by Casey Walker
“Yours, too.”
“I’ve left,” Alex said. “I’m leaving.”
“So that makes you better?” I said. “You’re in the clear?”
“I’m just saying it gives me a fresh start,” she said. “A clean slate.”
“Your boss died,” I said. “That’s a real ethical awakening.”
“This is what worries me: you’re always trying to smooth things over,” she said. “And with Leo? With Lightborn? They’ll use that—you never want to make a scene.”
“So how about let’s not have one here,” I said.
She stabbed a toothpick at the plate and came up with a paper-thin sheet of meat.
“What’s this?” she said, holding it up. It was white-marbled and pepper-studded.
“It’s speck, I think.”
“What’s speck?”
“Pig,” I said.
She wrapped it around a triangle of collapsing cheese.
“You say clean slate,” I said, after a long silence. “But you know that’s not how life is. There’s no such thing.”
WHEN THE MEAL was done, she got up to use the restroom, and when she returned I told her I had settled the bill. But of course there was no bill. We took a long silent walk back through Campo Santa Maria Formosa and beyond, drifting without definite aim. The Rialto Bridge appeared without being looked for, and we crossed it and wound past the closing shops south of the fish market. I lived a continual surprise, never more so than when, immeasurably lost, we came a few steps apart out of a sotoportego and paid half a euro to have a traghetto take us across the Grand Canal. I tried to pick out Lightborn’s terrace. Alex linked her arm through mine and kissed my neck.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
“You don’t have anything to be sorry about,” I said.
“I didn’t mean to sound like I was accusing you of something,” she said. “Or like I’ve been better.”
“Forget it,” I said.
“But did I ruin it?”
“You didn’t ruin anything,” I said.
“I want more for us, that’s what it is,” she said. “I mean, I want more from us.”
She skimmed her hand in the water, but I didn’t respond. I sneaked my arm around her hip and tugged her nearer. I couldn’t pretend it was right, to be in Venice with her under these circumstances, but I was asking her to look at Venice and not who’d brought us. The soft splash of the long pole in the water and the gentle rocking of the black boat was pure hypnosis. You could squint the world medieval on the canal by night. Clusters of fondaco buildings, trefoil arches. The lagoon had done what no city wall ever could, providing a thousand years of immunity from Ostrogoths and Visigoths, and now from Fiats and Peugeots.
“I know you feel done with DC,” I said.
She pulled her hand from the water and shook it off.
“If I move to New York . . .” she said. “The train is an easy ride. You always say you get work done on trains.”
“I do,” I said.
“So,” she said.
She pressed her hands together between her knees.
Whenever she’d talked about New York City and nonprofit work, I was sure she idealized it for seeming the very opposite of the world she took congressional business to represent. I couldn’t personally see how New York City was the right place to escape feeling strangled by money and power, but I understood that she wanted “more.” I wanted more, too—I just couldn’t say what “more” was. I was grasping at a language for fulfillment that I didn’t actually possess. We were coming to the pier.
“But what are you going to think of me for staying?” I said.
We swayed into the dock, and I helped her out, careful not to slip on the mossy bottom stairs. She never answered my question. The thought of her leaving focused my attention in a melancholy way, but I wondered, too, whether it was Venice itself that made me painfully aware of a disjuncture between where we were and the world beyond the lagoon. It was like I could reach out, hold time, feel its wriggling mass, and feel it blowing and blowing away.
LIGHTBORN AND LEO came crashing in late that night, their drink-roughened voices and mismeasured footsteps echoing up the stairs. By the next morning, Leo was pouting, and Lightborn’s palazzo was hardly big enough to contain it. I wanted nothing more than to get out from under Leo’s emotional weather and back into the city.
We were trying to slip out when Lightborn caught us in the kitchen. He stood before us sleepy-eyed in a terrycloth robe embroidered with a cursive “AL.” A demitasse espresso cup in his hand was stamped with the same design. He asked our plans, and we admitted to not having any.
“Take the boat,” he suggested.
My dumb response: “We don’t have a boat.”
Lightborn leaned back on the kitchen island, under a Murano glass chandelier, and laughed hard enough to make the glass tinkle.
“I meant take mine,” he said. “Keep it for the day. You’ll be gone tomorrow, right? You have to see the islands at dusk. It’s too perfect. Don’t skip Mazzorbo. No one talks about it, but on the back side of the island there’s a crumbling church that I think is the ne plus ultra of crumbling churches.”
I followed Alex’s eyes looking him over, and it was like we spoke telepathically of what we were seeing—his few gray chest hairs poking out from the robe, and his body showing all the care and labor of other hands. The hair cut well, and often enough that it didn’t look messy even when messed. The rounded pectoral definition from some Brazilian personal trainer. The cared-for skin, smelling far off not just of today’s regimen but of thousands of consecutive days of that same attention.
“Can I get you anything before you go?” he said. “Macchiato?”
Alex said yes like she made them every morning, and it seemed to please Lightborn to see us so pleased.
THE BOATMAN RAN us out on the lagoon and docked us at Burano. We picked up provisions for a picnic and walked across a small wooden bridge to Mazzorbo, where a group of schoolchildren ran around in the little churchyard. We spread out on a patch of ground between the water and the crumbling church, watching the kids and drinking cold Peroni from the can.
“There’s nothing we have to do today,” I said. The rarity of it astounded me.
“Did you hear them arguing last night?” Alex said.
“Who?”
“They were smoking cigars out on the terrace. I could hear it through our window,” she said. “Leo was furious about something.”
I watched two kids squat and pick flowers.
“Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” I said.
“Then why aren’t they speaking this morning?”
“Fucking Christ,” I said. “Is this really what we want to talk about?”
“Don’t you?” she said.
“No,” I said. I meant not, at any rate, today, or right this minute.
“Armand was saying, ‘It’s foolish, Leo. It’s desperate,’” Alex said. She did an impression, dropping to a stern baritone. “Leo apparently didn’t see it that way.”
“Leo has this power to ruin what seems unruinable,” I said.
She pulled her shoes off and leaned herself back in the grass on her elbows, staring up at the sky.
“They’ll sink the whole island they’re so full of themselves,” she said.
That’s when I realized she could take them lightly because she viewed them at a distance. Last night, she spoke of leaving, and this was leaving’s tone—Leo and Lightborn already figures of a shabby past, not quite real to her. I swallowed my own responses, and before I could think of a way to turn the conversation back to our escaping Venice moment, she moved over and kissed me. I tried to collect through her lips some of her limpid ease. I would have been ecstatic for her if I hadn’t felt like I belonged entirely to the life she was so happy to be leaving behind.
WE WENT OUT to Torcello to see the church before it closed. Loneliness crept over me with the afternoon shadows. Torcello was an odd
, unsettled place, grown over with thick rushes and blooming aster. The Norman church, a thousand years old, was at the far end of the island, and to get there we took a cobblestone path alongside an unruffled canal, past perhaps a dozen houses and three empty hotels. It looked for a minute like we’d have the church to ourselves. But soon the grounds were inhabited with breathless visitors in shorts and sunburns. The illusion of our own private island was nothing more than arriving a few minutes ahead of the latest vaporetto.
We climbed the campanile, and at the top Alex wouldn’t get near the edge. We started to talk about what was ahead for our relationship. I can’t remember how, precisely. I looked out to marshlands and puny uninhabited islands, and I’d begun to feel angry at the thought of her leaving, so I pretended, meanly, that we could dispassionately reason this out. I talked like we were not two people in an emotional tangle as much as two logicians. So she would move to New York City, I said. I couldn’t. My father had used his name to land me this job, and anyway Leo was a pathway for me, a ladder. I wanted Alex to protest, to console me, to tell me I should abandon all that and go with her. She didn’t. She let me go on. And so I said a weekend thing wouldn’t work, that the proof was overwhelming. Long-distance relationships should be settled science by now, as impossible as cold fusion or the sun rotating around the Earth. All I wanted was for her to disagree. We came out of the campanile, and I needed to hear her say it would hurt her to leave me behind.
“What you’re saying makes sense,” she said.
She should have said I was crazy and that reason, in these matters, was the wrong tool entirely. I wanted to hear how much she loved me, though I was too small to say the same to her.
“It doesn’t have to be difficult,” she said. “We’ll still see each other sometimes. Or we won’t.”
“It’s that simple,” I said.
“Easy,” she said. And that’s when I told her I didn’t think people often enough discussed these sorts of breakups, where good feelings were retained by both parties and hands went unwrung over the fate of it all. Fate isn’t cruel, I said—it would be better if it was. It’s just inconvenience dressed up in mysticism.
“I’m glad we can talk about it like adults,” she said.
So that was it. What I’d entered meanly and weakly, hoping for a love-ratifying fight, I blundered out of having accomplished a dissolution between us that I didn’t really want.
BACK AT THE palazzo, I passed Leo’s door with light steps and heard some kind of snuffling noise. The old door didn’t fully shut to the frame, and I pressed my eye to the slit. Leo was flat on his back, cold compress on his forehead. His eyes were wide open as he no doubt cast blame as far from himself as it would go, up through the palace walls, through the pink Venetian sky, his swarming curses landing at the feet of God, who had thwarted his ambitions.
Pierpaolo, shuffling off to his room, caught me peeking. He asked skeptically if there was anything I needed.
“Did Mr. Lightborn go out?” I asked.
“To take a late dinner,” Pierpaolo said.
He padded off in his slippers.
I returned to my room and sagged onto the bed next to Alex. Her bags were already packed for the morning. I tried to kiss her head, but she pulled away.
THE RIVA ON an April night was just brisk enough for a suit coat, and other than the occasional banging of a wheeled suitcase over the cobblestones, there was no sound but boats rocking into the piers. Yellow lights hung crooked from the lamps under a waning quarter moon. A spotlight shone back onto the frontage of the Hotel Danieli as waiters on a high terrace packed away outdoor tables. I considered stopping but didn’t have the nerve. Near the Bridge of Sighs, I declined to purchase any of the handbags offered by three chatty Senegalese men.
“Girlfriend?” one asked, holding a purse out to me.
I demurred, and he smiled like he knew just what code I was speaking. He opened a handbag at his feet, full of small plastic baggies of nicely clustered green buds. I wasn’t going to smoke anything tonight, but I felt it was polite to ask how much the marijuana was selling for. He gave me some prices that seemed wildly inflated, and I continued on my way.
When I passed the Hotel Danieli again, I buttoned my jacket and walked into the lobby like I belonged there. The bar was to the left. Near the piano, in red-tinted light, was Lightborn, the southpaw, tipping his drink alone. He was as still as I’d ever seen him, for once not gesturing big pictures in the air with that powerful left hand. I hesitated to approach him. Lounging under frescoes in his palazzo struck me as fairly impersonal compared to cozying up to him in a private moment. I thought how infrequently he must be in public alone. Any party where you found him these last and most successful years of his life, the ballroom would be filled with people he knew, or people who wanted to know him.
I took one of the tables that spilled out to the hotel lobby, a good distance from him. Were he to see me and wave, or nod, but make no further movement, then I would sit, and we would drink, together and alone, and I would walk back to his palazzo, and that would be the final word on the questions I had about why Leo was so angry. A server offered me a menu, which read “Dandolo’s Piano Bar.” I asked him who Dandolo was, and he happily recounted the story of a captain who bashed his brains out on the mast of his ship after losing a vicious battle with rival Genoa.
Lightborn’s eyes followed a bottle-blonde woman who threaded the lobby. My table sat in the arc of his gaze. When she’d passed, he turned to look at me again. His face clouded, accompanied by a barely there slump of his shoulders. He came and joined me, like he didn’t have the capacity not to make pleasantries, even as it drained him.
“The server was just filling me in on Mr. Dandolo,” I said.
Lightborn rolled out a long, tough sigh. “Leo put you up to this?”
“I’m off duty,” I said.
He sat and leaned his elbows onto his knees. “You know, he could be rich, and he could be happy, if he’d stick to representing dirt farmers. Be content to be a big man in a small place.”
“You’re wrong about that,” I said. “He’ll never be happy. Even if he gets what he thinks he wants.”
Lightborn turned his eyes to the piano player who’d just begun.
“I don’t want him pestering me with this presidential campaign shit again,” Lightborn said. “I’m not throwing money down the drain for that, and neither is anyone else.”
“He needs to be let down easy,” I said. “That’s always the way with him. He needs his care and feeding.”
“You’re a poor son of a bitch to put up with it,” Lightborn sighed. “Look, I told him this, but maybe you can really convince him, yes?”
“I’ll do what I can,” I said.
“He has to drop the fantasyland presidential shit and focus on something actually in his control,” Lightborn said. “I’ve got a project in mind for your district, something actually within his purview. Really promising stuff with some contacts in China I’d like him to meet. We could run a trip through my foundation, sometime next year. There’d be money in it for him, no question. So will you reason with him?”
We finished our drinks, and he ordered something I’d never heard of—a Negroni, two of them, in fact.
I know now that retrospect will sometimes show you what mattered all along, in defiance of where your attention initially landed. There are moments in our lives that are only released to us in the fullness of time—conversations occluded or half-understood, paths you follow without having noticed where the road forked. I only mean, and without defense, that the conversation I had with Lightborn was quickly swamped in my mind—that by the next morning, after too many drinks, it was something indistinct, and by the next week, it was still more distant, and nothing I wanted to think about. Then came a year of days, of showers and shaves, of insomniac nights mourning my father and Alex moving away. I filled my head with chaff—with rejiggering Leo’s breakfast fundraisers and drafting his honorary resolutions t
o be read into the House record and staying late to research laws he would never sponsor. Over all that time, Lightborn’s talk—scoffing at Leo’s presidential dreams, but replacing them with the promise of a district project and Chinese money—was transubstantiated, in my obliging memory, into its scruffy but common counterparts. Bribery became business. By the time I was on the flight to China, the schedule looked perfunctory to me, a mere junket, barely related to Venice at all except that it was still Lightborn’s money underwriting the trip. Leo’s presidential ambitions might still exist in his heart, but they were an office joke—the exploratory committee merely Polk’s act of appeasement. A district project was nothing Leo ever spoke about, and so my recollection that Lightborn had once referred to a mutually enriching scheme was cast largely into oblivion. Largely, I say, rather than entirely. Because this is how complicity works: You know and you think you don’t. You believe what is most convenient to you. I was surprised, in Kaifeng, to be handed money, but that only proves how easily innocence can be manufactured—that if you need it enough, a feeling can survive the absence of a quality, the way flowers will still look in bloom for a time even when cut from their roots.
The Negronis arrived, and we clinked glasses. I loved the bitterness, and the punch. What I later remembered with shame, I experienced that night with pride—a rich man had welcomed me as an equal into the world of his private pleasure.
MANY DRINKS LATER, I sat next to Lightborn at the lagoon’s edge, on a pier where we were protected from view by an enormous docked boat. I inhaled deeply, imagining the smoke curling through the pockets of my lungs then rushing back out. I pictured God exhaling the entire world.
“The African sold us some powerful shit,” Lightborn said.
The marijuana had been my idea. I felt it in my legs, which sacked out numb underneath me, and in my head, which began to tingle.
“The Moor was right,” he said.
“The who?”
“The Moor of Venice!”