do you know?”
“We don’t always. That’s what makes it difficult.”
“Impossible, maybe.”
“Maybe. We still have to try.”
“But why? The war is over.”
“Their crimes aren’t.”
“Ah. A passion for justice,” he said, nodding, a paternal indulgence. “Maybe you’ll be a lawyer.”
“Maybe.”
“Oh darling, really?” my mother said. “I haven’t wanted to ask. You’ve seemed-at such loose ends.”
“Don’t rush,” Gianni said. “To be this age, it’s wonderful. You don’t have to decide anything. Not yet. Not like us, eh?” he said to my mother. “We have to hurry with everything now.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Ah, you see,” he said, ostensibly to me, “how she makes fun of me.” His hand moved slightly toward hers and just grazed it.
I looked away. “Did you always want to be a doctor?” I said.
“Well, for me it was different. A family tradition. One of us was for medicine and one for-well, to carry the name. But he died, so it’s the end. I have only a daughter.”
“You’re married?” I said, not expecting this.
“I was. She died.”
“I’m sorry. Where is your daughter?”
“Bologna. At the university.”
“Medicine?”
He smiled. “No, an avvocato. Another one with a passion for justice. How did it happen?” he said to my mother. “To have such children?”
“Think of theirs.”
“Would you like to see the hospital?” Gianni said to me, not an offhand invitation, an obvious effort to get closer.
“The hospital?”
“For the architectural interest. It was once the Scuola di San Marco. Near Zanipolo. The library has the most beautiful ceiling in all of Venice.”
“Yes, I’d like that,” I said, the only possible answer.
“Even the hospitals,” my mother said, a little dreamy, finding romance in everything now.
“The joke is that you can see San Michele from the wards-the cemetery island. So they say the doctors finish you and the priests at San Lazzaro bless you and the boat outside takes you away. One operation, door to door.” He winked at my mother. “You see how practical we can be.”
And so it went, through the grilled branzino, the radicchio from Trevisio, the little cups of coffee and the shared plate of biscotti-light, aimless conversation meant to make us easy with one another, a kind of wooing. My mother was happy, enjoying herself, her eyes shiny, catching the light the way her earrings did, in tiny glints. She made jokes, laughed at his, until the table seemed as carefree as one of those afternoons at the Lido. Gianni looked at her with a fondness that surprised and then disconcerted me. And I, who was the object of the wooing, sat wondering why they were bothering. What did it matter what I thought, if they wanted to make eyes at each other and play at being twenty again? What could be nicer? A season in Venice with something to talk about later, over drinks at the Plaza. An old friend, not somebody she’d picked up in a hotel lounge. With a daughter at the university. That respectable. What business was it of mine? The truth was that I didn’t want to think about them at all. My mind was elsewhere, back at the station hotel, in that perfectly hermetic world of sex, where no one else existed. In the warm dining room, with my body loose and tired, all I wanted was my own life.
When we got up to go to the lounge for brandy, I took it as my cue to leave. Gianni would want to sit with my mother in the dim light and look across the water to Salute, letting the evening settle around them. I imagined a kiss tasting of cognac, a last cigarette, low voices-everything the lounge was meant for, what you paid for. But when I suggested going, he insisted I stay for a nightcap. For some reason it took a while to order-everything seemed to have slowed down, even the waiters-and then we drank without saying much. There were only a few other people and a piano near the door, played so softly it seemed the pianist too was logy with food and drink. Gianni fixed a time next week for me to go to the hospital. He sat back with a cigarette, looking contented. Outside the hotel, gondolas with different-colored tarps bobbed on the tide. I slouched, exhausted. There was nothing to do now but wait it out.
“Such a surprise, darling. A lawyer. So sensible.”
“It’s just an idea,” I said, but she waved her hand, brushing it away, and I saw that she hadn’t actually been talking to me but to some unseen audience.
I looked over, hearing the abstract, self-amused talk of drink. My mother, like all her friends, had a strong head, but it had been a long evening since the first Prosecco, through Gianni’s special bottle of Soave and the vin santo at table. Her words were still precise, but everything else about her seemed to have grown a little blurry. Even her lipstick was no longer fresh, faint at the lines. She was nestled into the corner of the settee, her fur draped around her, smiling, in love with the world.
“It’s late,” I said. “We should go.”
“Oh, Adam,” she said, teasing. “So sensible.”
“If you’re tired,” Gianni said to me. “Don’t worry, I will take her home. She’s happy here, you see.”
“Maybe too happy,” I said to him, not loud enough for her to hear.
“There is no such thing as too happy,” Gianni said mildly. “I will see that she gets home.” Firmly, a dismissal. “Can I call you a taxi?”
“No, that’s all right,” I said, getting up. “Thanks for dinner.”
“Oh, you’re going,” my mother said, evidently a new idea to her. She leaned forward to be kissed.
I bent over for a quick peck, and as I stood back I stopped, suddenly dismayed, seeing once again what Gianni must be seeing, not a carefree girl this time but a woman slack with drink, pliable, draped against the couch, her soft white throat tilted up. What he’d waited for all evening, what came after brandy. Did he take a room here, part of the Monaco service? My heart sank a little as I looked at her, a physical drop. When had this happened, this fading into someone else? While I’d been away, not paying attention. And each year she’d become a little more vulnerable, until all it took was a kind word and table manners, someone like Gianni.
I looked at him, half expecting a leer, something predatory, but he was smiling blandly, at ease with himself. What he must be used to, another of the lonely women who floated through Venice, away from home, a little drunk, easy. Without daughters at university and family names. Without anything, except money to buy a little pleasure, an evening out. This one had come with a son-an inconvenience, but now he’d been charmed too, taken care of, and he was leaving. Would they come back to Dorsoduro? Appear at coffee in the morning without even a blush, all of us grown up?
For a second I stood there, trying somehow to put myself between them. It’s not what she is, I wanted to say to him, but wasn’t it? Isn’t it what she wanted too? Who had actually paid for dinner? I couldn’t remember there being a bill, the sort of discreet arrangement a lady might make. But how do you protect people? And after all, what was the harm? One of those things. Unless it wasn’t. I looked down at her again, wondering what bargain she was making with herself. A fling? But maybe she hadn’t even thought about it, just followed an impulse, the way she’d come to a city where she could read menus and street signs but whose real language was unknown to her.
“Darling, you say you’re going, then you don’t go,” she said, laughing.
I smiled, shaking my head. “Just thinking.”
“Oh, god.”
I held up my hand. “All right, I’m off. Don’t be too late,” I said, imitating her.
“You don’t have to worry,” Gianni said without a hint of guile. “She’s in safe hands.”
The next day I found a hotel near the Rialto with cheap off-season rates and a side view of the canal. The old-fashioned radiator in the room actually produced heat, a luxury that winter, so I took the room for a week, using a chunk of my separation pay. Not what the army had intended, precisely, but in fact the room did finally separate me from the war. Every afternoon we sealed ourselves away behind the fake damask walls, too absorbed in each other to imagine anything outside.
