return to Paris, I buy a bottle of inexpensive Chianti and a round loaf of bread and head down to the ancient marketplace by the Arno. There, in the shadow of a high colonnade, the bronze statue of Il Porcellino guards the empty butcher stalls. It’s easy to move around on the crutches now, although the cobbled streets provide a challenge. I wear long loose dresses to hide my cast.
At the center of the piazza the white-robed Moroccans have spread their silver and leather goods on immaculate sheets. They sing prices as I pass. Because I have some lire in my pocket, I buy a thin braided bracelet of leather. Perhaps I will send it to my cousin. Perhaps I will keep it for myself. Down by the river, pigeons alight on the stones and groom their feathers. I sit with my legs dangling over a stone ledge and uncork my round-bellied bottle, and the wine tastes soft and woody. It’s bottled by the Cellinis. It’s pretty good, certainly not bad enough to make them go broke. I drink to their health, and to the health of people everywhere, in celebration of a rather bizarre occurrence. Two days ago I sold a painting. The man who bought it laughed aloud when I said he had made a bad choice. He is an opera patron and food critic from New York, the godson of my painting professor back in the States. He attended our winter exhibition last January and happened to be visiting Rome when the Del Reggio gallery was showing our work.
It is not a painting of Aïda dancing in the grapevines, her hair full of leaves. It is not an unapologetic self-portrait, nor a glowing Tuscan landscape. It is a large sky-blue square canvas with two Chagall-style seraphim in the foreground, holding a house and a tree and a child in their cupped hands. It is called
Above the Farm.
In slightly darker blue, down below, you can make out the shadow of a tornado. Why he bought this painting, I do not know. But there’s one thing I can tell you: Those angels have no feet.
Although it’s interesting to think of my painting hanging in this man’s soaring loft in Manhattan, it makes me sad to think I will never see it again. I always felt comforted, somehow, looking at that child standing by his house and tree, calm and resigned to residence in the air. Five hundred feet off the ground, he’s still the same boy he was when he stood on the earth. I imagine myself sitting on this ledge with Aïda, when she is old and I am famous. She will look at me as if I take up too much space, and I will want to push her into the Arno. But perhaps by then we will love ourselves less fiercely. Perhaps the edges of our mutual hate will have worn away, and we will have already said the things that need to be said.
The Isabel Fish
I am the canker of my brother Sage’s life. He has told me so in no uncertain terms. Tonight as we eat hamburgers in the car on the way to our first scuba class, he can’t stop talking about the horrible fates that might befall me underwater. This, even though he knows how scared I am after what happened last November.
“You could blow out your eardrums,” he says. “Or your lungs might implode from the pressure.”
“Shut up, Sage,” I say.
“Did you know that one in twelve scuba divers gets attacked by sharks?”
“Not in a pool,” I say.
Sage is sixteen, plays drums, smokes unfiltered cigarettes, and drives his beat-up black Pinto to school every morning, with me practically hanging onto the rear bumper because I’m slow getting ready. I know he sees me as a problem, a younger and more stupid version of himself, and a girl, not popular, sort of plain, with my hair pulled back in a knot most days and a walk some people make fun of. He used to be cruel to me in the normal sibling sense, but now it’s worse. He is far from forgetting Isabel, and who can blame him? She’d been his girlfriend for six months before the accident, and it’s only been four months since. Four months is a short time in the grand scheme of things, shorter than it’s
At the center of the piazza the white-robed Moroccans have spread their silver and leather goods on immaculate sheets. They sing prices as I pass. Because I have some lire in my pocket, I buy a thin braided bracelet of leather. Perhaps I will send it to my cousin. Perhaps I will keep it for myself. Down by the river, pigeons alight on the stones and groom their feathers. I sit with my legs dangling over a stone ledge and uncork my round-bellied bottle, and the wine tastes soft and woody. It’s bottled by the Cellinis. It’s pretty good, certainly not bad enough to make them go broke. I drink to their health, and to the health of people everywhere, in celebration of a rather bizarre occurrence. Two days ago I sold a painting. The man who bought it laughed aloud when I said he had made a bad choice. He is an opera patron and food critic from New York, the godson of my painting professor back in the States. He attended our winter exhibition last January and happened to be visiting Rome when the Del Reggio gallery was showing our work.
It is not a painting of Aïda dancing in the grapevines, her hair full of leaves. It is not an unapologetic self-portrait, nor a glowing Tuscan landscape. It is a large sky-blue square canvas with two Chagall-style seraphim in the foreground, holding a house and a tree and a child in their cupped hands. It is called
Above the Farm.
In slightly darker blue, down below, you can make out the shadow of a tornado. Why he bought this painting, I do not know. But there’s one thing I can tell you: Those angels have no feet.
Although it’s interesting to think of my painting hanging in this man’s soaring loft in Manhattan, it makes me sad to think I will never see it again. I always felt comforted, somehow, looking at that child standing by his house and tree, calm and resigned to residence in the air. Five hundred feet off the ground, he’s still the same boy he was when he stood on the earth. I imagine myself sitting on this ledge with Aïda, when she is old and I am famous. She will look at me as if I take up too much space, and I will want to push her into the Arno. But perhaps by then we will love ourselves less fiercely. Perhaps the edges of our mutual hate will have worn away, and we will have already said the things that need to be said.
The Isabel Fish
I am the canker of my brother Sage’s life. He has told me so in no uncertain terms. Tonight as we eat hamburgers in the car on the way to our first scuba class, he can’t stop talking about the horrible fates that might befall me underwater. This, even though he knows how scared I am after what happened last November.
“You could blow out your eardrums,” he says. “Or your lungs might implode from the pressure.”
“Shut up, Sage,” I say.
“Did you know that one in twelve scuba divers gets attacked by sharks?”
“Not in a pool,” I say.
Sage is sixteen, plays drums, smokes unfiltered cigarettes, and drives his beat-up black Pinto to school every morning, with me practically hanging onto the rear bumper because I’m slow getting ready. I know he sees me as a problem, a younger and more stupid version of himself, and a girl, not popular, sort of plain, with my hair pulled back in a knot most days and a walk some people make fun of. He used to be cruel to me in the normal sibling sense, but now it’s worse. He is far from forgetting Isabel, and who can blame him? She’d been his girlfriend for six months before the accident, and it’s only been four months since. Four months is a short time in the grand scheme of things, shorter than it’s
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