Page 58 of In the Garden of Monsters

Dalí seemed unperturbed. He pulled his wife down onto the chair next to him. “They are only doing their jobs, my Gala. Come. Come, eat.”

“It is very strange how they act,” Lillian agreed. “That was one of the first things I noticed when I arrived.”

I knew Lillian was trying to butter up Gala by siding with her, but tacking on the part about her arrival only set Gala further on edge.

“You shouldn’t even be here,” she screamed at her. “We never invited you.” She jumped out of her chair and stepped away from the table. “All of this, it’s all wrong. Every last bit of it. You need to go. I want you to leave on the first train tomorrow. Out of our sight.”

Lillian’s eyes grew wide and her mouth dropped open in shock. None of us could believe what we were hearing.

“If she goes, I’m going with her,” I said, putting my napkin down.

Dalí gave a great cry and stood up from the table, his chair knocking over behind him. “No, no, no, my Galarina. You cannot do this. No, no, no, no!”

While the others watched him stagger away from us toward Proserpina’s bench at the end of the hippodrome, I was distracted by a grinding sound that emanated from somewhere behind me. I turned to look. The Fury’s stony webbed wings were not at her side, but raised, as if in alarm. Her eyes briefly flashed green. Orpheus dashed out from under my table and ran toward the statue, hissing at it. Horrified, I tried to get Lillian’s attention, but Dalí’s cries had reached a crescendo, filling the garden, and all eyes were upon him. I turned back to the Fury and she was as she always had been, wings lowered, immovable, her stone face passive. Orpheus was walking toward me, tail high in the air.

When Dalí reached the bench, he had collapsed beside Proserpina’s stone base. While we could no longer see his face, he continued his demonstrative sobs and moans.

“Go to him, Gala,” Jack said softly. “He needs you.”

Gala looked stricken, as if torn on what she should do—stand her ground or go to him. Finally, after several more gulping sobs from the artist, she caved and went to comfort her husband, kneeling on the ground beside him, her arm over his shoulder.

I turned back to the Fury. She was as before, cold stone. Orpheus was back under my chair, his tail thumping against my ankle. I wanted to believe I had imagined the whole thing, but I was sure I had not.

“What just happened?” Lillian asked, her voice soft so it wouldn’t carry to the couple.

“You mean the Fury?” I ventured, hoping she might have seen it too.

She gave me a quizzical look. “No, with Gala. Why did she say all that?”

“She has wild mood swings,” Jack said. “She can be angry and irrational some days.”

I was about to say something about Dalí’s more demonstrative mood swing when it hit me. “She’s going to be even madder when she finds out that there is no train tomorrow.”

“I was thinking that,” Lillian said. “It only comes once a week.”

“Does he do this often?” I asked, looking toward the Dalís.

“Sometimes,” Jack said. He reached across the table for a roll and began to butter it. “He has strange, crippling anxiety attacks. I’ve only seen it a few times. Once a grasshopper landed on his easel and I thought he might literally die of fright. Only Gala can calm him when he gets this way.”

Paolo and Jack tucked into their food, but I didn’t feel much like eating, and Lillian didn’t either. We watched Gala dry Dalí’s tears with a handkerchief. Then she pulled him up off the ground.

When they returned, neither of them acknowledged what had just happened. Dalí sat down next to me and raised his glass of wine. “My little goddess, I will paint you in the mouth of the whale this afternoon!”

I wanted to groan, but given all that had happened, I plastered on a smile. Now I knew why Jack had a duffel bag full of towels. At least I’d be nowhere near the Fury.

Ignazio never showed for lunch, and while I didn’t end up eating, it seemed as though the meal was blissfully pomegranate seed free. I had a flutter of hope that perhaps it all had been some weird set of circumstances that really amounted to nothing. A hope that I might just end the week as a simple artist’s model and then go home, back to our flat in Rome, and to my life, which I mostly liked, as a struggling artist.

The whale was barely a stone’s throw from the Pegasus statue, separated only by a thin bubbling brook. I stared at the giant, open-mouthed whale head that jutted up out of the earth next to the stream, as though it was emerging from the sea. The mouth was open stone, hollowed out and lined with thick heavy moss and full of fallen leaves. Jagged teeth framed the top jaw, and a circular eye gazed ever upward. The little stream flowed around the stone head. It wasn’t a large body of water, and I could probably reach over it and scramble into the mouth of the whale on my own, but with the moss, it was very possible I could slip and fall into the stream.

Jack noticed my consternation. “Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

“I’m supposed to sit there?” I asked, pointing at the gaping maw.

Gala made a sound of exasperation. “What were you hired for, Julia?”

“It was merely a question, Gala,” I said, trying to keep my tone measured. While she had seemingly acquiesced to her husband’s demand that I remain in Bomarzo, I was wary that she might once again change her mind.

Jack stepped forward, offering his hand. “I can carry you over.”

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