from Les Très Riches Heures de Felix et Dangerose (2009)

At La Specola

The full-sized, anatomically accurate wax figures of vivisected lovely young women reclining on dusty velvet cushions in glass cases housed in La Specola in Florence were terribly disturbing to me. They're like Sleeping Beauties who have been tortured to death. They're like the bodies of young Christian martyrs. They're referred to as Venuses. One's torso is like sugar bowl with a lid that can be lifted off. And when you do, you find that inside her womb, a tiny fetus has begun to grow like a treasure. The figures have beautiful, flowing human hair. They have pearl jewelry and pierced ears. They have ribbons. They have sweet little hands and pretty tapering fingers. They even have pubic hair. And yet, their intestines are strung out like rosy garlands around them in their glass caskets. They are beautiful and horrifying, brides stripped bare and disemboweled.

All the wax anatomical models of individual body parts and organs exhibited at La Specola were intensely disturbing to me. With my own on-going health issues, I didn't like visualizing the inside of my own body or being confronted time after time after time with realistic, full-scale models of its internal organs. I found it all quite horrific and upsetting, like a grisly horror movie, and I cried for a while as I walked down the street after leaving the museum. The knowledge that I have a body, like an animal's, that it may already be diseased and may be cut up in an effort to cure me, and that I will, most certainly eventually die, and that I have a dense network of nerves that can cause me to experience excruciating pain before I do came crashing in on me. I was depressed for the rest of the day. I don't think Felix understood why my mood had suddenly turned sad when I met back up with him in the evening. I couldn't articulate the body horror, the dread, the fear those vivisected lovely young women inspired in me.

+ + + + + + +


“Love is my religion -- I could die for it.” (John Keats)

And evidently one of my former advisees (and he took a class with you once, years ago) did last week, by his own hand. Tragic. A beautiful boy, a sensitive soul of thirty years. I'm haunted by his death these days.

I always think at the end of a love affair that I will die (or must die, or should die), but I don't. Perhaps that's my tragedy: I live on. I put one foot in front of the other, I breathe, I take meals, I work, I see friends, I shop, I make plans for the future. My life goes on. I survive. But, truly, a part of me has died forever -- a unique part of me I shared only with one lover.

But, perhaps, with each ending of each romance something is also created? A timeless, transcendent space, a kind of metaphysical empty room full of blinding light? An intimate space that may only be shared with one other human soul in all the world? And maybe will be again someday? Or so it seems to me.

In my father's house there are many mansions. And in some of them dwell those I once loved so much I believed I would die if they ceased to love me. Perhaps one day, outside of time and space, we will love again, perfectly this time, in those rooms flooded with white light.


+ + + + + + +

I will return to Paris in October.

[As I make my travel plans for autumn, I remember that it was at about this time last year, as I finalized my travel arrangements before my departure to Europe for six weeks, that I wrote you to ask if you'd like to meet me for lunch as I passed through Florence in June for just a day. As I recall, you said you'd crawl through hell to do so. As it turned out, your crawl through hell was only just beginning that day, wasn't it, my old love?

The first of May will soon be there again, and with it, Janice, who'll arrive to move into her rented villa near the Palazzo Pitti and the Browning's Casa Guidi, just as she's done every May for longer than you have now been alive, my darling. Until her departure Labor Day, you'll have many opportunities to don one of your dinner jackets and linger with her over a second bottle of the cheap white wine she orders and you complain about, but drink anyway, chased afterward by grappa, during the interminable three- or four-course late dinners you'll share with her in expensive restaurants. You'll soon shake the moth balls from the folds of your evening clothes. It's festival season again, and Janice will take your arm, dressed in one the many designer evening gowns she, a Park Avenue widow, has collected over her vampire decades of New York shopping. I thought of the two of you today and meant to ask: and did you say you never read Tennessee William's play, Suddenly Last Summer?

And after an interminable May and June, when Janice leaves for her month in sunny Capri or Crete or Sicily, as stifling Florence once again suffocates under the weight of its tourists and money changers, on the first of July, as she does every year, Emma will arrive to spend a month with you in romantic Tuscany. Felix, be kind to her, for it is not her fault she's not an intellectual. She loves you as well as she knows how to, and she has waited around for you for twenty-four years now. You didn't give her the baby she wanted because of your own projects, and now she is nearing sixty. She would have raised it by herself; she wouldn't have bothered you to help or disturbed your work. And then she would have had a little child companion. It's too late for that now. You should be nicer to her.

And might you put your important work aside for just a little while and make some time for her? Might you rent a car, and drive her out into the open spaces of the green, terraced countryside with its poplar trees that point straight up to God?]

I bought my ticket tonight. I will stay part of the time at my old hotel on the Rive Gauche near Sennelier. I pointed it out to you one magical Sunday afternoon as we strolled past it on our way to or from Les Deux Magots. And, yes: I will stay again for part of my visit at our tiny, atmospheric hotel. I don't think I will have the courage to book that sacred space, chambre quatre-cents-neuf, but in whatever room they put me, I will seek a kind of final closing of this chapter of my life there -- our sweet, mad, doomed romance. The final drawing in Les Très Riches Heures, it turns out, is me, once again in Paris, alone this time, exactly one year after I made what I thought would be the last drawing, the two of us together in Venice on your birthday.

We did say, didn't we, and more than once, that no matter what came to pass, we'd always have Paris? Or were we only, as a joke, making a cheap, obvious, clichéd reference to Casablanca?