A Glancing Light

Chapter 9

I'd barely had time to put my feet up after getting back to my hotel room when the telephone rang.

"Hi." The familiar voice on the other end said. "I'm here. "Where've you been?"

"Uh . . . Calvin?" It took me a second to remember that Calvin Boyer, the Seattle Art Museum's marketing director, the man who had hustled me off to Mike Blusher's warehouse, was coming to Bologna to take care of his end of the arrangements for the show. The plans we'd laid in Seattle only last week seemed from another lifetime.

"Right, sure," he said. "Let's get together. We ought to go over some stuff."

"Where are you, downtown?"

"Yeah, I'm staying at the Internazionale, a couple of blocks from you."

We agreed to meet in half an hour, at 6:00, at the Caffè Re Enzo, a café-bar in the arched stone colonnade of the Podesta Palace, the long, fifteenth-century building that forms the northern side of the Piazza Maggiore. It was a place we'd had drinks in when we'd been in Bologna on a preliminary visit six months earlier.

It was only a five-minute walk for me, but I headed right there, chose a good table looking out over the piazza, and ordered an espresso, which was quickly brought, along with the usual tall glass of water. Then I settled down, my head tipped back against a carved rosette on one of the ancient, peeling columns, to wait for Calvin and take in the scene.

Bologna's Piazza Maggiore is enormous, one of the world's great public squares. Offhand, the only open civic space I can think of in Italy that is larger is the one in front of St. Peter's, and this one is livelier if not quite as handsome. Directly across from me, some 500 feet away, was the hulking Basilica of San Petronio. To my right, making the piazza's western border, the Palazzo Communale (with Colonel Antuono no doubt in his stuffy little "office" at that very moment, happily ferreting away his dog-eared folders in his dog-eared cardboard boxes). On my left another long, porticoed building, the Pavaglione, completed the perimeter of the square. Five big tour buses stood next to one another at one corner of the basilica, hardly noticeable in the vast space.

And in the center, milling about on six acres of stone- block pavement, were the people. Ordinarily, I don't go in much for people-watching, but when I'm in Italy I make an exception. The scene before me was a bigger version of the one that can be found in the main plaza of any Italian town in the late afternoon of a fine day. At about five o'clock you can count on groups of talkative old men beginning to materialize. I've yet to make out where it is they all come from. The square just gradually fills up, like a swimming pool being fed through a hole in its bottom. After a while, women and younger people also appear and get into the act in smaller, marginally less voluble numbers.

It always gives me the feeling that the curtain's just gone up on a crowd scene in a Donizetti opera, that it's all being choreographed for my benefit, and that in another moment everyone will burst into glorious song. They never do, of course, but they gather into noisy clusters, talking, laughing, arguing, jabbing each other with their index fingers, eloquently smacking their own foreheads and lifting their hands to the sky. Every now and then—at least to the eyes (and ears) of a phlegmatic American observer—they give every appearance of being on the verge of physically attacking each other, only to have the crisis dissolve into laughter and good fellowship.

Add to this a few hundred kids chasing the whirring flocks of pigeons that inhabit the place, and a few hundred tired, overexcited tourists trying to keep up with tour guides who are brandishing red or yellow umbrellas and urging them on with exhortations in German, Japanese, and French, and you have a bracing spectacle that's worth a trip to Bologna in itself. Not something I'd want to do every evening, you understand, but once a visit anyway.

Calvin showed up as I was finishing my coffee. "Six hundred years working on that church, and they still can't get it right," he said, slipping into a chair across from me. He was looking at the Basilica of San Petronio, begun in 1390 and, as Calvin had pointed out, with its marble facade not yet completed.

I laughed. "You can't hurry these things." A profundity worthy of Benedetto Luca himself.

Calvin took his first good look at my face. "Jeez, what happened to you? What did you do, get run over by a train?"

"A car," I said, and explained.

He listened, his chubby, rabbity face gloomy and intent, then thought a long time before speaking. "If you work it right," he said, "our workmen's comp insurance ought to cover you."

That was why he was a marketing director and I was just a curator.

"It's okay, Calvin. My own policy'll pick up most of it."

He shrugged. "Suit yourself. Well, I'm glad you're okay."

The waiter appeared. Calvin ordered a Cynar, one of those peculiarly bitter European aperitifs along the order of Ugo's Jazz! They claim it's made from artichokes, and I don't doubt it. Somewhere, somehow, Calvin had actually gotten to like it. I asked for a martini, which in Italy brings you a small glass of Martini-brand vermouth.

"So," Calvin said after his first sip. "Did you hear about Mike Blusher's reward?"

"I heard he's getting $150,000."

"Correction, we're getting $150,000."

"Come again?"

"Blusher's donating the money to the museum."

I was stunned. "To us? All of it?"

"Every bit. In appreciation."

"For what?"

Calvin grinned. "I'm not too clear on that part. For helping him get the publicity he wanted, I guess. And this is getting him even more. He actually made Time this week. Or, who knows, maybe he just felt guilty taking all that money for doing nothing. Tony said not to ask too many questions, just take it and say thank you."

"That I can believe. Well," I said with a sigh, "I guess Blusher's not pulling anything after all."

"Well, sure," Calvin said, blinking his surprise, "what did you think?"

For all his pitchman qualities, Calvin is at heart an innocent. It's one of the things I like about him.

"No matter," I said. Why harass Calvin with the complex and nefarious schemes Clara and I had been hatching in Blusher's behalf? None of them held water anymore anyway. A guy who gave away $150,000 to which he was legitimately entitled could hardly be accused of pulling a fast one.

So why didn't I trust him, even now?

A gusty wind had whipped up. A square of tissue paper, the kind local vendors used for making little cones to wrap fruit, blew up onto the table and caught on the stem of Calvin's glass. He brushed it away. "Blusher followed your advice on the other one, by the way."

"What advice?"

"You told him to take that van Eyck—"

"That fake van Eyck."

"—in to Dr. Freeman to have it X-rayed."

"Oh, yeah. But I didn't tell him to, I just said he could if he wanted to. What did she find?"

"I don't know. I haven't heard."

"Well, she's not going to come up with anything, or at least not what Blusher's hoping for. There's no Rembrandt or Titian under that van Eyck, Calvin. Nobody paints over a—"

"I know, I know. You told me. Hey, you want to go get some dinner?"

I nodded. The wind was beginning to make things unpleasant, not just because it was sucking little whirlpools of litter and grit up onto the table, but because it had driven many of the old men from the square into the protection of the long portico. They had not noticeably adjusted their volume, so that what had been a charmingly boisterous clamor now sounded like a war happening a few feet away.

I waved to the waiter. "Il conto, per favore."

"Watch this, watch this," Calvin whispered to me. He pulled out a thin black calculator the size of a checkbook. It had what I had come to recognize as the look of one of his airline gift-catalogue toys.

"Automatic currency converter?" I asked.

He shook his head.

"Expense analyzer and recorder?"

He shook his head again. He was punching keys and concentrating hard, his tongue sticking out.

When I'd paid the waiter, Calvin motioned for him to stay, punched another key, and held out the calculator to him. The waiter looked confused. Calvin kept sticking out the calculator. The waiter glanced at me for help. "Prego. . . ?"

I shrugged. I didn't know what Calvin was doing, either.

Finally, the waiter took the calculator from him and looked at the display. He smiled politely and looked at me again. This time it was he who shrugged.

Calvin took it back and showed it proudly to me. The display said "WHERE IS / DOV'È, DOVE C'È"

He went back to punching buttons while the waiter remained restively at the table. There were a lot of people waiting to be served. "Calvin," I said, "I can ask—"

"Sh, sh." He made a mistake, muttered, hit a few more buttons and grinned. This time he showed the display to me first: "A GOOD RESTAURANT / UN BUON RISTORANTE,'

"Ah," said the waiter again, and began to reply.

"No," Calvin said, and tapped the calculator. "Here."

He handed it back to the waiter. "It works both ways," he told me proudly.

"Calvin," I said, "he's in a hurry. There are a million people here, and he's the only waiter. Why don't you just let him tell us?" According to Clara Gozzi's standards, my Italian might stink, but this I could handle.

Calvin did some grumbling about the calculator's costing $170, but pocketed it with reasonably good grace while the waiter told us about a restaurant a few blocks away on Via Nazario Sauro, then quickly made his getaway.

To get there we crossed the Piazza Nettuno, a small square named for the famous sixteenth-century fountain by Giovanni da Bologna in its center, a flamboyant, thirty-foot high wedding cake of bronze and stone topped by a nude, muscular, triumphantly male Neptune. At its base sirens riding dolphins squeezed their ample breasts, producing five jets of water from each nipple. Four sirens, forty streams. Michelin demurely describes the whole thing as having "a rather rough vigour."

Calvin paused, studying the sirens appreciatively. "Oh, Debbie said to say hi," he said absently, then flushed. Debbie was the young woman who handled incoming calls in the staff offices, the one Blusher had inquired about in his genteel way, "the one with the knockers." You didn't have to be Louis to figure out the association.

He fumbled in his pockets and came up with an envelope. "She gave me your messages, the personal ones anyway."

I opened the envelope and pulled out two telephone message slips. The first was from "Mr. Poulsen." The message was "Can't get to you till 5/1." I turned slightly away from Calvin, suddenly feeling naked. Five days gone, and only two personal calls, one of which was from the plumber who was supposed to repair my garbage disposal unit. It didn't say a lot for my life outside of work.

The other was more personal, but it didn't do anything to raise my spirits, either. The caller was described as "Anne." Under MESSAGE Debbie had written: "No message. Just wanted to say hi."

Anne.

I stuffed the envelope into my pocket. "Come on," I said a little roughly, "let's go find this restaurant."

The meal with Calvin was not what you would call sparkling. He told me his plans for the next couple of days: meetings with Di Vecchio's staff at the Pinacoteca and with Luca. I told him about mine: a visit to Trasporti Salvatorelli in the morning, a meeting of my own at the Pinacoteca in the afternoon, and then, the following day, off to visit Ugo for the weekend.

Calvin was talkative, as always, but I had turned gloomy and uncommunicative, and after a while he tired of carrying on a conversation with himself. We parted company early, and Calvin went off to to whatever Calvin does at night in unfamiliar cities. I went back to my room at the Europa and moped.

You will have noticed by now that there's no woman in this story. Well, sure, there's Clara Gozzi, but you know what I mean. This absence of a Significant Female Other in my life was not the result of personal persuasion. It was just that things hadn't been going well for me in that regard lately.

My divorce, only eight months old, had come after ten years of a marriage that I thought was going just fine. I loved Bev, I was happily faithful to her, I enjoyed her company. We laughed a lot, our lovemaking was terrific, we liked the same music, the same food, the same sports, the same people.

And then one Saturday, when I got back from looking over a Mantegna Head of St. Paul that the museum had just gotten from Geneva, she wasn't there. No note on the refrigerator door, no clothes cleaned out of the closet, no nothing. She was just gone. This, mind you, after we'd casually agreed that morning on the Chinese restaurant we were going to for dinner. Two horrible days followed; repeated telephone calls to the police, the highway patrol, the hospitals. There was even one awful visit to the morgue. In the end I found out she'd moved in with a stockbroker, a guy I'd never even heard of. Moreover—worse, in a way—she'd been having an affair with him for a year and a half completely without my knowledge or even my suspicion.

Which shows you what can happen when you're dumb enough to leave your beautiful wife home alone while you spend your weekends blissfully buried in the fifteenth century. Oh, later on, when I thought about it, I could see that we'd been drifting apart a little over the previous year or so, but the truth is, at the time, I just didn't have a clue.

The long divorce negotiations, miserable as they were, at least had the virtue of killing the feelings I still had for Bev. But they went on so long, and I got so tired of our carping at each other through our lawyers, and niggling over every piece of furniture, every book, every tape, that in the end I gave almost everything to her, and was relieved to be done with it. The only thing that was important to me that I wound up keeping was our dog, Murphy, which, in effect, I traded for our new $8,000 car.

Impossible, you think? I'm exaggerating, you say? The system doesn't work that way? Well, think twice before you get divorced is all I can say.

The worst of it was, Murph got killed by a car a month later, so I came out of it with nothing at all that was worth anything.

And I loved that damn dog.

Now, while all this was going on, I took on a temporary European assignment, working with the Department of Defense to help put together a traveling exhibition of Old Masters paintings that had been looted by the Nazis in World War II, and later recovered for their owners by the American military. Anne Greene was an Air Force captain, a community liaison officer, assigned to the exhibition, to do whatever community liaison officers do. We met at the U.S. Air Force installation in Berlin, where the show was administratively headquartered.

This was fourteen months after Bev had left; fourteen months during which I'd been jokingly reintroduced to a singles scene that had changed so much I never did get my bearings in it—or wanted to get them, for that matter. At thirty-four I felt like a dinosaur from another planet, let alone another era. I even started to think that maybe I didn't like women anymore; modern women anyway. Anne changed that. Intelligent, self-sufficient, career-oriented, she was as modern as they come, yet I loved being with her, being anywhere near her. I started thinking that maybe I was healing, becoming whole again. I started thinking that maybe I loved her.

My European assignment lasted six weeks. Then I had to go back to San Francisco to resume my regular job at the museum. Anne and I stayed in touch, of course, and when the final divorce proceedings came up, she offered to take a week's vacation to be with me during what she figured would be a rocky time. I told her it wasn't going to be rocky at all— in my own mind it was already over and done—but it would be wonderful to see her. And when the whole business was finished, I would show her San Francisco. If she could afford to take two weeks, I'd show her the whole West Coast.

It turned out to be a mistake. I just wasn't able to keep my two worlds straight. The court appearances were bad enough, but I was ready for them. What I wasn't ready for were the out-of-court negotiating sessions in which Bev and I bitterly carved up and appropriated the rubble from a decade's shared history while our lawyers nodded sagely and dispassionately to each other: "That seems fair to me, Bernie, what do you think?" "Oh, I think we can live with that, Rita. We're not trying to be vengeful here."

Like hell we weren't. One thing you learn in a divorce is that you have reserves of vengefulness you never dreamed were there.

It had been far worse than I'd expected. In the afternoons I would slouch home to a waiting Anne, drained and dispirited, sullen and combative. And unable to make love.

Which, on top of everything else, made me defensive and quick to take offense. At one point, following a particularly humiliating nonperformance in bed, I remember ranting and going around kicking chairs and wallowing in noisy self- recrimination. Anne, after four or five days of unbelievable tolerance, finally blew up.

"Goddammit!" she yelled, suddenly sitting bolt upright in bed, "I didn't come 6,000 miles to get laid, so just shut up, will you!"

It was so unlike her, it stunned me into silence.

"You jerk!" she added after a moment, and whacked me with a pillow. It was the sort of thing that should have ended in teary laughter, but it turned into an ugly, heart-searing fight instead. Early the next morning, after lying all night with our backs turned stiffly to each other, we patched it up. But not really, not satisfactorily. It was never the way it had been before. Anne stayed another two gingerly days, then told me she really had to get back to her job in Germany. My heart was like lead, but I didn't argue. And so she left, looking tense and pale. God knows what I looked like.

In her place I would have left, too, only sooner. She had come to offer comfort, and I wasn't having any. I just wasn't ready for it.

That had been five months ago. Since then we'd exchanged two or three guarded letters. I didn't know if she was seeing anyone else, and she didn't know if I was. (I wasn't; the divorce, and then the miserable hassling with Anne had scraped me raw, worn me down. I gave it a try, but I just couldn't face the modern pre-mating ritual, not yet.) I'd wanted to call her a hundred times, but never got myself to do it. The thing was, I felt like such a twit. What would I say? Apologize? I'd already done that. So, afraid to bring things to a head, I had let them drift unresolved. In five months we hadn't spoken to each other.

And then this call. "No message. Just called to say hi." Surely it was time to see if we could work things through, and here was Anne—blameless, openhearted Anne—making the first move. And here was I, in Europe—as Debbie had probably told her—only a few hundred miles away from her base at Berchtesgaden. All I had to do was call her, tell her where I was, arrange to meet .. .

I looked at the telephone a long time, unmoving. After a while I undressed and went to bed.