This Crumbling Pageant Read online

  Holly wiped her tears away and then blew her nose with toilet paper. “Our landlord,” she said, looking steadily at Scott’s reflection in the mirror, “is not hitting on me. In fact, he invited us both out tomorrow.”

  “Oh, yeah? What for?”

  Scott had tried to sound upbeat and positive, though he could already feel his insides hunkering down against this plan. However, he had learned his lesson from Luca Gallo’s art opening: his wife was going to go out and have fun, with or without him, and preferably without him.

  Holly sniffed. “I told him how you keep saying you want to visit the Two Towers one of these days, and he said we should all go together.”

  “That sounds good to me.”

  “I was thinking of inviting the other Luca, too. Maybe he and his girlfriend will want to come.”

  “Great,” Scott said. “The other Luca has a girlfriend?”

  “Uh-huh. I met her at his show. She’s really smart, she’s gorgeous,”—Holly’s eyes rolled back to portray how drop-dead gorgeous she was—“and her English is excellent.”

  “Great,” Scott said again, this time with feeling. “I love field trips.”

  10

  The party gathered in the main square at noon, by the Fountain of Neptune. The weather was brisk and clear, favorable conditions for a visit to the city’s landmark watchtowers, only one of which, the taller of the two, was accessible to the public.

  “What a good idea!” San Michele said upon seeing Scott. “I haven’t been up the tower since I was a schoolboy.”

  There was a round of kisses, which Scott managed without incident. He noticed the artist’s girlfriend embracing Holly with an intimacy that was difficult to account for. She looked searchingly into his wife’s eyes, and only disengaged herself after Holly’s eyes had answered back reassuringly. He figured they must have done some sisterly bonding at the art exhibit.

  But what was Holly talking about? This girl isn’t “gorgeous,” Scott thought. She’s, at best, chic.

  She had on a fashionable brocade coat with a silly print, a slate-blue skirt, and tan knee high boots, all very Milanese, but her solemn face was too masculine to be called anything but handsome, if that. Holly had probably been seduced by the exoticism of the headscarf, a jewel-toned affair which only carelessly covered the girl’s blond hair.

  They had kicked things off in Italian, and Scott gratefully melted away and let his eyes pan over the sweeping grandeur of the piazza.

  It was pleasingly vacant, except for a solitary dog in the distance, slinking past the ominous façade of the basilica, and some women talking under a loggia, with a little boy and girl running around them in circles. Suddenly the children faced off, and the boy threw some breadcrumbs at the girl. Screaming, she struck out into the open square, three pigeons swooping after her.

  Scott laughed to himself.

  “So how are you adjusting to Italian life?” the girlfriend of Luca Gallo asked him. Her name had sounded something like “Arpi.” She had an accent that he couldn’t trace, but that clearly had British aspirations. By contrast, Luca and Luca sounded neither British nor American when they spoke English. They just sounded Italian.

  “I love it,” he said, turning back to the group. His wife was chirping away in Italian, looking tiny between the two Lucas. She had her hair tied back in a high ponytail. It hung straight down, but with an elegant flip at the end. She was beaming, and Scott inwardly berated himself for dragging his feet there. She needs to do these things, he reminded himself. She’s not like you. She actually enjoys going out and making simple human contact. She’s not an asshole like you. She likes having fun. And Italians are the same way. Scott looked at his landlord and the other Luca. Even the uncouth artist looked lighthearted. In fact, he looked downright elated. Both Lucas did. Their flowery hand gestures bloomed in the air with their words, seeming to conjure up the beauty and ambiguities and complex ecstasies of life, and settling without fail on Holly’s body somewhere or other. Just simple human contact. “The people here are really friendly.”

  Arpi pounced on that.

  “Really?” she said. “We’re not too Socialist for you?”

  Scott studied his inquisitor sideways. She had blue, humorless eyes. She had used scare quotes around Socialist. She seemed to think she really nailed him.

  “Are you from here?” he asked.

  No, she answered, she was from Iran, but after six years of studying in this country she felt comfortable identifying herself as Italian. “Actually, I’m Armenian. There’s quite a strong Armenian community in Tehran, you know.” She and Scott had about a three-minute chat—while his wife chirped away brainlessly, and the Lucas pawed at her—but within those three minutes the girl Arpi must have referred to herself as Persian at least five dozen times. She obviously liked calling herself Persian, even though with her blond hair and blue eyes she looked about as Persian as Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie.

  It was proposed by Luca San Michele that, before exerting themselves, they should all have some hot chocolate.

  “Oh yes, I adore hot chocolate!” Arpi gushed. She spoke with such a stereotypically pretentious elocution it almost seemed like parody.

  Luca Gallo, his princely face all rosy, touched Holly again and told her, “In Italy, you eat hot chocolate, with a spoon. You don’t drink it.”

  “Oh, so it’s just chocolate pudding!” Scott said, unimpressed.

  “Why are you yelling, honey?” Holly asked him.

  The question then became: Which place served the best hot chocolate? Luca San Michele thought he had an idea, but apparently, according to Arpi, he did not. She swore up and down that the greatest hot chocolate that ever lived was prepared right next door to her apartment, in a squalid little café on that upscale catwalk of a street, Via d’Azeglio.

  “Is that so?” San Michele said. “Well, the place I was thinking about is very good, too.” He gestured to the building in the middle of the piazza, a little fortress with a belfry and some businesses on the ground floor. Arpi instantly pooh-poohed the café as a day-tripping tourist trap.

  They discussed it for several minutes. Scott listened along, but then noticed the artist straying from the group. He stopped at the misty lip of the fountain and stood there gazing at the statue. Then Holly left Scott’s side and went over to be near the artist. The pair exchanged Giaconda smiles, and then together they beheld the buck-naked figure of Neptune.

  The bronze colossus stood casually, looking out with one hand holding his trident and the other frozen in the midst of a musical motion as it conducted the world’s waters. At his feet, muscular babies hugged dolphins that gaped and vomited water nonstop. It was a majestic scene.

  But farther below, in the spray of the rushing basin, the work was as monstrous and unsightly as any creature hauled up dripping from the deep. Four sea nymphs loitered around the pedestal, looking possessed, and squeezing their breasts so that water shot out crazily in thin jets, as if their nipples had sprung multiple leaks. The posture of the lactating nymphs was explicit, slouched back with legs spread wide open—legs which grew into scaly sea serpents that curled and bulged and disappeared into the bubbling pool.

  San Michele threw his arm around Scott’s shoulder.

  “Poor Neptune,” he sighed. “He looks so out of place in this city which doesn’t even have a river. You know, Scott, this fountain was commissioned by a cardinal back in the 1500s. The pope approved the design! Can you imagine the Vatican today,” San Michele asked, getting uncomfortably close to Scott’s face, “saying yes to something like this? A statue of a naked pagan surrounded by sexual sea monsters?”

  “Hm,” Scott replied, while watching Holly. Her profile looked very fair against the playful backdrop of the fountain. Her head was turned toward Luca Gallo, and she was saying something, something that made the artist blush. “That’s interesting.”

  &

  Arpi greedily scraped at the bottom of h
er glass cup. San Michele murmured in her ear, “I see you approved of the hot chocolate.”

  Her spoon went still. Staring into the empty cup, she conceded, “It was very good.”

  “Yes, yes,” Scott said, seated across from them. “A good time was had by all.” He looked around the table to see if anyone had picked up on his biting tone. Nobody had.

  San Michele leaned back and said without irony, “It certainly was.”

  “Oh, gosh!” said Holly, for the third or fourth time in as many minutes. “I really wish he wouldn’t do this. I’m too self-conscious to even eat.”

  “Don’t be!” Arpi beseeched her. She patted the artist’s brawny shoulder. “He’s always doing his little pencil sketches. Wherever he goes, he brings his drawing paper. It’s the reason he’s forever carrying around that disreputable rucksack.”

  Scott half-rose from his chair to get a look.

  “Oh yeah!” he said. “I never noticed that ratty bag slung across his back.”

  “Please don’t stop eating on his account,” Arpi insisted. “Like I said, he’s almost always drawing something.”

  Luca Gallo sat massively at the end of the marble-topped table, scratching at the little sketch pad on his lap. The whole thing had begun innocently enough: Gallo just happened to be doodling in the margins of a discarded newspaper at the same time that he was ogling Holly. But within minutes it had turned into an intensive drawing session.

  “Yeah, hon,” Scott said. “Eat up. I’m sure for him it’s no different than drawing a chair, or a floor.”

  “Thanks,” Holly said.

  Arpi went on: “I’m quite used to it by now. I hardly even notice when he’s doing it anymore.”

  “Can he hear us when he’s like this?” Scott asked, staring wide-eyed.

  “Scott!” Holly said with a nervous laugh. “Don’t make fun just because you don’t know how to draw.”

  Scott was flabbergasted.

  “Give me a pen!” he said. He snatched a napkin from the dispenser and laid it tidily in front of him. “And give me some elbow-room, for crying out loud. ‘Don’t know how to draw.’ I learned how to draw in kindergarten!”

  Before beginning, however, he peered up and stared at Holly’s face with such a serious expression that she burst out laughing. He burned her image in his memory, then huddled over his little napkin and got down to business.

  “Excuse me, Luca,” San Michele said.

  “Si?” said the artist.

  “I was wondering: Did you ever finish that winter scene you were working on when we met?”

  “Yes,” he said, in his careful English, “I finished it.”

  “Do you still have it? I was thinking I might like to buy it.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Too bad! You already sold it?”

  The artist then said something in Italian that made everyone gasp, except for Scott with his napkin.

  “You destroyed that painting?” Holly said. “Why?”

  Without disrupting his line work, Luca Gallo told them the story. “The dean of the university here. He asked me to make for him a painting. A landscape. So I painted it, but then I learned that he is a…” His pencil paused, and he looked up at Holly. “Come si dice? How do you say? Un Giuda.”

  “Judas?” she asked.

  “Si. He is Judas.” Then the artist started reeling off some more Italian, but this time Holly said she couldn’t quite understand.

  San Michele came to her aid. “This is rather lofty Italian. But in essence he said that the dean betrayed him by ‘pardoning an enemy.’”

  “Grazie.” Gallo thanked him. “So, I broke the painting, right in front of him.” And with that, he tore the page out of his sketchbook and handed it to Holly.

  “Oh my God!” she exclaimed.

  Scott peeked up from his napkin to see what the big deal was. “Jesus,” he said in a small voice.

  “It’s so beautiful!” Holly continued to blurt. She was having a physical reaction that was almost indiscreet, a vivid pink clawing down her face and throat.

  “Alright, get a hold of yourself,” Scott told her, then hunched over his drawing again with renewed vigor.

  “Let me see?” Arpi asked. Holly showed her, and Arpi let out a contented sigh. “This is nothing for him,” she said. “You should see what he would do if you sat for one of his paintings.”

  “Shh!” Scott shushed her involuntarily. He finished coloring in Holly’s hair.

  Holly’s nails dug into his thigh.

  “Don’t be a jerk,” she said under her breath.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” he hissed at her.

  “Let’s see yours, Scott,” Arpi said in a smart-alecky tone.

  Luca San Michele seconded the motion and, grudgingly, Scott consented. His drawing had actually come out pretty good. It wasn’t as technically skilled as Luca’s, of course, but he thought there was room in the art world to accommodate two different visions.

  “Okay. I guess it’s pretty much finished anyway.”

  He slapped the napkin down on the middle of the table. Everybody leaned forward, and then sat back again with mild laughter. Luca San Michele and Arpi applauded his effort. Holly said “aw” but stopped just short of saying “how pathetic.” Only Luca Gallo was giving it serious consideration.

  “Luca here seems to like it,” Holly joked.

  “Actually,” Arpi said, “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “See?” Scott said.

  “He loves naive art,” Arpi explained.

  They all got up to go.

  “Here, Luca,” Holly said to the artist, making as if to return the sketch.

  He was about to throw his scarf around his neck when he saw what she was up to. He dimpled. “You keep it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Si si si. It is a gift.”

  Holly let out a huge sigh of relief, gave him thanks and praise, and cleaned out her bag to make room for the paper. She rolled it up loosely, inserted it with care—but for all the fuss she made about Luca’s drawing, she completely forgot about her husband’s. It was left there on the table, and Scott made a point of not pointing it out to her, but of retrieving it himself with a mortally wounded look and folding it tenderly and putting it in his back pocket.

  It was a short walk to the Two Towers. San Michele linked arms with Scott and walked with him ahead of the others.

  “This city,” Luca told him, “used to bristle with towers. From a distance it supposedly looked like a bed of asparagus. Back then you weren’t a real nobleman in Bologna if you didn’t have a watchtower. They call them watchtowers, but they were all for show—for showing off.” He reconsidered. “Maybe sometimes for storing grain. My family on my father’s side is said to have had one. But then the towers were taken down by a committee of criminally negligent nincompoops, and now all that remains is a smattering. The two we are visiting today are the most famous. But, as you will see, one of these is rather a poor excuse. Soon after its construction it began leaning so heavily that it had to be chopped in half, though I suppose it was still imposing enough for Dante Alighieri to have stood under its shadow and compared it to the giant Antaeus. Have you read La Commedia? Your wife tells me you are a great reader of literature.”

  “Yeah,” Scott said, “she likes telling people that.”

  “Pardon me for saying so, but isn’t that a bit unusual for an athlete?”

  “Maybe that was my problem.”

  Luca laughed openly, his milk-white teeth beaming. “Grande!” he said.

  They ambled past a man with a grey, rectangular beard who was nursing a tray of glowing chestnuts behind a charcoal brazier. Then they turned up an ancient street called Via Artieri, under some scaffolding. A dog was trotting toward them. It looked like the same one Scott had seen from afar in the main square. A greyhound, wearing a muzzle. Even for a greyhound it was skinny.

  “Hey,
doggie.” Scott put his hand out to pet it, but the poor thing skipped past him, quivering all over. “That’s sad.”

  “What is?” Luca asked.

  “That dog had a muzzle on it.”

  Luca cast a marveling glance at his companion. “You Americans are very sentimental when it comes to your pets.”

  And you Europeans are very cruel when it comes to yours, Scott thought.

  They turned right and walked east under the begrimed arcades of the wide avenue of Via Rizzoli. There they came upon three youthful drug addicts lying in their path. The university quarter was at hand. They skirted past them, and Scott looked back to make sure his wife was doing alright. She was doing just fine, sailing safely in the lee of the mighty Luca Gallo. On his other side was Arpi, vaporing at length on some hoity-toity topic with raised eyebrows and drawn eyelids. They didn’t seem to be listening to her.

  By accident, Scott rammed his shoulder into an oncoming pedestrian. “Oh, shit!” he said. “I’m sorry!”

  “Is okay,” said the man, who was nice, and who hadn’t stolen his wallet.

  Traffic on the walkways was picking up. Luca San Michele knew everybody. One moment he was arm in arm with Scott, the next moment he was gliding away nimbly to exchange a word with some acquaintance and then bounding back with his springy step. There was something of the stage actor about Luca’s stalwart physique. Or better yet, the male ballet dancer. A sturdy torso with twinkle toes. He was going gray in a patently handsome way—just at the temples.

  Scott had started nurturing a small hope that Luca San Michele might be hitting on him, in which case he could cross him off the list of Holly’s possible suitors. The special attention he was giving Scott, those suggestive mermaids, this arm-holding now: Did it perhaps mean that he was gay? Or was he simply continental? It might be safe for Scott to pool his suspicions and direct them toward the other Luca, whose personality change fairly cried out for an investigation. In the period since they had first met in the square outside the movie theater, the fiery painter seemed to have fallen in puppy love with Holly. And Holly was either too innocent to see it, or too complicit to admit it, possibly even to herself. And Scott didn’t buy for one second the relationship between Gallo and this stuck-up chick Arpi.