what’s left.”
She was shocked into laughter. Then pressing against him, she sighed and then lay still. He had never said such a thing to her before, never touched upon what he was with the slightest levity and he watched her now with indulgence as if she were a child.
“I love you,” she whispered.
He closed his eyes. The mirror was gone, and so were the garments that covered both of them; or so it seemed to him. And he was thinking dreamily again of how much he’d liked as a child to be invisible in the dark. No one could wound him if he were invisible; and when he looked at her again, she wasn’t seeing paint, or wig, or velvet or satin, but only him, and it was as if they were in that darkness together.
“What is it? What are you thinking when you look this way?” she whispered.
He shook his head. He smiled. He kissed her. And in the mirror saw that shimmering vision of the two of them, lost in disguises, but a perfect pair.
But as soon as he reached the studio with her that night, he knew that Guido had spoken to her.
She was ready to leave everything to be in Florence at Easter. All her portraits could be done before the end of Lent, and surely he could wait that long. They could travel to Florence together.
She walked lightly, quickly about the studio talking of how this could be finished, and how that one was almost done. She needed so little to travel; she’d bought a new leather carrying case for her pastels; she had a desire to do many sketches in the churches in Florence; she had never been to Florence, did he know that? She pulled the ribbon out of her hair at just the right moment and let it fall down.
He felt slender and somewhat weightless as he always did after the performance, his masculine clothes so seemingly slight compared to all that Grecian armour, those skirts. And she was still the boy, only now with all this lovely corn-silk hair as if she were a page or an angel in an old painting.
And he stared at her, not speaking, wishing Guido had not told her, and at the same time knowing Guido had somehow made it easier for him. But these last nights with her…these last nights…what had he wanted them to be?
He could feel nothing wanting now as he looked at her, and she was showing him no sadness, no fear.
He beckoned for her to follow him into the bedroom, and she was in his arms suddenly, letting herself be lifted and carried. “Ganymede,” he whispered to her, feeling her voluptuousness through the breeches, and beneath the hard doubled-breasted front of her little coat.
It was as it had been in the café with Paolo; he felt sleepy and yet wildly alive, assaulted by colors everywhere that he looked. He felt the texture of the sheets between his fingers, the moist and warm flesh at the backs of her knees. Her shoulders were bathed, it seemed, in a bluish light from the candles, and gathering her to him, he wondered how long he could sustain it? When would come the awful, wrenching pain?
When she was softened with love, she lit the candles again. She poured the wine for both of them and commenced to talk.
“Everywhere in the world I’ll go with you,” she said. “I’ll paint the ladies of Dresden and London. I’ll paint the Russians in Moscow; I’ll paint kings and queens. Think of it, Tonio, all the churches, the museums, the castles of the German countries with their multitude of towers and turrets on the mountain peaks. Tonio, have you ever seen those northern cathedrals, so full of stained glass? Imagine it, a church of stone instead of marble with arches rising high and narrow, soaring as if to heaven, and all those tiny fragments of brilliant color made into angels and saints. Think of it, Tonio, St. Petersburg in winter, a new city fashioned after Venice and blanketed with lovely white snow….”
There was no desperation in her voice, but her eyes had a dreamy glitter, and without answering her, he pressed her hand as if to say, Go on.
Guido hadn’t really taken these last few blissful hours from him; there was an eerie beauty to understanding everything so clearly.
“We’d go everywhere, the four of us,” she was saying. “You, Guido, Paolo, and me. We’d buy the grandest traveling coach