One night we’re in the Piazza San Marco at one, listening to the band at Florian’s finishing up. As usual, they’re playing “New York, New York,” out of tune. We’re laughing about something, when suddenly we see a fifty-ish lady who looks like a waif.
“Let’s buy her a drink,” says Julian.
“Okay,” I say.
Julian gets up and invites her over. At first she demurs, but then, sensing it is safe (my presence comforts her), she joins us.
She’s from Ohio; her name is Gladys; she’s been an English teacher in Milan for nearly ten years. She loves Italy. Yes, she sometimes gets homesick.
With her scrawny neck, wispy brownish hair, beaky little nose, and inward-pointing teeth, she is one of those humans who most resemble a bird—even as Renzo is now merman, now Pan, as Julian is a dog (a silky white Maltese), as I am a ginger cat, as Dart is a big blond Labrador retriever (who turns, unpredictably, into a fox).
“You seem so happy,” says Gladys. “How long have you two been married?”
“Oh,
forever
,” says Julian.
“And where do you live?”
“In Malibu,” I say, “and in Connecticut. We divide the year.”
“And what’s the secret of your marriage?” asks Gladys wistfully.
“We don’t sleep together,” says Julian.
Gladys does a double take.
“That’s right,” says Julian. “I sleep in a box, and she sleeps in the bed. You’d be surprised how far that goes toward preserving our relationship.”
“You’re
kidding
,” says Gladys, half in disbelief, half in a desire to believe that
some
one
some
where has a good marriage, at whatever cost.
“Funny how it all got started,” I say. “One day we had a rather large appliance delivered to our house in Malibu—a washing machine, I think it was, or maybe a dryer. And my husband, Fred, here, said: ‘Darling, I’ve always wanted to sleep in a box—do you mind awfully if I try?’ ”
“You’re
kidding
,” says Gladys.
“Not at all,” says Julian. “So I filled the bottom of the box with a down quilt, a pillow, a teddy bear, and the like, and tried it out. I
loved
it! And ever since then, I’ve slept in the box, and Alice, here, sleeps in the bed. . . .”
“It’s not the same box, of course,” I say. “The first box wore out.”
“In fact, we just got a
new
box,” says Julian. “The secret of our marriage is that we have a constant supply of new boxes.”
Gladys looks quizzically from my face to Julian’s, wanting to believe yet not wanting to seem a fool (like all of us).
“You’re
kidding
,” she says.
“Not at all,” says Julian. “Marriage is difficult enough without both parties having to sleep in the same bed. The boxes are the answer.”
“You’re sure you’re not kidding?” asks Gladys.
“Sure,” I say, now sensing that the preservation of this little fiction is indispensable to all of us.
“What business are you in?” asks Gladys of Julian.
“The shoe business,” says Julian. “There’s no business like shoe business.”
“Interesting,” says Gladys.
“That’s why we come to Italy all the time,” I say, “because of the shoe business. They make the shoes near here—near Padova.”
“ ‘There’s no business like shoe business, like no business I know,’ ” sings Julian. Suddenly he looks at Gladys. “Did anyone ever tell you how beautiful you are?”
She looks at him again in half disbelief, half wishful-ness, and her whole face softens. The beaky nose, the wispy hair, the sparrow-brown eyes become, in the transfiguration of his gaze, beautiful. I see how this fiction becomes, through the force of Julian’s intention, true. And I know that all our lives can be transfigured if we only have a strong enough intention and hold it like the laser beam of Julian’s beautiful eyes on Gladys’s now beautiful face.
The next evening I am in the lagoon with Renzo again, riding across the waters, singing.
The lagoon is strafed with setting sunlight, and the full moon rises on the opposite side of the sky. The seagulls cry. It is too perfect, too magical, too much a cliché, and like many clichés, it is also true. We rock on the sea in the opalescent azure-pink sun-moonlight, drop anchor, and touch each other’s skin as if skin had just been invented and we were Adam and Eve about to board Noah’s Ark and reproduce the whole human race.
We speak rudimentary troglodyte English and rudimentary troglodyte Italian.
“Tu sei diavolo,”
I say. A devil is what you are.
“You like that,” he says. “Only a devil could capture you. An amazon needs a centaur to carry her off.”
And then words fail us and we communicate with our fingertips, with our tongues, with the brush of our toes on the surface of our skins. Outside, inside, sun, moon, have no meaning, and we are rocking in the boat of each other, in the lagoon of dreams, at once liquid and starry, watery yet made of shimmering light.
“Mio troglodita,”
I say.
“Pelle di luce, pelle liquida di stelle, occhi di luna,”
he says.
“Siamo animali,”
I say.
“Anima, animali,”
he replies.
He lounges in the boat, smelling of sex, of primal ooze, the tip of his cock crying for me.
We kiss, bite, tangle.
“Which animal are you?” he asks.
“Sono cane, fedele,”
I say, knowing I am really more cat than dog.
“Non è vero,”
he says.
“Tu sei gattina.
I see your claws even though you try to hide them.”
I am stung by this. Is it true? Or just a lovers’ game?
“E tu?”
“I’m a fox, a clever fox,” he says.
(My friend Emmie always says: “Listen to what they say at the start of a love affair; they are telling you how it will end.”)
“Now sleep,” he says, leaning me back in the boat, opening the snaps of my lace bodysuit, and beginning to fuck me very slowly at various angles. Both of us are half reclining, and tears are streaming down my cheeks. He is fucking me as if he wants to enter every part of me, discovering America.
I cannot stop crying and crying out, and as I start to come, he cries,
“Dai, dai, dai”
(come on, come on, come on) and
“Apri, apri”
(open up, open up).
He stops and moves, moves and stops, moves again—until I come, completely full of him, entered, eternal, and he comes with me, filling me with salty stars.
I am still crying, but as I return to myself I see him watching me, reserved, from a distance.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
“Il sesso,”
he says. Sex. “And another set of twins. If the twins arrive, I will be
monogamo
.”
Ah, promises, promises. This man will not ever be
monogamo,
any more than Julian will ever fuck me. But my judgment is lost, for here, in The Land of Fuck, there is no such thing as judgment.
“Can we be fifty-fifty?” he asks, “even though you are an Amazon? Or forty-nine-fifty-one?”
We have gone from sex to power, made that inevitable leap.
I lie with my head in his lap. The sky darkens. Stars appear.
“You have such a marvelous body,” he says. “You relax completely. The first time almost, the second time better, and this time completely.”
And I think that so much of sex is about this, about the man wanting to totally enter the woman, invade her and make her his. Without this need for mastery, possession, there is no animal sex. There are intellectual games about sleeping in boxes. There are verbal jokes about “shoe business.” But without this animal entering, sex doesn’t work, and only when sex works like this can you enter The Land of Fuck.
Is it all about cocks, finally, and whether or not they
work
? Is it all about their
size
? Women say no, no, no, having been taught their lessons well by men who fear their cocks are too small. Men say no, meaning yes, for all their behavior tells you that what they
really
care about is how their cocks work. Thom, Elmore, Dart, Danny, Lionel, Renzo, Julian—I have never met a man whose life wasn’t run by the size and stiffness of his cock.
This is the one thing women never dare say. This is the one thing we resolutely lie about. And why? Because it is all too true. The size and stiffness of a man’s cock determines his life. It determines how he feels about himself. It determines whether he likes himself. A man who likes his cock likes himself. And a man who can’t trust his cock can never trust himself. Or a woman. Or any other man.
Is it all that simple? I fear the answer is yes. The porno films, the baby oil, the leather, the black candles, are all compensations for cocks that don’t work. Or work capriciously. For when they work, all you really need is music and moonlight. Or silence and sunlight. Or twilight, half light . . . any light (or darkness) will do.
We start the engine and go in search of an open
trattoria
. We putter in the boat, looking for places to park. No place to park the Riva (how like New York!) and no
trattoria
open (how like Connecticut!).
I am melancholy, having been so totally opened. I try to remind myself of nonattachment, but that doesn’t work. I want to come back to my center, my equanimity, but The Land of Fuck will not give me back. Having totally forgotten that the only moment is now, I am in a reverie about some future life with Renzo.
We finally find a place for sandwiches and take them back to the middle of the moon-streaked lagoon, where we dreamily eat, listening to the gulls calling in the super-stillness and gazing at each other. What is Renzo’s secret? I wonder. He holds a part of himself in reserve, as I wish I could. At moments, I have the strong sense that all I have here is the Italian counterpart of Dart—another Don Giovanni but an authentic one: the Mediterranean man, who does the role
right
. Wax to receive and marble to retain. Have I merely fallen for Don Juan again?
(
Sane mind:
Are you asking me or telling me?)
Isadora: I’m with her!
Leila: Who?
Isadora: Your sane mind!
Leila: Will you please shut up and let me enjoy this?
We stay in the lagoon, squeezing out the last drop of moonlight. Then he takes me back to my hotel, to Julian, and to my melancholy self.
“
Don’t
fall in love with him, honey,” says Cordelia.
We are in the garden at Corte Sconta, having lunch, surrounded by the usual multilingual hordes who invade Venice during Regatta Week.
“Fall in love with
whom
?”
Cordelia gives me a don’t-bullshit-me look.
“Renzo Pisan, of course. Honey, he’s the Romeo of the Rialto, the Casanova of Cannaregio, the Don Giovanni of Dorsoduro, the gigolo of the Palazzo del Giglio, not to mention the Gritti, the Bauer Grünwald, and so on. She gives him enough rope to get his feet—and other pleasin’ parts of himself—wet, and then she yanks his chain and he comes scurryin’ home, tail—so to speak—between his legs. . . . The only thing worse than havin’ your own gigolo, honey, is borrowin’ somebody else’s.”
“Who
is
she?”
“If you look over there, you can see . . . so
hush
when you talk.”
I look. At a long table, half hidden behind trellised vines, sits a beautiful blond apparition in a shimmering violet suit and a purple hat festooned with purple grapes. Her brittle fingers glitter with major jewels; her neck is ablaze with emeralds, more appropriate for the Viva Venezia gala than for lunch at this simple restaurant in Castello. And beside her sits Renzo, very
cavalier servente
, peeling her figs.
They are holding court at a table of fashionable
finocchi
and American socialites. Renzo does not see me.
“What’s their story?” I ask Cordelia.
“I’m not sure I know the whole
thing
, but they’ve been married ever since
any
one can remember. She’s an honest-to-God
Prinzessin
from Wien—and he’s a Jew from a Spanish Jewish family. Her
mother
rescued him from the Nazis when he was a mere baby at the end of the war, raised him like a mamma (and his twin brother too), but him she fancied, sent him to architecture school, married him off to her daughter, settled estates on him. Apparently they were mad lovers once, perhaps still are. Imagine it! The Nazi princess and the Jewish beggar boy! Think what your dominatrix could do with that! Renzo lives in a strange ménage à trois with the daughter and the mother. I don’t know who does whom at home, but outside he does
every
one. The mamma’s a character too. When she was very young, she was married briefly to the count of something, and some people still call her ‘the cooking countess’ because she once had a Julia Child-ish television show on RAI-Due. She’s all involved with a project to restore the synagogues in the ghetto. Atoning for Hitler. She finances Renzo’s dreams.
“He’s utterly faithful, in his Mediterranean fashion. And a brilliant architect. And you can be sure they know all about you, or
will
, the minute you go any deeper. He’ll never leave them, honey. Sex is sex, but money an’ position last
forever
. Mamma got him all his first major commissions, and he’s loyal to that, though an American man wouldn’t be, would have to leave as a result. We Americani are
very
romantic and believe in moving on. The Europeans are far more practical than we are. Never forget it, honey. And La Mamma is La Mamma. And his wife is glamorous—if a bit cold. She has him followed. She knows
every
thing.”
“How did
you
know?”
“Don’t
insult
me, Zandberg. This is
my
town. Venezia is a village. I saw him swim up to you, an’ don’t think nobody’s seen you gettin’ in an’ out of Mamma’s Riva, an’ gorgeous as you are, may I suggest you are not the
first
lovely foreigner he has seduced?”