Left in Venice, he had no other choice but to look at these things. Lauren arrived in Paris, and Jason sent a telegram and waited, expecting to see her within the week. He was in no hurry: young German women walked past his window on their way from the train station. The bicycle sat in his room, upside down, perched on its seat and handlebars as he fussed with gear ratios and the pressure of the silk tires that brushed past his fingers. At night he went with his teammates to the trattorias. He tired of Venice.
She did not come. Not after a week, or two weeks, or a month. He was irritated; he wanted to get out of the city and go to Naples. He wanted to get a room overlooking its bay before the influx of Christmas tourists. As winter fell, all Jason’s teammates left for the south of Italy. Jason sent more telegrams. He didn’t leave his room much; that was because it was cold, of course, not because he was waiting for a phone call. He found himself working on the bicycle less and less, only spinning the front wheel and watching the room through the passing spokes. Christmas arrived.
He began walking to the train station every afternoon. The train was always due at four. Sometimes it wasn’t too late, arriving five-thirty or six. But he was always there at four in case it came on time for once: the hours would tick by. Then he would see the train’s one white light from far across the water, coming from the mainland. The train would empty, a throng of people flooding the platform, and then just a trickle; many had gotten off at Milan and caught other trains going south. When the trickle was over, he would still sit waiting, in case she was the very last one. Then he would go back to the hotel and check his box very carefully to see if he had gotten any messages. If anyone else in the hotel got any messages, he would read these too, to make sure they hadn’t been for him and put in the wrong box by mistake.
He realized she wouldn’t come before spring when he learned she was with Michel.
He couldn’t imagine she thought Michel was more beautiful than he was; he couldn’t imagine Michel made love to her the way he did. Yet he always had a feeling about Michel, since the night he first saw him in the apartment down below, standing there in the middle of the room alone. To be going through this now, Jason thought as he lay in bed at night, while the one front wheel of the bicycle continued spinning in the dark, makes no sense at all. It’s as though I had come back from Vietnam unwounded, only to be shot: I’ve weathered this already, she has never left me before, when I was seeing a lot more women than I’ve seen lately. It never mattered before what I did; she loved me too much to leave. Now that he was beginning to realize a certain part of his life was over, now that he was ready to settle down, she was challenging his preeminence in her life: that was how he saw it. It simply didn’t occur to him, he simply was incapable of entertaining the possibility that she really considered leaving him; and yet in the midst of all his other new doubts about himself, the incredulity with which he first confronted this one gave way to an ominous sense of inevitability he had felt from the first, and which now grew each day that she didn’t come to him.
That winter the canal froze over, and snow fell on the city for several weeks. Then the winter broke early. Jason began to notice some of the back waterways were very low, gondolas and boats stranded against the sides of the buildings. One day he left his hotel to walk to the station and saw people milling alongside the Grand Canal and talking. The canal, he then saw, was virtually disappearing. At the station he saw the Adriatic was gone: the large strand of water which the trains crossed from the mainland had begun moving east.
By the following week, Jason’s teammates began returning from their vacations to find a barren city. The Grand Canal was virtually dry, and the back canals were empty, except for pockets where the flow wasn’t as free and the water stood stagnant and still. The other riders told Jason that in Naples the beach had tripled virtually overnight. The garbage that had lined the bottom of Venice’s canals for decades was everywhere to be seen, and in the sudden heat wave that descended almost immediately thereafter, the reek became unbearable, along with the insects and rats hovering over and scrambling among the refuse. Tourists began leaving in droves, bicycle rally or no. Traversing every small bridge meant confronting herds of rodents; every dock where the town fishermen usually brought their catch was swarming with gulls mauling the dead fish. Finally the military came in and began cleaning up; but the smell didn’t go away, having permeated each house, each room, every doorway, the pores of the village.
The weather was sweltering, to the chagrin of the officials who had originally scheduled the rally for autumn to avoid the summer heat, then had rescheduled it for spring to avoid the winter cold—only now to be caught in premature heat. Still, the rally would either take place this time or not at all; most of the racers were loath to cancel it. For his part, Jason would have welcomed a cancellation. He wanted to leave right now; he also wanted to stay as long as he had to in order to wait for her. He was in the crossfire of two divergent impulses, neither of which had anything to do with the rally. He had always anticipated these competitions with relish, even a sense of compulsion; there was once a time when the idea of not riding in a race would have been abhorrent, particularly this race, which he knew would be his last. He did not feel this way anymore. Other things were collapsing, his own priorities were scrambled, and he so dreaded the prospect that the race would arrive before her that he could hardly think of it.
Two more weeks went by, and then a third. He took short practices, exercised lethargically. He felt tight; his legs itched from not shaving. His teammates, who depended on Jason for a good showing, became angry at the possibility that he would let them down. He didn’t join them in the trattorias, and he sat listlessly through the team sessions in which the course of the race was discussed at length. He understood he had to concentrate on the details of the rally because this rally was unlike any other he had raced in: it was less a test of speed or power than of mental and physical agility and cunning. But Jason sat facing the direction of the station, or the American Express, trying to understand why three weeks had passed and he’d heard nothing from her: she had said she was coming, and that she would notify him when she left Paris.
He telephoned the American Express in Paris and they told him nothing, impatient with his requests and hanging up on his demands.
He was also surprised to find himself thinking often of his dead son. He had never thought much of the son he had by Lauren, though it wouldn’t have been fair to assume this was indifference. It occurred to him now that his son had terrified him, from the moment Lauren told him she was pregnant, followed by that moment in San Francisco she had brought Jules in and set him on the bed at Jason’s feet. The two had stared at each other wordlessly then, and the most meaningful communication they ever shared was exchanged in that moment. Later it was Jules’ stutter that terrified Jason; it indicated the new gap between Jason and Lauren, for they had always shared a common and desperate love of physical beauty, beginning first with their taking of each other. The gap was, apparently, that Jason regarded Jules’ impediment as hideous, and Lauren heard it as a thing of wonder. Lauren acted as though the stammer was indicative of something bottomless in the child, a revelation so awesome and terrible it simply couldn’t be uttered, and consequently rendered everything else unspeakable as well. Jason figured Jules was broken, like a spring that was loose or a mechanism that was flawed. So he avoided the truth of his own fatherhood, even as he acknowledged the fatherhood of another child who was less personally threatening: no matter how beautiful Jules grew to be, he wouldn’t be beautiful when he opened his mouth, and the idea of a gold-medal stutterer seemed incongruous. Simply put, that Jules stuttered this way reminded Jason he was a failure; and that judgment of himself had pursued Jason too long and he was losing the energy to run from it.
So they never talked. When Jules was a small boy and Jason was there on one of his infrequent visits home, they sat and watched each other just like that first time on the bed in San Francisco. Now, having co
me to a standstill and with his own sense of failure bearing down on him, and the impending loss of the woman he thought he owned showing up his perfect beauty for the useless business it was, he started seeing Jules all the time in Venice—a small boy on this bridge or that, just standing waiting for his father. Jason never called to him; he would simply walk past the bridge and look at the boy, whose eyes never left him. Far past the bridge Jason would turn and glance over his shoulder, and Jules would still be there with his hands in his pockets just like any kid, and his blue eyes visible from many meters away. He realized suddenly that Jules had something to tell him about Lauren. He went back to the bridge and the boy was gone.
But he showed up later, in San Marco Square, where Jason was sitting at one of the outside cafés getting quietly drunk. The other members of the team were watching the beautiful girls who passed back and forth across the plaza; Jason was staring off into space and then there was Jules, sitting in the chair right before him, his small arms at his side and his small hands in his lap. He had something to say, that was apparent; and Jason wanted to beg him to tell him what it was, but he somehow couldn’t. He just couldn’t bring himself to beg the son that he’d never before brought himself to acknowledge. They sat there staring at each other, Jules wanting to talk but unable to bear the shame of stuttering for his father. Jason wanted to tell Jules he didn’t care anymore that Jules stuttered, it was all right, he knew certain things now and he could stand it, and he had to hear news of Lauren, whatever way Jules could tell him; and then his head was filled with a thousand things: he could sense the boy’s wrath, he could sense the boy thinking Now he wants to talk to me, he never wanted to listen to me before but now he wants to, but it’s too late. This, thought Jason, was the boy’s revenge.
The team found some girls from Geneva. But when a doe-eyed brunette nestled close to Jason, he shook her off, and went off alone.
He went back to his room and sat in the dark. He sat before the window drinking until he was heavily drunk. Several of his teammates came by and banged on his door, calling for him to come out, then insulting him. Jason you wheelsucker, they shouted. The next time someone knocked on the door he surfaced slowly from sleep, assuming it was another of his mates trying to rouse him. The knocking continued and he heard a woman’s voice, and with great hope he jumped up, thinking it was the landlady with a message from Lauren. He got to the door and flung it open only to see Lauren herself, in a faded and tattered dress, an old Italian sweater she had gotten somewhere, barefooted, a gold ring riding the top of her ankle.
The embrace, the kiss were perfunctory. They slept saying nothing. Lauren was exhausted. The next day they went to buy her shoes, and something to eat.
They spent their time together in desolate silence. At San Marco Square they had a drink and watched the people wading across the lagoon from the Lido. “It’s different now that most of the water’s gone,” said Jason, and Lauren nodded, distracted. “We haven’t been together much lately,” he said finally.
“We’ve never been together much,” she answered.
He said, “Where did you get that thing on your foot?”
“Tunis,” she said.
“Why?”
“I don’t remember.”
He thought a moment. “Where is Tunis?”
“Africa. I came by boat. From Sicily I got a ride up through Italy. In Rome I got a train. After I left Rome the station blew up. Did you hear they blew up the train station?”
Why did you come by boat? he thought. He said, “Who blew up the train station?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” she said, “politicians. It was nerve-racking coming through Florence.” She said, “I think I made good time, three days all the way from Sicily. Considering how terrible the trains are, how terrible everything is.”
“Is it all terrible?” he said, at the Rialto Bridge.
“Of course,” she said, staring into the empty Grand Canal. “The sea has left, and there are no lights anymore.”
“They still light the square till nine or ten o’clock. We’ll see it tonight.” That night a billowing fog, first visible to the east, blew into Venice within an hour. The two of them sat alone except for a few people drifting in and out around them. The cathedral was nothing but a huge hot shadow over to the side. Neither of them said anything. He knew she was thinking of Michel. Now that she was here, he wanted to be someplace far away from everything he remembered. “When is your race?” she said, after a while.
“Is he coming?” he only answered.
“Yes.”
He nodded. “Soon?”
“Yes.”
He nodded again. He stood up. “Tomorrow,” he said, “the race is tomorrow. I have to sleep.”
They returned to the hotel and prepared for bed. None of the things Jason had expected to be said were said on this first day together after almost ten months. She seemed in no hurry to talk. Sitting naked on the bed she watched him a moment, but glanced away when he looked at her too long. She pulled the sheets over her, and he turned off the light and got into bed; race or no race, he pressed himself up against her. He ran his hand down her side; she turned and sat up. He sat up beside her, angry at how everything was so humiliating. He sat back against the wall, waiting; she pulled her knees to her chest and rested her chin. He didn’t touch her; he wanted her to sense his low-burning wrath. He wanted her to come to him afraid she had made him angry, the way she used to come to him. He wanted to be in command, the way he used to be in command. “We have to talk,” he heard her say. He just lay back down and turned his back to her. When he felt her lie back too, and when he was sure she was asleep, he said, in a low voice, “It tore me up, the nights I knew you were making love to him.” When he finally fell asleep, she looked over at him and then to the window. She was awake long into the night, thinking about Michel, and wondering where he was.
It was a complicated race to begin with. It started at the station and ended at San Marco Square, a distance that could be walked in half an hour. In between those two points were exactly twenty-three other points spread out over the town, with which each rider had to make contact at least once. Every participant in the race had an assigned code letter and seventy-five numbered tags on the bars of his bicycle: at each contact point, the rider would rip off the next number from his bars and drop it in his team’s box. It didn’t matter what route the rider followed; he could chart any course he chose, but he couldn’t leave more than three of his numbers at a given point, he couldn’t leave any two consecutive numbers at a given point, and he had to leave at least one number at every point. Every time he left a number at a contact point that precise moment was logged in a book by referees stationed there, to assure that every rider had torn off his numbers in order. Number seventy-five had to be dropped in the box at San Marco Square.
These complications had multiplied by the morning of the race. While ramps had been constructed over the steps of the bridges so they could be crossed by bicycle, the canals were now empty—which raised the possibility of a rider actually using the canals themselves. There was nothing explicit in the rules that prevented this. Yet it threw all previously formulated strategies into chaos, since hundreds of new courses for getting around the city were now existent. Since everyone was thrown into identical chaos, the judges decided to let the rules stand as they were, though it did seem to give an added advantage to those Italian riders who knew Venice well—an advantage they had at any rate. No one was going to disqualify the Italians, since this was Italy and Italian racers were so highly regarded. The newest complication, evident this particular morning, was the fog that Jason and Lauren had watched cross the Adriatic basin the night before; the lagoon was throttled with it, making Venice’s labyrinthine passages all the more baffling and dangerous.
In the fog that morning the bicycles did not glisten the way Lauren remembered Jason’s bike glistening on the Kansan road the first time he rode past her father’s farm. It was as though th
e sea itself had billowed and risen and moved back to where it belonged, in the city; everything was hot and steamy even as the canals were dry and barren. Standing there on the steps of the station waiting with all the rest of the onlookers for the race to begin, Lauren listened so intently to the sound of a piano from someone’s room that she didn’t notice how Jason kept looking at her, as though he was waiting for one glance of reassurance to tell him she would still be there when it was over. Where is the music coming from? she asked several people, but none of them seemed to hear it. She asked one old Italian gentleman standing nearby. “Pardon me, signora,” he said, sympathetically, “but I’m afraid I don’t hear music.” Then, across the canal, as though the notes of the piano had parted the way, she could see an open window behind a balcony, and a white curtain blew behind the glass as the fog drifted by. Look, she said to the Italian gentleman, it’s coming from there; and the old man nodded kindly. At exactly ten o’clock, Jason looked at her one last time; and now in an almost desperate attempt to get her acknowledgment, he even waved to her. She barely saw him from the corner of her eye; she’d been watching the window with the curtain, and she’d been listening to the piano which came to her somberly and hauntingly through the fog. She looked to him, and he waved again, and she lifted her hand to him, and replaced it in her pocket. She felt utterly alone. She wished the race would begin. At a signal, there was the whir of wheels and the slight blush of the wind as all of them passed, some crossing the Scalzi Bridge heading deep into the thick of the village, many of the others moving up the Lista di Spagna along the Grand Canal’s periphery. In no time, every one of them was gone, and the crowd was left to look at nothing but the officials’ main table, crackling with walkie-talkies and bulletins from the twenty-three contact points and San Marco Square. Other than that there was only the music. The crowd dispersed and Lauren stood by herself, listening to someone she couldn’t see playing music no one else could hear.
Days Between Stations Page 22