by Ava Zavora
She was shocked when it was two a.m. and everyone was saying their good-byes and fetching their coats. Sadness started creeping up on her as she saw the remains of the feast, the music turned off, the furniture put back in its place.
"Stay the night, my dear," Elise then said as if sensing her melancholy. "It's too late for you to take the train to Brooklyn."
Sera did not hide her relief, not wanting to go out into the winter night alone. Another hour more of cleaning up, the crystal and china put away, the table stripped of its finery, then Marcello stifling sonorous yawns before shuffling to the bedroom in his slippers.
One by one the lights were turned off and Elise and Sera were alone. They sat by the fire Marcello had left burning in the fireplace.
"You look as if you could keep dancing,” Elise remarked with a smile.
"I can't believe it's three in the morning. I don't feel like sleeping at all." The beggar maid is reluctant to shed her own finery and so she starts twirling barefoot in the red velvet dress.
"I love this hour," Elise walked to the dark window pane and looked down on the empty street, "when everyone else is asleep and I feel like the whole world is mine."
Sera stood next to her. "You remind me of someone I don't remember meeting."
"Ah, most people say that I'm unlike anyone they know. Sometimes they mean to flatter, but other times they mean I am too strange, my lips are too red, my laugh too loud, my ideas are too much, I am too much. Who do I remind you of?"
Sera stayed silent, her turn to smile mysteriously.
"I take it it's not meant to be unflattering?"
Sera shook her head. "The opposite."
"Thank you, then."
"No, thank you, Elise. Thank you for tonight." Impulsively, Sera hugged her, taking the older woman by surprise.
"The dress belongs to you now." Pleased, she patted Sera. “Red velvet becomes you and you should wear it every time you feel like dancing."
"Oh, nights like these never happen to me. I go to school and clean houses. That's my life."
"You're just a baby, my dear, countless nights of dancing until two a.m. lie ahead of you. Even at my age I still expect to dance on top of a table or two, so much more a girl of 19."
"Do you feel sorry for me, Elise? Do I seem lost? Is that the reason for this dress, for tonight?" Sera asked, her eyes cast down.
"That's a heavy burden, distrust. Are you sure you want to carry it? Maybe set it down just for a moment?" Elise placed her hands gently on Sera's cheeks. "I gave you the dress because I knew you would look beautiful in it. I invited you to the dinner because I wanted to feed you. And I reached out to you because I sensed that something in you would welcome it. Was I wrong?"
Sera kept her eyes down, remaining quiet. Elise's hands fell away from her face, and then she spoke.
"I went to see my father last summer," Sera began. "I think that's why I moved here. I don't really know anymore, why I'm here. Nothing's turned out the way I planned."
Soon after she arrived, before she started looking for a job or a permanent place to stay, she had taken a walk on Riverside Drive. 1152 was an elegant turn of the century building with a brick stoop that led to ornate glass doors. Heart beating fast, she climbed the steps and looked through the glass at the foyer. Inside were polished marble floors and a heavy crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling. There was an old-fashioned wrought iron elevator on the left and a staircase to the right that curved up to the upper floors. A tall silver vase filled with graceful white lilies adorned a round wooden table in the middle.
She looked at the row of buzzers and mailboxes to the right of the doors. On #3 was taped a small cream rectangle on which was written "Wood." Sucking in her breath, Sera stared at the piece of paper and the buzzer below it, unable to move. Then suddenly, before she was aware of what she was doing, Sera pressed the white button. Nothing for one long minute, then--
"Yes?" A woman's voice crackled through the mesh-covered speaker. "Hello? Speak up, please, I can't hear you."
Sera backed down the steps and ran across the street. She sat on a bench on the edge of Riverside Park and watched the building, taking note of all the people who came and went, waiting for a man who would be almost 40 now, with blue eyes and brown hair. He would be handsome as the devil with a wife, a girlfriend, or a mistress who sounded young and spoiled. Or perhaps he would look like an athlete gone to seed, a once good-looking man whose dissipation showed in his flabby face, his fleshy body.
She was sure that as soon as she saw him she would know, something stronger than the pure hatred aflame in her would be set alight. She was charged and ready, but for what she did not know. What do you say to someone who the moment he knew of her existence, before she was even born, wanted all trace of her to vanish with some money he kept in a dresser drawer?
An elderly couple, an older businessman with gray hair, an Asian family, a glamorous woman in stiletto heels and sunglasses emerged from or entered the building at various times, but she saw no one who looked like the man who could be her father for the rest of the summer. And then came fall. She was at her usual place when she saw a man who fit her mother's description perfectly: very handsome, tall, with rich, wavy brown hair and blue eyes. It was him, she was sure. She saw him a few more times before she decided to approach him.
"I thought I would just knock on my father's door," Sera now continued to Elise, "And he would at least recognize me, recognize his own blood before him. I wore my dead mother's dress and stood in front of his apartment building, waiting for him. He walked right by me. I think it was him. I don't really know. The fact is any stranger could be my father.
“I wanted vengeance. I wanted him to remember her, to feel as bad as I felt. But when that man passed me by a part of me wanted him to recognize me for me. I wanted him to feel regret. But he kept walking. And I didn't say anything, not even to accuse him of my mother's death. Because what right do I have to be mad at him when I’m just as guilty? I came all this way, left everything behind, lost Andrew, for nothing. For nothing. And now I can't ever go back."
Elise couldn't possibly understand the torrent of words gushing out of her, but Sera kept on, unable to stop the tears that fell, the wave of anger and sorrow that she had contained for so long now set free.
Pounding a trembling fist on her chest, "Will this ever go away? Do you know? Because I can still see Andrew everywhere. He's in my head and I can't shake him off. You would think you'd die from pain this great, but I'm still alive. How is that possible?"
Still looking down because she could not face Elise, who was now pushing up the red velvet sleeves to reveal the red gashes she had made with the paring knife she kept beneath her pillow, just a slash every now and then, deep enough to bleed a little of the pain out.
Not gasping, as if she already knew, or lying to her and saying that it would all be okay, Elise just took Sera in her arms and let her cry until all her tears were spent.
Chapter 22
Six years later...
For the third time that week, fate brought Sera and the English professor together.
She had been busy dashing off notes on her well-worn spiral notebook, with phrases she would later use for her article to describe the luxurious Grand Hotel on the banks of Lake Bled. Then, she surreptitiously started taking photos of the old-fashioned lobby of polished walnut and chandeliers and the lounge overlooking a breathtaking view of the lake and Mount Triglav.
As she took a few shots of the reception area, she had seen the now familiar figure in tweed and corduroys and neat Oxfords, with his back to her, checking in. Although she was no longer surprised that she should run into him again, as she had at first in Venice, then Ljubljana, she was surprised to see him at the Grand Hotel.
No English professor then, she thought. She would have to revise her theory to explain his being able to afford this rather posh hotel. Her own accommodation at Bled was a small room in a humble penzion resembling a Swiss chalet, sim
ply decorated and clean, without a coveted view of the lake.
Perhaps he was an unassuming British lord of a crumbling castle in Yorkshire and owner of whippets that help him hunt pheasant when he wasn’t intriguing Sera by showing up in the unlikeliest of places. She laughed at her wildly improbable fantasy and made a mental promise to strike up a conversation next time they crossed paths so she can find out who he really was.
At that moment, perhaps sensing that he was being watched, the stranger turned his head and seemed to look straight at Sera. Reddening, she pointed the camera to the left in a none-too-subtle pretense of looking elsewhere. She nonchalantly tucked her camera back into her bag and strolled out the front doors to resume her walk around the lake.
Although it was a very picturesque town set against the Julian Alps, visiting Lake Bled had not been Sera’s idea. Nor was Venice. She had pitched Slovenia as the next hot destination and the editor at Vagabond had agreed. However, instead of an article on Lake Bohinj, which was a quieter, not as well known lake town, her editor had instead strongly suggested she write about the more touristy Lake Bled.
Further, he had asked for yet another article on Venice. As if it had never been done before, he had suggested an article about the last squero, gondola boatyard, in Venice. He had asked casually, sounding like he was asking her to stop by the store on her way to work, that a day or two in Venice while en route to Slovenia would be enough to write a thorough explanation on the state of gondolas.
“Will do,” Sera had replied, with lackluster enthusiasm. She would have to sacrifice time exploring Istria in neighboring Croatia, her destination after Slovenia, to write something on a well-exploited subject.
“The entire city’s sinking under the weight of tourist mobs wanting an expensive Disney ride. What else is there to write about?” she wanted to say to her editor, but bit her tongue instead.
Even if he was more concerned about the bottom line rather than exploring off-the-beaten paths, he had also bought five of her last articles. Venice sells, he would just say. She should be flattered and grateful of his assurance that he would purchase both articles on Lake Bled and Venice as yet unwritten, he was that confident of her abilities.
Writing about gondolas in Venice was like writing about the glass-blowers of Murano or even the problem of the sinking city—it was a cliché. As Edith Wharton had once famously expressed over a hundred years ago, what could she write about Venice that had not been written before. Rather grudgingly, Sera had flown into Marco Polo and, being ever frugal, taken the bus, then the vaporetto to her hotel, which was five minutes from Piazza San Marco. Everything, she had discovered over her last two rather disappointing trips to Venice, was five minutes from the famed Piazza.
Her initial visit had been during her first trip to Europe, right after she graduated from Columbia three years ago. Since she had never been anywhere except up and down the East Coast during her college years, Europe was to be her Grand Tour. With little more than a backpack and a camera, she had gone from England, to France, Spain, Germany, then Italy.
Venice, she had saved for last, and best, she had thought. After three months of stimulation, perhaps she had been too weary and homesick to have been in awe of the floating palazzos on water, the stone bridges, the elegant decay that the city embodied. Venice was like an aging actress on a stage of tarnished mosaics and peeling baroque illusions—once beautiful, but with decrepitude lingering underneath the thick surface of makeup.
Doubtful of her harsh first impression, she had made a second visit. After a lengthy stay at Elise and Marcello’s palazzo in Umbria, where she had whiled away lazy summer days devouring plates and plates of fried zucchini blossoms and growing brown under the Italian sun working in their sprawling garden, she had, with regret, taken the train from Florence to Venice.
Yet even as she walked out the doors of the Santa Lucia train station to be greeted by what should have been Venice at her most breathtaking, Sera felt nothing but indifference.
When Sera told Elise this, concerned that perhaps she was missing something, Elise had laughed and assured her that she had felt the same about Venice the first few times. “Get out of the Piazza,” she instructed Sera over the phone. “I know that’s where everybody gathers, but walk, get lost in the labyrinth of calles, linger in lesser known campos, perhaps then you’ll find her charm."
Sera had obediently done just that, but still the magic of Venice eluded her. It was during this third time that Sera realized what it was that disturbed her about Venice, that although she loved ruins and places steeped in old stories, Venice made her feel too sad. It was one of those places whose beauty only came alive when visited with a lover. She had been traveling by herself for years now, neither feeling alone nor lonely, and yet in Venice, she felt both, unbearable longing almost overwhelming her.
The sinking city was not without her treasures. Sera’s second trip had yielded part three of her series on the world’s best cemeteries. The first and her favorite had been Pere Lachaise in Paris, to be followed by the ones in New Orleans. The cemetery on island of St. Michele had the right combination of eeriness, forlorn beauty, and graves of the famed to qualify as one of the world’s best, with an especially creepy footnote that bones of the lesser known were uprooted and relocated to the mainland after 50 years.
No such scintillating subject waited for her this third time around, just 2,000 words regarding the ubiquitous symbol of Venice, the gondola.
She had chosen her prey carefully, a young gondolier who had yet to make a name for himself, for he and his rather plain gondola were consigned next to a remote campo. The nearer to the Piazza and the more elaborately decorated the gondola would indicate an experienced gondolier and therefore more guarded and less susceptible to her charms.
After a few minutes of her smiles and halting attempts in Italian, the earnest young gondolier, Gianni, had offered her a free ride. Knowing that the going rate was for 100 euros, Sera had been tempted, but declined very prettily, and instead secured a promise that he would show her around the squero in the morning.
She had blown Gianni a kiss over her shoulder while she walked away and as she turned, she had caught the amused face of a man leaning over a bridge across the way. Feeling unmasked, she felt the seductive smile she had worn for the gondolier drop. The man looked almost knowing, gazing at her with a directness that implied he had seen through her practiced and calculated flirtation. She had kept on walking down the cobbled walkway, knowing that the stranger watched her until she was out of sight.
The next night, her last in Venice, she and Gianni had rendezvoused at Piazza San Marco, where they danced first to the band at Florian’s then crossed to the rival band at Quadri’s. She had been tempted again by the young gondolier’s boyish charm, his long-lashed brown eyes and shy smile.
He had shown her that morning, as promised, the squero, where artists had been busy crafting the gondolas with skills they had taken 10 years to learn. To thank him for being such a gallant guide, she told Gianni to meet her at the piazza at dusk.
As he twirled her in this romantic, open-air ballroom, whispering outrageous flattery that only Italians could get away with, she had again spied the stranger from the night before sitting on an outside table at Florian’s by himself. He was watching them, or her, not too intensely so that she felt alarmed, but with a wistfulness that she recognized.
It was then that she decided, in his tweed blazer and brown corduroys, he must be an English professor alone on holiday. Perhaps he felt as she did, even in Gianni’s arms, alone and lonely in a city made for lovers. She felt sadness for him and for herself and in the future would have occasionally remembered him sitting alone at Florian’s as a mental image of how Venice always made her feel, had she not seen him again standing at the opposite end of the Dragon Bridge in Ljubljana some days later.
She had been surprised but not surprised; it was almost as if she had expected him to be there—a mirror of her own feelings.
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br /> As she started photographing the carved green bronze dragons that flanked both ends of the bridge, annoyed at lovers loitering mid span to ruin her long shot-she wondered briefly if she would ever again be one of them, half of a pair so immersed in the other that all this beauty and grandeur would merely fade into the background. And as soon as she thought it, there he was.
She could have said hello to him then and asked in a slightly mocking yet friendly tone, “Are you following me?" But she didn’t.
She had made the mistake before when, lonely in her solitude, she had indulged in flings during her travels. Inevitably, no matter how exotic and romantic the surroundings, she would become disappointed or irritated, then wish fervently to be alone. Not one had ever continued after the holiday was over. Lovers met in far-flung places satisfied her constant restlessness only temporarily.
Once she had traveled to Egypt with a current boyfriend, entranced with the idea of riding side by side on camels amidst the pyramids. The stress of travel, the heat, and an unfortunate bout of explosive diarrhea contributed to their undoing, however. They were barely speaking to each other by the time they got to Cairo and all but over upon reaching the Great Sphinx. The Egyptian disaster did not cause the problems in that relationship. It had only made it impossible to ignore.
So although she found the English professor to be handsome and rather mysterious, Sera had finished taking her photos, then continued on to the castle above Ljubljana without acknowledging that she had noticed him.
Ljubljana had not made an impression on Sera for it reminded her of half a dozen other European cities like Salzburg or Vienna. Bled pleased her more and would provide excellent photos to accompany her article, especially of the crystal blue lake and its enchanting island in the middle.
Once she had checked in at her penzion, she had immediately set out with her camera and notebook and taken an exploratory walk about town, checking out restaurants and cafes, approaching a few locals, mostly young people, who were more open to her questions and spoke better English. Having indulged in too much of Bled’s famous cream cakes, vanilla custard in between layers of flaky pastry, Sera vowed to tackle one of the many mountain trails the next day as both penance and research. She had been circling the lake and had stopped by the Grand Hotel when fate, it seemed, had led her once again to cross paths with the stranger.
