Cleopatra and Frankenstein(125)

*

Wow.





CHAPTER SEVENTEEN


January


Rome was in the middle of its mildest winter in fifty years when Frank arrived. A breeze with a tropical lilt licked at him through the taxi window as he headed toward the Fine Art Institute, where Cleo lived. The building he found was painted a faded fuchsia, with tall palm trees planted around its gates. A pink palace. It felt ancient and muted, precious and slightly forgotten. He couldn’t imagine a better place for her to be.

From out of sight behind the window sash, Cleo watched him wind his way up the stone pathway to the entrance with his familiar bouncing gait. She had been standing there waiting for him to arrive for some time, her heart beating like a trapped bird inside her chest. She watched from above as Frank reached the door and searched the list of names, ringing the button next to hers. He stepped back to look up at the empty window from which she had just ran.

Footsteps, the sound of fingers scrabbling on wood, whispered swearing, a lock scraping back, and there was Cleo. His heart swelled like a wave returning to her shore.

She had cut her long hair into a bob, a golden hood framing her face. Her beautiful heart-shaped face, he wanted to take it in his hands and hold it up to the light like a snow globe. She was wearing sun-faded jeans and a nubby butterscotch cardigan he recognized. Her slim ankles peeked out above canvas shoes splattered with paint. What a lovely girl she was. Like a white butterfly in a bar of sunshine.

“Your hair,” he said.

“Short,” she said and ran her fingers through it.

“Good.” He nodded.

“Not too short?” she asked.

“It’s beautiful,” he said. “Like a nun’s wimple.”

“You mean veil. The wimple’s what they wear around their necks.”

“See! This is why I need you in my life. Who knows how long I’ve been making that mistake. What if I had been talking to an actual nun?”

Cleo stepped out of the doorway and held his shoulders to take him in. Something about his face was different. His eyes looked clearer; she could see now that they were not brown, as she had always thought, but a golden hazel. It was as though the lights had come on inside him. She wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him toward her until they were cheek to cheek. He felt like a great tent collapsing around the central pole of her body.

“Come inside,” she said into his ear.

Frank followed her into the dark, cool entrance hall. She led him up the stairs to a sunlit landing, pointing out the kitchen and laundry with the shy pride of a student on Parents’ Day. Scattered on the kitchen table were several empty wine bottles left standing from the night before, deep crimson rings marking the wood’s surface. Frank stared at them with a mixture of relief and longing. He would never again sit after dinner like that, talk passionately about absolutely nothing like that, refilling glass after glass while evening unspooled into night. Cleo followed his gaze. Frank had told her he’d stopped drinking when he called from New York to suggest visiting. Six months, he’d said, but she’d had trouble believing it. Now, she could see that he was different sober, softer. Whatever defense alcohol had given him was gone.

“Do you want water?” she asked. “Or tea? Milk? Tea with milk?”

“I’m okay,” he said. “It’s just my first time traveling like this, you know. I feel a bit …”

“Tender?”

Frank smiled. “Yes,” he said. “That’s exactly the word for it.” They looked at each other, and a frisson of warmth passed between them. “Why don’t you show me your room?” he asked.

Her bedroom looked like a mixture between a hospital room and a dormitory, with speckled linoleum floors and a single bed covered with a pink comforter. Postcards of paintings by Lee Krasner and Jay DeFeo covered the wall above her small desk. The Fine Art Institute seemed to Frank like a boarding school for adults, a space both personal and impersonal, reflecting a group of inhabitants who would necessarily leave. Cleo loved it for this very reason; it was a place dedicated to creating.

Frank perched on the bed and felt something hard beneath him. He reached under the blanket and pulled out a smooth oblong stone. It was a pale opalescent pink veined with white, about the length of his hand, cool to the touch and heavy to hold. He looked at Cleo, who laughed. “Whoops, I didn’t realize that was still in there.”

She lifted it from his palm and slid it into a cluttered desk drawer. Inside were leaves of thick inkblot paper streaked with watercolors, a tapered white feather, a pen with a plastic sunflower on the end.

“What is it?” Frank asked.

“It’s a crystal.” Cleo leaned against the desk to face him. A thin strip of belly between her T-shirt and jeans appeared, like the sun peeking between clouds. “To put inside you. Actually, Zoe told me about it. You can use it to open your chakras, heal trauma, that kind of stuff … You’re rolling your eyes.”

“I am not!”

“You’re rolling them on the inside. I can tell.”

“You cannot.”

But she could. Cleo’s ability to see into Frank had always irked and thrilled him. He had never felt seen, really seen, until he met her.

“Put it inside you how?” he asked.

“Well, I don’t swallow it.”