CHAPTER FIVE
After the children are in bed Tess finds her passport and finishes packing. Dan is at a work dinner with a visiting delegation of Chinese doctors. Then she closes the door to her study and sits on the sofa with the computer.
Tess had lived with Mitya for less than a year when she was twenty-one. Since that time she kept the memory of him like an Aladdin's lamp inside her, something she could take out from time to time and rub to see it glow. Of course Dan knew about that relationship, but for him it had receded into pre-history. For her, to speak of it would have been to blow out the private flame, small as a pilot light, of another possible life.
She listens to the sounds of the house till it is quiet enough that she feels alone. Then she clicks onto Facebook, finding the white lozenge where she can put the name in to search. Her stomach does a small, strange, long-ago twist.
When she'd finished her arts degree, Tess had saved up from waitressing jobs and gone travelling in Europe for ten months, making her way down Italy to Naples, and then to Capri, where she got a job as a dog walker. The dogs she cared for were mostly small ones that spent a lot of time in women's handbags and under restaurant tables. She would leash them up, sometimes five or six at a time, like harnessing a team of grateful birds.
Tess took the same route every day, collecting each one from its owner or the owner's house then taking them along the stone-walled path down the hill. On the cliff side the wall was covered in cascades of astonishing purple bougainvillea; the other, lower side looked out across white houses and terracotta roofs to the bay. She'd walk through the pedestrian streets of the town, past all the designer shops, the little dogs clicking their toenails on the paving. Then she'd steer her entourage down the hill to the quay, past the cafés along the Marina Grande to where clusters of uniformed hotel porters milled around, waiting for the ferries to spill out their holiday makers, dazzled and expectant.
In the third week, as she passed a café on the Marina Grande, one of the dogs, a white Pomeranian, started barking at a customer. Tess reddened with embarrassment. As she approached the man, he bent to pick something up off the ground.
'Mi dispiace,' she said, then in English, 'I'm so sorry. He's never done that before.'
'No—,' the man smiled, 'I sorry.' He showed the chicken bone in his hand. 'I asking for trouble.'
She smiled back, a little uncertain, holding on to the dogs. The man pushed his sunglasses onto his head. He was older, maybe close to forty. He wore an open shirt and old leather slip-ons without socks.
'I have terrible English,' he said, stubbing out a cigarette, 'and worse Italian.'
She laughed. He stood up, placing some coins from his pocket on the table.
'I am walking this way,' he motioned the direction she'd been going, 'I may accompany you?' By then he was close enough to touch her elbow. 'You are The Lady with the Dogs,' he'd said as they set off, the first of many things which seemed poetic to her, in the sense that she didn't quite grasp their meaning.
One knock and Charlotte tumbles into the room. She sees her mother's face in the dark, lit only by the small glow of the screen in front of her.
'Do you know where my soccer shorts are?'
Usually Tess reacts crossly to the expectation that she'll have front-of-mind the precise location of everyone's every article of discarded clothing, in its relentless cycle from floor to drawer. But now she is chastened, even relieved.
'Try the washing basket,' she says mildly.
'Thanks.'
'And put your headgear on,' Tess calls as Charlotte leaves.
'Yessss, mum,' Charlotte drawls, in her mock dutiful-daughter voice.
When the door is closed Tess types in his name but doesn't press enter. For one thing, it feels like spying. For another, she is going nose-close to the invisible electric fence of her marriage. And for another, what she finds might snuff out her pilot light altogether.
Dmitri (who went by 'Mitya') was from Moscow, but had been living on Capri for six years since Russia had opened up, leaving behind a wife and a son not much younger than Tess. He was an artist, making works on canvas out of photographs, collage and paint. It might have been good—it certainly seemed like art, compared to the touristy oils of boats and seagulls and the Blue Grotto sold on the quay.
For some days they walked the dogs together. They talked as outsiders talk, bonding over what was foreign and strange to them both in Italy, as if that would make them less foreign and strange to each other. He told her that he'd wanted to get far away from the USSR, to a place where its categories did not make sense. Later, she realised that the categories he meant were of 'dissident' and 'non-conformist artist' and 'underground', which was what you were labelled if you refused to make 'socialist realist' art. But in that moment she was enthralled by the idea itself: that you might escape whatever categories you came from to a place where they no longer applied.
Sometimes they went to a beach club, where a restaurant controlled a little stretch of sand. They ate fish at tables with white cloths under a slatted wooden awning, and then sunned themselves on the rocks like seals. Other times they walked the cliff-edges on paved tracks and then down to small, private beaches to swim. Mitya was never working and always working—he took photos of her on the beach, in a jumper of his on a cold day, or in not much if it was warm. He sketched. He worked late into the night in the studio, by the light of large candles intended for church altars.
After three weeks, Tess started to stay at his place. It was a white-walled house high up behind the town, which Mitya rented from a Neapolitan businessman. The entire first floor was a studio with a diorama and a darkroom at one end, and a futon behind a screen at the other, closer to the balcony. The first morning she found someone else's box of tampons in the bathroom. So later, even when there was much talk of the two of them being 'soul mates,' she never quite shook the feeling that she was one in a string of girls.
Tess posed for him in the white diorama wearing only a necklace. It was a cheap and pretty chain with a couple of charms on it that rested below her clavicle; he painted it as heavy, looped links reaching to her navel. In the same way that he could make a flimsy chain into a work of art around her neck, he did what he wanted with her body. She saw herself repeated across his walls, and understood she had her uses.
Of course it was practically a rite of passage for a girl from the new world to find a European lover for a while—so many of her friends had done it that it seemed almost an organised part of life, like a language exchange. But still, he'd been hers. He read everything he could get his hands on, from St Thomas Aquinas to Orwell to the Beats. His parents had survived Stalin's famine and Hitler's war. He talked about the Russian soul, when no boys at home mentioned souls, ever. He was both hopeful and hopeless at once, as if his background had let him in on a secret about human nature she could not yet know. One time he wept openly about failing his son. He didn't want more children.
Tess had felt special, plucked from her provincial origins to be the lover of this man, catapulted into the centre of European art (so it seemed to her) by virtue of her youth, her blankness, the fate of having been picked out by him. But she knew at the same time—did all reasonably pretty girls know this?—that she could have been any half-decent twenty-one year old who walked into his life that day.
And both of them knew she could go home at any moment to another possible life, which was why he always framed that option in pejorative terms.
'Well, if you want to go, go.' It was after eight months of living together.
Mitya was on the balcony looking at the water—the ridiculous, beautiful, bobbing boats—not at her. He didn't say it as if he'd be upset if she left, but as if her leaving would constitute a failure of some kind; a failure to commit to a more complex life.
Tess's hands hover over the keyboard. She feels the flip in her stomach again. She types the three names including the patronymic. She presses enter.
The site comes up. It is run by his ga
llerist in Paris, where, it seems, he lives now. She scrolls down. His work is similar, if perhaps stranger and more washed-out than Tess remembers. There are no photos of him. She scrolls so fast the screen blurs.
Finally, there is one picture of him, from two years ago. Older but still recognizably himself: wide smile, short teeth, square chin. He wears sunglasses and a small-brimmed hat, and has his arms around two young women, also in sunglasses. Tess looks closer; she can't see enough of him. She scrolls back to the most recent posting: a photo of a grand gallery, in its windows the sign: 'Retrospective: Dmitri Voronin 1994-2014' The opening details are posted below: Vernissage, 18.30. It is at a gallery in the Marais, in four days' time.
Tess wakes. Dan is already up and into the breakfast routine—she can hear them all downstairs. He has let her sleep in.
She zips her case and brings it down. Charlotte is making a smoothie. The twins are at the bench, their hair still crazy from sleep, but with their uniforms on. Dan is trying to get broken toast out of the toaster with rubber-tipped tongs.
'Anyone seen my computer?' Tess asks over the racket of the vitemizer.
Lorna lifts the white, scalloped collar of her school dress and wipes her vegemite-covered mouth with it luxuriantly, from one side to the other.
'That's what that's for,' Lorna tells her brother. Today, that is not Tess's problem.
'Anyone?' she repeats.
'Gotcha!' Dan says to the toast. Then he gestures with his chin to a side table where he's put the computer. 'I charged it for you,' he says.
'Thanks.' Tess unplugs it, puts it in her carry-on case and sits down to drink her coffee.
Before she calls the cab she goes to find Dan, who is brushing Lorna's teeth.
'They're so disorganised at work. I got an email last night asking me to stay for the session on Saturday morning after all. I'm sorry. Will you manage?'
Dan pauses the teeth-brushing.
'Sure,' he says without turning around. 'When does that mean you'll be home?'
'Monday night.'
'No worries,' he says, and he believes her, and does not believe her.