Joy For Beginners (14 page)

 

THE PASTA ARRIVED, four plump squares arranged across her plate, their edges pressed shut in tiny half-moons the size and shape of a child’s fingertip. Melted butter flecked with thin, dark shavings flowed languidly over their surfaces and formed a golden pool on the plate around the ravioli. The smell rose up, deep and luxurious, like perfume warmed between the breasts of a beautiful woman.

“
Tartufo
,” the waiter said to Sara’s inquiring expression. “Truffles.”

“Oh my,” the American woman at the next table said, and directed her attention to her husband.

Sara took a bite and the taste filled her mouth, dense and rich, like the very essence of longing, then the pasta gave way to warm, fresh ricotta cheese and the sweet earthiness of porcini mushrooms.

“Oh my,” said Sara softly to herself.

 

THE LIGHT WAS COMPLETELY gone from the sky by the time she exited the restaurant but the piazza was lit with the pink glow of the rose-colored streetlamps, the open space still full of people, even though the air was cool. She started back toward the hotel, fully ready to find the bed she had denied herself earlier, her body humming from the meal she had eaten.

As she left the piazza and headed toward the bridge, she heard someone behind her, an inquiring voice. She turned around, wondering if someone was lost. Although she knew she had neither the language nor the knowledge to assist anyone, it made her feel good to think that someone might believe she would be able to help.

A young man with a sweet, open face caught up to her and began speaking in Italian. She shook her head and answered in English that she didn’t understand, at which point he switched to a halting version of her own language. He was playing a game, he explained, from the University of Padova—maybe she had heard of it? The university, she said, yes, thinking perhaps this was a scavenger hunt. She remembered them from college, the excitement of the challenges, the joyful embarrassment of asking strangers for things or favors—like a grown-up Halloween, only riskier. She smiled at the memories.

Encouraged, the young man continued. There was a game; he got
punti
, for
baci
.

Baci
, she knew. Kisses. She started to pretend not to understand, until she remembered he was speaking mostly in her language and ignorance on her part wouldn’t work particularly well. Besides, his face was kind; she sensed none of the signals that usually set her shoulders stiff.

He could kiss her, he explained, on the mouth, or the feet, or on the breast or the armpit. (Was that really what he meant? she wondered. He must have the wrong word—but he was pointing, so it must be.) He seemed a bit embarrassed.

She looked at his face, heard people behind her and realized they were not alone. There was no danger, simply a very odd situation. For heaven’s sake, he was a boy and she was a mother.

“On the feet, I guess,” she said, half apology, half challenge. “My husband wouldn’t like the other options.”

He looked truly discouraged, like a child refused a second helping of ice cream. “No, really?”

“Perhaps you should find someone else?” But she said it kindly.

He nodded in lighthearted defeat, leaned in and kissed her cheek, first one, then the other, as if in leave-taking. Then he kissed her quickly, softly on the mouth. It surprised her, the gentleness.

“You won your point,” she noted.

“No,” he said, “it has to be more . . .” He shrugged his shoulders eloquently.

“Ah, well then,” she said, smiling despite herself, and continued on her way, the softness staying on her lips for the rest of her walk like the last taste of dessert. She wondered if she had any idea, really, of what had just happened.

 

SHE WOKE UP TO the muffled sounds of the first boats moving through the canal outside her window. She lay in bed, the day coming to her in small, liquid moments, sleep slipping into wakefulness like the slow merging of two streams. She reveled in the utter luxury of it, the way the morning lay on her body, golden and full of possibility. For years now, she had woken up like a runner leaping from the starting blocks—her body yanked into consciousness by a baby’s wail, the sound of the puppy vomiting, the growl of the trash truck two doors away, their own trash cans still waiting to be put out on the curb. Sleep tossed over her shoulder as she sprinted down the hall, leaving dreams in a scattered trail behind her.

But now she resisted the urge to get up and lay instead in the nest of warmth her body had collected around itself during the night. She let her mind wander, bit by bit, back into her body, the soft edges of dreams blurring her first waking thoughts, the boundaries between sleep and reality ambiguous. She remembered Tyler coming home from school, so excited to tell her about tide pools and the way life thrived in the place between ocean and land. I am in a tide pool, she thought, and smiled.

Then she remembered the present she had found hidden at the bottom of her suitcase, with a note that read:
Open on your first morning in Venice. I love you, Dan.

 

IT WAS A CAMERA.

The note inside said:
I thought it was time you had one of these in your hands again. Now, here’s a game for you. Go find: a smell, a touch, a taste, a sound.

There was a knock, and Sara could smell the soft welcoming scent of coffee even before she opened the door. The clerk brought in a metal tray and with a quick “good morning,” he set it on the desk and exited. Sara walked over and inhaled the aroma of freshly baked croissant. She dipped her finger in the small bowl of apricot jam and tasted it, opened the window to an unseasonably warm March morning. Inspired by the view of blue sky and the golden palazzo across the canal, she hopped up on the sill. Out on the canal, a gondolier stood high in the stern of his boat, pushing forward into his pole then pulling it back, an endless give-and-take moving him slowly down the waterway through a parade of early morning water taxis. Sara saw a tourist on a passing vaporetto lift his camera and take a picture of her as she raised her cappuccino to her lips.

How would she find the things on Dan’s list? she wondered as she sat on the ledge. It was so like him; they always joked that an architect should think in the box, not outside of it, but that wasn’t Dan. As a result, his buildings and houses were elegant and unusual—egoless, one client had said. As if he had simply stepped out of his head and into theirs, seen what they wanted.

Still, how would you capture a smell with a camera?

 

FORTIFIED BY BREAKFAST, Sara set out, camera in hand. The city seemed to be celebrating the unusual weather; even the dour matrons sweeping their front steps appeared to be doing so in time to music. The last of the schoolchildren raced across the cobblestones in search of a classroom while the sound of church bells rolled across the city, low and round and comforting.

Following the map in her guidebook, Sara crossed the bridge and headed toward San Marco Square, putting the map away when she realized that the route was well marked with yellow signs. She entered a parade of people, surprised at the density. A few businessmen with briefcases moved expertly through the erratic traffic patterns of the tourists, who seemed capable of stopping for any reason—a shop window, a phone call, a bite of pizza. Couples and families gathered for photos on bridges, oblivious to those around them. Groups of teenagers laughed and pushed one another. A couple spoke in loud, flat voices, inveighing against the injustice of both cover and service charges at a nearby restaurant. Gondoliers cast their sales pitches into the crowds, trolling for clients; African men, their skin dark against the white stones and pale visitors, hawked fake Gucci bags. Shopkeepers looked out on it all with bored irritation.

Sara took a quick turn down a side street into sudden, incredible silence.

 

SHE WAS LOST. It had taken no more than two turns and she was entirely without bearings. Her guidebook was no help, its maps designed for the broad thoroughfares and direct connections, not the tiny alleyways she found herself in. Forward seemed the best option, so she continued through a low passageway—a tunnel, really, as if someone had simply carved out the first level of a building—and into a bright, open courtyard filled with pigeons. She stopped, unnerved by the sight. Everything held for a moment and then suddenly the pigeons vaulted up into the sky, the sound of their wings deafening. Without thinking, Sara raised her camera to follow their flight. Through the lens she saw an elderly woman standing at a window on the third floor, tossing out bread crumbs. The pigeons circled about her. She looked down at Sara and nodded.

It was funny, Sara thought as she left the courtyard and headed back out into the maze of streets. She couldn’t remember the last time she had really looked up and paid attention to anything higher than the top of her children’s heads. She had spent the past eight years looking at the ground ahead for things that would trip them, or behind for things they had dropped. The world had diminished to a height of four feet. And yet here it was, with a sky full of birds.

 

SHE DIDN’T KNOW how long she had wandered, one street leading to another, each bridge and canal offering views of water and light, each small garden a story hidden behind a gate or wall and visible only from the height of a bridge. As the sun reached higher it pulled the scent out of the canals, thick and complicated, as if seawater could ripen like cheese or wine. She had been warned that in the heat of the summer the smell could be almost overwhelming, but at that moment life still held the balance over decay, barely, poignantly. Sara stood on a bridge and closed her eyes, breathing in. When she opened them she saw a building on the other side of the narrow canal.

The building was sliding into disrepair, the plaster curling back from the worn bricks underneath, green trailing plants growing out from between the cracks and flowing down the walls. The curves of the ancient red roof tiles seemed to be melting into one another; the window shutters hung off their hinges like falling trees. The whole structure was sinking slowly, the straight lines of the window frames bowing into arches as it descended, reaching for the canal below. Sara raised her camera, breathed in and took the picture.

 

HOURS LATER, without her even knowing how it had happened, the dark and narrow street she was on exited into the broad open field of San Marco Square. Here the crowds had dispersed like wildflower seeds, settling in chairs at the outdoor cafes or sitting on the steps, hands on knees, leaning forward into the end of the afternoon. Others took pictures or wandered toward the basilica that rose at the end of the square, glowing in the afternoon light. The guidebook had warned that the San Marco cafes were ridiculously expensive, but her feet hurt from all the walking and the sight of ice cream made her hungry. She realized she had forgotten to eat lunch.

She sat at a table and ordered gelato and an espresso. They arrived, the ice cream in a large round bowl, the coffee in a tiny white cup. She slid her spoon into the gelato and tasted peaches, summer, home. The sun lit up the gold wings of the angels on top of the basilica and she sat watching, camera forgotten on the table, as children chased pigeons, couples and families lost and found each other, waiters moved among the tables like water, while elegant musicians played on violins and grand pianos and heartstrings.

She found an Internet cafe on the way home and wrote to her children:

BY THE END of the week, Sara had decided that her feet and eyes and nose were much more interesting guides than a map. Over the years, she had forgotten what it felt like to walk with the delicious purposelessness of going nowhere. But now she remembered, and she spent hours simply moving, reveling in the feeling of the muscles of her legs, the swing of her arms against her body. She stopped only to eat, or take pictures—the smooth brown leather surface of a cat mask, the light caught in its curves; the middle-aged couple oblivious to the world, sitting on a park bench, her legs draped across his lap, his fingers on her ankles. A family eating Sunday lunch, the aroma of their meal drenching the air in a scent so warm and round and golden it made breathing feel like eating.

How long had it been, she wondered, since she had seen the world like this?

One afternoon, she heard string instruments and followed the sound down a narrow passageway, through a tunnel between two buildings and into a small piazza. In the middle of the otherwise deserted square, Sara saw a man in a tuxedo and a woman in a white tulle ball dress and long white gloves. Tall, both of them, impossibly tall. On stilts, Sara realized after a moment. The couple, unaware of her presence, was pacing in long-legged strides in time with the music. Then suddenly they stopped, turned and moved forward into each other’s arms. Dancing. Ballroom dancing, the woman’s dress flowing out behind her, the long, thin blackness of her stilts sweeping up into the air as the man lifted her over his shoulder, a great arc of white, then landed her gently, serenely, back on the cobblestones from which she had started.

Sara watched until they stopped dancing and got down from their stilts and stood, laughing, in the middle of the piazza. She walked up to them.

“Why?” she asked simply.

“
Perche no
?” they replied. Why not?

Up above them, a child leaned out an upper window and clapped, her face alight with joy.