Finally, the German students pack up their backpacks and titter out the door, pulling the Frenchwomen along in their wake. The British family connects itself back together and shuffles out behind them, leaving me alone with St. Christopher. It takes me a moment to realize that the black-haired man is gone.
I stand, surprised that I am disappointed. I pick up my sketch pad and walk down the stairs. Outside in the great hall stands the man, hands in his pockets, waiting, I hope, for me. He seems agitated.
“Sometimes the crowds irritate me,” he says. “They show no respect.”
I ask him, “Are you Venetian?”
“I am. . . . Yes. I am.” The man waves his hand as if he were a king dismissing his court. “I shouldn’t let it annoy me. Come. Let us see the other Titian.”
He puts his hands on my shoulders and turns me toward the exit. I feel a small thrill at his touch, though he does it in a fatherly sort of way. But then, after a profusion of proxies, I have only been confused by the touch of a father’s hand and what, exactly, that is supposed to feel like.
We walk through the main floor of the palace and down the Scala d’Oro, the Golden Staircase, all gilded stuccos and white marble, and head out to the courtyard.
“My name is Marco.” His pace is fast, and I scurry to keep up. “My parents were not very creative, I’m afraid. I think every other man in Venice is named Marco, after our patron saint. He is symbolized by the lion, the Lion of St. Mark.”
I know this, but I don’t tell him so. We pass underneath the Porta della Carta, the magnificent marble entrance with its seventy-five lions. “My name is Fan,” I say. “My mother named me after Ebenezer Scrooge’s dead sister in ‘A Christmas Carol.’ My father wasn’t there to stop her.”
Marco pauses and holds out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Fan.” His fingers are long and spindly, like the bow of a violin. “Are you here on holiday?”
I notice he wears no rings. “Sort of. I’m visiting my aunt Ziggy, my stepdad’s sister. She lives here—she’s an artist. Well, she’s not really my aunt, and he’s not really my stepdad, he’s my mom’s latest boyfriend, but I call him my stepdad, so I call her my aunt. He sent me here for my birthday. Though I think they really just wanted me out of the house. They’re having problems.” I have no idea why I am revealing all this personal information to a stranger.
The brick bell tower, the Campanile, looms up in front of us; the Basilica, looking more like a magic castle than a cathedral, its four bronze horses galloping over the entrance, is to the right.
“Ziggy?” Marco pronounces it “Zeegy,” and his accent charms me like a snake. He takes my hand and tucks it through his arm. I know this is not unusual in Italy, friends linking together, men and men, women and women, fathers and daughters—but his touch throws me off balance and I stumble. Marco squeezes my hand with the inside of his elbow and steadies me.
“Ziggy is a nickname. I forget her real name.” My voice from the Florida suburbs sounds nervous and nasal, and I think I must speak more softly and accent my consonants.
“I believe I’ve met your aunt Ziggy,” says Marco. “At an exhibition. The Biennale, perhaps.”
“You have?” I am startled. “At the Biennale? The art festival?”
“It is not so unusual. Venice is a very small town. And Ziggy is a very distinct name.”
We weave our way across Piazza San Marco, the immense central square, which is crammed with visitors. We pass the outdoor cafés, with their dueling violins and pianos. An elderly couple, with pearls and white-tipped cane, dances a waltz. Dozens of languages from hundreds of people waft in between the notes; the bells on the Campanile chime six o’clock. I feel dizzy, as though I’ve stepped into an exotic painting, not quite real.
We stop at the opposite end of the square in front of an enormous double staircase. I know this is the Correr Museum.
“Napoléon tore down a church to connect the buildings in the square,” I say, wanting to impress him with my guidebook knowledge.
“Yes.” Marco smiles. “You’ve been studying our history.” I score two points. The green flecks in his eyes catch the sun, emeralds surrounding a dark stone setting. Again, he touches my shoulder to direct me forward. A finger tangles in my hair. He gently unravels it. “Your hair is the color of Titian’s paint.”
Now I really start to wonder if he’s coming on to me. I decide that would be okay. I touch the tips of my tresses and smile back at him, hoping I look demure. “Thanks.” My hair is burnt red and thick, like a lush, foreign material falling from my head. Sometimes I feel like nature made a mistake, and this shawl of curls was supposed to be given to someone more flamboyant.
We climb the stairs and enter the lobby. “The entrance to the library is at the very end of the museum these days, so we will actually walk all the way back to where we came, across from the Palazzo Ducale.” Marco ushers me toward a woman guarding the entrance to a long corridor. “It seems that entrances and exits are always changing in this city, like some madman playing a game. I have no control over it.”
I think that is an odd thing to say, especially when the woman at the entrance straightens up at the sight of Marco. “Buena sera, Sindaco.”
“Buena sera. I am taking this young lady to see the Titian in the Marciana.” Marco’s tone is authoritative, a superior to a subordinate.
The woman, however, smiles, as if she knows his secret. “Of course, Sindaco. Enjoy your visit.” She glances at me and winks, and I wonder what she’s thinking.
We set off again, hurrying past marble sculptures and antique maps, Renaissance paintings and ancient coins. Marco flings brief descriptions of each room over his shoulder.
“What does that mean, ‘Sindaco’?” I ask as we speed past a room filled with weapons and armor.
“Mayor.”
I stop. “You’re the mayor? The mayor of Venice?” Now I remember that Aunt Ziggy and her expatriate pals have gossiped about the mayor over evening spritzes at the bar in the neighborhood square, calling him a dangerous man. Aunt Ziggy said he’d licked her hand.
Marco nods and seems amused. “As you say, Fan—I try.”
We have arrived in a cool, dark room, curtains drawn, glass-encased manuscripts beneath a gilded ceiling. A gallery of canvases watches us, philosophers and gods, inventors and prophets. Aside from a spectacled fellow sitting behind a desk, we are alone. I think: I am alone with the dangerous mayor of Venice on my sixteenth birthday and I have never been kissed. I hear my heart beat. I hear myself breathe. Marco leads me through the room and into a smaller chamber. He positions me in the center of a large mosaic star on the floor.
“Okay, Fan. Look up.”
I realize I am trembling and try to get a grip. I take a breath. I raise my eyes. There is a single painting on the ceiling, a young woman floating on a cloud, bare feet dangling, nipples erect and poking through a billowy white blouse. Her head tilts toward a large, square mirror hoisted by a cherub. One hand holds a scroll; the other steadies the mirror. She lolls back, confident and contemplative, an elbow resting on a puffy piece of cloud.
“It is Sapientia, the patroness of wisdom.” Marco speaks softly. His murmur resonates off the chamber wall. “Eros, the god of love, holds the mirror.”
“She looks . . . in control.” I am aware, very aware, of Marco standing next to me. The fabric of his jacket brushes against my arm.
“She acquires wisdom by looking inward, with love.” Marco puts a hand on my waist as he speaks. “It is love that allows her to look in the mirror. It is power that allows her to harness her passion and examine the possibilities.”
I move closer, just a breath closer to Marco. I am in Venice beneath Wisdom and Eros, the god of passion and love. I think I am a pagan at heart and should embrace my Sapientia within. I want to gaze into the mirror held by Eros and float around the ceiling, dangling my toes off a fat, fluffy cloud. Marco turns his chestnut eyes down on me as I look up at the painting. Please, I think. Please
. . . And then Eros answers my prayers and I feel his lips on mine, gentle and soft, a kiss from the gods, born in Mount Olympus and transmitted by way of Marco’s lips.
“Happy Birthday, Fan.” Marco wraps my tumbling curls in his hands and pulls the hair back off my face, forcing me to look at him. I see myself reflected in the mirror of his eyes and wonder just how wise I am.
Kissing Lessons
Joseph Weisberg
The summer after seventh grade, I went to the Busby Berkeley Camp for the Performing Arts in Pinewood, Wisconsin. I went there because I liked to tap-dance. I liked to tap-dance because I had no friends, and when you have no friends, you gravitate naturally towards hobbies and interests which ensure that you will never have any friends.
The boys at Busby Berkeley were misshapen, bewildered, and talented. Beefo Kellner was tall and blubbery, spent most of his free time in his bunk clipping his toenails, and had a gorgeous tenor voice. Ed Waxman was squat, cross-eyed, and had numerous facial tics, but completely transformed into a sexy Brando-esque actor the moment he stepped onstage. Greg French had red hair gurgling up from his head like lava, never said a word to anyone, and tap-danced with grace and total abandon. The rest of us were hapless variations on these same themes.
The girls at camp were as perfect and put together as the boys were clunky and poorly assembled. Their hair was curled into loose ringlets that tumbled down to their shoulder blades, or blow-dried into lightly feathered Dorothy Hamill bowls. They wore diamond earrings and makeup with blue jeans. Some of them—Suzi Tefler, Shawn Coe, Nancy Rothstein—had women’s bodies, and moved around camp in a charged fourth dimension, like sexy ghosts. Only junior counselors could talk to them. Most of the others were wafer-thin, had tiny round butts, and tucked in their T-shirts to stretch them tight over their crab-apple breasts. In their own way, they were just as beautiful as the other girls, Kate Jacksons to their Linda Carters. All of them came from the suburbs of Chicago—Winnetka and Highland Park, Northbrook and Glencoe—and they seemed more open and sexual than the
Birth of a Tap Dancer
When I was ten, my cousin Tess took me to see a double feature of Singing in the Rain and Top Hat at the Biograph Theater. After that, I went to every Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movie I could. I renamed my goldfish Fred Kelly. I taped the poster from That’s Entertainment! over my bed. I got a pair of tap shoes.
Every day after school, I went down to our basement, put on the sound track from one of my favorite shows, and danced. I would clack away on the old chipped floor for hours, arms flying, body spinning, little clouds of slate dust kicking up around my feet. I’d arrive at dinner dripping with sweat.
After a year of this, my parents carpeted the basement. I tried dancing on the carpet, but they’d bought a particularly thick, spongy one. I tried dancing in my bedroom, but I wasn’t allowed to wear my tap shoes there because they would scuff up the linoleum tile, and tap dancing in sneakers is unfulfilling.
Soon my focus started shifting to Battlestar Galactica. I named my new hermit crabs Starbuck and Apollo, after the handsome fighter jet pilots in the show who streaked through the sky fighting Cylons. Cylons were members of a master race of robots that wanted to keep Captain Adama
Birth of a Tap Dancer
and his crew from reaching Earth. Instead of eyes, they had red beams in their silver heads that slid incessantly from side to side. I wanted to kill them.
The following spring, my parents decided that I should go to summer camp. Sales reps came to our house from places with names like Loxahatchee and Nebagamon. They showed slides of boys water-skiing and playing baseball, shooting arrows, turning Popsicle sticks into what appeared to be glued-together stacks of Popsicle sticks. The boys were always shirtless, completely flat from waist to neck, with little lines indicating where their chests were going to be.
Then Horace and Sylvia came. They were the owners of the Busby Berkeley Camp for the Performing Arts. Horace seemed to be about ninety years old, and had a pea-sized growth just above his upper lip. He’d had a stroke, and it
city girls I was used to. They made no secret of the fact that boys were the center of their universe. They talked unselfconsciously about the nose jobs they were planning for the end of the summer. And they flirted constantly. At home, nobody ever flirted with me, and now girls were winking at me from across rooms, giggling while they talked to me, hugging me. I felt like someone who’s been raised by a colony of apes, then returns to civilization and suddenly finds himself surrounded by the species he is truly meant to love.
Our show that summer was How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. Because the camp directors wanted as many kids as possible to get a chance to play a lead, the main roles were divided into four parts at Busby Berkeley. This meant that a tall kid with dark hair would come out for the
Birth of a Tap Dancer
was hard to understand him. Sylvia was somewhat younger, very robust, and made occasional jokes in Yiddish (which my parents laughed at, but I didn’t think they really understood).
In their slides, groups of kids were onstage, performing old musicals. In South Pacific the girls were in grass skirts and the boys in sailors’ uniforms. In Oklahoma the girls wore checkered blouses and jeans, and the boys wore cowboy hats and had guns on their belts. Every time a new slide came up, Sylvia would throw her arms out and burst into whatever song the kids were singing.
“We have a sports program, too,” Horace said, showing one slide of a chipped Ping-Pong table with a sagging net.
My parents looked at me, and in the dark, we communicated a silent “Yes.”
first quarter of a show, then a short kid with big red hair would come out in an identical costume for the next three or four scenes, and so on. I was cast as J. Pierpont Finch in the third quarter of How to Succeed. My big number was a college fight song called “Stand Old Ivy” that J. Pierpont sings with his boss. After the song, I had to go over and kiss Rosemary, the leading lady.
Rosemary was being played in the third quarter by Suzi Tefler, the most beautiful, most popular, and tallest girl at camp. She was a foot taller than me. The idea of kissing her filled me with a constant, jittery dread. I had never kissed a girl, and I didn’t really know how, and I didn’t know if when you were doing a show you kissed in rehearsal or waited for the actual performance to do the kiss for the first time.
For the first two weeks of rehearsal, we didn’t get to that scene. Then the day came. Everyone my age at camp was in the show, so they were all there, most of them sitting in the audience watching. I sang my song, a rousing anthem about how the Old Ivy Groundhogs were going to destroy their rival Chipmunks in a football game. Then I walked over to where Suzi Tefler was standing. I turned my back to the audience, closed my eyes, and moved my face towards her, praying that kissing would result.
I felt her breath. Then the electric tingle in front of her lips. Then Suzi jumped back and at the top of her lungs yelled, “HE BIT ME!”
The audience burst into a loud, punishing laughter. It went on and on, and every time it seemed like it was dying down, it built up again. I wanted to run off the stage but knew it would be a mistake to surrender whatever tiny piece of ground I had left.
Manon Guastafeste was my best friend at camp that summer. Guastafeste means “spoiler of the party” in Italian. Manon was short and hyperactive and had a big, beautiful nose on a Jewish-Mediterranean face. I had a crush on her, but she was going out that summer with Billy Zane, who would go on to play the handsome villain in Titanic twenty years later, and who looked exactly the same then as he does now. I accepted that I had no chance with her, and we settled into a friendship.
Manon saw how depressed I was after the biting incident. A few days later, as I was shuffling around the no-man’s-land between the boys’ and girls’ cabins, she came up to me and said, “I’ve solved your problem.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“I got Nina Steinberg to agree to give you kissing
lessons.”
Nina Steinberg was our friend. And she was cute. Although the idea of kissing lessons wasn’t particularly less terrifying than actual kissing, I said, “Okay.”
“She’ll meet you at Brigadoon tonight at nine o’clock.” Every building at camp was named after an old musical. My cabin that summer was South Pacific. The dining hall was Carousel. And the prop shed was Brigadoon.
That night, I rubbed Old Spice deodorant on my underarms and put on my best T-shirt. I opened the barn doors to Brigadoon ten minutes early. It was just a little clapboard shack, behind the main camp building. A chunk of roof from Fiddler leaned against one wall, a buggy from Oklahoma
My First Fight
There were two bullies at Busby Berkeley, Hank and Russell. They couldn’t sing, they couldn’t dance, and neither of them liked to act—it seemed like they’d gotten on a bus to the wrong camp and just decided to stay.
Their main victim was John Poderanski. John was a small, high-strung kid who wore black plastic glasses. Hank and Russell called him Numb Nuts. All day long they’d punch and slap him, pinch him on the neck until he started to cry, drag him over to girls and tell them he was “a faggot.” In the cabin before lights-out, someone would say, “Do the professor,” and Russell would snatch John’s glasses from his face, put them on his penis, and dance around singing, “Professor Cock ’n’ Balls! Professor Cock ’n’ Balls!” Once, they got all the boys to piss in a bucket they were going to dump on his head, but a counselor intervened in time.
One day, John got in my face and started yelling. “Hey, Numb Nuts!” over and over again, trying to impress Hank and Russell. I shoved him, and he shoved me back. Hank quickly stepped between us. “We’ll settle this at the archery
My First Fight
field after lunch,” he said. Then he turned to John and said, “I’ll be your second.” Russell looked at me and said, “I guess I’ll be your second.”
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