The Mountain Cage (38 page)

“What’s happening?” Miriam asked.

“You must know. I’ve come to help you. I’m your friend, Miri, and you need me now.” Vera gestured at a shiny black motorboat. “Get in. Thought you might like to see the outlying islands. You can get there on the
vaporetto
lines, but this’ll be easier.”

Miriam hesitated, then climbed into the boat. Vera got in next to her and sat down in front of the steering wheel. The motor began puttering almost instantly, as if the boat were starting itself.

Vera took them out of the harbor toward a broad canal that ran between islands, slowing down as they reached the open water of the lagoon. The boat slowed still more until it seemed that they were hardly moving at all. Miriam looked back. Venice was a pastel city adrift on a gold-flecked sea.

She could not recall seeing the other woman actually start the boat or put any keys into the ignition, although she noticed that a key was there now. Being in a strange place and seeing someone she had never expected to see here had disoriented her. Maybe Vera’s home was on one of the other islands. Perhaps Vera was waiting until they were there, in the place where she lived, before she told Miriam about her life and what had brought her to Venice. Miriam clung to those strands of rational explanation for what was happening to her.

“That’s the cemetery,” Vera said, waving toward a distant island on which a church stood. “Some famous people are buried there. You can hear the water lapping at the island when you’re among the gravestones. Trouble is, if your survivors don’t keep up the payments on your gravesite, they dig you up after fifty years and dump you somewhere else. The Venetians always find ways to make more money.”

“I wish some of that ability would rub off on me,” Miriam said.

“I used to wish the same thing,” Vera said. “I had some pretty desperate times after we graduated from college. Then I ended up with a fair amount of money and found out that having it didn’t matter as much as I thought it would.”

“I’ve been finding out that not having it matters more than I ever imagined.”

Vera had slowed their boat nearly to a crawl, following the darker blue waters of a channel through the green lagoon. In the distance, a fisherman with a net was standing to his knees in water next to his boat.

“Water seems awfully shallow,” Miriam said.

“Most of the lagoon’s like that. All the boats have to take certain routes to keep from running aground, and they have to go slowly, too. That’s partly because the water isn’t deep, but it’s also to keep from damaging sea walls like that one with a lot of waves from boats going too fast.” Vera pointed at a long stone wall bordering the church on another distant island. Miriam wondered why this nautical traffic was nowhere in evidence now. No other boats were on the water except theirs, no cruisers, no
vaporetti
.

“I should have kept up with you, Miri,” Vera went on. “I could have at least written to you.”

“I sent a wedding invitation to your parents and told them to forward it to you.”

Vera smiled. “They did, and I actually thought of going. But I couldn’t afford the plane ticket, and I hadn’t seen you for almost three years and—well, I figured a lot had changed.”

“You probably couldn’t believe I’d gotten so conventional,” Miriam said.

“That was part of it, I guess. I was going to write you a letter, but I tore it up halfway through. My life wasn’t exactly in order back then. Then I thought, well, there’s plenty of time, I can always get in touch later.”

Ahead lay an island of brightly painted houses, long drab buildings that looked like factories, and a precipitously leaning belltower. “I drifted for a while,” Vera continued. “I’d get a job and tell myself I’d work on my art in my spare time. Of course I never did. I’ve been a receptionist, a nursery school teacher, a case worker, a proofreader, and a few other things. I lived with a guy and we broke up, and then I lived with somebody else, and that ended, too. Basically I was just waiting for my real life to begin, or maybe just waiting to grow up.”

“Were you unhappy?” Miriam asked.

Vera shook her head. “No, but I was frustrated. The whole excuse for living that way was to get my painting done, and I wasn’t doing it. I had to keep pretending I would, because otherwise it was just a wasted life, really.”

They had passed the island with the leaning belltower. The light was fading, and Miriam wondered how close they were to their destination.

“Then a lot of things happened.” Vera rested one hand across the wheel. “My father died, and I lost my job, the one I had then, and—well, to make a long story short, I started doing freelance commercial work and using my free time for painting and taking classes. I wasn’t exactly a great success, but I was happy. Had my first show in a local bank.” She wrinkled her nose. “It was a start. Then I won a prize in a local art show. That’s where I met Al, my husband.”

“Sounds romantic,” Miriam said.

“He’d wandered into the art show by mistake on his way to a Chamber of Commerce thing in the same building.” Vera shook back her long gray hair. “We got married almost eight years ago. I’ve been really happy with him. We tried for kids, but I couldn’t have them, and at least we had each other. Never set the art world on fire, but I did a couple of shows in New York galleries and got part-time gigs in the local schools and community college. I got some critical attention. I could always hope—” Her voice trailed off.

Ahead of their boat stretched empty water, still and gray, and the sun had taken on a strange metallic glow. In the distance, an indistinct dark shape sat on the horizon. Miriam glanced at the other woman apprehensively. It suddenly seemed the height of recklessness to have gotten into this boat with Vera, to have come this far out on the lagoon.

“Al sold his business a few months back,” Vera murmured. “Our plan was to go to all the places we always wanted to see and never had, Venice and Paris and Istanbul and so on. The deal was this—we’d stay in one place until we felt like moving on, and then we’d go to the next city. Venice was the first stop.”

Miriam said, “So everything worked out.”

“You could put it that way.” Vera turned toward her and rested one hand on Miriam’s arm. “I’ve had some happiness.”

“And how long do you think you’ll be here?”

Vera drew away. Miriam saw now that they were approaching an island. A church of russet-colored brick sat just above a low sea wall; beyond the church were clusters of houses painted green and red and purple and yellow. The landing was a long wooden dock, but no boats were tied up there.

“Where are we?” Miriam asked. Vera did not reply. Miriam thought of pulling her guide and maps from her purse to check on the location, then peered at her watch. Four-fifteen, which was impossible; they had left the pier just below Saint Mark’s not long past four. Miriam squinted and saw that the hand marking the seconds had stopped.

“Damn this watch,” she muttered. “It just died on me. Battery must be defective. I just had it replaced before we left home.”

Vera said, “I should have written to you. I should have been a better friend than I was. You could have used a really good friend, I think, someone to help you treasure what you have, keep you from tormenting yourself.” She steered the boat smoothly through the water to the dock. “Go ahead. I’ll tie up the boat and follow you. That path there will take you to the square.”

Miriam climbed out of the boat. Darkness had come, even though it could not be that late; the shadows were deep under the broad-limbed trees that stood along the cobblestoned footpath. She followed the path up the gently sloping hill until she glimpsed the empty space of a town square above. She picked up her pace, and the silence seemed to thicken around her.

She entered the square. A church of pale stone stood in one corner; three-story houses with shuttered windows surrounded the square on three sides. A tiered fountain in which no water was running stood in the center of the square near a flagpole without a flag. There were no signs of people, no signs of life.

“Vera,” she said, and the air seemed to swallow the word. “Vera!” The emptiness of the place frightened her. “Vera!” She looked around frantically for the other woman. Why had her friend brought her here? She ran toward the church, wondering if she might find people there.

“Miri!” Someone was calling her, someone at a distance. “Miri!” She recognized the voice now.

She hurried toward the voice, out of the square and past a long row of houses. Alan was standing near a narrow canal; he held out his arms as she rushed to him.

“Miri.” He pressed her to him; she hugged him tightly, feeling suddenly that she had to cling to him, then looked into his face.

“What are you doing here?” she gasped. “How did you get here?”

He smiled, the way he used to before his not-quite-smile had become a habit. “I’m here now. Can’t you just accept that?”

Vera had arranged this. That was the only rational explanation. She and Alan had planned this in secret and he had pretended he wasn’t feeling well so that he could get to this island ahead of her. She could not be imagining it; he was here, solid and real. “You should have told me,” she said. “You didn’t have to—”

He took her arm. They strolled along the canal, past the few gondolas tied up there; she had not known that there were gondolas on these outlying islands. “Vera certainly fooled me,” Miriam murmured. “I never would have guessed. How did you plot all this? When you went to change money, I’ll bet. Did you know Vera was living in Venice all along?” He said nothing. “You saw her, too. You’ve met her. She talked you into coming here and surprising me. That means I’m not going crazy after all.”

Alan slowed his pace. “I haven’t been treating you well lately,” he said. “I wanted this trip to be something special for us, sort of a new start. Or, if things don’t work out businesswise, something we can remember.”

She clutched his arm more tightly. He had on his favorite dark blue cashmere sweater over his shirt. She did not recall seeing him pack the pullover, or the navy blue slacks he was wearing, either. They had both decided on his pin-striped suit, his white dinner jacket and black slacks for evening wear, and brown, beige, and tan jackets and pants for the rest of the time. She remembered the details because they had ended up arguing even over the clothes he would take, and he had insisted on throwing in two pairs of jeans at the last minute.

“Footloose and fancy free,” he went on. “That’s what I figured on for myself. Never thought I’d seriously consider getting married until I met you, and then I knew I just didn’t want to go through the rest of my life without you. Knew that two hours after I met you.”

“Two hours?” Miriam smiled. “I thought it took you two days to fall in love with me.”

“I told you it took me two days because I didn’t want you thinking I was too rash, or rushed into things. That’s why I waited a week before proposing, too.”

He had waited barely a week. She had insisted on living with him for a while first, to make sure they were truly compatible and things would work out, and it had not even occurred to her that moving in with a man she had known for only a week might be precipitous. They had been married six months later, and she had felt no qualms about that, either, despite her mother’s doubts about Alan’s new business and her friends at work who felt that marriage was an outmoded institution. They had to be doing the right thing. Otherwise, they would not be feeling so much for each other, would not have made the decision to share their lives so quickly.

Often she had thought of her early self as naive and deluded and too trusting. Now she felt as though she had seen things clearly then, and that her vision had become more clouded and blurred with the years.

“We were happy then,” she said. “Even with all the problems—”

“And then the kids came—”

“And then I was so damned exhausted all the time that there wasn’t time to think about whether I was happy or not.” Joelle had inherited her own father’s lanky frame and his dark hair, while Jason had Miriam’s blue eyes and her father’s broad, pleasant face. Everyone had always complimented her on her good-looking children.

“We had some good times,” Alan said. “I think I appreciated them more later, when I’d be remembering them, than when they were actually happening.”

He led her away from the canal toward a narrow passageway that ran between buildings. The doors were closed, the windows shuttered or their curtains drawn. She wanted to ask Alan how he had gotten here, why no one was on this island, why Vera had gone to all that trouble to get her to this deserted place, and then she gazed into his composed, serene face and forgot her questions.

A door was suddenly flung open. Miriam stepped back, drawing closer to Alan. She gazed into a small sitting room, where a young man sat at a table; the pretty young woman by the door giggled.

“Buona sera,”
Alan murmured.

“Buona sera,”
the young woman replied. She was wearing a long red dress and holding a mask in one hand. She lifted the mask to her face and tilted her head.

Miriam could now hear the sound of voices. At the end of the passageway, they came to a broad cobblestoned street and found it filling with people. Couples, a few in masks, strolled arm in arm and stopped to peer into brightly lighted shop windows. The younger women were in colorful long dresses, the older ones in subdued shades of purple and dark blue. Most of the men were in black pants and loose white shirts with full sleeves. They had to be locals; no one was wearing the tourist costume of jeans, T-shirts, and athletic shoes. Perhaps this was some obscure Venetian festival the travel agent and guide books had neglected to mention.