A longing for what she and Alan had once been to each other overwhelmed her. He had once loved her enough to resent every moment away from her; she had always trusted him to be at her side when she needed him. Now their troubles had poisoned even the wellsprings of love she used to think could never be tainted.
A movement caught her eye; she looked up. A woman was watching from a window up ahead, gazing down at the canal. Somebody was home in one of these houses after all. Miriam caught a glimpse of masses of pale hair, then lifted a hand to wave. The woman moved her hand in an arc, as if wiping an invisible window; the gesture seemed oddly familiar.
I know you, Miriam thought. She blinked, and the woman was gone.
Alan touched her hand. She was suddenly worried about him, afraid that he was keeping too much from her. Tell me what's wrong, she wanted to say. Tell me about all the problems, and we'll work them out together, the way we used to do. It doesn't have to be like this; I can meet you halfway. I won't pick at you, and in return you can listen to me, stop turning away from me, stop looking at me with that not-quite-smile on your face that tells me you're sorry you ever married me. All we have to do is remember how we once felt about each other, and everything else will fall into place.
The sounds of voices suddenly washed over her in a wave, nearly deafening her. The gondola drifted toward another bridge, this one crowded with Asian tourists. Miriam raised a hand tentatively; the people on the bridge grinned and waved and chattered among themselves. The water was slightly choppier, rocking the gondola. Up ahead, beyond the walls on either side of them, she could now see the broad, greenish expanse of the Grand Canal.
* * * *
They ate breakfast in their hotel, in the indoor dining room next to the outdoor tables where they had eaten last night. Miriam had gotten used to the strong Italian coffee, but still had to put milk in it to make it palatable, something she never did at home. Alan had asked the waiter to bring butter and was putting some on one of his hard rolls. His doctor had warned him about his cholesterol, but the butter would probably do him less harm than his cigarettes.
At the tables on the opposite side of the room, which each bore a marker near the floral centerpiece with the words “American Express,” a tour group of older gray-haired people were eating bowls of cereal. Despite their advanced age, the tourists all looked fit and energetic and blatantly cheerful. Almost all of them were couples. Miriam wondered how they had managed to live for so long and stay married to their spouses without looking as though they had regrets.
Alan finished his coffee. “Maybe you can buy a map of the vaporetto routes,” he said, “while I go upstairs and make that call to Bernie.”
She would not ask him about the call. They had managed a pleasant dinner the night before, largely because a couple in the American Express group, a retired engineer and his wife from Tampa, had struck up a conversation with them from their table. They had not gotten off to a good start that morning. The noise of boat traffic, loud talking, and singing gondoliers outside their open window had kept Alan awake for much of the night. Miriam would not allow herself to ruin breakfast with questions about his business.
“Vaporetto routes?” she asked, not sure of what Alan had meant.
“Vaporetto,” he said as he crumpled his napkin. “The public boats, the water buses. The plural is vaporetti.” He got to his feet. “Go to one of those booths and get a map. Just say, ‘Vorrei comprare una carta di vaporetti.’ That ought to do the job. If you want to be polite, throw in a ‘per favore’ and say ‘grazie’ afterwards. Even you ought to be able to manage that.”
He turned and walked away. How odd that she could feel hurt by his remark. She should be used to such comments by now.
Miriam stood up and headed toward the lobby. The retired couple from Tampa waved at her as she passed their table. She wondered if she and Alan would ever be able to afford to retire. She thought of what he had said last night, just before they had gone downstairs to have dinner. “You know what would solve our problems? If I dropped dead. Darrell could take over the business and then he could decide who to lay off next year. The insurance would take care of you, and Jason and Joelle would just have to look out for themselves. And I wouldn't have to be bothered any more, which would be one hell of a relief.” She had been too shocked to do what she should have done, embrace him and tell him that she could not bear to have him think that way.
She went outside. The narrow street was already crowded with tourists; they seemed to be everywhere. She wandered toward the open area where several vendors had set up their booths and asked in English for a map and schedule of the vaporetto routes. The man in the booth handed them to her; so much for Alan's sarcastic language lesson at breakfast.
She walked toward the Grand Canal. In a few minutes, she would go inside and wait in the lobby, trying not to look too impatient when Alan finally met her there.
“Miri,” a voice said. “Miriam Feyn.”
Miriam looked up. Near the stone steps leading down to the water stood a tall, slender woman in a red T-shirt and baggy jeans. Her unruly long hair was gray, almost white, but she still wore it as she had when younger, in a mass of waves that fell nearly to her waist.
“Vera Massie!” Miriam said, and hurried toward her. “I can't believe it!” They clasped hands and then hugged each other. “We just got here yesterday, on the train from Milan.” She stepped back, gripping her old friend by the elbows. “We actually got to Venice at the same time.”
“Actually, I've been here for a while,” the other woman said.
“You mean you live here?” Miriam asked.
“In a manner of speaking.”
Miriam felt a pang of envy. Maybe Vera was leading the kind of life they had once imagined for themselves. The other woman guided Miriam toward the courtyard of the pink hotel across the way; they sat down at one of the tables.
No one else seemed to be sitting here. Miriam looked around for a waiter, then turned back to Vera. “Vera Massie,” she said. “I can't believe it.”
“Vera Langella,” Vera said. “I thought of hyphenating it, but I never much cared for the name Massie anyway. Frankly, I was glad to have an excuse to ditch my last name when I got married.”
“Well, I'm not Miriam Feyn any more, either. I tried, but after a while, it was just too much trouble to keep telling people my last name was Feyn and not Loewe. Finally gave up when my daughter started kindergarten. Her teacher kept calling me ‘Mrs. Loewe,’ and seemed to resent it when I tried to correct her.”
Vera smiled. “You have a daughter.”
“A son, too.” Miriam glanced toward the Canal. The traffic had been heavy only a few moments ago. Now the broad waterway was quieter and even emptier than it had been at dawn, when she had looked out from her window to see shards of golden light dancing on the still green water. “I remember when you used to say you'd live here and have a gondolier as a lover.”
“Yeah, and that I was going to live in a palazzo. Afraid I didn't manage either the palazzo or the gondolier.”
Miriam could see her hotel room window from here. She lifted her head, thinking she had seen Alan looking outside. She noticed then that the vendors in the open area did not seem to be doing much business; the knots of tourists buying marionettes, postcards, and maps had disappeared.
“I didn't manage much of anything,” Miriam said. “I'm a claims manager for an insurance company, and my husband's a builder and contractor—he owns his own business. He's in our room, calling his lawyer, and he won't tell me what that's about, so it probably means he's doing even worse than I think he is. My daughter dropped out of college to live with a guy named Rich who wears his hair in dreadlocks and works at Burger King while he's waiting for his band to make it. My son's out at Hazelden going through his second thirty-day program for substance problems.” She wondered why she had told her old friend all of that. Maybe it was because of all the times Vera had nursed her through her black moods in college, fina
lly convincing her that things weren't as bleak as they seemed.
“What do you think of this guy your daughter's with?” Vera asked.
Miriam thought of Rich's gentle brown eyes. “Oh, in some ways, he's not so bad. He's reasonably mannerly, and he seems to care about Joelle. I just wish he were more ambitious, and those dreadlocks—” She sighed. “God, I sound just like my mother when she met Alan. She used to say he'd be so nice-looking if he just did something about his hair.”
“And your daughter? What are her plans?”
“I don't really know. Right now, she's doing some sort of free-lance computer stuff, graphic design and such. I don't really understand it that well, but she gets paid for it, however modestly.”
Vera said, “Things could be a lot worse, then.”
“I suppose.” Miriam leaned back in her seat. “I just hope she doesn't get pregnant. She'd probably go ahead and have the baby, even if Rich bailed out. That does seem to be the style nowadays.”
“Maybe he wouldn't bail out,” Vera murmured.
Maybe he wouldn't, Miriam thought. She already felt a bit more kindly toward Rich. “Actually, I'm more worried about Jason. He had everything going for him, a fellowship at Stanford and a wonderful fiancée, and he threw it all away. Let me reword that. He snorted and freebased it away. I think he might have died if a friend of his hadn't gotten him into detox.”
“What happened then?” Vera asked.
“He came home. Promised he'd stay clean. Alan found him an apartment near us and gave him a part-time job. Within a couple of months, he was out scoring again. I found out after he stole some of our silver to pay for the drugs.”
“What did you do?” Vera asked.
“Alan was so pissed off he was ready to call the cops. Before he could, Jason came over, really wrecked, and said he was sorry, that he knew he was out of control, and that he had to go back into treatment.”
Vera rested one arm on the table. “Then your son was acknowledging his problem. That's a good sign, isn't it?”
“I suppose so. He flew east to Minnesota a week before we left for Italy. Alan refused to cancel our trip. He figured we were better off taking the opportunity to travel while Jason was safely in Hazelden. God knows how we're going to pay for everything when we get home. We'll probably be paying off this trip alone for years, assuming we don't go bankrupt first.”
“At least you'll have had it,” Vera said.
“Oh, yes.” Miriam could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “We'll remember it every time the Visa bill arrives. And there'll still be a lot of sights we'll miss, because there just isn't the time to see everything.”
“You know what I always say?” Vera lifted her arms and pulled her long hair back from her face with both hands, exactly as she used to do in college. “You shouldn't try to see and do everything, no matter how much time you have. You should always leave something for when you come back again.”
Miriam's mouth twisted. “What if you know you'll never come back?”
“You shouldn't look at it that way, Miri. It used to help me when I'd tell myself that I'd come back to do something I hadn't done, that I'd left unfinished, even if I knew the chances were against it. What did I have to lose by hoping?”
Miriam shook her head. “That's the worst thing about getting older, losing hope. I used to think it was other things, getting creaky and arthritic and gray and just not having your physical and mental shit together the way you did when you were younger, but it isn't. It's knowing that nothing's ever going to get any better, that you're just going to drag yourself through life until you finally cash in your chips, that all the things you hoped might happen aren't ever going to happen and that your whole life was probably for nothing. Hell, I'm almost fifty years old, and what have I got to show for it? No wonder Jason and Joelle are so confused. Why should they look forward to anything when they see their parents going down the tubes?”
“Are you going down the tubes?” Vera asked.
“Alan won't talk about his business. He used to discuss it all the time with me. All we do now is worry about money and wonder month to month how we're going to get by—we're in so much debt now that everything could cave in on us tomorrow. I keep waiting for him to say he wants a divorce, even though we can't really afford one. We're not good for each other any more. We'd probably both be better off alone.”
Vera had opened something inside her. Miriam could not stop talking. She spoke of the constant financial pressures of the business and their children, pressures so overwhelming that she and Alan rarely talked of much else. She spoke of how they tore at each other, of how their friends were starting, very surreptitiously, to avoid seeing them quite as often, of the times she and Alan had gone out and their bitterness had pushed them into angry arguments and public scenes, of how horrified she was at some of the things she said to him even when she could not stop saying them.
“Oh, Miri,” Vera said. “Don't you understand? That's why I'm here, to help you.”
Miriam swallowed, struggling to control herself. She must have been unloading on her old friend for a good half-hour at least. She peered at her watch; it had been only a little after eight when she left the hotel. Now it was barely eight-ten. The Grand Canal was still empty of boat traffic, the nearest arched bridge abandoned by the tourist hordes. A gondola was tied up across the way, the gondolier resting against his long pole, so still he did not seem to be breathing. She could almost believe that she and her friend were alone in the sinking city.
Perhaps she was having a nervous breakdown. She had felt on the verge of one for quite a while. She turned toward the booths selling souvenirs, but saw no vendors there. She was imagining it, that everyone in Venice had vanished in the way she wished that her troubles would.
Vera was sitting with her left ankle resting on her right knee, the way she had when they used to sit around in the Student Union. Strange, Miriam thought, that Vera should look so much as she would have expected her to look, older but basically unchanged. Vera would not have cut her hair as Miriam had and colored it to hide the gray, or put on a blazer and a pair of tailored slacks with an elastic waistband because she was too old and carried a few too many pounds to wear jeans.
“Miri,” Vera said, “you loved your husband once, didn't you?”
“More than anything. We weren't just lovers, we were pals, best friends. He'd get so annoyed when he had to work late. I'd put the kids to bed and have supper with him, even if it was ten-thirty at night, just so we'd have that time together.”
“Miri, he needs you. You need him, too. Don't let a bunch of bullshit get in your way.”
“That's exactly the way you used to put it whenever I got depressed.” She had been going on and on about herself, never even asking Vera about her life. All she knew was that her old friend had married a man with the last name of Langella. She suddenly remembered the pale-haired woman she had glimpsed the night before, from the gondola.
“That was you,” Miriam said, “last night, in one of the houses along that side canal. Everything stopped, and I thought I was going to get a migraine, and then I saw you.”
Vera was on her feet. She seemed translucent, as though she were an image about to flicker out. “I have to go.”
“I'm imagining you. I really am going crazy.” Miriam could see the row of flowers behind Vera through her friend's hazy form. “I dreamed you up, and now you're fading away.”
“Go to your husband. I'll see you later, I promise.”
Before Miriam could speak, voices around her rose in a roar. Crowds were thronging past the nearby kiosks. Miriam gripped the edge of the table, suddenly disoriented as she looked around her. There was a crowd on the nearest arched bridge, and people were milling around in front of the train station and waiting near the docks for the vaporetto. The pathways on either side of the canal had rapidly filled with strollers.
When Miriam turned back, the chair across from her was empty; Vera was gone. She
squinted, but could not see Vera's red T-shirt anywhere among the crowds.
* * * *
Alan said nothing about his call to Bernie as they left the hotel. She could not tell him about Vera, about the long-lost friend who had appeared out of nowhere and disappeared just as mysteriously, who could apparently block out sound and make everyone in Venice disappear from view. He would tell her that she was going nuts and then accuse her of trying to drive him crazy. It was almost a relief to think that she might be cracking up. Having a breakdown might be the only escape from her problems that she could manage.
Miriam studied the map of vaporetto routes and discovered that both lines 1 and 2 would take them along the Grand Canal to the docks near Saint Mark's Square. “Line 1 is the local,” she explained.
“Let's take it anyway,” Alan said. “No need to rush.”
They bought their tickets and boarded the passenger boat at the docks by the train station, managing to slip through the knots of passengers and get seats in the prow. Alan seemed content to enjoy the view as the vaporetto made its slow progress along the Canal, crossing from side to side and backing water as it made its stops. By the time they reached the Rialto, Alan was smiling as he watched people bargaining over the prices of flowers, fruits, and fish in the open-air markets near the high arched bridge. Maybe, Miriam thought, Bernie had given him some good news for a change.
He was still smiling as they walked from the landing toward the Piazza San Marco, taking her arm as they entered the huge open square. Mobs of tourists were already swarming through the square as hundreds of pigeons swooped above them; Miriam ducked as one bird barely missed flying into her. Alan consulted his map to get them through the narrow streets and over a small bridge to the glass showroom. She had been prepared to resist the salespeople there, but Alan ended up buying earrings for Joelle, a necklace of glass beads for her, and arranging for the shipment of a ridiculously expensive hand-blown glass sculpture of two long-necked birds that Miriam had admired.
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