“ Life without love is like a tree without blossoms or fruit. ”
– Kahlil Gibran
ACCORDING TO PSYCHOLOGISTS, 95 percent of people think about sex at least once a day. I belonged squarely within the freakish 5 percent that didn't. Until da Vinci. After that, I thought about sex a dozen times a day-nothing compared to a man, but often for a woman. As I finished up my dissertation to hand in to my professor, I realized I hadn't been missing the physical act of sex. Sure, I'd been missing pleasure, but what I'd missed most was the golden triangle of sex, love and communication. I missed a real-thing relationship. I thought After, I'd never be real with anyone again, settling within the uncomfortable typecast of a melancholy widow. It was only after I stepped back into the world of the living again that I could consider loving again.
Author Josh McDowell claims that “I love you” can be interpreted several different ways. One meaning is “I love you if,” based on what the other person does. My sister could love Cortland if he lived in a mansion with a heated pool. Another meaning is “I love you because,” based on what the other person is: attractive, strong, intelligent. Da Vinci believed he loved me because I was kind to him in a strange new world. Because I took him in. Because I made him feel safe and warm and wanted.
I wondered if Joel loved Monica solely because she was beautiful, but a part of me believed Joel had loved Monica the third way-the same way he'd loved me: unconditionally. She was the one who had betrayed him, had loved him because he was the safe choice, the opposite of her equal partner Jonathon. Perhaps Joel loved her despite her being beautiful. For so long I had wanted Joel to love me more, better, longer, deeper, but after all that's happened, I knew how one could love differently and have it mean as much as the other.
The best and hardest love to achieve is unconditional. I love you, period. I love you when you gain twenty pounds, make a mess around the house, and grow black hairs from your moles. I don't just love you until someone better comes along. I love you forever.
I knew I had this kind of love with Joel. He didn't just love me until Monica was ready to return to him. He never would've jeopardized what we had. I was ashamed I had thought that he would leave me so easily.
I wanted to release Monica of her guilt before Christmas. Whatever she had to get off of her chest, I was ready and willing to listen. It was the second week of December, the first snowfall salting the earth as I drove to her office to meet her. She was busy as usual, squeezing me in between two appointments. My dissertation was tucked neatly in my portfolio, ready to hand over to the professor after I met with Monica.
I entered the building, visualizing the lines Joel had sketched in creating his work of art. Most architects use computers now, but Joel had been old school. He loved nothing more than his drafting table and a freshly sharpened pencil. I could feel Joel's presence with me as I made my way through the marble corridor to the stainless steel elevator. Monica Blevins, top floor. Of course. Corner office. Nothing but the best.
Her assistant showed me into her office where she was bent over paperwork, black framed glasses on her pretty face, lips as red as beets. She smiled upon seeing me and rose to greet me. “Thanks so much for coming,” she said warmly. “I'm sorry we have to meet in a stuffy law office.” I admired the exquisite décor and breathtaking view from her floor-to-ceiling window-nothing stuffy about it. I wondered if Joel had known which office would be Monica's, if he had spec'ed in special accommodations for her. It seemed like the sort of thing he would do.
Monica came around the large ebony desk to sit next to me in a matching leather chair. She crossed her legs, long runner's legs with calves that probably sent most men into salivation. She wore four-inch heels, something I'd never even attempted. She kept her gaze on me, and then I noticed her eyes watered. “How have you been?”
I folded my hands into my lap, no longer ashamed that she made me look like a fashion imbecile. I was being me, pressed khakis, a taupe cardigan and one new addition of red patent leather loafers, which remarkably gave me some pep in my step.
“Love the shoes,” Monica said, admiring them. “I wouldn't have taken you for a red shoe girl.”
“Me, neither,” I said. “I've discovered it about myself. I've always been afraid to wear red, so the shoes… well, it's a start.”
“A wise choice.” Monica said, probably considering whether or not to chitchat. There was so much we could talk about this time of year-holiday plans, what the kids want for Christmas-but I was glad she got right to the point. I'd expect no less of a good lawyer.
“Jonathon told me he saw you,” she said evenly.
“He did? Well, I'm glad for that. I wouldn't want to lie.”
“Of course you wouldn't. I'm the only liar here. I lied to myself for years. Don't assume that comes with the occupation. I lied to myself about Joel. I thought he would make me a better woman because of who he was. Give me a better life if I stuck with him.”
If. Because. I resisted the smile pressing at the corners of my mouth.
“I thought Jonathon could be no more than a fling. But you know what? He loved me even though I repeatedly told him I loved Joel and was going to marry him. He said, 'I don't care what you tell me. I'll never stop loving you. You could lose your looks and get fat and be a five-foot housewife who runs around in a robe all day and I'd still love you.'”
“Not that you would ever do that.”
“He knows me too well. But he said it, you know? And I just wanted you to know that I'm sorry if whatever I did in Joel's past messed things up between you two. I would understand if he had trust issues or kept himself from truly letting go and loving again.”
I shook my head. “You know what? It wasn't that way at all. I don't think he held back. It was me that always wondered. I was jealous. I mean, look at you. But I was wrong to think you were a problem.”
“I'm glad you're saying that, because I did try to get in the way of you two. When Joel was designing this building.”
My throat tightened, and I held onto my knees to brace myself for the news. “Just say it.”
She held my gaze, never wavering. “I kissed him.”
I exhaled. “And?”
“And that's all. I kissed him one night after a dinner meeting to see if there was anything left between us.”
Imagining the two of them in a soul kiss, made me stomach turn. “And?”
“Nothing. Joel told me he loved you and you were the one he was always meant to be with.”
I could feel a tear trail down my cheek. “He said that?”
“He said he never knew how good a life could be. All because of you and the boys.”
I nodded, my lips pressed together to keep from going into the ugly cry.
“I'm sorry I kissed him,” Monica said.
“I'm not. Maybe your kissing him made him realize the words he was telling you. Maybe you did the right thing by doing the wrong thing.”
Monica squeezed my hand. “I never thought of it that way. One last thing before you go. I wanted to give you some kind of proof about Joel-occupational hazard, perhaps-and I remembered I had kept a card he sent me.”
I took the opened envelope from her, afraid to put it in my purse, for fear it would disappear. “I never thought I'd be saying this, but thank you, Monica. For everything.”
I left her office, my free hand fingering the walls as I did, like a child who couldn't keep her hands to herself, as if touching them were somehow touching Joel. I ran my hands along the hallway, the doors, as the partners looked at me strangely, I turned in circles in the elevator as I touched it, too, while the elderly gentlemen in the three-piece suit grinned. “You must be in love,” he said to me as the doors swished open. I put my hand to my heart. “Very much so.”
I waited until I was seated in the car to open the envelope. My heart raced at the sight of Joel's neat penmanship.
Dearest Monica,
I write this because I felt you deserved more than an e-mail or a cold voice mail message. Our past was what it was, but I would not change it. That feels odd to say, but I am in such a good place in my life, and you are obviously happy with Jonathon. I realize now that looking back, you two were always more comfortable together than you and I ever were. Now that I am with the love of my life, I know what it all means. Because Ramona means everything to me, I must respectfully remove myself from the project, but know that you are in good hands with my partners and personally, you are in very good hands with Jonathon. Everything works out for the best.
Love, Joel
I held the open card to my chest, his words pressing against my heart. “I love you, too, Joel. I'll always love you.” And instead of looking up into the sky, I looked beside me, where I imagined him sitting in the passenger seat, fiddling with my stereo buttons. He winked at me, and I continued to speak to him. “I'm sorry I ever doubted you. And I promise to be open to feeling you in my life, guiding us, loving us, watching over us.”
“You should've known you couldn't get rid of me that easily,” he said, and he was gone.
I found Dr. Roberts on the stage, gathering up his notes as the swarm of students exited the auditorium. He was a legend-"Word Doc,” they called him-with a radio show on NPR and a blog read by thousands each day. Not bad for a man in his seventies.
Clutching my dissertation, I made my way down the aisle until I was looking up at him, my neck craned back. From that vantage point, he did look like some sort of language god, larger than life. My last living mentor, save for Panchal.
“ Ciao, Ramona. A che cosa devo l'onore? ”
Doc was fluent in eleven languages and conversational in twenty-two-something that made nice cocktail conversation, but that wasn't nearly as impressive to most Americans as it was to me. It was a game we liked to play, one of us started speaking in one language and you answered in another, until finally Doc broke into Swahili or a dead language no one spoke anymore-something only word nerds like us would enjoy.
I presented him with the dissertation, fifty typed pages.
“ A língua do amor? ”
Portuguese. Nice move. I responded in German, “ Für dein Lesevergnügen. ”
He laughed, his white beard catching the lights of the stage. “My reading pleasure, eh? I'll be the judge of that.”
I walked up the steps and we hugged. “Look out there, Ramona. Take a good, long look.”
My eyes moved from one end of the auditorium to the other, empty seats except for one sad sap who hadn't even woken up after class was dismissed. “Don't tell me. You bored him to death?”
“ Muy gracioso, señora. Very funny.”
“What am I looking at?”
Doc inhaled and made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Your future. When I retire next spring, we'll need a new Word Doc in town. I've already spoken to the dean.”
“But I've never taught in a college setting.”
He tucked my dissertation in his ratty leather briefcase, the same one he'd had when I was his student seventeen years earlier. “Rubbish. I've spoken to Panchal. We've run the numbers. Did you know that you've taught seven hundred immigrants how to speak English?”
I brushed it off. “Well, that's my job.”
Doc led me down the stairs and poked at the sleeping student, who wiped drool from his mouth and scurried off like a mouse running from a cat. Doc slung his worn leather strap over his shoulder. “We both know it's more than a job and you've done more than just teaching them to speak English. You've given them the sword.”
I followed Doc down the halls of the English building, recalling the first time I learned Doc's Way of the Sword. “Sword” is an anagram for “words.” He liked the swashbuckling analogy of the sword with language; that it is only through effective communication and comprehension that the world can prosper. Doc claims that it is mis-communication that leads to poverty, war, and death.
We stopped in front of a row of photos of the deans of the university. He himself was a dean in the '70s before he went into semi-retirement, but how can one ever retire from words? Words are life. He put his hand next to the photo of the current dean, Dr. Sanford
Theodore Irvin, the first black dean of the college. “What do you see here?” He motioned with his case down the long row of deans.
“A bunch of men with bad hair.” I smiled at my power to rankle the old prof.
He pounded his wrinkled hand on the empty space. “No,” he bellowed. “You're looking at your future.”
I raised my brows. “ I'm going to be the next dean of the College of Arts and Sciences?”
Doc nodded once. “Well, I'm no psychic, but plan on twelve years from now. God willing, I'll still be alive to see it.”
Ten minutes later, I was sitting in my black station wagon in front of the ATO house watching a slew of frats wrap Christmas decorations on the Roman columns of the porch. Da Vinci had been gone for two weeks. I missed him most at night, when he would climb next to me and wrap his warm leg over mine and pat my behind and rub my back, waking me to make love. And in the morning, when he would make the boys and me omelettes and toss the New York Times crossword to me with not one square filled in. And after school when he would go with me to cheer on Bradley at soccer practice or play chess with William and lose miserably.
I'd missed his birthday, too. Twenty-six and life to go. Taking a deep breath, I grabbed for my purse in the passenger seat, noticing that one of Anh's da Vinci books I planned to return later that day had fallen to the floorboard. There she was: Mona Lisa, smiling up at me, and I couldn't help smiling back.
The mystery of Mona Lisa's smile was one of the reasons people throughout history had been so fascinated with the painting. Da Vinci himself had been rumored to carry the painting around with him everywhere he went. Five hundred years later, Mona Lisa was still an enigma. Depending on which scholars you believed, she was either the wife of a Florentine tailor, named Monna Lisa, though the painting was named well after da Vinci's death, or the juicier choice was that the woman was Isabella of Aragon, part of the famous Sforza family. The juicy part? That da Vinci was her second husband. If the second rumor was true, then her alluring smile made perfect sense to me. Making love to da Vinci can most definitely put a smile on your face.
And why would da Vinci need to doodle her name in his notebooks if he could carry her painting with him? Always by his side.
I like to think that Mona Lisa could be any woman. Every woman. Whether her veil was to commemorate the recent birth of a child, as was the custom then, or that she was deep into the second phase of mourning the death of a close relative, Mona Lisa was undoubtedly expressing contentment with her place in the universe. Her smile seems to say: I am who I am and come hell or high water, you can't take that away from me.
I peered into the rearview and curled my lips into the Mona Lisa smile. The same, exact one. This much I know: when you can feel it, you can smile it.
As I bent to retrieve the Mona Lisa book and return it to the stack, a notebook jutted out from underneath the seat. I caught my breath. The notebook. He must be going crazy without it. I plucked it from the floorboard and opened it, half-guilty for peeking at something that could be a man's diary, but after all we'd gone through, I figured I deserved one little look.
I opened it, expecting to find the sketches and musings he'd written there from his journey across land and sea, how he'd tried to love me, only to lose me, but finding a good life despite the odds.
Instead I found pages upon pages of this…
Brkfst. Omelette w/extra cheese plus dry toast-800 cals
Lunch. Double turkey sandwich. w/chips plus brownie-1,125 cals
And this…
Monday-
Jog 4 miles
200 crunches
50 push ups
Make love
I laughed out loud. Da Vinci hadn't been keeping a private journal at all, but a diet and exercise journal. He was even more obsessed than my sister. Was making love to me nothing more than a good way to burn more calories at the end of the day? I gathered the nerve to get out of the car, tucked his journal underneath my arm and made my way through the college men, recognizing Pickler and T-Bone.
Figuring I should check in versus sneak in as I'd done before, I stepped in to the small office where a tiny desk and two chairs sat, and a small window through which I could see the guys decorating the front porch. I made my way around the desk, looking at the pile of papers of financials and frat business with notes in the margins. I sat in the swivel chair and saw a picture of me and da Vinci with the boys from Halloween taped to the computer screen. I winced. What were his things doing in the house mom's office?
I opened the middle drawer to find the usual office accoutrements: pens, paper clips, pennies, and a pledge pin like the one da Vinci had pinned on my poodle pajamas just weeks before. Could it be his?
The larger right-hand drawer contained a dozen notebooks just like the one I'd found in the car. How could anyone keep so many notebooks of calories burned and consumed?
Grabbing the one on the top of the stack, I opened it, expecting more of the same chicken scratches of food and fitness. Instead, I found elegant prose written partially in English, partially in Italian.
I flipped several pages, searching for my name. When I found it, my body became very still. Why do I fear that Ramona does not feel the same for me as I do for her? Why does she look at me like schoolboy who needs teacher? Why do I fear if she knows I know English better than I have let on that she will dump me? How can I make her know how deep my feelings are for her? I wonder most of all if love can be lost in translation.
“Mona Lisa.” His voice was reprimanding, but not cold. He seemed more shocked to be seeing me there than I had been finding the journal.
“Hello, da Vinci. Leonardo.” I stood and he hesitated, as if not sure how to approach me. A handshake? A hug?
He air-kissed my cheeks. “It's good to see you. You look well. No, better than that. Ravishing.”
I could feel myself blush. “You, too. I found this in the car.” I handed him the notebook I'd brought in.
Da Vinci opened it then tossed it on his desk. “You must think I'm shallow to keep a notebook of such things.”
I studied his features like one might a favorite painting in a museum. He grew more beautiful every time you laid eyes on him. “I think writing things down for posterity is a very good thing.” I gently closed the drawer door with my thigh so he couldn't see I'd found the others.
Crossing one leg over the other, he leaned against the wall. “I am no longer a frat boy. I am, as they say, house dad. You must be twenty-six to apply.”
“I hope you had a happy birthday.”
“I did. Thank you.”
“So you like it here, then?”
“In charge of these crazy Americans. This way I get free room and board and some spending money and can still watch over them. And the work is never tedious.”
I stepped out from the desk, proud of his English. Most frat guys wouldn't use the word 'tedious'. “You care about them, don't you?”
“Everybody needs somebody to look out for them. Like you did for me.”
I could feel the tears wet my cheeks. “I'm sorry, da Vinci. I'm just crying because I'm so happy for you. I mean, look at you. You made it.”
He reached out for my hand. “And look at you. You seem happy. Truly happy.”
“I am. I'm glad things worked out for you here. If you need some place to go for Christmas, I'm sure the boys would like to see you.”
Da Vinci tucked his longer hair behind his ears. It seemed like ages ago that I had done the very thing for him. Like another life. I resisted telling him he could use a haircut.
“I miss William and Bradley. But Chiara is coming for the holiday. I was wrong to believe that distance would make me love her any less.” He pointed to his chest. “Even though I couldn't see her, she was right here all along.”