Blood Orange. Drusilla Campbell
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.
She sat up. “Do you have something I can wear back to the hotel? I need a nap.”
“Sleep here,” he said. “Later we can go out again. Nothing starts in Florence until after ten anyway. On the other side of town there’s a jazz club. You’ll like it.”
“You don’t have to babysit me, Micah. You have a life—”
“Is that how you see me? As a babysitter?”
“What about clothes?”
“Give me your key. I’ll go back to the hotel while you sleep.”
His back was to the window; the falling sun outlined him like gold encircling a medieval icon. She held her breath. He turned, and they looked into each other’s eyes. He held out his hand, then led her to his bed.
She knew exactly what she was doing. She was in a three-hundred-year-old palazzo owned by an Italian princess. She had been transported to a fairy-tale world, and she did not once think of David and Bailey or stop to ask if this was the way normal people behaved. In the Kingdom of Florence none of the old rules applied. Later, she recalled what Lexy had once said about life being full of crossroad moments, opportunities taken or lost forever.
Late that night, after jazz and slow dancing, he leaned her against a crumbling garden wall draped in wisteria, unzipped her Levi’s, and entered her with his fingers. She cried in the dark from the thrill of it. Night and the city sounds, a few feet away the voices of men and women coming out of the club where they had been moments before. And Dana impaled on her lover’s hand, crying because she had never had an orgasm like that, never knew it was possible.
She inhabited a small world that week. In the mornings Micah brought her hot chocolate and a croissant from the coffee bar at the corner. They made love amid the crumbs and might not eat again until dinner; but she felt full all the time. In mirrors and shop windows she saw the difference in herself, a look of slightly blurred and puffed fatigue, a languor in her arms and legs. Her hair was heavier, thicker, and darker than it had ever been; and she wore it loose, not tied as usual at the nape like a convent girl.
They went back to the Uffizi three times so Dana could study paintings rich in visual subtext. Da Fabriano’s Adoration of the Magi transfixed her. In the faces of the crowd—suspicious, venal, good-natured, Mary’s sly and gossipy attendants—she saw the emotions of living people. She walked through rooms full of two-dimensional medieval virgins holding infant saviors with the wizened features of old men, but in paintings of the Renaissance she saw faces as modern as those in the cafés and shops of Florence. This was the great breakthrough of Renaissance art. It brought mortals into art where before there had been only saints and gods.
One morning as she put her hairbrush down on the table in the bathroom she knocked a vial of pills to the floor. She picked it up and tried to read the label written in Italian, but the only word she recognized was depression. Hard to believe, easy to dismiss. During the short time she’d known him Micah had been ebullient and lighthearted. No one who was depressed could have so much energy. She thought about mentioning the pills but told herself it was none of her business. Besides, these days doctors prescribed mood-altering chemicals to almost anyone who wanted them.
In the afternoon they bicycled out of town to the Villa Reale di Castello, a sixteenth-century garden laid out with checkerboard formality. Descendants of plants gathered centuries before from countries as distant as China filled the garden with the scents and colors of spring.
They sat beside a fountain and ate a lunch of fruit and bread and cheese; and afterward they found a secluded spot and fell asleep until an ill-tempered guard rousted them and they hurried off, giggling like teenagers. Micah seemed so happy; she could not help asking him if he still got depressed.
“You know about that?”
“Lexy told me.”
“Thank you, sister dear.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Did I say it was?”
“Look, it’s none of my business—”
“Hey, I’m glad you brought it up.” He did not sound glad at all. “What else do you want to know? Do I hate my mother? Am I constipated?”
She backed away from him, hands flattened in a “stop” gesture. “I asked a simple—”
“Yeah, well maybe it’s not so simple; maybe it’s so fucked up no one can figure it out anymore.”
She had no idea what he was talking about now.
“Come on, Micah, I’m getting hungry. Let’s get some of that hot chocolate at the bar. . . .” She held her hand against his cheek. “I’m sorry I pried. I never want to make you angry.”
“I’m not angry. Do I look angry?” He smiled, and she didn’t know what he was thinking. “I used to take pills for depression, but I don’t need them anymore. You make me happy, Dana. You make me happier than I’ve ever been.”
Another day they wandered through the Boboli Gardens in the rain giving names to the feral cats, getting soaked, playing chase and sliding on the wet grass. She remembered Lexy saying her brother was not a laugher. How amazing it was that now Dana knew him better than his own sister.
And every day, when they were not in galleries and churches and gardens and restaurants, they were in bed. Her vagina ached, and walking from one gilt-framed painting to another, she felt her clitoris as if it had permanently grown.
They made plans to visit Venice and Rome, Siena and Milan, where Dana had to see, must see, Bellini’s The Preaching of St. Mark in Alexandria.
“There are camels,” Micah told her, almost bouncing with delight. “And a giraffe and all these guys in fancy hats, and you hardly notice Saint Mark at all.”
With his knowledge of Italian art, and his