Without Reservations (31 page)

I thought about my own life and wondered: would there ever be
another large commitment in my life? Or would my life now become just a series of small ones? It occurred to me that perhaps, in the long run, small was better.

Right now I had two excellent commitments to carry out: to spend my last day visiting, if I could find it, the Casa di Riposo per Musicisti; and to get ready to leave for Venice, where I planned to hook up with a group traveling south to Tuscany, Umbria, and the Amalfi Coast.

True enough, neither of these plans amounted to a major life commitment. Still, I found myself thinking that such small steps may be all a person needs to set out on a new path. The thought cheered me, although until that moment I wasn’t aware I needed cheering.

Along with the cheer came a surge of optimism. It was a totally unearned optimism; mysterious in its source but real nonetheless. Then, in what I guessed was a sly trick of association, I thought of E. B. White’s observation that “once in everyone’s life there is apt to be a period when he is fully awake, instead of half-asleep.”

I started walking. When I approached the corner, I wondered: should I turn right? Or left? Then I realized it really didn’t matter. Either way, something new—perhaps a tiny adventure—awaited my arrival.

I hurried down the street. Whatever was around the corner, I didn’t want to miss a minute of it.

A
t caffè Florian the morning music had just begun. Tired-looking tourists sitting over their cappuccinos seemed to perk up as the band launched into a medley from
Cabaret.
I could see feet tapping under the tables, keeping time with the beat.

Late morning was a nice time to sit in the Piazza San Marco. The crowds had yet to arrive and the large square, half in sun and half in shadow, could be appreciated for what it was: one of the most beautiful and romantic spots in the world. Sitting at a table facing a domed, pink-and-gold church that glowed jewellike against a cloud-puffed sky of azure blue, I thought: it’s unreal. It’s like a stage set painted by children for a school play.

Of course, my being here was just as unreal. October was around the corner, but there were still mornings when I woke up, surprised to find myself in Italy and not in Baltimore. At home, the Japanese maple in my garden would be turning gold; at work, the newsroom would be back in full swing after the doldrums of late summer. Sometimes I thought I should be there, writing columns and rushing from place to place, not here, leisurely drinking espresso while contemplating the shimmering mirage of Venice.

But it was easier now than it had been six months earlier to let go of such thoughts. Usually I had only to ask myself one question: how stupid would it be to get stuck in the past or the future when I could sink into a morning like this?

So much was going on. I watched the waiters glide from table to table, swooping down at the last minute to present with a flourish a cappuccino or an iced Coca-Cola. An important-looking couple swept in, accompanied by an entourage of Prada-clad young
men carrying cellular phones. Across the square at the Quadri, a rival café to Florian’s, a second band of musicians could be heard tuning up. Then just as Florian’s quintet segued into “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” the Quadri’s group burst into a medley from
Oklahoma.
Dueling cafés, I thought.

I ordered another espresso. The waiter bowed and went off, expertly threading his way between the tables that now were quite crowded. I sat alone, looking around and eavesdropping.

Behind me a man said to a woman, “The canals are pretty, but I hate not being able to rent a car and go where I want to go when I want to go.” At another table where four women sat, one said, “Does anyone have any idea of how to get back to the hotel?” Two tables away I noticed an attractive man sitting alone reading
Le Monde.
Was he French? I wondered. To my chagrin, he caught me staring at him. He nodded, then smiled. I smiled back, then turned away, embarrassed. But I was also pleased. This small attention from a handsome stranger was like a bone thrown to my vanity. I resisted the temptation to march ahead into full-dress fantasy.

Still, I did allow myself to recall
Summertime
, an old movie filmed in Venice. In it, Katharine Hepburn played an aging, unaccompanied spinster visiting Europe for the first time. Wandering one late afternoon into the Piazza San Marco, she sits alone and sad at a café table, watching the couples around her. Then, just when she’s all teary-eyed—in the way only Katharine Hepburn can be teary-eyed—
poof
, the handsome Rossano Brazzi appears. They fall in love. She falls into a canal. They part, knowing their relationship has no future.

A sense of discomfort followed my reprisal of the movie’s romance-fantasy plot. The sad truth, no, the
pathetic
truth, was that it struck too close to home. It was not a scenario I wanted to examine in detail. Not now, anyway.

Three days had passed since I’d left Milan with a group of travelers. After Venice, our first stop, we were headed for Tuscany, Umbria, and the Amalfi Coast. Of the sixteen people traveling together, all but three—myself and two other women—were traveling with a partner of one sort or another. Our guide was a smart, formidable Australian woman who had lived in Italy for many years. She was also tall, an attribute that proved to be almost as valuable as her fluent Italian. When separated from the group by crowds or a tendency to malinger at a shop window, her long neck and elegant head bobbing above the thronging tourists proved a reliable compass.

We had traveled by train from Milan to Venice, stopping over in Verona for lunch. In Verona, by pure chance, I sat at a table with the three people who would become my closest pals on the trip: Marta and Bernie, a middle-aged married couple from Connecticut; and Vivian, a writer from New York whose husband had died two years earlier. Vivian was, as the French like to say, a woman of a certain age. Although I became close to Marta, Bernie, and Vivian, it did not follow that we were a foursome. My friendship with Marta and Bernie existed separately from my relationship with Vivian and, as the trip progressed, each had its own dynamic.

Marta, a short dark-haired woman with a quick, intelligent face and an acerbic wit, was amazingly well-read. She also was overweight; so much so that it sometimes physically slowed her down. Her husband, Bernie, was also quick-witted and well-read. I liked being around them. They obviously enjoyed one another’s company and were respectful of their differences. I was impressed that
Bernie, energetic and always ready to go, showed no impatience when Marta was unable to keep up. When such a situation arose, Bernie, in subtle ways, saw to it that his wife did not feel left out or self-conscious. Relaxed in both attitude and attire, Marta and Bernie seemed living examples of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach to life.

Vivian, on the other hand, was always perfectly turned out. Even racing to catch a train in the morning, Vivian was an exemplar of exquisite grooming and detailed accessorizing. In appearance and philosophy, Vivian was a true romantic. She believed in and was motivated by the idea of keeping romance alive in a marriage or relationship. To her this meant never allowing your significant other to see you if you were not coiffed and looking your best.

“Men want to see the finished product,” she told me, “not the work in progress.”

I could only imagine the enormous effort required by this approach but, according to Vivian, it kept alive the romance in her marriage until the very end. Professionally, Vivian put the same philosophy to use. She wrote romantic novels—a genre not to be confused with romance novels of the bodice-ripping kind.

But for all her attention to matters of appearance, in the end it was not color-coordinated outfits or attentive grooming that defined Vivian. She was a novelist, after all, and what interested her most—after the feats of self-adornment had been gotten out of the way—were other people’s stories. In conversation, she was surprisingly adept at asking the kind of unexpected question capable of teasing out a person’s intimate feelings.

“Are you in love?” Vivian asked me on our second night together in Venice. We were having dinner, the group that is, on a beautiful candlelit terrace overlooking the Grand Canal when Vivian, sitting next to me, brought up the subject of love. Ordinarily,
I would find such a question out of line if asked by someone I’d known for only two days. But traveling friendships are different from normal friendships, and I found Vivian’s question perfectly reasonable. Still, it was not one I could answer with any clarity.

“Oh, there are moments when I think of someone and find myself missing him,” I said. “But I don’t know if it’s love I’m feeling. In a way, it seems more like feeling the absence of love.”

“That’s interesting, although I’m not sure what it means,” Vivian said.

I laughed. “I’m not so sure I know what it means either.”

Earlier that day Vivian and I had spent part of the afternoon visiting the Peggy Guggenheim collection of twentieth-century art. We had taken the vaporetto across the Grand Canal to Dorsoduro; from there we walked along the narrow
calli
to the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, where Guggenheim had lived until her death in 1979. Now her modern art collection is there, existing side by side, like a debutant among dowagers, with the High Renaissance art at the stately Accademia Gallery.

Although Vivian and her husband had visited Venice several times, she’d never seen the Guggenheim collection. “Hal and I were not much drawn to modern art,” she told me as we entered the quiet, shady courtyard at the rear of the palazzo. Vivian often linked her observations to those of her late husband, Hal; occasionally she would accidentally slip into the present tense. I had the impression that part of Vivian lived in the past; that often what she enjoyed or did not enjoy was linked to memories of traveling with Hal.

I understood this. Although Mother had been dead for almost ten years, more than once on this trip I’d had the urge to phone her: “Hello, Mother,” I could hear myself saying, “you won’t believe it, but today in a private garden I saw the most beautiful three-hundred-year-old yellow rose growing against a pink brick wall.”

But Vivian, I found, was also capable of enjoying new experiences. When we emerged from the Peggy Guggenheim museum, she was genuinely enthusiastic about the collection. I told her I admired her for being open enough to let go of her prejudice against modern art.

Her answer was not what I expected. “I just wish I weren’t so prejudiced against the future,” she said. “At my age it’s a constant struggle to look ahead and be optimistic.”