Catherine de' Medici

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

Dear Diary:

Last week, during our first phone call in over twenty years, she said that she preferred Catherine to Cathy. I’ll remember that. I didn’t feel reprimanded. More like she was just stating a new comfort with her adulting life.

In college, Cathy was her breezy, flirty, playful name. Now it’s Catherine. Catherine the Great. Catherine Deneuve. Catherine de' Medici.

Her other parts of her personal history—all that I really needed to know, wanted to know—was that her divorce has finalized and, yes, she thought it would be nice to get together. We agreed to meet at the Art Institute. In Chicago, hands down it’s my favorite place to be.

For months now my teen daughter has been hinting—her hints are delivered on ICBM rockets—that I should start going out, dating, hooking up, whatever the kids say nowadays. Three years after her mom’s death, I still wear a wedding band. So far, I have been brushing off her suggestion, joking that the only dating that I needed was carbon dating.

Catherine and I agreed to meet at the Impressionist exhibit at the top of the grand staircase. I‘m here. On time. Actually, early so I had time to comb my hair in the men’s room. She is twenty minutes late so I text to confirm our meeting place.

When we made plans, I teased that I hoped I still made a good impression. Maybe that was too much, too suggestive.

In college, we were never actually an item. We were here-and-there friends who met up, seemingly by accident, for a few lunches between classes. If we had any chemistry, it was more American Gothic than Rowers’ Lunch.

Apprehensive that I am in the wrong section of the museum, I’m indifferent to the 300,000 works of contemporary art, Medieval armor, ceramics, Chinese bronzes, Native-American artifacts, dollhouses, textiles, Rodins and Monets, African works, Pre-Columbian sculptures, Roman mosaics, pop art.

Twenty more minutes pass. The Art Institute, as I am discovering, doubles as a place for the lost and the lonely.

When my wife and I hung out in museums, I never learned to hug myself. I didn’t need to. The art kept my distracted from myself. Most of all, my wife guided me, lead me, held me.

Since then, as a widower, a solo traveler, I’m teaching myself not to depend on other people for my happiness. People come and go like tour guides. Alone is like viewing a cubist painting from the inside out. Alone is the new frame for who I am, who I am becoming.

I idle the time looking at art by assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. In one of his pieces, a solitary, caged paper parrot perches on a stick looking like a taxidermied pet riveted to a pedestal and perpetually transfixed by an unattainable ring. Cornell practiced “the beauty of the commonplace” but nothing today feels common. A sheen on my reddened cheeks sends me to the men’s room, again, to splash water on my face.

Waiting, I sit on a marble bench, my hands gripping the edge, my back hunched over. My head is full of Styrofoam like the kind used to ship and safeguard artwork. Half of me wants her to appear; the other half of me is disappearing into my insecurities. A diptych in anxiety. The underpaint of my life.

Another twenty minutes race by.

No Catherine. No Cathy.

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