Any Day Now (24 page)

We hadn't been able to afford a gondola ride thirty-five summers ago, though Paul kept saying we could. We'd had a windfall in Florence that he was intent on spending as quickly as possible. He wanted to stay in a good hotel, eat out every meal. But I put my foot down about the gondola. To be squired through a few canals by a gigolo-type in boater hat and tight black pants for a small fortune? Paul had suggested it every day. I said no every day.

We'd begun to disagree about other things, too, about the architecture and whether cats were better pets than dogs, and the real reasons we were vegetarians. He thought my politics were too mild and I thought he should stop smoking weed because when he did he wolfed down whole loaves of bread and blocks of cheese, then got a migraine later. These had been little differences when we were making love three times a day, but since Florence, Paul's desire had turned polite. “Do you want to?” he asked in our tent at night. We'd found a campground called Camping Paradiso right outside Venice, convinced now that every city, every village in the whole Italian boot had a campground with this name. “Do you want to?”

So what now? I wasn't in the mood on this second solo day to do museums or palaces. I went into another street of shops looking for more gifts, found some lovely glass vases in one, and was loading them up on the counter, mentally ticking off the names of friends, when my hands began to shake and I had to put them all back on the shelf under the careful eye of the
signora
. I went back out into the street. I would walk. I would find comfort in the bridges and alleys, the piazzas, the water.

One night, in that earlier summer, after a day of barely speaking, we'd walked until our feet were numb. By midnight, the tourists had all gone back to their hotels, the kids to their hostels. We fed some cats a bit of cheese, ducked into a tiny church, miraculously still open, where Paul had sat for a long time with his eyes closed. We were so tired from our summer. It was unimaginable by then that we'd left L.A. with the idea of going to Israel to work the land like pioneers. Europe had gotten in the way. And money. We'd been so desperate for money in Florence that Paul had offered himself to two men, cousins. They'd talked art; they'd had sex. “They let me do only the things I wanted to,” Paul told me after.

But on the bus back to Camping Paradiso that night, Paul turned from the window to look at me. “We opened Pandora's box,” he said.

“No, you opened it,” I said, feeling immediately sick.

“You're right,” he said. He was not going to argue.

“Do you want to find those two faggots again, Davie and Chuckie, or whatever their names were?”

“This isn't about them,” Paul said.

“The sex was better, is that what you're trying to say?”

“I love you,” he said. “But I think I need a man to feel…”

“Aroused?”

“No, obviously not.”

“Powerful?”

“Complete,” he said. And it was my moment not to argue — though on and off for the rest of that night and the next week, I cried and bullied and raged. Do you know what a fucked-up life you're going to have? What are your parents going to say? (A lame jab, because at twenty Paul was only too happy to rough up the folks.) I reminded him how much he'd loved and wanted me. But in the end I had to accept a humbling fact: I couldn't change the way he felt.

I had a client a few years back whose husband left her for another woman. Of course, I've had many clients in the same situation, but this woman's conviction six months later that she could still change her husband's mind, not only about her, his rightful and deserving partner, but about the other woman, was so absolute that I couldn't wedge in the smallest possibility that maybe she was going to have to take his word for it, that at some point, she was going to have to believe him. He no longer wanted to be with her. The woman fired me after a few months, saying I wasn't on her side. Over the years, I've watched the slow coming-to on clients' faces, the sag in the chest, tears dripping into hands. He doesn't want me anymore. She doesn't love me anymore. But, wait, I tell them: There is a freedom that comes with accepting this, though it is a searing freedom.

I left the shops behind and walked in the way one walks in Venice. One is always lost, one is always gasping. Another alley, another courtyard, another church. I lost my sense of direction almost immediately. I threaded and wound, grateful for the shade in the narrowest streets, for the lack of crowds. And then I was in another small piazza and there was a one-word sign with a few flapping flags around it: Gondola. Mauro was his name, he said, and he helped me onto the shockingly unsteady thin wood boat. He was an older man and his hand was calloused and sure; he'd lifted a million hands like this.

“It's so shaky!” I cried.

“It's water,” he said and flashed his gondolier's smile. As we drifted free — “No one else coming?” he asked, looking around; he was paid by the person, after all — Mauro pushed his foot against the edge of the nearest building. “I will show you the Venice tourists do not see,” he said. “I show you the real Venice.”

“How many people do you say that to every summer?” I asked, sure he'd laugh or at least smile.

“Hundreds, thousands,” he said, not smiling, and propelling us out of our alley and into a wider canal. The sun struck the water and, blinded even with sunglasses, I had to look down. The gondola cushions were black vinyl with fake fur trim. Mauro kicked off again, black slipper against brick. My eyes traveled up — black toreador pants on short, muscled legs to the heavy white cotton of a long-sleeved shirt. There was something medieval in the cut, a costume really.

“How much is this going to cost?” I'd forgotten to ask.

“For you,
signora
, I charge fifty Euros.”

“That's a lot of money.”

“It's a lot of city,
signora
,” said Mauro, and began reciting Venice's vital statistics: 180 bridges, 37 kilometres of canals, 60,000 residents, 405 gondolas all gliding along on water only 6 feet deep. We passed brick so ancient there was no mortar left, just walls of stone balanced by habit. Every now and then I'd turn to watch Mauro's foot shove off against them as he propelled us in spaces that seemed too narrow for a swimmer. He flicked and pushed the way a goldfish navigates a bowl. What did he see from back there? The backs of sweaty heads, people aiming camcorders and editing images on digital screens? If he looked now he'd see only a woman in her fifties wearing linen capris, hands in her lap.

I could actually see the vapour now. It was here in front of my eyes, hazing everything slightly. Everything looked — I searched for the right word and could find only beautiful.

“There!” Mauro called as we pulled again into a wider canal with more gondolas. He was pointing to a bridge up ahead. I vaguely remembered this bridge. Paul had been fascinated by it, but I couldn't remember why.

“The Bridge of Sighs,” Mauro said as we pulled closer. Swarms of people were climbing and descending. It was an elegant curve of a bridge, but not, to my eye, any more special than the other 179. The building on our left, Mauro said, had once been a prison. As they crossed the bridge from the rest of the city to the rest of their lives, incoming prisoners would sigh. “You understand?” he said. “You understand the name now?
Molto
triste.
”

“Thank you,” I said when he pulled me up onto the dock ten minutes later.

“Worth the money?” he asked.

“I think so,” I said.

When I reached Paul by cell that evening, he wanted to know all about the gondola ride. “I still haven't gotten on one,” he said. “I just scoot around on the
vaporetti
. Now that I sort of live here, it feels silly somehow taking a gondola.”

“I'm leaving the day after tomorrow,” I said.

“I know,” Paul said.

“Do you plan on seeing me? Did you
ever
plan on seeing me or had you been thinking more in terms of cell-to-cell contact?”

“Of course I did.” He sounded wounded.

“Do you have any idea how painful this is for me?”

“Painful?” he asked and he sounded so surprised, I said, “I'm going now,” and hung up.

I paced around the boardwalk, not seeing a thing. I thought we'd worked through this stuff years ago: my rejection, his guilt. The seventies were made for working things through. We talked, we analysed, we talked. And we had mostly hung in. I was there for his grand amour with David (no accident, the name) and for David's death. He was there through the crash-and-burn of my long marriage. I
knew
this man, his eccentricities and vanities, his generosity and loyalty. We'd drifted together and apart for years, but the drift somehow always carried us back.

The street had just closed to cars the way it apparently did every evening. I turned off my cellphone and walked back to Hotel Paradiso. Two of the three Hungarians were taking a coffee and cigarette at one of the outdoor tables. They waved at me, an old friend already, and motioned grandly to an empty chair.

“Your other friend?” I asked.

“Oh, mens,” one said and they smiled hugely at me. I nodded as if I was in on it. Both women were dressed like they were attending an elegant beach party — long silky sheaths with silver sandals. They glowed with jewelry.

Hungarian? I asked. She met a Hungarian man here?

Yes, yes, they said. “Rich mens,” they said and again there were lots of nods and smiles.

“Mens?” one asked and pointed at me.

“No,” I said.

“Oh,” both said, looking disappointed.

“You? Men?” I asked, pointing at them.

“No, no,” they laughed.

Paul called as soon as I turned my phone back on, somewhere around 10:00 as I sat in front of the window in my room. I'd turned off all the lights, rolled up the shutter and taken off my clothes, too tired for the blast of the shower and the mop-up after.

“I just want to know one thing,” he said. “Why'd you stick around all those years if it was so bloody painful?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“You're the fucking therapist and you don't know?”

“I don't have one answer for one little thing,” I shot back. And then because I heard the absolute truth of that, I added, more softly, “Not one.”

“There's been something in this for you all along,” said Paul. I could hear someone speaking Italian in the background. Was it the radio or a live person? “I would even go so far as to say that your entire career has been built on that early pain, bafflement, whatever you want to call it. You've been trying to figure out the human psyche ever since Florence 1969, trying to crack it
and
protect yourself from it.”

“But it hurt so much,” I said. “It messed me up for years.”

“How long am I going to have to explain this to you, dear heart? Life is mess and complication. Nothing but. There's only little spaces for happy-go-lucky, for grace. And besides, why stick with the old pain when there's so much new pain available?”

“Don't go philosophical on me,” I said.

“Listen, even infuriating Harold got a bit insightful at the end,” Paul said. “Hey, here's a Brodkey quote for you…” I heard him going through papers… “‘It is not easy to accept your own unsuitability for life. But if I do not accept it, I will throw my life away in resistance.' Deep, huh?” His voice was getting weak. “Pending death does that.”

“Then we should all be a lot wiser,” I said. “Since it is, in fact, pending for all of us.”

“For you and your ilk, Letty dear, death is still just an idea. Tomorrow,” he said. “For real.”

In the middle of the night — it must have been the middle of the night because the roar of the street was muted — Paul called back. “What do I know about Venice?” he asked before I'd even said
pronto
. “I mean, what? What can I say that hasn't been said? One hundred and eighty bridges and four hundred gondolas? It's a city built on sticks, goddamn sticks.” And he began to cry. I'd heard him cry like this once a long time ago. The light in the tent had been an underwater shade of green.

I listened to him cry. “Thank you,” he finally said. “Anyone else would have rushed in with a pickaxe or a Band-Aid and I don't want either.”

“I thought I was the one who had to go through the heavy shit this week. See, even now you won't let me have the stage,” I said. The temperature had finally dropped. Something like a breeze was coming through the window.

“I will,” he said. “Any day now.”

“Do you remember the last time you cried like that with me?” I asked, a dangerous question if he didn't.

“Baggy old tent,” said Paul. His voice was nearly gone now.

“It's actually four hundred and five gondolas,” I said. “Mauro, the gondolier, said so.”

“See?” Paul said. “What do I know?
Domani
.”

But the next morning as I waited in the heat for the bus to the boat to the city, I called just in case. He'd made another message for me. “Did you know I have a friend who says that I've been here — I mean here on the planet, not here in Venice — so many times before, and that I've burned through so much karma in this lifetime alone, that I'll be coming back as light next time around? How about that? I will wrap my beams around you, Leticia. I will fold you in my rays. I will shine down on you.” He'd pulled the phone away to cough. “Don't look for me today. I won't be there. I thought I could, but I can't. All systems are going. Call it goddamn ego and caprice. Cowardice even. But, hey, something good comes of everything, right? I got a blast of your truth, which I suppose I still needed. And I got to have you near again, at least as near as I could. And you, you got…kiwi sauce. Mosquitoes. Gondolas.” Now his voice broke. “And my gratitude. That, Letty love, is rarer than love, though you have that, too, in case you were deluded enough to ever doubt it. But here's to delusions, too!
Arrivederci
, sweetheart. I'll be back. Any day now.”