Rennaissance
Today, we see the statue of David. His cock is unimpressive, but his hands stop my breath. My best friend Amy wants me to sweet talk a museum attendant into letting us touch them. I would settle down for those hands, I say. But what if you go all in for the hands, and his cock looks like that?
Amy laughs. She says hands are more important. She just thinks that because she doesn’t know about all the rest.
Amy is leaving me. In September she’s getting married. He’s a nice guy but she’s never seen his penis, and I worry about that. What if he’s not a grower? I ask, circling around to look at David in profile. What if you see it and think, yikes, but okay, it will get better with some action, and then it doesn’t?
Amy peruses the guidebook. Michelangelo barely slept or ate while he was working on this, she says. He worked in an open courtyard, so when it rained he just worked soaked.
The other statues are good, but I generally don’t care about statues. I don’t really care about paintings. I care about coffee, so we get some and drink it in Piazza San Marco. We make fun of the tourists posing endlessly for pictures in the square even though yesterday we spent an hour in the Rose Garden doing the same thing, pinching our fingers cutely around the brims of floppy hats and the skirts of flowy dresses.
I’m being selfish, I know. I’m trying to steal romance opportunities away from her fiancé. Locks on the bridge in Paris, gondola rides in Venice, pistachio gelato in memoriam of this side of our lives, to revisit when she’s bored, showing him the movies we used to watch in her mom’s basement, and I’m alone, planless, or out playing Skee-Ball with my sometimes boyfriends. Despite my efforts, when he calls, she picks up. She paid extra for the phone plan to make sure she could.
Today, Amy wants to see churches. Coffins beneath pews, stuffed with dead geniuses, and above them, their frescoes. I find her sitting down, looking up, mouth open. She’s more spiritual than religious, but she’s fascinated by the connection between architecture and the divine. What ever happened to buttresses? she asks. She complains about the mundanity of strip mall evangelism. Can a former PetSmart hold the grace of God? Her fiancé is more religious than spiritual. He likes ritual, tradition—he’s Catholic—it makes him feel safe, probably. He doesn’t have any stories of salvation, or revelation.
What if he wants to pray before sex? I ask.
He won’t.
You don’t know that.
There are other ways to know people besides fucking them, she says. That feels pointed. That stings a little. But: wine with lunch. Amy thinks it’s funny when I pretend to know about wine. I’ve been working in a fancy restaurant for a while and haven’t learned a thing except how to tell if it ages well. It’s all in the legs, I say, sticking one of mine in the air and flexing my foot. Get a load of those gams, Amy says, swirling her glass. She orders spaghetti, like always.
The recurring fight is that Amy doesn’t think I try hard enough to like him. Why does it matter? I ask, mostly because I know she’ll reply with an exasperated, Nini, you’re so important to me. In truth, I’m bored by him. How ready he is to raise dogs and babies and a pole barn in the backyard. During a birthday party game, he said if the birthday girl were in a jail cell, Nini’s the reason why. Maybe he was right, but I didn’t like the implication. All we did was swim in that fountain.
I have to stay on guard. I have to be on Amy’s side, always. Sometimes she doesn’t know what’s good for her.
In the market, a man selling leather-bound notebooks touches the small of her back. I remove his hand with my own and steer her away. Italian men adore Amy. She has long legs and dyed-red hair and wears heeled boots no matter how far we walk. The man calls after her, Bella! You look like America!
Back at the hostel, Amy groans into the bunk we’re sharing, digging her palms into her sore calves. Amy adores naps. A quick one before dinner, she says, but here’s her fiancé calling. I could throw her phone out the window. His voice muffles through the receiver like a Muppet. Laugh laugh laugh, it was good, more museums, check the one beneath the microwave. Miss you too, love love love.
What if he never wants to be on top? I ask when she hangs up. What if he can only come with your face in a pillow?
Give me a break, she says.
Don’t you worry about it?
I don’t. Why do you?
She turns away from me on the bed, tucks her hands between face and pillow, and says, Imagine being the first person in history to see a rock and think, I should make this look like a guy’s butt.
I picture an aproned Michelangelo soggy with rain, manic with hunger, hard at work on his slab of marble. What if he’d slept? What would David look like if he’d been made on nine hours and a grilled cheese? Maybe a penis more proportional to his hands. But I don’t think the sculpture would’ve been better. I don’t think stability is the path to the divine. There’s some necessary madness in knowing a stone so intimately you can bring it to life. The vein on David’s right hand is the sexiest thing about him. Pulsing, even in its stillness.
Amy falls asleep but I’m feeling impulsive and restless. I want to text her fiancé something rude. I want to take a train to Berlin and not tell her until I’m gone. I want to go out onto the cobbled night streets alone and turn off my phone, but it’s full daylight. I go outside anyway and try to feel dangerous. Sigaretta? I ask. A man in the square gives me one, but I don’t like smoking so I walk away with it, drop it in a violinist’s open case. Idiots with backpacks in front of the Palazzo Vecchio think the replicated statue of David is the real one.
Without Amy to flirt with, the street vendors settle for me, offering discounts, asking me to dinner, asking for a kiss. Amy had wanted to go to Colorado, where her family lives, where we spent a couple of spring breaks during college, but I suggested Europe instead. What if it’s our last chance to do something new together? I asked. She said, I’m getting married, not dying. But I’m selfish, I know I’m selfish. Here is this grave new world without her, and then what? Am I next?
I walk in slow circles around the streets of Florence. Soon Amy will wake up and wonder where I am. I want her to think the worst and miss me and leave me a voicemail saying, Nini, you’re so important to me. I don’t know how to pass the time without her. I could pickpocket a tourist. I could feed the stupid pigeons.
When one of the vendors calls to me again—Bella, I have something perfect for you!—I go to him, right to his mouth. But he leans away from my kiss. He stares at me, surprised, then turns to the other vendors and laughs. They all laugh. Michelangelo laughs in his grave. David’s shrimpy penis twitches with laughter. I should run away, or die from embarrassment. Still, I don’t go too far from where I started, in case she needs me to come back.
Chloe Alberta (@chloealberta) is a writer from Michigan, currently living in New Zealand. She earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing is published in Joyland, The Masters Review, Wigleaf, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. Read more at www.chloealberta.com.