilderment. “But how could he do such a thing to you?”

  “Because he supposedly loved me. And supposedly believed you were truly bad for me. Which you probably are. And because he was a writer, so what do you expect? They’re good at telling just the right lie.”

  “Well, understand that he really scares me. Tells me to protect myself from you, from your infection. To think of my wife, to think of my children.”

  So this was the flip side of Ed’s manipulations. “He was very persuasive when he wanted to be,” I manage to say in the midst of renewed anger.

  “But you know, even though he tells me, I’m always hoping somehow it’s not true or that you will be one of the ones who survive. But I’m really sad. I even pray for you. But you must realize what he does … this is terribly wrong, this kind of lie.”

  Unfortunately, I now explain, I hadn’t known about anything—that Michel and Ed met, much less the lie that E
d had told him—until I had recently read about it in the memoir. I tell Michel I thought he never contacted me because he was finished with me. “I lived with that for months. It was awful. And now the damage is already done.”

  Michel begins pacing in front of me. “But what does this mean?” he asks finally.

  “It means that I’ve gotten over you,” I force myself to say. “Now I can’t change it. I can’t reverse it.”

  “I see,” he says sadly. “Well, in all this time I have not gotten over you. It is the reason why I move out of the flat to my own apartment. It is the reason why I go riding and am not so much in Paris.”

  Carla emerges from the kitchen with a tray holding a freshly made risotto and a plate of sliced tomatoes and basil and begins walking toward the front of the villa. I glance at my watch; it’s three o’clock in the afternoon—Stefano certainly dines at odd hours. As she passes us, Carla meets my eyes; with a shrewd glance, she appraises Michel, then throws me a look of dismay. And somehow I divine that, for some reason, she disapproves of him rather than the idea of two men in a relationship. Balancing the tray with one hand, she reaches to open the door leading to Stefano’s wing of the villa. When I rush to help her, she says proudly, “Don’t bother. I do this door twice a day.”

  Feeling a bit constrained, I turn to Michel. “Maybe we should take a little walk, clear the air a bit. What do you think?”

  He agrees and yet, now knowing that we’ll no longer be in private, looking at the pale down on his forearms, the broadened chest visible through his white T-shirt, I find myself wanting to make love to him. And this is truly distressing to me.

  As we pass through the formal dining room en route to the loggia, we bump into Marina, who is coming out of the kitchen holding the most enormous key I’ve ever seen. “Ah,” she says with cool politeness. “I just found the key to the chapel I was telling you about.” She then translates this into capable French and adds, “This morning I told Russell a story about a friend of Napoleon III who lived and died here at the villa with three Russian princesses. They are all buried in our chapel.” She turns to me. “Are you going out?”

  “Just for a walk.”

  Handing me the key she says, “Well, if you’d both like to visit the chapel you may do so.”

  “Bien sûr,” Michel says.

  Key in hand, he and I cross the loggia and descend the stone steps to follow a large gravel pathway flanked with blue hydrangeas that leads to the pink stucco chapel with neoclassical columns, constructed in the early seventeenth century. Compared to the grandeur of the older villa, the chapel’s architecture is ordinary and imitative. Approaching a door flaking with dark green paint, I fit the teeth of the gargantuan key into a giant lock. The key rotates only a little. I keep trying to turn it but remain unsuccessful.

  “May I?” asks Michel. “I believe I have a bit more experience with ancient buildings.” He struggles but finally is able to turn the key in the lock. With an explosion of dust, the door creaks open.

  The chapel smells moldy and dank. Amber bands of late-afternoon light slant through the small, prisonlike windows. The main room is occupied by an altar at one end adorned with a portrait of a black Madonna and child in a braided gold frame, but the Madonna in the picture looks wilder than one would expect, almost like a Gypsy. The room itself appears strangely vacant, and I realize this is because pews have been removed; the loose terra-cotta tiles of the floor are covered by a wide gray rug placed in front of the altar, which stretches the entire length of the chapel. The ceiling is painted to look heavenly azure, Tiepoloesque, populated by trumpeting angels and putti. A ray of sun is wheeling directly in the middle of the altar, where I notice a marble miniature that looks like a model replica of the chapel itself. There are two large brass candlesticks on either side of it with thick tawny candles burned halfway down.

  I wonder aloud where the tombs are. Michel divines the answer and, with a deft movement, goes to where the carpeting is turned over and twists the whole thing aside.

  Beneath it, the graves of the princesses and their families are marble lozenges fitted together, each inscribed with Latin texts that give details of births in Odessa and Vienna and deaths either at the villa or in some place close by. Olga, the youngest princess, apparently died in Naples.

  “Can you imagine what it must’ve been like to transport a dead body in the nineteenth century?” I wonder aloud.

  Michel says, “They have fairly sophisticated methods. After all, this happens quite a lot, especially among the wealthier classes.”

  I continue reading the snatches of engraved history while Michel wanders toward one of the windows. The light in the room seems to grow more potent. “Do we ever go to Sainte-Chapelle together?” he asks me innocently, as though suddenly inspired.

  I tell him no, that I always went to Sainte-Chapelle on my own and in fact visited the sanctuary quite often after we broke up, hoping to get a perspective on our love affair as an impossible arrangement. “I went there the day I got the results of my blood test. Right after Ed made a point of showing me the mention in the paper that you and Laurence were separated.”

  “Of course he makes sure you see that.”

  “He also said the two of you had a brief affair.”

  Michel is completely taken off guard. “He says this?”

  I find myself smiling for some reason. “He called it a flingée.”

  Michel shrugs and looks up at the ceiling in horror. “This is a complete fabrication.” He fixes his eyes on me. “I think we are introduced somewhere. But this is all. I never meet with him until …” Michel suddenly hesitates. “He asks me to find him at his café.”

  Do I believe him? My instinct … What is my instinct here? My confusion about these two men is getting worse. On one of the chapel’s far walls I notice a very crude and very graphic crucifix presenting a nude and muscular Jesus clad only in rags tied around his waist. “Something I’ve been wondering, Michel. In the very beginning, who contacted whom? Was it you who contacted Ed? Or vice versa?”

  “I will tell you. Here is how it was. A year ago at the end of September was six weeks after it’s over between us. I’m missing you, so I go to your old apartment in the eighteenth and convince them to tell me where you move. So then I go to the rue Birague and wait until I see you coming out with this older man. I think I recognize him as the American poet who lives here in Paris. Then I ask a friend who says it is and gives me his full name and I find him on the Minitel. And when I try calling, he answers the phone and tells me you are not there. He asks who I am, and then asks me to meet with him.

  “And then at the café he convinces me how depressed you are and that I have no business being in contact with you unless I am prepared to leave my wife. Obviously I don’t tell him and perhaps what I should tell him is that I am missing you so much by now that I am already seriously thinking of living always in my own apartment. To make my life more open to you.”

  “And then a month later you tried to call me again?”

  “Yes, and at this time he tells me you’re infected.”

  “Which scared you away for good.”

  Michel spreads his arms. “Well, here I am, so obviously no.”

  “Oh, come on! This is way, way too late.”

  “But if I know I have to protect myself and you might not be well eventually—and this has to be a concern, right?”

  “I suppose. But like I said, you still could’ve checked to see how I was.”

  Michel ponders this. “But if I never stop thinking about you anyway, even if believing the poet’s lies, does that mean something, does that mean anything?”

  I study his face, constricted with all sorts of battling emotions. I want to believe him but am afraid to because somehow I don’t sense I’m getting the entire story, or even the exact chronology of events. And Ed’s death means I have only what he wrote in his memoir to compare to what Michel has just told me. I backtrack a bit. “What do you mean by making you
r life more open to me?”

  “The truth is, Russell, that I will always have to stay married to Laurence. The big reason, after all: Laurence is the one who has the money. The fabrics business, although mine, failed. I’m forced to sell it to my partner. I don’t get much at all, unfortunately, so I now depend even more on her. But this has always been our arrangement. She marries my family because we have an old name. And I marry her family because she has no name but money. We grow to love each other. And this often is how it goes,” he says simply but painfully. And yet I can detect how difficult it is for him to admit how dependent he is upon Laurence, that on some level he feels ashamed.

  I point out, “So then Ed was right. No matter what, you would never leave her. And even if you say that he meddled, despite his jealousy he convinced himself he was doing me a favor by keeping me away from you. And you a favor by lying.”

  “But if she and I will live apart, as we are now, then I will have plenty of time to spend with you. Especially because Laurence will accept this.”

  “What makes you assume that?”

  “Well, first of all, because this can happen—”

  “You mean when a man has a mistress and keeps her separate from his family and from the rest of his life?”

  “Something like this, yes.”

  “But I’m a man, so it’s not so easily accepted. This, according to your wife!” I explain that the day I showed up at the apartment, Laurence informed me that Michel’s living with a man would never be accepted by the echelons of the social world into which he was born, that it would be far more difficult than having a mistress on the side.