Isadora Read online

  “She seemed strong a week ago,” he added.

  “When she’s well, you can feel her in every room. The chandeliers shiver.”

  He seemed impressed, so she continued. “Why, Isadora once held an audience in such a trance, they woke to find they had moved en masse from their seats and killed a cat in the alley behind the theater.”

  “How thrilling,” he said. “It would be an honor to speak with her.”

  “I prefer her bedridden, honestly.”

  She was embarrassed to realize she had said this aloud, but Romano was distracted, watching his friends. One had gotten up to ask the kitchen for caffè coretto, and the woman set to arranging a tray with short cups and sherry glasses, unwrapping a bottle of grappa. They had brought a stovetop napoletana to the island and spent a good amount of time instructing the women on the proper method. The women listened patiently as the device their grandmothers owned and used daily was explained to them, and they pretended to take notes on the precise amounts of coffee and water and the character of the grind.

  Romano liked to feign embarrassment on behalf of every man in his party, but when they stood to leave, he would follow them out like an obedient dog. Elizabeth appreciated Romano as a kind and thoughtful man but saw his false fraternity as cowardice and hated him for it in the way one hates a pretty mirror in which one only sees oneself. She touched his arm, and he stopped sketching the office dogs until she moved her hand away.

  “It was a good season,” he said.

  “Where will you go next?”

  “The others will return to Milan and I’ll spend some time on the coast, at the home my family keeps during the summer.”

  “That’s a true shame,” she said.

  “Every season comes to an end.”

  “Your departure, I mean. We were becoming such good friends.”

  He frowned at one of the dogs. “And I haven’t figured out the light,” he said. “If I can’t understand simple light, forget about stone.”

  “It’s the same light wherever you are, my dear. Only your angle changes.” She shifted her chair closer, almost touching him again. “You see, it’s different from where you sit. The beam enters the window more fully.”

  One of the women placed a coffee and a grappa between them, and he turned his attention to the cup, turning it so that the handle faced her, and then him, and her again. He was a careful man. She could imagine his mother cradling him as a child, pressing her lips to the fine hair of his eyebrows, moving breakable objects to higher shelves, her boy making his way through the world with a halo of fine things just out of reach.

  “We are good friends,” Elizabeth said.

  “Indeed. You and your family, when your sister is well again, are welcome in my home. My parents keep the house on the coast. My father—”

  “That would be wonderful, but we would never impose.” This wasn’t true at all; her family was happy to impose. She thought of the rowdy time they all had spent with a second cousin who put them up in Marseille for a month before saying kindly and then more pointedly that the South of France might need a season off. “Thank you for the invitation, but I am needed in Darmstadt.”

  “Such an American sentiment,” he said, and gave a short laugh that sounded precisely like the first abrupt sounds of a boiling kettle. “Nobody needs anybody in Frankfurt.”

  “You know, comparing Darmstadt to Frankfurt is like saying Yonkers when you mean New York City.”

  “Yonkers!” Pushing too hard on the first syllable, he flattened the vowel as if the city were home to brick walk-ups stuffed with hay, chickens squawking from open windows.

  “I have no patience for Germany,” he said. “All their great halls rising over empty streets. It’s a towering hymn to the dead. The stonework alone is enough to crush the spirit.”

  “Poor Romano, was your heart broken by a beautiful German girl?”

  “Even the ghosts are lonely there.”

  “Complexion like milk, smelling of soft winter wheat?”

  He sketched an errant line on the dog’s tail and rubbed it with his thumb, cursing to himself. “I marveled at the facelessness of its people, and of its women, of course.”

  “Why, you’re blushing. It must be worse than I thought!” She couldn’t stop herself from teasing him. “She ran away with your dearest friend, and the two of them went on a motor trip around the country. You could only imagine the depravity!”

  “Something’s off with the grappa, don’t you think?”

  It was clear he wasn’t enjoying the joke, but Elizabeth didn’t care; his agitation thrilled her. “After they married, your friend and your lost love set up a farmhouse in Havelaue, and he paned the windows with a blue glass in the precise shade of her eyes so that when he looked to his garden, he could be reminded of her beauty as she slept.”

  “Yonkers,” he muttered. “What a world.”

  “And see, you’ll talk and talk of a place you don’t know the first thing about and remain totally silent on items of your intimate acquaintance.”

  “I only have to wade into cold water before I’ve had enough.”

  “That’s exactly right. You’re not brave like Jules Verne, who went twenty thousand leagues in search of the vastness of the sea.”

  He tossed his head back, as if the very idea of Jules Verne were so repellent that he needed to be physically distanced from it.

  “The vastness of the sea!” he said, a little louder than he must have meant. “It’s impossible for you to know it.”

  Elizabeth was ashamed, but his friends only looked over and laughed.

  “Why, I saw the vastness just this morning,” she said a little louder, trying to save face with the others.

  “You go to the sea and watch the boats,” he said. “The waves, the fins of little fish, the garbage washing against rock, sea foam, disturbances in the sand, tracks your feet have made. All those things, you know. You never know the vastness itself.”

  “I stood alone in the early morning hours, when there were no boats and no footprints besides my own behind me, and I felt a stark emptiness in my heart.”

  “It is not possible! You might have felt some condition of vastness, but if you had actually understood it, you would have lost your mind then and there. You would have walked until your feet left the earth, and there would be no more of you.”

  “The thought that I would end my life over your invented idea is as offensive as it is absurd.” Feeling wild, she reached right over and took a sip of his coffee.

  “A fact,” he said. He waited for her to replace the cup on its saucer before he spoke again. “I saw it happen once. A woman standing on the shore, just as you did this morning. She was wearing a long muslin dress and boots in the old style. This was some years ago, on the Italian coast. I was watching the woman, and the woman was watching the sea. She never once turned around, as I assumed she would. Later I realized that she never moved at all, not shielding her eyes against the sun, not shifting her weight from foot to foot. It seemed from the position of her head that she was gazing toward a particular point in the distance, though she was not observing the horizon line. I watched, foolish and helpless, from my balcony as this poor woman became acquainted with the vastness.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “What happened? She went face-first into the water and drowned before anyone had a chance to save her.”

  Elizabeth gasped. “But why?”

  He shrugged, stirring his coffee with a small smile.

  “You could have gone after her.”

  “I tried. I sprinted to cross the balcony and down the stairs to a switchback trail that went all the way down to the boardwalk. A thumbtack on the road went right into my bare foot, and I didn’t notice it until much later, when I was changing into dry clothes before I visited the police station to give my account. The infection I suffered later was so aggressive, that thumbtack nearly put me into my grave. Let me see if I can—” He turned slightly in his ch
air to lift his foot from his shoe and slipped off part of his sock to show her the mark. “Here it is.”

  “And the girl?”

  “I was too late. She was gone so quickly, it’s as if she were dying even as she fell.”

  “My God.”

  “Yes, she was already very dead.” He seemed ready to say more but paused, gazing down at his pencil as if he were trying to estimate its weight. He looked up at her and then to the other men. She leaned toward him, and they were quiet for a moment, his lips nearly touching her cheek.

  “My friends over there say that violence is the only balm for suffering,” he said. “They believe we must baptize this world with fire. What do you think about that, Miss Duncan?”

  She looked over at his friends, who were flirting with the youngest kitchen girl, giving her sips of grappa. In Elizabeth’s experience, it was the men who blustered about who carried the least potential to harm.

  “Did you know her, the girl?”

  He righted himself, disappointed. “I kept seeing her around my neighborhood after that. I thought for a while that her ghost had returned to haunt me, but it was another woman in a similar dress.”

  “How awful.” Elizabeth didn’t at all believe in ghosts but knew how an idea could pursue the mind like a restless spirit.

  “For months I would see the neighbor woman at parties. She wore three iron peacock feathers clipped in her hair and so resembled a creature who had landed in the midst of a conversation, peering around the passing plates for scraps before she would fly again. At last I approached her and told her that she resembled a dead woman. She didn’t like that at all, as you might imagine.”

  “What was her name, the one who died? Who were her friends, her family? Had she come to the shore on holiday?” Elizabeth noticed the thin man watching her from the kitchen. She lowered her voice. “You must have asked around, learned more about her tragic life.”

  He shrugged, looking away.

  Elizabeth had more questions, which she decided against asking. What in her life brought her to stand there that morning, facing down the infinite? Did her family turn from her in her final hours?

  “There was a Mass at some point in the little county cemetery,” he said. “I decided to walk there but I accidentally set off in the wrong direction and didn’t realize until it was too late. I came upon a remarkably smooth stone on that walk, which I still have.”

  “You could have met her family.”

  He shook his head, refusing to face her. “You’re asking me to carry this woman on my back. A burden like that gets heavier as you go, not lighter.”

  Elizabeth looked at Romano, and in looking felt as if she’d seen him for the first time. He was a nervous man, fidgeting with his sketchbook like a boy in school. She wondered how long she would have to sit with him before she could reasonably escape and go back upstairs, where Gus was likely sleeping upright in his chair.

  Her time on Corfu felt governed by a clock marking only the hour. She thought of all the people she had met: the women baking bread in the kitchen, Romano’s friends shouting over cards, Isadora’s old nurse upstairs, the European doctor lurking about, the thin man, who held his shirtfront back as he tasted the soup. She wouldn’t miss any of them when she went away, and none of them would spend even a moment wondering if they would miss her. Each of them would fade in the others’ minds like paper dolls in a sunny window. They would be relegated to the recesses of faulty memory along with an old recipe for crepes and Anna Pavlova dancing the dying swan, her flapping, desperate port de bras, faltering toward the crowd and away, panic in her darting eyes and none of them moving to save her.

  Interminable Corfu, where illness attended by island climate makes everything feel packed in cotton

  The main trouble with convalescing by the sea is the sea itself. They wheel you out onto a veranda and the brakes are set to face the trenchant sun, under which the blue expanse stretches merciless and uninterrupted save for some sad boat. It’s fine for a morning, but after a few weeks, any reasonable mind loses itself to mundanity, searching the scrubby hills flanking the bay and activity therewith: a stag picking through breakfast, a blustering thing that could be a bird on a branch or a man’s handkerchief. The hills seem to lurch forward, a landslide in perpetual motion, your weary eye accustomed to weeks with nothing available to read but the ceiling’s plain fortune, a crack in the slab suggesting six more months of illness and a shifting foundation also. Worse yet when you start to wish those hills would fall.

  We’ve given ourselves over to a new life. I feel rudderless without a schedule, and Elizabeth’s school surely languishes without her. To think, we were once so thrilled for the venture in Germany! The studio was such an expense, the materials of its making infused with a kind of mania, though at first it was all well disguised; the wood and lacquer were our first scent of freedom. We were consumed by our desire for independence. It was very American of us, though it was precisely the same desire our father kept as his traveling companion when he vanished in the night. The Oakland Council on Development hung a banner declaring Progress! over a burning beachfront as if they’d planned for the old boardwalks to dry to tinder before the outrage of some reckless spark. In leaving, we made to deny the connection we felt to fire and fathers both but came to realize soon enough that these tragedies would always repeat themselves one way or another.

  The studio in Darmstadt seemed at last to be the tragedy we were looking for. Construction alone nearly drove us to distraction, inspiring enough screaming fights between myself and Elizabeth that we had to tell the neighbors we were rehearsing a performance centered conceptually around Irish mourning. There was a materials issue; the studio’s rosewood floor required passage rites from British New Guinea and weeks of steady work from a carpenter who spent the first three days with his ear pressed to the wood, listening for its nuance before he unpacked a single sanding block.

  Despite our terrific fights, and despite the opening we threw with strawberry cakes and enough champagne to float the city, it soon became clear that the studio wouldn’t be very much fun. The neighbors, who all arrived empty-handed for the party but promised to enroll their daughters, soon found that business had not returned enough to invest in private lessons, that group sessions might have to wait until spring as well, when everyone surely would have a little more time and energy, and anyway the girls’ mothers just spent all that on toe shoes for ballet and would hate to throw them out after so little use, &c. We found ourselves trying to insinuate on a huddled community looking at one another for cues, ready to humiliate anyone who dared to step out of line. Change required courage, and courage, it seemed, required change.

  The other lesson of Darmstadt has been that every great idea is diluted by its creation. Elizabeth claims that they are making improvements in enrollment because her lover insists on teaching the girls to sing. He has some foolish thought about giving them things to lift into the air, as if their movement lessons are not strenuous enough. And so my grand experiment floats out into open water.

  “There’s my dancing girl,” the doctor says, sneaking up on me again. Taking up my cup, I quickly finish the last of my whiskey and cold coffee. The doctor is Parisian, and apparently he jokes over dinner with the other guests that he was imported specially for me. Really he just happened to be in the hotel when my strange illness came about, and he took the opportunity to work. He volunteered despite his wife’s plaintive objection that they were on holiday, that without his droning mundanities, she wouldn’t be able to properly ease herself into the absence of thought that helps to pass the time. I can imagine them on the ferry deck, his kit wrapped in a woolen blanket on its own chair, the three of them enjoying the afternoon.

  “How is our national treasure feeling this morning?” he asks.

  “Very well, thank you.” I’m so weak lately, in truth. I remember a dinner outside Milan, along the Naviglio, good heavy food and plenty of wine, and for dessert a rum chocolate salami
with walnuts. A piece of marrow was roasted in its bone and brought to the table with a great offertory feeling, the charred thing sizzling on its plate. It smelled so rich and savory, but I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. The marrow seemed too vital, a fundamental pudding. I watched the others spread it on thick slabs of bread. I should have spooned my portion up, blessing the beef for the chance to savor its primordial fat, licking it clean and gnawing the bone, absorbing every bit of its power to store it for this very moment.

  “Madame Grunet and I passed an evening last night with your siblings,” he says. “Augustin has the most fantastic idea about a real adventure, one that promises to take him—now hold on, we agreed on little movement and none of it sudden—”

  Gus will have to find us another bottle. “Have you seen my brother this morning, Doctor?”

  “You really shouldn’t touch the terrace rail, my dear. Better to keep your hands in your lap. I’ve taken on the study of metallic properties as something of a personal project. I’m convinced that dark metals like this”—he raps the rail for emphasis before wiping his knuckle on his coat—“cause a frenzy of the germ population.”

  When he leans in to examine my teeth, I worry for a moment that he might catch the scent of brown liquor before remembering he is partly so agreeable because he lacks the observational skill that physicians before him have employed to ruin whole afternoons. “The metal heats over the course of the day, you see, and develops a viral compound. Elderly and infirm, such as yourself, should avoid contact entirely. I plan to publish my findings soon.” Elderly and infirm! He should know; his face is draped with soft folds of expressive skin, and he has a paunch that reveals itself against his clothes when the wind blows directly at him. His belly strains against the tight expanse of cotton, pressed and tucked like a buttoned sheet.

  “All right then,” he says. “Let’s see those gums.”

  “And how is Madame Grunet?”

  “I hope you might meet her. Even after all this time she still finds ways to charm me with her little thoughts. Last year we had a luncheon with Frantz Jourdain, and by the end of it he had invited us to a private showing of the Salon d’Automne. I’m not sure if you know him, but Frantz is not a simple man to charm.” He continues on like this, working his way through the endless proof that cultural capital requires. “Of course, I destroyed it by taking the wrong position in the gallery. My wife wouldn’t look at me for a week, but I’ll stand by it, the art world lately is a waste of the time and money of generous men.”