“Well, exactly. Those weren’t ones his teachers ever saw. The one of the little girl—he did that around the same time, dashed it off. It was supposed to be me; he was painting me as he imagined I’d looked as a girl. He got it all wrong, I’m afraid, but still that piece has a soul. The work he did for them, though, it was polished and flat and religious. And he was an atheist!
“He progressed and progressed in the contest, and the end of the whole ordeal was that they sequestered you in a studio in the Château de Compiègne for seventy-two days. Seventy-two! Can you imagine? And they gave you a theme to paint on. First you had twelve hours to sketch, and then you had the ten weeks to paint, and you weren’t allowed to vary from the sketch. Whoever decided an artist shouldn’t change his mind? So for seventy-two days he was locked up, and there I sat pining away.”
Roman said, “Could he write you letters?”
“No! It was the worst time of my life. Now, I say that, but really I fell more in love every day. What’s more romantic than waiting for a lover who’s locked up in a chateau? I lost twenty pounds.
“I can’t remember what theme they gave, but what he produced was this stiff pietà. It looked like a bad Easter pageant, is what I thought. And he won. Three students won, in fact, which was a scandal. They hadn’t awarded the prize the year before, and someone before that had to give his prize back for some silly reason, so there were three spots open at the Villa Medici in Rome, which is where the contest winners were sent. Any other year, to be honest, Ranko wouldn’t have won. Everyone knew it was really third place, and he knew it too.
“So you can imagine: The love of my life sequesters himself for months, and his prize is three to five years in Rome. And we can’t get married now, because there’s no room there for a wife. He was elated, and I was just devastated.”
“This is the thing,” Debra interjected. “I understand devoting your life to the memory of someone great, but he was a jerk.”
Yale had to silently agree. Maybe Ranko hadn’t been a bad guy—the prize sounded like the opportunity of a lifetime—but if a young Nora had come to Yale for relationship advice, he’d have told her to cut her losses and move on.
“Then that summer, two things happened. One you already know: That terrible man had to go shoot the Archduke and start the war, and I could have just kicked him. But the other is that my father died suddenly. So in one instant, Ranko’s travels to Rome were put off, and in the next, I was called home.”
Roman made a sympathetic noise, underlined the word died in his notes.
“Everything was chaos, you can imagine. I wasn’t going to leave, I was going to stay with Ranko. I was almost happy for the war, in a horribly selfish way. But Paris was becoming dangerous, and my father’s death meant I had no money to stay in school—and then, in August, Ranko broke it to me that he was being mobilized. I hadn’t even known it was a possibility.
“I cried for two days straight, and I decided I’d go. I had a hell of a time getting out, what with everyone booking passage at once. I went back to Philadelphia, where my mother was, and I taught drawing classes to some insufferable children.”
“But you came back,” Roman said. “All the other pieces, they’re later, right?”
“Yes,” she agreed, and then she launched into a deep, wet cough that rocked her whole body. Debra shot out of her chair and vanished into the kitchen, and Yale stood, not knowing what to do. He’d become used to the PCP cough, a dry bark he’d heard on the streets and in the bars, a cough that made him think of a more medieval type of plague. He remembered Jonathan Bird, Nico’s old roommate, saying, “I just wish that with all this hacking I could cough something up.” Whereas Nora sounded like she was drowning. Debra was back with a paper towel and another glass of water.
Yale stepped into the dining room, signaled for Roman to join. They could give Nora space, at least.
Roman whispered: “He died in the war, right? Ranko Novak?”
Yale shrugged. “I mean, I don’t feel like this story has a happy ending.”
“It’s so beautiful,” Roman said. “Doomed love.”
Yale laughed. “Is it?” And then he couldn’t stop laughing. Which was terrible, because Nora was still coughing and Roman looked hurt. But the moony expression on Roman’s face, his voice, had hit the darkest spot of Yale’s humor. How beautiful, the doomed love! How gorgeous and ambient, the ways we abandon each other! The lovely wars we die in, the poetry of disease! He wanted to be able to call Terrence up, to say, “You were like Romeo and Juliet! Romeo and Juliet die puking their guts out. Tristan and Iseult at ninety pounds with no hair. It’s beautiful, Terrence. It’s beautiful!”
Roman said, “Are you okay?”
Nora’s cough was finally dying down.
“Maybe we should leave,” Roman said.
And then Debra was in the doorway, suggesting the same thing. “This is way more than I should have let her do,” she said. “What about tomorrow?”
It sounded lovely: the guarantee of another night up here, away from the city, away from everyone he knew. If only he could stretch it into a week, and then a month. No posters up here urging him to get tested. He could stay in Nora’s house, send Debra off to live her life.
* * *
—
In the car, Yale said, “If she dies in her sleep tonight, just shoot me, okay?”
“Now that you said it, she won’t.”
The seats were frozen, and the steering wheel sent waves of cold through Yale’s gloves. “I’m not sure I have that kind of power over the universe.”
Roman said, “When you think a specific bad thing is going to happen, it never does. I don’t mean like if you think it looks like rain it won’t rain, but like if you think your plane will crash, it won’t.”
Yale shook his head. “I want to live in your world. Doom is beautiful, and you can control your fate.” Although probably it was a belief system Roman desperately needed. Why mess him up? Yale couldn’t tell him anything the world wouldn’t eventually teach him on its own.
They stopped for a late lunch at the same place they’d eaten the night before, and Yale had the same batter-fried fish plus a couple of beers.
When they walked back into the bed and breakfast, Mrs. Cherry ran toward them, flapping her hands. “Oh it’s terrible, isn’t it? Now, your rooms have NBC and CBS, but ABC doesn’t come in too clearly. PBS you’ll get, too, I think, but you never know if they’ll show the news. I’d try CBS, myself.”
Yale was opening his mouth to ask what she meant, to say they hadn’t been near a TV all day, but Roman was already asking what channel CBS was and nodding in agreement as Mrs. Cherry said again how terrible it was. She didn’t seem that upset, though—it couldn’t have been the end of the world. “Now let me ask you,” she said, “do you fellows drink wine? A young couple checked out this morning, and they left a full bottle right on the floor. Hold on and I’ll grab it.”