That Winter in Venice

by Ciji Ware

  Jack took another sip of his full-bodied red wine. After a long pause he said, “I got an email from my mother today. She sounded pretty frantic. My sister, Sylvia—the twenty-eight-year-old I told you is still living at home? Well, she’s back in rehab.”

  “Oh, God, Jack, I am so sorry,” Serena replied, his revelation instantly stirring heartfelt sympathy. “We went through that a couple of times with Mama. No wonder you feel blue on top of everything that’s happening at the conference.”

  “Thanks,” he murmured. “It made me wonder if I should bail out of giving my other talk on Saturday and fly home to see if I can help.”

  “No!” Serena responded emphatically. “Don’t do that!”

  Jack looked both startled and slightly askance. Serena felt color rise to her cheeks.

  “What I just said probably didn’t sound like what I actually meant. What I mean is that in dealing with my mother’s addiction, I had to learn that I didn’t cause what was going on with her and I sure as hell couldn’t control it. Or cure it,” she added. “And the more I tried to play Rescue Ranger by going into my commando-I-can-fix-it-mode... the worse things became.” Then she added somewhat sheepishly, “Of course, that was my experience. It could be different in your family.”

  “But to just stand by... and to let my parents deal with everything...” His words trailed off and he stared at the breadbasket in the center of the table.

  Serena smiled sadly.

  “They probably can’t cure someone else’s addiction, either,” she noted gently. “Maybe they shouldn’t try?”

  Jack’s mouth had settled into a straight line and Serena knew he didn’t like what he was hearing.

  “So you think tough love is the answer?” he demanded. “Believe me, we’ve tried that, too, and that hasn’t worked, either.”

  It was her turn to reach across the table and cup his hand in hers.

  “Not tough love, Jack... lots of love, but just not expressed in the way you think.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Serena released his hand and put hers, palms down, on either side of her plate.

  “Look... in the ‘for what it’s worth’ department, what I learned when I got back to New Orleans after the storm is that people who went through the trauma of Katrina sought a lot of different ways to numb the pain afterward—or to try to avoid it altogether. My brother Nicholas, for instance, plunged into work, pushing my father aside, and practically living at our costume shop. My sister, as I mentioned, barely got up in the morning and preferred to sit and sew the same thing, over and over, all day long. And my mother... well, she didn’t even try to conceal her bourbon in a teacup anymore. She was wasted by eleven o’clock every single day.”

  “Sounds like what Sylvia’s been doing.”

  “People like my mother and your sister have picked a very dangerous way to try to self-medicate and block out the agony they’re feeling about all that’s happened to them... starting, probably, way back in their childhoods—if they weren’t happy ones—to say nothing of the sketchy choices they may have made along the way, even before the storm.”

  Serena stared into her wine glass and continued softly.

  “And then, for my mother, there was the horror of Katrina itself and the death of her favorite child, my brother, Cosimo, and his wife and her unborn grandbaby. At long last, Mama had a honking good excuse to drink herself under the coffee table in our sitting room with the high ceilings, silk drapes, and double fireplaces,” she said, with a touch of black humor she knew a fellow New Orleanian would appreciate. “And boy, did she do it up proud.”

  “You sound like you’re still angry.”

  “Do I?” Serena asked, and then nodded. “I’m sure I am... at least a little bit. As the eldest daughter, it got mighty tiresome, cleaning up after her, but in a way, I envied her for finding a method to blot out the pain we all were suffering. I might have been doing the same as she was if I’d been home for the storm... but your sister is committing a kind of slow suicide and asking the rest of you to watch her die.”

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed with a grim nod of his head. “I think that’s what’s so terrible for my mother, what with Sylvia living at home and all.”

  “Well, I know you’ll think I’m pretty hard-hearted, but eventually your sister will have to decide if she wants to live... or prefers to just push on outta here. I hope she makes the decision my mother did—to make a change before it’s too late.”

  “It’s as simple as that?” Jack asked with a skeptical expression. “Deciding whether to live or to die?”

  Serena nodded. “That’s what it ultimately gets down to, pretty much.”

  “But what if people like Sylvia and your mama won’t stop using? What if they refuse to stop, like Sylvia said to my mother’s face the other day. What if they want to just keep on doing terrible things to themselves? How can a family just stand by and let it happen?”

  “Well, for me,” Serena ventured, “I finally understood that I had absolutely no control over what my mother did or did not do. I just had to let her do what she was doing—or she would kill me too.”

  “Oh, c’mon, Serena,” Jack said testily, “isn’t that a little over-dramatic?”

  “Oh, for damn sure, it’s all a great, big drama, don’t you see? And for me, I found myself getting ‘addicted’ in a weird way to all the ups and downs my family was going through because of my mother’s behavior. When I first came back to New Orleans, I started acting almost as crazy as Mama was!”

  “You started drinking?” Jack asked in disbelief.

  “Lord no! Even crazier. I started pouring perfectly good bourbon down the drain. I’d hide her wallet so she couldn’t buy more. I’d look in the toilet tank for her hidden bottles and then scream in a rage when I found them. I kicked up a lot of dust, believe me. Quite the star of my own little drama, I was.”

  Jack stared at his minestrone soup. “Before I left on this trip, I ransacked Sylvia’s sock drawer about every other day, looking for cocaine,” he admitted. “One day I found some and gave her hell.”

  “Welcome to the club,” she said cheerfully. “Finally it dawned on me that if I was to help Antonelli’s costumes continue its hundred-and-fifty-year-old history, I had to step out of the vortex—the drama I couldn’t control. I had to let my mother decide whether she wanted to live or die. I stopped focusing on her and started paying full attention to the job I had to do if our family business was going to stay afloat—literally—after the storm. And then, of course, all that was followed by the recession that hit us so hard a few years later.”

  “But you told me coming over here that you had a ‘family intervention,’ for your mother.”

  “We sure did. It was to put her on notice that—before any of the surviving family members would help or engage with her anymore—she had to say to us, ‘I want to live... despite all this terrible crap that’s happened.’”

  “And what did she do?”

  Serena shook her head and gave a short laugh.

  “She kept on drinking.”

  “Well, what did you do?” he demanded.

  “Went about my business. At first, everybody was mad at me because we’d all gotten used to the drama, y’know? And then one day, Daddy and my brother, Nicholas, brought a big ole’ case of bourbon into the house, put it on the coffee table in the middle of the living room, and said to Mama, “Here! Have at it. We’re done with this too, just like Serena.”

  “And what happened then?”

  “She drank it all. Every last drop in every last bottle.”

  “Jeez...”

  “It just about killed each one of us to completely ignore her when she did this, but, as I said, the counselor urged us to go about our business, spending most of our time at the shop. We all tried to keep busy and away from the temptation to pick her up off the floor, or put her to bed when she was soused. No one made excuses to her friends anymore when she didn’t show up at dinners or her bridge club
. It was the hardest thing any of us ever did. She’d either live or she’d die, and it got down to our survival, too. It was her—or us.”

  “Wow. That must have been pretty rough.”

  “Oh... it was.”

  “Well, I saw her with you at the airport when we left, so I know she didn’t die.”

  “I guess she hit bottom the day she thought she was having a heart attack and I handed her the phone to make her own 911 call to be taken to the hospital. When she was there drying out that last time, she finally got the DTs so bad, she sought help on her own and slowly pushed past a lot of the horror of losing her eldest son whom she did, truly, think was the Baby Jesus... and I say that—now—with the greatest love.”

  “But the change couldn’t have just happened—” Jack said, ever the reporter. “What made the difference that time?”

  “In rehab that time, she slowly began to get out of herself by helping a couple of people she met at the AA meetings who were way worse off than she was. She started being grateful that she still had her other children after she met a few women who’d lost everyone in their family to the storm.”

  “What a story.”

  “Well, trust me, it hasn’t been all lovey-dovey ever since, but the only way out of the morass was to learn to savor the good things still present in our lives.”

  “Like what?”

  “Everything and anything,” Serena replied with a shrug, “even down to a beautiful sunrise on the Mississippi, or a dog who wags his tail every time he catches sight of me coming up the street to the shop in the CBD. Gratitude, Jack. That’s what saved my mother from the dark pit, and I dearly hope it keeps working for her.”

  “Simple as that?” Jack repeated.

  “Simple, and complicated, too. And by the way,” she added, “gratitude sure saved me.”

  “From the dark pit of loving a married man?” Jack asked, his gaze riveted on hers.

  Serena was startled to hear him mention her former lover. She took her time considering his question.

  “No,” she responded slowly, “not so much that. Marco actually did me a world of good in some important ways. He built up my shaky confidence. He told me I was pretty—even though I’m so tall—and that I was genuinely talented as a costumer. And given that my mother and father had been missing-in-action most of my life running the costume business or drinking, Marco’s kindness and the attention he paid me, and... I guess you could call it ‘love’... made me feel appreciated for the first time in my life.”

  “I see. But you said ‘gratitude’ saved you. From what?”

  “The darkness that descended when Marco died so suddenly and I had no way I could outwardly mourn him. I got completely stuck in that grief, and on top of it, losing my grandmother, whom I adored, and my brother and his wife soon after, and in that horrible way. The final blow was watching my mother simply sink under everything that had happened to us, to say nothing of the terrible state New Orleans was in for such a long time. I thought for a long while there was simply no way out of that pit.” She paused and captured his glance. “Well, you surely understand what I’m talking about. You were on the front lines in that storm and the recovery efforts. You witnessed what it did to everyone. What it probably did even to a lot of the reporters who saw such terrible things.”

  Jack gave a slight shrug.

  “I was affected, sure,” he admitted, “but I had a certain insulation being an observer. It put emotional distance between me and everything I was having to look at and evaluate before I wrote about it for publication.”

  Serena regarded him closely and took a deep draught of her wine.

  “You know what?” she said, setting down her glass decisively. “I don’t really believe you were as detached as you say you were, but never mind. For me the only path out of that big ole’ dark hole was to literally count the good things I had left... the most important of which was that I still had my life. Whatever talents I possess, I could use to celebrate that life through Mardi Gras and Carnival and all the things that beautiful dreams and fantasies are made of.”

  She smiled at him across the table to lighten the mood between them that had grown so serious. She raised her glass in a toast.

  “That’s what I’m concentrating on now. Here’s to creating beautiful fantasies, like coming to Venice and sitting in a place like this, cozy and warm and well fed, with the snow coming down and sipping some very good wine while I gaze across the table at your handsome face.”

  She waited for Jack to respond, but he remained silent, toying with his fork.

  Serena laughed self-consciously.

  Damn! Why did she always play her hand before the man played his?

  Oh, that’s right, she chastised herself, almost laughing aloud at the ironic situation she found herself in. Jack Durand was spoken for. Southern gent that he is, he shouldn’t respond. He already has a woman in his life.

  “Well, that sure was a big, ole’ long speech I just gave,” she apologized. “Sorry. And I certainly have no right to be telling you what you could do about your sister’s drug addiction, or how I thought you must have secretly been wounded by Katrina.”

  Without warning, Jack reached across the table and seized her hand with such strength this time that he nearly knocked over her wine glass.

  “Don’t be sorry for saying what you just have to me,” he said, as a peculiar buzz of electricity shot up the arm attached to the hand he was holding. “You’ve given me a lot to think about, is all. Both about Sylvia in rehab—again—and about how I’ve dealt with the aftermath of the storm these last years, which is to deny it had a very big impact on me.”

  “But maybe I overstepped—”

  Jack overrode her, countering, “And you’re right... I am really discouraged about what was said on the panel I chaired today. But, I guess I should be grateful that there are still other folks—besides me—who are trying to wake people up in time about the climate change stuff and its further degrading the coastal wetlands. You’ve given me a different way to think about some things.”

  His expression had lightened and Serena was relieved he seemed to shake off some of his gloom.

  “That’s the spirit!” she teased, relieved that she hadn’t offended him about such personal matters. “For me, gratitude always tends to make things seem a bit brighter.” Serena gave the hand that held hers a gentle squeeze and marveled at how warm and comforting it felt to be touching him. “Look, you’re grappling with much bigger problems, right now, than I am—worrying if I can translate Allegra’s brilliant designs into something a rich person coming to the ball will happily pay for. I think it’s definitely okay to feel blue, sometimes, about the sorry state of the world, including the polar ice cap melting.”

  Jack held her glance for a long moment and Serena had the strangest sense he was silently giving thanks that they were having dinner together this night. He released her hand and signaled for the waiter to prepare their bill.

  “We’re in Venice,” he said, finally, “and you’ve just convinced me I shouldn’t do my usual Rescue Ranger thing, as you describe it. I only have a few more days here and then I leave on a couple of field trips to inspect the latest plans to hold back the water, here, in the next fifty years.” He flashed a grin. “I think I should make the most of it. Why not celebrate that I’m in La Serenissima with a beautiful woman named Serena? I think it’s definitely another example of serendipity. Aren’t we up to Number Seven by now?”

  Serena couldn’t repress the broad smile she felt spreading from ear to ear.

  “If you say so,” she replied, tilting her head at a jaunty angle.

  He’d called her beautiful. She was perfectly aware that she had begun out-and-out flirting with a man who was once again paying for her dinner and had a serious girlfriend back home. Well, at least he wasn’t a married man, she congratulated herself.

  A voice in her head sang out a warning.

  Serena! You’re doing it again... falling for a
guy you can’t have!

  She answered herself silently that she and Jack were enveloped here in snowy Italy... out of time, out of space. Her attraction to the man sitting across the table from her was unmistakable, but at least this time, going in, she knew for an absolute certainty that it couldn’t come to anything, so her heart was safe, wasn’t it? Given the special circumstances of where they were, how could she resist a good, old-fashioned fling—or ignore the attractiveness of this sexy man, to say nothing of the perfect conditions surrounding them and how long she’d been celibate? If he asked her out again, she’d say yes, and let whatever happened after that... happen. After all, this was Venice! Jack would soon go back to the lady doctor, and she’d go back to Antonelli’s costumes. They traveled in two different orbits in New Orleans. They’d only see each other across the field at a Saints game in the Superdome. No problema. But meanwhile...

  “Look Jack,” she proposed, “let’s just have some fun while you’re here, shall we? For once, let’s both just forget about Katrina, and everything that went with it for a while, agreed?”

  Jack nodded emphatically, asking, “Are you free for dinner again, on Saturday following the presentation of my grandiose scheme to get the U.S. Government to restore the Louisiana wetlands?” Then, he hastened to add, “You can show up afterwards, of course, if you don’t feel like hearing me drone on.”

  Serena fished her cellphone from the depths of her purse.

  “If I can get all my work done, I’d love to hear your talk Saturday about saving my hometown. And I’d love to have dinner with you again,” she assured him, noting their date on her electronic calendar. “But you’d better take my phone number this time, signor... and text me with the time, place, vaporetto to take, and how I find you in that huge convention hall.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The next few days for Serena were a whirlwind of production meetings with the staff tasked with putting on the ball, coupled with back-to-back conferences with Allegra’s most important and demanding international clientele, some of whom were only now getting around to ordering their costumes.