Chris arrived in Cormòns last night. As Susan pulls into the parking lot beside the hotel, he is just starting up a retro-style yellow Vespa. He jumps off, hugs them all, and helps take in their bags. “How was Venice? Look.” He gestures toward a row of Vespas. “The hotel lets guests use them. Ever ridden one?”
Julia had a moped in high school. Camille has ridden a few times on the back of the motorcycle Charles had in law school. Susan hasn’t ever been on one but is ready for instruction. (I bet she is! Watch out, Friuli.) I’ve hopped on a few during my years here but I won’t risk weaving along hilly roads now. Since wine tasting is out of bounds for me anyway, I’ll plead work to do and pay attention to my Margaret project for a few hours. The countryside looks enticing, what we could see of it as Susan burned up the road. I’m getting cautious and if I were religious I would have uttered a few supplicating prayers on the way. Julia and Camille seem used to surging speeds and aggressive passing. Susan is a natural Italian driver; she gets that it’s a blood sport.
While the others settle in, Chris and Julia sit in the bar. She opens her files and he sees why she was a top editor. She has researched and prioritized the Friuli area; she’s organized hotels, restaurants, towns, and points of interest, keeping variety in mind. “We can visit my choices and then choose what works best for the groups,” she says. “I’ve left the wine to you, and that’s top focus.”
“Yes, but it’s food, people, and fascinating places that make trips exceptional.”
“Chris, you are what makes your trips exceptional. I saw that from the beginning. You have a natural ebullience that’s infectious. You have a good time, so everyone does.” He’s quick to smile, quick to praise, Julia thought. No dark streak of rage.
“You’re sweet to say so. You haven’t seen me delayed for six hours in the Frankfurt airport, about to melt into a pool of butter. Or trying to find the emergency room at night when someone has projectile vomiting!”
Julia already has studied the regional food. At lunch in the hotel, she suggests frico. “Perfect for a chilly day, though we should have been tending vines to work up an appetite. Frico is local. One of the basic food groups here! It’s like something fantastic happened to hash browns—a fried cheese and potato crisp, crunchy on the outside and creamy inside.”
“I already can taste it,” Chris says.
“They use Montasio cheese. I never heard of it but it’s from local cows who’ve munched on something good.” Already anticipating dinner, Julia scans the menu. She’s stumped by many words: guazzeto, abbrusolita, scalognato. The food has absolutely nothing to do with the Tuscan dishes she’d come to know well.
Venison appeared in various preparations, deer liver in one.
Chris goes blessedly slow as they get their bearings on the Vespas. “We’re in a Fellini movie,” Susan shouts, but no one hears.
“This must be heaven in summer,” Julia shouts, but no one hears. They all catch snatches of Chris belting out, is he crazy, “America the Beautiful,” followed by “Roxanne.”
Rough-clad men with weather-tanned faces and hard handshakes open the doors to cask rooms. Tasting takes place on an upturned barrel. No T-shirts, as in California; no flavored olive oils, no mugs, no shopping hype. The wines come out one by one, always poured into proper glasses. Turns out, the men are the owners. They have dogs thumping their tails. They have work to do. The tractor waits beside the door; they’re in briefly from the fields. Chris buys cases, and the owners also give the women bottles. Chris stacks everything outside to pick up later.
Three vineyards down, two more to visit, but those are too far for novice Vespa drivers. In the late afternoon, Chris and Julia take the van. The others stay at the hotel with their books bought in Venice. Camille, probably the least obsessed with food and wine, writes on her laptop. She was too enamored of Venice to leave. When I stood in front of the Porta della Carta, she writes to Charlie, a project came into focus. After weeks (decades?) of casting about, gazing at art, sketching, pondering, dreaming, I knew that I wanted my own paper doors. The workshop with Matilde was fortuitous because it gave me the idea of working with paper in a new way. I’m impatient to get to work now and I’m considering skipping the rest of the Friuli trip. But everything is fascinating me. She thought of her canvases from art school and beyond, wedged under an eave at her house in Chapel Hill. Was there a smidgen of talent there? She had been given a fellowship. She recalled life models from classes, a still life of roses in a green bowl, a few landscapes. PS, she added to Charlie, Look at my paintings in the attic. Is there anything to admire?
I find a chair by the fireplace downstairs and write a few pages about Margaret.
These are easy memories from when we were close in those two years before I met Colin. We read aloud to each other, traveled Italy in her Alfa, sat at a table with a bottle of wine, poring over Anna Akhmatova, Cesare Pavese, and Nâzim Hikmet poems, analyzing sentence types in Italo Calvino and Katherine Mansfield. She constantly gave me presents—pillows from Turkey, lotions from the English pharmacy in Florence, maps, Italian guidebooks from the 1920s, other books, books, books. She didn’t cook but loved to bring over the best white peaches or a white truffle when I invited her. If she didn’t love what she ordered in a restaurant, she pushed it aside and selected something else because life is too short to be disappointed with things you can control. I was fascinated with her and I think she was a little in love with me. Perhaps in love with the life I had before me. She was already sixty-eight when we met, but like my three new friends, she didn’t pay attention to her age. I didn’t either. She said she was “born with the energy of two people.” We often hiked stretches of the San Francesco trail from La Verna to Assisi, and the Rilke walk from Sistiana to Duino castle where the poet wrote the great elegies. Besides her Casa Gelsomino here, she kept an apartment in Rome that she’d had when she lived for many years with a woman whose name never came up and who was brushed aside when anecdotes from Margaret’s era there were mentioned. We’d go down for weekends to see exhibits and stay there, a fifth-floor walkup with a terrace overlooking the Tiber. One bedroom. Twin beds. Don’t ask. I didn’t. As I said, she remains herself, a cypher. She was annoyed when I fell in love, but seemed riveted when she met Colin and praised his offhand wit and his passion for architecture. She came to prefer him to me.
Would she be amused with all this chasing around of wine, and plotting trips for women to be engaged, entertained, stimulated? I like to think she would. She was always quick to spot the ways women are put down. A girls’ getaway might easily be condescended to, whereas a men’s hunting trip would not. Not that either promotes the general good. That always preoccupied Margaret, though she would occasionally take sybaritic trips herself, especially after a punishing journalistic mission in a dangerous or rough area. The injustices of the world fueled her. I also feel weighted by the immense crises in the world, but what can I do, other than donate and vote for reasonable candidates, about the immigrant problems, about global warming, about terrorism? Compost my vegetables?
I’m sure Margaret would be on site with refugees, chronicling what she saw and thought, pinning people (in her frosty way) to the wall with questions. I can see her mind working on the context of world immigrations throughout history, the long-range effects of diaspora, the individual stories we cannot even imagine. That might be the book she was meant to write, and one that would last—unlike her writings on the attempted assassination of a prime minister or the wrongdoings of some forgotten politician. Burning topics inspire journalists, and those books written in a zealous fever disappear as soon as the fickle news shifts. She did write about southern Italians migrating to Germany for work; this massive migration from the Middle East would be a natural for her.
There should be a word for what I’m thinking—to imagine the book someone should write, even if the someone is dead. (German has numerous precise words for emotions not named in other languages. Sehnsucht: nostalgia for someone else’s past or for something felt but not personally lost.) (I have this Sehnsucht for Margaret.)
At heart I believe that poetry has crucial work to do, all art does. What news remains from the cave dwellers? Not who killed the most game or ruled over the bush. Soot and blood handprints on the cave walls remain, and the sketchy stick figures and animals they drew. Art lasts. Still, the inexorable grind of world events keeps me anxious. Margaret, that’s part of her immortality: she’s that other voice in my head. She challenges. She pins me to the wall. (Oh, what’s that German word for the unrest birds feel the days before their migrations?)
Chris wants to go to the enoteca before dinner in town. Here are gathered many of the Collio region winemakers, freshly shaven, hair slicked back, wearing nice shirts and sweaters. Wine talk, nothing but wine talk. Chris and Julia shake hands with the men they’ve visited and introduce themselves to others. They don’t look like Tuscans. They’re sturdier, many have light hair and eyes, and they seem to hold themselves in more. Generations of living near Slovenia, of mixing with the Austrians, produced a different breed up here. “How great that these guys are friendly with each other,” Chris observes. “Among top vintners like these, you’d think they might be snarky toward their competitors—I certainly see that in Tuscany and California—but there’s a brotherhood here, a lot of leaning into the glass, heads nodding, wine swirling.”
“Don’t you love it that men kiss and hug?” Julia whispers.
The waiter sets down a board of cheeses for the group. He nudges Julia and points to thinly sliced pink ham. “Il migliore,” he says, “il prosciutto della famiglia D’Osvaldo.” The best—prosciutto made by the D’Osvaldo family. And it is. Julia resists the impulse to tear off the broad rim of fat edging each slice. The almost-transparent slice tastes pink and gently cured.
She rolls a piece and hands it to Chris. “We should see if we, you, can take the tour to the place that makes this. It’s spectacular. The fat tastes like salted butter.” Julia widens her perception of prosciutto, which previously she could easily pass on when the antipasti platters came around. She quickly notes the name.
At the bar, Camille and Susan order tastes of the friulano, then the odd ribolla gialla. Susan tries a sip. “Tastes like something the Roman gods might drink at their orgies.” She purses her lips.
“Honey, toasted bread, cane syrup, melon,” Camille jokes.
“That sounds like breakfast.” The waiter pours them a lemonade-colored pinot grigio. “Now that sparkles. It’s nothing like a usual house pinot.” Susan holds her glass to the light and the wine sends off coppery glints. “White pepper, mineral, oh, what about stone-ground stone.” She raises her glass. In a forest green tunic sweater, with her wind-burned cheeks, and her hair even more on end than usual, she looks elfin. Susan’s laugh lights up the room and she finds a lot to laugh about, a quality that must have served her well with grumpy clients looking for crown molding in suburban tracts. “Let’s run back and pick up Kit. You’ve noticed that she’s not drinking—and she did that night at Leo’s. Do you think she could be preggers? Let’s ask her.”
“I was wondering, too! But we cannot ask. Maybe she’s just off her feed a bit. You go for her. I’ll have another taste of, what?” Camille signals the waiter. “What else must I taste?”
He pours a sauvignon, Ronco delle Mele. “Hill of the apples,” he says.
But no apple ever tasted as good. A hint of crisp citrus but not like the heavily grapefruit note of the New Zealand sauvignons they quaffed all summer at Sand Castle. “I like this. May I have three bottles to take home?” She hopes she’s found a discovery for Chris and Julia.
She’s loving the cross-pollination among her friends: how she’s developing a more particular interest in food and wine—for sure won’t ever go back to frozen quiche. She’s become more interested in renaissance garden design, as is Julia. Being with Susan makes her want to be determined and ambitious. Susan and Julia are responding more to art. Susan came home from the last antique market with a well-done still life of cherries, which now hangs in the kitchen. They must all delve into Kit’s poetry.
Learning the language, they’ve found differences in aptitude. Julia is picking it up with alacrity; Susan is diligent with verb lists and pronoun practice. She’s not too shy to talk with the people she encounters in San Rocco, Venice, or wherever. She can laugh at her mistakes, whereas Julia apologizes, then speeds on. When she sits down to study, Camille finds herself quickly distracted. She’s wondering if she’s too old to learn conjugations or if she’s swamped by sensory overload and just can’t concentrate. What did Rowan call it? The Stendhal syndrome, named after the author, whose character almost collapsed from too much beauty in Florence. Camille keeps learning the same past participles over and over. When someone speaks rapidly, a veil falls down and she wants to doze.
Julia and Chris look so connected that the winemakers assume she is his wife. They’ve been invited to dinner. Camille sees Chris turn toward her and gesture. She hears the man he’s talking to shout “Certo. Tutti!” Certainly. Everyone.
Julia comes over to the bar. “We’re all invited to dinner at this man’s brother’s restaurant. Where’s Susan?” Julia looks flushed, buoyant, like the ends of her hair might spark.
“She’ll be right back. She went to get Kit. Aren’t these wines amazing? You know, Kit seems to be avoiding wine, and we’re wondering if she might be pregnant.”
“Oh, no. She’s too smart for that.” Burned into Julia: the enormous risk of having a child. “I’m loving these whites; they’re as complex as good reds. I’m not used to that.”
They’d all agreed not ever to say again, We’re not in Kansas anymore. At dinner, Julia wants to say it. She’s overwhelmed by the surprise of the food what’s-his-name’s brother brought forth. Snails cooked in tomato sauce with pork. Not like refined French escargot but a hearty, bountiful dish. They don’t get to order. Plum gnocchi arrives. They are seated with about twenty men and a scattering of women in an arched room lined with iron wine racks. Julia never did know the occasion, or maybe there is no occasion, but simply daily life in Cormòns. Woodcock from over the border in Slovenia. Capriolo: roebuck, thigh of, she surreptitiously translates on her phone. She notices that Kit’s glass remains empty. In this company, you’d have to be a raging alcoholic or, yes, pregnant to resist the superb wines. If she is, Julia thinks, I hope she was trying for this, a last gasp before the egg basket emptied. She catches Kit’s eye down the table, raises her glass, and sees Kit lift her water glass with a little back-and-forth movement of her head and eyebrows raised. From this silent gesture, Julia understands that Camille is right.
Chris puts his hand on her knee and she does not flinch. “This is over-the-moon good. It’s surpassing anything I expected. This is the kind of town you could live in. I saw a quirky brick house off the road to the hotel. Maybe I should chuck Napa and move here.”
“Now you’re influenced by us! You’re going crazy, too.” She’s thinking, what a great idea. Maybe once you’ve broken through one absolute, the next one is easier. Suddenly she wonders if Wade has moved on to another woman after Rose, and a sharp twist catches in her stomach. The winemaker’s brother—Mikal, he is—comes over to ask if they’re enjoying themselves, the lovely Americans. “Squisita,” Julia manages. Exquisite.
“Mille grazie.”
Chris launches them into a discussion of local wines and explains that he will be back in spring with more lovely Americans.
Camille, Susan, and I exited early, well, it was almost eleven, and Chris and Julia moved to a small table after the party broke up. Julia thought they should try a couple of desserts for research’s sake. A few of the men sat at one end of the table drinking grappa. Gentlemen all, they stood as we left, making curt bows and saying buona notte. Everyone’s tired but me. All that unaccustomed red meat, and I mean red, jazzed my synapses. Two kinds of deer, the big one that looks like a reindeer and the small cervo I sometimes see on my land. I even had some of the goulash Mikal passed around at the end. What a hearty chef, hulking, corvine Mikal, and what a generous table. As long as I’ve been in Italy, I’ve not met such a various cuisine as Friuli’s, such a happy blend of all those unhappy warring states that captured this area. No wonder Julia wanted dessert. I, too, saw that Sachertorte on the menu.
While they were gone all afternoon, I wrote a poem, which always invigorates me. I rested and then took a slow walk along a stream. In my work, I try to include something I see and something that happens. A secret tic. I’m convinced this keeps me grounded. I’m sure Julia knows about the baby. She looked at my glass and then at me quizzically. I’ll wait and tell them when we’re all together. Since I haven’t been to the doctor yet (because after that it’s real), I don’t think I should tell, but Julia I’m sure has guessed. Susan is driving slowly after such a boozy evening. When she starts singing “Blue Moon,” I join in. Camille’s head is bobbing awake, then sinking down again. Too late to call Colin. Three days and he’s home.
I pretended to sleep when Julia came in. She had not been eating Sachertorte all night. She crawled in her bed around five and didn’t stir until Susan knocked at eight thirty. I was rereading Austerlitz by W. G. Sebald because I remembered that he wrote about star forts and we are seeing one today. Julia’s choice, along with Udine and Aquileia for Chris’s tour. “Arise, arise!” Susan called. “They’re serving fluffy pancakes with some kind of thick cream inside. A thousand calories per bite. Van is warming up because it is freezing.”
On we go to Aquileia and Palmanova. To Maniago and Udine, back to Cormòns, then home. This rounds out Julia’s research on interesting places for Chris’s groups to visit in Friuli. En route, Camille says, “I hate to do this but I am dying to get back to Venice. I have this idea that’s like red coal in my brain and something tells me that I need to explore right now. I’m loving this, too, and I want to see the mosaics in Aquileia—how do you pronounce a word with six vowels—but after that, I thought I’d catch a bus or train, then spend the next two nights back in Venice. Kit, what’s the hotel where you and Colin stay?”
We discuss logistics, with Susan looking up train and bus schedules, Chris driving, Julia taking landscape photos out the window. I’m trying to read about Aquileia, named for an eagle who flew over while some Roman outlined city parameters with a plow. Or so they say. It’s decided. Chris will turn in his car, we will drive back to San Rocco, and we arrange to pick up Camille at the Padova train station en route home. I say mildly that Padova might not be easy to navigate, but these are Americans and they have utter faith in navigation systems on their watches and phones, systems that are ignorant of Italian drivers. Susan secures my (formerly) favorite hotel for Camille for two nights. Travel with others (herding cats) can drive you mad. Whims, logistics, misconceptions, and perhaps one pregnant woman who wants solitude.
Aquileia fascinates me. Like many Roman settlements this was strategic, a river port and headquarters for launching raids up into the Danube. It had peaked by AD 14. Will the town fascinate Chris’s group? We stop first at the basilica, built in AD 313. Yes! It’s worth a flight to Italy just to see this: the oldest and largest floor mosaic of the Christian world. Why haven’t I been here? Italy can always astonish you. I’m wishing for Colin. We are used to exploring together, falling into our own world of associations and reactions. I’m missing a limb that isn’t missing. “What’s your favorite part?” I’d ask him. Mine is the three fishermen (are two of them angels?) lowering their net formed with tiny black pebbles into a striated sea where all kinds of fish swim. A feeling of exhilaration sweeps through me; I can’t stop smiling as I wander around these fantasia expanses of mosaic.
Why travel? This! Across eons, the hand of the artist reaches for small mosaic bits. A riot of animals, fish, and birds spreads across the floor. A peacock—that must have been fun to fit the blue stones into the tail fan. A deer as big as the roebuck they served us last night. Donkey, lobster, heron, partridge, ram, a rooster pecking at a tortoise—the makers reveled in the natural world. There’s an allegorical and biblical context—Jonah and whale, angels, maybe other stories I don’t recognize, and pagan images, too, a winged horse and a languorous man sacked out under a pergola. Camille leans down to photograph a realistic group of snails. “What’s your favorite part so far?” I ask.
“I love this group of snails. But did you see the fishermen? I suppose they’re apostles. That net—completely transparent but made of stones—in the sea just knocks me sideways. And the swirly octopus!” (Okay, Colin—I can travel without you!)
“So many fish everywhere. It shows their world, I guess. This was a port, the sea nearby, water everywhere. Some of the fish I’m sure can be identified. We may see them on our plates at lunch.”
“How did this survive? I read earlier that the town was destroyed by Huns and once or twice by earthquakes.”
“It just got filled in and covered over somehow. Mud, straw, dirt, then some flooring went down. The Austrians took over at some point and discovered it. The town goes back to 181 BC. Just think of all the hordes that have overrun it.”
There’s a lot left to see but it’s quick. A row of fluted columns used to be the forum. In the archaeological museums—funerary marble busts and statues that used to line memorial roads; urns; and monumental tomb markers with Latin inscriptions. A profound cache of vivid mementos. That most of the town is still unexcavated makes me want to be an archaeologist with a ton of money.
There’s confusion getting Camille to a train, as there always is confusion in a travel group when someone breaks trail. She never elaborated on the “sex on the sofa” episode. Is she meeting this Rowan in Venice? She said she wants to explore an idea. Anyway, she’s off on her jaunt.
Onward. We drive to Palmanova. This is where I think most of Colin because the Venetians devised this nine-star-shaped fortress also as a utopian place to live. Palmanova, built as a moated fortress, was as an ideal city. This would intrigue Colin. I read in W. G. Sebald that forts designed like this almost inevitably were outmoded by the time they were built because of interim advances in armature. This ties into Sebald’s whole philosophy of a constantly dissolving world, that everything falls away as obsolete in the moment it appears. We are perpetually in arrears. Such a melancholy, well, tragic world view. (Margaret would agree with him.)
Palmanova, built in 1593, was meant to protect residents against raging Turks, Austrians, whoever tried to scale or batter the walls. The Venetians conceived the idea: beauty reinforces the good of society. What a lofty utopia. Everyone was to have the same amount of land. The plan was idealistic, the centro a hexagon, with eighteen concentric streets radiating from the center, and four ring streets intersecting the radials, a beautiful design. The trouble was—no one came. Finally, in 1622, Venetian prisoners were released to occupy an otherwise empty town. I think it’s true, as Sebald observed, “The more you entrench yourself the more you must remain on the defensive.” I would not like to live in a fort, no matter how ideal the hexagonal central piazza.
Interesting as it is theoretically, we wonder about a tour stop here. Julia is madly taking notes. Chris thinks not, though the history is compelling. Susan stops us at a café for coffee. “I’d bring them here,” I say. We’re standing at the bar. “There are many things to think about.” Susan reaches across me for the sugar. Like the Italians, she’s taken to copious amounts in her coffee.
I’ve read a bit. “What I immediately think of is three paintings on the ideal city by unknown artists around 1480 (one used to be attributed to Piero della Francesca). Palmanova must have been influenced by that prior century’s obsession with mathematical cities. They were laid out with specific proportions, perspectives, and vanishing points (all without the mess of actual humans, markets, animals).”
“I agree,” Julia says. “Chris would just have to prepare the background—everyone would be fascinated.”
(For my notebook: I wonder if these paintings of groups of buildings had anything to do with mnemonic memory palaces I’ve read about. The layout of this town could be one. So many windows and doors to store words. I can imagine locating information in each quadrant created by the web of streets; then each becomes a memory prompt. I’ve tried the method myself, using the rooms of my childhood home as repositories for stanzas of a long poem I wanted to memorize, Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.” It worked, though the poem is forever tied to the blue bedroom of my parents, the breezeway with bamboo furniture and ceiling fans.)
Like an Italian, Chris stirs in two sugars. “You are right, Julia, Kit. Walking around here makes me want to study the plan. From above it must look like an angular mandala.”
“You are a California boy!” I say.
Julia laughs. “Well, I’m entranced.”
“So am I. Maybe that’s what we all have in common—easy enchantment.” Damn, I’m missing Colin. He should be here. I want to talk about all this with him. We grab a quick pasta for lunch—mine with veal cheeks—and drive to die-and-go-to-heaven Udine.
Julia has located a hotel in the center, adequate but not up to Chris’s guests’ expectations. Who can blame them; they’re paying un sacco di soldi for their grand tour. Many of them will not come this way again—why not splurge? Julia apologizes—it didn’t look dated in the photos—but the place is fine, a bit tired but with large rooms and bathrooms fitted with old marble sinks.
Susan and I take off for a long walk around town. Julia and Chris are entering info notes and researching possible atmospheric agriturismi (farms open to guests) nearby. (They’re in his room, I note.) “Take notes and photos, please.” Julia waves good-bye. Susan is great with directions; I tend to get happily lost. We search out the museum, the lofty Tiepolo ceiling in the Oratorio della Purità, and the dusty-looking Caravaggio portrait of Saint Francis in the Galleria d’Arte Antica, which turns out to be a good copy.
“Couldn’t you buy that house with the vines? Couldn’t you move in your books and set up immediately?” Susan gets Udine. It’s a livable, dignified town. “One thing learned, since I have been living here,” she continues, “the good life is available for the asking. Why settle? It’s incomprehensible to me that we earnestly entertained the idea of moving into a nice, oh, yes, retirement community. What we did not know!” We pass well-dressed matrons with their dogs on leashes, kids on bicycles, men playing cards and taking in the afternoon sun at a café. We pass a shop for baby clothes. I barely glance at it.
“All true,” I agree. “But not close to a major airport. Impossible for me.”
“Oh, right.”
Having found a country inn at a vineyard for the tour, Julia goes back to her room. She needs a shampoo and to organize her clothes for tomorrow. She wants to chat with her father. It’s late morning his time. He’s probably taken his coffee out on his balcony overlooking the river. How she would like to slide open the door and join him. She looks quickly at her calendar. Just over three weeks until he arrives for the holidays. She hasn’t spoken to him for a week. He would love to see the little towns of Friuli. She needs privacy to think through what has transpired on this trip and what she wants to happen. Last night after the three desserts, after a strong digestivo, she and Chris drove back alone from the restaurant to the hotel. “Come up for a moment,” he’d said. “We can go over the rest of the trip. Seems like there are some choices to make.” Inside his room, he closed the door and they kissed. The kiss was sweet, then ignited. I don’t want this, she remembers thinking, to be like one of those clichéd movie scenes where they start backing toward the bed, flinging off clothes, ravenous, and placed in impossible positions, impossible for the woman’s pleasure anyway—backed up, standing against a wall and battered. But he held her, kissing her throat, her ears.
“You are marvelous,” he said.
“No, you are.” She writes on a piece of hotel stationery, telling herself the story. We kissed. Finally, we sat on the edge of the bed and he flopped backward, his hands over his head. “I never expected to feel this way. You are someone I know, have known all my life. I’ve never known anyone as easily. Are you sure we didn’t meet in another life?” I am both thrown by and drawn to his eyes, one tawny like a tiger’s-eye bead, the other the faded blue of an old chambray shirt.
“I know. I know.” I laid my head on his chest, listening to the solid thud of his heart. We talked about the vintners, the evening, the shock of roebuck on our tongues, about whether Kit is pregnant. He loves Susan and Camille. He says, with all of us, he feels released. I know that feeling as well. My friends multiply my life.
After those umpteen tastings of wine, I simply drifted, fell asleep. I said, We’re all right. Silence. I remember saying, Your eyes excite me, then hearing a low honking snore. Later I woke up and found that we’d stretched out side by side on the bed, Chris curled around me, holding my hand, his even breath behind my ear. I disentangled and crept out to my room. Kit was turned away, though I suspected that she’d awakened. I crawled under the blanket, still in my clothes.
(My composing methods may sometimes be suspect. How do I know about this scene? Her pages were folded into our guidebook.)
Susan went to the room to call her daughters in California. Morning there; evening already falling here by five in the afternoon. We’re swinging toward the darkest day of the year. Does my little sugar spoon of protoplasm feel the earth moving on its axis? I walk back by the baby shop and examine the onesies, the minute yellow sweater, fragile embroidered dresses only grandmothers would buy (my mother will miss everything), lace-trimmed socks, impossibly tiny lambskin shoes—this is Italy, after all. The other window displays folding strollers, room monitors, bouncy chairs, and high-and-mighty navy blue and white carriages that look constructed for royal bairns. I’m stunned, not having thought until now of all the paraphernalia in my/our future. I share the Italians’ fearful superstitions. I wouldn’t think of buying anything until I’m practically on the way to the hospital. But I snap a photo of the shoes and send it to Colin.
It seems like longer than yesterday that we were in Aquileia. That’s travel: time expands and compresses in unexpected ways. Just to take in one of the most pleasing piazzas I’ve ever seen, I order a hazelnut gelato at a café on Piazza della Libertà, and spend half an hour looking at passersby and patterns of shifting shadows. The great poet Czeslaw Milosz was right. The tragedy of living is to have only one life when there are many possibilities laid before us. Shouldn’t one spend a life, or at least part of it, in Udine?
Camille has covered a lot of ground during her afternoon in Venice. She’s sent home vials and packets of pigments from a miracle of an art supply store. Her project is coming clear to her now and she hasn’t even picked up a brush. She stocked up on handmade paper and will work with Matilde and Serena as she needs more.
Browsing in venerable bookstores, she’s spent almost a thousand euros on decaying leather books with pages of drawings and etchings of Venetian buildings and country villas, a few tomes of renaissance poetry, and in a regular bookstore, she’s splurged on art books—Giorgione, Palladio, Veronese. How she feels, she only can liken to falling in love, when every sense is heightened and intensified, when extraneous emotions fall away. She feels like a lens in the sun. After two trains, a vaporetto, and miles of walking, her new knee throbs. Her calf muscle wants to cramp with every step back to the hotel. Even so, you just should not have room service in Venice.
After a rest, she hauls herself up and slowly walks back to a six-table trattoria she passed earlier. Without the others to hear, her Italian improves. She orders with no hitch. Over a bowl of mussels and a grilled fish, she meets Americans at the next table, a young couple from Baltimore traveling to Europe for the first time. After the usual where-are-you-from conversation and observations about Venice, the woman asks Camille, “Are you retired? Or do you work?”
Camille answers, “I used to teach, now I’m a full-time artist.”
She has the whole next day to play. The buoyant excitement gives her bolts of energy slightly tamped by her irritated knee. She frequently stops for coffee or water. They didn’t get to see the Carpaccios when they were here before. She adores the painting of Saint Ursula sleeping in her bedroom while the angel pauses at the door bringing her palm frond of martyrdom. Why is she martyred? She fled her father’s marriage plan for her, taking along with her on several ships eleven thousand other virgins. He’d betrothed her to the barbarian Conan. She’s about to suffer her fate. She’s peaceful now in her lovely room with the little dog by her bed.
By chance, Camille discovers the hidden-in-plain-sight Carlo Scarpa museum, actually his office design for Olivetti typewriters, right on Piazza Grande but inconspicuous. A place to fall deeper into whatever she’s falling into. She lingers on the details, the brass cylinders supporting the marble stairs, adamantly modern lines so quietly executed that they seem timeless, the sculpture on a square of water, always water, reminding you that you’re in Venice. Here I am, she thinks, with Scarpa, the amazing architect. I’m beginning a long romance with him. She returns to the bookstore and buys a detailed and illustrated Scarpa book, then rushes to the Querini Stampalia palace and garden for a quick look at the Scarpa revisions. Susan should be here for the garden. Camille raises her arms over her head and shakes back her hair. Now I’m on fire, she thinks. Timorous to tensile. She limps a little on the way back to the hotel but hums as she goes “I Set Fire to the Rain.” We must have a dinner with Colin and talk Venetian architecture. Scarpa loved Roman lettering; I’ll tell Rowan all about that.
After dinner, she falls asleep with Scarpa, savoring what he loved: Japanese design, polished stucco, base materials used with precious ones, water, always for this son of Venice, water. Water, lapping doors, seeping under doors, doors opening to water, back doors opening to narrow streets, damp, water, the mind soaked, the body soaked and drifting.
Seven hours later she wakes up with Charles in her vision from a dream of walking along Spit Creek in their backyard. No narrative: there he is, Saturday clothes, tennis shoes, just walking as he did a million times along the path to the bridge he built himself over to a short woodland walk. He’s going to see if the white cyclamen are blooming, Camille thinks as she hauls out of sleep. Then she is awake. She parts the drapery just as the prow of a gondola passes her window. From the canals of Venice to Spit Creek. Charles, good for you. I’m glad you’re checking on the garden.
We spent our last day wrapping up their research. From Udine, we chased a lead up to Maniago, a town famous for the production of knives. Chris wanted to find one place his clients could find unique items to buy or import for their retail stores.
The artisan knives could inspire elegant murders. Slim and sculptural, the stiletto points make you want to pick up one and perhaps pierce someone’s heart. They look way too refined to gut or skin something. I bought a jade green one for Colin. The handles are horn, antler, or the pretty colors of Perlex, whatever that is. Maybe he will cut the string on packages. (Oh, cut the umbilical cord.) After a brief visit to the cutlery museum, we knew all we wanted to know about knife making and drove back to Cormòns for our last dinner.
Up early and on the road, Chris ramps up the sound of k. d. lang, all of us belting out “Hallelujah” and then her incomparable hookup with Roy Orbison, “Crying,” bare poplars on the roadside whizzing by, everyone happy with having seen new sights, Chris weaving around tractors, beating out time with the heel of his hand on the steering wheel, until we hit traffic and the van subdues, everyone in a travel trance. I fall asleep.
Camille made her train easily, arriving in Padova station in time to wait and wait for the others. Their trusted navigating systems neglected to know about road construction. She’d been standing in front of the station for an hour before she sees the van swing into the taxi-stand lane, Susan leaning out the window, waving.
“There’s Camille, look at her—she looks sort of disheveled but vibrant.” Susan threw jackets into the back so she could get in. “Do you suppose she met that Rowan in Venice?”
Camille piles in. She’s picked up a sack of panini in the station. We fall upon them and Chris turns up the music again. Sam Cooke. All of them know the words to “You Send Me,” and “Change Is Gonna Come.”