Permanence (8 page)

“I see,” says doctor, turning away from me. I can tell he does not want to press the issue of dreams.

Landing

We hear the captain’s voice coming to us from over the loudspeakers of this jet plane like God from the heavens. He informs us that we are about to land at the Leonardo Da Vinci-Fiumicino International Airport in Rome, Italy. From there, doctor whispers, we will travel to beautiful, romantic Venice. But I pray we will not be getting on another plane. I pray we will not be risking our lives any more than we already have.

Listen: I want to take a car to Venice; I want to take a boat or a train; I want to go Greyhound.

Now I look outside the porthole window. The solid ground is visible below me. There is the blackened, dead engine. The captain requests that we follow the “Emergency Landing Procedures” that should have been demonstrated earlier by the flight attendants, although he is quite sure we will have little use for them. “This is not overreaction,” he presses. “This is routine procedure during a situation of this nature.”

I am not reassured because this is not a natural situation.

Doctor takes my hand into his and squeezes it. He forces an unusual smile from behind his beard. “Just relax,” he says, “and everything will be just fine.” I believe him, whether I want to or not. I have no choice but to believe doctor. I need him.

The passengers of economy class emit small shrieks as the plane increases its angle of descent. Here’s what I do to prepare for Emergency “Crash” landing: I let go of doctor’s hand. I return my seat to its upright position. I sit up straight. I smooth the creases in my clothing. I smooth the creases in my life preserver. Flight attendants scurry about the isles, checking and testing the security of the passengers’ seatbelts. The flight attendants no longer have the look of cool confidence. They now have the same horrified expression I must be wearing.

Thank God for the absence of mirrors.

There is nothing outside but brown, arid land. Clumps of buildings and scattered farmlands separated by the black, snaking outline of roads; sometimes pools of water that glisten like tinfoil in the sun.

I feel my stomach turn inside out.

I place the seat cushion into my abdomen and, along with doctor, lean forward and place my head between my knees. I can see my feet. Quite suddenly, I sense a sharp drop in altitude. Then a quick rise. I say nothing, make no reaction at all. I do not look up. Neither does doctor. I look at my feet. My head is groggy from the Valium and scotch. My head buzzes. My mouth is dry. My stomach is tied in double knots from nerves and the presence of doctor’s baby.

I do not pray.

There is a small cry for “help” coming from the front of coach class. This is the old woman with the inflated life preserver.

“Thank God for life preservers,” shouts the drunken man from four rows ahead. “We can swim in the dirt.”

What happens next happens quickly.

There is the sound of the remaining engines screaming and the quick jolt of the plane as it touches down on the solid runway. My forehead bounces into the soft underside of the seat in front of me. I hold my head tightly between my knees, stare onto the floor and my feet. I am isolated, alone. But in my mind I picture the smiling faces of baby and Jamie. They are my comfort in the very face of death. I feel the braking of this plane thrusting me forward, the seat cushion compressed into my abdomen. We speed along the runway, the air rushing through the engines and the break flaps.

Abruptly, we begin to slow down.

We come to a dead stop.

There is an eerie silence coming from the cabin, as though we have crashed and I am the sole survivor.

But we haven’t crashed.

I reach my hand out to doctor. He takes my hand into his. Thank God, I think. Thank God doctor is alive too. Suddenly, I am praying.

A solid round of applause erupts from the passengers.

There is a call for everyone to remain in their seats.

I raise my head. In the narrow distance of this jet plane, I recognize the sound of people crying happy tears.

“Tears for fears,” says doctor, as he raises his head from crash position.

“Truly,” I say.

But then I lower my head again back into crash-landing position. I keep it down, stuffed into my seat cushion, the cushion pressed into my stomach. I do not cry as the Emergency Exit doors are thrown open by the flight attendants. I do not shout for joy. I live. That’s all.

Once on the solid ground

“Welcome to Italy,” says doctor.

Is he joking?

Together, we are clinging to the floor-to-ceiling stainless steel railings inside the bus that transports us from an isolated airstrip to the airport terminal. The old woman from the front of coach class has been transported not by bus, but by ambulance. Her body was prone, laid out on a stretcher with wheels, a transparent oxygen mask attached to her face. Once on the solid ground, the drunken man from four rows up went to his knees and kissed the tarmac. He took a separate bus to the terminal. I suppose I’ll never see him again, for as long as I live.

We ride these buses in silence.

Not a mention of the disaster that, only moments before, we narrowly avoided. As if nothing happened. Maybe risking our lives had all been a bad dream.

For your fear

“The best thing for your fear,” says doctor inside the busy airport terminal in Rome, “is to fly again…as soon as possible.”

I say nothing.

I stare outside the floor-to-ceiling airport windows and watch a jet plane coming in for a safe landing on this sunny, warm morning in late October.

I feel my stomach constrict.

“I thought we might drive to Venice,” I say.

“No car,” says doctor. He takes my hand and leads me into the terminal for the domestic flight that will take us to Venice. He takes care of our transactions with the counter attendant and hands me a ticket, closing my fingers around it. I look at the ticket in my hand.

“Oh,” I say, because I know I have no choice about flying.

“For your fear,” doctor says, “and mine.”

Doctor is had

Venice begins for doctor and I where the land ends and becomes water, literally.

I stand close to doctor, by the docks. I watch his expression go from blank to blanker when he peels away the money, bill by bill, from the stack he carries in his coat pocket. The cab driver who transported us from the airport to the canals is making doctor pay fifty-thousand lire for a ten-minute ride. Doctor presents it to the cabby who snatches the bills away from his hand.

Doctor stands perfectly still. Like a statue. He seems in shock. He is holding on to the remainder of his money as the cabby jumps back into his car and spins the rear wheels, churning up the dirt and dust into our faces. It isn’t long before we realize this: doctor has been had. He isn’t himself. We stand there for a few moments while, or so I assume, doctor reacquaints himself with Italian currency denominations and while he counts what’s left of the stack he carries.

Doctor looks up at me with his familiar, indifferent frown.

“Watch your money,” he says.

So I pull some of the Italian money doctor had handed me earlier out of my pocket. I spread it out in my hands as though reading playing cards. I stare at the money intently. I am really watching it.

I begin to laugh.

But doctor isn’t in a laughing mood.

“But Venice can only be so large…”

“In the interest of saving cash,” explains doctor, “we’ll take a water bus to our hotel.” This, instead of laying out cash for the sleek, stylish water taxis that also inhabit these canals.

But something is wrong. As doctor and I board this slow-moving, white barge, I have the strange but urgent sensation of being lost. I am confused by the foreign landscape, the homogenous structures and architecture.

I look at doctor.

I am worried about his lack of direction. He looks one way and then the other, and back again.

Apparently he is as confused as I am.

The boat is moving.

Doctor begins to say something but stops in midsentence. Angry passengers are forced to climb over our suitcases. They brush up against us with stiff shoulders and speak at us angrily in native Italian.

I feel like a tourist. And I am.

But I do not want to appear like a tourist.

A half an hour passes as doctor and I travel the famous, romantic, Grand Canal by water bus. We pass dozens of nameless buildings, jetties, and docks made of wood and stone.

Doctor is smoking. I can tell by his tight, frowning expression that he is growing ever impatient.

I remain silent and try to have confidence in him.

We are utterly lost.

Suddenly doctor decides to disembark at the next stop. “We can find our way by walking,” he says. “Besides, how large can Venice really be?”

I step onto the stone platform and begin my search, along with doctor’s, for a landmark I have no way of recognizing. Then doctor seems to discover this: “The Adriatic Sea,” he says, “is directly to our backs. We got off the bus on the wrong side of the Grand Canal.”

“Any suggestions?” I say, the two suitcases I carry growing heavier in the thick afternoon air.

But doctor is not listening to me so much as he is scanning the Venetian landscape. He is carrying four suitcases—two by the handles and two more tucked beneath his forearms—and the sweat is beginning to run off his brow, down his face, and onto his beard.

“Look for a pedestrian bridge that spans the river,” he insists.

But I locate nothing; doctor locates nothing.

Doctor begins walking toward a dock occupied by two empty gondolas and a gondolier. He drops the luggage.

“Will you take us across the canal?” poses doctor to this young gondolier. “I hope you speak English.”

The gondolier turns to doctor, smiles, and shakes his head as if to say, “Yes.” He laughs a wry laugh as doctor places our suitcases into the black, ornately sculpted gondola and steps inside, extending a helping hand for me.

I step into the narrow boat and quickly take a seat.

“How much?” doctor inquires to the gondolier, whose smile has grown wider.

There is the unsteady rocking of the boat so that I hold to the sides for balance.

“Are you sure we’re doing the right thing?” I ask, but doctor ignores me.

The gondola begins moving across the canal.

Doctor produces a stack of lire from his pocket and holds it in the air as this gondola moves slowly forward and bounces in the wake from the canal. “How much?” he repeats.

“Thirty,” says the gondolier in a low but firm voice. He poles the gondola over the water with one hand and looks away from us, over us, and at the dock approaching on the other side of this canal.

Without an argument, doctor peels the money away from his already dwindling stack and hands it to the gondolier. With his free hand, the gondolier quickly deposits the money inside the pocket of his black trousers.

But we are only halfway across the canal when doctor spots a pedestrian bridge a few dozen feet away, hidden by the abrupt comer of a stucco building facade where the canal banks sharply to the left.

Listen: we could have walked over the canal for free.

“My God,” doctor says. “I don’t believe it.” I can hear the laughter coming from this gondolier. But I say nothing. I merely maintain my forward focus, pretending not to notice anything. Doctor, I imagine, must be thoroughly embarrassed. Perhaps he is humiliated. But if he is anything like me, he is too exhausted to care.

But one thing is for sure, as we bob in the Grand Canal toward an approaching stone embankment: doctor is not in a laughing mood.

Once on the other side of the canal, doctor gathers our suitcases and we begin walking away from the gondolier, who is still laughing.

I am dead tired from carrying this luggage around in the unusual (according to doctor) Venetian heat.

“I don’t understand it,” doctor repeats over and over. “Venice is only so large.”

Hopelessly lost

We are hopelessly lost in romantic Venice.

Doctor and I have nowhere to turn for help in this, the lovely ancient city of dark canals, brown and gray stucco buildings, and clay-tiled roofs.

I remember the placards from my travel office—VENICE, they read, THE ADRIATIC CITY OF ROMANCE AND MYSTERY.

We’ve crossed an endless array of pedestrian bridges and walked for miles, or so it seems, along cobbled roads and alleyways in search of our hotel, but have managed only to become more lost.

This city certainly is a mystery.

Now I am sitting on top of my luggage at the entrance to an open bar along a Venetian side street. Doctor has gone inside in the chance that someone in there might know of our hotel. This is a bar that does not have a front door but a barricade made from chain link that, I assume, is pulled up when open and down when closed.

The unusual Venetian heat is exhausting; I need water.

Hordes of tourists stream by, along with the native Venetians. You can tell the natives apart from tourists by the way they push tourists aside as they move through the crowd. The native expression in general seems angered and impatient. Tourists move at a snail’s pace. I sit in the heat of the afternoon and stare at these people. I check the time. Two-thirty, Italian time. I have not slept properly in nearly thirty hours. I have not brushed my teeth or changed my clothing. My hair is in tangles. I’m hungry.

I sit atop my luggage and, for the very first time since we left America, begin to doubt my decision about coming to Venice with doctor. The questions that flash through my mind are crucial and will remain unanswered: did I come to Venice because I love doctor or simply because I need him? Is there a difference between love and need? Did I come to Venice with doctor because I am carrying his baby? One thing is for certain: I am not doubting my decision simply because of a plane that blew an engine or because we have become hopelessly lost. I do not blame doctor for something that is beyond his control.

I blame myself for being so dependent.