There will always be traveling companions on the way—or else there will be delicious solitude. But there is no excuse for fear. Singing with Julian along the Grand Canal, I dimly glimpse a life without my fear. Who would I be without it? Would I still be Leila?
(
Sane mind:
You would be Leila! You would have
yourself
!)
Sybille once made me deposit my fear in her metal box.
“I’ll keep it safe for you until you want it back,” she said. “You can have it back whenever you wish.”
Sybille is keeping my fear; my sane mind and I can go on without it.
That night, at the Gritti, Julian and I talk until dawn.
“I know that you’re having an affair with someone,” Julian says, “and really, it’s okay. I want you to be happy. You can tell me everything.”
“You already know about my gondolier,” I say.
“This is more than a gondolier,” says Julian.
“I don’t know about that,” I say. “Besides, once I tell you, the magic will be gone.”
“But if you don’t, you’re lying by omission. And that breaks
our
magic.”
“That’s the dilemma, isn’t it?”
“Let me tell you a story,” Julian says, “a story about my life that I’ve never told you because, until very recently, I had blocked it. . . .”
We settle into our special position, with our legs wrapped around each other.
“When I was a little boy in Toronto,” Julian begins, “my mother and father used to travel on the vaudeville circuit, and my older sister and I were left alone for long periods of time. My sister was only about fifteen, and very, very pretty—and in some ways she was the loneliest girl I ever knew. I must be about ten when this takes place—and just starting to be sexual. So horny all the time that I’m jumping out of my skin—and starting to have wet dreams—and not understanding them at all.
“My sister’s bedroom has a glass door covered with muslin curtains, and late every afternoon she goes in alone to take a nap. This must have been a weekend afternoon, since I wasn’t at school. I was doing homework downstairs, and suddenly I had a question to ask her. I went upstairs and down the hall to her room, but something stopped me from bursting in. The muslin curtain was slightly pushed aside at the edge—it was one of those curtains with a brass rod at the top and bottom—and I stood very still and guiltily peeked in.
“My sister lay on the bed in her peach peignoir, which was parted at her thighs. And there was a peach silk scarf over the lamp. The whole room was bathed in a rosy glow.
“She was moving one delicate hand in the vicinity of her open peignoir. A sense of disorientation overtook me. My heart began to pound. My penis stood straight up. My whole being seemed to throb. I knew I should not be watching, but I could not stop myself. And then her fingers disappeared inside her, and lovingly, sweetly, she drew them in and out. I could bear no more. My penis and her fingers were one—and I came with an explosion that made me cry aloud. My sister looked up, saw me, understood, and came to the door to let me in.
“‘Julie,’ she said—she called me Julie—‘don’t be afraid.’ I was trembling. She led me to her bed. We lay down together and held each other, legs and arms entwined. ‘Julie—if you know that this is beautiful, you will know something very few people know.’ And gently, gently, she brought my hand to her vagina and let me explore every part of her, telling me what to do, and how to touch her, and presently beginning to touch me as well. It was the sweetest and most beautiful interlude of my life. Utterly innocent, the sex of the Garden of Eden before the serpent came. And afterward, we lay together, entwined as you and I are now.
“Now comes the part I don’t want to talk about, the part I blocked for forty years and only retrieved under hypnosis.
“Two days later, she was rushed to the hospital in the middle of the night. I only remember standing outside her room and hearing a nurse say to another nurse, ‘That whore isn’t long for this world.’ I never saw her alive again.”
“What did she die of?” I ask lamely, as one does when one is overwhelmed by emotion and trying therefore to pin down the “facts,” as if facts could save us.
“For years I didn’t really know. Appendicitis, they say, but I knew it was wrong. I now think it must have been an ectopic pregnancy. Of course I was sure I killed her.”
“Of course.” I hug him. My eyes are streaming with tears.
“The worst is yet to come. My parents never came home. They were killed in a car crash somewhere in the Midwest. I don’t even know if they knew about their daughter. I was left with my aunt and cousin. One night I heard them discussing me. ‘I don’t want him,’ my aunt said. ‘He’s too weird.’ ‘I don’t want him, either,’ said my cousin. ‘He gives me the creeps.’ I packed my bag and hit the road.”
“You were ten?”
“I was ten. In some ways I’m still ten.”
“In some ways, we all are,” I say.
“That’s why I don’t think we should lie about sex,” Julian said. “Life’s too short.”
“And sex can’t be divorced from the rest of life, can it? We thought it could be, but it can’t. That’s the tragedy of our generation—that we thought sex could save us.”
“Nothing can save us,” says Julian, “not even love. But we can make the world less lonely for each other—sometimes. And sometimes we can’t even do that.”
“All my life,” I say, “I’ve wanted nothing but to bring sex and friendship together—and I seem to be farther from it than ever.”
“Me too,” says Julian. “That’s why the Trobriands fascinate me so. I want to know if there’s really a society in which people have solved the problem of guilt.”
“What do you think?”
“To read Malinowski, you’d think so—but he’s way out of date. The Isles of Love, they called them in the twenties, but I think it’s just another noble-savage myth. Gauguin, Robert Louis Stevenson, Melville, Michener—think of the layers of myth-making. Still, I dream of going. I have always dreamed of going. . . . I want to die there, and the place you want to die is the place you want to live. . . .”
“Do you really want to know about the gondolier?”
“Yes.”
“Well, hearing you talk about your sister, it’s clear to me that my gondolier, like Dart, is just another version of the impossible lover—Daddy, in short: the taboo man, the demon lover, the dybbuk, the incestuous incubus. He’s beautiful, but wet dreams are always beautiful. And he’s unhavable. He belongs to another, to mamma. . . .”
“Don’t we all,” says Julian, dreamy-eyed.
“And when we make love, all barriers between us vanish—like when you and I
talk
. Why can’t we have both—flesh and words?” I ask.
“Ah,” says Julian, “because then why would we compose or paint? We compose and paint to resurrect the fallen world, and it’s only because the world is fallen that it
needs
the beauty we make. In heaven, we’d be so filled with God’s beauty that we wouldn’t have to create.”
“Sophistry.”
“Not really. Which is easier to paint—heaven or hell?”
“Hell,” I say.
“And which is more fun to read—
Inferno
or
Paradiso
?”
“Inferno.” inferno.
“So we were given a fallen world to draw forth our human potential. In paradise we’d all be bored to death.”
“And yet you still want to go to the South Pacific? Do you want to be the Gauguin of electronic music?”
“I want to write an opera about all this,” Julian says. “And I’m a sort of method composer, in my own way. I want to start with a little boy watching his sister through a curtain—then sail off to Polynesia with a grown man in search of paradise. I want to write the great panoramic opera of man’s search for paradise.”
“We’re all looking for paradise,” I say. “And we never seem to know that we have it right here, right now, with our legs and arms around each other in this hotel room sailing through the universe. . . .”
“I know it,” Julian says. “But paradise, by definition, is always
there
, not
here
. Even if you
marry
your perfect lover, before long you’re both worrying about the contractor, the housepainter, parents’ night, the IRS. . . . Your impossible he would become all too possible. Better to have him for sex and me for talk.”
“But I want sex and talk in one person. Surely that’s not so much to ask.”
“I’ve never found it,” says Julian, “except in my chords, so why should you?”
“Because you don’t believe in it, and I do. Somehow, against all the evidence, I finally
do
. And I finally believe I deserve it.”
“Then you shall surely have it,” says Julian, “someday. But first you must
practice
believing it for a year or two. And oh, yes—you must get rid of that gondolier.”
We hug and drift off to sleep.
The next day, with Julian’s blessing, I go by water taxi to see Renzo on his curious island in the lagoon.
The house is deserted except for the chirping canaries and an unseen maid. The two princesses have gone to Milan for the day, to have their winter clothes fitted. Sunlight streams in the windows. Water from the lagoon dapples us with sequins of light as we make love.
With us, the lovemaking is so much in the present that it is a kind of meditation. Utterly fluid, with no beginning and no end, it seems not sex but a fleshly paradigm for nonattachment.
We
know
each other, body by body, soul by soul. We have known each other from the first moment we met and from the first time we made love. There has never been any question about it, never any doubt that it would work totally. Whether we talk or not, eat or not, we are always, always in harmony, joined, touching.
He touches my breast. The water ripples over us, spangling the ceiling. I touch his hair, his nipples. He sucks my lower lip. He strips off his linen shirt and linen slacks. I lie in his arms, smelling his armpit, content to hold him, touch him, not seeking more, not seeking orgasm. We are under the water, swimming through light. Just the smell of his skin, the touch of his velvet, his musk, is enough to satisfy me.
The fluidity of his body delights me; it is all there for me, without punctuation, without stop. A feast, moving like the waters of Venice, changing yet staying the same.
He sucks my lips, my breasts, calls me his Piccola Pittrice, and without knowing
how
, we are inside and outside each other, legs akimbo, legs together, he saying,
“Piano, piano,”
and moving, moving, moving slowly inside me to make it last. Whenever I start to come, he stops, makes me relax completely, so that at last I do not care whether I come or not, feeling him inside me, totally entered, wholly taken, given back to myself, given back to nature.
It’s strange, isn’t it, that we humans so distance ourselves from nature
even
in our lovemaking that the expectation of orgasm, the push for it, makes even loving teleological, a thing of expectations, anxieties, pressures. Renzo makes me totally enter the moment because
he
does, because his sex is free from an agenda, from pressure or expectation of any sort.
And so, having decided not to do anything but
feel
the moment,
be
in the moment, my body, of its own sweet will-less will, begins its crescendo. He moves and moves, stops and stops. But I have begun to come and then I scream and he covers my mouth (the maid, the maid) and begins to come himself, emerald eyes half closed, his face faunlike, brown, slanting, laughing, serious on the edge of orgasm and then liquid again, relaxed.
We lie together, Pan and Ceres, the god of the woods and the goddess of grain, smelling our own musk, our love odor—and then the bells ring and it is noon and we must go, we two daytime Cinderellas, turned to pumpkins by the stroke of noon.
I strip off my mask. Leila, Louise, Luisa slips away and there is only a woman, propelled by an unseen muse, her pen scratching in her sketchbook, her body aching with love, her heart high and happy because she knows she has done nothing to be so blessed and she knows that divine love is unconditional. She is in a state of grace. She wants to skip, to kneel before the Madonna, to invent drawings and paintings that will communicate joy to the joyless, faith to the unbeliever, and love to the loveless. She wants everyone to savor and celebrate life because it is a feast. It is there for the taking. You have only to open your mouth, open your hand, love one another, thank God, and rejoice.
At its most simple, life is a prayer. We pray in many ways. This is mine.
I cover pages and pages with pictures and words before I fall asleep that night.
Sleeping at Julian’s side, I dream I am carrying a wheelchair on my back through Venice. The city consists of snowy alps and jagged ravines, with a shimmering lagoon far below. I am carrying this backbreaking wheelchair up and down icy slopes because I am afraid that someday I won’t be able to walk. I am cursing the weight of it.
Throw down the wheelchair! I tell myself. You can walk! It was only your fear that crippled you.
I clamber into the wheelchair and race madly down a ravine. The wheelchair seems to fly, then rolls to a stop at the bottom. Miraculously, I stand, clothed in light, and throw the wheelchair into the lagoon.
I wake up. Naked, I walk into the bathroom and stand before the mirror. I am bathed in radiance. My heart is glowing.
Ah, I say, this is it, this is it. This is what we are meant to know. We need never be lonely. We are built around the godspark. Flesh is merely a lesson. We learn it and pass on. I hold that certainty all day as I explore Venice alone.
The next morning, I venture by myself to an exhibit of Old Master drawings on the beautiful little island where the Palladian church of San Giorgio Maggiore stands in the middle of the basin of St. Mark. With its green-hatted
campanile
, its halcyon cloister, its abandoned theater, this island is the sweetest spot in all Venice.