Liquid Desires (2 page)

“I'm sure they can make one, Barbara.”

After ordering the Contessa's ice cream concoction and another Campari soda for himself—this time bolstered with some white wine—Urbino asked her how things were in Asolo.

“If you came more often than once or twice a month you wouldn't have to ask! Bands of teenagers have been running around pulling up plants and breaking windows. It makes me almost happy not to have had any children. They'd be going through the difficult years now.”

Urbino let the Contessa's exaggeration pass. If she and Alvise had had children, even the youngest would have long passed through its difficult years. The Contessa must be approaching sixty, but suspicion was the closest he would come to truth until her seventy-fifth birthday when she promised a revelation. Urbino, twenty years her junior, felt that she was entitled to her vanity, especially since she looked a good ten years younger than sixty.

“I hope you appreciate my taking time out from all the preparations for the garden party to coax you into the hills of Asolo,
caro
. By the way, I broke down and extended a neighborly invitation to that retired American actress you've been wanting to meet—the one who's always parading around in pants and a turban and probably just waiting to break out in a leopard print and boa!
I've
never heard of her,” the Contessa said a little too lightly, “but Silvestro has told me all about her.”

Silvestro Occhipinti was the eighty-year-old longtime friend of the Contessa's dead husband, Alvise. In need of money, he rented out his villa to foreigners—currently the retired actress Madge Lennox—while living in several rooms in the center of Asolo.

“This impertinent person in pants is my last attempt to try to persuade you gently to grace us all with your presence. I know you don't like
les grandes fêtes
, my dear, but this is my very own. If you refuse again, I'm prepared to have Milo strong-arm you.”

The waiter brought the gelato and the Campari soda. For a few minutes the Contessa enjoyed her
coppa
in self-indulgent silence before filling him in on the gossip in Asolo. The most interesting was the story of a young American man who had been trying to gain devious access to Freya Stark, the well-known British traveler and writer, who had made Asolo her home for decades. The Contessa somehow held Urbino, as both a biographer and an American, responsible for the intrusion of his countryman.

The Contessa turned silent again and ate the rest of her
coppa
with the restrained enthusiasm of a well-bred child.

“You look as if you could use a pick-me-up yourself,” she said when she finished. “Why don't we order you some gelato? Alcohol is going to debilitate you in this heat.”

“Would you like another
coppa
yourself, Barbara?”

“Most definitely not.”

But despite the Contessa's refusal Urbino knew she was tempted, the only thing holding her back being not satiation or the fear of gaining weight—something she seemed to be blessedly immune to—but the embarrassment of being seen to indulge in two
coppe
in a row. She would be more than willing, however, to have her seconds somewhere else.

“An even better remedy than gelato for your haggard look,
caro
, would be La Muta,” the Contessa persisted. “The fresh air will do wonders for you! I'll take better care of you than they do here—and it won't cost you a single, solitary lira. You
are
coming back with me, aren't you?” There was a plaintive look on her face. “It's just that I miss you so abominably. Doesn't my coming here all the way from Asolo on one of the hottest days of the summer prove that?”

“I've missed you, too, Barbara. Of course I'll come.”

“Do you think I'll get to meet this ex-brother-in-law of yours, or are you going to keep him a big, dark secret like so many other things in your past?”

“You'll meet him. You might even like him better than me.”

“An impossibility of the most impossible kind,
caro
—even if your Eugene is handsomer and younger than you are. I'm yours forever, a fate I haven't chosen. But I do hope he has some tales—or would he call them ‘yarns'?—to tell of the days when your hair was as bright as Huckleberry Finn's and you hadn't yet become jaded!” She reached for her parasol. “Finish your drink and let's make a gracious but quick exit. I'll be walking in the garden while you arrange things. We might even have time for a real
Coppa Fornarina
at Florian's before we leave. This one”—she nodded down at the empty goblet—“left a lot to be desired.”

Making no comment, Urbino signaled for the waiter.

PART ONE

Death on the Grand Canal

1

“Now, isn't this just what you needed?” the Contessa said softly to Urbino as she seemed to glide past him the next afternoon to greet a newly arrived guest in the gardens behind Villa La Muta.

Urbino smiled. The Contessa's “this” included not just the sixteenth-century villa and its gardens with their grassy parterres and laurel-shaded dolphin fountain, the hidden, apparently random water sprays triggered by secret sources, the herb and medicinal plant beds famous centuries earlier, and the maze and the
giardino segreto
where they often shared tea and drinks. It also embraced the view across the wide Trevisan plain to the Alpine foothills, the walled, arcaded town above them with its castle and citadel, and the lambent air playing over the hills—everything, in fact, down to the brilliantly plumed parrot in the brass cage under the pergola which kept saying “
Ciao!
” in a distinctly clear and welcoming voice.

The Contessa's guests were gathered in decorous groups on the various levels of the gardens. A string quartet played Vivaldi, competing with the rustle of the wind and the singing of the birds. The whole golden scene, suffused with an air of dalliance and genteel conversation, was evocative of Watteau and delicately burdened with that faint suggestion of the melancholy and the transitory so often found in his compositions.

The da Capo-Zendrini family had chosen its retreat well. Instead of following in the footsteps—or rather the boat wakes—of other eighteenth-century Venetians who had made their summer
villeggiature
on the banks of the now brackish Brenta Canal between Venice and Padua, the da Capo-Zendrinis had gone to the hill town of Asolo, twenty-five miles northwest of Venice, where they had taken over La Muta, designed by Palladio's follower Scamozzi. The British, who regularly descended on the area for villa tours, often mistook La Muta for one of Palladio's own buildings.

The woman Urbino was talking with now said that she had once made the same mistake. She wasn't British, however. She was the retired American actress the Contessa had mentioned yesterday on the Lido—the woman renting Silvestro Occhipinti's villa farther up the hill toward town.

Although the Contessa claimed never to have heard of her, Urbino certainly had. Madge Lennox had made a respectable reputation for herself in a dozen American films, playing primarily independent-minded women, and had lived in an air of notoriety because of her rumored interest in both sexes. Known as “the woman whom Garbo and Huston had loved,” she had moved to Europe in the early sixties, after a dearth of roles in the States, and had appeared in Franco-Italian productions until her retirement fifteen years ago.

A tall woman with high cheekbones and skin that had avoided the sun and sought out the best of plastic surgeons, Madge Lennox looked much younger than her seventy years. A broad-brimmed hat shaded a face whose makeup was close to dead white, giving her aging beauty a timeless, even sexless look. She had a pair of large sunglasses that she kept putting on and taking off, drawing attention to both her large dark eyes and shapely hands. Her hair was completely covered beneath the hat by a deep-pink scarf. She wore ecru silk trousers and a man-tailored peach jacket. From the way she was holding her head and looking up at him, Urbino knew that she didn't want his scrutiny and judgment, however, unless they were benevolent. She wanted to be seen as she saw herself on her best days. If he showed that he saw her this way she would treat him with special kindness and care.

“When I saw the villa ten years ago,” she was explaining in her lovely, exquisitely controlled voice, “I was certain it was by Palladio. Do you know something of its history?”

Urbino accommodated Madge Lennox by beginning with the villa's name—
La Muta
, or “The Mute Woman”—telling her how it came from a seventeenth-century woman who had retired to Asolo after witnessing a murder in Florence and who had never spoken again in public. The Contessa had been disquieted by this somewhat Gothic association. After several unsuccessful attempts to establish a new name—among them
La Barbara
—she had eventually found a way around the problem by commissioning a copy of Raphael's painting of a gentlewoman, known as
La Muta
. The painting now hung prominently on the stone staircase in the front hall.

“Yes, I've seen it,” Madge Lennox said. “Wasn't the original stolen?”

“Back in seventy-five. The art police came and examined the Contessa's copy.”

“I've heard the Conte da Capo-Zendrini was flattered that they bothered to come here to look at it,” Lennox said in her soft, clear voice, showing that she knew something about
La Muta
—or at least the Conte—herself. “He was an unusual man. The people here still hold him in high regard.”

“I never met him. He died before I met the Contessa.”

“Oh, I see.” She seemed vaguely disappointed. She searched his face with her bold, black eyes. “I was wondering, Mr. Macintyre,” she said, slipping her sunglasses back on and smiling at him, “if you wouldn't mind venturing into the maze with me. I must say you're most appropriately dressed for that kind of thing.”

Lennox's dark eyes ran over Urbino's boater, red bow tie, blazer, and flannels. The Contessa had pronounced him perfectly “delightful,” but Urbino wasn't so sure himself.

“I regret to say that I don't know my way through,” Urbino said, “but there are covered signs you can lift whenever you're lost.”

“But that's no fun! I'd prefer being lost completely or being led through by someone who knows his own way.” She took a sip of her punch. “Do you live here, too? I've seen you at the Caffè Centrale with the Contessa.”

“No. I live in Venice, but I come here often.”

“Oh, you must be the American friend with the palazzo that I heard someone in town talking about!”

“I suppose so. I inherited a small building through my mother. She was American but her family was Italian. Venice has been my home for more than ten years now.”

“How interesting! I've never had the courage to live completely as an expatriate myself—to cut all the ties that bind me to home. I admire you, but isn't there a danger you're going to lose touch—with your past, your origins, I mean? Or have I read too many Henry James novels? To live in Venice all the time!” Madge Lennox shook her head slowly. “‘Venice the impossible' is how I think of it, especially during this time of the year. It's a smelly, slippery trap ready to catch you one way or another! Just look at that poor girl who was raped and murdered! You can't convince me that it had nothing to do with all the heat and madness in Venice this summer. I was there last week for two days, and it was more than enough! I got caught in the middle of a sweaty mob pushing and shoving for a view of the Bridge of Sighs. I almost passed out. ‘The living are just the dead on holiday.' That's what Maeterlinck—an impossible dramatist—said, and he could have been describing Venice in high season. But Asolo!” she came close to sighing. “I've been here since April and I don't ever want to leave.”

At this point they were joined by Silvestro Occhipinti, a bald, birdlike man who had had the ill fortune to outlive most of his family and friends, among them the Contessa's husband. He was all turned out in a white suit and cravat.

“I hope you never do leave, my dear,” Occhipinti said in accented English in a high-pitched, reedy voice. “Villa Pippa is yours for as long as you like. ‘God's in his heaven—all's right with the world!' I couldn't be more pleased!”

Occhipinti often sprinkled his conversation with quotations from Robert Browning, who had lived in Asolo with his wife on what was now the Via Browning, where Occhipinti had his own rooms. Sometimes the quotations were apt, at other times inappropriate or enigmatic. What they always were, however, was precise, age having done nothing to dim the memory of the old friend of Alvise da Capo-Zendrini.

“I'll have to leave in October as I've told you, Signor Occhipinti. The affairs of the world call me, I'm afraid.”

Occhipinti frowned. Looking up at the woman with his round little eyes from behind thick spectacles, he said, “‘Where the apple reddens never pry, lest we lose our Edens, Eve and I.'”

Madge Lennox, like the cited apple of Eden, somehow managed to redden beneath her heavy makeup. Her color deepened when Occhipinti added, “Perhaps you are planning to return to films. Wouldn't that be a happy day! How I remember you in
Dark Lady
! My heart was in your hands. But that was long ago. You've had a great career. Perhaps Signor Macintyre will write a book about you.”

“You're a writer, Mr. Macintyre?” the actress said, turning to Urbino with evident relief.

“A biographer. I write about people who have some connection with Venice. Not complete biographies but only their lives in relationship to the city.”

“He's written one on Robert Browning! ‘What of soul was left, I wonder, when the kissing had to stop'!”

“You must know Venice like the back of your hand, Mr. Macintyre. You probably found me foolish, running on the way I was. Why don't you stop by Villa Pippa sometime? I have an open mind. I would love to love Venice.”