“I can’t help how I look at you any more than you can help how you found your way back to art,” he says as he watches me over our hands. He presses his lips to my palm, then against my wrist.
“I didn’t find my way back—this was all a mistake. None of this is part—”
“If you finish that sentence I’m not letting you have the pizza dolce I brought you.”
Bastardo. What in the good Madonna’s name is pizza dolce?
He leans in closer, my hand still against his lower lip so that I can feel his breath against my fingertips. “Life brought you back to art. And when life brings you something, dolcezza, you take it, say grazie, and don’t look back.”
A breeze blows softly up Via Raffaello, rustling the needles on the cypress trees that flank the garden. I lean toward him, pulled by some invisible force, and touch my lips softly to his, then muster up every Italian cell in my body to purr “Grazie” into his mouth.
The way his mouth relents to mine makes me dizzy, and I find purchase in his hair with my free hand. He kisses me so softly—with less urgency than the night in the garden, as if we have all the time in the world, and the careful delicacy of his lips steals the breath from my lungs in a way that terrifies me so much I pull back with a sharp inhale.
My hand goes to my mouth like my fingers might find an answer to why I can’t let him kiss me like that—why I can’t let myself kiss him like that. But when I meet his eyes, I can tell he already has the answer. He shakes his head slowly. All the warmth and emotion that I asked him not to look at me with has disappeared. And the breeze that I welcomed only moments before is suddenly cold enough to send goose bumps over my bare arms.
“I have to get over to the museum,” he tells me, reaching into the basket and peering inside. “You stay. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.”
He puts the wrapped-up dessert in front of me and stands, then brushes off his pants and busies himself with cleaning up around me. I want to stop him, to tell him to stay with me, but the words don’t come until he’s walking away, back down Via Raffaello, his hands sunk in his pockets with the basket hooked at his elbow.
And at that point he’s too far away to hear me when I ask him to stay.
VENTINOVE
James
La FornarinaandLa Velatahang before me on the far wall of the bed chamber of Battista Sforza’s apartment in the palazzo. It’s a fitting place for the works to hang—in the room where the great duke’s beloved wife slept—because the subject is rumored to be Raphael’s mistress. The love of his short life. His muse.
In both works her dark eyes penetrate me, their intensity forcing me to search for some hidden message. The portrait on the left—the half-naked painting of his lover—is soft and intimate, while the formality ofLa Velatamakes you feel as if you should bow before her. Both masterpieces are haunting. As if they aren’t paintings at all, but the actual spirit and soul of the woman he loved trapped within a frame.
“What do you think?”
I turn to find Zio standing behind me, his jacket draped over his arm, his eyes flitting back and forth between the two paintings.
“I think Silvia is an absolute genius to have obtained these from Barbarini and the Palatine,” I say, clearing off my notes from the bench beside me to make room. “She must have had something on their curators.”
“She just may. I have heard that museum curators are a scandalous bunch.” He hangs his jacket on the edge of the bench and sits gesturing toward the paintings. “She is lovely, though, is she not?”
I nod. It’s impossible not to find the subject beautiful, with her oval face and stunning visage—but the reverence that Raphael injected into the work—the light and contrast, the color infused in her skin tone, the attention to detail on every single part of her—that is what I can’t escape. His work is always hard for me to leave, but these portraits—these are infused with passion. Everything he felt for this woman is immortalized in every brushstroke.
“I have noticed you’ve been a bit absent this week, Gi. Tutto bene?” Leo asks, tossing me a sidelong glance.
“Everything is fine, Zio. I’ve just been working on spicing up my stale lectures.” I hold up my notes from my lap, and he chuckles at the dig.
“Va bene. I thought maybe you were hiding. Avoiding someone—”
Here we go. I touch my temple to preemptively stop the throb to come. It’s not like I need a reminder of her right now. She sneaks into every waking moment—every sleeping moment as well.
“You rarely miss a dinner, Gi. And you are staying at the apartment. I can’t remember the last time you stayed there in the summer,” he adds, looking my way.
“The apartment needed repairs, so it’s just easier to stay there after working on whatever the issue of the day is,” I tell him.
“Forse, but Nina told me you fixed everything on Wednesday and yet here we are.” He points between us.
“Do you miss me that much, Zio?”
He pushes his lips together and shakes his head. His eyes look into me like the woman’s in the portraits. I let out a breath and look down at my notebook. There’s no use deflecting here. Leo can see right through me. Always could.
“She will be gone before you know it,” he says softly, his hand heavy on my shoulder. “Time has a funny way of haunting us when it is wasted.”
