Authors: Rafael Yglesias
He stowed the fax with his passport, to put it out of sight but safe until Monday. I must enjoy this weekend, he ordered himself, and walked to the bathroom to take a good, long look at his wife naked in the tub.
She was forty-seven. Her white skin was freckled below her collarbone. There was an irregular line he liked to trace across her breasts, and on the outside of her smooth, hairless arms, fading away to the tender hollows of her elbows and the cream of her forearms. She was dotted here and there on the inside of her soft and lean thighs. Enrique remembered her surprise when he first confessed his love for her freckles; they had always embarrassed her. She was vainer than most of the women he knew who weren’t actresses. She often came away from a session in the bathroom threatening to get an eye lift because she was developing her father’s bags. She sounded sincere and scared Enrique that she would one day indulge, and surgery by surgery turn into one of those women with startled, frozen faces and bodies so emaciated that their heads looked wider than their shoulders. So far she worked out nearly every day and had maintained her figure without silicone or a scalpel. Yet even so, he knew she was unhappy about her body. And her body was not what it was, of course, twenty-two years ago, when he first saw her without clothes. Her
breasts, that had suckled his sons, were smaller, the nipples browner and no longer resistant to gravity; her stomach, although still flat, was broader and softer; and there was a thin white scar from the cesarean drawn above the ridge of her still black pubic hair. When he’d grabbed her buttocks that afternoon to push into her deeper, her cheeks had filled his hands without spillage, but they were pillows, not firm fruit. Enrique would not admit it to a male friend, but Margaret’s middle-aged body excited him precisely because it was not the same flesh that he had lusted after as a young and stupid man. He wanted her today because what he had once desired was now landscaped by the history of their life together; and, although he didn’t know this and couldn’t know it as long as she was alive, he wanted her because, while in her arms, he felt safe.
“Are you looking at me?” Margaret asked. Her head faced away from the door, toward a window in red velvet.
“You’re beautiful,” he said.
“Stop looking at me,” she answered.
“Why?” he demanded, so he could tell her, when she confessed that she was ashamed of her aging body, that she was still beautiful.
“Because I don’t know you well enough,” she said.
Margaret wasn’t often witty. In keeping with the tradition and manners of Ashkenazi women from Poland to Queens, she kept conversation practical. Rarely did she show off the intelligence that she had passed on and encouraged in their sons. He retreated to the bed. Knowing that they had already had their anniversary coupling was very relaxing. Until he’d gotten that fax, the trip had been magical. He was determined not to let his career once again ruin his fun.
He heard her rise from the tub and step out onto the marble floor. He imagined her groin wet and black. He wondered why her
joke about him looking at her naked lingered in his mind. When she appeared in her white silk teddy, bought for this sexy vacation, he noted the big freckle above her right knee, that he always enjoyed seeing during the summer months of shorts, and then he knew what had struck him about her comment:
She knows me, that’s what’s funny. She knows me through and through; I’m the one who doesn’t know her.
They kissed long and deep, and he got hard again, but when she asked, with a slight reluctance, “Do you want to?” he lied and said, “I’m fine.” She kissed him good night with obvious gratitude and fell asleep within seconds. He lay on his side, listening to the slapping water, and he thought—
I am in love with Margaret.
He relished this surprising fact with deep satisfaction, and decided that he would bring up the unmentionable subject tomorrow during the fancy lunch on Torcello.
He knew that to bring up ugly memories would be to jeopardize their romantic mood, but he believed that nothing too awful could happen in such a musically named place. Torcello. Torcello. He wanted to know more about the wound Margaret carried with her and never discussed, and to heal it if he could. He resolved that on Torcello he would dare to speak of it.
His sleep was dreamless and relaxed, his first good rest in months. During the expansive, languorous predawn awakening, Margaret sighed and rolled over to him wordlessly, resuming a slow and rhythmic breathing as if heavily asleep. Her arm, fragrant with bath oils, snaked around his shoulder, and small, cool fingers crept down his stomach until she took hold of his cock—something she hadn’t done on waking up since their first year together. Another unusual, relaxed, drowsy lovemaking followed, and he forgot all about his resolution to have a frank conversation. Nor did he recall it while they had coffee and bread from a café squeezed into a space no larger than a newspaper kiosk, nor while
they hunted for the Peggy Guggenheim museum in another converted Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal.
As they shuffled along with the flow of tourists past the Cubists and Futurists, he remembered. He paid no attention to the paintings. He watched Margaret study them, a more intriguing show for him. He was fascinated by her knowledgeable and mysterious method of surveying the art, walking right past this Braque and then standing at a Kandinsky for a long two minutes, squinting as if it were out of focus, and moving on with a wistful sigh. “You like that?” he asked, and she said, “It’s okay,” which made him laugh.
He knew well from her clothing, her decoration of their apartment, her photographs and paintings that she had a discerning and creative eye. She read a lot, much more than he, and was smart about books. But she didn’t care whether they were original or profound; she read to be entertained. With images, though, she wanted more than to be soothed or delighted. She had a gift which was mysterious even to her. To Enrique, the proof of her innate ability was that he couldn’t reconstruct backward how she had known her choice of color and composition would work. Often what she was attempting seemed doomed. But from the choice of an outfit to the composition of a painting, it always turned out well. For Enrique, that was the telltale difference between craft and talent, between learning what ought to be right and possessing the felicity of impeccable taste.
She was a mystery to him. In truth, she was a mystery to their friends. Certainly she was underestimated. Few of the people they knew thought her the talented one in their marriage. Most knew that, although she was gregarious and pleasant, he was the one who would say something that would provoke either irritation or delight, an exchange they would remember. And when one of their friends had a crisis, they turned to him for sympathy and help; Margaret might scold or insist on her advice as a remedy. In
the early years of their marriage, his greater popularity surprised her, and it surprised him, because he knew, as he assumed she did, that she was as smart as, and certainly better educated than he; that her estimations of the people they knew were often less naïve than his, and that her advice was likely to be wiser. The true difference in how their friends felt toward them individually was that, despite Margaret’s broad smile and friendly conversation, in contrast to Enrique’s self-pitying confessionals and rants at society, she remained opaque to everyone—acquaintances, family, and close friends. She kept a part of herself secluded, in a secret location unknown even to Enrique.
Margaret informed him that the Locanda Cipriani on Torcello could be reached expensively on the restaurant’s private boat—presumably the way Papa, Madonna, Princess Di, and Stephen Hawking traveled—but that she wanted to take the vaporetto, the public water bus, because it would be more fun. He glanced enviously at the handsome, wood-paneled cruiser, but she was right about the gaiety of riding the vaporetto. It was cheering to stand shoulder to shoulder with a boatload of merry tourists, who didn’t look decorous and miserable in splendid isolation like rich travelers but were babbling and pointing and snacking and complaining and laughing, all full of life, except for one young man who had turned green. And Margaret had the girlish fun of photographing the two strapping, olive-skinned, young Venetians who manned the water bus, dashing in their striped blue and white naval shirts and bell-bottomed blue pants, smart red caps atop handsome heads of thick black hair. “You’re in love,” Enrique accused her when she convinced the handsomer of the two to pose for her on the prow, pulling in the dock line.
His wife answered the charge with a sly smile. “They look like you, Puff,” she whispered and kissed him fast and light on the lips, hers wet, cool, and salty from the Gulf of Venice spray. Enrique
made a skeptical face. “That’s how you looked when I met you,” she amended.
She was being kind. He had been scrawny and gawky, no sailor’s lean muscular body. But he did once have a thick, full head of raven hair. “You could sue me for false advertising,” he said, pointing to his balding head.
She smiled ruefully. “You think the court will give me my waist back?”
They arrived forty-five minutes before their one o’clock reservation. Margaret was prepared for that and guided Enrique to a recommended walk on a path cut around the island’s perimeter. “We’re supposed to have champagne,” she told him. “It’s a very decadent lunch. We probably won’t need to eat dinner.”
“I always need to eat dinner,” Enrique said and stopped at a cleared spot on the path, with a sweeping view. He stretched his right arm wide and beckoned for her to enter. She did, although he could tell she wanted to keep moving. There was a small bush with tiny yellow flowers fluttering between them and the water and the floating city in the distance. The day was hot. Bees buzzed, and blossoms seemed to be everywhere. He wondered how it could be October. Perhaps the island was located in some magical latitude for the very rich, where it was forever springtime. He hugged her hard and then released her. “You want to keep walking?”
“We should head back. I want to get there a little early so we can pick a table in the shade. It’s really hot today. Like summer. I love it.”
They turned, walking back to the low green building she had identified as the Locanda. He sighed heavily. She asked, “Are you thinking about the deal?”
“Yes,” he lied.
“Don’t do it if you don’t want to. We have enough money if you want to write another novel.”
That was a surprise. Pleased, he took her hand and swung their arms the way they used to when bookending a walk with their toddler sons. They reached the finish of the cleared path and stepped onto the graveled drive up to the Locanda. “So you think I should write another novel?” She didn’t answer. She kept her profile to him, not meeting his eyes. The silence went on too long. She was reluctant to say, but like him, he thought, she wanted to tell the truth today. “You can tell me,” he urged her.
“No, I don’t think you should,” she answered at that prompt. She met his eyes and pouted regretfully, a sign that she expected him to feel hurt.
He didn’t respond while they wandered into the restaurant and down a hall past photographs of Papa and Prince Charles through the interior to the outside garden, where tables were set with thick linen, sparkling crystal, and gleaming silverware.
At Margaret’s instruction, Enrique had dressed up, in blue blazer, gray trousers, a striped blue and white shirt. He had balked at wearing a tie. He almost wished he hadn’t. He felt naked compared to the black-suited, bow-tied waiters and two florid-faced, elderly men in pin-striped suits at a table nearby, accompanied by a pair of bejeweled women in floral print dresses. On the other hand, although they were seated in a well-shaded table under a canopy of vines, it was hot in the still garden air, and he was glad he had nothing around his neck. He wanted to take his jacket off but was afraid they would toss him out for so shocking a disrobing. Despite this discomfort of formality, when he regarded his smiling wife, pretty and merry as a young woman in her silk black dress, with a red, curving, abstract pattern swirling down one breast and across her waist and disappearing around a hip, he felt at ease and free of all worldly concerns.
He said yes to the waiter’s suggestion that they begin with champagne, and Margaret beamed when he popped the cork,
pouring the golden bubbles into fluted glasses. First, Enrique toasted her, “I love you,” and she answered, “I love you.” And then he got back to it. “So you don’t want me to write a novel.” She looked abashed and worried. “It’s okay,” Enrique said. “I’m not upset. Don’t get scared. Tell me the truth.”
“I’m not scared,” she insisted. She sighed. “I’m being selfish. Has nothing to do with what you want. If you want to write them you should, but they’re no fun for me. I don’t think they’re much fun for you either, but that’s your business.”
“Not fun because I get moody?”
“No!” She shook her head with irritation, as she did whenever he didn’t automatically understand her meaning. “You don’t get moody about writing your books. Not anymore. I don’t think you should write books because there’s only a tiny audience for serious novels. People love movies. Everybody loves movies. Especially publishing people. Anyway, I’m just being selfish. Your movie projects are fun for me. I get to visit you on the set in Prague, in London, in Paris, and I get to meet stars and directors and go to premieres and have caviar on Air France and”—she raised her flute, just missing colliding with a bee en route from the trellis above, buzzing toward a rosebush softening the main building’s edge—“I get to have lunch with my husband on Torcello.”
While they selected from the three-course prix fixe and watched the tables fill up with more well-dressed and beautiful, or ancient and wealthy patrons, Enrique prepared to raise the sore topic. After all, she had said her difficult piece, that his great ambition in life was a drag for her and something she’d rather he didn’t do. He had a right to say his difficult piece. “Margaret.” He sat up straight in the wicker chair and looked at her full-on. “There’s something I want to say to you.”