Up until the morning of the day she left, Eve wasn’t sure whether she would go. She made preparations she couldn’t have made without that advance: buying a new suitcase (not wanting to use the one that matched Larry’s); searching out flattering new dresses, comfortable boots, and a pashmina; getting a bikini wax and a pedicure. All but one of those things she could justify to herself as basic maintenance, which tight finances had forced her to let slide. And she’d need the suitcase eventually; she’d be going somewhere in the next year, even if it wasn’t Venice.
She has lost ten pounds in the two months since the ticket arrived—the Larry weight, she called it to herself, which made it easier to lose. She’d have liked to lose fifteen.
In the Nordstrom’s dressing room, trying on bras, she assessed herself dispassionately in the mirrors. When your finances sag, your breasts sag; even with hand-washing, her bras had lost their lift. The best of these new ones, in a different size, took another five pounds off her, at least. Her waist has returned. She still dislikes the lack of smoothness of her back around the bra straps, but there’s no help for that, with the amount of weight the bra has to carry. This is where the shawl comes in.
I am not going to meet my lover, she told herself. Even if I go. We are not lovers anymore.
As the plane takes off, she wonders, is he on this plane? She is in Business Class. He is not. Could he be in First Class, a late boarder? She has visions of him coming through to find her once the plane reaches cruising altitude.
No. He wouldn’t book her a worse seat than his own.
Could he be in Coach? That’s possible. He might not have been able to afford two Business Class tickets. Eve knows that the fame comes much faster than the money.
When the seat-belt sign pings off, she is tempted to walk back through the main cabin to see if he’s there. And if he is? She can hardly imagine a worse reunion, a pretzeled hug in the narrow aisle. And if he isn’t, how silly she will feel to think he might have been.
She stretches out in her diagonal pod, chooses the alt rock station from the airline’s audio programming, and opens her book. It’s already dark outside, and there’s a curtain she can draw around her for privacy. With luck she’ll fall asleep soon.
She has never traveled alone. With Larry, she booked the flights and hotels, but she let him lead her from baggage claim to taxi rank, let him take charge of the daily demands of tourism, feeling protected by his presence in unfamiliar places. Not that she was less competent—in fact, she often had to tell him what to do—but she preferred that whatever it was, he be the one to do it. When, more recently, she has thought of traveling somewhere, she thought of going with a friend: Deborah, maybe. It didn’t really occur to her, until she bought that suitcase, that traveling alone was possible.
After what she has done with Micajah already, getting on a plane to one of the most civilized cities in Europe with a return ticket in hand is hardly a risk. And the knives? She will guard against them by armoring herself with the present. No questions about Bethany; no thoughts of the future; nothing beyond the new bubble they will inhabit, light-filled and iridescent until it pops.
And if he’s not at the airport? She will make her way into Venice, check into a hotel (she’s searched online and reserved a room for one night just in case), book her return flight for a week later, and spend that time savoring art and history and treating herself like a rather thrifty queen.
“Sometimes you find love, and a storm comes through and destroys it, and you don’t know if it will flower again.” Micajah’s voice.
Eve has been dozing. The voice is gone. “Night Blooming Jasmine” is playing. Maybe it was her imagination, hearing those notes, that retrospectively created his voice.
Like shadows in her dream, she hears the steps of the flight attendants pass her cubicle. One set of footsteps stops exactly beside her, and Micajah slips through the curtain, perching on her seat like a child’s painting of an angel, then fitting himself into the seat with her, lifting her dress, his finger stroking tiny ups and downs in time to the waltzing rhythm of the song he wrote for her, playing her like the virtuoso he is, drawing out her own internal music by instinct.
“Your bistecca fiorentina, Ms. Federman.” The flight attendant’s briskly cheery voice, just outside the curtain, startles her awake. She snatches her legs together—but they are already together, decorous under the blanket. All her clothes are in place.
As she eats, she pages through the in-flight magazine, and finds that Micajah did DJ a playlist for the airline. He booked me on this flight, Eve thinks. It cannot be a coincidence.
Leaving the plane, Eve walks slowly to Passport Control so that the Coach Class passengers can overtake her, looking for the square set of Micajah’s shoulders, his loping walk. He’s not among them. As she comes through the automatic doors from Baggage Claim, one of the last passengers, she scans the Arrivals hall. He is not there.
She feels her mood and her confidence deflate. Her spirit, disappointed, is as tired as her body. She will have to find her way to the hotel she’s booked. She starts to rummage in her bag for the printout.
“Scusi, signora.”
She looks up into a dark face, worn by time and weather. The man holds out a sign reading Signora Eve. Looking for her full name, she hadn’t noticed the sign when she came through the doors.
She follows him to a taxi rank of boats. The cityscape is dotted with factories—not at all what she imagined.
They chug past half-submerged posts, which Eve soon realizes are road markings. Behind them, the industrial shoreline mists over, its smokestacks becoming optical illusions. Eve feels herself between worlds, guided only by the line of green-furred posts in the flat lagoon, being ferried by a taciturn boatman into the unknown.
Finally, in front of them, forms take shape in the haze: domes, narrow towers, growing in height as the boat draws nearer. The city is a mirage—heavy stone floating on water.
As impossible as we are, Eve thinks. Maybe this is the only place where we could see each other again.
When they enter the Grand Canal, the boatman cuts his motor down to its lowest speed, and Eve is struck by the quiet. The few motors she hears are specific and individual, coming and going. On either side, where the stone facades give way to open spaces, human voices color the air like birdsong.
The boatman pulls up to a dock on the right, leaps out, and secures a rope around a stanchion. He hands Eve’s suitcase up to a uniformed bellman, helps her disembark, then departs. The motor’s wake leaves a flourish in the water.
Eve follows her suitcase into a lobby more beautiful than any room she’s ever seen: intricately painted walls, silver-speckled mirrors reflecting a dimly lit infinity of curlicued glass chandeliers, thick textiles of damask and velvet and silk. The bellman points Eve toward the reception desk. She’s intimidated by the opulence of this room, the quiet authority of the staff. She feels a pang of panic. Why has Micajah sent her alone into this palace, which at this moment feels as sinister as something in a fairy tale? She cuts off this train of thought as a) ridiculous, b) irrelevant, and c) plain wrong. Micajah is not cruel. This is generosity: a Business Class plane ticket, and what may well be the most expensive hotel in Venice.
Probably, she decides, he is waiting for me. She looks once more, carefully, around the room, into the shadowy corners, the wing-backed armchairs that might hide a face. He’s not here. Of course he isn’t. If he was waiting for her, he’d have seen her and she would already be in his arms.
Would I? she thinks. She’s still wavering about whether she wants it all to start again.
Standing there, irresolute, in this quietly purposeful room, she feels self-conscious. She moves to the reception desk.
“I didn’t make the reservation myself,” she begins. “I’m not sure what name it’s under.”
“You are the signora Eve?” says the man behind the desk.
“Yes,” she replies with relief. “You were expecting me?”
“Of course.” He slides a form across the desk and hands her a heavy gold pen. She fills out the form and returns it to him.
“This is my room? In my name?” She’s not sure how to ask the question. She knows only that she doesn’t want to be surprised when she enters it.
“Certo.”
“Alone?”
“Certo.” This time his tone has an edge to it, as if he is offended by the implication that the Gritti is the kind of establishment where guests are expected to share rooms.
“Is there a Mr. Burnett registered here?”
“I am sorry, signora, but we do not divulge the names of our guests.”
How to put it? “Mr. Burnett made the reservation for me. I was under the impression that I was meeting him here.”
She sees in the man’s face a flash of compassion for the crushing awkwardness of the situation she’s in. He is too professional to ask or judge, but he is human enough to relent.
“I am sorry, signora,” he repeats, making a movement with his hands as if he is releasing a bird.
He gestures to the bellman to approach and hands him a key. “I wish you a delightful stay,” he says with a little bow of his head, and turns his attention to a camouflaged computer screen.
The elevator, lined with tall mirrors of the same gray-mottled glass, feels to Eve like a dark version of Cinderella’s coach. The prince is not waiting for me, she thinks. He is somewhere in the shadows.
Her room is small and precious as an empress’s music box. She tips the bellman with a ten-dollar bill, too tired to deal with unfamiliar euro notes. As soon as the door closes behind him, she sinks onto the bed. Jet lag, the semi-sleepless night, the emotional roller coaster she rode downstairs, are making her light-headed.
She drags herself to her feet, and to the bathroom—a brightly lit time-jolt from the eighteenth century to the twenty-first. She brushes her teeth, then crawls between the crisp sheets and sleeps.
When she wakes, many hours later, she notices, on the writing table by the window, an envelope addressed simply “Eve.” When she opens the flap, she sees that the inside is lined, luxuriously, with green-marbled paper. It holds a square card embossed with the Gritti crest.
“I’m glad you came. M.”
Eve stares at the familiar slope of his handwriting sunk into the grainy weave of the paper, willing it to reveal more. Then she realizes there is something else in the envelope. She pulls it out: a page torn from a guidebook describing an abandoned monastery on the outlying island of Torcello.
Eve has dinner on the Grand Canal, on a floating terrace extending from the palazzo. Before tonight, she would have said it was sad to eat alone in a fancy restaurant. Yet the longer she sits there, with her black-squid-ink risotto (she deliberately chose the most exotic item on the menu), the better she likes being single at her table: free to spin tales about the people crossing the wide wooden Accademia Bridge, carrying satchels or leading small dogs on leashes, and about the other diners, mostly people of her own age or older, one table of men arguing heatedly in German, another family with a sullen teenage son and a preening daughter; free to tune them all out and immerse her senses in the gravity-defying city.
And to read more about the monastery on Torcello. In her room she googled it, and had some pages printed out by the concierge.
Nearly a thousand years ago, Torcello was more populous than Venice itself. When the lagoon silted up and the land got swampy, people moved away, to the growing city further away from the shore. Even the buildings were pulled down and carried away stone by stone. Some of the palazzos lining the Grand Canal were built with stones from Torcello.
Micajah has still not communicated with her directly. She’s getting annoyed. Whenever a bellman or concierge comes outside, she thinks he might be bringing her a message, but no message comes. His silence makes her feel like she’s being played.
An occasional motorboat leaves behind the sonic trace of its passing: the lapping of water against the wooden docks and the stone walls, the beat swelling and dying away, echoing in the disused water gates. A row of gondolas bobs in the water near her table, their low seats padded by gold-tasseled cushions. I could take a ride in one after dinner, Eve thinks. But alone? A gondola ride at night through Venice, one of the most famously romantic things in the world. It will be hard not to feel the absence of Micajah beside her.
She’s reminded of the famous photo of Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal on Christmas Day or her birthday or her wedding anniversary, whatever it was—a day when Prince Charles should have been with her and wasn’t—sitting on a bench, shoulders slumped, hands demurely on her knees, looking doleful and alone. After a first automatic rush of sympathy, Eve had wanted to slap her.
As she signs for the check, Eve thinks: I am enjoying this evening as much as any evening, ever. Early evenings with Larry were exciting, evenings with Micajah, delirious. But now, by herself, Eve understands how highly strung she was in those evenings. Wanting everything to be perfect, wanting the love to flow to her without the tiniest hitch, more aware of wanting the man to be happy than being happy herself. Wanting to say the right thing, wanting him to think her wonderful. Wanting to think him wonderful. Snatching at the moment before it vanished.
She decides that she will take a gondola. But first, she goes up to her room. The day before she left, a UPS package arrived: her prototypes, 3D-printed in a pliable composite material. She tucked the tulip in her suitcase. Now she slices open the bubble wrap with a nail scissors. There is her tulip, with the velvety soft surface of the real thing. She had this one printed in a creamy white, with a green stem.
It will make a good story that her flower had its first test-drive in a gondola.
She takes the stairs down, feeling the tulip move gently inside her body, the ridges of the petals stroking up and down. A tingle runs through her.
As she pays the boatman, she is positively glad to be single. She feels the boundaries of her self expand, filling the space around her, leaving no lack, no gap where a man should be.
The gondola tips and sways as she steps down into it, the wave splashing softly against the wood pilings of the dock. It takes an effort of concentration to move to the seat without falling, the tulip’s petals pressing deep in the front of her abdomen as she bends over, touching a sensitive spot as she turns to sit down. She pauses, savoring the warmth. Perhaps that was one of the spots that Micajah found and tagged with a letter of his name. They are all hers now. She might share them again, with Micajah or with another man, but she doesn’t yearn for it. This is a contentment she’s never felt before. She recognizes it as happiness.
The boatman unmoors and pushes off, and begins to sing. Eve holds up her hand.
“Per favore, no.”
He guides the gondola into a side canal, dark and quiet. The only sound is the drip of water sliding from the pole, the caress of the gondola’s wake against the stone, the whispering echoes of far-off footsteps.
The velvet of the seat cushion is silky against the backs of her legs. There are other, loose cushions, dark blue with gold insignia. She plays with them: nestling them around her, propping up her legs to find the angle that makes the tulip most powerful. Tiny adjustments of position send pleasure coursing through her.
The rhythm of the gondola lulls her, a gentle push and then a glide, slowing, and another push, penetrating further into the dark reaches of the city. Dim reflected light shadows the pocked and crumbling plaster. The boat passes narrow alleys, closed off at the far end by blank walls. The air smells of lichen.
She clasps one cushion close, over her stomach. Tensing the muscles of her arms creates a corresponding tightening in the muscles of her core, which clasp the tulip tighter too.
She lets the smile steal across her face. In secret, the sensations branch and intensify. Eve clenches her toes, and warmth floods her legs. She leans her head back, and feels the air currents play across her throat. Her fingers knead the hard ridges of the embroidered gold crest. This is pleasure without a goal: as enveloping as a bath, uncomplicated by the twists of emotion. Only this object, the work of her hands, returning to her the energy she infused into it, multiplied a thousandfold.
She can move the tulip inside her without, to the eyes of others, moving a muscle. She can choose just how much to reveal or hide. Here in this gondola, on a dark night in a city where she knows no one, there is little necessity for concealment. What thrills her is the thought that she could go about her days like this, with a secret flower to sweeten them.
And if I could, she thinks, any woman could. There’s no being good or bad at this: no skill, no learning curve. Only paying attention.
She imagines a coffee shop, a playground, a supermarket. Raw-skinned mothers, buffeted by their children’s demands, closing their eyes for a quick moment’s refuge. Old ladies feeling the life force again, reliving the past or imagining a future they’d thought was forbidden them. Women on the poverty line, aging fast with toil and worry, flooding with endorphins that make them feel beautiful. Women, like she used to be, who get through their days by averting their eyes from their desiccated dreams, finding a power of self-sufficient happiness they never knew they had.