Eve spends her days walking, getting as lost as she can in the back reaches of Venice where the tourists don’t go. She wanders through churches and scuole, seduced by Bellini madonnas and the tender domesticity of Carpaccio. She imagines Casanova prowling, fixing on his next target, and courtesans teetering on ten-inch platform shoes to keep their feet above the floodwaters.
She visits the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, smiling to herself as she recalls that morning in Micajah’s bed, her certainty now that the G-spot really is all in the mind. Their lovemaking seems long ago, a rogue event that inserted itself briefly between her old life and her new. She is getting used to Micajah’s peculiarly distant presence, and rather likes it; his return into her life eases her, yet his absence absolves her of demands.
It’s been four days, and she has heard nothing more from him. At first it seemed bizarre, but now she realizes it’s entirely in character. By nature he’s an ascetic, a hermit. He told her once that he hates crowds, hates the public gaze. A reunion with her in Venice, at a luxury hotel, would feel false to him, even if it hadn’t felt that way when he sent her the ticket. He’s elusive even to himself: unsure of what he wants, allergic to expectations. He never pressed her, never made himself inescapable. Except for that one night—and look what happened.
She takes a vaporetto from the Fondamente Nove to Murano to see the glassworks. At the vaporetto station she notices the schedule for Line 12, which goes to Torcello. She does not read it. But that night, back in Venice, as she wanders through the quarter near the Arsenale after a plate of pasta at a cheap and cozy trattoria, she hears the notes she knows so well, edging up in half-steps: the intro to “Night Blooming Jasmine.”
Could it be Micajah, calling her to him? It would be like him to put their meeting in the hands of fate: to park himself somewhere and play and wait to see if she passes by.
Her throat tightens. Her heart thuds, as if it’s trying to drown out the sound. She wants to move toward it, wants to run in the other direction. The mixture of panic and yearning freezes her in place, as immobilized as Lot’s wife.
Then she hears the drumbeat, the guitar, the band kicking in. It’s just the recording, coming from a speaker. She sits down on the steps of a little bridge, waiting for calm to come, letting the adrenaline metabolize.
As she sits there, the music—his longing for her transmuted into sound—imprints its waves one more time into the currents of her body. The familiar pattern is as powerfully intimate as his voice would be, or the touch of his fingers. This she will always have. But once she leaves Venice, she may never hear him, or feel him, or see him, again.
Only about twenty people live on Torcello now. Eve has to take a vaporetto to Burano, another island, with a wide street of ice-cream-colored houses and mountains of lace-edged linens for sale, and change there.
As the second vaporetto chugs north, the gleam of the sun behind a mist of low cloud gives the sky the dull sheen of much-handled metal. Eve is one of only three people headed to this far corner of the lagoon; it’s still early season and the tourists haven’t arrived en masse.
Micajah may not even be there. It’s possible that he has directed her there to find something, something that he found for her. It might be a relief if he’s not there. Though she has left behind the anger and the betrayal she felt that night in Brooklyn, she is afraid of falling back into the swamp of desire and being desired. She is a different woman from the one she was before she met Micajah, and the one she was before she left him, but her footing in this new independence still feels precarious.
Taking shape in the misty air is a church tower, then a church, then the island with its stone sea walls.
Grass sprouts between the blocks of the quay. The side near the waterline is mossy, with the mixed smell of growth and decay, thick and sweet and grassy, a smell that comes in gentle waves like the lapping of the water. The stones are pitted with age, as if the raindrops of centuries had left dents where they fell, but cut straight and square with civic pride, to raise the people above the marshes and mud. Eve senses the ghosts of those footsteps around her, so faint that in another century they will have faded away.
The walls that remain are low and crumbling, overgrown with flowering weeds and weedy flowers, straggling unpruned across the abandoned stonework. As she walks along a dirt path, Eve realizes there are paving stones beneath the drifts of soil that have covered them, turning civilization back into wild land again.
Eve feels, with sudden clarity, that she is in the center of her world, at the place where all the lines of her life meet. How can that be, she thinks, with Allan on the far side of the globe, in darkness while she stands in daylight?
Because he is living his life now, and I am living mine.
As she walks toward the church tower, heat rising from the old paving stones through her sandals, she sees Micajah sitting with his back against a crumbling wall. His black hair, his beautiful face, in shadow, his long legs angling into the sun. He holds the instrument she gave him vertically on his lap, playing soft, random notes.
When he looks up at the sound of her footsteps, she recognizes something she’d never registered before: an alien, angelic transparency in his eyes.
Angels don’t have human hearts. They don’t know what it is to bleed. Eve remembers that Satan used to be an angel, the best and brightest of them all. She imagines the pitchfork in Micajah’s hand, prodding her into sensation, tearing the veil of numbness away. She remembers him fucking her godlike on the edge of space with New York stretched out hundreds of feet below.
Ten feet away from him, she stops.
“I didn’t want to find you here,” she says.
“I’m an illusion,” he says. “If that’s what you want. Touch me and I’ll vanish into thin air.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you’d be here?”
“Because then you wouldn’t have come.”
“And if you’d said you wouldn’t be here?”
“You wouldn’t have come either.” His smile throws a cord over the space between them. “You like not knowing. Did you know that?”
“Yes.”
Eve loved that sense of being seen that Micajah gave her. He came into her life like a new sun, and the true Eve flowered. She no longer needs his eyes in order to see herself.
“How long have you been here?”
“Four months. Reading in the archives.”
“What about the band?”
“I quit. I owed it to them to stay until we hit. But all that wanting — you don’t hear the noise of your own engine. Until you switch it off, and then it’s peaceful. And all that time you had no idea how loud it was.”
There is something monkish about Micajah, despite the very unmonkish experiences she had with him. She can imagine him in a scriptorium, preserving the knowledge of an unknown past and transmitting it into an unimaginable future.
“I don’t know Italian,” he continues, “so I had to use a dictionary. It was slow. But, finally, I found something about a jasmine viol. It was made for the mother of the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.”
“It’s called a viol?”
“If it had strings and a bow, they called it a viol. They went apeshit with the shapes.” He laughs.
“When was it made?”
“Late 1700s.”
“Here?”
“Here. On Torcello.” He gestures around to the absent walls.
“The monk who made it would have been as famous as Stradivari if he’d wanted to be. But I couldn’t find his name.”
He seems to admire this anonymity, even envy it. He embodies that same contradiction, of being both solidly grounded in the tasks of the day yet only delicately attached to the corporeal plane. When he played for her, she could see him leave his physical location in space and time. When he plays, she realizes now, he is at his devotions. It’s not a performance. It shouldn’t be public.
“But look what else I found.” He gestures around at the small walled garden. The sun is just reaching a bank of flowering sage.
“Sage,” says Eve. “Bees love it.”
“The monks here made honey too,” Micajah says. “But look. Look harder.”
The garden is half cultivated, half wild. Weeds everywhere, but the flowerbeds are distinct.
“Syringa. Alyssum. Nicotina,” says Eve. “Those are the ones I know. And jasmine.”
Micajah says nothing, just waits. As she gazes at him, baffled, she feels a slight breeze blow her dress against her thigh, and the scent of alyssum drifts into her nostrils. Carried on the wind across the still water of the lagoon, she hears the chime of a church bell.
“It’s a flower clock?” she asks, astonished.
“Do you think it could be?”
Eve looks around. “It’s possible.”
“I fiori delle ore,” he says. ‘The flowers of the hours.’ Just that one line. I found it in the abbot’s records. He doodled it in the margin.”
She explores the garden, touching the petals and the leaves of the flowers. “They’re mostly scented plants,” she says. “For the blind, this would be a little paradise.”
“Maybe he was blind, the monk who made this,” Micajah says. “I imagined him a mute, extra-sensitive to beauty. But maybe he was extra-sensitive to smell. Not the head gardener—just a lowly worker. He found Linnaeus’s book in the library, or maybe he thought of the idea himself: instead of the grimly ticking clock, which was probably the only sound he heard all day, he could grow an organic clockwork powered by the sun and the rotation of the earth, that would parcel out the hours and instruct the monks when to sing the glories of God.”
He’s telling the story as if he’s written it. Maybe he has, Eve thinks. His imagination is private. She senses that he shares it rarely.
“So he experiments, year after year, tracing the habits of the flowers he’s chosen, learning their preferences for water, soil, and shelter, finding which ones grow well together, coaxing them into symbiotic patterns, striving to bring nature into synchronicity with terce, matins, vespers. He has to choose the hours of one specific day to focus on—so he chooses Midsummer Day. But year after year the clock seizes up and fails to strike a blossom on a crucial hour. This patient monk strokes the flowers to reassure them that they’ve done nothing wrong. They haven’t disappointed him, they just acted as God directed. It was he who miscalculated, misplanted, miswatered, mismulched.”
Eve laughs, liking the words.
“He sees in this unattainable beauty an image of the Garden of Eden.” Micajah stops, as if waylaid by the thought.
“Go on,” Eve says, “if the story isn’t over.”
“It’s never over.” He smiles at her. She knows he means their story, as well as the monk’s.
“Next year he does better. He acquires an assistant, a young brother who has entered the monastery after an unhappy love affair with a married woman, and vowed never to think of women again. He solaces himself with the beauty of the flowers: he strokes their petals, he murmurs endearments to them as he once did to his beloved. They blossom for him. And when the old monk is no longer able to walk, one midsummer dawn he’s carried outside on a litter, propped against cushions, which are allowed him only because of his age and infirmity, to see the first flowers opening. When darkness falls and the jasmine blooms, he takes his last breath.”
“They would have buried him in this garden,” Eve says. “They would have consecrated some earth for his grave.”
“Gardening is like music,” Micajah says. “The temporary conquest of entropy.”
Entropy: the tendency of things to fall into chaos. Order is fleeting, and precious. Eve’s mother was wrong: something too good to be true can be true—but it can’t last long.
“We should play for them,” Micajah says.
“The flowers?”
“Come here.”
Tentatively, she approaches him, still nervous of being drawn back into his force field. Love for him is nearly overwhelming her.
“Sit,” he says, settling himself against the stone wall and beckoning her to sit in front of him, his legs on either side of her. Above him, the branches of an apple tree bend into an arch, dotted with tiny fruit.
She leans back into him—their first touch, sightless, after so many months apart.
He rests the viol on her knee.
“You play it,” he says.
A shaft of pure terror runs through her. What if the sound she makes is an ugly screech, an insult to this beautiful thing and to everything it stands for? The viol feels strange as she tries to fit her body around it: how to shape her hands, her arms, her legs. When, finally, she’s ready, Micajah places his left hand over hers, gentling her fingers onto the viol’s neck. With his middle finger he presses on hers, holding a string taut.
With his right hand, he brings the bow around in front of her, inviting her to take it. She does, and he places the fingers of his hand over hers in a half-embrace.
She notices that she’s stopped breathing.
Micajah moves her hand closer in, making the bow hover just over the strings. Rotating his wrist—and hers—he adjusts the angle. She wills herself to loosen her wrist and abandon herself to his guidance, knowing that any tension in her body will mar the sound.
He clasps her infinitesimally tighter. She feels the barest touch of the bow against the lowest string. The pressure increases, firm and steady. Then he draws their joined hands to the right.
A long note, deep as a well, takes form in the still air. We made that, Eve thinks. Micajah and I, together.
He guides her hand back, close to the bridge again. The fourth finger of his left hand presses her fourth finger down onto the second string. Again, his right arm embraces her a fraction closer as he brings the bow onto the viol. Again, he draws their joined hands to the right, a longer note this time, a little higher.
The sound waves linger in the air. Eve imagines the flowers drinking them in, transforming them into greater depths of color and scent.
For a third time, Micajah moves the bow back to the strings. His left index finger guides hers onto the third string. But just as she expects him to bring the sound into being, he lets go, his hands poised above hers. This time, she forms the sound herself. The note falls somewhere between the first two, bringing them to completion.
“You could restore this garden,” Micajah says. “I rented a house here. You could stay.”
It would be an idyll: a summer snatched out of time, the hours marked by the blossoming of flowers. Then Eve thinks of her other flowers, and feels a burst of excitement about what she, herself, is in the process of creating.
She moves away and turns to face him, brave enough now to meet those gold-flecked green eyes.
“My flight leaves tomorrow,” she says.
“You could change it.”
He stands, his hands shaping themselves to the concave curves of her waist. She remembers how perfectly fitted they felt there. Beneath her hands, his waist feels lithe and strong, like the trunk of a tree that bends with the wind—a birch, or an aspen. She used to imagine holding onto him in a storm.
“No,” she says. “I can’t.”
She does not want to withdraw from the world. She wants to dive into it in a way she never has before.
“The vaporetto will be back soon,” she says. “I need to catch it.”
As they walk back to the dock, they hold hands lightly. They have not kissed yet. Eve imagines how it will happen, in this warm golden sunshine: the rippling water, the scatter of orange poppies and wild thyme growing in the chinks between the paving stones, the chug of the vaporetto’s engine hurrying their goodbye.
They reach the dock as the boat comes in. Leaning against a wall not far away is a backpack. Micajah drops her hand to go and retrieve it.
“You’re leaving Torcello?” Eve asks, confused.
“I decided I’d wait a week for you,” he says. “I rented the house in case you’d want it.”
“So you weren’t going to stay with me, if I stayed,” she says.
“No.”
They board the vaporetto and stand by the rear railing, alone.
“Last night in my dream, you kissed me,” he says. “We were saying goodbye.”
“Where are you going?” she asks.
“Istanbul. Then on from there.”
She looks back at Torcello, its dome and towers dissipating into the haze. The viol has taken this trip before: from Torcello east to Istanbul.
“It’s a quest,” he says. “Like mining—going deep into the mineshafts of music. I want to find what’s there. Kurdistan. Yemen. Iran. Afghanistan, if I can get in. Central Asia. The Pakistani borderlands.”
He’s dark enough to pass for local in many of those places. Eve imagines him in the winding lanes of souks, in bandit-pocked mountains, carrying this valuable thing. Drawing complex, twisting melodies from it. Maybe giving up his life for it.
“It’s all about the search,” he continues. “You don’t decide what you’re looking for. You let the treasure find you.”
I wasn’t looking for the viol that day it called to me, Eve thinks. Or for you.
He pulls a ring of keys out of a pocket of his backpack and gives them to Eve.
“Here, in case you need a place in Brooklyn. I changed the lock.”
She smiles back at him, grateful. It might be good to start a new life there. She doesn’t need an explanation about Bethany; they’re beyond that. And whatever it was that battered him in the past—the story that Barbara spoke of—seems tangential now. He has never brought it up; either he doesn’t want to tell her or it’s tangential to him too, and in either case she has no need to ask. As she sat by Barbara’s bed, she saw it as the key to a door that, by then, she no longer wanted to open. She had thought knowing about his past would lead to understanding him. That it would “explain” him. Now it feels like a simplification, as if he were no more than the product of a recipe, which could be reverse-engineered if she knew some of the ingredients.
She walks with him over little curved bridges, along quiet alleys, until they emerge onto the piazza facing the Grand Canal. On their right, wide steps lead up to the train station. The canal here is busy with the everyday labor of Venice: the loading of merchandise on and off boats.
“I’m going east,” Micajah says, setting his backpack and the viol case on the marble paving. “And you’re going west.”
He puts his hands on either side of her face. Her hands settle in the small of his back, her fingers tracing the map of his spine. Their kiss is more tender than passionate, like white flower petals edged in red. Their lips linger, unwilling to break away.
Eve is the first to pull back—ravenous, suddenly, for the green depths of his eyes, the flecks of gold.
“I do love you,” she says. She remembers his word, pure: love without expectations or explanations, relying neither on the past nor the future.
“I love you, Eve.”
He picks up his backpack and the case. Before he turns away, he strokes her underneath the eye, as if he’s wiping away a tear that she hasn’t yet cried.
“The world is round,” he says. “Maybe we’ll find each other on the other side.”