The Chapel by Michael Downing

countryside, and I’m dying to see the airport one more time. At dinner tonight, I’ll steal a cotton napkin. You’ll want a hair scarf to tie under your chin.”
    I said, “You have me confused with Gina Lollobrigida.”
    He checked his watch. “So, if you will tell Sara not to expect me today, I’ll meet you this afternoon at the Arena Chapel at three-fifteen or so.”
    I drew back my hand. “If I do stay, I’ll have seen the chapel by then.” This day was shaping up like a Roman arch, and I had the feeling I was on the downside already.
    â€œPerfect. You will know how to get there. There are benches just outside the visitor entrance.” He picked up a little biscuit but thought the better of it. “I have two tickets for a lecture at four.”
    I consulted my itinerary. “I’ll be at the basilica.”
    He pointed at my phone. “Where’s the camera on that thing?”
    I turned it on and handed it to him. “Press here.” I resisted the urge to fix my hair.
    He stuck out his tongue and snapped two pictures of his open mouth. “Now, you can tell everyone you went to the basilica and saw St. Anthony’s eight-hundred-year-old tongue.” He drank the second espresso and stood up. “Three-fifteen. Look for a mandressed up like a Catholic priest.” He left via the arcade, heading away from the hotel.
    I picked up my phone. No new messages. It was two in the morning on the East Coast. Rachel and Sam were asleep. For the first time in months, I was ahead of them. For a moment, I felt like their mother again, comforted by the idea that I would have advance knowledge of any global catastrophe and could warn them, urge them to take cover.
    Before I left the café, I had a conversation with a helpful young man at Air France. For twenty dollars, he sold me a twenty-four-hour hold on a reservation for a Tuesday afternoon flight from Venice to Boston. If I left at three on Tuesday afternoon, I would be in Paris by five, and in Boston by eight-thirty on Tuesday night, which seemed a little breathtaking, as was the pricing—$10,000 for first class, $4,500 for business class, and $2,500 for coach. Added together, all three options equaled the cost of the deluxe holiday I was tossing away. I opted for coach, despite his warning about the hefty charge for a second suitcase and other bulky items. I assured him I’d only be checking one bag.
    Back in my hotel room, I emptied the second suitcase, the banged-up match to mine, Mitchell’s better-traveled bag. He’d made it to Rome on Harvard’s tab several times, and once to Milan, but he’d never been to Florence, having waited to see it with me. He’d never get there now, a permanent exile, like Dante, who never entered the walls of his beloved hometown after he got himself tossed out when he was thirty-six.
    This biographical fact and everything else that remained of the Dante book was in the suitcase whose contents I had spilled onto the bed, all of Mitchell’s copious notes and the few furiously marked-up pages of his own fragile prose he had preserved. I’d even brought along a sampling of his photocopied pages of The Divine Comedy translated by the great British mystery writer Dorothy Sayers in her spare time,annotated and crammed with Mitchell’s marginalia. He’d left me thousands of similar pages, and I’d been stuffing the duplicates and triplicates into the newspaper recycling bin week by week.
    Many of the pages I had saved were crazy quilts, photocopied bits of esoteric literary exegesis Mitchell had taped to blank pages and then drowned in scribbled counterarguments and probably very witty or sardonic exclamatory bits of Italian that were lost on me. I’d sorted them into folders, one per artist—Botticelli, Blake, Rodin, and Dalí—as well as writers ranging from Chaucer and Milton to T.S. Eliot, Freud, and Jung. Some of