Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (16 page)

The music on the sound system was heavier, funkier, than before. Laura said she needed a glass of water. As they were stepping towards the galley, James summoned them into the bedroom again. It was the same scene as before, with dimmer lights. As James began chopping out more lines, Laura said that they should use some of her own stash, but he waved the suggestion aside.

‘No,’ he said, as soon as he had snorted up a line. ‘It is my pleasure. Please.’ He really was an advert, James, for the civilizing effects of cocaine. Laura helped herself to another nose-full and Jeff followed suit, motivated by a hunger that had already been thoroughly assuaged. James introduced them
to some of the other people in the room, including a couple sitting in a chair, who, until that moment, had been kissing passionately. They did not appear to resent the interruption. Jeff saluted them both and shook hands with one or two other people in the immediate vicinity. Unconsciously, he was aping James's style of extreme formality. It actually made conversation easier, leaving him free to concentrate on how
incredibly high
he was feeling. Except, as soon as he did that, he had a great urge to start blahing on about how
incredibly high he was feeling
and jumping round like Diego Maradona in his Neapolitan pomp. His heart was beating wildly, his legs felt trembly, but, in James's presence, he felt a compulsion to behave as if he had just enjoyed the benefits of a complimentary healing session at an exclusive spa on the Pacific coast of America. Through the door the music was audible as a deep, but not intrusive, thump. There was the sound of laughter, all around, talk in several languages. He made room for Laura on the bed. Her cap was tipped back on her head. The couple who had been kissing earlier were kissing again. There was a knock at the door and a young woman of uncertain nationality came in and curled up next to James. The vibe was poised midway between the relaxed, sleep-over atmosphere that you got with a bunch of strangers on Ecstasy in an uncharacteristically well-upholstered chill-out space and the franker physicality of the early stages of what might turn into some kind of sex party. Either way, Jeff was too amped to find out what might happen next. He and Laura stepped outside, where half a dozen people were dancing, including cowboy Troy. The music was louder than before. Laura's eyes were shining. Her bare feet moved lightly over the colourful, Oriental rug that demarcated the dance floor. More people joined in and soon a nice little dance party was happening.

Dancing freed Jeff from the state of serial distraction to
which coke made him prone, but eventually, after another glass of champagne and several conversations (of which he could not recall a single word), he was on deck again, crowded with people drinking and talking. He leaned on the rail, looking back at the light-rimmed horizon, as though taking his watch on the bridge of a destroyer. A woman in a sparkly green dress was standing next to him. They smiled, but did not speak. The black water was splashed with light, reflected stars. A speedboat powered by, causing the yacht to rise up and rock in its wake. The night was thick with heat. Unlike grass, cocaine did not enhance – or even lend itself to – the lyricism of the moment. Still, he was thinking to himself over and over, if this is not my idea of a good time I don't know what is. I am having an unbelievably fantastic time, he said to himself. I am having the time of my fucking life! The last six or however many hours it was were like a concentrated version of everything he had ever wanted from life. What more could one want? The thing about this life is that you just don't know what's going to turn up, what's going to come your way. Christ, he had arrived at the Tom Hanks philosophy of life, part
Forrest Gump
and part
Cast Away.
It was exciting, coke, but it didn't give you much in the way of profound thoughts, he thought. The thing about Tom Hanks was that all his films, not all of them but the quintessential ones, were about wanting to get back home.
Saving Private Ryan, Cast Away
and – this was the one that elevated the point to the level of universal truth –
Apollo 13.
And that was their shortcoming, because life, at its best, was about wanting never to go home, even if that meant spinning off into outer space. Having said that, perhaps it was time to go, to go back to the hotel. But he didn't want to go yet. He was still having a good time, still having the time of his life, or at least he thought he was. Maybe he did want to go. Maybe,
although he was still having a good time, or thinking he was having a good time, he was ready to have a different good time. Still feeling high, he was conscious of not feeling as high as he'd felt a short while earlier, when he'd been feeling far higher than he wanted to feel, a feeling whose passing he somewhat regretted. He recognized these post-euphoric symptoms of cocaine, every impulse turning instantly into its opposite. The thing was not to have any thoughts at all, not to fall into the kind of wired-up reverie that made you feel like a dog chewing its tail. How did people ever become addicted to cocaine? He wasn't sure he even
liked
it – though not liking something did not necessarily mean one did not want more of it. He ran that sentence through his head again, untying the tangle of nots. He held up his glass of champagne and looked through it at San Marco, bubbling away greenly like an underwater city. He took a big gulp and turned round. He leant on the rail, tilted his cap back on his head like some swilled-out rummy in a Hemingway story. James, he saw, had emerged from the bedroom, was mingling agreeably with his guests again. Laura too, talking to a guy of about his age, wearing a pale linen jacket. She spotted him and walked over.

‘Let me tell you about linen,’ she said. ‘After a certain age, it makes a man look ten years younger. Up until that age, it makes him look ten years older.’ It was an excellent point, but Jeff was struggling, slightly, with the complexities of the arithmetic involved. He made a mental inventory of his wardrobe, relieved to discover that, as far as he could remember, he didn't own a single item of linen. This bit of stocktaking may have taken longer than he realized. Laura was saying, ‘I'm wondering if it's time to leave.’

‘What time is it? Oh, you don't have a watch either.’

‘It's three,’ she said. ‘I just asked someone.’

‘Three! How did it get to be so late? Let's go.’

‘D'you want to?’

‘I don't know. Do you?’

‘I'd like to stay
and
go.’

They decided to go, even though they didn't know if they wanted to. They found James, who thanked them for coming to his little drinks party. Laura handed back her cap but James said they should both keep them as souvenirs. So they descended the gangplank and walked along the quay like two sailor buddies on shore leave, looking for fights, hookers, tattoos.

Jeff's arm was around Laura's shoulder. The moon was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it was the wrong time of the month. Its absence now made him conscious of its non-appearance earlier in the day, at the Biennale.

‘You know what was lacking in the Arsenale today?’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Photographs of the moon, of space. That's what I love more than anything. Pictures from the NASA archive. The Apollo programme. Extra-Vehicular Activity. Space walks. The Lunar Module. Earthrise. The blue of earth against the infinite black of space.’

It was a valid point even if, conversationally, it proved a void.

They'd given no thought to how they were going to get back home, back to the mainland – if that's what it was called. At the Zitelle stop they consulted the timetable and, after much deliberation and concentration, worked out that a vaporetto was due in twenty minutes. Which meant, since walking was so nice, they could continue on to Redentore, the next stop. They walked on, their arms around each other, hips bumping occasionally together. The dark water lapped against the quay. A satellite passed overhead, silverly and quickly.

A crowd of people was already waiting at Redentore when they arrived, followed, minutes later, by the vaporetto.

They sat outside, at the front of the vaporetto. Another clear, calm night. The lagoon was flat, still, dark. The air, as the boat powered forward, was hot on their faces. It was like being on an open-air spaceship, surging through a sea of stars left reeling in its wake.

In the morning they returned to the place where they'd eaten breakfast the day before, where Jeff had eaten breakfast on his first morning in the city.

‘I can't help it,’ he said, as they drew near. ‘I'm programmed to keep coming back to the same place. Ideally, in fact, to the same table. Which, I see now, is free!’

They sat down. The sun bounced off the silver chairs and the cutlery. Jeff had spent ten minutes in the bathroom, sluicing out, excavating and blowing his nose in order to get it functioning again. And he had a headache. If he hadn't been so happy, he would have been feeling irritable from tiredness and a combination-hangover. (The kind of sleep you had after coke – if you were lucky enough to get to sleep – was devoid of any component of rest, as if the brain kept gurning away while it was notionally asleep.) Laura seemed fine, not even particularly tired – or at least she didn't look it. In a nice, wifely gesture she passed a newspaper for him to look at, but the print was too black and the paper too white.

‘So, what about Cap'n James?’ he asked. ‘About six months from rehab?’

‘Maybe so,’ said Laura. ‘Which means these are the best six months to know him.’ They ordered more water, more coffee, extra glasses of orange juice. Best of all, Laura produced aspirin from her trusty bag.

After breakfast they crossed Accademia and walked to
Laura's hotel so that she could change. He used the bathroom and then lay on the bed, watching her undress and dress, starting to feel better. She had put on a navy blue dress, a halter neck that left her long back almost bare.

‘Ready?’

‘That would be putting it a bit strongly, but at some level I suppose the answer is yes.’ He got off the bed, slipped his feet into his sandals, followed her out of the door.

There were a lot of Biennale-related things scattered around the city that neither of them had yet been to. Fortunately the one they most wanted to see, James Turrell's
Red Shift
, was also the nearest, by the Rialto. It was part of a larger exhibition, but they skipped the other stuff and joined the queue for the darkened room.

At first it looked like just a red painted rectangle, luminous against a dull background. Then, as they sat down and watched, it changed – but so subtly that it was impossible to tell how or when it had changed. The red became a slightly different red, a bit darker or brighter or something. The shape remained the same but, as the colour altered, so the edges of the frame became less rigid. There was a pulse in the changing redness. The surface of the picture was completely flat and infinitely deep. They sat without speaking. Time melted away, registered only in terms of the light and colour changing, to purple, to a deeper purple, a purple that was almost blue and then
was
blue … They were perhaps ten feet away from the light but there was no distance. The colour, the light, touched them. The cycle was beginning again. They stood up and reached into the flat surface of the red, but there was nothing there. It was impossible to feel the back or the side of the light source. Their hands stretched out, suspended in the shifting red that was no longer quite red. It was an illusion, but because it was an illusion this did
not mean it was less real than anything else, than things that were not illusory.

They were disoriented when they stepped outside again. The red square of light was still pulsing in Atman's head as they boarded a vaporetto at Rialto. The fact that they didn't know where it was going changed the vaporetto from a bus to a cruise ship. Neither of them said anything about the Turrell.

For the first time since Jeff had been in Venice, inspectors came and checked everyone's tickets. Being in possession of properly validated, three-day passes suddenly seemed a significant achievement, something to be proud of.

‘We can spend all day on a vaporetto, if we want,’ Jeff said smugly.

‘Yes,’ Laura said. ‘Though if we did, we'd be (a), bored out of our fucking minds and (b), completely seasick.’

They chugged under the Accademia Bridge, past the Gritti and the Guggenheim Collection and San Marco. Eventually they passed beyond Giardini and out into the lagoon, which may even have been the sea proper. Sky and sea opened up. Gulls wheeled overhead. The boat managed to keep fractionally ahead of the pursuing wake. Bits of a wave – the wake of another boat motoring by in the opposite direction – managed to splash aboard for a moment or two. There were various buoys or markers to indicate channels. Someone had dived from one of these: his feet could be seen as he plunged into the sea. At another marker a hand – bright red – emerged from the sea: artworks, of course, life-sized sculptures.

From time to time Laura consulted the map. Eventually she said they should get off at the next stop.

‘What's here?’

‘San Michele,’ she said. ‘A cemetery.’ He could see it now: like Böcklin's
Isle of the Dead
, but symmetrical and neat, and not at all foreboding.

After so long on a boat, the land swayed like the sea. Laura put up her lemon parasol. With the sun so bright, it glowed as if illuminated. All the women, surely, wished they had a parasol, and all the men must have wished they were with the woman who had one. They walked through the gates, entered the curving walls of the island. Beyond this they found themselves in the larger grounds of the cemetery. It was crowded with graves, crammed with flowers. Laura said, ‘Diaghilev is buried here. And Stravinsky’

The first sign they saw, though, was for Ezra Pound. Within the white arrow indicating the way to his grave, someone had written, in black felt tip: ‘J Brodsky.’ Strictly speaking it was graffiti, but it was very civic-minded too. Officially you were directed towards Pound, but someone had taken it upon themselves to update the canon through a bit of guerrilla action. Pound now led, inexorably, to Brodsky. Jeff had never read Brodsky, but knew he was a big deal, that there were growing numbers of people for whom he – Brodsky – was a bigger attraction than Pound. They came to another sign indicating Pound's grave. Once again, the same person had written ‘J Brodsky’ in felt pen on the arrow.