by Casey Walker
Our boat bounced off a wake—this is what it must be like, I thought, to be two less-limited people. The driver had a tan without splotch or burn and a ruffled white shirt undone three buttons from the top. I teased Alex for how she watched him. The boat spun hard left. We knocked into each other. I have to say again how she looked, laughing so hard with her hair in her mouth, not just beautiful but unself-conscious, at ease with herself and with me. Everything was in precise counterpoint to the hours of plane flights. Flight—think of it, at thirty thousand feet, at five hundred miles an hour—it should be a miracle, and yet we had drained it of all magic. It was our expensive little boat that felt like the miracle.
We came around the cemetery island. Alex whistled us past, and I hushed because I couldn’t whistle at all. Her hand flew past my face to point at two of St. Mark’s gray bulbs appearing through the haze, like they had just been sketched there a moment ago. The triangle top of the campanile stood beside them, pointing up at her own pointing finger. I thought, right then, everything would work out—Alex and me. I thought that my own life, even with the still-recent sadness of my father’s death, might still end up a lucky thing.
We looped under the fish tail of the far bits of the island—a city that had been dropped from the sky, shattered into a hundred pieces, and bridged carefully back together again. Lido was south, the barrier island protecting us from the open water of the Adriatic, and we sped through the middle channel between San Giorgio Maggiore and the Doge’s Palace, shining and slightly pink. Palladio’s church suffered in a full body cast, its scaffolding reminding us that even paradise required maintenance.
We motored past the launch in front of Harry’s Bar, west of where the vaporetto shoved travelers out at San Marco, and turned up the mouth of the Grand Canal. We took a smaller inlet, and the driver weaved into a dock fronting a hotel. He took Alex by her forearms and steadied her up. I didn’t want to get out of the boat.
I paid him out of my wallet, though I felt I had crossed over from ordinary life and should be paying, by otherworldly custom, with the coins left in my mouth at death. A couple thirty years older than us waited to board our boat. They managed to come across as both elegant and drunk, the lady with a gold brooch swaying from top-shelf gin. The ferryman sped off, leaving Alex and me looking down into the wake with our hearts broken—broken because we could never have back those moments of first arrival, no matter how perfect that it had happened and that we were here.
LIGHTBORN’S PALAZZO OCCUPIED the west end of a square reachable only by a tight sidewinding passage where the walls narrowed in like a dead end—Alex and I couldn’t pass side by side. And yet once through, a full campo appeared with a crumbling church on one side and two fat tabbies stalking each other in the shade of a cistern. We saw an old man, a few inches over five feet, in a buttoned vest and a tie. He hailed and shuffle-stepped toward us. He introduced himself as Lightborn’s caretaker, Pierpaolo.
Pierpaolo shook with some kind of palsy. He tried to take Alex’s suitcase. She let him only after she saw it might be taken as a comment on his infirmity if she refused. It pained me to watch him weighted by our belongings.
The old man showed us inside, and the boom of Lightborn’s iron door shutting behind us was an echo I would hear in my mind long after. Our steps bounced up through the stone vault of the entryway. Settling us into a second-floor suite, Pierpaolo informed us that Leo and Lightborn, who I knew to be traveling by private jet, had stopped to golf at St. Andrews and would now arrive the next day. When the caretaker left, I fell happily into one of the wobbling lacquered chairs. Above me, in a cloudy, angel-filled fresco, fat naked babies swarmed Jesus around a giant cross. I took a moment to stare at the flowing industry of the fresco—everyone around Christ always seems so busy.
I heard Alex batting around in the bedroom, squeaking open the windows. I thought I heard a gasp, and I got up to find her. She seemed to have somehow left the room. I looked for her means of escape. Finally, I saw that what I had taken to be a full-length window was in fact a door, slightly ajar. I found Alex on a terrace, one hand on the stone balustrade and the other covering her mouth. We had come in the back entrance of the palazzo, unaware that its real frontage was the Grand Canal. I think she heard my footsteps, but she didn’t look up until I stood behind her. She was crying—not just welled up, but really crying. Maybe it was travel stress or exhaustion, the lifted weight of her job and the shock of her boss’s death. Or maybe it was just the unanticipated appearance of this postcard waterway. We watched the regatta—sturdy boats filled with trash and construction cement; police watercraft speeding past the moored skiffs of vegetable sellers; elegant gondolas filled with honeymooners. I remember being more impressed than I believed I could be, happy that my familiarity with the image had not blunted the aura of Venice in its much-seen crumble and sink. It’s all so beautiful, Alex kept saying, and I said I thought so, too.
She turned to me and said, “It makes me feel like I’ve wasted my whole life.”
WE SHOWERED TOGETHER, and the flight cramps washed out. Alex’s thin hair clumped into thick ropes. It seemed possible that I had never actually been awake. That I’d been—what’s the Yeats line?—a tattered coat hanging on a stick. Alex and I turned the thought over, of our wasted young lives. Our DC days, the brain at half-mast. The interminable pleadings of constituents. Meandering hearings productive of nothing but suicidal ideation. Our bodies held up less by spine than by caffeine. A nice day was a brief lunch stolen together in the basement cafeteria.
“My boss lived his whole life that way,” Alex said. In front of the mirror, she tugged her hair out. “And it’s over now. And for what?”
I couldn’t imagine being Leo, either—being even that successful—so if that success seemed hollow, then better to give up the ghost now.
Rinsed clean, we walked the Riva degli Schiavoni until it was dark. We wandered into the Piazza San Marco and paid outrageously for drinks at Florian’s and listened to a band run through the American songbook. No matter, because we were inventing new lives. I was staggered into a fresh awareness and determined not to lose it. I cast Luke out—invited the ghosts that crept from all the buildings to linger around us in place of our own familiars.
So when I said to myself later that Armand Lightborn was responsible for three of the best days of my life, this was what I meant—fifteen-euro glasses of prosecco and “New York, New York” bouncing between the ransacked decoration of the Byzantine church and Napoleon’s old administrative buildings. I owed it all to Lightborn—Alex close, her arm linked into mine above the elbow, and what was really a baffling happiness, not just the absence of stress or foreboding or boredom, but a solid feeling of elation all by itself.
When the cafe closed, we lingered in the all-but-empty piazzetta with the clock tower behind us ringing midnight. Even the pigeons had gone to bed. The last people on the Riva were scruffy immigrant rose sellers and sad-eyed men near the Bridge of Sighs selling stolen or imitation Italian handbags. Something of an almost religious dimension radiated off of Alex, in her dreamy smile, like she had suddenly found it possible to reclaim her lapsed faith in a stupid world.
STRONG CAPPUCCINOS, WITH patterns in the foam, washed out our midmorning drowsiness. Alex and I drank them standing at a polished tin counter in a cafe catty-corner to Lightborn’s palazzo. That day, Alex discovered she liked pistachio gelato, the Guggenheim mansion, the view from Dorsoduro across the Giudecca Canal. She preferred most things Gothic to most things Baroque and loved nearly any Byzantine mosaic with radiant gold tints and extensive halos. I liked whatever she liked. I especially liked her, and the feeling she gave me that this life of ours could be touching and vivid. We went back to our rooms after a day-long wander and tore our clothes to shreds without bothering to close the windows.
Leo and Lightborn descended that evening like an expected storm. I tried to lock myself down for it, determined not to let Leo ruin this feeling. They laughed their way into the
palazzo, with Leo hanging off Lightborn’s elbow. Plenty of people clutched at Lightborn that way, like they were mobbing him around home plate, and though it didn’t speak well of my boss that he was among them, I tried to remember that in other ways it was Lightborn who seemed to require it. Not all of us need to be so admired. I wanted to believe we could live compelling lives with our unknown names, and be satisfied with the love of a handful of intimates. The respect of others would not add any number to your days, and what comfort a powerful reputation might give on long, difficult nights must be easily matched by the fear that success simply gave you more to lose. I felt there was just as much subservience in Lightborn’s need for admiration as there was in the sycophant who offered it.
“Not bad, huh? Not bad,” Leo said, squeezing my arm at the elbow.
“A revelation,” I said. Lightborn was now behind him, speaking Italian without pause to Pierpaolo. I couldn’t say if his Italian was good, but it sounded forceful and made me credit him with full command.
“Mr. Lightborn, you’re a Renaissance man,” I said when he approached us. And it was true—because he was cruel and kingly and deserved a public beheading. And yet, after last night, I was willing to love him, too.
He shook my hand, slapped my back. He kissed Alex on the cheek, and she stiffened. He barely knew us, but his effusion was calculated to disguise that. And then he was gone, off to his rooms, calling back to us that we’d meet on the terrace for drinks. So how, I thought, do you get a fix on a man like that, one so accustomed to public display? You had only his few light remarks to work from, his generosity that was overawing and yet cost him nothing when compared to his vast stores of wealth.
“Alex, can I steal Luke for a second?” Leo said. I’d nearly forgotten he was next to me. I looked at Alex and then to pallid Leo, with his brutish bag-eyes, and wanted him to notice how he intruded. She excused herself to change for dinner, floating away like one of the pink-cheeked, hair-tossing girls in the ceiling frescoes.
“How are you kids?” he asked. “How is she?”
“She’s managing,” I said. I wondered if Alex could be passed off as someone even remotely in mourning.
“It’s so tragic for her,” Leo said.
“I should probably go check on her,” I said. “She doesn’t want to be alone.”
“Of course,” Leo said. His eyes asked: Who will be consumed by grief when I’m gone? His hanging face said his tally of mourners was coming up short.
WE GATHERED FOR an aperitif on the terrace—Campari spritz, canal-side above the green water.
Lighborn was a southpaw, drink in his right hand so he could gesture and emphasize with his left. It occurred to me he fought that way, too, on the sinister side, keeping everyone out of balance. We had just worked with him on an issue you would think had nothing to do with him: labor laws in the Marianas Islands, a US protectorate exempt from the federal minimum wage but still able to use the “Made in the USA” seal. Lightborn was right there in the background lobbying to hold back a proposed extension of the minimum wage to the island’s garment workers. Many staffers speculated that Lightborn’s next move would be some huge building project that would benefit from poaching the cheap labor. No plan of that sort had yet appeared, but that was just the point. His thinking ran far ahead, to purely conjectural things. It seemed he’d never be stuck or run out of rope.
“Ten years,” he said when Alex asked how long he’d owned his “palazzo.” I watched to see if she could say the word without laughing.
“Is it a hassle?” Leo asked.
“Worth it so far,” Lightborn said. “Even the headaches.”
“And those are?” Leo said.
“The tourists. Most of the summer. Carnevale. And of course nothing works for long—not the pipes, not the showers.”
We sat up listening to him until the sun dimmed out somewhere over Mestre. A substantial portion of what I knew about Lightborn’s history came from a Vanity Fair article, which wasn’t a profile, exactly, because he hadn’t cooperated. It detailed the early family fortune, how his father had years ago bought a small hotel and replicated it into a national chain before selling it for millions. Armand was the only son. He went to Choate, where he left quietly, and suspiciously, before turning up at a baseball academy, having discovered the power in his left arm. Division I recruit, college career ended by blown ligaments. There were whispers of drug-related arrests (paperwork mysteriously lost), but the more substantial rumors surrounded Armand’s career-making land deal with a Wyoming mining company that underwent layers of convoluted title transfers no one could make heads or tails of except to say that Lightborn had managed—perhaps fairly, perhaps not—to evade tens of millions in legal culpability for an open pit still leaching ore into surrounding lakes. Responsibility for the cleanup would have sunk him before he even began. When the magazine piece was published, Lightborn vigorously denied everything, even prosaic matters of public record. He wrote a letter to the editor in retort: “There are so many errors in the litany of falsehoods in your recent article on my private life that it seems silly to try to correct them. Most are too egregiously fabricated to bother denying. I cannot, however, let one fact go uncorrected: My college ERA was 1.13 and not, as stated, 1.33. Yours, A.L.”
Three drinks before dinner had me sailing, and it was only by pinching myself that I kept from sinking into a catnap. Lightborn and Leo had dinner plans at Armand’s “regular” spot, the Hotel Danieli, but Lightborn said he would call in a reservation at a great little place he sometimes dropped in on. He sketched me the directions, off of Campo Santa Maria Formosa. Had Lightborn next promised me the moon and stars, that he would fetch them down for me and let me pet them like docile cats, I would have believed him entirely. Alex took my hand in hers. We had barely let go of each other since we arrived. It reminded me that on regular days we spent too much time circling around each other, sharing the same space without really being together. We each had phones that rang with our bosses’ plumbing emergencies at three a.m. Why didn’t the boss call the plumber first? Because that was our job. I lurched with Alex from crisis to crisis, and what got lost was just sitting next to her, as we were now, with a drink, touching. We left for dinner, and the shining stars were covered in a soft, pleasing fur.
WHEN WE ARRIVED at Enoiteca Mascareta, there was a placard on a corner table with my name on it. From behind the raucous bar up front, the owner appeared, a chinless man with a crashing wave of gray hair. He opened a bottle of champagne for us with a sword. I saw a twitch in Alex’s smile.
“Let’s play Vegas oddsmakers,” she said. “Do you want the over or the under on Lightborn’s implosion?”
“Tell me what you mean by implosion,” I said.
“Federal agents,” she said. “His offices at dawn.”
“What’s the line?”
“A year,” she said.
“Is this a fair bet?” I said. “Or insider trading?”
“I’m taking the under.”
“What’d you hear?”
“Nothing proprietary,” she said. “All public record.”
“I would have bet the over anyway,” I said. “I’m sure Lightborn will be with us awhile. I’d put a billion dollars on it.”
“Good,” she said. “You can pay me in his seized assets.”
“Shake on it,” I said. We did.
“Here’s my other question,” Alex said. “Why does everyone like him?”
“You don’t?”
“No, I’m not saying that,” she said. She posed her hands palms up, weighing. “But don’t you think you shouldn’t?”
“What’s he been convicted of, exactly?”
“That’s a Beltway line,” Alex said. “I was hoping you had something better.”
She picked up a large serrated steak knife and tossed it hand to hand by the butt. The bartender stared, and the owner cocked his head. She was making everyone nervous. I reached out and flattened her hands on the table.
/> “You can’t see a black hole, either,” she said. “You figure it out by what’s around it.”
“Guilt by association,” I said. “That’s not really fair, is it? He’s been pretty good to us.”
She must have taken this to include her champagne, because she put it down faster than if it had drowned flies in it.
“I’m not saying he isn’t a swell guy in some social capacity.” Her eyebrows went up at “swell.” “I’m talking about the rest of what he does.”
“What he does is called capitalism.”
“You think leading Leo around on a leash is capitalism?” she said. “What good is that Marianas Islands vote doing Leo?”
“That’s principle,” I said. “Leo doesn’t believe in minimum wage, period.”
“And meanwhile Lightborn’s fucking his wife.”
“That’s a rumor,” I said.
“You saw it yourself,” she said.
“No,” I said. “Technically, I saw them talking at a party.”
“So Lightborn doesn’t worry you?” she said.
“You want me to cancel our entrees?” I said. “Pack tonight?”
The owner, with his big eyes and hams for hands, set an overflowing plate of meats and cheeses down in front of us. Alex had a quick exchange with him in her guidebook Italian. When she turned back to me, the focus of her indignation had shifted.
“This is your decision,” she said. “Tell me you see that.”