16. Rome, October #3
“It’s more the fact of what I don’t do. Getting a proper job, that kind of thing. That, and, well.” I gestured sadly to myself. “Who I am.”
She let me cry on for a moment or two, my shoulders jolting. Then I apologized, which she said I had no need to do. She handed me a tissue and I collected myself, blowing my nose.
“You’re carrying such a lot with you, Gus, aren’t you?” she said finally. Then her eyes glinted. “Because there’s something else, isn’t there? Mary?”
My stomach lurched. “Is it that obvious?”
I tried to treat her comment lightly, but it was the first time I had admitted my feelings for Mary, for any girl, to someone of my parents’ age. On the one hand, I felt exhilarated, but on the other, I felt frighteningly exposed.
“But aren’t you getting on pretty well?” she said.
“I’m not sure. I hope so.”
“I’m sure she adores you.” Jean smiled, then got up from her chair and led me out of the room. Moments before, she had pointedly checked her watch. It was now time for me to go. “But do you adore you? That’s the bigger question. That’s the part that needs work.”
By the front door, she kissed me on both cheeks. As she clasped me warmly, Jean apologized for going so deep.
“That game can be quite confronting. And I can be such a nosy parker. You must tell me to back off sometimes.”
“Don’t apologize. I actually enjoyed myself. Thank you.”
“Well, that’s encouraging.” She beamed at me. “I’m looking at so much potential here, Gus.”
I smiled back. Then she slipped me some cash for the taxi home. A fifty.
I asked the cab to stop once we’d got onto Piazza Venezia so that I could walk and keep most of the money.
Standing by a late-night pizza stand, with traffic thundering over the cobbles, I texted Mary.
I was exhausted from my evening with Jean, but also desperate to see her.
Looking back, I wonder if there was something already troubling me, on a bodily level.
Some nervous energy I needed to release or numb out.
Just out of drinks party—so nice , I wrote.
I made out to Mary like I’d spent the night with a bigger crowd.
Jean is such an eccentric , I wrote. You’d love her.
Mary replied effusively, which made it clear she was drunk. Excited, I asked for her location, which after a minute or two she managed to share. She was near Piazza del Popolo in some nightclub.
Gussie babe , she wrote as I hurried up Via del Corso. I need you!
The devotion to Mary that Jean had just observed was rearing up in me now. I told her to stay exactly where she was and that I’d be there really soon. My phone buzzed. Mary, again. I felt a twist of joy at the sight of her name on my home screen.
Come find meeeeeee! Xxxxxxx
The seasons turn quickly in Rome. By October, it was too cold to spend hours sitting idly outside in the piazzas.
With the money I had earned from the Melrose school—a merciful ten euros an hour, which came in envelopes of coins after the Friday sitting—I began to immerse myself in the galleries and museums that Jean had recommended I visit, using her pass, which got me a discount.
Gradually, Rome started to feel like a friendlier place, no longer an expensive antagonist, but a glorious host.
Whole afternoons disappeared as I studied the sculptures at the Vatican Museums, or the Villa Borghese, in a hungover or dumbfounded state, notebook in hand, seized by competing emotions of wonder and fear.
Often, Rome seemed a crazy place for a residency, because the works I saw were so intimidating.
To visit those galleries and then return to my cramped studio to work on my own pieces—vases, bowls—homogenous, mainly useful objects, as Jean had already identified, was humbling.
Sometimes it helped to affect an inner nonchalance to the wonders I was seeing: that cosmic portal in the roof of the Pantheon, Nero’s marble bathtub, Michelangelo’s little turtles on the fountain near Jean’s place in the Ghetto.
Jean had a checklist for me—she called it the foundation , and I was gradually working my way through it.
Since I had taken the bath at her apartment, Jean would send me text messages to check in, and sometimes, only if she had the time, she’d arrange for us to visit some of the sites together.
Each time I met her, I was struck not only by her kindness, but also her worldly access.
She was eager, even adamant, that I experienced it all and had the best of everything: the highest views, the creamiest gelato, the most abundant antipasto.
“You should bring Mary with you, next time,” she said. “I’m sure she’d love this, too.”
But Mary was often coolly indifferent to her surroundings.
She’d lived in the city for only a year, but I noticed that when she ambled past the Pantheon, she barely looked up at it; when I showed her the secret Caravaggio frescoes in the French church—a tip from Jean—she had yawned noisily like a bear.
Piazza Navona—a place, for me, that was so dazzlingly baroque I practically shielded my eyes—was, for Mary, merely a venue for a coffee, or someone’s flat for the late-night, post-nightclub binges she called afters .
I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be cool. I was starting to love the city with an intensity that was becoming inseparable from my fixation on Mary.
She was there in all my favorite works: The smooth marble of the Bernini sculptures reminded me of the pale undersides of her arms; Apollo’s indents on Daphne’s flesh made me think of how my fingers might dig into Mary’s hips.
That golden afternoon light which filled the naves of every chapel I visited reflected her waterfall of hair; the smells of the pizza restaurants in Trastevere, salt and yeast, might also be the taste of her mouth.
When I couldn’t see Mary, or talk to her, I wanted to talk about her.
This wasn’t something I could discuss with my Italian peers on the residency, who spoke poor English.
It was obviously impossible to broach this subject with my roommate; she had recently adhered a crucifix to the wall nearest her bed, and I was certain she was still a virgin.
So it was that Jean, who had so easily perceived my crush, became my confidante.
When she passed by Monti, I’d take a work break and meet her for a coffee—Jean usually arriving on her old Dutch bicycle in some fabulously structural black coat—and I’d lean against the mirrored bar and tell her about my conversations with Mary and the little frissons of attraction that were passing between us during our sittings.
Jean never let me forget that not only was she an expert on Rome, and on the works of art and sculpture that we both enjoyed, but she also had a professional understanding of the human mind.
“This is what Mary’s actually thinking” was how she often began her sentences. Her analysis, frequently, was informed by the “crushing” weight of wealth that must have been bequeathed to Mary. That, and her famous parents, who, Jean was adamant, had clearly been “very absent.”
But, along with her academic interest in my blossoming friendship, I could also tell that Jean liked the whole lovelorn drama of it all.
With no one else to turn to, I was grateful that she indulged me.
The more openly we spoke, the more normal I began to feel.
Not only that, but a richer, warmer sensation I hadn’t known in myself before had begun, too. An excitement, like an itch.
Looking back, I see that speaking openly with Jean not only brought me huge relief, but also, for the first time in my life, a sense of hope.
It therefore seemed natural that I confided in Jean straight after my tenth sitting, the one where I saw Lawrence touch Mary.
We’d started out in high spirits.
“You’re early,” Mary had said, skipping out of Lawrence’s study.
She was barefoot and dressed in her painting shorts—ripped denim, cut high on the thigh, which showed off her slender figure—and a powder-blue shirt made from one of her mother’s famous prints.
A matching ribbon was plaited into her hair.
I had been waiting for her in the corridor, talking to Decca.
She’d leaned in and kissed me on the cheek in front of everyone.
It was the first time she had done that.
Briefly, I was transported; the air was full of the smell of her perfume, the tropical scent of her shampoo.
Keeping a firm hand on the small of my back, she steered me, playfully, toward the classroom.
Once I was in position, Mary put on music, then began to make bold, confident strokes on her canvas, skipping back and forth from her vantage point.
She’d lost that expression that I’d noticed in previous sittings, that frightened look.
Kind smiles, and little sounds of encouragement, escaped from her pretty mouth.
She no longer seemed so at war with herself.
When I remarked that her feedback session with Law must have gone well, she told me it had.
“I’m blaming it on you,” she said giddily. “He’s quite happy with how this is going,” she said, pointing her brush at the painting. “It’s a miracle.”
I smiled. “You seem to care a lot about what he thinks.”
“Because he’s brilliant.”
“He seems so tough on you, though.”
She thought this over, then she looked back at me, a wry smile spread across her face.
She began to tell me about what he’d said in the crit, that Mary was starting to remind him of his most famous student.
“Just before she got picked up by a gallery. He’s only tough on me because I’ve got potential. ”
We painted in silence a while longer, until Mary granted me a bathroom break. On my way there, I met Lawrence in the corridor. He was wearing his usual cords and a black painting smock, carrying that perpetual soda can in his hand.
“Still here?” he grunted, as though I were a party guest who had overstayed my welcome. I hurried on past him, my eyes trained to the floor.