The Sonnet Lover (5 page)

I realize I’m a little
too
early when I get off the elevator, but at least there’s no line at the bar. Plus, I recognize the bartender as a former student.

“A Greek Goddess, Dr. Asher?” he asks me as I approach.

I look behind me as if expecting a white-robed Athena to appear from behind one of the potted trees in the corners.

“It’s the party’s signature cocktail,” he tells me, pouring a drop of orange liqueur into a glass flute. “A hint of Grand Marnier, Cointreau, and”—popping the cork on a bottle of Moët Chandon—“champagne.”

When the fizz settles, he hands me a drink the pale orange color of Tuscan stucco. I take an experimental sip and nod my head appreciatively. “Nice, Jake,” I say, pulling his name out of an invisible roster in my head. “Are you graduating this year?”

“I graduated last year,” he tells me, lining up a dozen champagne flutes and carefully measuring a few drops of Grand Marnier in each one. “I’m bartending until I can get an acting job. I heard there’s going to be a lot of film people here tonight.”

The elevator opens and a flood of laughter and perfume wafts into the room. I see Jake looking over my shoulder appraisingly at the crowd. “Well, I’ll leave you to it, then,” I say. “Good luck.”

I walk away from the newcomers toward the wall of north-facing windows overlooking the park. It’s a gorgeous view, one of my favorites in the city, especially at this time of day, when the sky is the cobalt blue of twilight. Across the park, the Washington Square Arch, recently cleaned and restored, gleams white, and the lights of Fifth Avenue seem to spring out of it like a luminescent river that casts shimmering droplets along its banks. Something in how the lights look tonight, distant beyond the cold glass, reminds me of the lemons in the
limonaia
in the last scene of Robin’s film. I find myself pressing my face against the glass just as Zoe had.

“You shouldn’t stand so close to the glass,” a voice says from close behind me. “It could break and you’d fall to your death.”

I turn, wincing at the image of my broken body—the second I’ve entertained today—and force my face into a smile to greet Mara Silverman, wife of Gene Silverman, the head of the film department.

“Hello, Mara.” I tilt my head to receive a kiss on the cheek. “Actually I’d just end up on the balcony, but thanks for the warning.”

The balcony, which runs along three sides of the building, has a Plexiglas railing so as not to obstruct the view. There are two metal doors to it, one each at the east and west corners of the room, but they’ve been locked tonight because of an incident at a party last year when a distraught sophomore tried to climb over the railing and was saved from ending her life only by one of her friends, who hung on to her feet until security arrived.

Mara’s cheek—colder even than the glass—grazes mine, and then she pulls back as if stung by the contact. Or maybe she’s just afraid of getting lipstick on the collar of her buttercup yellow Chanel suit. As usual, she’s overdressed for the event. She looks as if she’s dressed for a country club dinner or a formal bar mitzvah instead of a film show in downtown Manhattan. What’s painful is knowing how much time and money she probably spent picking out the outfit and having it altered to perfectly conform to her size-four figure, then having her shoulder-length black hair touched up to hide the gray, blown, and set, her nails manicured, and even her feet, which are hidden in tasteful Ferragamo pumps, pumiced and pedicured. I know because I once made the mistake of accepting an invitation to a “girls’ day out” with Mara, and this is what we did.

“Is Gene here?” I ask, looking hopefully around for her husband.

“He’s still downstairs with all those Hollywood people.” Mara shudders and takes a sip of her sparkling water. Mara never drinks. “But I felt claustrophobic so I came up here. Can we move away from these windows? I don’t like heights. Didn’t one of those suicides happen here?”

“No, that was at the NYU library.” I follow Mara a safe distance from the windows. “They’ve had to glass in the atrium at Bobst. They should make these railings higher, too. That’s why the doors are locked.”

A waiter with a tray of miniature quiches approaches us, but Mara waves him away as if he were a homeless person begging for money. No, that’s not fair. Mara would give money to the homeless person way before she’d allow dairy to pass her lips. “So far, though, Hudson’s been relatively lucky in that department—” I begin.

“Imagine not knowing your child was in that much trouble. I bet they’re mostly children of divorce.”

I’ve heard Mara’s views on divorce before. On our girls’ day out she talked of little else. She told me she “didn’t believe in it,” as if divorce were a figment of the popular imagination like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny.

“What if you knew your husband was cheating?” I’d asked, knowing full well that Gene was infamous for sleeping with his students.

“Men,” Mara had said, crossing her legs and nearly kicking the pedicurist in the head. “What can you expect from them? They think with their penises. The trick,” she said in a stage whisper that only the women under the hair dryers would miss, “is to never let on that you know.”

I had stopped feeling sorry for her, but it was too late. By then I was the only professor or faculty wife who had spent any time with her and so she always latched on to me at college functions. I resign myself to spending the next quarter hour with Mara and ask after her son, Ned. She treats me to a rundown of Ned’s college application procedure, which sounds as if Mara herself had been the one actually applying. After she has recited his application essay to Cornell verbatim, I remark that it’s a shame he hadn’t wanted to go to Hudson, as he would have been eligible for tuition reimbursement.

“Yes, well, he was interested in the acting program, but I helped him to see how impractical
that
was. He has to make a living, after all, and he always did so well in science, so he agreed to be premed if he could do the theater program in Italy this summer. Besides, I didn’t think Hudson would be right for Ned,” she says, and then adds, in a throaty whisper,
“Too many gays.”
Mara’s eyes dart nervously around the room, as if on the lookout for homosexual predators. But again I re-alize I’m being unfair to Mara. She’s not exactly a homophobe—she loves her gay hairdresser, for instance, and
La Cage aux Folles
is her favorite musical—she’s just a little overprotective when it comes to her Ned.

I follow her gaze around the room, which is filling now with men in crisp suits and women in summery cocktail dresses. The lights have been dimmed to show off the glittering skyline beyond the windows. Votive candles in blue and gold glass bowls are scattered about the room, echoing the lights of the city. The room feels more like a garden party than an academic reception on the tenth floor of a Manhattan building. I see Robin and the girl Zoe talking to Mara’s husband, at the center of a cluster of men in white suits. As no self-respecting New Yorker would wear a white suit before Memorial Day, I conclude that these must be Cyril Graham’s friends from Hollywood. Robin himself is wearing the Versace tweed over a white T-shirt and faded jeans, but he looks every bit as sartorial as the Hollywood clique—and he doesn’t look a bit like he needs saving.

“There’s Robin Weiss, the one whose film won first prize,” I tell Mara. “He’s talking to Gene.”

Mara wheels around and scans the room to find her husband. When she does, she undergoes a sea change, not so much in her expression (she’s had far too much Botox for her face to give away anything) as in her posture. Her shoulders hunch up to her ears and she wraps her bony arms over her flat chest as if defending herself from an attack. I look back to see what’s brought on this bout of anxiety and notice that Zoe’s standing very close to Gene, one slim bare hip cocked against his leg. Poor Mara. She must be afraid that Gene’s found another conquest.

On our girls’ day out Mara had devoted a good half hour to extolling Gene’s good looks. He’d been the handsomest boy at Tufts, she’d assured me; all the girls were after him. She’d even shown me a picture she carried in her wallet of the two of them at their senior prom. “Yes, quite handsome,” I’d said, trying not to inject too much enthusiasm lest Mara decide that I, too, was after her husband. The truth was that I’d never found Gene’s type—wispy blond hair cut in a seventies shag framing a babyish face and grazing footballer’s shoulders—that attractive. And two decades had done nothing to improve his looks, which have gotten softer rather than sharper. He still wore his hair longish—often pushed back by sunglasses on the top of his head even at an evening event like tonight’s—and his face had gotten pudgy around the eyes and jawline. His shoulders still strained the expensive Tommy Hilfiger jacket he wore over black jeans, but much of that muscle had turned to flab. He still managed to attract enough student admirers to keep Mara on her guard, though. Clearly she now thinks that Zoe is a threat.

Just when I’m feeling sorry for her again, she points across the room to a cluster near the east door to the balcony. “Who’s that lovely young woman President Abrams is with?”

I turn and see Mark talking to a slim blond woman in a tailored dove gray suit. “I think she’s the new lawyer working on the Graham bequest,” I say, my voice neutral. I can guess what Mara’s up to. On our girls’ day out I’d stupidly confessed that Mark and I were involved. Now she must think that if she has to feel jealous of her husband, she would like company. I swallow the last sip of my champagne cocktail, making a silent promise to myself
not
to get sucked into Mara’s games again, and hold up the empty glass between us. “Can I get you something from the bar?”

“No,” she says, “I can’t mix alcohol with the medication I’m on.”

Her eyes are darting back and forth nervously. In addition to her fear of heights and flying, Mara admitted to me at the salon that she’s an agoraphobe—clearly panicked to be left alone in the growing crowd.

“I think I’ll get some air.” She edges away from me toward the door on the west side of the balcony.

“President Abrams has ordered the doors to be locked…” I begin, but Mara has already summoned a security guard (the one posted, in fact, to keep people off the balcony) to open the door for her. It doesn’t take long for the guard to yield to the incipient hysteria in Mara’s voice. She slips out onto the balcony, keeping her back pressed up against the window and staying as far as she can from the railing. The folds of her yellow knit suit creased against the glass make her look like a rare butterfly specimen splayed between sheets of wax paper—caught between her warring fears of the crowd inside and the sheer drop from the balcony.

When I turn from her, I feel curiously flattened and exposed as well, as if my motives for putting up with Mara Silverman were as transparent as the glass itself. “Just because you slept with a married professor once upon a time doesn’t mean you have to make up for all the wronged faculty wives of the world,” my friend and colleague Chihiro Arita has told me. I wish Chihiro were here tonight, but she’d opted to take her twelve-year-old niece to an anime film instead. “Give me katana swordplay over faculty politics any day,” she’d e-mailed me last night when I asked whether she was coming.

I look for Robin and see he’s still in his crowd of admirers, but when he sees me he waves for me to come over. As I approach the group, though, one of the white suits peels away—like a petal falling off a chrysanthemum. I’m so pleased with the image that I’m reaching into my purse for pen and paper when I realize that the man is headed straight for me.

“Dr. Asher, isn’t it?” he asks, thrusting forward his hand.

“Yes,” I admit, submitting my hand to his firm grip. Everything about this man looks firm, in fact, from his flat stomach and well-developed chest muscles under a close-fitting black T-shirt and gleaming white cotton jacket to his tanned bare skull. “I’m sorry,” I ask, when he releases my hand, “have we met?”

“Leo Balthasar,” he says, as if I’m supposed to recognize the name. He draws a business card from the breast pocket of his jacket.
Leo Balthasar,
I read,
Producer, Lemon House Films.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “I don’t get to the movies much.”

He throws back his head and laughs as if I’d said something very witty. The top of his skull shines in the yellow candlelight. Without turning his head, he reaches out to intercept a passing waiter’s tray of champagne flutes and procures us each one of the orange-tinted cocktails.

“Have you had one of these Goddesses, yet? Cyril Graham claims to have invented it on a cruise with Jackie Onassis in the Greek isles.”

“Ah, so you’re a friend of Cyril’s…”

“That’s who told me about you. He said you were the one to get on board the sonnet project. Said no one had a better feel for Shake-speare’s sonnets.”

“That’s hardly true,” I say, sipping my champagne. “There’s Helen Vendler, for instance—”

“You,”
Leo Balthasar says, leaning in closer and holding his glass of champagne up to my face like an orange exclamation point, “are the one Cyril Graham wants on the project.”

“And what project is that?” I ask, trying not to appear as clueless as I feel.

“The Shakespeare project. A film based on the sonnets of Shakespeare. The whole Dark Lady–slash–beloved boy–slash–famous poet triangle. It’s your boy’s idea.” Balthasar looks over his shoulder toward Robin Weiss.
My boy
?

“Robin’s my student,” I say, instantly hating how prim I sound. A Miss Jean Brodie in the making. “Do you mean the film we just saw?
The Lemon House
?”

Leo Balthasar laughs his full-bodied laugh again, which seems to require leaning his head far enough back to draw in air from the upper reaches of the ceiling. “What we saw tonight was a sweet student effort, but what I’m interested in is a script Robin Weiss sent me two weeks ago. I don’t usually pay attention to student work, but this project has potential—and backing. Cyril Graham has interested some of his rich friends in making the film at La Civetta. Picture
Shakespeare in Love,
only steamier. And set in Italy, of course.”