Suddenly, the chatter dies at the table, but I am too possessed by my rendering to give it any thought. And yet perhaps I should have. There is a reason for the silence.
“Scusi,” I hear said in my direction.
I look up.
“Lei è un artista?”
I hesitate before speaking. The woman is addressing me as the others look on. Her hair is swept across her face by a sudden piazza crosswind.
“Signore?”
“Sì,” I manage to utter finally as a response to her curiosity. I sense I’ve been caught stealing. “But my English is better than my Italian.”
The woman smiles again coyly, then lifts her glass of prosecco to me, and I remember that long-forgotten Chianti, and we touch glasses. She toasts in appreciation of artists—of all artists, not just me—and it fills me with sudden joy.
“My name is Rodrigo. Please forgive me. I am sketching you. Do you mind?”
She replies while laughing and looking at her friends. “I am flattered,” she says in her Florentine-accented English. “Be my guest. But aren’t you missing something?”
“. . . Of course . . .” I smile, too.
With that she rests the frames of her sunglasses upon her head, offering up the final gift: her eyes. They are green and aqua, like the waters of Sardinia, and I am stunned by their beauty. To me, the eyes of a woman hold all the mysteries of the world, and the eyes of a beautiful woman hold the greatest treasure of all.
An hour goes by, and a couple of my subject’s friends peel away from the table and mention their destinations. But my subject stays, projecting her music, that voice that haunts me. With her remaining friends, she speaks of lives foreign to me in a fluid Italian concerto. I am on my fourth glass of Chianti. I feel very warm, and I am driving at full capacity.
Eventually, I see in my peripheral vision that she is getting up from the table.
“Is it finished, artist Rodrigo?”
I add several lightning touches and lean back in my chair. “ ‘Finished’ is always a loaded proposition. But, yes.”
“My name is Carlotta.”
I rise and shake her hand, a light press of soft, slender, elegant fingers meeting my own thick and callused, dried-paint-speckled ones. The combination of ancient voice and eyes weakens me. She continues to look at me.
“So, are you going to give it to me?”
The question takes me by surprise. Not that I am selfish, but I need to keep something of her, and I can’t let it go. A rush of nervousness hits me, and I am reduced to a standing awkward fool.
“Uh, no. It’s fifty thousand dollars.” Instantly, I knew I shouldn’t have said that.
The lovely smile dies a little then; it kills me to see that. I am every bit the fool I feared. In the brief silence, I pray to the gods of frescoes that she hasn’t taken my crass comment the wrong way.
“Fifty thousand dollars? It took you just a few minutes . . .”
“No, it took me a lifetime,” I say, and immediately recognize that I have been doubly rude.
The truth is my sketch does not do justice to her beauty, and I am ashamed of it. I do not want her to have a mediocre piece. That would be the greatest of all my sins. But she could not know that.
Her face contorts. It remains just as beautiful, but a different color of beauty’s rainbow. Her mood has been altered, along with her opinion of me.
“It took me a lifetime, too. Bravo, artista di merda!”
I am more than an asshole. I am a jerk. A garden-variety jackass. She leaves me standing there dumb, confused, and numb to the touch.
Her remark is to the point and correct. It has taken her a lifetime to become the exquisite creature that she’s become, not just her uncommon physical traits but her smarts and instantaneous wit as well. I have spent only an afternoon with her, and already I am possessed and haunted by her. Now, rebuffed, I am obsessed with her.
I tear out of the restaurant looking in every direction, but there are floods of tourists and backpackers mixing in with the Fiorentini. I decide on Via dei Calzaiuoli heading toward the Ponte Vecchio. I ascend the quaint little medieval bridge, and at its crest, I see her gazing into the jewelry case of an artisan’s shop. She is eyeing a silver panther with ruby eyes. I approach her, so fully relieved I have found her.
“Mi dispiace,” I apologize.
She looks up quickly, then stares back into the display case. But she does not move away. “Rodrigo Concepción. The Spanish painter. Famous”—she says, then she looks back over at me—“playboy . . . and arrogant.”
I hesitate and let myself shift from the posturing me of minutes before to the real me. Sometimes I am arrogant, on the surface—a defense mechanism, really—but deep inside, where the real me hides, I am shy, even humble. I decide that being vulnerable and letting her see the real me is the only way to get back in her good graces.
“I feel for the panthers, Carlotta. They are constantly annihilated for their beauty. Sometimes that’s the problem.”
My comment has taken her by surprise. “How do you mean?”
“I mean that beauty can be punished. Like success. And then, of course, you can become a prisoner. To them both.”
“Are you a prisoner?”
“Perhaps, yes. But worse than that, I am crude. And unmannered. Please forgive me.”
“Forgive me also. I don’t often use such language.”
“I deserved it. I was fearful that my drawing was, well, less than what I am capable of. Less than what my subject was. I did not want you to even see it.”
She just looks at me, but not blankly. There is weight to her gaze. It is not surrender but enough of a capitulation to incite me to try to start over.
“Let me buy you a caffè.”
She eyes me briefly and does not look away. She smiles so very faintly. “Mi dispiace, I have to go. Maybe next time.”
I tear out a page from the sketchpad and extend it to her. She reaches for it, and our fingers graze as she accepts it. Her softness meets my roughness. Again.
She is expecting it to be her portrait. It is not—not this time. She glances at the drawing. “Grazie mille,” she says tepidly, and once again produces that reserved curve of her lips which I have already grown to love.
She continues walking, and I know not to follow her. I know to never follow beautiful creatures in the night. They can become very dangerous, and so I watch the danger disappear from sight.
THAT NIGHT I AM SCHEDULED for a dinner date with my old friends Bernardo and Catarina. But I cannot eat, and I don’t want my meditations obstructed with small talk, so I cancel.
I am floating and watching myself from above as I make my way back to the pensione near the Accademia. As I get closer to the hotel, I hear that voice again, her voice, and I look around, to the corner, up on the scaffold, to an apartment sundeck, but I cannot see her anywhere. I swear I can hear that voice, but the creature in possession of it is nowhere to be found. She is like a ghost.
As I ascend the stairs to my penthouse and art studio, I pass some transients checking out with Giuliana. I am tipsy and exhausted, and it is time for me to rest. That chance encounter with the woman at Giubbe, it was a dream. Was she a tourist? Or native Fiorentina? I will likely never see her again. That’s what I tell myself. That’s what I have to tell myself. It is the most merciful thing I can do.
I decide I can’t stand the new canvas I am making from the New York series, and I get up and slash it into strips with an X-Acto knife, and I do it with relish.
I return to bed to die a soft death. “She is a ghost, I think.” And I say it over and over, like a mantra, until I can say no more.
I hope the ghost appreciated my flower.
7
NEW YORK TOREADOR
My eyes unsealed and I was again befuddled and confused, unsure of where I was. Alfonso strode in noiselessly with a wellness shot and some scrambled eggs, asking me how I felt. My butler’s presence in my bedroom snapped me out of my disoriented daze. I
was back at the casa SoHo. I knew I’d been sleeping heavily and dreaming substantially. I was feeling invigorated for some reason, if not upbeat and inspired.
“Hola, Alfonso, gracias—”
“Maestro, you have been sleeping for a long time.”
I groaned something Neanderthal and unintelligible even to me. I cleared my dry, raspy throat. “Bueno. Rest for the wicked.”
The man smiled dutifully with a glint of gold from his rear molar.
“And I think I had a good time . . .”
Once Alfonso glided out, I took a ravenous bite of the eggs and switched on the flat-screen with no sound, just to settle me and infuse me with the colors of the world.
It wasn’t long before Rafaela charged into the room, slamming the door against the wall and sending a chip of paint fluttering helplessly to the carpet like a dead butterfly. She did look beautiful when she was angry, and her rage was unleashed upon my bureau as she rifled through every drawer, tossing each one shut with menace.
“Tell me where, Rodrigo.”
I coughed a little. “Where what?” came out half-baked.
“Where the fuck are they?”
“They? Who the hell is ‘they’?”
“The sleeping pills! You have been sleeping for two entire days!”
“Two?” I swigged on the cappuccino with another mouthful of eggs. “That sounds wonderful. Good for me.”
“You know how much work you have to do?”
That gave me pause. “Well, why didn’t you wake me up, then?”
“I have been trying to! I almost called 911!”
“You aren’t allowed to do that . . . I don’t like 911.”
While rummaging through my closet, Rafaela found the little red box from my childhood. She snatched out my vitamin baggie and threw the contents of each pill canister in the toilet and flushed it.
I was still groggy and didn’t have the will to speak of the economics involved: she’d just jettisoned a few hundred dollars’ worth of meds. I was content to change the channel with the remote and find some new colors. In times like these, ignoring her was crucial, a natural defense against hypertension.
Rafaela tossed off some more targeted vitriol and spiked condemnation, and that was just fine with me. Eventually, I slid out of bed and removed my pajama bottoms, while Rafaela was still barking like a Doberman. For some reason I slammed the bathroom door behind me, even though I was not so emotional. It was a statement of sorts, just to indicate who was still the boss.
I bypassed the bathtub, already prepared, and opted for a shower. I loved steam showers, and this was the only conscious decision I made. The fact was, I could not get that Florentine dream out of my head. Who is this girl, and where did she come from? Had I ever met her, or was she just a creation of my mind, like a new painting, orchestrated and brushstroked during sleep? I figured the steam shower might provide me with some answers.
But it did not.
. . . And where is she now?
I locked myself in the studio and placed a towel at the base of the door to shut out any light or sound or anything else on the other side. All day I sketched and finessed her portrait, dozens of times, to improve upon my disastrous effort at the Giubbe Rosse—I remembered that much of the dream. I suppose it’s like, after a thousand victories, you remember only the game you played badly and lost. I paid particular attention to her eyes, which she had shielded most of the afternoon but then revealed gloriously in the golden-hour piazza sunlight with the simple but deft lift of the oval shades. I attempted to infuse the mystery of her within the hazel-green irises of her beautiful eyes and in her delicate mouth, akin to the elusive gaze and mysterious grin of the Mona Lisa. Each time I had an inkling I was capturing her, she somehow escaped, the same way she had fled from me that evening at the Giubbe, and then again at the Ponte Vecchio.
As I labored unsuccessfully through the charcoals and then the oils, I kept trying to decipher where I had met her. Had I met her once, albeit briefly, and did she exist after all? There had been so, so many nights of surrealistic nocturnal social clashes with massive intake and indulgence, and perhaps I was recalling her from some lost and out-of-bounds condition that was barely registering on my synapses. But nothing came to mind, and the mystery raged on.
Of course, I tried to deconstruct the reasons for my folly. This girl, this woman, meant something more to me—perhaps too much—and I was cracking under the pressure. She was sapping me of my confidence; I was no longer the bold and dynamic Rodrigo, the toreador painter, a matador of art, becoming both the bull and the bully in the process, and taking down one toro after another with relative if not arrogant ease. Something about this young woman unmanned me, unglued me, incited my nervousness, and made my hand awkward and tentative, sweaty, clammy, and increasingly unsure. I was capturing something, yes, but not her, not Carlotta di Firenze. The mere thought of her was turning me into a fumbling art student.
The only allowance I gave myself for such mediocre efforts was that I did not really know this woman; I had not spent enough time with her, and I needed to get to know her better. It was incumbent upon me to seek her out, and this became my mission.
It was not lost on me, either, that this Carlotta was satisfying a need for me psychologically: she was filling a void, a hole, the hole that my present dissatisfying life was becoming. She was an ideal and a perfect creation of my mind; it was my soul’s gift to me, it must have been. How else could she be explained? She wasn’t in my living room. Or bathroom. Or hallway. She had taken up residence in my mind, at my soul’s invitation. Good, soul. Good on you. Help the desperate man in need.
And then I unleashed a rendering with a fury. My fingers were again at my beck and call, and I summoned a work that I would consider my masterwork, if not masterpiece. The feline eyes, lit by the golden Tuscan sun, came alive like twin emeralds. All the shades of green, from lime to mint to sage, were present in those eyes, and she was breathing before me. Carlotta was alive. Then I replicated the formula on all the previous duds and failures, leaving some as sketches and half-painting them while completing others. The series was scintillating, and I was prideful yet protective: I knew in that moment that I would never show these paintings to anyone.
Rodrigo the toreador had returned and imposed his will upon the canvases, making them succumb to his desires. I had tricked myself, my mind had deceived me temporarily, to allow my verve and confidence to reclaim me. This was the only way. And how did I do it? In the most Machiavellian of ways.
On the canvas itself, in the paintings, I had to deconstruct her, degrade her, devalue her, in order to have her, to capture her ghostly all-everything spirit. My soul had responded to the desperation and given me the wherewithal to birth this creation. I sighed in relief when she was done. And when I left the studio, I double-locked the door behind me. I didn’t want anyone to see her. Any part of her. She was mine and I would be selfish, for both of us.
Rafaela had been calling and texting me for hours, as I was late for a club opening. I didn’t care. But now I was done. My hands trembled as I locked the studio door, and I knew why. There was more to this Carlotta. Though I’d deconstructed her, there was more to the story. I hadn’t really stopped believing in her. She was more than a garden-variety muse. And I needed to get to know her better.
I had tricked myself into seizing her portrait. Something fresh and authentic and real had been aroused in me. I didn’t give a shit if it would sell, nor would I put any of it up for sale. It would be a series not driven by the demands of a marketplace. But this series needed to come to life, it needed oxygen, it needed to live and breathe. And I asked for mercy.
“Please forgive me, Carlotta,” I said aloud. “I have stolen from you. And I hope to repay you in ways I have never paid anyone.”
8
MALICE IN WONDERLAND
I had come to an agreement with the owners of the Mina Hotel to adorn their lower-level space with my fantasy murals. I had thought the
dark, subterranean lounge would be the perfect setting and ambience for my Alice in Wonderland frescoes, but after I started, I didn’t like the idea at all. I didn’t like the surface of the walls I had to paint on, I didn’t like the light, and I didn’t like what I painted on those walls and in that light. Sometimes it’s like that: you don’t know what will happen with an idea until you try it. Like it or not, though, I had a contract, and I had to finish what I had agreed to do. I totally understood why even some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance had been known to abandon commissioned works in progress—and had occasionally gotten away with it. But there was no way I would get away with it. I had to keep on painting.
The whole project had been a pain in the ass to do, and now it was opening night. I didn’t want to go at all or to do any press, but Rafaela goaded me. I had exhausted myself earlier that evening, and I followed her without protest, like a dog on a leash. We arrived two hours late, and as soon as I entered, I knew I did not want to be there. The place was crowded but empty. And I still didn’t like what I saw on the walls. Made me feel like a whore, like I had sold out for the money, instead of following my soul.
The staff escorted Rafaela and me to my designated booth. When I looked across the room, I detected the unctuous con artists, connivers, strokers, and rip-offs—who had an agenda in a setting like this—slithering in and around tables and booths, identifying big-money targets to whom they might unleash their profiteering deceptions: the art-world heavies, real estate agents, Wall Streeters, gallerists, publicists, lawyers, and also the more reptilian middlemen like themselves, learned in the art of greed and getting their piece. The filler was there, too, the urban underground nomads who had been avoiding the light of day for years and had climbed out from beneath their rocks and emerged from East Village roommate-stuffed hovels to engage in another evening of 100-proof aimlessness.
Just that simple gaze across the room made me angry.
“So, no interviews?” my PR gal, Rachel, leaned in and barked, like a real Manhattan pusherette. She was boasting of all the C-list attendees she’d invited, B-list hopefuls, and A-list pipe dreams. The fact is, the A-listers I knew were across town attending several movie premieres—and that was just fine. Maybe they were even getting to see a decent flick. I chose to ignore Rachel’s blatherings and informed Rafaela that I was going upstairs to have a smoke.
The Beautiful Dream of Life Page 4
