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?