Liquid Desires (43 page)

The waiter brought over the Contessa's second
Coppa Duse
.

“Could we put aside this whole sad story for a while,
caro
?” the Contessa said with a sigh as she picked up her spoon. “Let's put the rock back down in place.”

The Contessa dipped her spoon into the blue-drenched whipped cream. A yellow and black butterfly landed momentarily on her shoulder, perhaps mistaking her floral print for the real thing, and then fluttered off toward the geranium plants across the square.

“Tell me, wasn't Evangeline supposed to have come to Venice?” she said teasingly. “Don't tell me you've left the poor girl languishing, albeit in luxury, at the Cipriani while you stay cool and aloof here in Asolo!”

Urbino told her that Evangeline had decided against coming to Venice and had gone to Rome instead. When he explained about Keats, Shelley, and the Protestant Cemetery, the Contessa's well-arched eyebrows rose fractionally.

She finished another spoonful of the
coppa
before saying, “My! Two graveyard romantics! How could such a marriage of true minds ever have foundered? Tell me, then. Will this meeting in thunder and lightning take place?”

Urbino had had little time to think about Evangeline during the past few days. Since Monday when Eugene told him about her move to Rome, he had been busy with the authorities in Asolo and Venice. Last night at the Palazzo Uccello he had tried to think things through, but hadn't been able to get far before Flavia inevitably intruded. Only toward the end of his solitary hours, with Serena in his lap and Mahler's Fifth Symphony on the player, had he made a decision.

“I'm going to Rome for a few days,” he now told the Contessa, “but there won't be any trip to the cemetery.”

“Should I be relieved? Why aren't you making a ghoulish visit?”

“Because I know Evangeline. I know how she thinks. If I were to go to the cemetery, it would be an acknowledgment that I wanted to begin something with her again or that I might be considering it—and neither is true.”

“I see! You don't want to keep your ghoulish appointment because you loathe being manipulated.”

The Contessa nodded her head, as if she had found the skeleton key to all her friend's peculiarities.

“But I've decided to go to Rome, haven't I? She's manipulated me into that.”

“So that's how you
do
see it! In that case, you should stay right in Asolo and not budge an inch. Summer is absolutely marvelous here, you have to agree. We'll ‘do the social' together, take walks, hide away in the
giardino segreto
where I'll tell you over and over again how much I appreciate what you've done for me and how I'd never do anything to hurt you. Maybe we can even plan another
fête champêtre
together to make up for my garden party.”

“I
have
to go, Barbara,” Urbino said, surprised at his apologetic tone. “If I don't, Evangeline will misinterpret it. She'll think I still have some romantic feelings for her that I would rather not deal with. Besides, I have no ill will toward her. She might have hurt me at the time by taking up with Reid and I wish she had been honest with me instead of having me find out the way I did, but I take a lot of the responsibility. I wanted to protect her more than I loved her. I see that more clearly now than I ever have.”

“It's amazing what even an intelligent man won't allow himself to see until he has to!” the Contessa interjected.

“And now I finally want to put it all behind me,” Urbino persisted, “and the best way is to see her. I'll take the train to Rome tomorrow with Eugene. Evangeline and I will go to dinner, spend some civilized hours with each other, maybe go to the Borghese Gardens or the Villa Farnesina, and talk about the good times. She'll see that I care about her and wish her well, but nothing more. Perhaps I
am
being presumptuous to assume that she has something else in mind now that her marriage to Reid seems to be over, but if I stay up here it won't do either of us any good. Things would be unresolved between us. I don't want her to wonder why I didn't come to Rome. And
I
don't want to wonder why either!”

Urbino and the Contessa remained silent for several moments. Then, under his breath so that the Contessa only heard an indistinguishable mumble, Urbino whispered, “
Colla famiglia
—the family glue.” Urbino had long been fascinated by this play on words which also meant
con la famiglia
or “with the family.” The expression had more resonance for Urbino now than it ever had.

In Italy so much was done
with
the family, so much was done
for
the family and, most decidedly,
because
of it. The family was, indeed, like a glue that held its members together, but not always for their own emotional health. One of the light-emitting diode signs from the previous Biennale came back to Urbino again: “Even Your Family Can Betray You.” The history of Flavia Brollo's family revealed this clearly and tragically—as did Ladislao Mirko's relationship with his abusive father in which both father and son had betrayed each other.

And the family glue was there also in the Hennepin family, although admittedly to a lesser extent, where it was as thick as the molasses made at the Hennepin sugar houses.

Yes, the family glue. Urbino had resisted it, and he didn't regret that he had.

“I'll have Milo drive you and Eugene down,
caro
,” the Contessa said, apparently accepting his decision to go to see Evangeline in Rome. “Perhaps I can come along, too. August is an atrocious time for Rome, but I haven't seen Alvise's cousin Nerina in ages.”

“It would be better if I went alone, Barbara.”

“Believe me! I have no wish to intrude on ‘auld lang syne'! But remember, it can be a somewhat bitter brew. As you wish,
caro
, but my squadron of Roman spies will tell me if you slip off to the cemetery,” she added with a smile, apparently having recovered from her brief high dudgeon.

The waiter came to their table for the empty goblets.

“
Un'altra Coppa Duse per il signore
,” the Contessa told the waiter.

“But, Barbara, I don't want another one.”

“Wanting has nothing to do with it! You need a lot of soothing this afternoon,
caro
. I'm concerned that you make your descent on Rome cool, calm, and collected. If you don't, who knows what will happen?” The Contessa looked at him earnestly, as if to show him how much it would pain her if certain things were to happen in the Eternal City. Then her gray eyes became mischievous. “And if by chance you can't quite finish your
coppa
, I'll help you. Don't you know that's one of the things I want most in the world to do?”

Perhaps seeing the confusion he felt, she quickly added, “I mean, of course, my desire to
help
you. Poor, muddled, well-meaning men like you bring that out in a woman.”

“If you really mean that, Barbara, would you tell me something?”

Urbino made a long pause.

“Well, what is it,
caro
?” the Contessa asked with a touch of impatience.

“Would you tell me why I'm
really
going to Rome?”

The Contessa laughed, seeming to take his question less seriously than he had intended it.

“I thought you'd never ask, but let's wait for the
coppa
,” the Contessa said, reaching across the table and touching his hand.

When the
coppa
came, however, the Contessa delayed giving Urbino the benefit of her opinion until he turned the whole concoction over to her, permitting himself only an initial spoonful. Then, with a smile on her attractive face that made Urbino wonder whether it was in anticipatory relish of the gelato or of her imminent illumination of him, the Contessa launched into just why
she
thought he was going to Rome to meet Evangeline—and a long, involved explanation it proved to be.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Mysteries of Venice series

1

Wrapped in a canvas sheet and covered in one-hundred-and-ten-degree mud, Urbino lay on a gurney in one of the therapy rooms in Abano Terme. He felt as if he were in a secret room of the Marquis de Sade's château, surrounded as he was by antiseptic tiles, grotesque protrusions of spigots and hoses, and an ominous gaping drain in the floor. Only his face, chest, and right arm were free. The therapist had said he would be back in twenty minutes.

Urbino hoped so. Only five minutes had passed and he already felt like calling for help. Thank God for his free hand, which was intended to give the guests—never were they “patients”—the sense that they weren't completely restrained. He raised it to wipe beads of sweat from his forehead and tried to think pleasant thoughts.

He wasn't successful. How could he be, wrapped up like a corpse in a morgue? He was also dead tired, having tossed and turned for two nights in his overheated room, where a sulfurous odor had seeped under the door—the same sulfurous odor that was all around him now and that seemed to suffuse everything and everyone at the spa.

Why not just admit it? He had made a mistake. It would have been better to have checked into the Grand Hotel des Bains on the Lido or the Hassler Villa Medici down in Rome for a complete change of scene, but he'd stick things through for two more days. The Contessa wasn't expecting him back until then. In fact, she might not be that pleased to see him, occupied as she was with the Barone Bobo.

Two hours later, after a spell of sweating induced by the mud therapy that was supposed to “rid his body of its toxicity,” Urbino had a massage, then went to the pool. As he finished his last lap, he looked up to see Marco Zeoli's long, thin face, etched as it always seemed to be with fatigue. The assistant medical director of the spa held out a towel.

Zeoli was doing everything to make Urbino's stay as enjoyable as possible, in the hope that he would praise the spa to the Anglo-American community in Venice. If all went well for him, Zeoli, only forty-one, would soon be made chief medical director. He had been there for almost fifteen years, commuting the twenty-five miles from Venice, where he lived with his widowed mother.

“You seem in fine form, Urbino.”

Zeoli's cold, exact voice suited his severe look. He had always reminded Urbino of a figure out of a Goya painting. It was amusing, if not also a little disconcerting, that a man in his position didn't emanate more of an air of healthiness, unless it was to be found in the ever so faint whiff of the spa's salubrious sulfur that clung to his sallow skin.

“Not everyone comes here because of a problem, and yours is quite minor as far as these things go,” Zeoli quickly added. His professional eye made a quick examination of Urbino's right big toe as Urbino dried himself off. “Quite a few come just for rest and recreation—from as far away as England and Germany. That man and woman over there”—he indicated a late-middle-aged couple with round, healthy faces and reddish hair—“come all the way from Finland every year, and they're in the best of health. Remember that Abano's mud and thermal waters have drawn people since the time of the Romans. Maybe you can come back and work on your newest book. Our library is the best in Abano. If you have any problems or suggestions, let me know. Good day.”

Zeoli left.

As he sat in a poolside chair, Urbino thought about what Zeoli had said about the Romans and smiled to himself. The men and women in their white robes, in fact, did look a little like toga-clad Romans, especially an overweight, homely man taking off his robe at the other end of the pool. With his round, completely bald head and pendulous lower lip, he resembled a corrupt senator from the time of the Caesars. It was only his unmistakable aura of sorrow and preoccupation that softened the edges of the image. He caught Urbino staring at him and frowned.

Urbino turned his attention to
Fire
, D'Annunzio's novel about Venice, a fictionalized account of his affair with the actress Eleonora Duse. The hero was delivering a paeon to Venice at the Doges' Palace while his aging mistress gazed adoringly at him from the crowd. The scene was filled with passion and bombast, poetry and prophecy, which managed to be somehow both inspiring and ridiculous at the same time.

Despite all D'Annunzio's excesses, you could easily be drawn in, as Urbino was now. This was D'Annunzio's power, a power that the unattractive little man had exerted not only on the page but in the bedroom. All this made Urbino apprehensive about the Barone Casarotto-Re, who supposedly resurrected D'Annunzio's spirit, though obviously not his homely flesh.

“Excuse me, Signor Macintyre.” It was the pool attendant with a portable phone. “You have a call.”

“Urbino!” Urgency charged the Contessa's voice. “I hate to bother you in the midst of your mud”—her light laugh sounded strained—“but there's a problem. Everything is at sixes and sevens! Bobo is being threatened! You have to come back to Venice immediately and do something!”