Good on Paper by Rachel Cantor Page B

structure I’d proposed in my paper. I ought to have been flattered, but instead I found it odd—troubling, even.
    At this point in the book, Dante, smitten, stares at the now-married Beatrice in church. Another lady, standing between them, believes that Dante stares at her. What an opportunity! He decides to use this second lady as a “screen love,” to deflect attention from Beatrice. For years— years !—he pretends to love this blameless girl; people talk, he writes her poems, a brilliant stratagem! Then she leaves town. What’s a poet to do? Love, disguised as a grubby pilgrim, suggests another who might serve as a substitute “defense.” But when gossip about this new lady reaches Beatrice, Beatrice snubs him.
    Dante is devastated—poor Dante! He retires to lament and is again visited by Love, who this time suggests that Dante address Beatrice directly—through the mediation of poetry. Art will thenceforth be his only “screen.”
    Critics remind us that screen loves were a convention of the time. Some question the innocence of these affairs, but no one —no one !—asks if Dante’s screen loves (or his wife) are ill-used as a result. No one asks if he was right to make one lady the object of gossip to save the reputation of another.
    In what follows, Romei, to his credit, makes explicit the cruelty and deceit glossed over by Dante. The narrator’s courtship depends on an ever-escalating series of deceptions, practiced with increasingly less concern for consequences. The narrator invites himself to parties where Esther is likely to appear, polyglot affairs evoked through cascades of jumbled language: The Wasteland meets La Dolce Vita . Esther drifts toward Romei, a bit high, highball in hand. He grabs the attention of the crowd, tells raucous stories of an invented past—aristocratic loves, artistic coups, meetings with remarkable men—discovers a garrulousness, a facility for fakery, he hadn’t known he’d had. Esther affects indifference but neglects to introduce him to her husband.
    His first poem in this section concerns one of these “performances.” An English sonnet, inverted so the all-important couplet, the rima bacciata (the “kissing rhyme”), appears on top, where all couplets secretly feel they belong. Three quatrains follow, subordinate now, a Babel-ing Greek chorus.
    I scanned my memory of Romei’s books and concluded that the sonnet was neither an old poem nor a patchwork of old poems. It wasa pastiche, a Romei poem playing at being a Romei poem, a parody of the work Stockholm called the “strangulate cry of a remaindered generation.”
    Romei, enchanted by his new life, realizes he’s been in hiding, a prisoner still of his grain silo. He liberates clothes from the closets of drunken friends, takes any opportunity to practice his new persona. He watches Esther read and write in the park. Sometimes—a limber man, apparently—he watches her from a tree. Sometimes he comes upon her “by chance,” takes her to the Catacombs, the church of skulls, places where she trembles and must touch his sleeve. Over cappuccino, using half sentences, broken words, she confides a certain unhappiness: her husband is kind but … One doesn’t … He can’t, which is to say he won’t … not really. Her gabbling is captured in an Italian sonnet replete, of course, with weak feminine rhymes.
    One day, in front of Masaccio’s Expulsion , in a scene brimming with elevated language, elegant artifice, Romei kisses the back of Esther’s neck. She doesn’t stop him—in fact, she kisses him back. The scene’s artificiality, its nonliterality, is made plain by the fact that the painting in question, a fresco depicting the ejection of Adam and Eve from Eden, is not (in “real life”) in Rome, but attached—firmly, we hope—to the walls of a Florentine chapel.
    Esther seeks him out. She waits in Piazza Santa Maria, umbrella in hand, as if they had a date, she calls asking about Italian