The Sonnet Lover by Carol Goodman Read Free Book Online

the sonnets of Shakespeare. The whole Dark Lady–slash–beloved boy–slash–famous poet triangle. It’s your boy’s idea.” Balthasar looks over his shoulder toward Robin Weiss. My boy ?
    “Robin’s my student,” I say, instantly hating how prim I sound. A Miss Jean Brodie in the making. “Do you mean the film we just saw? The Lemon House ?”
    Leo Balthasar laughs his full-bodied laugh again, which seems to require leaning his head far enough back to draw in air from the upper reaches of the ceiling. “What we saw tonight was a sweet student effort, but what I’m interested in is a script Robin Weiss sent me two weeks ago. I don’t usually pay attention to student work, but this project has potential—and backing. Cyril Graham has interested some of his rich friends in making the film at La Civetta. Picture Shakespeare in Love, only steamier. And set in Italy, of course.”
    “Italy? There’s no proof Shakespeare ever went to Italy.”
    “There’s no proof he didn’t, eh?” he asks, winking at me. “According to Robin, there’s a legend at La Civetta about a woman poet who lived there in the sixteenth century who some people believe was Shakespeare’s Dark Lady.”
    “He must mean Ginevra de Laura,” I say, finishing my Greek God-dess in an unwisely large swallow and looking around for an exit strategy. In a minute he’ll be telling me that Shakespeare didn’t write the sonnets. “I’ve heard of her. She was the mistress of Lorenzo Barbagianni, the villa’s owner, and said to be a great poet, only all her poems were lost, so that’s really just speculation. I’ve never heard this rumor about her being the Dark Lady, though.”
    “But, see, at least you know who she was,” Balthasar says, waving his glass in the air. “That’s why we want to get you aboard as a writer on the script. With your credentials—”
    “There are plenty of academics with better,” I tell him.
    “But none,” he says, clicking his half-full champagne glass against my empty one, “who also writes sonnets. You see, we want the poet’s sensibility, not one of these dry-as-dust academics’. Of course, the money will be a little better than what your average academic publisher pays.” He leans in even closer so that I can smell the sweet orange liqueur on his breath and mentions a figure that’s roughly ten times larger than the advance I’d gotten from the university press that’s publishing my book on the Renaissance sonnet.
    “And that’s just for six weeks’ work this summer,” he says rocking back on his heels. “All expenses paid, of course, and first-class airfare.”
    “Airfare?”
    “To Italy. I’m doing the preliminary location scout in July and then, if everything checks out and we’ve got a script, we’d start shooting at La Civetta in August.”
    It’s the second time today I’ve been invited to La Civetta, and although I have no intention of accepting this offer either, I suddenly have the uneasy feeling that, like a hero in a fairy tale enduring some test of will, I will find the third time the offer is made the hardest to resist.
    “Thank you, but no thank you,” I say, putting my empty glass on a table and holding my hand out to shake his. He takes my hand, but instead of delivering the firm shake he’d greeted me with, he pulls me in closer to him.
    “You’ve got my card,” he says. He makes it sound almost like a threat. Like I’d taken something that belonged to him. “We’ll be in touch.” Then he lets me go and turns away. I see him go out the door to the west side of the balcony, which—once breached by Mara—has now filled with cigarette smokers. I turn back to look for Robin. The nucleus of white-suited men has acquired an outer ring of film students in their uniform of black jeans and black T-shirts. Robin, at the center of this circle, is beginning to look a little wilted. If the movie people around him are anything like Leo Balthasar, I’m surprised