The Sonnet Lover (14 page)

I can’t help but compare this flight to the cut-rate Sabena flight I took to Italy twenty years ago, eight hours spent with my knees slammed into my chest because the seats in front of and behind me were occupied by basketball players on their way to a tournament in Brussels. They were so obviously more uncomfortable than I that I didn’t dare recline or complain when the man in front leaned so far back in his flimsy seat that I could smell the Vitalis in his hair. And when the paltry meal was served, I joined in with the team as they donated their dinner rolls and processed cheese wedges to a fellow they all called “Buns.”

I hadn’t really minded, though. I had made my escape over my mother’s objections (
Why do you have to go all the way to Italy to read poetry? They’re shooting people in the kneecaps over there.
) and in spite of financial difficulties (I spent so many hours behind the bar at Cafe Lucrezia that there was a permanent ridge of espresso grounds beneath my fingernails) and a last-minute attack of conscience that my mother really wouldn’t be able to cope without me.

“I’ll take care of her,” Aunt Roz assured me. “You go. You may never have this chance again—who knows how long any of us has?”

I’ve often wondered whether she had a premonition that she would be the one gone before I came back. Not my long-suffering hypochondriacal mother, but lively Roz killed in a taxi that ran a red light on Lexington Avenue, on her way back from buying a hat at Bloomingdale’s. (
I don’t know why she didn’t take the subway,
my mother said at her funeral.
She always took the subway.
)

But I didn’t know then that my aunt’s death and my mother’s diagnosis of lung cancer would call me back before the year was over. As far as I was concerned during that youthful journey to Europe, I might never come back. I was good at languages. Why not travel around and pick up a few while teaching English to pay my way? I felt as though I were escaping not just my mother’s expectations for me but the self she would fashion me into: the cardigan-wearing, PBS-tote-bag-bearing high school teacher that had been the height of her unrealized ambitions for herself.

I wonder whether Robin had thought he was escaping the specter of becoming his father, poor stoop-shouldered Saul, who had been so frail at the funeral that he could barely lift the shovel high enough to clear the rim of Robin’s grave. Leaving the cemetery, he had suddenly fallen to his knees and I thought he had fainted, but he was only plucking a few blades of grass from the ground to throw over his shoulder—an ancient Jewish custom to ward off evil spirits, but also, I have always felt, a way of severing ourselves from the dead.

I take my leave of you,
I can imagine Robin thinking as he made his own journey to Italy. The sentiment was apparent in Robin’s screenplay, which Leo Balthasar had sent me last week. In it the young William Shakespeare, burdened by a nagging wife and forced into unemployment when the London theaters are shut down by the plague, receives an invitation from a mysterious woman. There are hints that she’s a long-lost love, but the screenplay is vague on this point. She frames an invitation to her villa in Italy in the shape of a sonnet that proves just as irresistible to the Bard as it had been to me. In fact, it works so well as a catalyst for the action in the script that I find myself siding with Chihiro’s theory that Robin had written the poem himself—or found someone to write it—and pretended that it was a genuine Renaissance sonnet in order to pique Balthasar’s interest in the screenplay. I wonder whether Leo had then demanded the original sonnet as proof of the historical basis of the script. I could try asking him, I think, glancing over at Leo to see whether he’s showing any signs of awakening, but then I hear a familiar voice coming from behind the curtain that separates first class from coach.

“You don’t seem to understand. I have a friend up there who will be most angry with me if I don’t say hello,” a woman is complaining in haughty tones to, I can only assume, a flight attendant. “If you don’t let me by, I will complain to the management of the airline and see to it that you are fired.”

The curtain bulges and parts, and Mara Silverman slips past a beleaguered flight attendant into the empty seat next to me. When the attendant shows up at her side, Mara smiles sweetly, as if she didn’t recognize her as the same person whose job she just threatened, and asks for a glass of orange juice.

“The fresh-squeezed kind you have up here,” she says, “not that bottled stuff they gave me back there.”

I exchange an exasperated glance with the flight attendant, who brings back a glass of orange juice for Mara, spilling only the tiniest bit on Mara’s Juicy Couture jogging suit. If she’d planned the move as revenge, she miscalculated, because Mara then requests a bottle of club soda, towels, and some of the shower gel that she’s sure must be in the toiletry cases the airline provides for its first-class passengers. Only when Mara has restored her velour hoodie to its pristine state and pocketed the toiletry case does she turn to me.

“Really, Rose, I’m surprised you’re in first class. On your salary. Of course, you don’t have children so I suppose you get to spend it all on yourself, but I’d think you’d want to be putting some away for your retirement. You’re, what…forty now?”

I’m not sure what flaw to respond to first: my extravagance, my barrenness, or my age. I could, of course, tell her that Lemon House Films is paying for my seat, but then I realize that Mara’s husband, Gene, is also working for them, and clearly they haven’t provided him with first-class accommodations. Mara will be furious if she realizes that I’m being treated better than Gene.

“I had some extra frequent flier miles that were going to expire, so I upgraded,” I say.

“Ah, we used all ours taking Ned around to colleges this year. Of course, the film company’s paying for Gene’s ticket, but not mine. Or Ned’s.”

“So, Ned’s traveling with you?”

“No. The students had to go two weeks ago to start rehearsals. Ned insisted on going with this group who got budget tickets to Switzerland. They planned to hike in the Alps for a few days and then take the train to Florence. I’ve been going out of my mind worrying about him. They weren’t even going to get sleeper compartments on the train! Can you imagine, wanting to sit up all night on a filthy Italian train eating salami sandwiches and drinking warm beer! That might be all right for some, but with Ned’s asthma and psoriasis, he’s bound to be a wreck.”

I can, actually. It’s how I first entered Italy, and after the cramped flight to Brussels I’d been happy for the legroom of a train compartment, even if it was occupied by three Mount Holyoke juniors who took up all the overhead luggage space with their matching pink duffel bags, which I later learned were stocked with six-packs of Tab and multiple cartons of Playtex tampons (
I’m not sticking anything foreign in there,
one of the girls confided to me later over a dinner of, yes, warm beer and salami). I’d woken up that morning surrounded by the pink light of dawn reflecting off the snow-topped Alpine peaks and the plains of Lombardy spread out below us. “Fruitful Lombardy,” I’d remembered from
Romeo and Juliet,
“the pleasant garden of great Italy,” and felt as if I were entering the illuminated pages of a medieval manuscript.

“You don’t mind sitting up all night when you’re young,” I tell Mara, “or wearing the same clothes or sleeping in crowded hostels.”

“Yes, well, easy to say from the comfort of first class,” Mara says, reaching over and patting the fleece blanket I’ve got tucked around my legs and letting her hand linger on the pile of typescript in my lap. “Is that the script you’ve got there? The one that boy wrote? Is it really any good? Gene says he’s sure it needs a lot of work. You really should let Gene have a look at it so he could do some work on it. You know he’s been hired as a script consultant on the film by Mr. Balthasar.”

She pronounces the producer’s name loudly enough to wake up the man himself, and I see him stir a bit under his blanket, but if he’s awake he chooses not to reveal that fact. I imagine he’s waiting until Mara leaves. He’d told me last week on the phone that he’d given Gene the job of assistant script consultant. “It was either that or have him pop up in six months with a lawsuit claiming all Robin’s ideas were stolen from him. I wouldn’t put it past that shrew of a wife of his to goad him into a lawsuit to feed her designer-clothing habit. But I’m giving you first crack at the script; you decide when to give a copy to Gene Silverman.”

“When we get to the villa I’ll have some copies made,” I tell Mara without mentioning that I’ve already scanned Robin’s screenplay into my laptop. “I’m afraid this is my only copy right now.”

“You really ought to have made copies in New York. What if the plane goes down? What if one of the stewardesses steals this copy while you’re sleeping? If you like, I’ll hold on to it when you go to sleep. I never can sleep a wink on planes, even after a couple of Xanaxes.”

“That’s all right,” I tell Mara, looking past her to the flight attendant who’s approaching with my dinner tray, “I’ll be sure to put it securely away before I fall asleep. Right now I think you’d better get back to your seat or you’ll miss the in-flight meal.”

“Hm, maybe they can give me a tray here,” she says, casting an appraising eye over my Chilean sea bass and braised endives served on real china with real silverware. I can hardly blame her for preferring this to the Saran-wrapped insta-meal that awaits her in coach, but if I let Mara stay now, I’ll be stuck with her for the rest of the flight. And I wouldn’t put it past her to wait until I fall asleep to take the screenplay for Gene. I catch the flight attendant’s eye as Mara makes her request and shake my head. “I’m sorry, ma’am, we have only enough meals for our
ticketed
first-class passengers.”

I almost feel sorry for Mara as she wilts at the emphasis the flight attendant puts on “ticketed,” but not sorry enough to want her company for the rest of the flight.

“Well, then,” Mara says, gathering up her toiletry case and free slippers and sleeping mask, “arrivederci until Italy, then. Maybe we can share a cab to the villa.”

I nod noncommittally as Mara leaves, hoping that my proximity to the exit will get me through customs and immigration early enough to get my own cab. I’ve waited twenty years to see La Civetta again; Mara’s the last person I want for company when I go through those gates. When I finish my dinner and the flight attendant has removed my tray and given me a scented hot towel and a handful of after-dinner mints, I pull out the screenplay again. As soon as I’ve got the pages in my lap, though, Leo Balthasar, as if awakened by the rustle of screenplay pages, slips his eye mask up onto his gleaming forehead and peers over at me.

“Oh, good, you’re looking at Robin’s script. Why don’t we run through it together?”

Before I can protest that I’m still making notes, he’s making himself comfortable in the empty seat by my side: adjusting the tubular pillow he wears like a pet boa around his neck, summoning the flight attendant for a pot of freshly brewed coffee, and angling the reading light on the pages in my lap so that I feel like an actor in the spotlight.

“So, what do we think?” he asks. “Does our boy have something here?” At least Robin’s “our boy” now instead of my boy.

“Well, I’m very impressed with the language,” I say, taking a sip of coffee, which is, to my surprise, nearly as good as Cafe Lucrezia’s, “especially of the poem that he’s included.” I’d found when I read the script that only one poem was actually included: the
limonaia
poem that Ginevra sent to Shakespeare to invite him to the villa. There were numerous places in the script for other poems, but instead of the poems Robin had written in brackets, “Poem to come.”

“And I like the characterization,” I continue. “Robin has—
had
—a real feel for Shakespeare as a young poet and dramatist. I can’t help but think he put a lot of himself in these scenes—”

“Yes, yes, but the plot line? What do you think of that?”

“Well, I have to admit that he’s created a fairly plausible premise for what is essentially a fantasy. He has Shakespeare traveling to Italy in the summer of 1593 when the London theaters were closed because of an outbreak of plague. True, Shakespeare’s company would have been touring then, but there’s no way of knowing whether Shakespeare was actually with the company—”

“Aha! So, you admit it. Shakespeare could have gone to Italy.”

“He could have gone to Timbuktu for all we know. It doesn’t mean he did.”

“Yes, but
Romeo and Juliet
isn’t set in Timbuktu, is it? It’s not
The Merchant of Timbuktu
or
Two Gentlemen of Timbuktu,
is it? All the writers I know are always writing off research trips. Why should Bill Shakespeare be any different? Wouldn’t he want to scout out locations, gather material, check out Juliet’s hometown to pick a good balcony for Romeo to scale?”

“Well,
Romeo and Juliet
was based on an Italian poem by Bandell, which was translated into English by Arthur Brooke, so Shakespeare could easily have written it without traveling to Italy. Besides, there’s nothing in
Romeo and Juliet
that reveals a firsthand knowledge of Italy, nothing he couldn’t have gotten out of Italian sources available to him. As for
The Merchant of Venice,
yes, some scholars have found the Venetian setting fairly convincing, although there’s certainly no hard evidence in that. There’s the scene at the ferry on the River Brenta in which Portia sees Balthasar off, but the fact remains that there’s no evidence that Shakespeare ever went to Italy.”

I’d thought Leo would like the reference to his Shakespearian namesake, but he only shakes his head angrily. “Tell me, is there a shred of evidence that he ever made the trip from Stratford to London? Can you show me the ticket stubs? But does anyone doubt that Shakespeare traveled back and forth between Stratford and London?”

I have to admit that there aren’t any ticket stubs documenting Shakespeare’s travels between Stratford and London that I know of.