It was his knocking on the door that did it, she told Bruce afterwards. His ringing the bell. His standing before her in the doorway, in his cashmere cardigan and bow tie, all scrubbed and pink like a cartoon pig.
Immediately the dogs ran to him. When he bent down, they licked his face.
“That was probably what upset me most,” Eva said. “As if he was trying to take my dogs too.”
Needless to say, she didn’t invite him in. And why should she have? For eighteen years they’d been next-door neighbors, and in eighteen years neither had ever set foot in the other’s apartment. Instead she listened to what he had to say across the threshold. Though the party was to be held on the night of the inauguration, it wasn’t to be an inauguration party per se. That is to say, he and Kitty would still have been throwing it even if “their guy” hadn’t won. More to the point, though it was true that most of the guests would be people who shared their gladness at the change about to sweep through Washington—and wasn’t change in and of itself a healthy thing?—this wasn’t why he and Kitty had invited them. Nor would everyone at the party be of the same political stripe. Some Democrats would be there. Even a few die-hard Hillary supporters. If she and Bruce chose to drop by, they’d find some fellow travelers.
“But I’m guessing you won’t,” he added, in an almost wistful tone. And then, when Eva didn’t reply: “In any case, let me assure you, the noise will be kept to a reasonable level. You won’t even notice.”
“That was the last straw,” Eva told Bruce as they got ready for bed that night. “I mean, it’s bad enough that they’re having the party—but then to come over and rub my face in it—”
“He might just have been trying to be friendly,” Bruce said.
“The winner can always afford to be friendly to the loser,” Eva said.
“You mean that if they’d lost, you’d be friendly to him?”
“I don’t know. If I’m to be honest, probably not.”
“Why not?”
“Because no matter the outcome, the fact remains that he voted for … I don’t even want to say the name.”
“Well, yes, he’s a Republican. Naturally he voted for the Republican. But that doesn’t mean he was at all those rallies, shouting ‘Lock her up.’ ”
“How do you know he wasn’t?”
“Alec Warriner at a rally? I really can’t see it. My hunch is that if you asked him, you’d find that the main reason he voted for Tr—”
“Don’t say that name. I refuse to have that name uttered in my house.”
“Sorry. My hunch is that if you asked him, you’d find that he didn’t vote for Tr—for him-who-shall-not-be-named because he likes him, but because he thinks that he-who-shall-not-be-named will get the corporate tax rate below twenty-one percent.”
“I think you’re wrong,” Eva said. “I think it was because he hates her so much. That’s the thing I can’t wrap my mind around—why people hate her so much. It might be because I went to Smith and she went to Wellesley, but I feel an attack on her is an attack on me.”
“Who knows? Maybe hate is blind. Like love.”
“Don’t try to be philosophical. You just end up sounding glib. And anyway, it’s not true. Hate isn’t blind. It sees—and in this case what it sees is that she’s a woman.”
“Well, but so is Marine Le Pen. So are Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, the one who used to have the judge show—you know, what’s her name. Jeanine Pirro.”
“Oh, God, her. Don’t mention her.”
They got into bed. As Bruce switched out the light, it occurred to him that for all the years of their marriage, he had always slept on the left side and Eva on the right. Exactly how this arrangement had come into being, he couldn’t remember. All he knew was that it was now second nature to him, so much so that even when Eva was out of town and he had the bed to himself, he slept on the left. Even when he was traveling on business and staying at a hotel, he slept on the left. The idea of the bedside lamp, the bedside table, being on his right was more than his imagination could cope with.
There was a rustling in the dark—the dogs coming in, jumping up onto the bed, and settling themselves between his and Eva’s legs.
He closed his eyes. He could hear Eva turning over. He could hear her pulling open her bedside drawer, taking out the bottle of Ambien, opening it, and shaking a pill onto her palm. On election night she’d also taken an Ambien—which hadn’t stopped her from being wakened at two thirty by a noise that she quickly identified as cheering. For maybe fifteen seconds, a delicious sensation of relief flooded her—Hillary had won!—until she realized where the cheering was coming from.
In the morning, as was his habit, Bruce rose at six. He showered, dressed, fed and walked the dogs, and was just leaving for work when their maid, Amalia, arrived. He hardly ever saw Eva in the morning, since it was her habit to sleep until eight or eight thirty.
As they had most weekday mornings over the past eighteen years, Bruce and Amalia nodded at each other as they passed.
Nine hours later, when he got home, Eva was waiting for him. Her face was flushed and she was rotating the rings on her fingers, one after the other.
“So I’ve made a decision,” she said. “I can’t be here for this inauguration party. The mere idea of it, of those idiots rallying together next door—next door!—to gloat over their victory, to rub it in my face, the way they did on election night …”
“Well, but Eva, I hardly think you’re the reason they’re having the party.”
“Yes, I am. I know I am. I know it because if we’d won, I’d have done the same thing … Anyway, I refuse to give them the satisfaction of being here to endure it. It’s too much. I have to get away.”
“Well, why not go to the country?”
She shook her head. “It’s not far enough, the country. It’s the country—this country—I need to get away from. I’ve been thinking about it all day. Where in the world is there a place where I won’t even hear an echo of that cheering? And then I hit on it. Venice.”
“Venice?”
She nodded exuberantly. “I’ve always loved Venice, ever since the first time I went there, when I was in college.”
“But it’s January.”
“Exactly. That’s the best part. It’ll be practically empty, the way it was my semester abroad. The wind, and the acqua alta, and the utter silence at night … Well, what do you think? I’ve been checking flights. We could leave on Thursday and be there before the horror show starts.”
“But that’s next week. I can’t get away on such short notice.”
“Can’t you? Then I’ll ask Min. She’ll be game. She always is.”
Min was. They left on the night of the nineteenth, arriving at their hotel by water taxi at two in the afternoon—six hours ahead of New York, Washington, the inaugural circus.
And from the moment they stepped off the boat, Eva breathed more easily. She felt that she was once again in the civilized world.
They stayed at a four-star hotel in Dorsoduro. For five days they didn’t look at a newspaper. They didn’t turn on the television. Each morning they would visit a museum or a religious building—the Accademia, the Frari, the Scuola di San Giorgio degli Schiavoni, with its frescoes of Saint George slaying the dragon, and later delivering the dragon, not quite dead, to the Mamluks. “It’s like he’s got the poor thing on a leash,” Eva said, either failing or choosing not to notice the sword that the saint was brandishing to deliver the final blow. “I think the dragon looks sweet. Like a dog.”
The frescoes in the scuola had real dogs in them, too. “Which is your favorite?” she asked Min, who plumped for the scruffy white terrier gazing up at Saint Augustine as he received from Saint Jerome the news of his imminent demise.
“The obvious choice,” Eva said, “though for my part I prefer the long-snouted greyhoundish one watching him baptize the Selenites.”
In the afternoons they shopped or sat in cafés, Eva reading Jan Morris and Min pretending to send texts but really playing Candy Crush. Each day passed more quickly than the last, and then on the sixth, Ursula Brandolin-Foote invited them to tea at her palazzo near Campo della Maddalena. Aaron Weisenstein, who had published some of her translations from the Serbo-Croatian, had told her that Eva and Min were in Venice, and she’d tracked them down. Ursula was a stately woman in her early seventies, with thick hair dyed several shades of gray and a fondness for multihued caftans that lent emphasis to her high breasts and long legs. Although she owned roughly half of Ca’ Brandolin, she told Eva and Min, she occupied only a portion of the piano nobile and rented the rest short-term to visiting academics. Her own flat she also occasionally rented, to studios making period movies and television series. “It has that sepia look,” she said as, with a sweep of a billowing sleeve, she indicated the vast sofa covered in faded Fortuny velvet, the heavy silk curtains, the bookshelves with their stock of ragged paperbacks, the bombe chest, and the basket by the fireplace from which old copies of La Cucina Italiana spilled. Rugs were scattered over the terrazzo floor, which had been poured to create a trompe l’oeil of rugs scattered over a terrazzo floor. On the ceiling, blue-and-pink stucco work framed a trompe l’oeil sky to which time and smoke had lent the yellowish tint of the sky outside at dusk. “All this was in situ when I inherited the place,” Ursula went on. “A mixed blessing, since I only got the property. No money. I’m poor as a church mouse.”
She laughed, her laugh unexpectedly high-pitched, almost a caw.
“How long ago was that?” Eva asked.
“Oh, now, let me see, it must have been 1986 or 1987 when Zia Carlotta went to her comforts—she was ninety-three, you know, young for Venice—the doges all lived to be a hundred and ten—so I guess … 1989? Ah, and here is Elisabetta with our tea. When I moved in, Elisabetta was also in situ, weren’t you, Elisabetta?”
“Si, Signora.”
“She understands English but she won’t speak it. How old are you, Elisabetta?”
“In Ottobre ho compiuto novantacinque anni,” Elisabetta said.
“See what I mean about the Venetians being longevitous? Sul tavolo. Sit, ladies, sit.”
They sat, Eva and Min on the sofa, Ursula on a beige vinyl-covered recliner that somehow did not look out of place. Along with the tea, Elisabetta had brought a plate of sandwiches spread with a fish paste that gave off a dubious odor.
“And is this your first time in Venice?” Ursula asked, taking up a purple vape pen.
“Oh, no,” Eva and Min said at the same time.
“I’ve been at least—”
“It’s my fourth—”
“You go first.”
“No, you.”
Ursula vaped.
“It’s my fourth visit to Venice,” Eva said, with restrained impatience.
“Eva’s an authority on Venice,” Min said, touching Eva’s knee.
“No, I’m not,” Eva said.
“Yes, you are,” Min said. “She’s writing a biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner.”
“No, I’m not,” Eva said.
“Oh, what a good idea!” Ursula said. “I’ve always wondered why someone hasn’t done one.”
“Someone has,” Eva said.
“Only it’s not very good,” Min said.
“We’re going tomorrow to Palazzo Barbaro.”
“Our beloved Ca’ Barbaro!” Ursula said. “Such a grievous day it was when the Curtises had to sell the piano nobile. And yet it’s always the same story here—the inheritors of the old houses paupered by their upkeep.”
“I heard the family bickered,” Eva said.
“In Venice bickering is a tradition. Our laws, you see, are based on the Napoleonic Code, which means that when the owner of an historic property dies, it has to be divided equally among his heirs. Well, in the case of Ca’ Barbaro, there were three children, and they simply couldn’t figure out a way of divvying the place up. Which is a pity, because if they had, they wouldn’t have had to sell.
“When I inherited, it was simpler. There was just me and Zio Ernesto. But then when he died, his half had to be split among his children, three from two marriages. Since then I’ve lost track of who owns what.”
“Forgive me if this is a rude question,” Min said, “but your English is so fluent. Where did you learn it?”
“Where else? In bed!” Again Ursula gave her alarming laugh. “But seriously, I’m basically American. In a different life, I was married for thirty years to an African Americanist—a white one, alas—an authority on the Harlem Renaissance. Before the divorce, Norman and I lived in Urbana. We adopted two black boys from the South Side of Chicago. One’s in California now. He works for Google. The other’s a jazz pianist based in Berlin.” She took a purely notional sip of tea. “Of course, I’ve kept up my American passport. It used to be that if you were American and you spent more than six months of every year abroad, you could get away with not paying taxes in either country. Those halcyon days, alas, are over.”
“So you can vote in American elections?”
“Can and do—and what a horror this one was! Afterwards I had to take to my bed. I was sick with disgust. President Caligula, I call him.”
“Oh, I like that!” Min said. “Eva won’t say his name, you know.”
“It’s true,” Eva said. “I hate to say it, but since arriving in Venice I’ve felt ashamed to be an American. I’ve never felt ashamed of it before. Just yesterday at Florian, for instance, when the waiter came to take our order—I don’t know what it was, but something impelled me to put on a fake French accent.”
“A very good fake French accent,” Min said.
“You see, I had this premonition that if he realized we were American, he’d spit in our coffee,” Eva said. “And yet for all that, I’d rather be here than there. I dread going home.”
“Then why don’t you stay?” Ursula said. “I’m putting my flat on the market. You could buy it. And if no estate agents are involved, we’ll save on the commission.”
“Buy an apartment?” Eva said, in the same tone she used when she was contemplating buying a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes.
“Why not have a look?” Min said. “It’ll be a lark.”
Ursula took them on a tour. There were five rooms, all with intricately stuccoed walls and ceilings. Each of the fireplace mantels was carved from a different type of marble. On one side, the view was of the Grand Canal; on the other, of Ursula’s garden, which was aromatic and overgrown and scattered with lacy cast-iron tables and chairs. “There is some history to the house,” she said. “For instance, it’s reputed that Byron wrote Beppo here, though of course that is a claim made by several other Venetian houses. Also a doge was born here. I forget which one.”
“The garden is lovely,” Min said.
“Isn’t it?” Ursula said. “I don’t think I could bear to part with it, though of course I must consider the brute realities. My situation is not much different than that of the Curtises. The cost of maintenance is so high, and Italian taxes are extortionate.”
They concluded the tour with the kitchen, which was ugly in that way that only nineteen-eighties kitchens can be ugly, and the one bathroom, which was at the opposite end of the flat from the bedrooms.
“But if you sell it, where will you live?” Eva asked.
“Oh, I’d use some of the money to renovate the attic. A teensy bath, an angolo cottura. That’s all I need. As you can imagine, it will break my heart to leave my lovely flat, though of course if you’re the one who buys it, it will alleviate my agita considerably. I’d know it was in safe hands.”
With aristocratic delicacy, Ursula withdrew so that Eva and Min could confer.
“You must have it,” Min said. “Think what you could do with it.”
It was Min’s role to encourage Eva to take the adventurous steps that she herself would take, if she only had the money.
“Should I?”
“An opportunity like this—”
“It will need a lot of work.”
“Jake can do it. It will be a dream for him.”
“I’ll have to talk to Bruce first.”
“You know perfectly well that if it makes you happy, it will make Bruce happy.”
“I so long for an escape.”
“You deserve it. If anyone does, you do.”
Eva walked to the window. As she looked out, the faintest hint of a smile came over her face.
Two days after she got back to New York, she invited Jake to dinner.