All that day she felt someone behind her, quite old; she would catch a glimpse of his white hair as he stepped back behind a corner every time she looked. She wondered if it was the old Italian gentleman who stood beside her in the crowd at the beginning of the race; there were times she was sure it was Billy, who had clawed his way up out of the Mediterranean sand. She felt he was waiting for her to lead him somewhere, and she wondered if he was impatient. After getting something to eat and walking around several hours, she found her way back to the station to wait for the train. Today it arrived on time, and she waited until it emptied completely and no other soul could be seen. She had been certain he would arrive today; she was thrown into confusion by his failure to do so. It was awful to think, as she thought now for the first time, he might not come at all; yet she didn’t believe that, she was sure he would come, he had to come. She set off for the American Express near San Marco Square, hoping to get there before it closed. The footsteps behind her were never hurried or frantic, simply keeping pace with her, and after a while she forgot them.
She arrived at American Express a few minutes too late. Dejected, she returned to San Marco Square, where she could see the porticos of the plaza through the mists, and the tower which shot up vanishing into the fog. Lauren thought about taking the elevator up anyway. Not a single rider had come in; a small group was at the officials’ table, where there was a lot of rushing around and static from the walkie-talkies. When Lauren got to the top of the tower, she was above the fog; nothing of the city could be seen, though the casinos of the Lido were visible to the south, dark and dead; the sea was far away, shuddering on the eastern horizon. She was up in the tower about half an hour and decided to come back down. She looked around to see if her follower was nearby; but there was only one other couple, with a small child. At the bottom it was as though she had fallen back to another world altogether. She decided to see if Jason had come in yet; she routinely expected him to finish among the first.
There was still a great deal of concerned activity among the officials, and not a bicycle to be seen. Everyone was talking in a number of languages. She stood and watched the scene listlessly, lost in her own thoughts, until the excitement of the officials and several onlookers pulled her attention back. She looked to see if a rider was finishing. There was still no sign of a bicycle. Lauren walked up to one of the American officials. Excuse me, she said.
He said something into his radio.
“Excuse me,” she said, “do you know when they’ll be finishing?”
He looked at her blankly. “Who are you?” A voice came in on the walkie-talkie and he turned from her. There was a splatter of conversation.
“What’s going on?” Lauren said, to nobody. Italians were gesturing at the fog. She waited for the American to finish with the radio. “What’s going on?” she said again, this time to him.
“Jason’s wife,” he said, pointing at her.
“Yes,” she said.
With an expression both annoyed and befuddled, he listened once again to the radio, determined there was nothing of importance, and said to her, “They’re trying to find the riders.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not a single rider has come in at any of the contact points.”
“What?”
“None of the contact points has reported seeing any of the riders since the race began.”
“That seems odd,” Lauren said.
It was now eight hours since the race had begun, and only a couple of hours before nightfall. In the fog, in a city like Venice, the prospect of locating anyone was unlikely. Everyone kept telling each other how improbable it was that anything could have happened to fifty riders; but the officials organized search parties anyway and sent them out. After two hours each of the search parties returned without one rider to be shown for the effort.
By now the entire city knew about the bicyclers, and everyone was advised to keep an eye out for them. There were scattered reports of glimpses of riders here and there; people heard the mechanical locking and shifting of gears just behind them, or around a corner, or in the next corridor. In the dark the whirring of wheels was heard by everyone, echoing from some place several bridges away. Torch-bearing volunteers returned all night to San Marco Square (which this evening was kept at least dimly lit past the usual hour) claiming to have caught a fleeting glance of someone down an abandoned canal; but the cries of the searchers went unanswered, as though the riders themselves were dashing around the city unaware they were lost. By midnight the square was packed with people, all standing around waiting, while the canals and passageways were streaming with search parties led by those townspeople who had spent their lives in Venice and understood its secrets. The officials decided on a new strategy, based on the idea that trying to track down anyone who was constantly in motion, as a bicycler would be, in a place like Venice was impossible: they would attempt to limit the means of motion. There were four hundred bridges in Venice, almost all of them with ramps for the bicycles; the ramps would be taken away. This would at least slow the bicyclers down. Secondly, men with torches would be placed along the Grand Canal, the Rio Nuovo, the Rio di Cà Foscari, and two or three other major waterways of Venice, all of which crossed the city; the riders couldn’t get anywhere very long without using the bridges or coming into contact with these main channels, or coming to a dead standstill, in which case the search parties would find them. The only flaw to this plan, someone suggested, was if the fifty riders each happened to be riding in fifty very small, confined circles.
That raised in everyone’s mind an ominous possibility no one wanted to consider, let alone give voice to: that at this point the riders had driven themselves utterly mad. The mainland airport outside Venice Mestre was now contacted to send a helicopter over the lagoon; it arrived an hour later. Whirling over the fog, perilously avoiding the tower, the helicopter boomed out to the entire city a message for the bicycle riders. The message explained to the riders, in a very matter-of-fact tone of voice, that they were lost. They had been lost for hours, the message said. The race was not supposed to take this long, the contact points they had been searching for were not supposed to be this difficult to find. The message explained to the riders that they should be quite exhausted by this point. The message explained that they could stop racing, because the race was over. In Italian, the voice explained that the Italian team had been declared the winners; in French, the voice explained that the French team were the winners. In German, the Germans had won; in Russian, the Soviets were victorious; in English, the Americans, Britons and Australians had emerged in a stunning three-way tie. At any rate the race was quite finished, and each rider should get off his bicycle at once and sit down wherever he was and relish his victory. Someone would be along shortly to escort him to the winner’s box in the square, where a large enthusiastic crowd was waiting to cheer him.
Through it all Lauren waited at the base of the tower, where she finally fell asleep. About four in the morning, a man woke her. Signora, go back to your hotel, he said; you will hear if there’s any news. He gently pulled her to her feet. She thanked him and trudged on, across the square, disappearing through one of its porticos into the back passages of the city. Every second or third turn was lit by a lantern hanging from one of the archways; she had no idea exactly where she was going, and she tried to pursue a straight line from the square, figuring that going in one direction would at least get her somewhere. She was most conscious of trying not to backtrack on herself. The lights were only blurs in the fog, and at times she had to extend one arm lazily before her in case a wall suddenly sprang up in her path. It was still very hot, and she removed her sweater and wiped her hair from her eyes. Everything inside her that she was thinking and feeling ran together like the corridors of the city. The anxious gut-wrenching fear of something having happened to Jason ran head-on into the anxious gut-wrenching fear of something having happened to Michel: they both ought to be here, she said. She asked he
rself whether, down deep, she was most afraid she would wind up without either one and therefore alone; she considered this fear with contempt. The sheer terror of being alone was something she could no longer justify to herself. It represented to her a sort of capitulation to the fear of taking chances: it was the kind of resignation she had made long before, from which meeting Michel had set her free. Because of this she had an instant compulsion to get the gold ring off her ankle any way possible, though she was not at all clear how it got there. Because she was not at all clear how it got there, she had an instant resentment toward her long-prevalent lack of clarity as to when and how she had really first met Michel. She no longer liked at all the things that weren’t clear to her, though Michel had argued in Paris that it didn’t matter, the clarity of details, if the sense of things was clear. The compulsion to remove the ring passed—it was only a ring—but it left certain resolutions, and certain possibilities, one of which was that she might be best off without either Michel or Jason. She asked herself now if she loved either of them. She answered that she certainly loved Michel. She answered that she no longer knew if she loved Jason.
She was becoming more confused in her direction and she was determined not to get lost. When she came to one of the empty canals she decided to leave the walkway and follow it, on the good chance it would lead to the Grand Canal. The assumption was accurate; within a few minutes she emerged into the wide ravine of the canal, where the torches had all burned out and the searchers had either given up for the night and gone to their beds to get some rest, or had fallen asleep right in their tracks. She walked down the middle of the canal alone and damp and weary, her dress clinging to her, her thoughts self-involved. After a few moments there loomed before her the white Rialto Bridge, somehow retaining a bit of the torches’ luminescence before turning to shadow. It was then that she heard it. She looked around her, trying to find it; it was the sound of the piano she’d listened to the morning before, its notes dropping from the air. She was still trying to figure it out when a gust swept past, and she could hear the sounds of the bicycles, all of them, around her. They had approached from behind and ridden right by her on both sides, now disappearing somewhere in front of her. She was so taken aback that it took her a moment to call. “Wait!” she cried. “Hello!” But they were gone and the music trailed off with them; and she stood there incredulously just looking into nothing when an answer came from in back of her, in the sound of his steps.
She turned there in the middle of the Grand Canal and saw his form emerge, slowly, and stand there before her and open his mouth and stop as though he was afraid to call her name, afraid it would somehow not come out. She waited until he said it—“Lauren,” it did come, he appeared grimly relieved—and she gasped a little. “Oh,” she just said, and stepped up to him, and reached over and touched his face, and then his hair, which was now completely white. His ravaged eyes did not quite meet hers. They were still fixed on something that time and time again he tried to shut out, only to open them each time and see the same individual horror. His face was not old; he was not jowly, nor was his nose larger; he was not shrunken. But his eyes and his hair were ancient, and indications of a passage from which he couldn’t return. She laid her open hand on his cheek and looked at him sadly; and then he turned to stare into her eyes directly, the muscles of his face holding fast. Then he broke down. She pulled him to her shoulder and against the strap of her dress he cried, clinging to her hair with one hand and trying to cover his face with the other.
Over and over he said her name. She led him to the shadow of the bridge and they lay against the bank. He turned away from her; she pulled him back. She took his face in her hands. “Why have you been following me?”
He shook his head. “You were with him,” he finally said.
“Not today.”
Each time he looked up, he looked away again. “How long…” he began.
“Since…?”
“Paris.”
“Almost four weeks, I think.” She still held his face. “Are you all right?”
But he wasn’t all right. “I was on the train a long time,” he said.
“Look at me.”
“I was confused.” His eyes were closed.
“Michel.”
I kept count, he said. I marked the days on the compartment walls, the way prisoners do. I filled one compartment and moved to the next. I filled one car and moved to the next. Every compartment was a year, every car a decade and a half. I was in the last compartment of the last car when I got here. I was the only one on the train. They had to come and tell me when we arrived because I kept all the windows closed at all times; I had learned to do that. So I had no way of knowing, I thought we were in Wyndeaux again when we stopped. We were always in Wyndeaux when we stopped.
“Wyndeaux?”
“They always got on at Wyndeaux.”
“Who?”
He grimaced, covering his eyes.
“Michel, listen to me,” she said. “I have something to tell you.”
“I know.”
“You don’t. I found the house. Your mother’s house.”
He nodded. “I know.”
She pulled him to her against the bank of the canal. His knees buckled and his face slid to her breasts, and she pulled the dress down and pressed his head against her. The Rialto Bridge rose above them in the fog, and the shine of the lanterns came from the nearby passageways. She was hot and his face was hot against her so she dropped her dress completely from her shoulders. She tore at his shirt and opened it, and tore at his belt. Make love to me in your blue coat, she said. She took him in her hand and caressed him. I’m sorry, he said, when he didn’t respond, and she put her fingers to his mouth. Tell me about your dream, she said. He shook his head. I don’t have a dream, he said. Once you did, she said; and he answered, It was someone else’s dream born in me, at the moment it died in someone else. And then it died in me, and I don’t know where it went, I don’t remember it at all. Lauren told him, I know where it went. She said, It was born again in my child, and it killed him. How do you know that? he said; and she answered, I know it the way we both know that somewhere, sometime, before we ever met, we were together some way. And now the dream is out there sailing the seas in a bottle, for anyone to find. The pulse of his wrists beat against her nipples. Her hair spread out across the bank above her head like plumage. One leg tensed and the other bent slightly when she felt his tongue inside her; she dropped her hands to his snowwhite hair. He moved his tongue slowly until her entire back arched against the incline of the bank, her toes curling in the soil. She began to move her head from side to side, and all around her the steam of the canal began to dance with light, like crystal; there flew across her vision a stray gull looking for the water, there blew across her feet the stray scarf of a gondolier looking for his boat. For one fleeting moment she thought water was beginning to trickle back into the channel; and she raised her head to look and saw it was her, that with every flickering spasm of his tongue she released more of herself until her thighs were gleaming in the fog. He slowly brought his hands down and held her from behind, pulling him to her a little more; in turn she pulled him closer, his white hair brushed against her belly. She imagined herself to be another long and dimly lit corridor. She imagined she was lined with lanterns and torches which cast a faded glow for him to follow. The more lost inside her he became, the greater her flow, until she thought she would fill the canal herself. She was caught motionless by his discovery of the volatile moment she carried in her; he touched it and she grabbed his hair and held on. When he touched it again she was flung into the dark looming shadow of the bridge above her. He rested his eyes, and against her blond mound he kissed her where she was enflamed and flooded. He stood and pulled her to his chest, and she felt him reach down and separate her with his hand and enter her standing. He was so hard and burning he seemed to tear his way up through her; she felt herself lifted from her feet and braced against one of the
beams of the Rialto. He wrapped her naked body in his coat, and she nestled her thighs against his hips, clutching the nape of his neck. Every so often she would shift, and feel him shift inside her, the tip of him touching something else far up within. From across the canal she could see an old woman carrying a lantern, and they could both hear her footsteps echoing above them as she crossed the bridge. Lauren’s breasts bobbed against his shoulders, and he gently bit the side of her throat. They stood like this for what seemed an immeasurable period of time, smoldering at their common core. She pressed the side of her face against his forehead and he stroked her hair. A breeze came down the canal from an unknown direction. I love you, Adrien, she said. Not Adrien, he answered, it was never Adrien. Adrien was a name that came to me that particular dawn. I don’t know why, my name isn’t Adrien. I love you Michel, she said. He nodded, his eyes closed. Whatever happens, she said, I want you to always remember that I loved you down deep inside me. He nodded again. I didn’t want to, she said. I know, he answered. She felt the lining of his old coat against her bare body. You’re still so hard and I’m still wet, will it be terrible when we come, will it kill us? Perhaps, he answered. She looked at the side of his face and said, I’ll have to be there when he returns. He nodded, never opening his eyes. She touched his lids and watched him, and waited to die with him if that was her fate.
He left her at the hotel where she asked to be alone. She could see how terrible it was for him to be cast back into the fog by himself. But he could see the passages of conflict that wound through her.
So he walked back the way they had come, up the middle of the Grand Canal until he rounded the one bend and saw the Rialto Bridge in the distance. That was where he heard the music, beginning to fade as though the pianist was carried off by the sea. He’d heard it before; it came drifting from a window the morning the race began, when he was standing in the shadows of the station watching her on the steps below. Now he began to follow it. Along the edge of the canal were the remains of old vessels and the paraphernalia of armies; all the way, the music was in front of him. Then he saw them.
Days Between Stations Page 23
