In a world defined by an insatiable hunger to gorge its senses with explosions of color and fulmination of sound and unrelenting activity, looking intently at a drawing on a piece of paper was an almost ascetic act. Strand found it, in her, beguiling.
When there was only a single room of drawings left to see, he drifted back to her and they finished the exhibit together.
Outside the threat of rain had passed and the sun was bearing down through the heavy air. The humidity was so high that their sunglasses fogged over immediately when they put them on. Mara laughed about this and said she found the city’s semitropical atmosphere a challenge to feminine grace. On the other hand, she added, wiping off her sunglasses on the hem of her dress, she thought there was something sexy about the heat.
They returned to Strand’s house and sat for a few minutes in the air-conditioned library, sipping iced tea.
“Well, that was fun,” Mara said. “It was, uh, it was comfortable being with you.” Then, frowning, watching him closely, “I hope that doesn’t sound… odd to you.”
“No, not at all.” He smiled. “I know what you mean.”
Mara daubed at the sweat on her glass with her napkin, thinking.
“You don’t know,” she said tentatively, “how much I appreciate your asking me to have lunch here, with you and Meret. It’s the first normal thing I’ve done in… ages.”
“Normal?”
Her eyes roamed the bookshelves. “Well, maybe normal isn’t the right word, but, I don’t know… comfortable, normal…” She took a deep breath. “It felt… tranquil.”
She looked up cautiously to see how that might strike him.
He nodded.
“I’m just trying to say that it felt good to be included in something like that.” She shook her head. “With this really absurd divorce grinding on, sometimes I feel an absence of context, as though I’m just not quite meshing with… anything.” She stopped. “This is muddy water to you, isn’t it? I’m not making myself very clear.”
Strand nodded. “I’ve enjoyed today, too. It’s been a good thing, for both of us.”
She looked at her watch. “Well, the morning appointment has turned into most of the day.” She stood. “It’s been wonderful. Thank you very much, Harry Strand.”
The time of day that Harry Strand hated finally arrived. It used to be his favorite, the hour just before dusk when the sun was poised only a few degrees above the horizon and the sharp light of the southern spring relented to the inevitable demise of another day. In the garden of the courtyard, protected by the stone walls of the old house, shade had already enveloped the fountain and the palms, and the blue hues of evening were alchemizing the tropical greens of Romy’s garden into deepening shadows.
Romy’s garden. Romy’s time of day. Sometimes Strand still kept their ritual, sitting in the quiet with a glass of ice-chilled Scotch. But it wasn’t any good anymore. The companionship was gone, the exchanges of small concerns and expressions of small delights. The Scotch remained. More of it now than before, of course. It didn’t replace what he had had, but for a little while every day it dulled the regret of having lost it.
Tonight, instead of taking his drink into the courtyard, Strand took it into the library, put on a CD of Lucia di Lammermoor, and took down all of his books on the five artists who had created Mara Song’s drawings. He put all the books on the library table, pulled his chair close, took a sip of Scotch, and began searching through the books.
After nearly an hour, Strand went into the kitchen to pour another drink. He returned to the library, turned off all the lights except a small one, and kicked off his shoes, propping his feet on the seat of another chair. Lucia di Lammermoor was well into its tragic story as he let his eyes settle on the drawing illuminated by the dim light on the wall at the end of the library table. There, in a space especially created in the center of the bookshelves, was his own Maillol drawing, a conté study of a nude the artist had done in preparation for executing the lithographic illustrations for the French-language edition of Lucian of Samosota’s The Dialogues of the Courtesans.
The image was of a woman who, in the process of walking away from the viewer, turns in midstride and looks back. It was the first drawing that Strand and Romy had bought together, shortly after she’d come to live with him while he was in Vienna. He had discovered it in the home of an old Austrian banker whose family had retained Strand to appraise his art collection prior to selling his estate. It was a lovely thing, and when he’d shown it to Romy she had reacted to it passionately. She had become intrigued by the tenuous message implied in the turn of the woman’s hips, by the curiosity conveyed in the twist of her neck and her tilted shoulders, her head, bent slightly and turned to cast a sidelong glance at the viewer.
The number of hours Strand had sat here looking at this drawing during the last year was well into the hundreds. Or so it seemed. Though the house was full of art that they had collected during their years together, this single drawing held more of Romy’s soul than any of them; when he was in its presence, he was in Romy’s presence.
It was at this moment that Strand suddenly thought of Mara Song. She was the first woman since Romy who had worked her way unbidden into his thoughts. He was just superstitious enough to find that of significance, though he had no idea what significance to attach to it. Maybe it simply meant that it had been long enough, and Mara’s appearance at this point in his life was nothing more than a gift of time and circumstance.
CHAPTER 8
Within a few days of receiving Mara’s drawings, Strand finished his appraisal of her images and asked her to come over to review it. She came in the middle of the afternoon, and they talked about his conclusions and how he would approach the sale. Mara was still there when Meret left at five o’clock. They had drinks. They talked. Strand suggested they go to Chiara’s for dinner.
A few days after that Mara called him to say she had received legal papers from Italy that represented yet another hurdle in her complex divorce proceedings. Would he like to celebrate—quietly? She had learned of a Thai restaurant that might be good. They ended the evening talking over drinks in the garden of Strand’s house.
Gradually, with neither of them bringing attention to it, the subject of the sale of the drawings fell away. Mara returned the drawings to the bank vault. Strand didn’t mention it because the sale of the drawings was a conclusion and introduced a connection to the end of something. He didn’t ask Mara why she had dropped the subject.
The next few weeks passed quickly. Strand and Mara saw a lot of each other, each of them growing increasingly at ease with calling the other to suggest dinner at a favorite restaurant or a movie or just to get together at either of their homes for a meal, which often ran late.
Mara came frequently enough to Strand’s at the end of the day that she and Meret soon became good friends. Often when Mara was coming over for the evening she would show up a little early, before Meret left for the day, and the two of them would have an early glass of wine and visit while Strand finished whatever he was doing in his office.
Sometimes on weekends when Meret wasn’t working, Mara would come over and spend the day, browsing in Harry’s library or playing CDs from his collection while he worked at his desk. She would bring her sketchbooks and curl up in a chair somewhere and work quietly. They would have drinks in the garden and talk, a pastime of which neither of them seemed to tire, every conversation bringing to each of them an accumulative knowledge of the other that continued to stabilize their friendship.
And it remained a friendship, a close friendship, but nothing more than that. Mara always went home in the evenings, or Strand did when he was at her place. Increasingly, though, Strand’s house became the place where they were most comfortable.
Strand thought a lot about what would happen if the relationship turned more intimate. In a way he yearned for it, but in another way he very much wanted to keep it just the way it was. He tried to make peace with his ambivalenc
e, but in the end he couldn’t bring himself to remove the boundary line that protected him from a level of complication that he still wanted to avoid.
For her part, Mara seemed at ease with this, and their friendship settled into a routine in which they desired and sought nothing more than simply to be in each other’s company. But it quickly moved beyond that to the point where they very much desired each other’s presence, and the alacrity with which this happened surprised both of them.
May and June passed from the calendar in this manner, and the first anniversary of Romy’s death slipped quietly past in a single summer night, its hurt and heartache softened, at least to the point of being bearable, by Mara’s reassuring presence. July was almost gone when Strand told Mara that he was going to have to start traveling.
“Really? For how long?” She was curled up in an armchair in his office, near the windows and his desk, sketching by the oblique light that came in from the courtyard. She had gathered her hair in a loose pile on her head to keep it out of her face while she sketched, securing it in place with a couple of pencils. She was barefoot, and she was eating a frozen lime bar, a napkin in her lap.
“A few weeks.” Strand put down his pen and pushed away from his desk. He had kicked off his shoes under the desk and propped his feet on an ottoman.
“Where are you going?”
“San Francisco, then Rome. I’ve got a collection of Eakins portrait studies that I’ve been putting together for a client in San Francisco, and a man in Rome has got a little bunch of Fuseli drawings that I’d be a fool to pass up.”
Mara finished her lime bar and wiped her mouth with the napkin and then carefully wrapped the stick in the napkin.
“You’ve been working on these a long time?”
“Most of the year.”
“Sounds like fun,” she said, but she wasn’t successful at hiding her disappointment at the prospect of his leaving. Strand was a little surprised, and gratified, at her reaction. “When are you leaving?”
“In a couple of days.”
“Oh, that soon?”
She was pursing her lips slightly, her eyes diverted to her pencil as she doodled distractedly in the bottom corner of her sketchpad.
“I was wondering,” he said, “when I get back from San Francisco if you’d like to go on to Rome with me.”
Her pencil stopped. She didn’t look up. She said, “Oh… well…”
He could see her mind working in her face, something he was beginning to appreciate about her. It was an unusually transparent behavior, a lack of calculation that he found refreshing. His entire professional life had been spent dealing with people under control. Spontaneity, apparent spontaneity, was rare.
“In a few days?” she asked, still not looking up.
“Right.”
She nodded slightly, as if having confirmed something to herself, and then she looked up at him.
“I want to say something, Harry.” Her face reflected just a hint of acknowledgment that she thought she was stepping into risky water. “I’m forty-two. I don’t want to pretend that I’m in my twenties, and that I’m engaged in some sort of game here. One, I don’t have the patience for it anymore. Two, I don’t have the time for it anymore. I’ve wasted too much of it already. I must have thrown away five years in the last twelve months. Three, I want you to know, without having to be coy about it, that I like you very much, and, frankly, I don’t want you to wander away before we get to know each other better. Really get to know each other.”
She stopped, but not long enough for him to say anything before she went on.
“If you don’t have the same… interest… in continuing this in a serious way, just tell me. I’ve been through quite a lot in the past couple of years, and I think I can handle honest answers if they’ve got honest feelings behind them. You don’t strike me as the kind of man who’d be cruel about it if you didn’t want this to go on.”
She paused again, but again she didn’t let him interrupt her train of thought.
“I guess what I’m trying to say is, well, I think I’m a romantic woman, but at this point in my life it seems to me that good common sense is just as important.
“I’ve been burned pretty badly with this marriage, Harry, despite my bravado about it. I just can’t make that kind of mistake again.” She stopped and looked down. “But we seem to have so much to offer each other. If this is a… possibility for us, well, I’d hate for us to miss an opportunity simply because we didn’t know how to talk to each other about what we’re really feeling.” Again she confronted him with her eyes. “I don’t want the rituals of… getting to know each other to confuse what we might be genuinely feeling. We can’t mistake, or misrepresent, our feelings for each other, Harry. Either way.” She paused. “I think… that would be a shame.”
He couldn’t answer her immediately. Though she had spoken haltingly, there was no misunderstanding the depth of her feelings, and Strand wanted to accord her the same considerate deliberation.
“I can’t think of anything I’d like better than to continue this… as long as we can.” He thought a moment, his arms crossed. “I don’t know how far down the road I’m thinking. I don’t know that I have ‘plans.’…”
“No”—Mara sat up in her chair, putting the sketchpad down on the floor—“I didn’t mean that you had to spell it out for me. I, it’s just that, a trip like that, it could change things.” She stopped, seemingly frustrated at her own inability to express precisely what she was thinking. “Harry, you know what I mean here. I’m so very grateful to you for our friendship… for you sharing your home, for Meret’s friendship… for you including me in your life.” She took a deep breath. “For me, it could easily go farther than this. It seems like we’re at that point where this could become something else, something more.”
“But you don’t want to do that yet. Or maybe ever.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I’m afraid to if… Look, I don’t want sex to complicate a friendship. If it’s only going to be a friendship.”
Strand stood, put his hands in his pockets, and leaned his shoulder against the window frame. He looked outside a moment and tried to straighten out his thoughts. When he turned back to her she was reaching up and taking the two pencils out of her hair. She tossed them onto the floor by her sketchpad, shook out her hair, and leaned back in the corner of the chair and looked at him.
“Do you think it’s possible that you could be expecting too much from this?” Strand asked.
“Expecting too much? What do you think is out of proportion in what I’ve just said?”
“It sounds to me like you’re wanting guarantees.”
She frowned at him, waiting for him to go on.
“Guarantees,” Strand said, “that you won’t get hurt. Guarantees that I’m going to be the kind of person you want me to be. Guarantees that I’m not going to disappoint you.”
For a moment neither of them said anything, and this time he had no perception whatsoever of what was going on in her mind. The silence went on longer than he imagined it would. She broke her gaze and looked away. She nodded slightly, as if to herself, her eyes finding and settling on a drawing on the wall near her chair.
“Okay, I see your point,” she said. “Maybe I’m trying to be too careful.” She shook her head, thinking. “Maybe I’m, I don’t know, trying too hard to avoid the common little disasters that destroy a relationship, the kind of things that afterward, when it doesn’t work out and it’s over, you say to yourself, I should have seen that coming.”
“I’d like to do that, too,” Strand said. “But you can’t take the risk out of being human. Especially the kind of risks that two people take when they’re trying to feel their way into each other’s lives.”
She seemed embarrassed and at the same time a little sad, a reaction that puzzled him.
“Believe me,” he said, trying to diffuse her confusion, “I didn’t mean to push this. It was only a suggestion.�
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“Harry, I’d love to go to Rome with you. I would dearly love to.” She smiled apologetically. “I don’t know. I guess I thought I wanted it too much.”
“Good,” he said, smiling too.
CHAPTER 9
ROME
Ariana Kiriasis sat on a large, damask-upholstered divan in the upstairs sala of her home in a quiet street in the Aventino, the southernmost of Rome’s seven hills. She was looking out to the view over her balcony, the double doors of which were thrown open to the pleasant morning air and to the sound of crows in the stone pines on the grounds of the nearby churches of Santi Bonifacio e Alessio and Santa Sabina. This single view was the reason she had bought the old house, as well as the reason it was grossly overpriced, considering its wretched plumbing and deteriorating stucco walls, which she had had to pay handsomely to have repaired.
Having an artistic and romantic eye, she had never regretted her decision. To the northwest, the view encompassed a long stretch of the Tiber and all of the district of Trastevere. On a day like today, with a slight haze in the summer air, the filtered light illuminated the dome of Saint Peter’s with exquisite effect, as though it were a colossal pearl hurled from heaven onto the muddy banks of the Tiber.
This was the view Ariana stared at now, but it was not the view she was seeing. So intensely was her mind engaged that she actually saw nothing at all. On the sofa beside her, and scattered over the floor around her small slippered feet, were the pages of the morning’s International Herald Tribune, which her maid brought to her every morning with her espresso and pastry.
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