Fictionwise Publications
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Copyright (C)1996 Pamela Sargent
First published in Phantoms of the Night, ed. Richard Gilliam and Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, 1996
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Their hotel was near the train station, close enough for Miriam and Alan to walk there. She hefted their carry-on bags while he picked up their two suitcases and followed her down the steps. At the docks along the Grand Canal, people were getting out of a long flat-topped passenger boat as three gondolas glided away across the greenish-blue water. The air smelled of sulphur and salt water and gasoline and faintly of rotting fish.
Alan had a map showing the location of the hotel. Miriam knew that he would not look at it and would only get annoyed if she stopped and rummaged in her bag for her own map. He would never look at a map or ask directions. In Florence, it had taken them forty minutes to get to the Uffizi from the Piazza Santa Croce because Alan knew exactly where the Uffizi was and how to get there and you couldn't miss the place because it was only a five or ten-minute walk from the Piazza Santa Croce.
He led her away from the Grand Canal to a narrow cobblestoned walkway that ran between a row of buildings and then past kiosks and booths offering postcards, marionettes, newspapers, magazines, cheap jewelry, T-shirts, toy gondolas, and masks. The hotel, a square yellow six-storey structure, turned out to be only a five-minute walk from the station. Miriam sat on a sofa in the lobby while Alan checked them in, studying the map she had bought after getting off the train. Her friend Leah had told Miriam that she would need a good map in Venice. Her hands shook as she refolded the map. The strain of trying to be calm during the train trip was catching up with her. If she dwelled too much on the problems awaiting her and Alan when they got home, she would panic and lapse into one of the fits of hysterical weeping that so enraged him.
“It's Room 414.” She looked up as Alan handed her a metal key attached to a small plastic cylinder bearing the room number. A porter in a red uniform was with him, carrying the suitcases.
She followed her husband and the porter through the lobby to the elevator. Like the lifts in their hotels in Rome and Florence, the elevator was a closet-sized conveyance barely large enough for the three of them and the luggage. The elevator shook as it stopped at their floor. The hallway to their room had pale walls with gold trim and dark red carpeting. The porter opened the door, then led them inside, setting the bags down near a wooden closet.
“Grazie,” Alan murmured. “Prego,” the porter replied. Alan handed him a tip; the door closed behind the porter. Another minefield now lay ahead of them, that dangerous stretch of time when they would rest in their hotel room before unpacking, when one or the other of them might say the wrong thing because there was nothing else to distract them from each other. An invisible band tightened around her chest.
“Our gondola ride's at seven,” Alan said. Miriam looked at her watch and saw that it was only five. “I checked at the desk. We have to go over to that dock near the train station. It'll cost about 140,000 lire.”
“Isn't that kind of high? That's something like a hundred dollars, isn't it?” The Italian currency still confused her, even with a pocket calculator, and the unfamiliar bills seemed like toy money.
“More like eighty, but you can't exactly come to Venice without taking a gondola ride.”
The small room had two twin beds pushed together and a narrow third bed pushed against the wall. “It's sweltering in here,” Miriam said.
“Better open the window, then, because there isn't any air conditioning. They told me at the desk. They're doing repairs. Maybe we won't need it. I mean, it is late September.”
Miriam pulled back the curtains, then opened the large windows. The room overlooked the watery green span of the Grand Canal, a walkway alongside it, and, just below, an open area dotted with kiosks. Another hotel, painted pink, was across the way, its flower-lined courtyard filled with empty tables covered with pink tablecloths. The miasmic air still smelled of sulphur, salt, and decay.
She said, “It isn't what I expected.”
Alan let out a sigh. “Don't start, Miri.”
“I didn't mean—” Miriam stopped herself. She had almost risen to the bait. She had meant to say, but in a light, bantering tone, that she didn't expect her first sights in Venice to be a lot of shops and booths selling tacky souvenirs. Alan would have retorted with quiet but bitter words about how he was sorry they couldn't afford some place closer to Saint Mark's Square. She would try to apologize, but by then he would have retreated into one of his silences. He would be thinking that she was after him again because nothing had turned out the way they had hoped, and he knew that she blamed him for a lot of that. She was not blaming him for anything at the moment, but she had done so often enough in the past. She probably deserved to feel guilty now for all the times she had cut away at him. He had picked at her, too, usually when she was at her most vulnerable, as if her unhappiness made her give off pheromones that only made him want to hurt her more.
He had told her six months ago that they should go to Italy, because they had never been and had always wanted to go. “We can't afford it,” she had told him. “You're right,” he had replied, “we can't. We also won't be able to afford it later, and by then we'll be too old to enjoy the trip. We'll never be able to afford it. So we might as well go now.” His mouth had twisted in the expression she thought of as his not-quite-smile, the look he had whenever he was feeling especially bitter.
Miriam turned away from the window and sat down in the room's only chair, next to the small desk. Alan was sitting on one of the beds. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out a pack of cigarettes. Miriam lit one of her own. She did not have to feel guilty about smoking over here, where non-smoking areas seemed nonexistent. Alan, after quitting for three years, had relapsed last spring, so she did not have to feel guilty about smoking around him, either. She no longer had to listen to him harp at her about the dangers of side smoke and how he would not come to visit her in the hospital if she developed lung cancer and that he could barely bring himself to kiss her sometimes. He did not kiss her that much anyway.
“There's actually kind of a nice breeze,” Miriam said. “We probably don't need any air conditioning.” She still felt too warm, but did not want to admit that out loud. He would blame her discomfort on menopause and tell her to pester her gynecologist for more goddamned hormones so that she wouldn't be so bitchy and have so many hot flashes. She would have to remind him that larger doses were more dangerous and that the estrogen made her gain weight and that he was already nagging at her to lose a few pounds. They had gone through that particular argument before.
“Want a drink?” Alan asked.
“Sure.”
He reached into one of the carry-ons and took out a bottle of Scotch as Miriam went into the bathroom to look for glasses. There was a drain in both the floor and the shower stall, which had no curtain. The stall looked forlorn without a curtain; the curved metal soap holder made her think of a hand held out in supplication. Tears sprang to her eyes; she swallowed hard. Tears came much too easily to her lately. She could not start crying now. Alan would explode if she did. “I'm doing my best, Miri. I'm trying as hard as I can, but I can't control the world. Do you ha
ve to cry so much? Do I have to worry about you all the time on top of everything else? Can't you ever be happy?”
Three glasses were near the sink. Miriam brought them out to Alan. He poured a couple of fingers of Scotch for each of them, then began to unpack. She drank while watching him hang up his clothes. She would wait until he was in the shower before she unpacked her own.
“Someday,” Vera Massie used to say, “I'm going to move to Venice. I'll live in a palazzo and have a gondolier for a lover.” Vera had been her best friend in college. Strange that Miriam should think of her now, when she had lost track of Vera long ago. They had said such things back then, believing that at least a few of them might happen. Vera would paint and Miriam would write articles for magazines. They would travel to Venice, Nairobi, Amman, Istanbul, Sydney, Monte Carlo, and Rio de Janeiro, fall in love with guides, adventurers, gamblers, artists, and mysterious men with no visible means of support, and somehow pick up enough at odd jobs between trips to support themselves.
Well, Miriam told herself, at least I made it to Venice, and wondered what Vera would have thought of the circumstances. Her old friend would not have imagined back then that Miriam would travel there only in an effort to shore up a failing marriage and to pretend, for a while, that her troubles were not that serious.
It was probably just as well that she had lost track of Vera, who had possessed an enviable talent for being cheerful and enjoying the moment, whatever problems might lie ahead. Vera would have been disappointed in what Miriam had become.
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The sky was grayer, but still light when they met the gondolier by the dock. Alternating between Alan's halting Italian and the gondolier's slightly better English, the two men finally managed to agree that the ride would be an hour long and would cost only 110,000 lire and that it would take them along some of the side canals.
The gondolier helped Miriam into the stern of the craft. She sat down as Alan climbed in next to her, followed by the gondolier. The gondola rocked slightly as they drifted away from the dock. Four gondolas carrying small groups of graying and white-haired passengers were gliding toward them; in a fifth gondola, a man standing on the platform next to a gondolier sang as a man in the middle of the gondola played an accordion. The elderly passengers lifted their plastic cups in a toast, saluting Miriam and Alan as they passed.
The gondolier behind them shouted to one of the other gondoliers, who responded with a stream of Italian. “What are they saying?” Miriam asked.
Alan leaned back in his seat and slipped his arm over her shoulders. “Can't tell,” he said. “People say that even other Italians don't understand this dialect too well.” He smiled. “Bet they cultivate it deliberately. Probably don't want any of the passengers to know what they're saying.” He had been listening to language tapes and practicing with a phrase book ever since they had decided to take this trip.
In some sense, Miriam thought, she had married the adventurer she had hoped to fall in love with when younger. Alan was, however, an adventurer who had failed at being truly adventurous. He picked up languages easily—French during a summer abroad in high school, German during his Army days, when he had lucked out and ended up in Europe instead of Vietnam, some Spanish when his business had started hiring more Latino construction workers. His plans for their life had been both straightforward and risky. His business would grow, even if they had to stick their necks out in the beginning. People always needed new houses, and he knew he could not stand working for someone else. When they were bringing in more money, Miriam could quit her job and they would travel, as they had always intended to do. After their children came, the plan had been to wait until they were old enough so that the family could travel together.
They had gotten no farther away than a winter vacation in Cancun and a summer vacation, years later, in the Canadian Rockies, because the business had required more and more of Alan's time. By the time they had been ready to abandon armchair travel for the real thing, Alan was struggling to keep his business afloat, Miriam was hanging on to her job wondering when the insurance company would lay her off, their daughter Joelle had dropped out of her third college in a row to move in with her boyfriend, and Jason had developed his substance abuse problem. Substance abuse, they called it, as if her son's difficulties were somehow metaphysical and might have been solved if he didn't have to live in a material world made of substance that even physicists couldn't understand.
Alan's arm tensed around her. “What's the matter now?” he said, and she heard the tightness in his voice, the sound of exasperation that could quickly turn into anger.
“Nothing,” she replied, trying to smile. They were here to have a good time, to live in the present, not to worry about failing businesses, troubled children, and lost dreams.
A motorboat passed them, making the gondola rock a little. Their gondolier was steering into a side canal. The sounds of motors, singing gondoliers, and accordions abruptly ceased.
The sudden silence startled her. This canal was narrow, with stained and peeling pastel walls rising up on either side. A few motorboats were tied up near walkways and stone steps leading to doors. The shutters of several overhead windows had been opened, and clothes hung from ropes stretched between windows, but the buildings seemed empty. Miriam heard no voices and saw no movements inside the windows. The silence was unnerving, as though the crowds of tourists and residents had suddenly abandoned the city. Perhaps all the people were out, riding in gondolas and walking along the narrow streets and meeting friends for dinner.
How fanciful of her to imagine that Venice was populated by people who had nothing better to do than to take an evening stroll or boat ride, sit around drinking wine, make their own contributions to the city's works of art, and admire the decaying beauty of their atmospheric homes. Many of Venice's citizens would still be engaged in the necessary tasks of guiding herds of tourists to various sites, cooking and serving hotel and restaurant dinners, selling souvenirs. Some of them might work in the refineries across the lagoon during the day, coming back only at night. Most of the people in this region apparently lived over there on the mainland, under smoggy gray clouds and amid factories and storage tanks. Many of them might not even get to this graceful city that often.
The gondola was approaching a small arched bridge. A few people stood there, unmoving, gazing down at the canal. How still they were, Miriam thought, almost as if they were made of stone. The air shimmered, making auras glow around the people on the bridge. She touched her head reflexively, afraid a migraine might be coming on. Alan would blame her for ruining her vacation and tell her that she had brought the attack of migraine on herself.
“What's the itinerary for tomorrow?” Alan asked then, his voice sounding strangely hollow.
Miriam pressed her lips together. He could not simply enjoy the gondola ride; he had to keep thinking ahead. They had to make sure that they had plenty of sightseeing planned, so that they could keep up the illusion that they were having a vacation, an escape from which they would return refreshed, that this trip would somehow heal everything that had gone wrong between them. They had to keep busy, or otherwise there might be too much time to think and to brood and to argue.
“There's that place Leah told us about, that showroom that sells Murano glass,” Miriam said at last. “It's near St. Mark's Square, so we can see the church afterwards. The tour for English-speaking tourists starts at eleven.” If they were lucky, they might meet a congenial couple during the tour of the church, people they could have lunch with so that they wouldn't have to get through lunch by themselves. “Then we can see the Doge's Palace.”
“Let's do that by ourselves, okay? I don't want to be following a herd around for that, too.”
“Fine,” she said. “I'm sure we can buy a guide at the entrance.” That might keep them busy until dinner, and Alan had taken the precaution of making reservations for that already.
“Have to remind myself,” he said, “to call Bernie aft
er breakfast.” Bernie was Alan's attorney. Lately, Alan had not told her much about his ever more frequent meetings with Bernie. Maybe he was thinking of declaring bankruptcy. He would come home one day and tell her that his business had finally gone belly-up. He would say that he had kept it from her because he did not want her fretting over everything and making herself sick, even though she had been worrying about everything and making herself sick all along anyway.
“Is it so important it can't wait?” Miriam asked.
“Yeah, it is,” and she knew that he would not tell her what it was.
The gondola glided around a corner into another canal. Miriam was growing used to the odor of decay, and the dark green water was still. For a moment, she was at peace, taking pleasure in the silvery light and the soft sound of water lapping against stones. Had they come here when they were younger, while they were still living together or after they had first been married, by now Alan would be trying to kiss her. She would have protested, wondering what the gondolier might think, and Alan would have assured her that the man had probably steered plenty of lovers deep in the throes of passion along this canal. They would have giggled and cuddled and then gone back to their hotel room to make love before dinner.
She could not imagine that happening now. They should have come to Venice when they were younger, when they would have loved Venice for what it was and not only as an escape. She thought of how Venice was slowly sinking, of the hordes of tourists who came here trying to recapture the sense of beauty, joy, or romance they had lost, whose demands had turned so much of this city into more of a theme park than a place of romance, who roamed over these islands and along the canals in herds. One day, they would all come back to find their beloved city under water, forever lost to them.
She turned toward Alan, about to speak, then forgot what she was going to say. His brown eyes stared into hers for a moment, then looked away. He had lost some weight recently, and now the tanned and leathery skin of his face sagged more, making him look older.
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