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  It all started at an estate sale in Altadena, where she and her husband went to look for art—and also, she said, she just liked looking at “neat old homes.” Some of the collector’s family members were at the sale, and they suggested that Veronica meet their relative and check out his wares, which he was looking to sell off. She herself rarely wore jewelry, she told me, besides her platinum wedding band, but after viewing some of the man’s collection, she happily negotiated to purchase the entire lot, paid in advance by the pound—and thus began her relationship, her conscription, with the collector. He knew she intended to sell the lot piece by piece on eBay, and that was fine with him. She didn’t know anything about costume jewelry, but she bought a few books so she could start researching it. Every week, then, he began delivering the goods—hundreds of pounds packed neatly in huge, moving-size cartons. They conducted these transactions at a public park, Veronica said, because he did not want his neighbors to see him moving so many boxes out of his house. (She also believed he kept a storage unit—there was simply too much to fit in any house.)

  Seriously, a park? Argentina? Drugs had to be involved somehow, but I couldn’t quite work it out. Smuggling cocaine inside a . . . Vintage/ Antique Brooch Pin teeny miniature goldtone mouse green gems one gone? A fence operation made no sense either, unless there was a black market for 99-cent costume jewelry. Anyway, I could not believe someone as open and seemingly wholesome as Veronica would involve herself in such a sketchy business, let alone tell a complete stranger the details. And then there was the problem of posting the thousands of pieces of evidence online, in plain public view. Plus Veronica sounded as bewildered by her story as I was. She felt like Scrooge McDuck, she said, shoveling through the mountains of jewelry in her house, trying to keep up with the supply, get it sorted, photographed, labeled, listed, sold, packed, and shipped. Archie was growing annoyed because he kept stepping on pins and rhinestones. Her father was worried about her. Veronica had enlisted her sisters to help, but there was still no end in sight. He just dropped 1800 pairs of cufflinks (matching sets with tie tacks) off Sunday, she wrote me in an e-mail. UNBELIEVABLE—I almost had a heart attack—no more room in my house ha ha It just keeps coming . . .

  No matter how fast she worked, how much she sold, she did not appear to be making a dent. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, she might even have been making things worse. Did I tell you he gave me 900 collectible old photo negatives of trains ships and trolleys? she wrote to me. And that he has over 200,000 collectible civil war time documents? We were supposed to have gotten to those by this summer but jewelry isn’t ending and he hasn’t said when it will! I ask him and he just exhales and laughs and says “OOHH LONG TIME MORE” . . . . . . . . .

  Of all the jewelry I purchased from Bergie—I still think of Veronica that way—the Vintage brass Made in India red and white mother of pearl bracelet remains my favorite, though I’ve never once worn it. It sits atop a stack of Powell and Pressburger DVDs on my coffee table, an objet d’art keeping me company while I watch the 1947 movie Black Narcissus for the fiftieth time. The bracelet matches the movie’s hyper-saturated reds and creamy, nuanced whites, colors the film’s designers obsessed over and won Oscars for. “Vermeer was the sort of painter I had in mind on Black Narcissus,” the cinematographer Jack Cardiff said; he modeled shots in the film after Vermeer and Van Gogh paintings, which he liked to copy by hand in his free time as a hobby. “It’s great art, and then it will be kitsch, and then it will be art again,” said the contemporary director Alan Parker about the film, in 2009.

  Based on Rumer Godden’s 1939 novel, Black Narcissus is “a story about the disorientation of European nuns in India,” according to Wikipedia, which is like calling Alice in Wonderland a book about a girl who takes a nap and has some dreams. The escalating hallucinogenic beauty of the remote, half-ruined Himalayan palace to which the British nuns are sent drives each of them slowly mad in her own way. One secretly mail-orders a bright red dress and lipstick from the city, another is haunted by relentless memories of an emerald necklace and earrings she gave up years ago, and the no-nonsense sister in charge of the garden finds herself surreptitiously planting beds of exotic flowers instead of the vegetables they all need to survive. There is no escape from beauty, the film seems to say. “There’s something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated!” exclaims one character.

  I watched Black Narcissus for the first time in 2011 and quickly discovered that it worked better than any drug or therapy to break my mind and body out of their ever-constricting room of pain. All of Powell and Pressburger’s films worked on me this way, alchemically, like great art, larger than the sum of its parts. I especially loved The Red Shoes, based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about a girl who gets her wish for magic shoes, then can’t take them off and dances herself to death. “Time rushes by, love rushes by, life rushes by,” says her Svengali, Boris Lermontov, in the film, “but the red shoes dance on.”

  I could so relate. In 2001, I was thirty-five years old with two published books and a tenured teaching job. I had never spent a single night in the hospital in my life. Then, overnight, it seemed, the warranty ran out. To quote Joy Williams’s short story “The Route”:

  A worn battery cable shorted out on the frame, setting fire to the engine at the same time an electrode from the spark plug fell into the combustion chamber, disintegrating the piston. The tires went flat the transmission fluid exploded the gas tank collapsed an armature snapped shooting the generator pulley through the hood the brake shoes melted the windshield cracked and the glove compartment flew open spilling my panties into the street.

  In The Red Shoes I found a literal, practical kind of sustenance, watching perfect bodies move perfectly, knowing how much pain each had endured, tortured over a period of years in the interest of producing a bit of beautiful ephemera. “It was 1947,” wrote the Red Shoes director Michael Powell in his autobiography. “A great war was over and a great danger to the whole world had been eliminated. The message of the film was Art. Nothing mattered but Art.” There wasn’t much else left to care about at my place either.

  When Jim, my ex-fiancé, and I met, I was still in high school, and he owned and ran a successful comedy club and experimental theater—a sort of circus I hoped to run away to—but his true love had always been art. He attended design school before I knew him, and one of his last jobs before his death was at a Lucite studio, where he designed housewares and jewelry. By that point I was so busy working toward my imagined future that I had little time for his increasingly bitter phone calls, which seemed to come from my past. Now my body was failing and Jim was dead, the doors to both past and future closed and locked, and I was missing most of the present.

  A few years before his death, Jim sent me a Lucite jewelry box he’d made for me—a simple, clear rectangular box with storage drawers, clean lines, nothing elaborate. Because I didn’t wear much jewelry and already owned many other items he had given me over the years, and because I didn’t know he was dying, I unthinkingly donated the box to a thrift store. It wasn’t until I realized I was collecting Bergie’s collection that I remembered the jewelry box and wished for it back, too late. Like everything else about Jim, the gift seemed prescient and miraculous—as if he had known someday I would need it.

  “Cherish anything that wakes you up, if even for an instant,” Joy Williams once wrote to me, a line which brought to mind a poem by Rumi: The door is round and open./Don’t go back to sleep. I still place bids on Bergbay310’s offerings from time to time, surprised with each new round of listings at which items I win, which I lose. Like horoscopes, they are always uncannily, perfectly relevant. The latest shipment from Pasadena included a Vintage/ Antique Pendant Charm Miniature mother of pearl clown. For some reason I was the only one who wanted it—nobody else even placed a bid. Inside the package Bergie had added a tiny folded Post-it note that read: To: The Home for Orphaned Clowns. Attn: Wendi.

  Like pain, like ar
t, the collection is infinite. It has woken me up; I won’t go back to sleep.

  JOHN H. CULVER

  The Final Day in Rome

  FROM The Gettysburg Review

  THE WAITING ROOM in the ER at Rome’s Policlinico was a vast rectangle with four banks of chairs set facing each other in a much smaller rectangle. One group of chairs was missing a front stabilizer, which meant that any time someone sat down or stood up, the rest of the chairs moved in unison. Those not seated milled about in quiet conversation or stood near the faded tan walls that were covered with a variety of posters providing health tips and warnings. Two big-screen television sets hung from opposing walls. Reruns of Starsky & Hutch and Quincy dubbed in Italian aired across the gulf of the wide room. The ceiling was a good fifty feet above us. You could play field hockey in this place if you removed the chairs. The tile floor was grooved from foot traffic.

  Ten hours earlier we had been on a tour bus seeing the sights. We had listened to the recorded dialogue in Spanish, French, English, and German announcing the various historic buildings we passed. The bus slowed at these but didn’t stop. Rome was easing into its hot summer period, and I imagined how stifling the city would be if the temperatures were fifteen degrees warmer and there was no breeze to stir the air. Now I was standing in the emergency room wondering if she would live or die.

  I alternated between scribbling notes on my small pad of paper and pacing the enormous room. I felt the need to record things, since my mind was not holding on to facts or the sequence of events that had brought me to a hospital in Rome at the end of what had been a glorious day. Occasionally I would glance at the TV screen to see a suspicious Jack Klugman in the autopsy room about to cut into a corpse. Before his scalpel touched flesh, he would say something that seemed to be of major importance, even dubbed in Italian. I never saw this show back home, but the Italian language made the scenes appear interesting. Starsky & Hutch was a chase-and-crash cop show, an insult in any language.

  Across from me, a petite woman with the complexion and bone structure of someone from the Balkans sat quietly with her Italian partner. There was no indication of what they were doing in the medical facility. Neither of them had visible wounds or bandages, nor was there any blood on their clothes. They never approached the desk where several attendants recorded business. The woman, who was so small and delicate it seemed I could hold her in my hand, would periodically get up and go to both the men’s and women’s bathrooms and emerge with thick skeins of toilet paper wrapped around her hands. She would then patiently unwrap and rewrap the paper. The man never said a word, but every thirty minutes or so he would walk outside for a smoke. Everyone seemed to light up—nurses, patients, family—which left the outside patio carpeted with cigarette butts.

  The ER was in Rome’s largest hospital, which was also a teaching hospital. Ambulances, dented and scraped from numerous encounters with other vehicles, wailed into the bays at regular intervals, their service increasing as afternoon wore into evening in response to rush-hour incidents. The hospital was built in the postwar years, and different wings had been appended at various times over the decades. White-clad staff came and went, the waiting room a central passage point to the other medical areas. The tiny woman unraveled her toilet paper. An ancient man with a cleaning cart mopped around the chairs and the surrounding areas by the walls with regularity, tingeing the air with a whiff of disinfectant. After he did the bathrooms, the woman retrieved the replenished supply of toilet paper. We veterans of the ER were amused by newcomers who entered the respective bathrooms and emerged with quizzical looks on their faces; it had taken me two hours to realize that only the bathroom reserved for the handicapped contained toilet paper, something they would deduce for themselves if they remained in the ER long enough. Every now and then the loudspeaker would broadcast a message or request in rapid-fire Italian that would have been incomprehensible in any language; every hospital in the world has the same garbled public address system.

  There was an orderly chaos to everything. No one was frantic. Doctors and nurses hurried by; some stopped briefly at the time clock to punch in or out; others opened doors and quickly disappeared behind them. Periodically the main ER portal opened, and someone would call out the name of a waiting family and ask them to come inside or beckon someone waiting for treatment.

  We had stopped at a small market after the tour ended to pick up a few things for the long flight home the next day. After a few minutes I realized she hadn’t moved. She stood by a fruit bin. One hand was placed on the left back side of her head. “Pain,” she said. I asked if it was like one of her migraines. “No, that’s over here,” and she tapped the back right side of her head. “This is different.” After a few moments the pain lessened, and we slowly walked the several blocks back to the hotel. She felt better after resting and then went to the bathroom to pack her toiletries. She came out, grabbed the left side of her head again, and muttered, “Oh God.” The pupils in both eyes vanished behind her eyelids, and she slowly folded into my arms. In the ambulance I showed one of the attendants her insurance card, but she just looked at me sternly and said, “No, free, free.”

  I finally heard the call of “Robertson,” not my name but hers. A man in a white coat saw me respond and quickly came to guide me to a small office behind the desk, as if I couldn’t navigate by myself. Three youngish women were there, two in white physician garb and the other in a nurse’s uniform. One had tears in her eyes. Between the three struggling to find the right words in English, I heard “brain aneurysm,” “wasn’t expected to make it through the night,” and “do you want to say goodbye?”

  Contemporary American pop tunes were playing in the ER. The staff went about their business, giving injections, inserting tubes, and cleaning the gray-brown seepage from the brain of the man in the bed next to hers. Many sets of eyes were on me as I looked at her. She was comatose, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths, a ventilator in her throat. I said goodbye for her daughters, two grandchildren, and myself. A beautiful woman, inside and out. I left through the ambulance doors, nodding to those taking a smoke break, and walked back to the hotel in utter disbelief at what had taken place over the four hours since she had collapsed in our hotel room.

  I returned at six the following morning. There was an odd but different collection of souls in the waiting room from the previous evening. Now the televisions were showing Italian news. I alternated between pacing and sitting for three hours before “Robertson” was called out again. She had died moments earlier. I repeated the goodbyes and collected myself as best I could, sitting at a small desk that had the computer with the charts of the several people in the ER visible on the screen. Nurses and physicians patted my shoulders. Their touches and anguished looks were heartfelt. My final act in the hospital was to sign the form for organ and cornea transplants. Another gathering of medical staff stood outside smoking when I left. We traded single arm waves in the air.

  The U.S. embassy was several miles from the hospital, a walk that went quickly. Italian soldiers were stationed in front of the embassy, sinister automatic weapons slung over their shoulders as if a terrorist movie scene were about to be filmed. I stated my business to one, went through the security check, and walked up the stairs to the second story, where a few of us gathered to report lost passports and other problems. I filled out the Report of Death in a Foreign Country form. The Italian man who assisted me anticipated my questions, probably from handling such reports too many times. I surrendered her passport and printed the contact information for her daughters. He asked if I wanted to use the embassy phone to call anyone back home, or if I needed additional funds to fly home. I didn’t. He gave me a sheet with the names of several funeral homes in Rome that had experience—and staff fluent in English—in handling the deaths of Americans.

  I arranged for her to be cremated and the ashes returned to me by air at an international airport, since the urn had to clear customs. I gave her clothes to a maid at th
e hotel who knew no more English than I did Italian, but her sorrowful look said she was aware of her morte.

  My seatmate on the plane and I chatted a bit. She was several years older than I and was returning to the West Coast, where her third husband would meet her. She had outlived two previous husbands, and this one wouldn’t travel with her, she reported with a laugh. She recommended the Nixon-Frost movie. We both put on our earpieces, and the movie began. We were flying west with the sun. I dreaded the return to earth.

  KRISTIN DOMBEK