Blood Orange Page 5

  “David?”

  “It’s me, Micah.”

  Her thoughts shut down.

  “Let me in, Dana.”

  If she ignored him, Micah Neuhaus would bang with his fists until the neighbors called the police. He would like nothing better than to make a public demonstration. But if she let him in … He was a python curled in the darkest corner of her life.

  This was ridiculous. He was an adult human being, nothing like a snake. She did not know what he was doing outside Arts and Letters, but she could guess, and it would not do. He had to leave her alone. She stood up, rubbing her damp palms on her running shorts, beginning to feel angry. What was he doing in San Diego? He had no business intruding on her life this way, and she would tell him so, and he would hear the steel in her voice and know that she meant every word.

  But her knees were jelly as she went downstairs and fumbled with the doorknob.

  He pushed past her into the dark bookstore.

  In the weeks since they’d parted she had forgotten how young he looked, though he was almost forty, not much younger than she. He wore sandals, a pair of snug Levi’s, and a baggy black sweater. His dark hair curled near the nape of his neck and was more untidy than she remembered it. But the piratical gold earring was still in his left ear, and the bruised, sensuous mouth had not changed. She remembered how his lips felt against the inside of her elbow, the pinpricks of pleasure, the half-drunk sense of simultaneously dropping into the center of her body and lifting out of it.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I saw your husband on TV.”

  “How did you know I’d be here?”

  “I watched you leave your house.”

  “How dare you spy on me?”

  “I’m really sorry about the dog. Is it okay?” He added, “I worry about you, Danita.”

  “Don’t call me that.”

  “It’s your name.”

  “No one calls me Danita.” Except her grandmother. It was a memory of the old life, the life before she met David and began to live as normal people did.

  “I’m glad the dog’s okay.”

  For a few moments she had forgotten the terrible afternoon and night just past. Now the fear and panicky confusion, the tactless policeman, and her argument with David rushed back at her with the power of a flash flood.

  He put his hands on her arms, and she jerked away. “Don’t be mad, Dana.”

  “What do you expect me to be?”

  “Just listen to me, okay?”

  “What’s the point? We’ve been over this a dozen times.”

  “No, I’ve got something new to say.” His face was bright with conviction. “Where can we sit?”

  “Say what you have to say, Micah.” There would be no sitting down, no getting comfortable.

  He laughed as if he read her mind. By the light of the street lamp outside the store Dana saw his blue-black eyes crinkle with amusement. “I’ve got this friend, he owns a great little house on the beach down in Mexico south of Ensenada, and he wants to sell it to me.” As he talked, he walked back and forth between the rows of bookshelves, letting his fingers trail along the spines. His nervous energy filled the store, crackled through the bookshelves and along the countertops like heat lightning.

  “You could come down sometimes. It’s only a couple hours’ drive, and David’d never have to know.” He grinned at her. “I’ll stay out of the way; you won’t have to worry about me.” Another grin. “I’ll be a good boy.”

  Groaning, she slumped onto the stairs and rested her head in her hands.

  “Dana, I’ve had time to think. I was way out of line before. I know that. But you’re important to me.”

  He crouched before her, taking her hands.

  “My beautiful Dana, I don’t want you to suffer.”

  His back was to the window, his face in shadow; but a gray dawn light had begun to fill the store, and as he spoke she watched his mouth, wanting to trace the sulky outline of his lips with her fingertips.

  She spoke to break the spell. “What about Lexy?”

  “Forget my sister. Think about what I said.”

  “She loves you, and she worries, and you won’t answer her phone calls.”

  His lips pinched in irritation. “I’ll call her, okay? Okay?” He stood up and paced in front of her.

  Dana felt her will strengthen.

  “You never should have come back here.”

  “I want to be near you.”

  “Go back to Italy. You had a good life.”

  “First say you’ll think about Mexico,” he said.

  “No, I won’t.” He was not a python. There was no lightning. “I told you, Micah. My life is in San Diego with David and Bailey. You can’t be part of it.”

  She stood and pulled her back and shoulders straight. “I want you to go.”

  “What’s wrong? Why did you change?” His question was almost a whine.

  “This is a pointless conversation.”

  She expected him to argue with her, but instead he walked to the door. With his hand on the knob he said, “I love you. You either don’t know what that means or you’re fooling yourself. Either way …” He pressed his fist against his chest. “The pain, Dana, I can’t stand it.”

  He waited, but she refused to speak. If she did not respond to his drama, he would leave.

  “Okay, I’ll leave, but don’t tell me to go back to Italy. I’m not gonna do it until you come with me. In the meantime, if you want to see me, I’m living in that apartment house on Fourth and Spruce, second floor front.”

  And then he was gone, and it was as if a tornado had passed, sucking the air from the bookstore, leaving Dana with a bruised pain in her chest. She sat on the stairs again and by the gray light of dawn stared into the grain of the wood as if she hoped to read a message there.

  Florence

  .n January David had received a large bonus check, the first in .Cabot and Klinger’s history. He endorsed it over to Dana and told her to buy a ticket to Italy. No one got a Ph.D. in art history just thumbing through picture books, he’d said. She was both excited and fearful at the prospect of traveling alone. If she left her family for her own pleasure, fate might choose that time to punish her for being careless with what she had never deserved to have in the first place. She fretted about accidents, earthquakes, epidemics, and terrorists.

  David said she was sweet and superstitious, but with the assistance of Phillips Academy and Guadalupe he would manage just fine. She had never been anywhere. Before she went to school in Ohio, she had not ventured farther from home than Los Angeles. She told Lexy she wished they’d used the bonus for a new roof.

  “It’s Europe,” Lexy said. “And Italy’s practically the cradle of civilization. You’ll get there and you won’t want to come back. But you do need some backup, and I’ve got just the thing. My brother’d love to show you around. He’s been in Florence almost ten years. He’s practically a native. Plus he’s an artist. That can’t hurt.”

  Dana did not want anyone to see what a klutz she was sure to be without David.

  “He speaks the language-didn’t you just tell me you’re worried about not speaking Italian? He’ll love you because he loves me.”

  Lexy persevered, and Dana gave in and let her call Micah.

  “You have a right to have fun, Dana. Go for it.”

  David said almost the same thing when he saw her off at Lindberg Field. Friends and people she barely knew told her to have fun. It offended her, the way they tossed the word out-as if fun was a universal concept everyone but she understood. She did not remember playing games with the kids she grew up with. She had never owned a doll and never wanted one. Dana had been a loner, a quiet and bookish kid who’d had part-time jobs from the time she was eleven. The first “fun” time she actually remembered having was with David at the circus in Cincinnati. Even the barista at Bella Luna, the one with five rings in her left nostril, told her to relax and have fun. As if it were that easy. Jus
t a wish and a click of the ruby slippers and she would be able to cast off the careful habits of a lifetime. Take some risks, Lexy told her. Life isn’t about being safe all the time.

  After three hours in the Atlanta airport and dinner thousands of feet over the gray Atlantic, she swallowed a sleeping pill, then until she fell asleep made lists in her head: places she wanted to visit, particular works of art she wanted to see. Before she dozed off she kissed the photo of David and Bailey she had shoved in the side pocket of her carryon. She missed them both and wished she’d stayed at home.

  Micah met her at the airport brandishing his ridiculous and embarrassing sign, shocking pink, with her name in black Old English letters eighteen inches high. At the entrance to the four-star hotel where David had insisted she make reservations because it was only two blocks from the Uffizi Gallery, Micah had parked at an angle between a BMW and a Renault. He sprang from the car, grabbed her bags, and handed them to a bellman. Another uniformed person opened her door and put a gloved hand under her elbow. Her head spun and her knees almost buckled. She’d barely slept in the last thirtysix hours. And eaten virtually nothing. She leaned against the desk for support as she signed the register and gave the clerk her passport.

  As she followed the bellman to the elevator, Micah said, “I’ll wait down here.”

  For what?

  “If you go to sleep now, you won’t wake-“

  “Until I’m totally rested. That’s the whole idea.” She barely contained her annoyance. She did not want to offend Lexy’s brother, but she knew what she needed. Her body was shouting that if she did not sleep, she would die.

  They stood at the elevator while the bellman held it open. Micah said something to him in Italian, the man stepped into the elevator alone, and the doors slid shut.

  “What did you say to him? I need to-“

  “He’s putting the stuff in your room.”

  She jingled her room key in front of him. “He can’t get in.”

  “He’s got a passkey.”

  She slammed the heel of her hand on the up button of the elevator.

  Micah said, “It’s just past five here. You need to keep moving until at least ten.”

  She leaned her forehead against the wall.

  “I know some people, they got here about the same time as you and went right to bed. They woke up at one-thirty in the morning. Screwed their whole day.”

  The elevator appeared to have taken up residence on the third floor. She imagined the bellman going through her suitcase and finding the emergency five hundred dollars David had tucked in the pocket of her slacks.

  “You can’t give in to jet lag,” Micah said, grinning. “It’s the physical equivalent of terrorism.”

  She sighed. “Can I at least have a shower?”

  “But don’t lie down.”

  “Generally, I shower on my feet.”

  “You’re done for if you lie down.”

  The elevator door opened. The bellman stepped out, and she stepped in.

  “If I’m not down in thirty minutes …”

  “I’ll come get you.”

  “Ring my room.”

  “I’ll pound on the door.”

  In the early twilight the Arno was a satiny olive-green. It lay to their right across a narrow cobbled street jammed with cars and motor scooters that filled the air with noise and stinking black exhaust. Micah told her, “If you know where the river is, you can’t get lost in Florence. Not in the Old City.” He pointed across the river to a red-tiled palazzo of pale gold stucco. “That’s where I live, the place that looks like it’s falling into the river, which it almost is. I rent the top floor from the princess who owns it.”

  “A real princess?”

  “Italy’s got hundreds of ‘em. Mine’s eighty and poor as a peasant.”

  He steered her out of the traffic onto a cobbled street wide enough for one car and stopped a block up in front of a shop selling upscale souvenirs of the city.

  “That’s me,” he said, pointing to the elegantly precise pen-andink rendering of a Florentine skyline displayed in the window.

  Dana was surprised by how good it was.

  “One of these pays the rent,” he said. “I generally sell a couple a month. More during the summer.”

  “I want to buy it and take it home.”

  “Nah, it’s way overpriced. I’ll give you one.”

  They followed the narrow street. As they stepped into the Piazza della Signoria Dana’s knees went suddenly weak. She cried out inadvertently, surprising herself. There before her were the statues she had seen in books: the immense figure of Neptune rising from the sea, and Duke Cosimo astride a beautiful figure of a horse. No matter how fine the reproduction in a book, nothing could have prepared her for the size and life that emanated from the actual statues. She forgot about having fun, about David and Bailey.

  In front of the reproduction of Michelangelo’s David, Micah said, “I’ll take you to see the original in the Academia. It’s amazing, of course, practically a shrine, with camera Nazis all over the place and everyone telling you to be quiet if you raise your voice above a whisper.” He looked disgusted. “I actually like this one out here better, even if it isn’t the original. The David was meant to be public art, exposed to life. I understand all the practicalities, but I don’t like it when people treat art like it’s … holy. Mostly Italy doesn’t do that.”

  They walked back toward the Arno through the imposing colonnade of the Uffizi Palace Gallery. “I love this city,” he said. “Everywhere I look I see something beautiful.”

  His words awakened her. Until that moment she had been seeing Micah as Lexy’s eccentric and impertinent little brother, as a wild driver and a source of restless energy who would not let her sleep. But in the amber twilight of the colonnade she shed her resistance like a snake its tired skin. She saw that he was like an angel in a Renaissance painting, with his dark and curly, untidy hair, his large blue-black eyes and sensual, sulky mouth. Micah’s high energy and enthusiasm had made him seem boyish at first, but in the half shadows she could see the sadness in his face. The lines around his eyes had not come from laughing. She felt an instant empathy, and vaguely remembered Lexy saying her brother suffered from depression and had been unhappy as a boy. Happiness and grief were both written in his face along with something renegade she could not classify. As she stared at him, half mesmerized by the contrasts, she lost her footing and stumbled. He steadied her with his hand on the small of her back. His touch excited her, and she jerked away. She had not been prepared for that.

  They crossed the Arno at the Ponte Vecchio, where most of the gold- and silversmiths had closed their shops for the night. It was the middle of the week and not quite tourist season. Though there was plenty of foot traffic on the ancient bridge, it did not feel crowded to Dana. They walked up the hill past the hideous facade of the Pitti Palace until they came to the little Piazza Santo Spirito and a first-floor restaurant just large enough for six tables. Micah had to duck his head as they walked in. He was perhaps six-three or four and slender; but he moved like an athlete, which surprised Dana. Jock-artist was not a common type. David was smart, but he had no interest in art.

  Micah and the owner, Paolo, played together on a recreational soccer team; they greeted each other with an embrace. Their conversation was incomprehensible to Dana, but she guessed the subject was soccer because the body language of men talking sports is much the same in any country. The heads turn from side to side, the shoulders and arms pump.

  At dinner Dana and Micah talked about the city and art, and she went on about her thesis topic until she felt she had to apologize for talking so much. He said he was interested and asked more questions, informed questions that started her off again. Explaining, explaining: her thesis had never seemed more real than it did that night. It was thrilling to be in Florence on her own, talking art, without Bailey tugging on her, or David looking at his watch, never telling her where to go exactly but always with
his hand on her elbow steering and supporting like she might fall over if he did not hold her up. She felt guilty for her thoughts.

  It was after eleven and cold when they left Paolo’s and walked toward the river through the almost empty streets.

  Micah put his arm across her back. Tired and a little drunk after sharing two bottles of wine, she leaned into him and resisted his suggestion they find a taxi.

  “Let’s walk,” she said.

  In less than a day, this city has seduced me.

  She woke up feeling headachy and slightly nauseated but ignored the symptoms, blaming jet lag and too much wine the night before. This was the day Micah was taking her to the Uffizi.

  They walked past the tourists waiting in line and entered the gallery by a side door because Micah knew the right people. They made their way backward through the gift shop to the marble stairway where the guard waved them through with more jock body language. Her stomach dipped as they entered the first rooms, the walls covered with iconic art in blue and gold and umber dating back to the early centuries of the second millennium.

  After the third room she went into the long passageway and sat on a bench, dropping her head between her knees.

  “I’m going to be sick.” She looked around for a sign directing her to the rest rooms.

  Micah blinked and pointed over her shoulder, through the window and across the colonnade where they had walked the night before and into the corner of the gallery farthest from where they were standing.

  It was more than half a mile away.

  When it was all over and she sat in an easy chair in Micah’s apartment wrapped in a duvet, Dana was able to laugh as Micah described in graphic detail how much worse it might have been. True, she had not made it all the way to the rest rooms, but at least she had gotten as far as the stairs leading down to them. And the line could have been worse. In the summertime there might have been fifty people staring at her while she threw up.

  They talked of art and life, and Micah fed her dry crackers and soda water. As the afternoon waned, the light streaming through the tall, uncurtained windows of the palazzo changed from white to yellow to red-orange. Across the river, the bricks of Florence, absorbing the light, turned to rose gold. The room filled with long shadows and the dank smell of the river. Dana yawned and closed her eyes.