If Paris is, as a whole, man’s most beautiful creation, Venice is his most unlikely. Like something dreamed or imagined, it is sinking before our eyes. I have often felt, when wandering the quieter alleys, that I can hear the air seeping from the bricks as they slowly disappear into the lagoon.
Our honeymoon kept having to be put off. The original plan for the end of June did not happen for reasons I am even now unsure of, but I do know the postponement came from Gerhardt and Maureen. Summer is no time to visit Venice. September and October are the city’s busiest months and Maureen always felt that to see art through a crowd is not really to see it at all. We thought of November, but Annie and I had already agreed to visit Theo for Thanksgiving. December is of course a slippery month and January and February were very cold. Maureen and Gerhardt went to New York in April. And then it was May, almost a year since Annie and I had been married.
What did we do for that year? This is what frightens me most. I remember moments, but piled up, they account for less than a week. I remember London, the buses and the road works. I remember travelling from one place to another, looking out the window at the streets filled with people. I remember waiting for trains and going to films. I remember walking on the heath. Annie had lunch four times a week in the pub on the high street. One particular afternoon, I surprised her there. I bought drinks for her friends. They teased me good-naturedly and Annie leaned against me and held my hand in her lap. . . . When it was hot that first summer I walked around the corner one morning to get the paper. When I returned, I found her stretched out in the garden weeping. She held a book against her chest; she couldn’t stand the way it ended, she told me. That night, we walked up the hill for an Indian meal. It was still light after ten and as we walked home after dinner, aside from the men standing around outside the pub, it felt like the middle of the afternoon. Annie didn’t feel well. She hadn’t eaten much. When we turned off the busy road onto our street on the way home, she steadied herself against the letterbox and was sick in the gutter. Her shoes were splattered with yellow grains of rice . . . . In September, we drove out to the country. We’d risen early. Annie slept in the seat beside me. The yellow streetlights and then the first blue light nested in her hair. At the farm, she stood on a wooden fence, looking down at a mass of wriggling brown and black bodies and chose our little dog. On the way home, it trembled in her hands on the backseat and wet her dress as we passed into London.
We saw Maureen only once over that year. She came to London and stayed in a hotel near Hyde Park. Gerhardt paid for her trip. His money came from the family business, the production of professional uniforms: nurses, waiters, blue-smocked French electricians. Maureen and I spoke regularly over the phone. She was living in Vienna and through letters provided me with regular updates on the progress of her book. Gerhardt had said she possessed great talent. He talked about financing a small private publication if it failed to attract the attention of a major press, perhaps even if it did. I had long ago given up believing anything she said about the book. I told her all about my exciting photographic career. I began by doing portraits, crying babies in matching sweaters, weddings; but I wasn’t much good at handling the subjects. They looked at me and their looks were asking if they looked all right, and somehow, I never succeeded in convincing them that they did.
Gerhardt and Annie did the actual organizing for the trip. When Maureen and I spoke, we never discussed those details. Whenever one of us broached the subject she said, “I’ll pass you to Gerhardt,” and I said, “I’ll pass him on to Annie,” as if those details were beneath us.
I think it took me several months to realize that the fact that he was always on hand to be passed the phone meant that he and Maureen lived together. Maureen had not lived with a man since Theo. There had been men over the years with whom she had spent time; it was not uncommon for her to find her way into someone’s apartment for a short period (Marcel’s for instance), but the apartments were usually uninhabited. I had no idea what Gerhardt’s home would have been like. I hoped it was large. Gerhardt was ten years older than Maureen and although still quite young, he was retired and would be home all day getting under foot. When I asked about her living situation she was not forthcoming. I said, “so, you’re living together?” and she responded, “we’re very near the museums.”
We had a pleasant flight. The grey day we left in London was transformed the instant the plane nosed its way through the final layer of cloud. The metal wings baked in the sun, a warm light drifted through the portal windows and half the passengers dropped off to sleep around us.
After what seemed to be barely any time at all, the plane lowered over endless sunny fields and we walked in a group across the hot black tarmac towards passport control. We stood in line together, the young couple on honeymoon. I wore a lightweight sportsjacket that I liked to think of as casual. Annie had had her hair cut shorter. She wore it held back from her face with a pair of sunglasses balanced at the crest of her brow. She had chosen a practical grey dress with large square pockets over each hip and a hemline that hovered at her knees. She wore dark stockings, a pair of black buckled shoes and a maroon cardigan. She had reapplied her lipstick as we taxied closer to the terminal. She looked lovely, but subdued as she watched the family in front of us fall into disagreement. The father spun around and waved his finger very close to the faces of his children. The veins in his neck stood erect with rage. “Enough!” he said through closed teeth and then he glared at us as if he expected us to intervene on his children’s behalf.
“Do you see?” Annie whispered. “When you get people away from home, they turn on one another. I was on a flight once, from Malaga. When we arrived in London, two policemen came on board and removed a man from the rear of the plane; he had struck his wife.”
When it was our turn, we stepped forward together. I handed our passports to the young, unshaven man sitting behind the glass partition and folded my hands on the counter. He glanced up at them and I took them down. I wanted him to ask if we were a family, but he did not.
We collected our bags and walked through customs towards the bar. We reported to the Hotel Informatzione desk as Gerhardt had instructed where an attractive young woman ticked our names off from a list she had in front of her. “The Hotel Europa-Regina?” she asked. I nodded. She said that Maureen and Gerhardt had not yet arrived. They were expected in just under than two hours. I looked at my watch. The woman suggested we have a coffee. We went into the bar and had sandwiches and espressos. There were no stools, so we ate standing. The bar was full of water-taxi drivers, all wearing sunglasses. Everyone seemed to know each other, the barman included, as if it were not an airport bar at all, but an intimate local establishment.
After a cigarette, I pushed our trolley outside and found a place on the wooden pier in the sun. Annie sat on the luggage, her legs delicately folded. I sat beside her on the ground, keeping a firm grip on the trolley to avoid her rolling away. We held our faces up to the warm sun and listened to the water beneath us. “That’s nice,” she said. “Gerhardt suggested we look towards Venice if we had to wait. He said you have to pass through Marco Polo airport which is one of the ugliest parts of Italy to get to Venice, the most beautiful.”
“You two have become very friendly,” I said.
“Yes we have.”
I stood and revolved the trolley so that Annie could sit on her perch and look out across the water. It was what one might do for a toddler in a pushchair to keep them amused. Annie laughed lightly to herself and then, with disappointment, said, “you can’t see the city from here. I’ll have to correct Gerhardt.”
“No,” I agreed. There was just the expanse of blue water nicked by grey and the lesser islands, Murano and Burano, in the distance. “I hope he doesn’t spend the entire time telling us what to look at.”
“Don’t decide you don’t like him before he arrives. I think he makes you jealous.”
“What do you mean?” I laughed.
“You had Maureen all to yourself as a child.”
I sat down with my back against the railing looking in the other direction, perhaps to spite Gerhardt.
“You’ll finally have the opportunity to play out some of those Freudian scenarios,” she laughed. She leaned over and stroked the top of my head.
“Is that what you’ve been reading?”
“No,” she said. “That’s basics . . . . Did you know that you two almost talk the same?”
“And what do you mean by that?” I asked.
“You’re the most hopelessly old-fashioned people I’ve ever met.”
Behind the airport stood several blocks of government housing. Tall, white stone buildings with drying laundry draped from most of the windows. The lower windows were lined with black metal bars through which dangled the occasional arm attached to the shadowed figure of someone watching the tourists arrive for their holiday. They were ugly buildings, unlike anything found in the city of Venice. These were what Gerhardt suggested we did not look at. There used to be a poor section of Venice. The word ghetto was invented there. I don’t think any such place exists today. The farmland we saw from the air supplies Venice with produce; the government block supplies the city with labor. One might think the city is a collection of only the attractive things in life, but people are leaving. The hotels, I’ve heard, are having a difficult time getting young Venetians to stay and work.
There was a breeze, but the white early afternoon sun kept us warm. It hung strangely low in the sky, at about equal height with the top floors of that large white building. The lagoon chattered behind us. A constant stream of water taxis and vaporettos came and went. I opened and closed my eyes, listening to the assortment of languages drifting past from the tourists and felt that warm suspended sensation of skimming along the edge and into the shallows of daylight sleep. A man laughed endlessly. The breeze buffeted part of his laughter higher, dropped others to a point near extinction, and it would seem he had stopped, as if he had not been laughing for a very long time, as if there had been no laughter at all, until another breeze lifted the sound again.
I woke in stages, in tides. The laughter, I began to realize, was the creak of the wooden pier in the current. The boats and the people walking past became sharp for an instant before they again drifted away. Only when a jet erupted into the sky did I lazily open my eyes and look at Annie who seemed even more half-lidded than I, and then we drifted off again.
When I next opened my eyes, I did not at first recognize the two people walking towards us. They wore matching green Austrian hats, with the rear rims folded up, and long pheasant feathers jutting up from the side. Maureen had tucked her hair up beneath her hat, and wore the front rim low, almost covering her eyes. She wore a coat, an expanse of blue fabric, tightly tailored at the shoulders, but a sweeping wave around her lower half. In my semi-dream state, she seemed to be floating above a mass of leashed, blue dogs. Gerhardt wore a crumpled raincoat over a jacket and tie, and pushed a trolley with a pile of mismatched cases and an enormous umbrella thrust sideways between two bags. They stopped and stood over us, blocking the sun with their hats.
As Annie greeted Gerhardt nearby, Maureen dropped down in front of me. Her face was more made-up than usual and if it had been her intention, she had succeeded in looking younger. “Are you asleep?” she asked. She leaned forward and gave me a gentle kiss on my cheek.
“Come on,” said Gerhardt. “We have a taxi going.” He reached down and helped me to my feet. He gave my hand a formal shake. He met my eyes with a sincerity that suggested he had rehearsed the moment. His eyes were even more aquatic and unreal than I had remembered them. His skin was not the same sandy complexion it had been when I’d met him a year earlier. I imagine Maureen had put a stop to the sun-beds. He was now more of a polished pink, and without the glowing tan, purplish and veiny at the end of his nose. His hair (and I have always wanted to describe someone this way) was flaxen; his teeth, although I doubt they were his own, were bright as bone. I had not been wrong in remembering the sense of depletion in his face, the way it dropped off from his prominent cheekbones, and then surfaced again in his buoyant lips. He patted me gently on the shoulder, and then pointed in the direction he wanted us to proceed.
Maureen and I pushed one of the trolleys behind Annie and Gerhardt. The wooden boards of the pier rattled beneath the trolley’s shaky wheels, turning this way and that, sometimes bringing us to a jolting halt. Maureen seemed very happy. Her clothes were expensive and as we walked she removed her hat and patted it against her knee revealing a new hair-do. It was short, with bangs cut just above her eyes and tints of an unnatural red. The style was uncharacteristically modern and, I thought, Germanic, but she made no explanation. “I can’t believe it’s been so long, Gordy,” she said and shook her head with sorrow. “Terrible.”
We loaded our bags into the water-taxi, handing them one after the other to the driver. He stood inside the boat sweating with irritation until a bell-hop who had come out in the taxi from the hotel (the words Europa-Regina were embroidered on his jacket) came running along the pier and jumped on board. He soothingly patted the driver’s back and pushed him away, resuming the loading of our bags himself. When the red-faced driver had wandered over to join the other drivers at the bar, the bellhop smiled, and said, “he’s angry.” Gerhardt answered him in Italian and the two of them shared a joke they did not explain to the rest of us.
In the boat, Maureen and I sat down opposite Annie and Gerhardt on the long blue-cushioned benches running the length of the cabin. We were the first on board. The floor was carpeted and draped in sunlight from the salt-specked windows. We rocked slightly in the tide.
“I like your hair,” Annie told Maureen.
Maureen tossed her head back. “Good isn’t it?” she said. They smiled at one another and fell awkwardly silent.
I stared at Gerhardt. He was still so unfamiliar. He looked down and swept his hand along each of his thighs as if he had just finished eating something that had left him covered in crumbs. “You’ve never been to Venice, have you?” He turned and laid one of his long hands across Annie’s knee. He kept it there.
“No,” she grinned. “I’m really looking forward to it.”
“Well, you’re going to love it,” he continued. “It’s the most enchanting place on earth.” He looked around to be sure the coast was clear before reaching into his pocket for a small airplane-sized bottle of cognac. “I stole this so that we could have a toast,” he said. “Our first in Venice.”
“Oh, you didn’t,” said Maureen.
He broke the metal seal and took two long sips.
“This is not a school trip,” protested Maureen.
He extended the bottle towards Annie, swallowed what he had held in his mouth and frowned. “Ghastly stuff,” he said. Annie tentatively raised the bottle and said, “to Venice, then” and took a swig. We all drank. Even Maureen drank. She pointed the bottle at Gerhardt and said, “to you, dear,” and took a small sip. She shuddered with the heat of the liquid as if she had felt a chill. Gerhardt opened another bottle and passed it around again. “One more before we have to share our boat,” he said. This time, Maureen refused. She took a book from her bag and put on her glasses.
Slowly, the boat filled with other hotel guests. They were all couples like us. The driver had great difficulty convincing several suspicious men that the hotel had paid for the boat and that there would be no excessive charge upon arrival.
After we had waited for some time, I heard the sound of someone running along the pier. I turned to see a colossal suitcase appear in the rear of the boat followed by another of equal size and then a woman’s voice thanked the porter.
Gerhardt leaned forward, careful not to crush his hat resting on his lap, and called out, “it’s already paid for.” The woman came inside, paused in front of us and smiled politely. “It’s paid for,” Gerhardt repeated.
“Thank-you,” she said. She stepped carefully along the rocking cabin and collapsed into the only remaining empty seat. She looked exhausted. “Sorry to hold everyone up,” she said without looking up. She swallowed her words in a way that made it difficult to tell immediately that she was an American. She removed a book from her bag and leaned over to shine an imperceptible stain from the end of her shinny black boot. The boots had pointed toes and needle heels. They were for a younger woman. From her slightly fallen face, I guessed she was around fifty. They seemed to be a very new and well-considered purchase.
Soon after, the engine started and we slowly reversed away from the pier and then turned equally slowly until we pointed out into the open lagoon. We passed a row of other taxis, bobbing up and down, raising and lowering their drivers who stood like hood ornaments on the bows. When we were further out, the speed increased and the front of the boat lifted itself from the water.
We had unwisely chosen our seats directly next to the engine; conversation was virtually impossible, so we sat in silence. At the top of the varnished wooden steps I could see the driver. Behind him the airport grew smaller along with the tall white building until they disappeared from sight. Gerhardt sat erect beside Annie. He frowned and looked at something out the window between Maureen and me. The first few times he did this, I turned, but failed to see what concerned him. He leaned forward and glanced up at the driver. He seemed agitated, as if he was concerned the driver was taking us the wrong way. Before long, he stood as best he could without cracking his head against the low ceiling, and darted out the doorway and up the stairs. Some of the other passengers watched him go with interest. Maureen turned from her book and looked at his green hat that remained where he had carefully placed it on the bench. It seemed to take her a few moments to register that he had actually gone and had not shrunk to a size that he could be concealed beneath his hat. And then she went back to her book.
Outside, Gerhardt stood beside the driver, holding himself steady on a railing and squinting into the distance. The driver looked over at him and Gerhardt nodded approvingly. He steadied himself on his feet and reached into his inside pocket for a pair of dark glasses. He looped them over each ear and then stepped forward and lifted his head defiantly into the wind. Lagoon water slowly flecked his glasses, but he didn’t seem to mind. His hair snapped and wavered. He clenched his jaw and surveyed all around him like a conquering general. He looked perfectly comfortable on the high seas. I would not have been surprised to learn he had a drawer full of naval decorations somewhere, except that he was Swiss, and of course, the Swiss don’t have a navy. His tie leapt from his jacket and floated in the breeze. Occasionally, he reached behind him and tried to smooth it inside his jacket again where it would only stay for a moment or two before springing free again. I was the only one watching him. Everyone else in the boat was either engaged by their companion or by something they read. Even the late-comer, who sat in the least desirable seat with her back in the direction we were going and so had the best view of the driver and Gerhardt, was engaged by a paperback mystery. I alone watched as Gerhardt removed a third cognac bottle from his coat pocket, took a long drink and then tried to get the driver to have a drink. When the driver shook his head, Gerhardt drank the rest of the bottle himself and then tossed it over his shoulder into the lagoon.
We slowed down to pass the smaller islands and Gerhardt came back into the cabin and folded his arms across his chest. He smiled from behind his moist sunglasses. His face had reddened from the sea air, and his hair was a tumult above him. Maureen leaned towards him as if she had something to say and when he leaned forward to find out what it was, she reached up to comb down his hair, but he flinched back with irritation and performed a half-hearted effort himself. The engine picked up again and Gerhardt took Maureen’s hand and tried to get her to come outside with him. After tugging on her arm for a moment, he gave up and climbed the stairs again by himself. Maureen turned to me and said, “he had too much to drink on the plane. He always tends to have too much on planes. I think he’s frightened, but won’t admit it.” She smiled.
The sun had gone behind a cloud. The water turned darker and with an inconsistent wind became a choppy sea of hungry mouths opening and closing. Gerhardt’s trousers wrapped themselves around his pointed shins. He still wore the same proud expression as he looked forward, but I imagined he was colder. I had almost tired of watching him when I saw him turn, and, as if he were slyly rejecting a bad piece of meat, neatly vomit into the water. He cleverly positioned himself in the wind so that none of it would get on his clothes. It was very quick and very clean. The driver did not notice, and had I turned away for an instant, I would have missed it as well. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and took a packet of mints from his trouser pocket. I presumed it was seasickness. If I had consumed the same amount of cognac at the same rate, on top of whatever he might have had on the plane, I would have also been sick, but I guessed he was a more experienced drinker. I looked over at Maureen. Had she spent the last year with a man who regularly stole bottles of cognac and vomited over the sides of boats? It had never occurred to me that she would not do perfectly well in the world without me, but perhaps she had been surprised by a loneliness that made the likes of Gerhardt acceptable. His money, of course, would have been appealing to her. Money was one of Maureen’s needs, although she had no regard for it; it simply made her possible. I cannot believe, however, that wealth alone would have determined her choice of partner. She had never married any of the men who had been so fond of her and who, financially at least, could have given her the life she wanted. In letters she had described her life in Vienna as days spent in the library or at the galleries, evenings in adorable little restaurants on the way home, or the occasional grand affair in a hotel. I could not imagine Maureen spending a year nursing a lush. I could not equate her with the women we had seen in the hotel bars of my youth propping up their drunken men, smiling with embarrassment. No. I decided it was seasickness.
Before long, Gerhardt popped his head inside the cabin again. He grinned as if he had a great surprise for everyone and pointed towards the bow. Through the windows, we had our first view of Venice. Faint on the horizon appeared the tower of San Giorgio Maggiore and the curved, onion-shapes of the domes of San Marco. A series of blue, wet-looking clouds had rumbled in behind the city, and with them the water ahead seemed darker still, as if the city had been built on a hill and cast its shadow across the lagoon. A few moist scraps of light were visible on the highest roofs where the sun had slipped through a break in the clouds. The light seemed to be coming from inside the buildings, rather than from above: from beneath the flaking paint and cracked teal slate of the tower at San Giorgio, from inside the domes of the palace.
It is a remarkable city to come across in this way. As if a great curtain is spun away, Venice rises from the sea as a reward to those who have found it. Despite the millions who have traipsed though the city—crossed the bridges, floated in the gondolas—it is easy to believe that by merely laying eyes on Venice, one is partly responsible for its perfection. Annie leaned forward and took my hand.
The engine slowed and the boat traffic thickened. The water tapped insistently against the side of the boat as if the water were suddenly filled with specks of metal, lucky pennies. We passed from the lagoon into the Canale Di San Marco. Several people were enjoying picnics on the steps of the San Giorgio Maggiore. As the boat slowed, it rose and fell more dramatically in the tide. We all sat twisted on the bench gazing through the windows as we passed St. Mark’s square into the Grand Canal. Maureen pointed at the mass of tourists traversing the footbridges of the smaller canals that ran perpendicular to us. “The hordes,” she said and Annie laughed.
Not far beyond the clutter of gondolas around St. Mark’s square, The Europa-Regina Hotel appeared. The hotel is comprised of what were once four palaces, then two hotels, The Europa and The Regina, and now one, connected by a central patio and behind it a glassed-in restaurant. Two porters stood on a rickety pier swaying in the canal awaiting our arrival. They wore green trousers and waistcoats, white shirts, black bow ties and very expensive looking sunglasses. Despite their crisp appearance and the relative distance from which I first caught sight of them, they managed to look bored. They began a conversation with our driver when it seemed we were still much too far away for them possibly to be addressing anyone on board. The city seemed to have only recently turned dark and cloudy. A few defiant hotel guests remained on the patio, their hair askew in the sudden breeze, their dress too light for the chill in the air. Something in their expressions, in the way they held their coasters on the table as the tablecloths flared exposing the rusty white table legs beneath, suggested the breeze had arrived with us.
As we moved broadside on towards the pier, our little vessel rocked with amazing awkwardness. It suddenly seemed possible that we might actually crash into the pier knocking the porters, who now stood with their arms outstretched toward us, into the water. Just when things seemed to get really dangerous, the two porters reached down, and with a quick exchange of rope with our driver, safely clasped us to the pier and the rise and fall abruptly ceased.
Annie was the first out of the boat. A hand in each of the porters’, she positively flew up onto the pier. I remember this image, her flying above me, her legs pressed tightly together as if she were diving into a pool, with great pleasure. One of the porters turned his head and gave her another look as she passed him. I felt great possibilities. As if that glimpse of Annie flying above me reminded me of the purpose of our visit. This was our honeymoon, despite the fact that my mother and Gerhardt had come along. I had not forgotten, but I had, in a sense, forgotten Annie. Love relationships are a series of separations and reunifications. An idle thought can suddenly make the person beside you a total stranger. Half a dozen desertions and triumphant returns can pass in a single car journey. In the amount of time it takes to travel to the country and collect a small dog two people can abandon and betray one another in any number of ways.
At the check-in desk, I took my rightful spot next to Gerhardt. I watched Annie and Maureen in a mirror above the desk where they stood amongst the mirrors and electric opening and closing doors of the lobby. They did not speak. They looked tired and road-weary. Maureen walked over and plopped herself down in a striped chair that probably had not been sat on in years. At the time, I’m not sure I took proper notice that this my first experience in a hotel with Maureen when it was not she who was chatting up the attendant, as I waited with the bags in the background.
When the attendant turned to us, he addressed us in English and Gerhardt spoke to him in Italian. After we had handed over passports and signed the proper papers Gerhardt gave me one of the bulbous brass knobs that served as key rings. As it turned out, Gerhardt and Maureen’s room was in The Regina; ours was in The Europa. This meant we took separate elevators. We agreed to meet for dinner. We said our ciaos and Annie and I walked through the lobby and up a few marble stairs and through a sitting room that served as vestibule to the dining room. It was well tailored, but plainly a room to walk through rather than sit in. Large imitation tapestries hung from metal rods on the walls. An extended Japanese family occupied the large sofas in the center of the room, apparently planning their evening out. Annie paused to inspect one of the elaborate tapestries. In bright reds, it depicted a field dotted with workers bringing in a harvest.
“Remarkable,” said Annie.
“Everything has to be brought in,” I explained. “Food. Everything.”
We continued through the room, down a few more marble steps and along the hallway, past several glass display boxes filled with clothing and jewelry. We passed a noisy kitchen with swinging, finger-smudged doors and found our elevator, half the size of the grander elevator that had transported Maureen and Gerhardt to their rooms.
Our room looked over a secluded campiello and down onto the glass ceiling of one of the kitchens below. The room was quite small and was almost entirely filled by an enormous double bed with a varnished oak headboard. All the furniture was in a similar neoclassical style. A bottle of champagne floated in a bucket of ice on a table near the window. Annie went over and picked up the card.
“It’s from Theo,” she said. “‘Happy honeymoon.’ Isn’t that nice?”
“Yes,” I agreed. I had actually picked up a half bottle of Moet from duty free and had been concerned about how to get it properly cold. I no longer needed to worry.
A small blue armchair sat snug in the corner on the other side of the bed. The oak chest of drawers at the foot of the bed contained a television. Two windows draped with white curtains stood on either side of the chest of drawers. “Would you mind opening one of the windows?” Annie asked. She sat down on the bed with an exhausted sigh. I opened the window and then wandered into the dark-tiled bathroom. It was roughly half the size of the bedroom. It contained a long, deep tub, a bidet, a proud looking toilet, and piles of fluffy white towels to match the robes and slippers hanging behind the door. “Come and look at this,” I called.
I had never stayed in a hotel of this caliber before. As time went on, Maureen and I visited increasingly more economic hotels. I had been out to eat in posh hotels with Theo; and occasionally Maureen and I left our inexpensive hotels and had lunch at the more famous hotels. Later, lunch became just tea or drinks when that was what she felt we could afford. By the time I reached my late teens the hotels where we stayed had become almost seedy. Not the sort of place that rents rooms for the hour, but where deception is worth the cost of a whole night. They were always quite empty, just a few rumpled men smelling of perfume who wouldn’t meet your eye in the lobby and then the women who smiled automatically when we passed in the hall. When I was sixteen I quite accidentally visited one of these women in their rooms when we stayed in a hotel in Madrid. We met in the hall. She had been out getting soda and asked me in and I agreed. I sat where she had urged me, on the edge of her bed holding a small cup of wine. She wore a pair of faded turquoise leggings, pulled up over the small bulge of her stomach. She had removed her make-up and had dark eyes. She looked old and not undesirable. We sat there having a pleasant time together. She spoke a few words of English and I a few words of Spanish. And then suddenly I realized the nature of our interaction, or at least the direction it was going. It was the way she held my hand steady as she refilled my glass. I left abruptly, and, probably quite rudely. Sometimes, I regret it.
After a moment, Annie appeared at the door to the bathroom. She was barefoot and held one foot curled protectively over the other. She looked around the room and raised her eyes. She seemed mildly annoyed. I don’t know what annoyed her. I suppose it’s annoying to realize such luxurious bathrooms exist when you don’t have one of your own.
The bell rang and our bags arrived. I tipped the blonde porter. He looked at me knowingly when Annie came out of the bathroom and rattled the bank note in his open fist. He remained just long enough that it seemed he wasn’t going to leave—as if I had forgotten something—and then he turned and departed. Annie unzipped her suitcase where the porter had arranged it on the stand and removed her toiletry kit. I didn’t feel like unpacking. I followed her into the bathroom and sat down on the edge of the tub. She began carefully to arrange her belongings along the cold tile shelf. She watched me watch her in the reflection of the mirror.
“What are you staring at?” she asked.
“Your particularities,” I said.
“Have you not memorized my particularities, yet?”
“Yes I have. I’m just enjoying watching you.”
She finally turned and opened her sweater. With a quick yank, she freed her blouse from her skirt. “I’m going to have a bath,” she said and leaned across me to turn on the taps.
About an hour later, the phone erupted into shrill rapid sounds. How familiar we become with the way our machines talk to us. This machine sounded distinctly foreign. I was lying across the large bed. I must have fallen asleep. The television was on without any sound. I tried to ignore the phone perched just out of reach at the opposite end of the bed. Without twisting my head, I was able to watch it ring. I have always been amazed that phones do nothing as they ring. They sit perfectly still as if they were not responsible for the interruption. I heard Annie pick up the receiver in the bathroom.
She appeared a few moments later flushed and dripping wrapped in a towel. Her creamy, slightly top-heavy legs were almost completely naked. She frowned at her reflection in the standing mirror beside the curtain. She lifted the heavy rear of her haircut before dropping it again. She did not look at me, but would not have made the gesture had I not been in the room.
She began to work her way through her case, folding things into drawers and slipping dresses onto hangers.
“Who was that?” I asked.
“We are to dress for dinner,” she said in a posh accent.
“Oh yes?”
“‘Fraid so, old boy.”
She stopped what she was doing and stood up straight. She had been bent over her case. She touched the small tee shirt in her hand to her brow. “I think my bath was too hot,” she said. She came over and sat beside me on the bed looking woozy. After a moment of consideration, she removed her towel and lay down on top of me. “Let’s stay here,” she said.
“No dinner?” I asked.
“In Venice.” Her voice was muffled. She was talking over my shoulder with her face pressed into the bedcover. “Let’s live in a hotel in Venice forever,” she continued.
“You haven’t seen the city yet,” I protested.
“I saw it from the boat.”
I stroked my hand up and down her naked back. “What time is it?” I asked.
“After six, or something. We’re to meet you’re mum and Gerhardt on the patio at seven. It looks like it’s beginning to rain, however.”
I turned and looked out the window. Just a handful of drops had begun jaggedly to streak the glass. We proceeded to make love—our first and only time while in Venice—with the lights on and the curtains (Annie must have done it while I was asleep) pulled defiantly open.