Breathless (4 page)

“Veils and contact lenses don’t go together,” Leo said without smiling. “Especially
not green
contact lenses.”

I flushed at being found out. I loved the “Oh, les beaux yeux,” compliments I got on the boulevard whenever I wore them.

I bit into one of the dark green peppers sitting in a little dish of nibbles on the table. My tongue caught fire. I gulped down water, swallowing my embarrassment.

“Not water, bread,” Leo said, passing me the basket.

Leo outlined his plan for the year, though “plan” was not quite the right word for his scenario. The deal, he said, was to be open to things as they happened and to be ready to move on. I liked that concept, though living it out might be another matter, I thought.

“What about school?” I asked, when he told me he had left Columbia with an unfinished master’s essay on T.S. Eliot.

“First I have to see Greece and Turkey—then Israel.”

“I thought you were going to Italy.”

It was obvious for Leo that one country led to another. You just had to look at the map.

“And money?”

“I have a stash,” Leo explained, from selling the hash he bought in Tangier. When he left the States, he had shipped his bike on a freighter to Tangier, where William Burroughs (another hero) was often in residence. “I can always deal a little on the side.”

“Isn’t that dangerous?” I asked, imagining my father’s reaction to this information. “Don’t expect us to visit you in jail.”

Leo shrugged and dug into the steaming mountain of couscous in front of us.

I didn’t want to treat him the way my parents treated me, demanding accounts of feelings and whereabouts, as though they were owed an explanation. With Leo, the roles were reversed. I pressed him—if only in my mind.

“What’s dangerous is getting drafted,” he said, with an edge of condescension. “Vietnam.”

H
E WALKED ME BACK TO
the Foyer, his arm thrown over my shoulder, as if something had been decided at dinner.

“You don’t you miss anything about New York, not even Greenwich Village?”

“Baby, not Greenwich Village. The Village. Period. You’re still just a nice little Barnard girl from Riverside Drive,” he said with a mixture of tenderness and scorn. I knew the Village as well as he did. But Leo always assumed the role of the one who knew. And I went along with it.

When we arrived in front of the Foyer doors, Leo took my face in his hands and kissed me gently with his pillow lips. I wanted to ask him whether we would see each other before he left, but I knew that was not a cool chick thing.

Monique was reading
The Portuguese Letters
in bed. The letters were supposed to have been written by a Portuguese nun who was seduced and abandoned by a Frenchman, a soldier who had passed through town. Her letters to him from the convent went unanswered. They were heartbreaking, Monique and I agreed.

“Are you going to sleep with Leo?”

“It depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether he asks me to meet him in Italy over Christmas.”

Monique was going to Tunisia for the holidays. I didn’t want to stay in Paris alone.

“But if he doesn’t ask me, I won’t. Sleep with him. I’ll just stay here and work on the master’s essay, which is what I should be doing anyway.”

Would we or wouldn’t we? How should we decide? That was always the question between us.

“I wish someone would leave me enough money so that I could live in Europe and never have to think of consequences,” I continued, trying to explain my confusion.

Monique sighed, put the book down, and shut off the light.

“Money,” she said, “that’s so American.”

Why did everything always come down to that? My being American? The point wasn’t money; it was the problem of what my parents always called consequences, the running argument between us about everything I wanted to do, and would do, I believed, if it weren’t for them. “Think of the consequences.” I had come to Paris to get over the fear that their mantra might be right. Monique yearned for something absolute, irresistible, beyond practical considerations like geography or money. That’s what made her European, she thought, and superior to me. It was too late to argue. I lay awake reviewing the kiss.

A
FEW DAYS LATER
I found a note from Leo at the front desk asking me to meet him at Le Bac, the café next door to the Foyer where I often had coffee with Monique in the morning. I immediately decided I would make the trip to Italy if he asked, even though I didn’t know what it meant, or even what I wanted it to mean. Acting, not waiting, had become a matter of principle with me. Not that I wasn’t waiting, of course. The trouble with existentialism, as far as I could tell, was that it worked better for men than for girls. I struggled to believe I could create myself by acting in the world alone. But even Simone de Beauvoir, looking back, said she had been waiting since she was fifteen for the “dream-companion” she found in Sartre. I had come to France, the land of my intellectual heroes, to live a passionate adventure of my own, but I seemed still to be taking baby steps, still waiting to be asked, while knowing this couldn’t be the answer.

“S
O WHAT DO YOU THINK?
” Leo finally asked, stirring sugar into his
petit crème
.

“About what?” I asked back, wanting the question put into words. Leo hesitated as though he thought I was expecting him to propose marriage.

“You know, meeting me in Venice, baby.” I had hoped for a little more language, but “baby” was going to have to do. “Why don’t you ask Valerie to drive you? She just bought a car, didn’t she?” Leo had met my classmate Valerie at a Thanksgiving party for Middlebury students.

“But you don’t like her. You said she was uptight, or maybe even lesbian.”

“But she likes you, baby, and if she gets you to Venice . . .” Leo didn’t finish the sentence. I decided to take his pragmatism as an expression of his intense desire for me to make the trip.

How could I tell my parents I was going to Italy without putting Leo into the picture? They would try to discourage me if I said I was traveling alone (think of the consequences). I told them that a girl I knew from the Middlebury program was driving to Venice for the Christmas holidays and that she had asked me to join her. “Her father’s a professor,” I added, “a Renaissance art historian, specializing in Giotto.” I wanted to round out the portrait in terms I knew my parents would find reassuring. My sister was majoring in art history. Giotto was already a household word.

No Sun in Venice

W
E LEFT THE
F
IAT IN
an open lot near the Piazzale di Roma and walked to the youth hostel where we planned to meet Leo for our first night in Venice. It was late and we decided to leave our suitcases in the car since we’d be moving to a hotel early the following day. By the next morning, when Valerie and I returned to pick up our luggage, the car had been picked clean. We stared at the empty car for a few minutes without speaking, stunned by our bad luck.

After two hours of declarations to the police, shrugged shoulders conveyed the official response to the plight of American girls leaving their belongings in a car with telltale TT license plates on Christmas Eve. “Peccato, signorine.” That’s a pity. Anyway, it was “la Festa,” and everything was shut down for the holidays. Valerie glared at me as if I were entirely to blame, and maybe I was, given my true motive for luring her to Italy. I was less willing to take the blame in the required filial letter: “I’m worried that you’ll think I’m irresponsible, etc. but is it
really my fault?” I hated losing things, but I also hated knowing that by return mail my own feeling of loss would be drowned in the vast ocean of parental ire.

After our useless performance at the police station, we walked over to the Dorsoduro, where Leo had reserved two rooms at the Calcina, one for Valerie and me, and one for him. Valerie’s father had suggested the Calcina, a
pensione
everyone who knew anything about art history preferred because John Ruskin had stayed there. The Calcina catered to American and English academics who couldn’t begin to afford the legendary hotels like the Danieli, chosen by my parents, or more glamorously by George Sand and Alfred de Musset, who also traveled to Venice in winter. Still, the
pensione
faced the Guidecca canal and Leo had managed to get us rooms with a view.

When the stores reopened after the holidays, I walked into a small shop I had noticed near the Campo Santo Stefano, whose windows inspired daydreams of seduction. I fixated on what I took to be a slip of pale brown silk, trimmed in cream-colored lace, that would skim the top of the thighs. Too short for a skirt, too long to tuck into pants, the slip, if that’s what it was, completed by matching bra and panties, seemed designed uniquely for dallying in a hotel room—filmed by Antonioni. The bra was made of two tiny triangular pieces of silk strung along a thin strap; the low-slung bikini panties formed a slender V at the crotch.

I hesitated at the counter, shocked by the price of the ensemble and embarrassed in my own eyes by the waist-high white cotton underpants I was wearing, and whose outline I was sure the saleswoman had deciphered through the dressing room door.

“Take beautiful things,
signorina
, and you can never go wrong,” the saleswoman intoned, as if uttering a famous Italian maxim. I had been brought up on the opposite principle, inculcated in me by my mother through years of shopping from bins of clothing in the bargain basements she haunted. I had had a long apprenticeship at the crowded stores on Union Square, plunging my hand into the bottom of the pile (“You never know what you’re going to find”) to pluck out a treasure minus its original label (if, of course, you knew what the
missing label was). I quickly cashed several traveler’s checks’ worth of lire as I pictured wearing the slip that night with Leo, feeling guiltier about spending the money than about “going to a man’s room,” in my father’s preferred euphemism.

Of course, in my shopping fantasy the hotel room was not a bathroomless
pensione
above a restaurant, even if Ruskin had stayed there in another century.

I knocked on the door of Leo’s room, down the hallway from the one Valerie and I were sharing. I held my new purchase up for inspection.

Leo nodded approval, but just kept sucking on his hash pipe, his pupils already pinpoints of satisfaction.

The first time we had sex, Leo reminded me of Philippe, minus breakfast in bed and the bathtub with blue water. Affectionate, but almost distracted, as though it wasn’t the first time but the thirtieth, or as though we had stopped counting before we began. Leo’s investment in sex was hard to decipher.

“Sex isn’t everything,” Leo said when I wondered aloud about what had (and hadn’t) happened. “Besides, you’ll get better, eventually.” Why was pleasure again my job to figure out? And what exactly was the job description? Even speaking English, I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

V
ENICE IN EARLY
J
ANUARY WAS
icy and misty, not the sublime white luminosity I had imagined. But we were happy to be tourists, crossing bridges, coming on hidden squares. “Speaking tons of Italian,” I reported to my parents, hoping to make them feel that my Barnard education had paid off, despite the stolen suitcases, “actually constructing vaguely intelligent sentences.”

As the three of us wandered through Piazza San Marco, almost deserted for the season, the cool rhythms of the Modern Jazz Quartet playing
No Sun in Venice
vibrated in my head. The album, a birthday present from David, had a Turner painting of the Grand Canal on the cover.

“You know, of course, that Vicenza is more important architecturally than Venice,” David had written in his last letter from New York. I didn’t see how that could be true, but I was used to taking his
opinions seriously. We had broken up in late spring just before I left for France, but no sooner had I said the words “It’s over” than I found myself wishing I could take them back, even though, as we both agreed, it was “impossible.” We wanted different things, but maybe I had exaggerated our differences, maybe difference was good. The glue of ambivalence bonded our lack of resolution, our inability to make the break stick. The year away was supposed to clarify our feelings.

I told David I might be traveling to Italy at Christmas. I knew he wouldn’t be able to resist the chance to make me a list of what I should see, even though he had never been there himself. The two of us had always had an epistolary relationship, even when we lived in the same city, a few blocks apart. It wasn’t necessarily meaningful that we were writing again.

“We should really drive to Vicenza on Sunday,” I said at dinner. “Vicenza is more important architecturally than Venice,” I added, omitting David’s “you know about Palladio, of course,” but neither Leo nor Valerie protested.

Our time in Venice was almost over. We were all getting tired of walking around in the cold; Valerie and Leo were tired of each other. Maybe the change of scene would improve relations before we parted. Valerie and I would return to Paris from Vicenza. Leo could hitch a ride back to Venice and head for Rome alone on his motorcycle.

The windshield was frozen and the rear window was fogged. Valerie complained that she couldn’t see a thing. From the backseat of the car, Leo offered to take the wheel.

“You can’t drive my car when you’re stoned,” Valerie said, without turning her head, her foot on the break.

“Don’t brake, just downshift.” Being stoned never prevented Leo from giving advice.

I had decided to sit in the back with Leo, even though I knew Valerie would resent finding herself in the role of chauffeur. My head was in Leo’s lap; I was ignoring the weather and Valerie’s complaints. Leo continued to carry on a conversation with Valerie about the road. Suddenly, there was a crashing sound and the car skidded on the black ice, back-ending into a ditch on the side of the road. Then quiet.

We were alive! The three of us gingerly climbed out of the car, which seemed remarkably intact, though the back wheels were hopelessly jammed into the ditch.