Motion Sickness Read Online Free Page A

covered with white caps and I’m wondering about the many swimmers who’ve been challenged by these inhospitable waters. The ship’s motion makes me queasy, nearly sick, and I look toward the horizon line. My father, who also got seasick, told me it’s what you have to do and if worse comes to worse—or worst—you drop your head between your knees.
    At the point of no return, where France is closer than England, the sky clears, very suddenly, and turns a bright cloudless blue, and some English people on deck raise their glasses to toast the sun, which hovers on the horizon like an apparition or, more comically, like a mark of punctuation.
    Switching trains in Paris at the Gare du Nord, there’s time to telephone Arlette, just to say hello. She’s probably at her bookstore. But I don’t. I change money, receiving large colorful notes for smaller English ones, buy black-and-white real-photo postcards of places I haven’t visited and French and English newspapers, drink a bowl of café au lait, wonder at French bread, reminisce about the smell of Gauloises and the nice Frenchman in Paris who ecstatically began at my ears and the nasty one in New York who wanted me to work harder, as he put it. Wantonly I enjoy hearing the French language, knowing that in a few hours it’ll be Italian. I write postcards. All this can make one feel like a traveler.

Chapter 5
     
Ruin
     
VENICE
     
    The hotel was once a convent. Down the road, or canal, is a church of the same name that’s no longer used for services. This parallelism doesn’t escape me and surprisingly I like to go into the church just as I like sitting in the hotel’s lobby and garden. The empty church has a dank smell, maybe it can be said that it reeks of disuse, although this may be too vivid. Its aroma, redolent of mortality and the ephemeral, embraces one in a perfume of long ago, much too ripe, too long past, where the present couldn’t intrude. I breathe in, very deeply, the sweet old air, reminded that in that movie,
Putney Swope
, it was admonished that you can’t eat atmosphere, and I’m not sure that’s absolutely true, especially when you’re not physically hungry. A man sitting close to me, the church’s other lone visitor, hears me, shifts on the velvet seat and may believe I’m sighing. I think he’s Hungarian but have little to base this on. As I’m wearing black, he might imagine I’m a devotee of some sort, an ambiguity I momentarily enjoy and have already played with while temporarily sequestered in the ex-convent. All my devotions are secular.
    Another visitor makes her presence felt by moving from alcove to alcove and dropping fifty lire in slots in metal boxes which activate spotlights. Sudden illuminations fiercely disrupt the quiet dark spaces, making visible the Madonna with child, saints in ecstasy, chubby angels hovering above the holy couple. Tintoretto, the Hungarian hisses as if we’re in collusion. Beautiful, I answer, not knowing what else to say. He nods. These paintings are beautiful, because they’re everything they’re supposed to be and nothing more. They’re constant, like pets or old friends, the ones who ask for the same old stories and jokes. The friends to whom you want to tell the same old jokes. As if you and they were identical twins. And then tell them, word for word, gesture for gesture, just the same, like the last time, and wait for their response, as if your life depended on it. Today, breathing in church air, I’d like to be an extra in someone else’s story. The young American woman in black who intrudes upon the reverie of the somewhat older Hungarian man in tweed. The Hungarian crosses himself as he rises from the pew, murmuring Adieu or something like that. I mumble too then bow my head toward the altar penitentially.
    Two men walk in and point at the paintings. They’re speaking English in sober whispers and I follow them, to hear what they’re saying. One is lecturing the other about