The Unexpected Waltz Read Online Free PDF

life.
    My dreams were vaguer, and thus easier to ignore. I told people I planned to go into business, and fervently hoped that they didn’t ask me what kind. Because I really had no idea what I meant by that statement, only that I knew I wanted to earn my own money. It was a strange ambition to have in the seventies, especially for a girl. Everyone else was about drugs, sex, and music; money was just something that we simultaneously disdained and counted on our parents to provide. But Elyse would laugh and ask whether someday, when she was a starving artist and I was a captain of industry, would I open up my big brass gates and let her in? And then she would add, “Thank God one of us is practical.”
    That day in the Accademia in Florence, I let Elyse talk me out of the headsets, just as I’ve let her talk me in and out of things our whole lives, and they finally admitted about ten of us past the velvet rope. As we entered the gallery, we all turned in unison to face down the hall toward the sunny rotunda where David was standing. He looked exactly how I expected him to look, only better. For a second I almost got what she’d been talking about.
    “He glows,” I said to Elyse, and she smiled.
    “Yes,” she said. “Some of them do.”
    The place was packed and, special group pass or not, we were going to have to work our way down slowly to the rotunda. At least there was plenty to look at and sometime in the middle of that European summer I had started to notice that what’s on the way to the famous stuff is often more interesting than whatever it was you originally thought you should see. The hall was lined with a series of statues called The Prisoners, big, heavy blocks of marble with wild half-carved men. They were thick-limbed and powerful but trapped within the blocks, their bodies writhing as they struggled to break free.
    “I wonder if the sculptor meant to leave them that way,” Elyse said.
    “We’d know if we’d gotten the headsets.”
    She consulted her guidebook. “ ‘ The Prisoners ,’ ” she read. “‘Sometimes called The Slaves. Michelangelo started this series when he was fifty-nine and worked on them until he was seventy.’ ” She snapped the book shut. “Shit, that’s eleven years. They must be as finished as he wanted them to be.”
    The last slave on the left bothered me the most. His arms were flexed in an obvious struggle to pull his head free from the marble. “It’s like the statues are making themselves,” Elyse said solemnly. The night before, as we’d traveled from Rome to Florence, she’d read to me how Michelangelo claimed he didn’t create David —that he’d found him sleeping in the marble, completely intact. That he’d simply picked up his chisel and carved away everything that wasn’t David. It’s a sweet thought, I guess, that some perfect man is already out there waiting and all we have to do is find him and brush off the dust, but Elyse had snorted when she finished reading and said, “Bullshit.”
    I looked at the dates on the brochure they’d handed us along with our tickets. Michelangelo finished David when he was a young man himself, not even thirty, and The Prisoners had come much later in his life. It was odd, I thought, that in the beginning he was looking for pure beauty already formed and in the end he was willing to let the art fight its own way out of the stone. The headsets probably would have explained it all.
    The crowd loosened up a bit as we passed through the gallery and got closer to the rotunda where David was waiting. We walked around the base of the statue a few times and then sat down on a bench. I haven’t been to Italy since, but I doubt you can walk right up to David now. They probably have ropes and Plexiglas and high-tech security. But on that summer day, Elyse and I just sat there, shockingly close, looking up at the veins in his arms, the rippled muscles across his shoulders. You could see his ribs and the slight indentation