Are We There Yet? (12 page)

“Hello again,” he says.

She turns to him and looks momentarily surprised. Not displeased. But surprised.

“Hello,” she says. “Isn't this wonderful?”

He looks back over the square.

“Absolutely.”

“It makes me want to—”

“—fly?”

Julia laughs. “Yes! Exactly! How did you know what I was going to say?”

And the answer is:
Because I was going to say the same thing.

Elijah feels the electric rush that comes when coincidence turns into coinciding. He feels nervous and comfortable, disbelieving and amazed.

He does not need to know what is happening in order to know something is happening.

“Where are you from?” he asks.

“Toronto,” she replies, her inflections now explained.

“Have you been here long?”

“No. You?”

“No.”

They are not looking at each other. Instead, they stare out into the square, each extremely aware of the other's every breath, every move.

This doesn't make sense
, he thinks.

Her arm brushes his, and when she turns to see him, loose strands of her short hair blow over her eyes.

“I'm going to Florence,” he says.

And she says, “I am, too.”

Since Danny can stand Elijah's driving even less than Elijah can stand Danny's, it is Danny who drives the rent-a-car. Within five minutes, they are lost on a road where it's prolongedly impossible to make a U-turn.In response, Danny swears like a drag queen with a broken heel as Elijah bends and folds the map into something approaching origami.

It is not a good moment.

Danny swerves through the lanes, dodging the European cars that whiz by at incomprehensible speeds. Elijah wonders how guilty his parents will feel when both their sons get trapped in a fiery wreck in the middle of a prepaid vacation.

We are going to die
, Elijah genuinely thinks.
Or, at the very least, we are going to kill a cyclist.

He takes some comfort in the fact that the stop signs still read STOP.

Eventually, the road they're on turns into the road they had meant to get on in the first place. Once on the highway, Danny relaxes behind the wheel. Elijah puts a CD in the stereo—Paul Simon's
Graceland
, something they can agree upon.

Once the music is in, Elijah decides to close his eyes. If he can't see, he won't be scared.

He thinks of Julia and the hour they'd managed to steal before Elijah had to leave Venice. A spare cafe hour of signals and conversation, sharing the arcane facts of their lives, touching upon the founding of Rhode Island and the temperature of a Toronto summer day. Finally, he'd had to leave, their goodbye drawn out over a number of goodbyes and one-last-things to
say. He didn't know where he'd be staying in Florence, but she had been able to write down the name of her
pensione
.He promised to be there as soon as she arrived.

Danny had not been happy when Elijah returned so late. When Danny demanded to know why he was so tardy (such a schoolteacher word), Elijah disguised Julia in a fit of mumbles and evasions, saying quite simply that he'd been lost. Danny could believe this easily enough.

Now they are making up for Elijah's delay, as Danny fulfills all of his test-drive fantasies. Even with his eyes closed and the music playing, Elijah can sense the impatient speed. There are two kinds of drivers, he thinks: those who see the world around the road, and those who fixate on the road itself.

We'll end up where we want to be. We always do.

Elijah reclines in the melody of “Under African Skies” and thinks once more of Julia. The promise of Florence has become the promise of their next encounter. But unlike Danny, he is not in a rush. He wants to feel the nervous sweetness of expectation, if only for a little while longer.

“Open your eyes.”

Elijah hears Danny's voice and wants to reject it. He's been safely, happily asleep, dreaming of a gondolier who sings love songs to a maiden on a bridge. Surely, Danny doesn't need to wake him. Surely, he can read his own map. Why can't he leave Elijah to his reverie?

“I mean it. Open your eyes.”

Elijah stirs and groans. He opens his eyes and sees the plastic wood of the dashboard.
Graceland
has now played twice around.

Danny smiles in amusement and says, “Look outside.”

Elijah turns to the window and is startled straight into joy. A field of sunflowers surrounds the road, devout yellow heads bent, an oceanic congregation. Elijah cannot see beyond them. There are so many, and they are all so bright. Sunflowers as far as the eye can see.

“I wonder,” Danny says, “are sunflowers called sunflowers because they look like the sun, or because they follow the sun? Either one would be a perfectly good explanation, and there are so few things that deserve two perfectly good explanations.”

The sunflowers are retreating now—Elijah turns back to look at them, his wonder nearly dreamlike in its intensity and disbelief. He feels a strange gratitude toward his brother, for he knows he could have slept through the whole thing.

So instead of answering Danny's question, he says, “I met a girl named Julia in Venice.”And he tells a little bit of the story. Not the good parts. But enough to let Danny know what's going on.

A girl
, Danny thinks.
Elijah has met a girl.

He doesn't know how he feels about this.

Florence is not quite what Danny or Elijah had been expecting. Venice, in many ways, has misled them into thinking that the past can remain fully intact. And yet here is Florence, a city of the past with a city of the present imposed right atop it. (The future is nowhere to be found.) Benettons grow in the cracks between cathedrals. Moped-clad citizens run on caffeinated fumes. Crosswalks are suddenly necessary. Ghettoblaster teenagers skateboard past multinational newsstands. The Arno River shrugs by.

For a moment, traffic makes Florence seem like anywhere else. As Danny curses and stops and starts and struggles for direction, Elijah takes drive-by snapshots of the city and its contradictions. Venice was a museum city; Florence is a city with museums. There is, Elijah thinks, a big spiritual difference between the two.

Danny and Elijah are staying a little outside the city, at the Excelsior on the Piazza Ognissanti. There is a message waiting for them at the desk. Elijah's heart lifts when he sees the envelope, wondering how Julia could have known.

But the message is from Mr. and Mrs. Silver—
Hoping you're having a lovely time!
—signed with
Much Love
. Danny grumbles a little (he still has not entirely forgiven his parents' trickery) and hands Elijah the note. The porter brings their bags to the room, and they immediately depart. (Elijah takes a piece of the hotel stationery with him, just so he'll know where he's staying.)

Elijah wants to track Julia down immediately. But Danny is so antsy that he's willing to forgo his afternoon nap. This day is
not supposed to be a Transportation Day—it is supposed to be a Florence Day, and Danny is willing to take the necessary steps to see it before sundown.

They taxi to the center of the city in the most rushed hour of the day. Danny is reminded of home—men with their leather briefcases jostle down the sidewalk, exuding a barely concealed hostility. A woman with a stroller crosses against traffic; horns blare in response.

“Where have you been?” the taxi driver asks. “Where are you going?”

Danny looks down and notices Elijah's shoes are untied.

“You'd better tie them,” he says.

Elijah scowls and makes a double knot.

The driver nods and turns up the radio.

Elijah stares out the window, somehow expecting Julia to be there, waving.

The Duomo is closed, so Elijah and Danny must be content with walking around its brilliantly traceable exterior.

“Not bad, for a church,” Danny says. Elijah is elsewhere.

“Where's she staying?” Danny asks.

“Here,” Elijah replies, pulling out an old bank receipt with an address written in red ink on the back.

“Then I guess we'd better go there and ask her to dinner.”

It is, by all means, an awkward situation. Because Elijah has no intention of sharing his time with anyone but Julia. But at the same time, he must be grateful for his brother's gesture. As they wait in the lobby for Julia to appear, Elijah tries to conjure somewhere else for Danny to go. But it's no use…for now.

The elevator teasingly discharges passengers who are markedly not Julia. Danny laughs to himself as they disembark, imagining that one of the sixtysomething dowagers is the woman for whom Elijah has so obviously fallen. He almost doesn't notice when Julia arrives. It's from Elijah's beaming that Danny can tell.

So this is Julia
, he thinks. She isn't really attractive—rather boyish, with her hair so short and no make-up. No breasts to speak of. In fact, no real curves of any kind. And what is a girl without curves if not, well, a boy? Danny is confounded by his brother's choice.

“Julia, this is my brother, Danny. Danny, this is Julia.” She doesn't have a label yet. She is just Julia.