Venice Is Sinking Into the Sea

James Sallis

She loved him, Dana thinks, more than most, as she walks in the small park across from the house she’s rented for twelve years now. A Craftsman house from the thirties, two bedrooms, living room, kitchen, all of them much of a size. This time of morning the park’s filled with the homeless. They appear each day as the sun comes up, depart each evening, trailing off into the sunset with their bedrolls, clusters of overstuffed plastic bags, shopping carts. Occasionally she wonders where it is they go. Lord, she was going to miss him.

Almost no traffic on the street where late each Friday night you can hear hot cars running against one another. Dana walks leisurely across to have coffee and a bagel at Einstein’s. She knows the bagels are bogus (she’s from the city, after all), but she loves them. Feels much the same way about the muscular firemen who hang out here most days.

Sean was a fireman. Smaller than most, right at the line, which meant he’d always had to work harder, do more, to make the grade. Same in bed. ‘I’m always humping,’ he’d once said, unconscious of irony. Despite his size, or because of it, he’d gone right up (as it were) the ladder, promotion after promotion. With each promotion he was less and less at home, more and more preoccupied when there beside her.

Sean was the first, messy one.

She’d never much liked Dallas anyway, and started up a new life in Boston. Brookline, actually, wherefrom she hitched rides, in those trusting, vagabond sixties, to the library downtown. Her apartment house was up three long, zigzag terraces from the street. Furniture from salvage stores filled it, a faded leather love seat, stacked mattress and box springs, formica kitchen table standing on four splayed feet, edged with a wide band of ridged steel. Wooden chairs that seemed to have legs all of different lengths. A line of empty fishbowls.

Almost every day back then they’d be flushed out of the library because of bomb threats. There was never a bomb, just the threats, and the dogs and the bomb squad filing in. The announcement came over an intercom used for nothing else but to call closing time. Patrons would gather outside on the square (this in itself seemed so very Boston, so old America) and wait, fifteen minutes, thirty, an hour, to be allowed back in. One of those times, Will Barrett Jr struck up a conversation with her. He was there reading up on subarachnoid hemorrhages. Couldn’t get into the Mass General computers, he said, and had to evacuate one the next day. They never made it back into the library. Had moderate quantities of bad Italian food, inordinate quantities of good beer, the whole of an amazing night. She never asked how his patient had fared.

She’d hang there naked and shivering, steam banging in the radiators, twelve degrees outside (he always left the radio on), waiting for him to come home, thighs streaming with desire and the morning’s deposition of semen. Because she wouldn’t let herself become a victim, and because that was what he wanted, she became instead a kind of animal. Smelled it on him, another woman, one day when he came home and unlocked the cuffs. She’d learned a lot by then. That one wasn’t messy.

Wayne worked at the Boston Globe, writing what they call human interest features. Roxbury woman puts three kids through college scrubbing floors, the emperor of shoeshine stands, Mister John sees the city from his front porch, that sort of thing. Most of it Wayne simply made up. Each morning four or five newspapers showed up in his driveway, the Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, L.A. Times. He never read them. He’d sit around all day drinking beer and watching TV and after dinner he’d go into his office and tap out his column on a tan IBM Selectric. This would take an hour, tops. Then he’d call the paper. They’d send a messenger over. Wayne would join Dana to watch whatever was on at nine. Many times, the next morning, she’d be able to see in the column pieces of what they’d watched on TV in early evening. For a month, maybe two, the sex was great, then it was nonexistent. For a long time Dana didn’t understand that. Then she remembered how Wayne was always grabbing something new, holding on for dear life for an hour or two, letting go. Ask him about that mother out in Roxbury and he wouldn’t even remember.

Simply amazing, what you can do with a hat pin. You introduce it at the base of the skull, just under the hair line. They weren’t easy to find these days, but soon, haunting antique shops, she had a collection of them. Plain hat pins, hat pins tipped with pink pearl, with abalone or plastic. Her favourite had a head with a tiny swan carved of ivory. They were amazingly long.

Jamie worked on the floor at the Chicago Stock Exchange, pushing will and voice above the crowd to move capital from here to there. He did well, but the work seemed to absorb all his energies. He came home ready and able to do little more than eat the takeout Chinese he brought and watch mindless TV – sitcoms and their like. Night after night Dana lay throbbing and alone, wondering how it had ever come about that she’d attached herself to this man.

St Louis then, heart of the heartland, about which Dana remembered little more than the man’s name, the Western shirts he favoured, the look of his eyes in the mirror.

Minnesota, where for weeks at the time ice lay on the land like a solid sea and blades of wind hung spinning in the air.

New York, finally. Home. Where she thought she’d be safe with Jonas, her obscure writer who published in small magazines no one read, and should have known better. Essentially a hobbyist, she thought. Now to everyone’s surprise, his more than anyone else’s, Jonas is fast becoming a bestseller. His novel, written in a week, went into six printings. McSweeney’s and the Times are calling him up. So tonight, after the dinner she’s spent hours preparing for him, coq au vin and white asparagus with garlic butter (cookbook propped on the window ledge), a good white wine, cheese and fruit, he excuses himself ‘to get some writing done’.

He’s been writing all day.

‘What are you working on?’ she asks.

‘Couple of things, really. That piece for Book World’s almost due. And yesterday I got an idea for a new story.’

Later she enters what he’s dubbed The Factory, a second bedroom apparently intended for a family with a dwarf child. His desk takes up most of one wall. Two filing cabinets occupy the opposite corners, by the door, and books are stacked along the walls. Pushed back from the desk, he has the keyboard in his lap, eyes on the screen. There she sees the words ‘Death by misadventure’.

No. By unfaithfulness, rather.

Because he loves something else more than he loves her.

She stands quietly watching. He is concentrating on the story and never realises she’s there with him. As he scrolls to the top of the screen, the title appears: ‘Venice Is Sinking Into the Sea.’

It’s a story about her, of course.

She who lifts her hand now, she whose hair is so beautiful as it begins to fall.

MAXIM JAKUBOWSKI was born in 1944 in London but educated in France. He opened the Murder One bookshop which he ran for over 20 years alongside London’s Crime Scene Film and Literary Festival. He has written 15 novels, with a predilection for crime and erotica, and has edited over 100 genre anthologies, including the prestigious annual Mammoth Book of Best Crime. A winner of the Karel and Anthony awards, his latest novel is Ekaterina And The Night. Under another name, he makes regular appearances in the bestseller lists.