Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (14 page)

A few minutes later he knocks, and I stagger up to greet him.

“Thanks for the flowers,” I say. “They're lovely.”

“Oh, it's nothing,” says Per, a big man, stooping, gray, grizzled, diffident in his guilty, Swedish Socialist fashion about being thanked. The years have not been good to him. He drinks too much. Worthy roles and worthy political views have not saved his life. When we had our affair a decade ago in Stockholm, he looked better. So, probably, did I.

“Sit down,” I say. “Can I order you some tea? Some coffee?”

“No, I just ate. God—you look pale. Isn't anyone looking after you?”

“Only Shakespeare,” I say. “I keep getting these curious bouquets of white roses signed ‘W.S.,' with sonnets enclosed. At first I thought they were from Björn, but now I don't know. It could be a prank, or maybe not…”

Per shrugs, then changes the subject. Mysterious roses and sonnets are not his thing. He is a political animal, not a poetic one. “Listen, Yessica, I have not heard from Björn directly, but Lilli
has
communicated with me. She and Björn are in Lugano, staying with Anthony and Liana Burgess. They are in hiding, so to say. Björn is trying to get the financing for
Serenissima
back on track. When Grisha made his big scene and Björn fled the festival, the RAI—the Italian state TV—pulled out. I think they would look for any excuse to do so anyway because of the usual political crisis here, but Björn also lost his German financing at the same time and suddenly there was no film…But now, Lilli says that if we wait, she and Björn may just get the Germans back, this time with a French company coproducing. She pleaded with us not to leave, not to give up.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I intend to stay.
Serenissima
will be a great film—that I know. And I trust Björn to get it back together. The Mozart film was splendid, but this one will be even better. And Lilli sounded so resolute. I know she is strong and can do it.”

“Where are you going to stay?”

“Well—I shall move to the Gritti, if I can, as soon as possible. I called my old friend Nico and he was very kind as always. The tourists begin to clear out of Venice after the regatta, after the Campiello, after the film festival, and it becomes another city…I intend to wait. But you—you are too sick to go home anyway. I should stay here and look after you till you get well. You
need
someone, dear Yessica. You are too much alone. You need a bodyguard, what the Mafia call a walkaround man. You are too vulnerable by yourself. I could see the way Grisha Krylov forced himself on you—and you were too weak to resist. That, by the way, was a pure KGB maneuver. They
want
him to seduce Western celebrity women, as many as possible, so that he has an excuse to visit them abroad. It's classic.”

I was suddenly alarmed that Per would move in with me, banishing the Elizabethans. I wanted my solitude now, more than ever.

“Per, that's a good idea—move to the Gritti. I will join you there in a week or so, when I'm better.”

“Meanwhile, what will you do? Who will look after you?”

“The doctor, Dottore Dazzi.”

“That crank? I'm a better doctor than he is.”

“Anyone is.” I laugh. “But I'm on penicillin now. In a day or two I should be better. Call me and check on me. That will be enough, I promise.”

Per shakes his head and pulls at his curly gray beard. “Am I too much of a Jewish mama?” (He pronounces it “Ewe-ish mamá,” as even the most expertly English-speaking Swede would.)

“I need a Jewish mama—you're right. All orphans do. But you can mother me by phone…Go. I give you permission.”

Per kisses me gently on the cheek, clasps my hand. I wonder (I often wonder when meeting my former lovers or husbands) how on earth I ever could have been attracted to him? He seems a nice man—worried, soulful, sensitive, self-punishing, and a bit of a drunk, but not the least attraction for him stirs either in my gut or my quim—as Mummy always called it. (She said it was a shame that one of the most beautiful things in all of nature did not have an equally beautiful name, and quim got her vote for such a name. “Vagina,” she claimed, was clinical; “cunt” and “twat” were both beneath contempt. In retrospect, I feel immensely grateful to have had a mother who mused about such things!)

Per, however, no longer causes any tumult in that secret place. I wonder why. Do the stars govern these things? The planets? Are people attracted because their zodiacs are in a certain alignment at a certain period of their lives? Would Romeo and Juliet, ten years later, walk by each other with never a flicker? Jessica and Lorenzo? Portia and Bassanio? Desdemona and Othello? Shakespeare and his Dark Lady? Is it all a question of interlocking zodiacal tracks that hold us as if spellbound, and carry us back, back, back to childhood obsessions? How often I have been in love, and how empty all those loves seem today! It seems to me now that I will never be in love again—unless it is with someone I invent, or someone centuries dead.

After Per goes, I am alone again with my flowers and my thoughts. I get up and look at the white roses once more, stare into them searching for some clue, reread the sonnet about “lust in action,” and examine my little crystal ball for some sign of my two Elizabethans. Perhaps they will peer out at me and tell me where to find them. But no. The crystal ball is clear. It reflects only the room, the sky, the ocean, the lucent braids of the great chandelier. Suddenly, on a sort of inner dare, a wild hunch, I opened the little silver casket Vivian Lovecraft gave me. It has always been empty, containing only Vivian's good wishes for me, her white magick, her craft. Not so now.

My heart nearly stops beating when I see that now it contains a little parchment scroll. And on that scroll, lettered in the same perfect calligraphy I have come to know from the preferred sonnets, these words: “Who chooseth me must give and hazard all he hath.”

I am dumbfounded. This is the line from
The Merchant of Venice
around which the whole play revolves. These are the words that constitute a test for Portia's suitors. These are the words devised by her dead father to test her future groom. And it is only when Bassanio has the wit to choose lead above gold or silver, and hazard above surety, that he gets the girl—and her fortune as well. Risk alone is sure, Shakespeare seems to be saying. In life there is no safety, except by risking all for love.

Damn, I mutter to myself. There is no question of going back to the Land of LaLa now. I stay in Venice till I solve this mystery. But how? At the moment I have no idea.

The phone shrills. I let it ring, too tired to answer it. When it stops, I call the front desk, ask them to hold my calls, and I doze. I am hoping that somehow in my dreams I will solve the riddle, as sometimes I have solved the problems in certain roles by merely going to sleep and letting my unconscious take over. This time it does not work. I toss on my feverish bed thinking of my dead mother, my living daughter, my dead father, my dead grandfather, whose will confounded generations of lawyers and executors and ensured that the remaining family members would claw each other to death for decades after his demise.

It is still early—only nine-thirty or so in the morning, and in New York, the wee small hours are just dawning. Antonia sleeps, her copper lashes shading her freckled cheeks, her masses of red-gold hair tousled on her pillow, the back of her neck moist with the dew of her preadolescent dreams—in which, I hope, I at least figure as a fairy godmother. That I cannot call her and wake her at this hour is, in a way, a blessing, since when I reach her at her father's house she is always somewhat torn—wanting to talk to me, yet holding something in reserve, in part because she does not want to alienate her father by loving me too loudly, and in part because she must keep her turbulent longing for me in check in order to accept her life.

I know all this, and as her mother the last thing I want to do is cause her pain, so I telephone her sparingly, always at times when I calculate Lincoln will not be there. We were nearly inseparable until she was five, when her father remarried and instantly began plotting to take her from me. How naive I was about those plots! I thought a man as boring as Lincoln Devendish Fuller II had not such duplicity in him, except when it came to leveraged buy-outs, but I was wrong. He began innocently enough—suggesting that Antonia stay with him one fall and go to kindergarten in New York while I was making a movie in Morocco.

It was to be temporary and I had no reason to see harm in it. Our divorce had been perfectly amicable—though I'm now inclined to believe that an amicable divorce is a contradiction in terms. Previous to that, he had visited the child as often as he wished and she had suffered remarkably little as a result of my easy, open attitude toward his involvement in her life. But once he had Antonia in his clutches, he moved swiftly. Unbeknownst to me, he had hired a detective to document my sexual life for the past two years. Not that it was lurid by LaLa Land standards—three leading men, one Texas oil billionaire, one exercise instructor in his twenties—but it was enough to
look
like depravity to a bribed judge. Lincoln sued for custody on the grounds of my “promiscuous lifestyle” and the fact that I traveled a lot for my work. And he got it, whereupon he began making it harder and harder for me to see Antonia at all, treating her like the princess in the tower for, supposedly, her own good. Enough said. What the world does
not
need now is another story of a bitter divorce. Still, you can imagine my sense of betrayal at having had my openness and trust abused. All that had happened five years ago, but the wounds would always be fresh—like that mythic wound in my grandfather's head.

I sleep fitfully for a few hours and when I awaken, it is to the sound of a note being pushed under my door. Shaky, with a dry mouth and a pounding head, I get up and retrieve it. The envelope is one of the standard hotel ones marked E
XCELSIOR
L
IDO
, V
ENEZIA
—but inside is a note typed on buff-colored parchment with no letterhead. It reads:

Liebe Jessica,

I shall assume you have not received any of my messages, for certainly you are too kind to ignore them totally. Please forgive my bad English and my breaking heart. I cannot leave this place without seeing you again. May I come to you, if only in a dream?

Ich Liebe Dich

Wolfgang Schnabel

It is impossible to describe the devastating effect this note has upon me—especially in my delirium and fever. I have totally forgotten the German swain who romanced me in the bar before the Red Cross Gala, and it has certainly never occurred to me that his initials were W.S.!

I feel as if all comfort, all succor, all hope for the future, have been taken away and I am doomed to return to Pacific Palisades to endlessly play tarts in miniseries set in Las Vegas, in which I am flanked by other aging actresses and pursued by mobsters who were once my leading men. I refuse to spend what's left of my life, my gift, my voice, my heart, playing characters even Lance Robbins would not recognize as human.
Meshugga
I may be (what actress is not?), but I would rather die in Venice than wither away in Pacific Palisades, my heart (not to mention my head) shrunken by the roles left to me. I refuse! I rebel! I take Wolfgang Schnabel's note, carefully tear it into little pieces, and throw it, like confetti, down to the beach. The pieces flutter. The
bambini
look up, hoping for autographs. I slam the windows and take to my bed.

So I stayed. I stayed at the Excelsior while I recovered from my fever, and after that I stayed at the Gritti, having mournful drinking bouts with Per in the dark little bar on the first floor. I stayed while Venice emptied of tourists; while the Japanese tour groups (who glide down the Grand Canal to the strains of Neapolitan music in gondolas ranged six abreast) departed again for Tokyo, Nagoya, Kyoto. I stayed while the Cipriani pool grew colder and colder and the English octogenarians fled to London, Oxford, Henley, Uxbridge, Staines, Brighton, Bath; while the
settembrini
ceased their cruising and went home to New York, London, Paris, Key West, San Francisco, East Hampton; while the hardy German hikers took their rucksacks and went back to
Universität
in München, Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg; while the honeymooners (of all nationalities) went home to face Real Life in Cleveland, Sydney, Stuttgart, Sofia, or Stratford; while the Venetians reclaimed Venice.

It grew cold. It was in fact the coldest autumn in a hundred years. Snow came from the Alps and settled. Canals froze. The jollity of Venice in summer—all red-ribboned straw hats and
gelato
in a rainbow of flavors—was banished as Venice became a city where bitter wind whipped through gray and frozen
calli
, and getting warm and dry became life's major quest.

After the Gritti, I moved (to save money) to the Fenice; after the Fenice to a funny little house in Dorsoduro that belonged to a friend of my dear friend Lorelei, the honey-curled Viennese painter who has lived and worked in Venice for twenty-five years. Lorelei was going through a bitter divorce, which occupied much of her energy, but nonetheless, with her characteristic generosity she had found for me a crooked little house on a back canal where the rooms were filled with a variety of odd antiques and Mexican folk art, as well as Braque, Chagall, and Miró drawings, some small Picassos and Dalis, and even a Diego Rivera drawing. The owner was a very old, very beautiful Greek woman painter named Demetra, who flickered in and out of madness (and lived, these days, in a cave in Crete, worshipping the Mother Goddess); and the works of art had been given her by the painters themselves, who were all, at one time or another, her lovers. The house had a haunted feeling about it, and I was glad to move in with my volumes of Shakespeare, my books on Venice, my clothes, my notebooks. I was determined to continue my study of
The Merchant of Venice
and not to lose hope. Having had my fill of hotel life, I was pleased to shop at the Rialto, trudge through the
calli
in the bitter cold (carrying in one hand my string bag full of groceries and in the other my witchy black umbrella).