Vitruvian Man

by Kent Shell

Published in Grist, A Journal of The Literary Arts

Issue 18, 2025

On the day he left New York he booked an Uber from the street and waited there with his suitcase, smoking a cigarette, the half-empty pack in his hand. He knew she was watching him from their apartment window, twelve floors from the street. They had lived there thirteen years, in one of those crappy Midtown high-rises that looked good in the realtor’s photos but once you were inside it was a different story. When he had gone to take his suitcase from the top shelf, the folding closet door had popped out of its track yet again. It was the kind of place the rental agency he worked for repped. After putting some clothes in it he had paused for a second before stepping into the carpeted hallway. “Go ahead, leave,” she had said. He had pulled the front door closed behind him before she could say anything else.

Manhattan bloomed with the smell of garbage in August. It was rush hour, and everybody wanted to go home. There were the usual ranks of cars at a standstill in front of the building, honking. Impulsively he balled up the cigarette pack and tossed it into the street, and then, rather than regretting having thrown away his cigarettes, he decided to quit. He’d been wanting to do it for a long time. Eventually his Uber arrived. On the plane he stayed awake all night, and when the plane landed it was dawn.

In Rome he was stunned by the density of existence. Rome wasn’t just something you saw in the movies. It was solid—a single syllable with the dependability of centuries. He found a room at a hotel near the Forum, and it was to that columned precinct he returned at the end of each day. He walked all day, every day. Twenty thousand steps, twenty-two thousand steps, seventeen thousand steps: his iPhone counted as he made his way across the Ponte Fabricio, down the Via Appia Antica, along the narrow cobbled streets of Trastevere. All over the city he walked where ancient Romans had walked, stood where they had stood. He took tours and waited in lines at museums. He was pushed through the galleries of the Vatican by a sea of faceless tourists; he strolled in the shade of the tall cedars of Lebanon that lined the paths of the Borghese Gardens. He was fifty-five years old and Rome was a marker—a boundary delineating past and future.

He’d been overseas just once before—France, in college, with a girlfriend, on the verge of a breakup—everyone they knew was going abroad that summer, so they converted their cash to traveler’s checks at the American Express office and set off for the city of love. In Paris they’d broken up for good, and he’d walked with his backpack to the Gare de Lyon and purchased a student rail pass. For seven days he’d hurtled across the countryside in speeding trains from town to town, sleeping in hostels, looking out the window at the landscape rushing past. Those are French clouds, he had thought to himself. Those are French cows. Those are French power lines, those are French farmers thinking about their French crops, and there is a French dog running, and there is a French woman on a French bicycle wearing a French dress, wet from the French rain.

The sun in Rome was a Roman sun, blazing across the sky. His room was like a monk’s quarters into which not a single expression of the unnecessary intruded; the only embellishment was an ornate plaster cornice at the top of two walls. The narrow, high bed was like a bed for a pilgrim. You had to move the desk chair from its position to pass to the bathroom. On top of the desk he had shifted a lamp and placed his suitcase, split open like a book, revealing next to nothing—the change or two of clothes he had packed and a guidebook picked up at the airport. In the bottom of a window that didn’t open, facing the back wall of another building, an overburdened air conditioner whined in the heat.

After two weeks he could find his way back to the hotel from anywhere in the city without a map. He took sightseeing buses every day, getting off at random stops and walking without direction. If he had an extra life with which to do whatever he wanted, he decided, it would be this. He would go wherever he felt like going, staying at old hotels and sleeping in spare, high-ceilinged rooms. He would spend his days immersed in cities. The crowds, the silent ruins, the stone everywhere shaped by the hands of dead carvers. The roar in his ears and the relentless sun. The flood of language and the pulsing of other lives. At the end of each day the sun turned red, and the granite and marble structures of Rome continued to radiate the heat they’d stored since morning.

Late in the afternoon he bought prosciutto and a loaf of bread in a small piazza and sat at the edge of the fountain in the shadow of a church, throwing crumbs to the pigeons and drinking Italian beer until the plaza was empty. As dusk fell, dark swarms of bats began to launch themselves from hidden roosts. At 9 p.m. the sky finally grew dark, and he strolled slowly through the narrow streets, stopping at a bar for a drink, stopping for an espresso, stopping for a gelato. When the hotel appeared before him, its illuminated face was marked here and there by small lizards stuck fast like burglars caught mid-escape. Inside, the lobby was carpeted and the air was hushed. “Buonasera,” the room clerk called.

He knew his room would be stifling, so he took the elevator to the rooftop bar for a nightcap. Horizontal clouds were lit by the moon. An old bartender stood behind the bar, half in shadow. His hair was wiry and gray, and his lined face bore a grave expression. He wore a dark vest with gold trim over a white shirt with the sleeves folded tightly to just below his elbows. The bartender seemed like he had been imported from an old black-and-white movie, a movie about love and loss and alienation in exotic locales, in the role of the silent but loyal manservant, stalwart witness to the hero’s journey. The bartender gave a small bow.

Feeling suddenly like he wanted to be in the movie himself, he asked the bartender for an amaro instead of the vodka tonic he ordinarily would have. The bartender sighed and said, “Ci sono molti amari, signore,” and gestured wearily toward a row of brown bottles with colorful labels. After a long pause the bartender shrugged, and selected a bottle and poured. “Gusto. Prego.”

He took the drink to a small table set back among potted plants, where he sipped the amaro and looked out over a stone parapet at the marble city. Automobile headlights traced the streets below, accompanied by the faint, pesky bleating of European car horns. A party of noisy Germans appeared from the direction of the elevator, singing jolly German drinking songs and taking over several tables, calling out drink orders to the bartender. They were part of the large tour group currently occupying much of the hotel; he saw them at the breakfast buffet every morning. He pulled back a little further into the plants.

“Hallo, it’s the American!” Several of them raised their glasses toward him. “Health!”

He raised his glass back and said “Prost,” which sent them into gales of laughter.

They shouted over one another, calling out greetings to him that he couldn’t understand. They shouted again, this time to the bartender, and banged on the table tops: “Bring him whiskey! Bring him whiskey!” and the bartender obliged. “Komm, komm!” they cried, waving him to join them.

Two hours later he was still on the roof, drinking with the Germans. The plump-bottomed frau he’d noticed earlier that week having breakfast with her husband was perched on his knee. Her cigarette was in his mouth, and his arms were around the soft roll of her waist. She tugged his ear playfully, whispering something in German while her husband and their friends encouraged them, laughing. She laughed loudly, spilling her martini on his lap, and reached down between his legs with a napkin. She took the cigarette from his lips and cupped his face in hands thick with rings. She placed her red lips on his and slid her tongue into his mouth.

When the bar closed he went with the couple back to their room, where the husband had a bottle. Their room was more deluxe than his, larger, with nicer furniture and a silent air conditioner. The woman stepped out of her skirt and folded it neatly, and then she did the same with her blouse and her slip, and stood in panties and bra. The husband handed drinks around and said, “You can see my wife is quite fond of you.” When he appeared to hesitate, the husband said, “We leave for Hamburg tomorrow,” and sat in the upholstered chair, leaving only the bed. “Please, I insist. We won’t meet again. It will be our pleasure.” The husband raised his glass and he did likewise, and the woman raised hers too and they all drank. 

He woke later on the bed. His clothes were on the floor. The woman was next to him, nude and snoring. Her husband was lying back in the chair like he had been shot, his shirt untucked and his flaccid penis curled in his open zipper like a garden slug. He dressed silently and left. He rode the small elevator two flights down and an automated female voice announced his floor: Terzo Piano. He slid the clanking gate open and got out.

In his room he sat on the high, narrow bed. The air conditioning hadn’t put a dent in the heat, even though he’d left it on all day against hotel rules. He took a cold shower and brushed his teeth twice and lay on top of the bed, with his arms and legs outstretched so nothing touched, like Da Vinci’s man in a circle, spinning. He looked up at the light on the ceiling for a while, and before he could get up to turn it off, he fell asleep.

Hours later he woke again. The overhead fixture blazed. He didn’t know where he was, so he tried thinking back to the last day he could remember.

The day he remembered was recent, a day like many that had preceded it—he had woken up on the sofa again—except it was the day he woke up knowing his marriage was over. It wasn’t any one thing that made him know it. It wasn’t any thing, at all. Before dressing for work he’d showered as usual, hoping the feeling would wash off. It didn’t. He sat heavily on the bed as he put on his shoes to see if she would notice. When he left for work she was still asleep.

He hadn’t gone to work that day, though, or the day after. Instead he called in sick and went to a coffee shop. He plugged his laptop into a wall receptacle and drank coffee all day and surfed the web, reading the news and looking for things to distract himself. He found that he could let go and the world wouldn’t end. He clicked on an Expedia ad and saw a sale. He emailed the rental agency saying he quit, and transferred half the money from their joint account. The next day he was gone. Rome. It was that simple.

The hotel room’s brightly lit walls locked into place with the corniced ceiling. He remembered the drinking from the night before, and the German couple. He got up and put his hand in front of the air conditioner, and looked at his reflection in the black window. He sat back down on the edge of the bed. In the yellow light his skin looked sallow. It was four in the morning—still 11 p.m. yesterday, New York time.

Whenever he had insomnia he thought back to the different women he had slept with in his life. He remembered those he had loved and those he hadn’t; who had hurt him and who hadn’t; who he had hurt. Some nights the number of women he had known seemed plentiful; other nights it seemed like too few, like he had been too timid in life. And then there was the German woman lying naked upstairs. In his narrow pilgrim’s bed in Rome he felt a wave of loneliness.

He pushed the pillows up against the headboard and laced his fingers behind his head. It had been impulsive, leaving everything behind the way he had. It had been reckless going to the German couple’s room. He could have been robbed, or worse. But instead all that had happened was what he wanted.

He was living his life. He slowed his breath and let the thought comfort him. He wondered how long he could afford to stay in Rome before he had to return to New York. Maybe he would count his money in the morning, take stock and make a plan, or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe he would go to another country, another city—Vienna, Istanbul. Eventually he would have to go back, find another job. He wasn’t worried. Rental agents were always jumping agencies. This would be a good time for a cigarette, if he still smoked. He could think in Rome. He knew he had to make some decisions, but he didn’t have to decide anything yet. One thing was certain—anything was possible. The Germans had been proof of that. The fact that he was here, in this hotel room in Rome, was proof of that. He got up and turned off the overhead light, and closed his eyes to sleep. He wouldn’t remember his dreams, and he had no wife there to tell him that he talked in his sleep.

He slept through breakfast and woke up with a hangover. He would be late for the tour. He dressed and took the stairs down, leaving through the lobby without making eye contact.

#

The meeting point was a sea of sun hats and small colored flags held aloft by tour guides. The confirmation email had said to look for a blue triangular flag, and finally seeing it in the distance, he began to make his way there. It was already getting hot.

From up close the Colosseum was staggering—a quarter million tons of stone abiding across the centuries. The jagged, descending silhouette was familiar from a thousand postcards and National Geographics, but not like this. The sheer size of it—the stillness, the density, the coolness of its shade—conveyed an almost overwhelming sensuality. The ruin before him, the sun on his face, the noise of the milling crowd and the traffic, his hangover, his empty stomach, the memory of the night before, made him feel animal and impermanent.

The blue flag began to move, and he followed. The guide was in her mid-forties, blond but not flashy, attractive. She wore hiking shorts and shoes and a sleeveless cotton blouse with a khaki safari hat, and she had an appealing gap between her front teeth when she smiled. Her arms and shoulders were mahogany, her tanned face was scattered with freckles, and her eyes were blue. She told the group that during the school year she taught art to high schoolers, but her real life was here, in summer, leading these tours.

She was not so beautiful that he would look ridiculous cast opposite her in the black-and-white movie co-starring the bartender from the night before, and not so young that he couldn’t picture being with her in the extra life he imagined himself living. She had a lean, athletic gait as she took the steps at an unhurried pace, and he followed, asking questions in response to her narration. She directed her commentary more and more toward him, since he was interested. The group came along with bovine contentment, their interest flickering to life from time to time. By the time the tour ended near the Forum it was two o’clock. The group broke up quickly, everyone fleeing back to their hotels to avoid the hottest part of the day. The sun bore down like a fireball.

Pretending he wanted to practice his Italian, he asked her if she would have coffee with him, and to his surprise, she accepted. They walked in the midday heat from the Palatine Hill back to where the tour had begun, and found a café. She sat on a small metal café chair across from him. Her name was Monica.

“Like Monica Vitti, the actress,” he said.

She perspired unselfconsciously in the sun, wiping her neck with a bandana and casually pushing back the blonde hairs that strayed from under her hat. A waiter brought two espressos and a plate containing an assortment of biscotti. She ordered a bottle of acqua frizzante.

She waved the match out after lighting a cigarette. “My husband—Marco—Marco made me promise to quit, but when he’s away, I smoke.” She exhaled, blowing the smoke to the side, and smiled at him, revealing the space between her teeth. He remembered everything he loved about smoking, all of the rituals. The rustle of the cellophane wrapper. The small weight of the pack in a pocket, tapping the end of the cigarette on the table before lighting it, inhaling the first deep drag, the sour, addictive smell of the match’s flame. Matchbooks from restaurants. The heavy sideways exhale, carefully picking a bit of tobacco from a lover’s lips.

Marco was away two weeks out of every month. He was a junior engineer for an NGO that built dams in developing countries. His frequent absences had been romantic at first, she said, and he always brought her back a gift, some little token. Now, whenever he returned he always gave her the same thing: a 360-gram bar of Toblerone chocolate from the duty-free shop. She had teased him once about how predictable he had become, and after that he sometimes brought her white Toblerone instead.

“He flew yesterday to Sudan. What do you suppose it will be in two weeks—milk chocolate or white?”

They both laughed. He wondered if Marco had affairs, and then naturally, he wondered if she did, too. She seemed to read his mind. “He is a good man.” She pointed to the band of pale skin on his ring finger. “And you, while you are in Rome? What is your wife doing?”

He had taken off his ring and put it away in a drawer months ago, but he had continued sleeping on the sofa, hoping something would change. And then he left. “I ended it. It’s my fault. I know that. But that’s all over now.”

“It’s so easy in America—you just do whatever you like. Marry, divorce, whatever you like.”

“It doesn’t feel easy,” he said. “How do you say that in Italian?”

“Which? It’s so easy? Or it doesn’t feel easy?”

“Either,” he said, and laughed. “Both. I don’t know. Will you teach me Italian? Maybe I’ll never go back.”

She blew out smoke and smiled at him. Again the gap in her teeth. He felt like it was a game they were playing, and if he played without imagination, he would lose. She had put him on the defensive earlier; he couldn’t let that happen again.

The next day he decided to wait for her in the shade of a plane tree near the spot where the tour ended. She seemed pleased to see him.

“Posso comprare un aperitivo?” he said.

She smiled. “Il tuo Italiano è orribile.”

“Merde,” he said. He held up Google Translate to her on his phone.

“Merd-AH,” she corrected. “And Italians don’t drink aperitivi—aperitifs?—in the afternoon. But vino, si. A glass of white wine, I will have with you. I am thirsty. Grazie.”

“Prego. Prego, right?”

“Yes, prego.”

At some point that afternoon, as they drank wine, their hands briefly touched, as if by accident.

On the third day, it was hotter than the two days before. The air was dirtier. The café seemed grittier. The waiter leered knowingly when he saw them. His black pants looked baggier and dingier, and the white towel tucked into his belt was stained. Even the cobblestones under their café table were less auspicious, causing it to wobble. Only after their glasses were refilled a second time, and the sun struck the two blond liquid circles in their glasses in a way that caused them to shimmer, was the afternoon’s luster restored.

He asked her how she had come to be an art teacher. She told him she had wanted to be an artist, but her parents had insisted she learn something more practical. She was the first in her family to go to college. And they had been right, she said. In her final year of school she’d fallen under the sway of a young professor who believed you could live on wine and cafés and fine ideas. Here she smiled at the memory.

“I could have believed in those things too,” she said, “if the gas was magically kept on and the bills were paid. My teacher had an inheritance, not a large one, but enough so that she didn’t have to be practical.”

One evening her professor, a brilliant woman fifteen years older, had made a pass at her.

“I was so naive,” she said. “I wanted to please her. But I couldn’t—I couldn’t do the things she wanted. I hadn’t meant to lead her on. After that my heart was broken. She said hers was too, but she had no shortage of adoring, earnest students like me. I had only one teacher like her.

“Anyway, soon I met my husband,” she said. “He was handsome, an engineering student, as you know, reliable, smart—about real things—and I knew what my future would be.”

The sun crossed the sky. That day, and every day after that, they went back to his room. And every evening as the sun turned red and sank behind St. Peter’s dome, she took the train to her suburb and he returned to the rooftop bar, greeting the old bartender in phrasebook Italian, and ordered an amaro.

They were regulars at the café now, hardly warranting notice. The usual waiter was no longer there. Instead a portly man with greasy hair and unshaven jowls gave a perfunctory nod when they sat down, and eventually made his way to their table to take their order. When he returned he carelessly placed two glasses in front of them. He poured the wine sloppily, and left the bottle. Small islands of white wine pooled on the metal table top. He glanced at the spills and walked away.

#

She was sitting on the edge of the bed in his hotel room. He lay next to her. They hadn’t spoken for some minutes. If it were a movie they would have been without clothes moments before; she would be putting on earrings and getting dressed, checking herself in the mirror. He would be smoking a cigarette with his one arm folded against the pillow behind his head, watching her move. He would blow a smoke ring, satisfied.

In the movie they would have just had sex, but this time—the last time he would see her—they had not. She had taken off her blouse and then stopped. Beneath the bronze dagger of her throat her tan ended abruptly and her breasts were as pale as the moon.

“Marco returns Sunday evening,” she said.

He was angry with himself for feeling stricken, angrier with her for reminding him it would end. “With Toblerone, I hope,” he said, to cover his emotion.

“He is an engineer,” she said. “Every problem has a solution—he relies on consistency.” She looked away. “So this must be the last time. What will you do this weekend?”

“What about—this? Seeing you?”

“I cannot. He will be back. I must become myself again before he returns.”

“But tomorrow—or tonight then. Spend the night with me tonight.”

“You must have another tour guide to have drinks with,” she had said with a small smile. “There are so many of them. Your catacomb guide tomorrow, I’m sure she’ll be lovely. And maybe she won’t be married.”

“No. She’ll be ugly, or in love with her husband. Or a lesbian. None of which apply to you.”

“Stop it. Don’t turn ugly. This has been nice.”

“Nice?” he said. “Is that what it’s been?”

She picked up her blouse and began to put it on.

“I’m sorry. Stay. Stay with me. Don’t leave.”

She turned to look at him. “It’s late,” she said. “I think I will go.” She buttoned her blouse and stood to leave.

He thought of the night two weeks ago when he had lain in bed with his arms and legs radiating out from his body, his feet and his hands describing points on a circle, like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. He stretched his arms and legs out again now, grasping for something to hold on to.  He was falling through his life, spinning and spinning, the ground racing up at him. She slipped out the room and closed the door behind her.

#