Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

  She sits down on the damp chaise longue. I deserve to be cold, she thinks. In Bologna, Rowan had taken her hand when they crossed a busy street. She’d looked down as though she were holding a fish. As soon as they got to the curb, she pretended to shift her bag and took her hand away. In the museum, he’d guided her twice by her elbow. She’d not been touched in eighteen months. A surge of current ran through his hand. Rowan is nothing like big Charles. He’s bony, with a Roman nose and unruly eyebrows. And the beard. She doesn’t know what she thinks of the beard.

  After the fine press exhibit, where Rowan lingered over every cover design and layout, they stopped for lunch and looked over the books he’d bought. She loved learning about the typefaces and inks. Don’t the most powerful friendships start when a person opens a new world for you? Rowan hardly ate. He had much to say about various printers, how many missed the crucial tie between form and content while others got it, got it. She loved his intensity. Her own ignited as they talked books, talked art. She has been reading about old pigments, how they were made from burned peach pits, berries, cochineal bugs, and charred bones. Can they learn to make them together?

  After lunch, at the Morandi museum, she was the one who held forth. To her surprise, as she noticed the relationship to architecture of the boxy and cylindrical shapes in one painting, she put her hand on Rowan’s shoulder as she gestured. “It looks like the abstracted skyline of some small angle of Bologna,” she mused.

  Rowan pointed out the wavy edges of Morandi’s boxes, bottles, and teapots. He smiled. “They look deckled.” With Charles, she’d never really discussed art, only in passing, never linked to him on that level of herself.

  Charles wasn’t indifferent to art but his interest, she realized, was perfunctory rather than passionate. She suddenly wondered if that was part of why she quit painting. She wanted Charles’s full interest, and art was not the conduit.

  She became so invested in their life together, all the vigor and fun and challenge of it, that she locked herself out. She never noticed when the marriage she loved began to dull her craving for making art. And, well, there was that trip to New York. She didn’t want to think of that. Marriage kept me in a cozy cocoon, she thinks. Wings furled. That’s harsh. I was happy. Admit it—happy but bound. Honey-soaked wings.

  When they’d arrived back in San Rocco, Rowan offered her a ride home. As they drove from the lower hill toward town, he said, “I live right down the next road. I have the place for my sabbatical. Why don’t I make us a quick pasta arrabbiata, my specialty—well, the extent of my culinary expertise. That and pesto.”

  “Sounds good to me. I told Julia, she’s our resident chef, that I might be late.”

  * * *

  —

  Rowan pushed her chair in at the table and sliced the bread. “Are you married?” she asked.

  “No. I was once. In my twenties, I fell for a doctor with two kids, six and seven. She was nine years older than I, and, man, she had an obnoxious ex. He was an emergency room doc at the hospital where she practiced. Briefly, we were married ten years and I helped raise her boy and girl. They were tossed back and forth with the ex and nothing ever seemed settled. Lot of problems, especially with the girl. I’m not proud of this but I couldn’t love them as much as I should. Tess worked long hours. She was smart. Vivacious. My work didn’t remotely interest her. A drift set in. I couldn’t hack it with the kids when they became teenagers. Lorie, always a drama queen, flipped on Christmas morning when she was sixteen because I didn’t get her the right computer. She stalked out of the living room shouting that she hated everyone. And Jack. Trouble. That same holiday, he turned up with a case of gonorrhea. Seventeen. This shit was constant. The final episode was the big New Year’s Eve reveal. The ex called me and said he was having an affair with Tess, and had been for two years. That was it. Sick story from two healers.”

  “It was true?”

  “And more, yes. They’ve lived together ever since. The kids, I don’t want to go there. Walking disasters.”

  “No one since? That’s a long time ago.”

  “Yes, you know, casual hookups. Two other involved relationships with former students, eager to hear about every r and k I set in type. Both flared and faded. Both young, eventually wanting that baby.” He served us seconds.

  She replays after dinner when he built a fire and in the middle of more talk of Morandi, perhaps more Morandi than he wanted to hear, he pulled her close and firmly kissed her. The next thing she remembers is his beard on her bare full breasts, and then she lies back on the sofa as he stands up and strips off his shirt and pants. She pulls off her sweater. At least the light is dim, she thought. “I don’t know…” she begins, but he is on her and his hands are everywhere. Those white-as-porcelain hands that manipulate the tiniest type, those hands. She’s dry but his mouth is not. Everything works. She laughs and he does as well. They’re moving hard enough that she fears for the sofa.

  “Where did that come from?” She has her arms still around him and can feel the standing knots of his spine. Did he orchestrate this? California free spirit beds down another hippie chick?

  “From when you sketched a cypress tree on the napkin yesterday. From when you introduced yourself: Camille. I’ve always loved camellias. And you were so wide-eyed at the papermaking class.” No, he’s passionate. He’s who he seems to be. Obviously, skilled at more than typesetting.

  So. That happened.

  * * *

  —

  It must be five in the morning. I’ll be a wreck for my full day in Venice, she thinks. I don’t have to solve anything. Am I, underneath all the agonizing, glad? Charles. And Charlie! Wouldn’t they be stunned?

  Camille went back to her bed. Susan appeared not to have moved. She ruffed her pillow and determined to sleep. She had no eloquence like Rowan’s—she’d merely thought him an interesting-looking person when she met him—nothing to explain why she’d had sex, really fine sex considering they were on a rickety sofa, with someone she barely knew. Such a grieving widow, she thought. But, am I full of regret, or do I feel that I should be? I’m not accustomed to being a free agent. What’s the downside? I’m used to considering everyone. I don’t have to. Maybe the surprising thing should be not that I had a one-night stand but that someone desires me, at my age. (And his age, too, as a matter of fact.) I didn’t even worry about my thighs or my biopsy scar or if I’d sweated in Bologna. I felt aggressive. What I let myself flow into was a big rush of freedom. I thought that was over.

  She slept.

  * * *

  —

  I am the first one up. I walk up the calle to a bar already crowded with locals on their way to work. At a quiet table with my cappuccino and pastry, I miss Colin and “our” inn with small rooms painted with scenes from commedia dell’arte. On our days in Venice, we walk for miles every morning, taking in current exhibits, spend leisurely afternoons in our room, then go out for ombre, drinks named for the small shadowy bars that plunk down a tumbler of simple red on the counters. Long dinners beside some canal ensue.

  Good, I have a signal. It’s an hour earlier in London but Colin already is poring over the plans for the Saudi hotel. He picks up immediately. “Still knocked off my perch,” he admits, “but I’m feeling something I’ve never even considered—this more profound kind of intimacy. We couldn’t be closer. But now we are. And it strikes me that—you know, the intertwining of DNA, this new person—implicates us in a new way.”

  “Implicates. Interesting word. What you say is true, but does it make you feel sure you want to go forward as somebody’s daddy? I’ve never understood the basics that other people seem to take for granted. Birth. Death. Seeds knowing how to be chard or sunflowers. The sun reliably shines. Seeing—the optic nerve, for god’s sake. Miracle! An elderly person looks back at the child she was and that child seems still to exist. Now I’m caught up in one of those mysteries. I
don’t even know how my phone is calling you from this Italian bar.” I pause. “And sleep. Who understands why we fall unconscious and start up a thousand stories on some internal screen?”

  “Kit, stay calm. You’re wigging out but you’re right. Last night I dreamed I was riding on the back of a whale. Where does that originate?”

  I laugh. “Well, that one seems obvious. But, yes, why does your brain present you with that image?”

  “I’ve got a meeting, love. That image is why you love poetry.”

  “Hey, we’ll talk later. I imagine everyone’s up and ready by now. We’re going to the Rialto, then the market. Julia is on a mission to learn all the names of fish in the Adriatic, quite the feat. She’s going to flip when she sees the Latin names on the iced counters of fish, and even the name of the boat the fish came from. Then, a couple of museums, maybe just wandering about. Camille wants to go to art supply shops and Susan wants to get some books on Venetian gardens, oh, the Peggy Guggenheim garden. She’ll most likely be looking for sculptures for Villa Assunta after that.”

  “They sound great. But think of me. Think of our favorite room with all the masked actors painted on the walls.” On our first trip we succumbed to buying masks and both of us became totally spooked when we wore them while making love.

  Masks scared me as a child on Halloween, even the papier-mâché Raggedy Ann my mother made for me. You put on the mask and you are gone. All the touristy masks for sale around Venice repulse me. I hope I don’t get the “mask of pregnancy.” Note to self: sunscreen, #50, even in winter.

  * * *

  —

  By evening, we’d all combed Venice—back canals with lines of sheets and shirts strung across overhead, stray cats slinking down narrow passageways with bright lights shining at the end, sudden piazzas where children kick soccer balls, and water, the common denominator: everything bounded by water. At Julia’s suggestion, for dinner we traveled over the waters to Mazzorbo, a lagoon island where adventurous winemakers brought back an ancient vine, started a small inn and a restaurant. Susan arranges a water taxi to take us over. I love this little island just beside lively Burano, the most colorful village on earth. It’s a living paint sale. Mazzorbo is opposite, quiet, weedy, sparsely populated. (I started to write backwater but wrote timewash. Nice word for these lagoon islands: timewash.)

  The restaurant is sleek, glassy, and subdued. Julia confers with the waiter. Even I don’t know some of the words on the menu. Everything’s local and they’re using algaes and other plants that grow in brackish water. Salicornia, Julia decides, is pickleweed that grows on dunes at home. Camille misreads squab on the English translation, thinking she’s ordering something with squash. Half through, it comes out that she’s vastly enjoying pigeon, which she never could imagine ordering. “So much tastier than turkey,” she says. “Remember it’s Thanksgiving week at home.” They talk about their traditions, the rushing to the football game, the walks in the woods. Julia remembers making pumpkin soup in a pumpkin and the bottom falling out as she took it into the dining room. “Thanks, Julia Child! A mess!”

  Susan said that after the girls decided they were vegetarians, they always went to an Indian restaurant for Thanksgiving. Camille usually invited a table of students and cousins and Charlie’s friends. “My overwhelming memory is exhaustion—the endless preparation, the cleanup, with the actual meal seeming to be over too fast. I always threw out the cranberry sauce that no one ate.” But lovely. Charles at the end of the table, clashing the knives and asking who wants dark, who wants white. The late afternoon nap, the house quiet.

  The winemaker has produced an extraordinary white from an almost extinct varietal. Golden and unctuous, the wine seems to sing. They hardly dare order a bottle because it’s wildly expensive but they do. Sliced four ways, much is affordable. Camille shocks the bejesus out of us when she suddenly offers a toast to “uninhibited sex on sofas.” Madonna! I take a sip of the wine. The Venetian sun has melted into the glass.

  * * *

  —

  One of the magic experiences on planet earth: zooming in an open boat across dark waters toward Venice.

  Chris arrived in Cormòns last night. As Susan pulls into the parking lot beside the hotel, he is just starting up a retro-style yellow Vespa. He jumps off, hugs them all, and helps take in their bags. “How was Venice? Look.” He gestures toward a row of Vespas. “The hotel lets guests use them. Ever ridden one?”

  Julia had a moped in high school. Camille has ridden a few times on the back of the motorcycle Charles had in law school. Susan hasn’t ever been on one but is ready for instruction. (I bet she is! Watch out, Friuli.) I’ve hopped on a few during my years here but I won’t risk weaving along hilly roads now. Since wine tasting is out of bounds for me anyway, I’ll plead work to do and pay attention to my Margaret project for a few hours. The countryside looks enticing, what we could see of it as Susan burned up the road. I’m getting cautious and if I were religious I would have uttered a few supplicating prayers on the way. Julia and Camille seem used to surging speeds and aggressive passing. Susan is a natural Italian driver; she gets that it’s a blood sport.

  * * *

  —

  While the others settle in, Chris and Julia sit in the bar. She opens her files and he sees why she was a top editor. She has researched and prioritized the Friuli area; she’s organized hotels, restaurants, towns, and points of interest, keeping variety in mind. “We can visit my choices and then choose what works best for the groups,” she says. “I’ve left the wine to you, and that’s top focus.”

  “Yes, but it’s food, people, and fascinating places that make trips exceptional.”

  “Chris, you are what makes your trips exceptional. I saw that from the beginning. You have a natural ebullience that’s infectious. You have a good time, so everyone does.” He’s quick to smile, quick to praise, Julia thought. No dark streak of rage.

  “You’re sweet to say so. You haven’t seen me delayed for six hours in the Frankfurt airport, about to melt into a pool of butter. Or trying to find the emergency room at night when someone has projectile vomiting!”

  Julia already has studied the regional food. At lunch in the hotel, she suggests frico. “Perfect for a chilly day, though we should have been tending vines to work up an appetite. Frico is local. One of the basic food groups here! It’s like something fantastic happened to hash browns—a fried cheese and potato crisp, crunchy on the outside and creamy inside.”

  “I already can taste it,” Chris says.

  “They use Montasio cheese. I never heard of it but it’s from local cows who’ve munched on something good.” Already anticipating dinner, Julia scans the menu. She’s stumped by many words: guazzeto, abbrusolita, scalognato. The food has absolutely nothing to do with the Tuscan dishes she’d come to know well.

  Venison appeared in various preparations, deer liver in one.

  * * *

  —

  Chris goes blessedly slow as they get their bearings on the Vespas. “We’re in a Fellini movie,” Susan shouts, but no one hears.

  “This must be heaven in summer,” Julia shouts, but no one hears. They all catch snatches of Chris belting out, is he crazy, “America the Beautiful,” followed by “Roxanne.”

  Rough-clad men with weather-tanned faces and hard handshakes open the doors to cask rooms. Tasting takes place on an upturned barrel. No T-shirts, as in California; no flavored olive oils, no mugs, no shopping hype. The wines come out one by one, always poured into proper glasses. Turns out, the men are the owners. They have dogs thumping their tails. They have work to do. The tractor waits beside the door; they’re in briefly from the fields. Chris buys cases, and the owners also give the women bottles. Chris stacks everything outside to pick up later.

  * * *

  —

  Three vineyards down, two more to visit, but those are too far for novice Vespa drivers. I
n the late afternoon, Chris and Julia take the van. The others stay at the hotel with their books bought in Venice. Camille, probably the least obsessed with food and wine, writes on her laptop. She was too enamored of Venice to leave. When I stood in front of the Porta della Carta, she writes to Charlie, a project came into focus. After weeks (decades?) of casting about, gazing at art, sketching, pondering, dreaming, I knew that I wanted my own paper doors. The workshop with Matilde was fortuitous because it gave me the idea of working with paper in a new way. I’m impatient to get to work now and I’m considering skipping the rest of the Friuli trip. But everything is fascinating me. She thought of her canvases from art school and beyond, wedged under an eave at her house in Chapel Hill. Was there a smidgen of talent there? She had been given a fellowship. She recalled life models from classes, a still life of roses in a green bowl, a few landscapes. PS, she added to Charlie, Look at my paintings in the attic. Is there anything to admire?