A stunning cold wakens me. Dull thin snowlight shows itself from behind the window’s white lace. White on white, and Fernando is gone. I run to raise the thermostat, then back to the window to watch the spectacle. A foot or so of icy snow has already fallen on the terrace. Would the real estate agents still come? Should I wait to begin polishing up things? I wander through the rooms, which seem bigger or smaller now, empty without his open suitcases and shoes and all his highly colored cargo festooning them. I miss the disorder that went away with him. How unlike me. I remember back to the June morning when I closed on this house. I had played the unflinching martinet, running my hands over surfaces, tsk-tsking over paint splatters on the mahogany satin floors, threatening to halt the proceedings because of a quirky garage door opener. The restructuring of the house had been a yearlong saga, ten months of which were conducted long-distance from Sacramento. “A fireplace in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the living room?” sneered the contractor during our initial meeting. During the final two months of work I had stayed at Sophie’s—she being a new friend, a woman in a transition of her own, who sought company at least as much as the income she earned from renting rooms in her musty old house. I would spend hours each day on-site, deep in some little project of my own or sometimes running and fetching for the workers. I thought back to the great painters’ rebellion on the morning I began with, “You see, I’d like each room to be painted in an almost imperceptibly descending tint of terracotta.” I’d spilled a sackful of color chips onto the floor. “And the dining room, I would like it to be in this clear, bright sort of primary red,” I continued, brandishing a swatch of damask.
“Red, really red, like your lipstick?” asked one of them incredulously.
“Ah, that’s exactly it. Lipstick red,” I smiled in perfect satisfaction at his quick comprehension. Besides, what’s so odd about red? Red is earth and stone and sunset and barns and schoolhouses, and certainly red can be the walls of a little candlelit room where people sit down together to supper.
“It will take six, maybe eight coats to get an even coverage with a color that dark, ma’am,” warned another. “It’s gonna make the space feel smaller, closed-in,” he said.
“Yes, the space will be warm, inviting,” I said as though we were in agreement.
I remembered going to visit the painters during their work, bringing them cold tea and the first fat ripe cherries still warm from Sophie’s tree. And when the opus was finished and nearly every one of the workers, all of them spiffed and scented, came to the house-warming, it was the painting squad who photographed the rooms from a hundred angles, two of them coming back again and again to shoot the spaces in changing light. The sweet little house, made with so much love, had, after all, been an obsession, short-lived. All I wished for now was to be free of it, to leave it fast behind me, to go and live in a house I’d never seen, a place Fernando wincingly described as “a very small apartment in a postwar condominium that needs a lot of work.”
“What sort of work?” I’d asked brightly. “Paint and furniture? New drapes?”
“More precisely, there are many things to put in order.” I waited. He proceeded, “Nothing much has been done since its construction in the early fifties. My father owned it as a rental property. I inherited it from him.”
I skewed my imaginings toward the grotesque, hoping to avoid later delusion. I pictured small-windowed square rooms, lots of Milanese plastic, mint green and flamingo pink paint peeling everywhere. Weren’t those the colors of postwar Italy? It would have been nice if he’d told me he lived in a third-floor, frescoed flat in a Gothic palazzo that looked over the Grand Canal or, perhaps, in the former atelier of Tintoretto, where the light would be splendid. But he didn’t. It wasn’t for Fernando’s house that I was going to Venice.
I missed him desperately, even sniffed about for some remnant of his cigarette smoke. As I walked through the living room I could see him there, his Peter Sellers grin, arms folded at the elbows inward toward his chest, fingers beckoning me. “Come here to dance with me,” he’d say, as his newly acquired, enormously esteemed Roy Orbison disk sobbed through the stereo. I would always lay down my book or my pen, and we would dance. I want to dance now, barefoot, shaking in the cold. How I want to dance with him. I remember the people waltzing in Piazza San Marco. Was I really going to live there? Was I really going to marry Fernando?
Terror, illness, deceit, delusion, marriage, divorce, loneliness had all come to visit early enough in my life, interfering with the peace. Some of the demons just passed through, while others of them pitched tents outside my back door. And they stayed. One by one they went away, each leaving some impression of the visit that made me stronger, better. I’m thankful the gods were impatient with me, that they never waited until I was thirty or fifty or seventy-seven, that they’d had the grace to throw down the gauntlets when I was so young. Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn, young, how to pick them up, how to work them against the demons, and, finally, how to outlast if not escape those same demons, life can seem more merciful. It’s that long, smooth, false swanning through the course of a life that seems to drive a person, sooner or later, into the wall. I never swanned through anything, but I was always grateful for the chance to keep trying to shine up things. Anyway, by this time, there wasn’t much left to fear. A grim childhood, scattered here and there with the hideous, provided early grief and shame. I kept thinking it must be me who was all wrong, me that was so dreadful, me the cause of the epic agony in my family. No one worked very hard to dissuade me from my thinking. Why couldn’t I live in a house with golden windows where people were happy, where no one had bad dreams or white-hot fear? I wanted to be anywhere where someone wasn’t lashing old pain across my new life, flailing it smart as a leather strap.
When I understood it was me, myself, who’d have to build the house with the golden windows, I got to work. I salved heartaches, learned to bake bread, raised children, invented a life that felt good. And now I’m choosing to leave that life. I let myself remember my quaking fears when the children were small, the lean periods, my playing for time with the gods, asking to stay strong and well enough to take care of them, to grow them up a while longer. Isn’t that what single moms do? We fear someone stronger than us will take away our babies. We fear someone will find grievious fault with the job we’re doing, with the choices we’re making. We’re already hard enough on ourselves. And even in our strengths, we’re judged broken. At best, we’re half-good. We fear poverty and solitude. Lady Madonna, children at her feet. We fear breast cancer. We fear our children’s fear. We fear the speed at which their childhood passes. Wait. Wait, please, I think I understand it now. I think I can do it better. Can we just repeat last month? How did you get to be thirteen? How did you get to be twenty? Yes. Yes, of course, you must leave. Yes, I understand. I love you, baby. I love you, Mommy.
At first, I talked more often than usual to Lisa and Erich, my children. I would call, and they would ask a million questions I wasn’t certain how to answer, or they would call just to hear if I was okay, if I was having doubts or that sort of thing. After a few weeks we spoke less frequently and with strain. They needed to talk more to each other than to me during this time, having to sort out shock and joy and fear, perhaps. Lisa would call and I would cry and she would just say, “Mom, I love you.”
Erich came to visit. He took me to dinner at Balaban’s and sat across the table searching my face hard. Satisfied, then, that at least I looked the same, he sat a long time sipping quietly at his wine. At last he opened with, “I hope you’re not frightened about all this. It will be good for you.” It was a vintage tactic of his to reassure me when it was he who was drop-dead scared of something.
“No, I’m not frightened,” I said, “and I hope you’re not either.”
“Frightened? No. I just need to readjust my compass. You and home have always been in the same place,” he said.
“And they still are. It’s just that now home and I will be in Venice,” I told him.
I knew the difference between going off to university, knowing that home is a few hundred miles away, and having one’s mother dissolve that home to go and live in Europe. Now home would be six thousand miles away, not accessible on long weekends. And there was also this person called Fernando. It was altogether a less dramatic event for my daughter, she having lived in Boston for several years already, deep in romance, her studies, her work. I wished my children could feel part of this future of mine, but all this wasn’t happening to the three of us together, as most events that had happened before in our lives. This time something was happening only to me. A part of me knew we were an old team, inseparable by a sea. Another part knew that their childhood was ending and that, in a strange way, my childhood was beginning.
The really precious parts of my life are transportable, not conditions of geography. Why shouldn’t I go to live on the fringes of an Adriatic lagoon with a blueberry-eyed stranger and leave no trail of biscotti crumbs to find my way back? My house, my fancy car, even my native country were not, by definition, me. My sanctuary, my sentimental self were veteran travelers. And they would go where I would.
I shake off the reverie and put on the kettle, start my bath, call the café to see if the baker has arrived on time and sober and set Paganini at a gentle volume. The real estate agents will soon be here.
Rather than racing about to clean the whole house, I opt for the more elemental seduction of crackling fires and the scent of some cinnamon-dusted thing wafting from the oven. Once I have flames leaping in all three hearths, I cut up some three-day-old scone dough left from one of Fernando’s breakfasts, top the little pillows with spice and sugar and great dollops of butter and close the oven door as the bell rings. I greet the throng, which arrives together, despite the storm, as though on divine command. The brigade files past me, tossing coats and scarves onto a divan, revealing their smart mustardy blazers, and, without ceremony, commences inspection. There are eleven agents in all. The restrained murmurs of approval soon give way to delighted screams as one opens the door into the pewter-papered guest bath, another looks up at the nineteenth-century Austrian crystal dripping from the living-room ceiling and yet another eases herself down into the coppery velvet plumpness of the wingback chair in front of the kitchen fire.
“Who was your architect?”
“Who did the work on this place?”
“Your decorator must be from Chicago.”
“My God, this is fabulous,” says the only gentleman among the women. “Why on earth do you want to sell this?”
“I know,” stage-whispers someone else. “It’s so romantic it makes me feel frumpy.”
“You are frumpy,” the gentleman assures her.
“How can you bear to part with it?” asks another.
It was clearly my turn to speak. “Well, I’m leaving it because I’m going to marry a Venetian.” Big breath. “I’m going to live in Venice,” I say gently, deliciously, trying out the words. Was that me, was that my voice? The brigade responds with a long silence. When one begins to speak, all of them do.
“How old are you?”
“How did you meet this man?”
“Is he a count or something?” asks one, eager to embroider the text.
Mostly, I think, they want to know if he is rich. To say outright that he is relatively poor would perplex them, nick away at their fantasy, so I opt for a part of the truth. “No, he’s not a count. He’s a banker who looks just like Peter Sellers,” I say.
“Oh, honey. Be careful.” It’s the frumpy one speaking. “Have him checked out, I mean, really checked out. Four years ago my friend Isabelle met up with a Neapolitan on Capri, and he almost bamboozled her into a quick marriage until one night she woke up and heard him mooning, whispering into his cell phone from the terrace outside their hotel room. He’d had the nerve to tell her he’d only been saying good-night to his mother.”
Her story seems some inappropriate cocktail of low-level envy and a genuine desire to protect me. She doesn’t know Fernando, I think. That I don’t know him either seems irrelevant.
One of them, trying to rescue the more symphonic motif of the tale comes in with, “I’ll bet he has a gorgeous house. What’s it like?”
“Oh, I don’t think there’s much that’s gorgeous about it. He lives in a 1950s condominium on the beach. Actually, I haven’t seen it yet,” I say.
“You mean you’re selling your home and cashing in your whole life without. . . .” Her query is overruled by the gentleman who aims to comfort the crowd.
“Maybe it’s Venice you’re in love with. If I had a chance to move to Venice, I wouldn’t give two hoots for what the house was like.” They sally and banter without me.
When the brigade exits, one agent stays behind to write an offer to buy my house herself. The offer is serious, reasonable, not so many thousands of dollars less than the price Fernando and I had talked about with my attorney. She tells me she has long been planning to end her marriage, leave her job, and start an agency of her own. She says that finding this house with the lipstick-red dining room is the last button necessary to activate her renaissance program.
“I won’t be leaving behind any magic dust here,” I warn. “If you buy this house it doesn’t mean you’ll fall in love with a charming Spaniard or something like that. It’s just a pretty little, regular house,” I say inanely, wanting to protect her from her impulse and, perhaps, me from mine. “Why don’t you think about it and we can talk later,” I continue without looking at her and as though I was big and she was little.
“How long did you think about it before you said yes to your Venetian? This is all happening just as it should,” she says with a voice that came from a misty place inside her. “I’d like you to tell me what furniture you are willing to sell,” she continues. I learned much later that, with some deft caressing of the zoning laws, my red dining room became the office from which she operates her independent agency.
I call my children. I call my attorney. Fernando calls me. I call Fernando. Was it all going to be this simple? I pull off my good black dress and pull on jeans and boots, remembering I had to place an order with the meat purveyor before ten. I ring up Mr. Wasserman without thinking first what I’d cook for that evening’s menu. I hear myself telling him I’ll need baby lamb shanks, fifty of them. I’d never yet cooked baby lamb shanks at the café. Used to my orders for game and veal, Mr. Wasserman misses half a beat, then assures me they”ll be delivered before three. “How will you cook them?” he wants to know.
“I’ll braise them in a saffron tomato broth, lay them over French lentils and add a stripe of black olive paste,” my chef’s voice announces without consulting me.
“Write me in for two at seven-thirty, will you?” he says. After a look at the ice-encrusted car, I walk the mile or so to the café, though I’d never once walked to work before. Of course I’d never been romantic about old smoke from an Italian cigarette left behind in my bedroom, either. And those baby lamb shanks. Tramping through high snow that is falling still in earnest, my old white Mother Russia coat trailing, making a soft, scraping noise behind me. I wonder when I will begin, if I will begin at all, to feel sad about all these endings I was sealing. Would there be some late lapse of courage? Is it, indeed, courage that was shaping my way? Is it bravado? Did I fancy myself some aging armchair swashbuckler setting off, at last, to adventure? No. My friend Misha says I am la grande cocotte with flour on my hands. Or ink stains. No, I’d never been an “armchair” anything. And let’s go back to why I must anticipate anguish or muddy what was feeling immensely clear. There is nothing I want more than to be with Fernando. Anyway, June seems far off, safely, sadly far away.
As I near the corner of Pershing and DeBalivier I remember there is to be a meeting with my partners before lunch. A father and son, the elder is a rancorous old magistrate, the younger, a gentle-hearted philosopher who is restaurateuring to please his magisterial old papa. That it is papa’s choice to never be pleased has yet to impress the son. It’s a brief, cool discourse between us, an almost luscious divorce, and we agree that June 15, the day after our last programmed event and one year, to the day, from when I’d moved into my house, would be my last. I call Fernando. He says to book my ticket even though it is only December 19. It is not yet noon, and I’ve sold my house and drawn up a graceful exit from a piece of my business. All that’s left to do now is the slow braising of fifty baby lamb shanks.