The Girl in the Glass (26 page)

“I said they like it a lot. They like the concept. Some distributor in New York does too. It’s because she’s a Medici that there’s this interest. So naturally, some family records are going to be required.”

“Well, they probably aren’t that hard to find, no?”

“I don’t know.” I sipped from my glass. The wine was smooth and robust and smelled of pepper and cherries. “We’re talking three hundred years of Sofia’s ancestry that she says begins with an illegitimate son. I have no idea how hard it will be. I was hoping there were family records right here in the flat. Wouldn’t you think there would be if Sofia’s family is Medici? How would they all know this if there weren’t records?”

Lorenzo shrugged. “Pieces of paper. Records. Not that important.”

“Well, money is pieces of paper, too, Lorenzo. And it’s pretty important.”

He laughed loudly but didn’t comment.

“She’s taking me to see her father tomorrow to see if he knows if there are family records in the flat,” I continued.

Lorenzo’s jovial tone slid to something more thoughtful. I could see in his eyes that he already suspected our visit to Sofia’s father wasn’t going to yield anything. “Really?”

“Yes.”

“You know what I think?” I shook my head.

“I think we need music.” He lifted himself out of his chair and disappeared inside. Apparently we were done talking about Sofia’s ancestry. Smooth acoustic guitar music, Mediterranean in style, floated out to me. Lorenzo reappeared.

“That’s better,” he said. Then he held out his hand to me.

“What?” I said.

“It’s a beautiful night in Florence. Let’s dance.”

“I don’t know how to dance.”

He reached for my hand and pulled me to my feet. “There is no how, cara. You
feel
a dance.” He put one arm around my waist and brought me close enough to smell his cologne. Spicy and sweet. He took my other hand and bent our elbows so that our arms rested against his chest. He hummed the tune that the guitar was strumming and swirled me about the little balcony. I stepped on his foot. Not on purpose, but he didn’t seem to care.

“I told you I couldn’t dance,” I said. And he laughed and said something in Italian that meant nothing to me. “You might want to try that again in English.”

He laughed louder and twirled me away from him and then pulled me back.

“You saw the
David
?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“And he knocked me off my feet.” This pleased him and he twirled me again and brought me back close.

“Not so hard to imagine a statue could talk to you, eh?”

I’ve only been in the arms of a dancing man a few times in my life. My father used to dance with me, but it’s different when you are a little girl standing on your father’s shoes as he sways to old Sinatra tunes. Prom doesn’t count because no one really dances at prom. You just bounce around on the fast songs and schlep a shuffled circle on the slow ones. I’m talking about dancing the way Lorenzo was dancing with me at that moment. Even polite Miles couldn’t dance like this, like it was as easy and effortless as breathing. I relaxed into that graceful movement, and soon I wasn’t stepping on Lorenzo’s feet anymore. My eyes were closed, my head was nestled against his chest, and I was feeling the dance, just like he told me I should.

“Look at you, cara mia,” he whispered into my hair. “You are dancing.”

“Look at you,” I whispered back. “You’ve got bruises on your toes.”

He laughed, said something in Italian, and I again had to remind him that if he wanted to discuss anything with me, he had to use the language of all us lazy unilinguals.

“I said, you are sweet and fun and lovely. Why aren’t you married?”

When you’re thirty and single, the last thing you want to hear is “Why aren’t you married?” It sounds an awful lot like “What is wrong with you?”

“Why aren’t you married?” I shot back.

He rubbed the small of my back with his thumb. “I tried it once. Not very good at it.”

“Maybe you didn’t try hard enough.”

He rested his head on top of my head. “Maybe. You’d be good at it, though.”

“And how would you know that?”

“I just do.”

We were quiet for a moment. I didn’t know what to say to that comment. So I said nothing.

“Do you have a special someone, cara?”

I bristled a little. “You know I don’t. You ask me this every time we Skype.”

He drew me closer, perhaps thinking I was going to pull away. “I meant is there someone who is special to you. And perhaps he does not know it?”

I felt heat rise to my cheeks, and I tipped my chin downward in case there was some physiological way for him to feel the warmth on my face through his clothes.

“Marguerite?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled into the fabric of his shirt.

“What?”

Who knows why I lifted my head and spouted what I did next. Perhaps I am at my most honest when I am in the embrace of strong arms.

“There are moments when I think I am in love with the man my mother is dating.”

Lorenzo arched back a little. “Truly?” He was smiling. Sort of.

My face was burning with embarrassment, but it had felt so good to say it out loud and for someone to hear it. Even so, I thumped my forehead onto his chest.

“No. I don’t know. I just met him. He’s only thirteen years older than me. And the day I met him, I thought she was setting me up with him. But she wasn’t. She just wanted me to meet the man she was dating. Who just happens to be a younger man.”

“Tell me what you like about him.”

“I barely know him,” I muttered.

“But you are drawn to him. What is it about him that draws you?”

And as we swayed to the music, I listed the things I liked about Devon, starting with his kind heart toward my mother. His gentle manner toward me. His compassion. His quick response to need. His perceptive thinking. His kind eyes, soft voice.

“He’s just such a genuinely nice person,” I concluded. “It’s … it’s very attractive.”

Lorenzo began to stroke the back of my head. He held me the exact same way the day before when I fell apart in his arms after being stood up at the airport.

“Those are all wonderful reasons to be attracted to someone, cara.”

“But he’s my mother’s boyfriend!” I looked up at Lorenzo, daring him to find something good to say about that.

But he didn’t say anything. He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “If he chooses your mother over you, he has a huge check in the minus column, Marguerite.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. It was funny, really. But also not funny. The fact was, he
had
chosen my mother over me. I hadn’t thought of it quite that way yet. Devon wasn’t doing mental gymnastics after meeting me like I was after meeting him. He already had chosen her over me.

The laugh in my throat died away, and Lorenzo must have sensed I hadn’t thought this through. He kissed my cheek and whispered something in Italian.

“English, please,” I whispered back.

“You deserve more than he will give you.”

I knew if I tipped my head up, Lorenzo would probably kiss me. I hadn’t been kissed in over a year. I was aware of how dangerous it was to be kiss deprived, hurting, and in the arms of an attractive male friend. But I tipped my head up anyway. Lorenzo wasted not a second. It was as if he had pulled the lever himself that brought my chin up to his. His lips on mine were warm and sweet from laughter and wine. He brought his other hand down around my waist so that I all but disappeared into his embrace. Into that kiss.

I was lost in it for several seconds, in that dreamlike place that your
mind takes you when physical sensation is so powerful it is nearly your undoing.

To Lorenzo, it was probably an enjoyable, throwaway kiss. I was quite sure he liked kissing women. He liked bocce ball. He liked to dance. He liked wowing people with his photography.

But I had no place in my brain or heart for throwaway kisses. I pulled away.

“Lorenzo.” I said his name gently.

“Yes,” he said, kissing my neck.

“I want … some gelato.”

He looked at me, eyes sparkling with amusement. “You want … gelato?”

I knew why he was kissing me. He probably thought he was doing me a huge favor, romancing away my troubles with distracting kisses. But surely he wasn’t in love with me. I was someone he was fond of. I could think of nothing good that could happen from allowing him to continue.

“You know any good gelato places around here?”

“You really want gelato? That’s what you want?”

“I do.”

He raised my hand to his lips and kissed it like a Victorian gentleman. “Well, then. I know a wonderful place to get gelato.”

His kiss was still warm on my lips when we headed downstairs, my hand in his, as if I were a child who needed help on the stairs.

I remember my mother talking about my grandfather once, with tears in her eyes, telling me what a kind nonno he was. I have the vaguest memory of him bending down to kiss my cheek. Or maybe I was bending to kiss his.

He remarried after my grandmother died, but I have no memory of the woman who was his second wife. She was not liked among the family.

When Cosimo died, it is said, my mother lost more than her beloved father. She lost the apparatus of her freedom. Not only that, but the matter of my dowry, as well as my future and Virginio’s, was now to be left to my uncle Francesco, who succeeded my grandfather as Grand Duke of Tuscany.

When my grandfather died, everything was placed in Francesco’s hands.

He was not like Cosimo. He did not dote on my mother. And he did not like Troilo Orsini.

21

Tuesday morning dawned bright and warm. Sofia and I enjoyed breakfast on her balcony while she updated me on the last eight chapters she planned to write to bring her word count up to fifty thousand. She was confident she could have the new chapters done by mid-July. I felt good about the proposed chapters and was fairly sure Beatriz and Geoffrey would be okay with having all the content done by the middle of the summer. The first hurdle to cross in getting Sofia’s book published was taken care of. There would be at least fifty thousand words.

Next we had to establish that she was who she said she was. Perhaps I would be surprised by her father’s condition when we saw him later that afternoon and he’d be able to easily direct us to older family records. Sofia could only go as far back as the late eighteen hundreds with information she found in her father’s family Bible. There was another one hundred years we needed to cover. If her father couldn’t bridge the gap, I was going to have to start looking on my own.

And I still had to find a way to somehow let Sofia be Sofia in the pages of her book, ethereal voice and all.

As we sipped a second cup of coffee, Sofia asked me to describe the statue I hoped to find at the Uffizi that morning. I hadn’t seen my nonna’s painting in almost twenty years. I attempted to describe how I remembered it.

“The statue has her arm bent in either welcome or request; I’m not sure which. It’s like she’s reaching out to the little girl in the painting who was my grandmother.”

“The statue has her hand like this?” Sofia raised her arm and bent it slightly at the elbow, turning her palm upward in supplication.

“Yes.”

“And is she seated on a rock in water?”

I couldn’t remember. I closed my eyes to picture it, but all I could see in my memory was the little dancing girl and the statue reaching out to her.

“I don’t know.” I shook my head. “I don’t think there was water.”

Sofia nodded. “Maybe there was water, but your nonna’s grandfather chose not to paint it, eh?”

“Why? You know this statue?”

“I think I do. But she’s not at the Uffizi.”

My heart sank a little. Just a little. Sofia still looked quite pleased.

“She’s not?”

“No. If it’s the one I’m thinking of, she’s in the Boboli Gardens at the Pitti Palace.”

Sofia stood, stepped into the flat, and came back out a moment later with a heavy book in her hands. “All the Boboli statues are pictured in this book. She’s in here.” Sofia sat back down and leafed through the book’s colorful pages. She landed on one and spread it out before me, “That’s her, right? Andromeda?”