A Thousand Days in Venice Read Online Free Page B

“I’ve used so many of mine to sleep. One by one, I’ve mostly waited for them to pass. It’s common enough for one to simply find a safe place to wait it all out. Every time I would begin to examine things, to think about what I felt, what I wanted, nothing touched, nothing mattered more than anything else. I’ve been lazy. Life rolled itself out and I shambled along
sempre due passi indietro
, always two steps behind.
Fatalità
, fate. Easy. No risks. Everything is someone else’s fault or merit. And so now, no more waiting,” he says as though he’s talking to someone far away off in the wings.
    When it’s my turn, I begin to tell him of some milestone or another—when we moved from New York to California, stories about my brief, terrible stint at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, about traveling on my stomach to the remotest parts of France and Italy to find one perfect food or wine. Everything sounds like a case history, and after a short roster of recitals I know that none of it matters in the now, that everything I’d done and been until this minute was preamble. Even in these first days together, it is very clear that this feeling of mine for the stranger has trumped all the other adventures in my life. It has shuffled everything and everyone else I thought I was moving toward or away from. LovingFernando is like a single, sharp shake of the stones that lets me read all the patterns that once baffled and sometimes tortured me. I don’t pretend to understand these feelings, but I’m willing to let the inexplicable sit sacred. It seems I had my own set of heirloom bandages. Astonishing what a man bearing tenderness can do to open a heart.
    He comes to the café with me each morning, helps with the second bake, chopping rosemary and dumping flour into the Hobart. He loves pulling the focaccia out of the oven on the wooden peel, learning to shake the hot, flat bread deftly onto the cooling racks. We always pat out a small one just for us, set it to bake in the place where the oven’s hottest so it comes out brown as hazelnuts. We tear at it impatiently, eating it still steaming, burning our fingers. He says he loves my skin when it smells of rosemary and new bread.
    Afternoons we stop in at the newspaper office if I have a column to drop off or something to work out with my editor. We walk in Forest Park. We have supper at the café or go to Balaban’s or Café Zoe and then downtown to the jazz clubs. He doesn’t understand much about geography, and it’s three days before he can be convinced that Saint Louis is in Missouri. He says now he understands why the travel agent in Venice was exasperated when he tried to book a ticket for Saint Louis, Montana. Still, he suggests we go to the Grand Canyon for a day, to New Orleans for lunch.
    One evening we return late from dinner at Zoe. We had talkedfor a long time about life when my children were little. I take a small green faille box of photos from my desk, looking for one to show him of the Lane Gate Road house in Cold Spring, New York, that we all loved so much. Sitting by the fire, the stranger sifts through old vignettes. I join him, and I see he keeps turning back to one of the just-born Lisa, who is cradled in my arms. He says her face is so sweet and so like the face in her grown-up photos, so like her woman’s face. He tells me that my face is sweet, too, that Lisa and I look very much alike. He tells me he wishes he’d known me then, wishes he could touch the face that was mine in that old photo.
    Now the stranger begins unfastening my bustier, and his hands are beautiful, big, and warm, fumbling as they graze my skin through the soft lace. He begins brushing away crumbs from my décolleté, from between my breasts.
“Cos’è questo?
What is this? Your whole day is recorded here. We have evidence of burnt rye toast; two, perhaps three, kinds of cookies;