Eighteen days later, and only two after I’d set down again in the United States, Fernando arrives in Saint Louis, his first-ever journey to America. Trembling, pale as ashes, he walks through the gate. He’d missed his connection at JFK, racing not fast enough over a space wider than the Lido, the island off Venice where he lives. The flight had been by far the longest period he’d suffered without a cigarette since he was ten years old. He takes the flowers I hold out to him, and we go home together as though we always had, always would.
Coat and hat and gloves and muffler still in place, he moves softly through the house as though trying to recognize something. Startled that the Sub-Zero is a refrigerator, he opens one of its door expecting to find a clothes closet. “Ma è grandissimo,” he marvels.
“Are you hungry?” I ask him, beginning to rattle about in the kitchen. He eyes a small basket of tagliatelle I’d rolled and cut that afternoon.
“Do you have fresh pasta also in America?” he asks, as though that fact would be akin to finding a pyramid in Kentucky.
I start the bath for him, as I would for my child or an old lover, pour in sandlewood oil, light candles, place towels and soaps and shampoo on a table nearby. I set down a tiny glass of Tio Pepe. After an alarmingly long passage of time, he saunters into the living room, splendid, wet hair slicked back flat. He wears a vintage dark green woolen robe, one of whose pockets is torn and bulging with a package of cigarettes. Burgundy argyle socks are hiked up over his thin knees, his feet tucked into big, suede slippers. I tell him he looks like Rudolf Valentino. He likes this. I’ve set our places on the low table in front of the living-room fire. I hand him a glass of red wine, and we sit on cushions. He likes this, too. And so I have supper with the stranger.
There is a white oval dish of braised leeks tossed in crème fraîche, spritzed with vodka, bubbling, golden under a crust of Emmenthaler and Parmesan. I don’t know how to say “leek” in Italian, and so I have to get up to find my dictionary. “Ah, porri,” he says. “I don’t like porri.” I quickly rifle the pages again, pretending to have made an error.
“No, they’re not porri; these are scalogni,” I lie to the stranger.
“I’ve never tasted them,” he says, taking a bite. As it turns out, the stranger very much likes leeks, as long as they are called shallots. Then there are the tagliatelle, thin yellow ribbons in a roasted walnut sauce. We are comfortable, uncomfortable. We smile more than we talk. I try to tell him a little about my work, that I’m a journalist, that I write mostly about food and wine. I tell him I’m a chef. He nods indulgently but appears to find my credentials less than compelling. He seems content with silence. I’ve made a dessert, one I haven’t made in years, a funny-looking cake made from bread dough, purple plums, and brown sugar. The thick black juices of the fruit, mingled with the caramelized sugar, give up a fine treacly steam, and we put the cake between us, eating it from the battered old pan I baked it in. He spoons up the last of the plummy syrup, and we drink the heel of the red wine. He gets up and comes over to my side of the table. He sits next to me, looks at me full face, then gently turns my face a bit to the right, holding my chin in his hand. “Si, questa è la mia faccia,” he tells me in a whisper. “Yes, this is my face. And I desire now to go with you to your bed.” He pronounces these words slowly, clearly, as though he’s practiced them.
When he sleeps it’s with his cheek against my shoulder, an arm anchoring my waist. I lay awake, stroking his hair. There’s a Venetian in my bed, I say almost audibly. I press my mouth to the top of his head and remember again that brusquely delivered assignment I’d received so many years before from my editor: “Spend two weeks in Venice and come back with three feature pieces. We’ll send a photographer up from Rome,” she’d said, without any good-bye. Why didn’t we find each other on that first trip? Probably because my editor never told me to come back with a Venetian. Here he sleeps, though, a stranger with long, skinny legs. But now I must sleep, too. Sleep, I tell myself. But I don’t sleep. How can I sleep? I remember the sort of ranging aloofness I’d always suffered about Venice. I’d always found a way to put her off. Once I traveled nearly to the edges of her watery skirts, jaunting over the autostrada from Bergamo to Verona to Padova when, only twenty miles away, I turned my little white Fiat abruptly south toward Bologna. Yet, after the old jaundice about her had been cured during my first Venetian hours, I’d always dug deeply for reasons to return, begging for writing assignments that might take me anywhere close by, trolling the travel sections for the right, cheap ticket.
I moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, last spring from California, staying in a rented room for two months while house renovations were completed and a little café was launched. By June life had shape: the café, a weekly restaurant review for the Riverfront Times, the carving out of a day-by-day route through my new city. Still, wanderlust came flirting. Restless by the first days of November, I’d set off with my friends Silvia and Harold, heading back into Venice’s honeyed arms. I never thought I’d be heading for these honeyed arms, I think as I press closer to the Venetian.
Mornings, we take to sitting by the kitchen fire, facing each other in the rusty velvet wingback chairs, each with a dual-language dictionary in hand, a full, steaming coffee press, a tiny pitcher of cream, and a plate of buttered scones on the table in front of us. So settled, we speak of our lives.
“I keep trying to remember important things to tell you. You know, about my childhood, about when I was young. I think I am the prototype for Everyman. In the films I would be cast as the man who didn’t get the girl.” He is neither sad nor apologetic for his self-image.
One morning he wants to know, “Can you remember your dreams?”
“You mean my night dreams?”
“No. Your daydreams. What you thought you wanted? Who you thought you’d be?” he says.
“Of course I can. I’ve lived many of them. I wanted to have babies. That was my first big one. After they were born, most of my dreams were about them. And when they grew older, I began to dream a little differently. But I really have lived out so many of my dreams. I’m living them now. I remember the ones that went up in smoke. I remember all of them, and I’ve always got new ones rolling around. And you?”
“No. Not so much. And until now, always less. I grew up thinking that dreaming was a lot like sinning. The discourses of my childhood from priests and teachers, from my father, they were about logic, reason, morality, honor. I wanted to fly airplanes and play the saxophone. I went away to school when I was twelve, and, believe me, living among Jesuits does little to encourage dreaming. When I went home, which wasn’t very often, things were somber there as well. Youth and, especially, adolescence were offensive stages through which almost everyone tried to rush me.”
He is speaking very quickly, and I keep having to ask him to slow down, to explain this word, that word. I’m still back with the Jesuits and the saxophone while he’s already onto la mia adolescenza è stata veramente triste e dura.
He thinks volume is the solution to my blurred comprehension, and so now he inhales like an aging tenor and his voice swells into thunder. “My father’s wish was that I would be quickly sistemato, situated, find a job, find a safe path and stay dutifully on it. Early on I learned to want what he wanted. And with time I accumulated layers and layers of barely transparent bandaging over my eyes, over my dreams.”
“Wait,” I plead, flipping pages, trying to find cerotti, bandages. “What happened to your eyes? Why were they in bandages?” I want to know.
“Non letteralmente. Not literally,” he roars. He is impatient. I am a dolt who, after twelve hours of living with an Italian, cannot yet follow the drift of his galloping imagery. He adds a third dimension to bring home his story. He’s on his feet. Pulling his socks up over wrinkled knees, arranging his robe, now he is wrapping a kitchen towel around his eyes, peeking out over its edge. The stranger has combined speed and volume with histrionics. Surely that will do it. He continues. “And with yet more time, the weight of the bandages, their encumbrance, became hardly noticeable. Sometimes I would squint and look out under the gauze to see if I could still catch a glimpse of the old dreams in real light. Sometimes I could see them. Mostly it would be more comfortable to just go back under the bandages. That is, until now,” he says quietly, the show finished.
Maybe he’s the man who didn’t get the girl unless the girl was Tess of the d’Urbervilles or Anna Karenina. Or, perhaps, Edith Piaf, I think. He’s so deeply sad, I think again. And he always wants to talk about “time.”
When I ask him why he came racing so quickly across the sea, he tells me he was tired of waiting.
“Tired of waiting? You arrived here two days after I came home,” I remind him.
“No. I mean tired of waiting. I understand now about using up my time. Life is this conto, account,” said the banker in him. “It’s an unknown quantity of days from which one is permitted to withdraw only one precious one of them at a time. No deposits accepted.” This allegory presents glittering opportunity for more of the stranger’s stage work. “I’ve used so many of mine to sleep. One by one, I’ve mostly waited for them to pass. It’s common enough for one to simply find a safe place to wait it all out. Every time I would begin to examine things, to think about what I felt, what I wanted, nothing touched, nothing mattered more than anything else. I’ve been lazy. Life rolled itself out and I shambled along sempre due passi indietro, always two steps behind. Fatalità, fate. Easy. No risks. Everything is someone else’s fault or merit. And so now, no more waiting,” he says as though he’s talking to someone far away off in the wings.
When it’s my turn, I begin to tell him of some milestone or another—when we moved from New York to California, stories about my brief, terrible stint at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, about traveling on my stomach to the remotest parts of France and Italy to find one perfect food or wine. Everything sounds like a case history, and after a short roster of recitals I know that none of it matters in the now, that everything I’d done and been until this minute was preamble. Even in these first days together, it is very clear that this feeling of mine for the stranger has trumped all the other adventures in my life. It has shuffled everything and everyone else I thought I was moving toward or away from. Loving Fernando is like a single, sharp shake of the stones that lets me read all the patterns that once baffled and sometimes tortured me. I don’t pretend to understand these feelings, but I’m willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred. It seems I had my own set of heirloom bandages. Astonishing what a man bearing tenderness can do to open a heart.
He comes to the café with me each morning, helps with the second bake, chopping rosemary and dumping flour into the Hobart. He loves pulling the focaccia out of the oven on the wooden peel, learning to shake the hot, flat bread deftly onto the cooling racks. We always pat out a small one just for us, set it to bake in the place where the oven’s hottest so it comes out brown as hazelnuts. We tear at it impatiently, eating it still steaming, burning our fingers. He says he loves my skin when it smells of rosemary and new bread.
Afternoons we stop in at the newspaper office if I have a column to drop off or something to work out with my editor. We walk in Forest Park. We have supper at the café or go to Balaban’s or Café Zoe and then downtown to the jazz clubs. He doesn’t understand much about geography, and it’s three days before he can be convinced that Saint Louis is in Missouri. He says now he understands why the travel agent in Venice was exasperated when he tried to book a ticket for Saint Louis, Montana. Still, he suggests we go to the Grand Canyon for a day, to New Orleans for lunch.
One evening we return late from dinner at Zoe. We had talked for a long time about life when my children were little. I take a small green faille box of photos from my desk, looking for one to show him of the Lane Gate Road house in Cold Spring, New York, that we all loved so much. Sitting by the fire, the stranger sifts through old vignettes. I join him, and I see he keeps turning back to one of the just-born Lisa, who is cradled in my arms. He says her face is so sweet and so like the face in her grown-up photos, so like her woman’s face. He tells me that my face is sweet, too, that Lisa and I look very much alike. He tells me he wishes he’d known me then, wishes he could touch the face that was mine in that old photo.
Now the stranger begins unfastening my bustier, and his hands are beautiful, big, and warm, fumbling as they graze my skin through the soft lace. He begins brushing away crumbs from my décolleté, from between my breasts. “Cos’è questo? What is this? Your whole day is recorded here. We have evidence of burnt rye toast; two, perhaps three, kinds of cookies; focaccia; a mocha brownie—it’s all here archived inside your lingerie,” he says tasting the few telltale bits. I laugh until I cry, and he says, “And about those tears. How many times a day do you cry? Will you always be full of lacrime e bricole, full of tears and crumbs?” He presses me down into the cool plush of my bed and, when he kisses me, I taste my own tears mixed with the barest traces of ginger.
“Will you always be full of tears and crumbs?” He’s a wise old man, I think, remembering his question while I watch him sleep. Yes, crumbs are the eternal symbol of my intemperate nibbling, my chest forming a good shelf to collect them. And, too, there’s some constancy about the tears. Quick to cry as I am to smile, who can tell me why? A long-ago something that still rasps inside me. Something in the pith of me. These are not the stinging, weeping, nighttime tears I can still cry from old wounds. “Stand up you who have nothing left of your wounds,” said my friend Misha one evening after a double vodka. After one of his patients shot himself dead with a pearl-handled pistol.
Much of my crying is for joy and wonder rather than for pain. A trumpet’s wailing, a wind’s warm breath, the chink of a bell on an errant lamb, the smoke from a candle just spent, first light, twilight, firelight. Everyday beauty. I cry for how life intoxicates. And maybe just a little for how swiftly it runs.
Less than a week passes before I awake one morning with a raging flu. I never get flu. It’s been years since I’ve had even a cold, and so now, exactly now, with this Venetian lying in my rosy silk bed, I am burning with fever, my throat is on fire, and I can’t breathe for the hundred-pound stone on my chest. I’m beginning to cough. I try to remember what I have in the medicine cabinet for comfort, but I know there is only vitamin C and a ten-year-old, oily, unlabeled bottle of Save-the-Baby that I’ve carried about since New York.
“Fernando, Fernando,” I croak out from the blistery narrows in my throat. “I think I have a fever.” At this point I do not yet understand that the word, the concept of “fever,” conjures plague in the soul of every Italian. I think this phenomenon is a manifestation of medieval memory. Where there is fever, there is sure to be a slow and festering death. He leaps from the bed, repeating “febbre, febbre” and then leaps back into the bed, placing his hands on my forehead and face. He says the word “febbre” at three-second intervals like a mantra. He places his still-hot-from-sleep cheek on my chest and speeds up the mantra. He says my heart is beating very fast and that this is a grave sign. He wants to know the whereabouts of the thermometer, and when I tell him I don’t have one I see, for the first time, Fernando’s face in torment. I ask him if this thermometer-lessness is a deal breaker.
Not bothering with underwear, he slides on his jeans and pulls a sweater over his head, dressing for a mercy mission. He asks me how to say termometro in English, and because its pronounciation is close to the Italian, he can’t differentiate the two. I write it on a Post-it along with “Tylenol and something for flu.” It hurts desperately to laugh, but I laugh anyway. Fernando says hysteria is common in cases like this. He checks his money.
He has lire and two gold Krugerrands. I tell him the pharmacy takes only dollars, and he throws up his hands, saying how little time there is to waste. He bundles into his jacket, wraps around his muffler, tugs his furry hat into place, and stretches a glove over his left hand, the right-hand one having disappeared into the ether over the Atlantic. Girded for the wars he might face in the forty-degree sunshine during the three-block journey west into Clayton, the Venetian departs. This is to be his very first solo socioeconomic encounter in America. He comes back into the house to fetch his dictionary, kissing me twice again, shaking his head in disbelief that I could have invited such tragedy.
Full of warm tea and all the little pills and potions with which the Venetian has plied me, I sleep most of the day and into the night. Once, when I awaken, I find him sitting on the edge of the bed facing me, his eyes pools of sweetness. “The fever has passed, you’re lovely and cool now. Dormi, amore mio, dormi. Sleep, my love, sleep.” I look at him, at his narrow hunched shoulders, his face still a picture of worry. He gets up to adjust the blanket, and I look at him bending over me in his sensible knee-length woolen underwear. I think he looks like the skinny man on the beach before he wrote away for his copy of “Muscle Culture.” I think he is the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen.
I ask him, “Did you think I was going to die?”
He says, “No. But I was frightened. You were very sick. You still are, and now you must sleep again. But you know, just in case you do die before I die, I have a plan, a way to find you. I don’t desire to wait another fifty years, and so I’ll go to Saint Peter and I’ll ask directly for the kitchen, for the wood-burning oven, to be exact. Do you think there’s a bread oven in Paradise? If there is, there you’ll be, all full of flour and smelling like rosemary.” He tells me all this while he pulls at the sheets, attempting knife-edge military corners. Finally content with his adjustments, he sits near to me again and, in a whispery baritone, the Venetian stranger who looks very much like Peter Sellers and a little like Rudolf Valentino sings a lullabye. He caresses my forehead and says, “You know I’ve always wanted someone to sing to me, but now I know that what I want more is to sing to you.”
Next morning, tracking the scent of his burning cigarette, I run out toward the living room. “You should not be get upping,” he tells me in English, chasing me back into bed. He climbs in next to me and we sleep. We sleep the sleep of children.
On the morning of the day he is to depart for Venice we forgo our fireside chat, we leave coffee in our cups. We don’t stop by the café. We don’t even talk very much. We walk a long time through the park and then find a bench on which to rest for a while. A flock of geese are honking and flapping their way exuberantly through cold crystal air. “Aren’t they a little late getting south?” I ask him.
“A little,” he says. “Perhaps they were waiting for one of them to catch up or, perhaps, they were lost. It’s only important that now they are on their way. Like us,” he says.
“How poetic you are,” I tell him.
“A few weeks ago I would have never even looked up at those birds, I would have never even heard them. Now I feel part of things. Yes, I feel connected. I think that’s the word. I feel already married to you, as if I’ve always been married to you but I just couldn’t find you. It even seems unnecessary to ask you to marry me. It seems better to say, please don’t get lost again. Stay close. Stay very close to me.” His is the shadowy voice of a boy saying secrets.
After returning home from the airport that evening, I light a fire in the hearth in my bedroom and throw cushions down in front of it as he had done each evening. I sit there where he had sat, pull his woolen undershirt over my nightgown and feel as small and fragile as I can remember. It has all been settled. He is to begin moving papers about in Venice in preparation for our marriage. I am to close up my life in America and get to Italy as quickly as I can, looking to June as the absolute latest date. I decide to sleep by the fire, and I pull a blanket off the bed and lie down under it. I inhale the scent of the stranger, which rises from his shirt. I love this smell. “I love Fernando,” I tell myself and the fire. I am bewildered by this fresh new fact of my life, more from the swiftness of its coming than by its truth. I search for some sense of folie à deux. I find none. Rather than being love-blinded, it is in love that I can see, really see.
Never was there even a flickering sense of my having been beckoned up onto a white horse by a curly-haired swain, by the man-who-would-be-king, my one-and-only-meant-to-be-mine. I never felt the earth crack open. Never. What I felt, what I feel, is quiet. Except for those first hours together in Venice, there has been no confusion, no confounding, none of the measuring and considering one might think to be natural for a woman up to her knees in middle age who thinks to jump the moat. Now all the doors are open, and there is warm yellow light behind them. This does not feel like a new perspective but like the first and only perspective that has ever belonged only to me, the first perspective that has been neither compromised nor redrawn. Fernando is a first choice. I never had to talk myself into loving him, to balance out his merits and defects on a yellow pad. Nor did I have to, once again, remind myself that I wasn’t getting any younger, that I should be grateful for the attentions of yet another “very nice man.”
Too often it is we who won’t let life be simple. Why must we squeeze it and bite it and slam it against what we’ve convinced ourselves are our great powers of reason? We violate the innocence of things in the name of rationality so we can wander about, uninterrupted, in our search for passion and sentiment. Let the inexplicable sit sacred. I love him. Skinny legs, narrow shoulders, sadness, tenderness, beautiful hands, beautiful voice, wrinkled knees. No saxophone. No airplanes. Jesuit ghosts.
I wait for sleep that doesn’t come. It’s nearly three in the morning, and I remember that in five and a half hours the real estate broker and her agents will be arriving, en masse, for a look at the house. I wonder about my audience with the Italian consulate in Saint Louis, whom I’ve heard is a witchy Sicilian. I understand how much I have taken on with the stranger but, more, I know that whatever else might happen, I am in love for the first time in my life.