He put his arms around her and they kissed. She’d known for a long time that she wouldn’t go back with him. Even so, the thought that Woody hadn’t pursued her with the same determination that he’d pursued Biscotti made her sad.
Woody rolled down the window and Biscotti put her head out.
“The woman,” the driver said—the driver had been hired by Woody’s lawyer—“she’s a good friend?”
“Very good friend.”
The driver nodded. “Always tough to say good-bye. At least you got the dog.”
When they got to the autostrada, Woody reached into the backseat and patted Biscotti’s head. He was thinking back to the stone altar in the Archeological Museum. Maybe he had glimpsed into the future after all. Everything seemed familiar. He stroked the dog’s head. Dogs’ heads are shaped just right for hands.
They passed a sign for Siena. The driver lit a cigarette and offered one to Woody. Woody was tempted. He hadn’t had a cigarette in years. The smell was wonderful. His wife, Hannah, had had to give up smoking when she joined the convent. She said it was the hardest thing. Giving up cigarettes. The thought of it brought Woody to the edge of tears.
“You okay?” the driver asked.
Woody wanted to explain, but he didn’t understand it himself.
Margot took the number-14 bus back into the center, but instead of getting off the bus in Piazza Santa Croce and going home, she went all the way to the train station and then took a cab to her studio. She looked at herself in the mirror in the slow, slow elevator. She could see that she’d been crying, without even knowing it—but just a little. She negotiated the locks and the alarm system. The Galileo was on her workbench.
She got out her lifting knife and her Japanese water stones from the library cabinet where she kept her tools. She’d made the lifting knife herself, when she first went to work with Signor Cecchi in Prato, out of a hacksaw blade. She’d clamped the blade in the job backer, snapped it in half, ground down the teeth, taken the angle back on a grinding stone, finished it by hand, and wrapped the handle in leather. Signor Cecchi had held her hand every step of the way, and she could feel something of his spirit in the knife as she held it in her own hand, a spirit that would help her face the uncertainties that lay ahead of her, that would help her overcome them and master the art of living.
She put the Japanese stones in a bucket of water to soak while she fixed a small pot of espresso. Standing at the bench, waiting for her coffee to brew, she could look down on the Arno. She could see the shops on the other side of the Arno, the leather shop where Esther had bought her multicolored coat. The river moved as slowly as the elevator. She’d lived in Florence ten years before she’d been sure which way the Arno was flowing. She knew it flowed from Florence to Pisa and from Pisa to the sea, but for ten years she hadn’t known north from south.
By the time she’d drunk her coffee, the stones were saturated. She slipped the coarsest one into a wooden holder she’d built to hold it over the sink and moved the blade of the knife across the top in long even strokes, running a little water over the stone from time to time so the pores wouldn’t clog with tiny particles of metal from the blade. Then she moved to the second stone, and then to the third and finest stone. She continued to move the blade back and forth till the edge was so sharp it approached nothing, and then she honed it on a piece of rawhide.
She looked over her survey sheet and paused for a moment. Like a surgeon, she slid the lifting knife under one side of the soft crumbling leather of the codex and lifted the spine off the back of the text block. There was no turning back now.
The Italian Lover
AN ESTHER KLEIN PRODUCTION
The industry was struggling to recover from a string of big-budget disasters. Harry’s film had tanked, followed by Clint Eastwood’s The Rookie, Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer’s The Russia House, Robert Redford’s Havana, and—the biggest disaster of all—Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities. There was a lot of breast-beating in the industry about the need for a reality check, about the need to economize. Hollywood was in the mood for a modest romantic comedy with an Italian twist, and The Italian Lover generated a buzz. The marketing execs at Leviathan put some serious money into the trailers and production stills and advance screenings and press packs. And much was made of Michael’s death. He’d been making films for thirty years; he knew everyone. Everyone knew him. How could they not come to the opening?
The Italian Lover opened in December on over a thousand screens across the country. Esther saw it in L.A. She’d already seen it five hundred times—dailies, rough cuts, fine cuts, Eddie’s cut, her own cut, the Leviathan cut. She’d worked with Eddie on what passed for a back lot at Leviathan in Burbank on one of the new Avid systems, a first for Esther. No film bins, no editing tapes, no splicers. It was amazing. It was like using a word processor instead of a typewriter. You could save a sequence the way you had it originally, try it two or three different ways, and then watch them all. Without pulling anything apart the way you had to do on a Steenbeck table.
Leviathan had tested two endings. One version ended with Sandro’s passionate speech in which he proposes to marry Margot, even though she’s going to give the money to the convent. He’ll teach her how to live: they’ll sail the Mediterranean, tread grapes in their bare feet, go camping in Sardinia, make love on a mountain peak. The other version ended with Margot walking down London’s New Bond Street—or Via Capponi dressed to look like New Bond Street—by herself, looking in the shop windows. In her purse she’s got the money from the sale of the Aretino volume at Sotheby’s. She admires something in the window of an antique shop, an Etruscan statue of a little girl. She enters the shop. THE END. But the second ending had been a waste of time. Viewers preferred the first ending nine to one.
It’s always unnerving to see your film in front of a “real” audience, responding to the film, scene by scene, as it unfolds on the screen. It’s like watching your daughter at her first piano recital. You can’t relax till it’s over. But Esther didn’t have to wait till it was over. The dogs sniffing butts in the opening sequence said everything that needed to be said at that moment—the audience loved it—and the long take of Zanni walking across the piazza while Margot watches him from the window of his apartment was like watching Chaplin in the long shots in City Lights or The Gold Rush, everything working on five or six levels. They cut the second Settignano sequence, which slowed down the narrative too much, but that was it.
The Italian Lover opened at the Fox on Hollywood Boulevard. It was a preview for “the community.” It was everything a gala is supposed to be: a giant searchlight illuminated the heavens; paparazzi took pictures of Miranda, who’d flown in from Italy, and of the high-level studio executives—the deal makers—who came to check out the film and to register their affection and admiration for their fallen comrade, Michael Gardiner, who had died in August. A handful of recognizable stars appeared too, stars whom Michael had directed over the years.
Zanni generated more publicity in absentia than if he’d been on the scene. The tabloids were full of the story of the government’s refusal to grant him a visa.
The audience was enthusiastic and at the party afterward, at the new Ma Maison Sofitel, Esther schmoozed with everyone and accepted condolences on behalf of Beryl, who’d stayed in New York. She ate too many hors d’oeuvres and drank too much champagne, but she was clearheaded enough when Harry called her at the hotel to offer his congratulations. “You’re gonna make some money,” he said. “You’re gonna do a lot of business.”
“Thanks, Harry,” she said. “It means a lot to me. I mean that you called.”
He asked her if she wanted him to come to the hotel, but she said no. She was staying at the Beverly Wilshire, because she’d sold the house in Santa Monica. But it didn’t matter. She’d buy another one. She was somebody again.
PIAZZA CALENDA
Beryl saw the uncut version of the film in her own private screening roo
m in her apartment in New York. She hadn’t gone to the opening in L.A., but she’d accepted a lifetime achievement award for Michael at the Golden Globes in January. Her children and their families arrived in the afternoon; the other guests came at seven for a light supper, which she prepared herself in the kitchen with two stoves and two refrigerators and two sinks, and served in the living room.
The screening room accommodated all her guests in comfortable chairs. It was the first time she’d used it. There’d been a problem with the modified Norelco projectors, and problems with the electronic focusing system, and the tech support people had been there all day and were still there, going over things with the projectionist, when the guests arrived.
What was she expecting? hoping for? afraid of? She was afraid it would be mediocre, “middling.” Would her guests care? Would it matter?
Zanni was truly wonderful, but it wasn’t Zanni Beryl was remembering; it wasn’t Venice. It wasn’t Florence. It was the time in Naples, when she was in the hospital bossing Michael around, sending him out to see this and that, Pompeii and Herculaneum, the mosaics at the Archeological Museum and the Spanish Quarter, and all the time he was drinking Frascati at a little trattoria in Piazza Calenda.
She tried to turn this revelation into something profound, but what she remembered was the food that he’d brought her from the restaurant, china plates covered with foil; what she remembered was Michael climbing into her hospital bed and holding her; what she remembered was the nurse pulling the sheet up over them. They’d never have gotten away with that in Sloan-Kettering.
THE SAME RIVER TWICE
Heracleitus of Ephesus says you can’t step in the same river twice, but Woody wasn’t so sure. He’d stepped back into his old life, taken up his former teaching duties—Horace, Catullus, Virgil, Homer, Classical Mythology, and Beginning Greek—moved back into a house just down the road from his old house, bordered by the same stream on the west and the same moraine to the east. If you floated a bottle on the stream, the way the girls used to do, it might just make it all the way to the Mississippi; and if you drove up to the little cemetery on the cusp of the moraine, where Cookie was buried, you could look down and see the light in his kitchen window.
Woody saw The Italian Lover the day after Christmas. His daughters had come to St. Clair for the holidays—Sara and her family, Ludi and her dogs. Woody didn’t want to see it. It was too complicated. They’d have to get a sitter for the kids; they’d have to drive all the way to Peoria; it was snowing and the roads were slippery. But the girls wanted to go.
Woody wasn’t sure why he was apprehensive. He didn’t need to be. He hardly recognized the story. It would have been ten times better if they’d used the screenplay that he and Margot had written. He kept grousing about the differences. The girls shushed him, told him to hush, to relax and enjoy it for what it was—a romantic comedy. But when they caught a glimpse of their father in the piazza, with the dogs sniffing each other, they started whispering and Woody had to shush them.
They knew about Margot, and on the way home they kidded him about the love scenes. “Why did you come back?”
“Naietao d’ Ithakan eudeielon,” Woody started to say, but they interrupted him. “Not in Greek, Papa. Don’t hide behind Homer. What was your real reason?”
Woody couldn’t answer the question. Florence was so beautiful in the film, more beautiful and interesting than he remembered it. The piazzas, Santa Croce, Fiesole, Settignano, the convent. Miranda was as beautiful as Margot. And Zanni. He and Zanni had hit it off. Zanni had been impressed with Woody’s political role in Italy and had invited him to come back to Italy to go duck hunting up in the hill country around Padua. And then the happy ending. The lovers getting married. He pulled himself together. “The happy ending misses the whole point,” he said.
The girls disagreed. They still wanted an answer. But he didn’t find an answer till they’d left and he was alone, sitting at his desk, writing a letter to Margot. He sat in his study and wrote with the Montblanc pen she’d given him for Christmas, though he preferred the italic nib of his old Duofold.
“Dear Margot,” he wrote. He didn’t apologize for not writing, though it had been over six months since he left her at the Agip station at the lower edge of Settignano. He just told her what he could see in front of him, out his window. He could see the stream and the woods beyond the stream. He could see his own tracks in the snow, and the dog’s tracks. He told her about the girls coming home for Christmas, and what they’d eaten and how the dogs had gotten along and how he pulled his grandchildren on the sled he’d bought for them on sale at Tractor Supply. He told her about his classes, how they were up to sixty lines a day in the Homer seminar, focusing on the Achilliad, and he told her about the young woman who’d replaced him when he was gone and who was now in a tenure-track position, a fire-breathing feminist who’d regarded him with suspicion at first. But he liked her because she’d fought tooth and nail to prevent the old dean, Woody’s enemy, from folding the Classics department into something called “World Literature.”
He told her how much he’d enjoyed her article in the November issue of the National Geographic on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the flood, and he told her about visiting his wife, Hannah, in the convent, before she died. “She wanted a favor. She wanted me to change the inscription on the tombstone, Cookie’s epitaph. That’s what we quarreled about originally. She’d wanted la sua voluntadè è nostra pace, God’s will is our peace. That’s what she had the monument company put on the stone in the first place, but I had them sand it down and put on a new epitaph: ‘Against the strength of love, you will find no herb. Against the strength of love, no herb grows in the garden.’ She hated it, but I couldn’t see Cookie’s death as part of God’s plan. What kind of a plan could it be to let all those people be blown up? But what she wanted now was a line from Shakespeare: ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.’ And the funny thing was, I could see it. ‘Think about it, Woody,’ she said. ‘Do you think it didn’t matter? That no one noticed? Look how you noticed, Woody. Look how you fought for her. I don’t know the whole story, but I know you went to Bologna. You went to the trial. You fought for her, Woody. You loved her. It’s not “just a man gone.” Can’t you work your way out from this, from your love, work your way out to God’s love? Maybe not all the way. Just a little way. You can’t say her death was meaningless. If it was, why did you care so much?’
“And I knew she was right. But she was having trouble talking. She was on a respirator and she started coughing. I told her I could go that far, and I tried to get her to stop coughing, to take it easy, and when she stopped coughing she asked me again, ‘Will you do that for me, Woody? Then I’ll rest easy. It’s been on my mind so long.’
“‘I’ll take care of it, Hannah,’ I said, and I bent over to kiss her. I was thinking how happy we’d been, and I think she was thinking the same thing. ‘I remember, Woody,’ she said. ‘I’ll always remember. You’d better go now. I’m tired.’”
And he told her about stopping at the monument company on the way home to order a new tombstone and about the biography of Odysseus he’d started putting together. “Did you know that Odysseus had a sister?” he wrote. “Nobody knows that. She’s mentioned only once, in Book X, but think of it. Odysseus grew up with a sister. Don’t you have to wonder how she shaped his life, like all the other wonderful women he encounters in the poem? Arete and Nausikaa and Penelope and Kalypso and Circe. When I think of them, I think of all the wonderful women in my life, and especially you, Margot. Seeing the film last night brought it all back to me. I’ve been trying all morning to figure out how you’ve shaped my life, and the answer just came to me. I’ve thought of you as my temptation, like Kalypso or Circe, or even Nausikaa, but you weren’t my temptation. You were my helper. You were my Athena. You came to me when I needed you, and you helped me on my way when I needed to go home.”
And he told her that he read everything he wrote
aloud to the dog, Biscotti. He told her about going duck hunting with Biscotti in the marshes down by the river, the Mississippi, and how she could swim under water and retrieve two ducks at a time, and how she could negotiate the thickest briars, and he told her that it was time for lunch, a salami sandwich for him and Science Diet for Biscotti, and that after lunch he and Biscotti were going to go to his office for a while to make up his syllabi for the new term.
And then he read the letter aloud to Biscotti, and then he signed it, “Love, Woody.” He put it in an envelope and sealed it and addressed it and dropped it off in the mail room at the college.
A BROAD ROMAN ACCENT
Miranda spent a week in L.A. in December doing the interviews required by her contract, and she stayed for the premiere of the American version, which had been cut to get an R rating, but she left right after the premiere. She was two months’ pregnant and wanted to go home. She was four months’ pregnant when the film opened in Rome, dubbed into Italian. She was the only one who didn’t enjoy it. She sat between her husband and her mother-in-law.
She’d turned down several offers from Gordon Talbot at Leviathan, and later on she turned down several job offers from Guido’s father: she could be a secretary at the movie-supply house; she could be a salesperson; she could be a consultant; she could be whatever she wanted to be at Graziano Brothers Movie Supply Company. But what she wanted to be was a book conservator, and on the basis of a strong recommendation from Margot, who’d given her away at her wedding at the end of August, she had apprenticed herself to a conservator in Rome, working with her hands: folding, sewing, pressing, cutting. She gave her mother-in-law fits by riding Guido’s Vespa 40X to work every morning, to Signor Melozzo’s studio near the Piazza del Popolo. On Friday afternoons she volunteered at the cat shelter in Largo Torre Argentina.
She was embarrassed by the uncut sex scenes. Not because her bare butt was on display, but because there was no rhythm to them. No give and take. No long slow buildup, the way there was with Guido. But her mother-in-law leaned over and whispered in her ear, “How lucky, to be like that with Zanni, so intimate, even if he’s from Venice.”