A Thousand Days in Venice Read Online Free

“leek” in Italian, and so I have to get up to find my dictionary. “Ah,
porri
,” he says. “I don’t like
porri
.” I quickly rifle the pages again, pretending to have made an error.
    â€œNo, they’re not
porri;
these are
scalogni
,” I lie to the stranger.
    â€œI’ve never tasted them,” he says, taking a bite. As it turns out, the stranger very much likes leeks, as long as they are called shallots.Then there are the tagliatelle, thin yellow ribbons in a roasted walnut sauce. We are comfortable, uncomfortable. We smile more than we talk. I try to tell him a little about my work, that I’m a journalist, that I write mostly about food and wine. I tell him I’m a chef. He nods indulgently but appears to find my credentials less than compelling. He seems content with silence. I’ve made a dessert, one I haven’t made in years, a funny-looking cake made from bread dough, purple plums, and brown sugar. The thick black juices of the fruit, mingled with the caramelized sugar, give up a fine treacly steam, and we put the cake between us, eating it from the battered old pan I baked it in. He spoons up the last of the plummy syrup, and we drink the heel of the red wine. He gets up and comes over to my side of the table. He sits next to me, looks at me full face, then gently turns my face a bit to the right, holding my chin in his hand.
“Si, questa è la mia faccia,”
he tells me in a whisper. “Yes, this is my face. And I desire now to go with you to your bed.” He pronounces these words slowly, clearly, as though he’s practiced them.
    When he sleeps it’s with his cheek against my shoulder, an arm anchoring my waist. I lay awake, stroking his hair. There’s a Venetian in my bed, I say almost audibly. I press my mouth to the top of his head and remember again that brusquely delivered assignment I’d received so many years before from my editor: “Spend two weeks in Venice and come back with three feature pieces. We’ll send aphotographer up from Rome,” she’d said, without any good-bye. Why didn’t we find each other on that first trip? Probably because my editor never told me to come back with a Venetian. Here he sleeps, though, a stranger with long, skinny legs. But now I must sleep, too. Sleep, I tell myself. But I don’t sleep. How can I sleep? I remember the sort of ranging aloofness I’d always suffered about Venice. I’d always found a way to put her off. Once I traveled nearly to the edges of her watery skirts, jaunting over the autostrada from Bergamo to Verona to Padova when, only twenty miles away, I turned my little white Fiat abruptly south toward Bologna. Yet, after the old jaundice about her had been cured during my first Venetian hours, I’d always dug deeply for reasons to return, begging for writing assignments that might take me anywhere close by, trolling the travel sections for the right, cheap ticket.
    I moved to Saint Louis, Missouri, last spring from California, staying in a rented room for two months while house renovations were completed and a little café was launched. By June life had shape: the café, a weekly restaurant review for the
Riverfront Times
, the carving out of a day-by-day route through my new city. Still, wanderlust came flirting. Restless by the first days of November, I’d set off with my friends Silvia and Harold, heading back into Venice’s honeyed arms. I never thought I’d be heading for
these
honeyed arms, I think as I press closer to the Venetian.

    Mornings, we take to sitting by the kitchen fire, facing each other in the rusty velvet wingback chairs, each with a dual-language dictionary in hand, a full, steaming coffee press, a tiny pitcher of cream, and a plate of buttered scones on the table in front of us. So settled, we speak of our lives.
    â€œI keep trying to remember important things to tell you. You know, about my