Without Reservations (32 page)

If appearance and energy were any indication, Vivian could be in her fifties. However, certain biographical facts mentioned by her suggested she was closer to seventy. Marta, who liked Vivian, leaned toward the higher figure. “I think she’s had a facelift,” Marta said. “It’s subtle, but there’s something about the mouth.” Bernie, who said he didn’t know from facelifts, said, “What does it matter? I’d be happy to have that kind of energy at any age.”

It was true. Vivian seemed tireless.

“Let’s walk back to the hotel,” she said after leaving the Guggenheim collection. She was suggesting a walk of at last two miles; more, if we got lost in the narrow, winding
calli
that snaked through Venice with no obvious beginning or end. Walking in Venice, I had found, was like white-water rafting: once you entered the eddies and swirls of these small streets the only thing to do was go with the flow. To me, being swept along to some mysterious destination was part of the city’s magical allure.

After forty minutes of walking, we emerged from one of the
narrow
calli
onto the vast open space of the Piazza San Marco. Vivian didn’t seem or look tired. In fact she suggested we stroll around the arcade and do some window-shopping. A few shops down from Florian’s, Vivian stopped in front of a window display of expensive jewelry. She told me of her husband’s habit of buying her a gift, usually jewelry, on each of their trips. In Venice, he had surprised her with a turquoise bracelet.

“The one I’m wearing,” she said, raising her arm to show me a lovely blue-green rope of turquoise. “He bought it here, in this shop.” Vivian paused. “I’ve thought about getting earrings to match it.” She paused again. “Would you like to go in with me?”

I agreed and we entered the shop. Immediately, a well-dressed man with coiffed silver hair approached us. “May I help you?” he asked.

Vivian showed him the bracelet and explained she was interested in turquoise earrings. “My husband bought the bracelet here and I thought you might be able to match the color.” Vivian and I were then seated in chairs before a glass case on top of which were flat black velvet pads. The man left, returning with a small case of turquoise earrings. I could see at once they were not at all the same color as Vivian’s bracelet. Vivian could, too, but was polite enough to try on one of the earrings before pointing out the difference. When she did, the man became annoyed.

“But that is as close as you can get, signora. If you know turquoise you know this is a good match.”

“But I have seen turquoise in just the shade of my bracelet,” Vivian said.

“Well, perhaps, signora, you should buy
that
turquoise,” the salesman said curtly, removing the turquoise earrings from the black velvet pad. He was dismissing Vivian. And she knew it.

“That would never have happened if I’d been with Hal,” she
said, walking back to the hotel. “Or if I were a younger woman.” She sighed. “That’s the worst thing about growing older. People dismiss you. As though you were a child.”

“Oh, Vivian, you’re much too much of a force to be dismissed,” I said. My reassurance, however, did not cheer her. For the first time on the trip, she looked tired.

As I lay in bed that night I thought of Vivian’s remark about optimism. Or, more to the point, her observation about the difficulty of maintaining optimism as you grow older. I thought about the bittersweet feelings I had in Milan as I watched Carolyn go off to begin a new life. Everything was ahead of her, I had thought then. Including the idea of time as an infinite presence. Unlike me, she had not yet heard the faint sound of a clock ticking.

But as I lay in bed in Venice, thinking about the people I’d met on this trip and the challenges and excitement that each day brought, I heard no ticking. Instead I thought about how I had surprised myself this year by jumping in to reshape my life before life stepped in to reshape it for me.

And, I reasoned, if I could reinvent myself once, I could do it more than once.

The next morning brought a surprise. When I arrived at Florian’s for my cappuccino, the Piazza San Marco was almost entirely under water—in some places by as much as a foot. To allow pedestrians to
cross the square, catwalks had been set up on metal trestles that rose a few feet above the water. Fascinated, I watched as people struggled to navigate the narrow wooden planks. Since pedestrian traffic flowed in both directions like a two-lane highway, crossing required not only balance but nerve. Particularly disadvantaged were the new arrivals to Venice, those just deposited by vaporetto and searching for their hotels. They had the added burden of dragging their luggage with them across the makeshift platforms.

“It’s the
acque alte,”
said the waiter, standing next to me in the arcade outside Florian’s. “The high waters from the lagoon.”

I had read about the
acque alte.
I knew that each year, usually between October and April, exceptionally high tides poured through the three gates and into the city. The Piazza San Marco was particularly vulnerable, the waiter told me, because it is the lowest point in Venice.

After watching for several more minutes, I mounted a plank that would deposit me near the less-crowded Castello neighborhood. The group was leaving for Florence after lunch, and before we left I wanted to check out an inexpensive
pensione
recommended by a friend. I already knew I wanted to spend more time in Venice, and this place sounded quite nice.

Sadly, I never got there.

Halfway across the catwalk a major pile-up occurred when some school kids, out for a joy walk, decided to play a version of “chicken” on the narrow planks. After placing themselves on a collision course with oncoming tourists, they would wait to see who would give way first. Naturally it was always the adults who chickened out, jumping into the foot-deep water. When my turn came I decided it was better to jump than fall. Several tourists behind followed me, like lemmings, into the water. A big splash ensued. I got soaked.

Later, sitting in my room, my clothes hung on a chair to dry, I consoled myself with thoughts of what a good story it would make when I got home. Although it wasn’t exactly like Katharine Hepburn falling into a canal—I did jump, after all, not fall—there were some similarities. It involved Venice, for one thing, and water, for another.

In the next few weeks, as the group worked its way south, the days and the towns passed by quickly. We were like a touring company of actors: always on the move, packing and unpacking, checking in and checking out of hotels, catching trains and buses on a schedule that allowed us to wake up in Perugia, have lunch in Rome, and go to bed in Sorrento.

And like any group thrown together in a strange situation, we developed the sort of we’re-in-this-together, for-better-or-for-worse camaraderie that I found appealingly familial. It was something I missed, the sense of sharing those small, daily experiences that, as far as I can tell, are really what life boils down to.

I particularly enjoyed being around Marta and Bernie. Often we shared meals together, using the time to agree on or argue about books, politics, personalities, and what we liked or didn’t like about the trip. If I had to pinpoint what drew me to Marta and Bernie, beside their humor and interest in the world, it was this: the three of us just liked one another. And we all knew it.

It was in the hill towns of Tuscany and Umbria, however, that the depth of Marta’s character began to reveal itself to me.

Because Marta’s weight limited the amount of walking she could do on the steep streets of towns like Amalfi and San
Gimignano, she sometimes spent the afternoon sitting in a café or on a hotel veranda with a view. There, with the town’s activity going on around her and the olive groves stretching out beneath, Marta sat, taking in the essence of that particular place. Sometimes, when I grew weary of long lectures inside museums and churches, I would abandon the lecturer—as Whitman had abandoned his “learned astronomer”—to join Marta outside in her quiet vigil of the Italian countryside.

On one such occasion in Assisi—a town with streets so steep it was like walking up the face of a cliff—Marta said, “I know some of the others think I shouldn’t have come on a trip that involved so much walking and climbing. But I don’t feel I’ve missed a thing. Just look out there.”

It was late afternoon and we were sitting in the warm sun of the Hotel Subasio overlooking the Umbrian countryside. Beneath us, stretched out as far as we could see, was a patchwork quilt of hills, olive groves, and terraced vineyards.

“You’re right, Marta,” I said. “I can’t imagine anyplace I’d rather be.”

The hotel just outside the city walls of Siena looked fabulous. An historic sixteenth-century villa surrounded by olive groves and gardens, it was the epitome of Tuscan charm. It was a little after six in the evening and we were lined up at the receptionist’s desk, waiting to check in. We were all tired and hungry and not looking forward to the predictable delay that accompanied the processing of a late-arriving group.

“I hear the rooms here are lovely,” Vivian said, as we stood in
the lobby waiting to be shown to them. I could tell she was anxious. It was becoming clear to her that single travelers, despite paying a surcharge, did not get the best rooms in the house. Although I thought the practice of penalizing someone for traveling alone was unfair, I’d grown used to it. Vivian, on the other hand, had not. It distressed her to be assigned to what usually amounted to a small room with little or no view.

When our turn came to follow the bellhop to our rooms, he ushered us, along with the third single woman in the group, through a door leading away from the main hotel. After climbing a flight of steps and crossing a hallway, we found ourselves in a modern annex. There was no sign of any other guests in this part of the hotel. The bellhop stopped to open one door, and then another and another. I stepped into mine. It was a dreary room with a musty smell. Since it was dark outside I couldn’t tell if it had a view.

Oh well, I thought, it’s only for two nights. I started to unpack; in an hour we were to drive into Siena for dinner. I heard a tap on my door. It was Vivian. “Is your room as bad as mine?” she asked. I could tell she was upset.