a full stop, a single breath in and out, before I hear Stefano’s voice again—“Pronti… Via!”—and with a deep whoosh, they are off with unbelievable speed, using their legs now, too, as Stefano calls, “Tutti insieme! Uno! Due!” When they pass the club, I can see that they move as one, their bodies folding and stretching, folding and stretching, their muscles flexing and releasing in time.
“Uno! Due! Uno! Due!” Stefano’s voice echoes across the water as they approach the Ponte Vecchio. Within seconds, they are in the bridge’s shadow and then lost to the sunlight on the other side. Four months ago. I stood in front of an annunciation surrounded by people, all potential donors. It was a special tour I was chosen to lead because I’d studied these things and because one of the prospects spoke Italian, and I’d studied that, too, though as soon as he began speaking, my blank stare stopped him.
It was bright in the gallery, hard to make out the features on the faces around me, except for the well-heeled woman in the center, the one who’d asked, Aren’t you warm, honey? at the beginning of the tour, nodding at my cardigan. It was May, but I was always chilled then.
I was talking about perspective when the ground grew unstable and the faces blurred, as though someone were erasing them, one by one. And then I must have fallen, hard. Darkness. Nothing. Then a voice, light, a face that I knew. One of the guards helping me stand. He liked me. He wouldn’t tell, didn’t tell. But someone did. Someone had.
Because the next day, Claudia invited me to lunch. She was so unlike me, but we had history. She’d helped to hire me five years before, became my mentor and then my friend. I trusted her.
We went to a café by the museum. The sun was merciless, the traffic screaming around us, but Claudia was composed as always—seated cool and tall, her lips a decisive line as she looked over the menu. I hesitated. Ordered fruit and yogurt, a splurge.
“You haven’t been yourself, Hannah,” she pressed as soon as we were alone. Her eyes—sharp and blue, blue, blue—didn’t leave room for questions or doubts. “You’ve been making mistakes.”
I nodded. I’d always been good at my job. Not good like Claudia, who handled the major gifts. But I could smile and smile. I was competent and, most of the time, invisible. Unless I made a mistake. Which I had, more than once.
“These aren’t small errors.”
There were gaps in my days. The details consumed by the next meal, the exercise to negate it, whether I’d need to throw up and how and where. And then that voice, always that voice. If only you were. Each day I felt closer to it.
“They cost money.”
I’d grow dizzy scanning the screen, pull the wrong file, approve the wrong payment—
“That e-mail was a bomb.”
—forward the wrong message. And suddenly I wasn’t invisible at all.
“And there was a complaint about the event. One of the guests said you collapsed.”
I nodded dumbly. If we could just keep the conversation to work, to my many mistakes.
“I told them you were sick,” Claudia said. “Robert doesn’t know about it.” The director.
Our food arrived and I watched her eat. I didn’t defend myself. I thought it would end there. But she had arrived with knives.
“I think you have a problem,” she said, her eyes catching mine again. They looked right through me.
My yogurt sat cold in front of me. I couldn’t lift my spoon.
“Hannah?”
I took a breath, tried to assure her that I was all right. She didn’t realize, perhaps. But I couldn’t look her in the eye.
“I don’t think you understand,” Claudia said. “You have a real problem.”
Something stopped in me. The scene began to unravel. I was not a reliable source, I knew, and still.
“I’m fine,” I said quietly.
“You’re not fine, though. You’re starving. Look at you. Your eyelashes are falling out.”
This image would stay with me, maybe forever. It wasn’t true, but it stuck. This was the end of our friendship. I lost other friends, too, though not in quite the same way.
I meet Francesca at the end of my first week at the club.
I’ve been here every day, working out on an ergometer in the room below the Uffizi, and the movements of this new routine are slowly growing familiar: I position myself on the rowing machine’s small sliding seat and grasp the wooden handle. When I push with my legs, the seat slides back along the metal bar. I draw the handle all the way into my chest, the pressure of the cord it is attached to mimicking the resistance of water. Then I allow it to pull me back toward my feet, the seat sliding in, my body curling forward, my knees folding up to my chin. The spinning wheel exhales a breeze that cools me before I spring back again. I’ve lost so much muscle this past year, and the first few pulls are difficult—my arms and legs shaking and the seat shuddering beneath me—until I get into a rhythm. Curling forward, springing back. Slow and then faster. The movement is a relief; the expended energy counterbalances the ever-expanding list, my inventory. Still, I don’t look at myself in the wall of mirrors. I keep my eyes on the handle, on the wheel, on my feet.
Finding me battling the machine in these first days, Stefano has helped. I’ve spoken with only him and Manuele, not with any of the others, all men, no matter what time of day. In the morning, the old men’s banter echoes through the corridors with the clang, clang, clang of the weight machines. Midday the working men arrive to train while the city has its siesta. After school, it’s the boys—they flail about on the river as Stefano calls instructions from a speedboat, his reassuring smiles interspersed with grimaces as they teeter and totter and cut too close to the rubbish-filled banks of the Arno. The old men are still on the embankment at that hour, rounding out the day with criticisms as the silhouetted teens slide past in small wooden sculls.
All men and boys. And then I enter the locker room on Saturday and find Francesca bent over the sink naked, examining her eyes in the mirror. They are red-rimmed.
“How are you?” she tosses my way in flawless English. “I’m Francesca. You’re the American.”
“Hannah.” My voice sounds strange.
“Hannah. You a student?”
She must be flattering me. “No. Not studying. Just visiting.”
“How long are you here for?” She spreads cream under and then over her eyes, massaging it in.
“I’m not sure.”
“Huh. Well, watch out—time is different here.” She rubs her fingers together. “Slippery. It feels like it’s moving slower, but it’s a trick. You see my face?” She eyes me in the mirror as she pulls her skin taut. “You can always tell how I’m feeling. I can’t be too sad. You see it right away. It sticks, you know.”
“You mean—”
“Wrinkles. Age. Anyway, you’re too young to know. How old are you?”
“Twenty-nine.”
“Huh.” She returns to her reflection. “I thought you were younger.”
Her comment would irritate me, except that I’m more concerned with how I’m going to change. Normally I wouldn’t undress out in the open, would avoid the glances that might become questions. Even after I began eating again, the flesh kept falling away, and still my bones protrude. And then there are the bruises. They appear some mornings, without cause, blooming across my body like evidence. But there are no private spaces here, and so I change carefully, trading one piece of clothing for another. I look at Francesca. I’m not frail compared with her. I am an Amazon—much taller, with large hands, large feet. Some echo of the women of my past. Francesca is of