The Sonnet Lover (33 page)

Hugging the dark folds of the shawl close to me, I cross the hall and enter the top floor of the library. With a qualm I notice that Zoe has neatly arranged manuscript boxes and folios on the table by the window and remind myself that I’d better start sorting through them tomorrow. Not now, though. I descend the spiral staircase to the main floor of the library, glad to see that the room below me is dark. I should have brought the flashlight with me, but once I’m outside the moon will light my way. As soon as I reach the bottom of the stairs I can see the reflection of moonlight on the marble floors—a path leading to the doors to the garden. I’m almost there when a voice stops me.

“Ah, Rose, I knew you wouldn’t be able to resist the garden on such a night. I’ve been waiting for you.”

I turn slowly, careful to keep the shawl with its cargo of poems close against my body, and face Cyril, who’s sitting so far back in a velvet club chair that I can make out only the tips of his loafers and the long waxy fingers of his left hand lying on the arm of the chair.

“You know me too well, Cyril. Who could resist the gardens of La Civetta under a full moon? I’m surprised you came in from the loggia.”

“Even these warm summer nights are too chilly for my old bones,” he says. “I needed a little
restorative
to warm me up.” His right hand appears from the shadows cradling a silver goblet etched with spirals and set with opalescent stones. “Would you join me in a little nightcap?” he asks. I’m about to tell him that I’ve had more than enough to drink when he adds, “Unless, of course, you have some more pressing engagement?”

Even without being able to make out his face, I can guess he’s smiling. I’m caught.

“No, no engagement except with the gardens under the moonlight, and the moon’s just risen.” I sink into the chair opposite him, angled into the moonlight so that he can see me, while I still can’t see any more of him than his disembodied hands, which now lift a decanter, made of the same design as the cup, from a hammered silver tray on a pedestal table set beside his chair, and pour the liqueur into a silver goblet that’s set on the tray as if he’d been expecting me. He pours a little water from a ceramic pitcher and hands me the cup; his fingertips when they graze mine feel as cool as the metal. It’s impossible to tell the color of the liqueur, but when I sip it I taste licorice. Sambuco, perhaps, or any of the half dozen Italian liqueurs that are flavored with aniseed. The slight metallic aftertaste comes, I imagine, from the silver.

“I don’t think I’ve ever drunk from a silver cup before,” I say. “I think I read somewhere of a wife poisoning her husband with ground-up silver.”

He makes a dry sound that could be a laugh or a cough. “You’d need quite a bit more silver, my dear; it’s not like the lead cups that made the Romans mad, although”—he chuckles—“I have been having my after-dinner drink from these since a Turkish pasha presented them to me in 1956 as a thank-you for giving him some rose cuttings for his garden. Perhaps the silver has addled my brain.”

“Your brain doesn’t seem the slightest bit addled,” I say. Cyril must have sat through the scene in the
pomerino,
quietly watching the drama from his dark corner. I wonder what he made of it. Does he know that Mark is blackmailing Claudia into dropping the lawsuit? I take another sip of the curiously warming liqueur. It feels like liquid silver slipping down my throat, like moonlight stealing under my skin. “You’ve come to a comfortable arrangement with Hudson College and now you’ve put together this movie deal. You seem quite on top of everything…except, I suppose, for the lawsuit.”

Cyril steeples his long fingers in front of his shaded face. “I wouldn’t worry about the lawsuit, my dear. I’ve always got something up my sleeve.” For a second the moonlight hits his fingertips in a way that makes them look like claws, but then I blink and they’re just the yellowed, cracked fingernails of an old man again. An old man who’s willing to hide the truth of a boy’s death to protect his property, I’d wager.

“Is it worth it, do you think?” I ask, taking another long sip of the liqueur for courage. Cyril’s not an opponent to take on lightly. “When you think about a young boy’s life—”

“What’s one young life compared to all this?” Cyril asks, holding up his hands to indicate the villa. “My only aim has been to leave a legacy. To preserve La Civetta for posterity. If Claudia has her way, it would become a glorified Hilton, full of tourists sporting their dreadful soccer shirts and buying underwear emblazoned with David’s penis. My God, the last time I ventured into town during the tourist season I saw a vendor selling a calendar of penises.
Famosi piselli.
And the streets are full of Eastern Europeans dressed up as statues and gladiators—like at Disneyland! Claudia’s own son was romping about town last year with that American boy in see-through tights. Can you blame me if I want to preserve La Civetta for scholars instead of letting it fall to the Philistines?”

I take a long draught of my drink to give me time to think of an answer. Of course, I want to see La Civetta preserved as a place for scholars to study instead of as a playground for rich tourists, but I’m remembering the students today with their David boxers and picturing the fairies dressed in tights and troubadours dressed in doublet and hose for last night’s performance. I’m not sure, really, how far Cyril and Mark’s vision of La Civetta is from Claudia’s. Not enough of a difference, really, to justify hiding the truth of a boy’s death.

“Maybe there’s another way to settle it. Maybe all Claudia wants is an acknowledgment that Orlando belongs to your family,” I say, thinking that such an acknowledgment will be little enough once Orlando’s part in Robin’s death is revealed.

Cyril leans forward, his face, rising out of the gloom, alarmingly yel-low, his eyes bloodshot. He looks like a drowned man surfacing out of the dark water. “What that bitch wants is to make us all suffer. You tell your friend President Abrams that there’s not enough money under the sun to buy her off. She’ll take my last chance at happiness and yours, Rose, just like she did twenty years ago. We can’t sit around waiting for her to give us what we want; we have to take it—” Cyril’s invective is interrupted by a coughing fit. I get up to pour him a glass of water from the ceramic pitcher and nearly lose my balance. The room seems to slide a bit, the moonlit surfaces as slippery as glass.

“Here,” I say, handing Cyril the glass and steadying myself on the arm of his chair. “Calm down. I’m sure you’ll come to some sort of arrangement with Claudia…and as for what happened between Bruno and me…well, I can hardly blame her for that. She got pregnant—”

“Do you think that was an accident? She knew she was going to lose Bruno to you and that the only reason he’d stay was if she were carrying his child. Or at least if she made him believe it was his child.”

“That may be,” I say, “but she couldn’t very well have made him believe it was his if he hadn’t slept with her, and no one forced him to do that.” I pour myself some more of the liqueur, which, I notice, looks cloudy in the silver cup, and take another long drink. This isn’t what I want to be reminded of on my way to meet Bruno.

“It’s a lapse I’m sure he’s had occasion to regret. Personally I’ve always suspected that she drugged him.”

“That’s ridiculous.” I try to laugh, but the sound I make comes out tinny and my mouth is suddenly full of the bitter taste of metal. I finish the rest of my drink and put the silver goblet down on the tray, metal ringing against metal like a bell tolling. “She’s not Lucrezia Borgia. And even if he had been drugged, that’s no excuse.”

I gather up my shawl, and the poems in the lining crackle angrily. I see Cyril’s ears actually twitch at the sound. His hand shoots out and grabs my arm, the long, yellowed nails pressing into my skin. I imagine he’s going to rip the poems from their hiding place, but instead he stretches his mouth into a wide, lupine smile. “You’re a strong woman, Rose—not everybody has your strength of character—but we all have our weaknesses.” He lets my arm go and grasps the edge of the shawl, rubbing the material between his fingertips. “I hope this will keep you warm enough. Don’t stay out too late. The gardens grow damp after midnight.”

I nod. “I’m only going to take a short stroll,” I say, pulling the shawl around me as if its blackness could make me invisible from him. “Thanks for the drink.”

“You’re most welcome,” he says, holding up his cup and inhaling the aroma of the liqueur. Although it’s probably just a trick of the moonlight, I imagine for a moment that the cloudy liquid casts a greenish light on his face. “It’s difficult to find the real stuff nowadays, but there’s an order of Benedictine monks in the Val-de-Travers where it was invented by a French doctor who had fled the Terror…” He must notice the look of confusion on my face. “Oh, I thought you knew.
Artemisia absinthium.
Or as some call it, the Green Muse. It’s
my
personal weakness.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY

W
HEN
I
STEP OUT INTO THE
POMERINO
I
THINK, FOR AN INSTANT, THAT
I
have stepped back in time to the winter of my junior year, to the night it snowed. The statue at the center of the walled garden—a half-nude goddess with a leaping deer at her side and bow strapped across her bared breast—is blindingly white, as if dusted by snow. But when I come close enough to lay my hand on the cool marble, I see it is only an effect of the moonlight—and perhaps of the two glasses of absinthe I’ve just drunk. Leave it to Cyril to imbibe not just any after-dinner drink, but one redolent of history and mystique. “The Green Muse,” it was called by the artists and writers who favored it in nineteenth-century Paris. Granter of visions and corruptor of virtues. All myth, I’ve heard. Most of the reported effects came from the adulterants used in cheaper brands, which the lower classes—all those laundresses and prostitutes in Toulouse-Latrec’s paintings—drank all the more to match the alcohol content of the more expensive brands. And, I’ve read, the chemical similarity between
Artemisia absinthium
and cannabis has been greatly exaggerated.

Still, the last time I found myself so fascinated with the texture of stone was the last time I smoked pot. I realize that I’ve been standing here in front of this statue for…well, I’m not really sure how long. I feel as if she’s cast a spell on me, willing me into the same stony rigidity as her. Of course, I suddenly realize, she’s Artemis, the namesake of the herb I’ve just drunk. I nearly laugh at the coincidence (the way I recall laughing at such epiphanies when stoned) but remember that Cyril is probably still watching me from the library. Just as he must have watched the whole scene with Mara and Orlando and realized that she was trying to interfere with the plan to blackmail Claudia into dropping the suit. Claudia was right—La Civetta really is built for spying. The walled
pomerino
feels suddenly like one of those glass snow domes and the child shaking it is Cyril.

I turn to the right, hearing a creak that could be my bones coming rustily to life, but is actually the sound of paper rustling in my shawl. I walk through the same gate that Orlando, Mara, Leo, Ned, and Zoe all passed through before, out onto the lemon walk. Under the moonlight the glossy leaves of the lemon trees shine like polished jade and the lemons like globes of yellow quartz. It is as if I’ve wandered into a world carved out of precious stone—a
pietre dure
landscape. For a second I think the two figures pasted up against the wall farther down the walk are part of the stone inlay. Cupid and Psyche embracing, perhaps, only this Psyche has Zoe Demarchis’s raspberry-colored hair and her Cupid is the gangly Ned Silverman. They are so engrossed in each other that they don’t notice me, even though the moonlight lights up the path between us. As soon as I move, though, they’re bound to hear the crunch of the gravel, and I find myself loath to disturb them, so I step off the path into the soft grass.

To my left is the yew path that leads down to the
teatrino.
I’d planned to go into the rose garden that way, but I hear voices coming from there and glimpse shadowy shapes on the grassy stage. Some of the shapes, I know, are the statues of Shakespearian heroines, while others must be students performing impromptu theatrics, but I find it hard to tell them apart. The absinthe has affected my perception in a way that makes solid objects appear to shimmer with an otherworldly life and live things freeze into stone. When I turn right, stepping over the chain, to take the staircase down into the sunken rose garden, the marble steps seem to undulate like an escalator. I reach out to hold the railing, but the piece of decorative carving I touch turns scaly and skitters away under my hand.
The lizards,
I remember with a shudder. I concentrate on placing each foot carefully on each step, feeling for the wide cracks and loose paving stones and praying that I don’t step on a lizard.

On the landing I find the broken statue. She’s mostly in shadow, but as I step over her, a splash of moonlight falls on her vacant eye, making it glitter reproachfully. Another streak of moonlight seems to bring a broken hand to life. I feel something graze my ankle, and in leaping away I nearly fall headlong down the next flight of stairs. I manage to catch myself just in time. I creep down the rest of the stairs, clinging to the railing no matter what brushes against my hand, until I reach the tomb of the veiled woman.

In the silver moonlight I can just make out the lines: “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” I remember that Robin thought Shakespeare’s promise to his beloved to immortalize him through art was “an infinite deal of nothing.” I’d put Robin’s bitterness down to some trifling love spat, as though I didn’t know how thoroughly one could have one’s heart broken at nineteen.

I look up at the statue of the woman reclining on the tomb. She’s wrapped head to toe in diaphanous drapery—a winding sheet or shroud, perhaps. Even her face is covered in the material, her features faintly visible beneath the tightly stretched veil. I walk around the tomb in a slow circle, noticing how the figure seems to be straining against her wraps like a mummy struggling to free herself of her winding sheet. I realize that even though the night is warm, I’ve wound the black shawl around me just as tightly in an unconscious imitation of the tautness of the statue’s drapery. Although I know that the lines of the poem were added later to the tomb, it feels as if they were written for her. “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” She seems, though dead, to be struggling against the bonds of death as if her lover’s promise will indeed bring her back to life. Resurrection by the pen! I’d laugh at the thought if it didn’t suddenly chill me to the bone. I’ve turned Shake-speare’s eighteenth sonnet into a Hollywood B zombie movie. I stop in my tracks, dizzy from walking in circles, and hear the question Robin asked me that day in class.