by Lisa Gornick
On the eve of their departure, Cubby had called from Dallas, presumably to discuss some legal snafu concerning his divorce but, Richard thought, desperate-sounding in his insistence that he would meet them in Venice. Richard had, of course, anticipated that Lena would be annoyed. In the moment before saying yes, he had not, however, added up the pieces: that for Lena, rerouting their meticulously planned trip to Florence (Lena never does anything that isn’t meticulously planned) to meet Cubby, who she claims is the only man she knows who has reached the age of forty without developing a single virtue, in Venice, a city she despises, would be intolerable.
“It’s twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours out of our vacation so I can give my college roommate a pat on the back before his divorce goes through.”
“It galls me that you jump through hoops for him. Is there anything, other than the fact that he’s going to inherit fifteen million dollars, that is interesting about Cubby?”
Richard sighs. He and Lena have had this conversation countless times. On each occasion, he has explained to Lena that his attachment to Cubby has nothing to do with Cubby’s money—that it has to do with their freshman year rooming together at Yale, with their weekend visits to Trinity College where they both lost their virginity on the same night with the same girl, with the trip they made together cross-country the following summer during which the car was stolen and they were held up at knifepoint in Cheyenne and Cubby never let on that he’d flunked two classes and wouldn’t be returning to Yale in the fall. To Richard, reared on a diet of caution by his father (always worried about bills, about taxes, about slick roads and tire treads and worn-out refrigerator coils, about what his dry-cleaning customers might think), Cubby had seemed fearless—undaunted by challenges, liberated from concerns about the mundane, from concerns about what Richard’s father always referred to as consequences. For Cubby, bones could be set, dented front ends pounded smooth.
Whereas Richard now usually negotiates with ease—times and places, which restaurant, what weekend—with Cubby, whose generosity seems free of inhibition and the alloys of calculation, Richard has always felt reluctant to refuse a request. With someone who would literally give away the car he is driving (while in law school, Richard had admired a red Triumph Cubby had bought on a whim; “Take it,” Cubby said, punching Richard’s arm. “You know what a lousy driver I am. You’re doing me a favor”), how could he say no for less than dire reasons? This, of course, only further enrages Lena, who sees Cubby’s guilelessness as part of his unquestioned privilege. “Yes, it’s great that Cubby’s so generous, but it’s nothing for him to give you a car. For him, it’s of no more significance than my offering the plumber a cup of coffee. But in return, you feel like you have no right to ever have a say. It’s like he’s the benevolent monarch and we’re supposed to be the loyal serfs.”
Richard had been pained to realize that Lena had accurately diagnosed the problem. This time, he hardly had the phone receiver back in the cradle after having agreed to meet Cubby in Venice before his neck muscles gripped and he realized he’d done it again—inflamed Lena’s view that he is a coward with Cubby. In the two days since, Lena’s anger has moved through its characteristic phases: from a silent but palpable rage to yesterday’s brittle politeness to this morning’s tentative but still distant banter. Now Lena raises a hand over her head. Catching the waiter’s eye, she points at her empty coffee cup.
“I know. I know. I should have talked with you first. I should have suggested he come to Florence. I got swept up in feeling sorry for him. He seemed so excited about the idea of Venice, I didn’t have the heart to say no.”
Once he’s said it, Richard senses that he’s made a miscalculation, that Lena is not ready to discuss the incident any further.
“If she comes down with that skirt on, I’m going to kill her.”
Then Richard gets it. This is Lena’s revenge for Cubby: she’ll torment him by fighting with Brianna. “Please, Lena,” he blurts. “Don’t.”
He is taken aback by how shaky his voice sounds, by the strength of his reaction—as though the timelessness of the city has erased fourteen years.
Lena’s eyes contract and then fill with tears. She winces and Richard realizes that she’s been unaware of what she has been doing. He imagines Lena’s brain clicking as she surveys the events of the past day, feels guilty to have thought Lena would purposefully wound him by hurting Brianna. She takes his hand between her own two and lifts it to her lips.
She murmurs into his fingers. Richard reaches over and kisses her lowered forehead. “Forgive me,” she whispers.
Lena lets go of his hand and dabs at her eyes with a napkin. “There she is,” she says.
Looking over his shoulder, Richard can see Brianna wending her way toward them. Dressed in black leggings and an oversized T-shirt, her thick hair falling loose over her shoulders, she looks like a Thoroughbred horse with strong, well-defined limbs. Richard watches while the vaporetto ticket man turns to get a better view of his daughter.
When she reaches their table, Brianna gives them a big smile. She kisses Lena and then laughs as she wets her finger in her mouth and rubs at the smudge of lipstick left on Lena’s cheek. “Spare me,” Richard jokes, backing away from Brianna’s brightly colored lips.
Brianna gobbles hungrily on the bread and takes a long gulp from Lena’s water glass. “Cubby called,” she says. “He missed the flight from Rome but he’s going to take one this afternoon. He said he’ll call us at the hotel around six to make a dinner plan.”
Richard braces himself for a torrent of I-told-you-so’s. When Lena remains silent, he steals a glance in her direction. In return, Lena flashes him the second of her shy-arrogant smiles for the day—more pleased, Richard sees, to have been so easily vindicated about Cubby than angered by Cubby having missed his plane. Relieved to not discuss Cubby in front of Brianna, Richard realizes that Lena is not going to comment: she considers it beneath her to land such an easy blow.
Lena pushes back her chair and strikes her La Principessa pose.
*
It’s Lena who suggests that they go ahead with the plan to visit Murano. Richard knows that this is, in part, a ploy to keep them out of the Piazza San Marco with its associations to her father, Guy, and the three summers they lived nearby while he worked on his biography of Canaletto. Now Lena views Canaletto as plebeian (“Quotidian!” she once neighed), her father’s interest in Canaletto flowing from the same character eddy that had led him to Frankie, the library cataloguer for whom he left Lena’s mother, Isobel, by then diabetic and obese with an unpleasant odor that emanated from her skin, three months before Lena and Richard were to be married.
Although Lena has not been able to excise her childhood love for Italy, she has funneled it into a passion for Florence and Tuscany, dismissing as crude anything that came before or after the Renaissance—Canaletto, St. Mark’s (referred to by Lena as that ode to the Byzantine barbaric), and most of Venice relegated to the ash heap. From the venom with which Lena delivers her proclamations, Richard can detect the extraordinary effort it has taken her to destroy the sense of wonder she once felt about this city under siege from the sea, its palaces and churches decorated with the plunder of the East. Last night, watching Brianna, mesmerized as they headed south to the hotel by gondola, Richard could only extrapolate from Brianna’s glazed fascination, from the way she clutched his arm, how Lena, so much more high-strung, must have first experienced this place under Guy’s tutelage.
Even at twenty-four, Richard had felt transfixed by Guy. The first time Lena took him to her parents’ house, Guy had given Richard a tour of the paintings that lined the walls. They’d paused in front of a Canaletto reproduction in Guy’s study with its alphabetized ceiling-to-floor library of books. Guy pointed to a tiny round sign in the painting that marked the same Hotel Sturion where he, Isobel, and Lena had lived the summer Lena turned ten. In Richard’s own parents’ home, there had been one bookshelf that held a set of World
Book encyclopedias, the King James Bible, the telephone book, and a dozen or so best sellers acquired over the years as Christmas gifts from his father’s sister, who belonged to a mail-order club. Except for a painting of an oceangoing sailboat that hung over the living room couch and a deer’s head mounted in the basement rec room, the walls of his parents’ home had been bare.
At Murano, they get off the vaporetto. Lena dodges the guides hawking tours of the glassworks and then ducks inside one of the shops that line the main street to look at a blue glass bowl she’s spotted in the window. Richard holds up a finger, signaling he’ll be back in an hour, and Lena makes a cross with two of her own, meaning make it half an hour. Richard nods, and Lena smiles in return, her mood softened, he senses, by the salty air and the glimmer of sun now pushing through the clouds.
He takes Brianna’s arm, leading her away from the commercial bustle and toward the church of San Donato. Tomorrow and during most of their first week in Florence, he will be occupied with lawyers representing the Swiss and Italian bankers he is trying to interest in financing an electric power plant outside Nairobi. Lena will attempt to get Brianna to spend as many days in the Uffizi Gallery as Brianna can tolerate while Lena raves about the transcendent qualities of Botticelli and Raphael, unaware, Richard thinks, of how like Guy she sounds. In exchange, Lena has promised Brianna that she’ll buy her a pair of ankle-high Italian boots (though in private she has worried to Richard that the Italian footwear won’t come in Brianna’s size). When Richard is done with his business, they’ll rent a car and spend a week touring the Tuscan hills to the east and the Chianti district to the south.
Inside the church, Richard shows Brianna the intricate tile work of the floor and points to the mosaic of the Madonna, her head encircled in gold, floating over the altar. Brianna gazes dutifully at the floor and then sinks into one of the pews. She leans back and stares at the ceiling. Her mouth relaxes, and for a moment she looks again like a child with a drooping lower lip, her newfound composure dissolving in the blaze of gold.
Richard first saw the mosaic four years ago, a few months after Guy was diagnosed with brain cancer. Although Lena had never forgiven Guy for abandoning Isobel to her swollen ankles and wrists, for fracturing Lena’s until-then-unbroken childhood loyalty to her parents, leaving in its wake a coolness inside her, at base, a skepticism about the nature of love, she had been beside herself at the idea of Guy’s welfare being in Frankie’s hands. “I don’t trust her,” Lena cried to Richard. “She’ll have his will rewritten with everything in her name and then she’ll tell the doctors to turn off the lifesaving machines. I won’t have it,” Lena cried, pounding the pillow.
Perhaps because Frankie thought of Richard and herself as similar, both from families where no one talked about the Renaissance, perhaps because Richard watched sports on TV the two or three times a year when they brought Brianna to New Haven to visit Guy and Frankie, so that Frankie had the feeling that he wasn’t “stuck up like that wife of yours,” Frankie had agreed to let Richard assume the guardianship for Guy. The papers hadn’t been inked a week when the neurologist informed Richard that Guy had a new tumor in the frontal lobe of his brain. Each choice had been worse than the next. If they didn’t operate, Guy’s chances of living a year would be slim. If they did operate, Guy might die from the surgery. If he survived, he might be severely impaired—“impulsive, like a child of six or seven,” the neurologist said, “prone to fits of temper and unable to plan more than a day or two in advance.”
“Christ Almighty,” Richard responded.
“Yes, Christ Almighty,” the neurologist echoed.
A week later, the decision still unmade, Richard boarded a plane for Venice, where he was scheduled to present a paper at an international conference on the debt issues of African nations. He gave his paper the morning of the third day of the conference, then played hooky from the afternoon proceedings. Too distracted for museums, he took the vaporetto here to Murano, his first time to the island. He arrived at dusk, and as he descended the gangplank, the streetlights flashed on and patches of yellow haze infiltrated the gray mist. Uninterested in the glassworks, he wandered away from the stores toward San Donato. When he opened the heavy wooden door, he’d been stunned by the golden Madonna arched over the altar. Like Brianna now, he sank into one of the pews. Having lost religious belief long before he left Eureka, he’d been surprised to find himself praying: Please, tell me what to do about Guy. He heard a rustling and his heart turned wild like an animal caught in a cage as he imagined a miracle, the golden Madonna whispering a response, but then the wooden door squeaked and a blast of cool air hit the back of his neck and a group of Japanese students poured down the aisle, breaking the spell.
Brianna points to the mosaic of the Madonna. “Is it from the Renaissance?”
“No, from long before.”
“Then Mom wouldn’t like this, would she?”
“No.”
“Barbaric!” Brianna whispers, in imitation of Lena.
“Crude,” Richard teases, pinching his nose and jutting his chin into the air.
Brianna giggles. “Kwo—what’s that word Mom uses?”
“Quotidian,” Richard says in falsetto.
“Well, I think she’s beautiful.”
Richard feels a surge of love for Brianna as he adds Byzantine Madonnas to the list of b’s—backgammon, burritos, Bond movies—that he and Brianna enjoy without Lena. He leans back in the pew and gazes at the Madonna.
*
At five they return to the hotel. Brianna flops onto the cot that’s been added to their room with Franny and Zooey. Watching Brianna sprawled on the couch lost in a book or playing soccer or singing with her school choir, Richard and Lena will sometimes look at each other with a secret smile of triumph: victory over the skeptics, or maybe some part of themselves, who had presumed an adopted child, without their genes, would never have their talents. The truth is neither of them believes they could have with their own genes produced such a magnificent child.
Richard opens the window and leans out. Without reservations, they had been unable to get a second room—hence the cot for Brianna—or a room facing the canal. He looks down at the courtyard fed by half a dozen passageways and festooned with clotheslines and clay flowerpots, then draws the lace curtain, the pattern casting a wobbly shadow over Lena’s slender arms as she unbuttons her blouse and reaches for her robe. Lena plumps the pillows on the bed and lies down with the Uffizi catalogue balanced on her knees.
Richard lowers himself into the armchair by the window and unties his shoes. He is struck by the incompatibility between the exquisite scene before him—his wife and daughter resting on a late afternoon in Venice, Brianna propped on her elbows, Lena with her lovely limbs gracefully arranged atop the plum-colored bedspread—and the tightness in his gut as though a metal vise were squeezing his bowels.
Lena studies the catalogue plates one by one, fixing, it seems, each painting and the information printed beneath in her mind. Richard wants to shake her, to yell, What the hell are you doing, you’ll be in the Uffizi in two days, why are you studying the goddamned catalogue? Then, abruptly, she gets up from the bed and goes to the sink. She fumbles through her cosmetics bag until she finds a bottle of Tylenol. Richard feels a cramp in his stomach. He watches while Lena swallows the caplets without water, then raises her eyebrows as though to ask, Do you want one? before putting the bottle back in her cosmetics bag. He shakes his head no, afraid that any utterance would pull the loose thread that unravels the entire garment.
*
Lena had refused to tell him what she wanted. By then, Guy—woozy and disoriented, with toothpick limbs and white wisps where only weeks before there’d been a head of thick, still mostly black hair—seemed to Richard only abstractly connected to the man who had once taught him how to transform thoughts in the head into thoughts on the page. “You’re the legal guardian,” she said. “It’s your decision.”
“But he’s your f
ather. I need to know how you’d feel if we operated and he then lived for five more years like the neurologist said—maybe with fits of rage, unable to plan ahead. Or if he died from the operation. Or if we don’t operate and he then dies in a year.”
“I don’t have any feelings about it.” Lena turned off the light. “Ask Frankie and Caitlin.” When Richard asked Frankie, she responded with a torrent of tears and then wiped her face on Richard’s sleeve. Having moved from her parents’ home in Waterbury directly into Guy’s home in New Haven, having, Richard was alarmed to learn, never written a check and with no idea as to what assets Guy had or what debts they owed, Frankie was panicked by all of the alternatives. Richard didn’t ask Caitlin, Guy and Frankie’s then-eleven-year-old daughter, though watching Caitlin—whose resemblance to Lena (the same deep-set gray eyes; the same high forehead and pale skin) always caught Richard by surprise—scramble eggs for the three of them for dinner, warm rolls in the microwave, and wash lettuce for a salad, he had wondered if he should.
Richard had pled with Lena to come with him to the Venice meetings. “Brianna can stay with a friend. I know you don’t like Venice, but it’ll be good for us to have some time together.”
“I can’t.” Under Lena’s eyes, there were dark hollows—the telltale sign of the insomnia that wrecked her during bad times.
“Do you want me to cancel? I can do that. I can say there’s a family emergency.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve worked for months on the paper. It’s only six days. I will be fine.”
Onstage with the other members of the panel, Richard had been overcome with a feeling of gratitude toward Guy, who, when Richard was five years out of law school and trying to find a way out of a transactional group at a big firm, had taught him how to write an article. Sitting at Guy’s kitchen table, Guy had explained, “An article is like a painting. First and foremost, you have to get the audience’s attention. Without that, all of your ideas will go to naught. That’s the difference between a first-rate and a second-rate Canaletto. With the second-rate Canalettos, the canvas looks shadowy and uninviting. Most museumgoers will walk right by. Second, there has to be a central topic. Afterward, the reader has to be able to say in a sentence, That was an article about such and such. Similarly with a painting. Look at a Titian. Novels could be written about what’s going on in the corners. But when the viewer leaves, he has a central image: Mary rising to heaven.” Two weeks later, Richard had taken the train back to New Haven with the first draft in tow. While Guy read, he’d wandered through the house, looking for the hundredth time at the Venetian art on the walls. Afterward, Guy rolled up his shirtsleeves and reached in his desk drawer for a blank pad of paper. “Very good, very good start,” he’d said before proceeding for the next two hours, the two of them seated side by side at his worktable, to cajole Richard into distilling the fundamental ideas while he scribbled reams of notes, all with such calm and good humor that it wasn’t until Richard was halfway back to New York that he’d realized that the article had to be entirely rewritten.