Women in Sunlight Read online

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  Walking to the house, basket of sticks in hand, last rays of sun exploding in molten splotches on the lakes out in the valley, an armful of chard, sprigs of thyme and rosemary in my pocket, Colin waving from the front door, Fitzy springing after a copper leaf spiraling toward the grass, Stairs to Palazzo del Drago left on a lawn chair, Gianni beeping, mouthing buona sera, Signora as his van freed of passengers speeds by, a little music—Thelonious Monk?—drifting from my house, there, like that, the subject chose me.

  Colin’s veal chops, a fire, a most excellent brunello from our stash, and an unexpected rain pelting the black windows—what could be better? Of the great experiences of my life there are many, but nothing exceeds the plain happiness of a fall night at home, Bach cello concerto on low, a couple of handfuls of chestnuts to roast over the coals. It’s beyond luck that I sit here listening to Colin compare versions of Mozart operas he loves, talk about Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, the messiest book ever written, and about how his corduroy pants pocket has ripped. Plus, he keeps our glasses filled halfway, toasts various absent friends, and, leaning in to poke the fire, looks warmed and handsome in the leaping light.

  As I swirl my glass, the flames bounce glowing crescents onto the wall: broken moons, transparent and colliding. How shall I proceed? What can I observe that prefigures the fate awaiting me, awaiting these three women, who might have now discovered Tito’s spider-haunted wine cellar and are opening some dusty, sure-to-be-sour vino nobile di Montepulciano? Sharply kept in my mind’s eye, the ritual ancient Egyptians practiced. On the day of a pharaoh’s birth, slaves began to build his tomb. When my notebook with good paper ends, when my computer files are jammed with notes and lists of words and questions, will these new arrivals on the hill be gone, will Margaret be laid to rest at last, will I leave or stay?

  I think I am a reliable narrator but I’m not sure. I’m the sort of writer who likes to have two projects going at once. Or three. My poetry is sporadic; I don’t force it. On that, I’m with Keats, who thought poems must come to you as naturally as leaves on a tree. More mundanely, writing for me is like cooking—I like to have all the burners blazing when I’m in the kitchen. Though this sounds as though I’m a house afire as a writer, I’ve written only three books of poetry and two short prose works. The first of those was on Freya Stark, who set off in the 1920s for Arabia and Assyria, where no other western woman had traveled. She was a stellar writer. The second book—a short bio—focused on Maud Gonne. Yeats, my all-time favorite poet, loved her passionately and gave her face some immortal lines. Two of the oddest are food oriented. “Hollow of cheek as though it drank the wind / And took a mess of shadows for its meat.” In another poem, she favored “a crazy salad with her meat.” She was a crazy salad herself. Once she had sex inside the tomb of her dead two-year-old son. She hoped to capture his spirit for a new child. (I almost can understand a grief like hers.) Writing is a crazy salad, too. Crazy main course and dessert as well.

  What gives me the confidence to begin a new book? Well—I won two major awards for my collection Momentary Maps. George Clooney riding through my adopted village of San Rocco on a motorcycle stirred far more local interest than my faraway awards. Tuscans are not much impressed by celebrity of any kind, even Clooney, though the carabinieri in their Valentino uniforms did escort the mayor to my house to present me with a bouquet of lilies. I went to New York, Boston, D.C., the West Coast. How glorious to be lauded and toasted but after that, nothing seemed to happen because of the two framed citations, except a few offers for visiting lectureships at universities, and why would I want to do that? Winter in Ithaca, summer in Arizona? The two foundations gave me substantial cash (substantial for a poet anyway), with which I gratefully replaced the septic and heating systems in my house.

  Poetry, they say, makes nothing happen but truly it makes everything happen. The electric line, the pith of the language, the nailed-it figurative image, that’s my home, my first love, and the thing that people perish for the lack of in their lives. (Someone else said that, but who?) I was honored. Many poets labor forever in a vacuum. I wish I could believe the awards were deserved, but I deeply suspect that living in Italy, well away from internecine literary wars, helped. Maybe I was only the one everyone could agree on.

  If you know of me at all, which I doubt, it’s probably for Broken Borders, my Freya book. Through Margaret’s connection with a producer, the unthinkable happened and my concise tribute to a heroine of mine became a wide-release film. You’ve seen it, sure you have, but who knows the name of a writer behind a movie? Chaste Freya would not have appreciated the screenwriter’s addition of sex scenes with Assyrian desert warlords. I consoled myself with the fact that many new readers found their way to Freya’s actual books. She (though dead) and Hollywood and I made money. Again, not money like the digital whizzes or even like my cousin in real estate, but a benison for me. I finished the kitchen renovation. The rest I stashed away.

  My Maud book, too, gave me egress into larger worlds. She simply called out to be written about and I heard her. The playwright Orla Kilgren adapted my Swan of Coole for the stage, wonderfully interweaving Yeats’s poems with my text. Five years later, the curtain still rises four nights a week in Dublin. Colin and I make many friends through various productions and festivals, and god knows, enough of the actors and directors have found their ways to Tuscany for exhaustingly long visits.

  Sometime expat that I am, in love with Europe since my Florida childhood, I’ve never taken on an American subject, certainly not five of them—the women, me, and Margaret, who’s American only by birth, and from Washington, D.C., at that.

  I’ll fly on cultural memory, instinct, wax wings if I have to.

  As Colin puts down the fire, I step outside to see the black woolly sky punctured with diamantine stars. In other places they shine; here they blaze. You have to gasp. Best to fall on your knees. Through the trees, the Malpiedi house looks like a gray square smudge against the darker hill. Is one of the women looking out the window, amazed at the fiery constellations? Tonight, five stars form a connect-the-dots waterfall splashing onto a wedge of moon. Is another having her first dream in Italy? And the third, her little dog at her feet, perhaps sleeps the deep country sleep, darksome and silent, and will wake at four a.m. dazzled by the knowledge that she is waking up in Italy. Italy!

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  Local artisans still make blank books with leather spines and pretty paper covers. Friends give them to me for birthdays. Visitors leave them with notes saying they hope I will be inspired. A writer must be in want of a blank book, right? In this lifetime or the next, I won’t be able to fill all the daunting white pages, especially since I usually work on a legal pad or computer. But tonight I take a special one off the shelf. A bone-colored vellum spine and abstracted yellow flowers bind a thick book that opens nicely. Will I find my way? A reviewer described my poetry as “sparse and harsh.” My prose, instead, luxuriates in detail—what I think of as illuminations. (Why write prose unless you can go off on side trips, layer, and loop back to the subject at hand?) Here, I’ll hope to start at the beginning of an odyssey, a hundred revelations and stories.

  The ending? As in the last line of a poem, a novel (even this hybrid) may find that its own end feels like a beginning. Or a spinning—a dime tossed off a high bridge.

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  San Rocco lies just beyond two curves downhill. I zigzag over on a Roman road and I’m at the town gate in ten minutes. Doubtless, this is why the three women chose the Malpiedi place. I’ve seen the website. “Easy walking distance to town” jumps out as what everyone wants—an isolated house but near the piazza. When I walk in tomorrow morning, as is my habit, most likely I’ll hear of the three women’s arrival; probably an incident or two will have circulated via Gianni, the driver; and also Grazia’s opinion, formed from maybe three emails, will
be widely quoted.

  Before I go to bed, I draw an orange leaf on the first page and write New Leaf.

  What follows will accumulate slowly. Their stories will float around town. Many will come to me directly. (Oh, I’ll invent no doubt.)

  Even now, I intermittently forget about Margaret’s book. (Failing her.)

  Working title: Margaret Merrill: Exile at the Window. A short book, a tribute, really—something I feel obliged to accomplish, since in the end I fell down on my part of our rocky friendship. I’m bothered by that. Plagued may be an overstatement, but there it is, a nagging, unfinished feeling, like not making the doctor’s appointment when you’re so overdue for a mammogram that every time you undress you’re imagining your x-rayed breasts pocked with calcified white dings like the surface of the moon.

  May she find space here to breathe again.

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  I’ll puzzle out my own story, mapping constellations. Wish I may, wish I might.

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  The three American women arrived shortly before the first frost of October 2015. Their individual stories began in once-upon-a-time land, but their story together began by chance, as most stories do (and what if I had not sat next to Colin Davidson on the Florence airport bus). As I learned, they met in late April in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.

  When the bus arrived at the Florence train station ten years ago, Colin helped me with my lumpy bag. A stranger comes to town, that story. We intersected. Millions of atoms swarmed and re-formed in the air. I have an exaggerated sense of smell (not always a bonus). As he put down my bag on the curb, over the diesel fumes, I caught his scent of lime water and sun-dried linen, a scent from some idyllic tropical island I was yet to visit. I wanted to bury my face against his shoulder. You’re here, I thought. He smiled and I remembered a quote from somewhere, the poet with the big lips. We looked at each other, I think with surprise. I’m reserved, I would never do this, but out of nowhere, I asked, “I’m Kit Raine. Do you have time for a drink?”

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  I draw a large X on the second page and write X in Flux. I have no idea why.

  All dark below. I latch the shutter.

  Benvenute. Welcome.

  CHAPEL HILL, NORTH CAROLINA

  “You’re late, Charlie, which is fine with me. I don’t want to go anyway.”

  “Ingrid had a loose wire cutting into her jaw and I had to run her by the orthodontist before school. Sorry. Those wires must have gone off track for half the kids in town. We were stuck for over an hour for a five-minute fix. It’s always crazy when Lara is away. We’ll be there in plenty of time, Mom—it doesn’t start till eleven.”

  Camille slipped on a light sweater, lime green. Not an easy color to wear and with her pale skin and newly blond-streaked hair, she thought she looked sub-aqueous, or possibly jaundiced, in the hall mirror. She felt a moment of shame. Is every late-middle-aged woman in America blond-streaked? And what is late-middle-aged now? Surely she qualified as simply old. She saw Charlie over her shoulder, looking at her with a frown, a worried look she’d first seen on him in kindergarten when his sweet potato didn’t sprout and everyone else’s grew a dangling vine. “I think you’ll love it,” he said. Unconvincingly, she thought.

  “Where is Lara this time? Someplace exotic?” Charlie’s Danish wife works as an anonymous inspector of hotels and restaurants for an annual Scandinavian guidebook. She’s traveling constantly, leaving Charlie to squeeze in his painting around hauling Ingrid here and there and—recently—driving his mother to physical therapy, Fresh Market, and, today, out to see Cornwallis Meadows. Usually Camille would drive herself, but three weeks after the replacement of her right knee, he thought the least he could do was take her.

  “You know, I’m not sure. Maybe Vancouver.” It’s Lara who’s encouraging Camille to move to Cornwallis Meadows, an idyllic over-fifty-five community. Since Charles Senior’s death last year, Lara has been on the subject of the five bedrooms and the waste and how it must be lonely, not to mention the burden of mountains of stored stuff in the garage and attic. Charlie sees her point but can’t imagine his mom out of the sprawling clapboard house with the deck built around a live oak. How many birthdays have been celebrated under that canopy of branches? Camille has her long borders, yes, a responsibility, but she loves knocking about among the phlox and wormwood, adding a couple of hundred daffodils every fall, and gathering joyful peonies in late spring. Charlie remembers his practice, how ants shook down from the white and pink peonies onto the black lacquered piano as he pounded out “Ol’ Man River” and “Clair de Lune.” White ones had a rosy smear in the middle, and he thought his mother had kissed each one.

  “Vancouver sounds super. A great dinner and a fancy hotel. I’ll take it over this jaunt.” Camille sent out only this quick jab. She’d agreed to visit Cornwallis Meadows. Her daughter-in-law, she knew, was not just trying to manipulate her. She was genuinely concerned about Camille starting to figure out what Lara called “the next stage” of her life. But Camille suspected, too, that she had her eye on the house Charlie grew up in—its spacious glass-walled living room overlooking Spit Creek and the kitchen with miles of travertine counters. Who could blame her? Charlie’s painting career might never move them out of flimsy Karlswood Valley starter homes. Lara actually dreaded the airports, room service, kitchen visits, the inspecting of shower doors, turndown service that knocked just as you were dressing for dinner, and even looking under the hotel beds. A glamorous job that isn’t.

  Maybe Charlie was childish. He didn’t want to think of the house gone, strangers stuffing their golf clubs and Christmas decorations in the attic where he still stores his old snorkeling gear, tennis rackets, college textbooks, and early paintings. His mother’s paintings are up there, too, facing against the dormer. Lara had mentioned that maybe if his mother liked Cornwallis Meadows, they could move out of the brick ranch with three shoebox bedrooms and yellowed hardwood floors. Charlie didn’t see how that would be possible, unless his mother continued the upkeep and steep taxes. He didn’t know how much money his dad had left. He assumed plenty for the rest of his mom’s life, and he hoped a nice windfall for him afterward. He knew about the enormous life insurance policy because his mother had given him a big birthday check. “Mom, just give it a chance. Just a look. Be fair. You might really like ol’ Cornwallis. All the art classes. You never should have stopped painting. You know everything about it—you’ve memorized every painting after 1500. And they say the restaurant is good—grilled halibut, pot roast, garlic chicken—I saw the menu online—really great choices at lunch and every night—no dreary cooking for one. There would always be someone to do things with, you know, you and Dad were so…so together. And you’d have your own apartment and car.”

  “I know, sweetie. I’ll keep an open mind, but, really, my knee is going to be fine and I…” She waved her arm around the living room, including the brimming bookcases, the piano, the two blue velvet sofas and the rug brought back from Turkey on one of their expeditions, as they always called their trips. “You know, Charlie. Home, all this”—she gestured again—“for a long time.”

  Charlie saw her perplexed look change to a frown. “Mom, you do exactly what you want to do. You will anyway.”

  Nice that he thinks so. Since the afternoon last spring when Charles came home from work, she has no idea what she wants to do.

  “I’m home,” he called from the front door. His last words.

  “I’m in the kitchen.”

  He tossed his briefcase on the floor by the hall table and ducked into the bathroom to freshen up. Rinsing lettuces at the sink, water running, she didn’t hear the thud as he hit the floor, felled by a massive heart attack as swift as it was fatal.

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  Cornwallis Meadows, formerly a vast dairy farm bordered, the s
ign said, by an Indian trading path (later a mule track) that the British general and his soldiers were reputed to have trod during the Revolutionary War. The community managed a Chapel Hill address, though it was, Charlie now realized, near Hillsborough, way the fuck out of town. His mother put it more succinctly when after about fifteen minutes of speeding out old Highway 86, she observed, “This place is in East Jesus.” They both laughed and Charlie buzzed open the sunroof and all the windows for the brown earth smell of plowed fields, the tender spring green auras around the trees, and the sluicing water in roadside ditches running from the April rains. Soon the honeysuckle would be rampant, sending out shoots of heavy perfume. A local restaurant makes honeysuckle sorbet every spring, and Charlie always takes his mother for dinner during that brief season. He relishes her responsiveness to simple treats, how she smiles with her whole face over a handful of grocery-store tulips or a basket of plums from his yard. Then he gets to feel personally responsible for her pleasure.

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  At the wide-open white Cornwallis Meadows gates, Charlie turned in behind three other cars winding up the drive to the columned antebellum house that now served as the dining room and presentation rooms for the complex. The house had belonged to the Dalton family for donkey’s years, the family that a century ago funded half the university buildings in the area, as well as more recently the medical research center that still draws droves of people to retire nearby.

  Later Dalton generations raised Tennessee walking horses, made bad marriages, and lost much of the solid fortune the first Tanner Dalton made, who remembered how by now? They’d died off and the last of them, Tanner IV, in his dotage sold the land and the house, married his nurse, and moved to Sarasota. The notable house and serene acreage that extended to the Eno River was snapped up by a Charlotte developer backed by serious venture capitalists. Therefore: Cornwallis Meadows.