Louisa Meets Bear (14 page)

Lena raises her index finger to beckon the waiter. “
Vorrei un caffè macchiato caldo
,” she says in her excellent Italian. The waiter wipes off their outdoor table and scribbles on his pad. He seems to register nothing about them, and Richard is certain if they were to return in twenty minutes, he would again wipe their table without a flicker of recognition. This is part of what Lena abhors about Venice—that two centuries in which the city's major commerce has been displaying its rotting facades have left an insurmountable gulf between the Venetians and the foreigners upon whom they depend.

Richard watches as Lena breaks off a piece of bread, picks up a butter knife, and then puts them both down. After nineteen years of marriage, he knows she is struggling not to gobble the entire basket of bread, all of it eaten so quickly that afterward she will stare miserably at the remaining crumbs and say she hardly tasted a calorie. She taps the table with the butter knife. “This city,” she says, “it's like watching an aging call girl decked out in garb even she knows looks ridiculous.”

Richard resists the impulse to grab Lena's wrist and say,
Stop, you're making it worse
, it's only one day, Cubby's an old friend, Brianna will enjoy riding the vaporettos. Instead, knowing how Lena likes setting up the verbal trap and then watching her opponent take the bait, he says, “So that makes us the johns?”

Lena smiles—the smile that Richard thinks of as her shy-arrogant smile, her pleasure at her own intellect overtaking her usual reticence. Were Lena not so consumed with a torrent of black feelings, she might jab his arm and say,
Ahhh, I should have been the lawyer instead of a hospital administrator,
to which Richard would reply,
Absolutely, my dear. And I should have stayed in Eureka and run the biggest dry-cleaning establishment in the county,
to which Lena would retort,
You mean the only.

Again, Lena reaches for the bread and then withdraws her hand. “It's been nearly half an hour. Where the hell is she?”

Richard turns his metal chair so he can see the archway through which Brianna should have come. Two backpacking students tear off chunks of bread while they examine a map. Yesterday, on the train from Milan, Richard and Brianna had studied maps of the city while Lena read a catalogue from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence—a missive, Richard knew, directed at him to indicate Lena's refusal to participate in the planning for the day in Venice.

Despite Richard's imposing paunch about which skinny Lena and athletic Brianna tease him mercilessly, he sports the most sensitive stomach of the three of them. When, an hour out of Milan, Brianna pulled from her shoulder bag a traveling backgammon set and asked Lena, “Mom, be a team with me against Dad,” and Lena coolly refused, Richard had felt his stomach clench and a cramp take hold in his lower abdomen. Although he knew that Lena's ill humor had nothing to do with Brianna and that most mothers and fifteen-year-old daughters oscillate between distance and fireworks (last night, when Brianna wanted to wear her black mini-mini skirt as opposed to her black regular mini out to dinner and Lena banned the mini-mini for the duration of the trip, there were fireworks), he has never overcome his profound nervousness when Lena expresses irritation with Brianna.

At these times, when each side of the triangle that Lena, Brianna, and he form seems charged with high voltage, Richard feels acutely aware that Brianna—who matches Lena's pale fragility point by point with a robust, muscular beauty—is not their flesh and blood. At two days, when they first got her, Brianna's olive skin had looked lush against Lena's white hands. At eight, her firm, round arms had stopped in wrists already wider than Lena's; by twelve, she had towered four inches over her mother. Last night, photographing his wife and daughter on the Rialto Bridge, Richard had been struck how, from a distance, Brianna, with her broad shoulders and large breasts, looked like the parent; not until he zoomed the lens in close did the perfection of Brianna's skin and the still-unfocused quality to her eyes, as though she is not yet quite hatched, make the age relations clear.

“Where did you tell Cubby we would meet him?” Lena asks.

“At Harry's Bar, at noon. I thought we could show Brianna the islands—make a tour of Murano, Burano, and Torcello. Cubby's probably never been farther than the Campanile.”

“Which means he'll be there at two.” Lena breaks off another piece of bread. This time she has it nearly in her mouth before she hurls it at a pigeon skirting the canal wall.

On the eve of their departure, Cubby had called from Dallas, presumably to discuss some legal snafu concerning his divorce but, Richard thought, desperate-sounding in his insistence that he would meet them in Venice. Richard had, of course, anticipated that Lena would be annoyed. In the moment before saying yes, he had not, however, added up the pieces: that for Lena, rerouting their meticulously planned trip to Florence (Lena never does anything that isn't meticulously planned) to meet Cubby, who she claims is the only man she knows who has reached the age of forty without developing a single virtue, in Venice, a city she despises, would be intolerable.

“It's twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours out of our vacation so I can give my college roommate a pat on the back before his divorce goes through.”

“It galls me that you jump through hoops for him. Is there anything, other than the fact that he's going to inherit fifteen million dollars, that is interesting about Cubby?”

Richard sighs. He and Lena have had this conversation countless times. On each occasion, he has explained to Lena that his attachment to Cubby has nothing to do with Cubby's money—that it has to do with their freshman year rooming together at Yale, with their weekend visits to Trinity College where they both lost their virginity on the same night with the same girl, with the trip they made together cross-country the following summer during which the car was stolen and they were held up at knifepoint in Cheyenne and Cubby never let on that he'd flunked two classes and wouldn't be returning to Yale in the fall. To Richard, reared on a diet of caution by his father (always worried about bills, about taxes, about slick roads and tire treads and worn-out refrigerator coils, about what his dry-cleaning customers might think), Cubby had seemed fearless—undaunted by challenges, liberated from concerns about the mundane, from concerns about what Richard's father always referred to as
consequences
. For Cubby, bones could be set, dented front ends pounded smooth.

Whereas Richard now usually negotiates with ease—times and places, which restaurant, what weekend—with Cubby, whose generosity seems free of inhibition and the alloys of calculation, Richard has always felt reluctant to refuse a request. With someone who would literally give away the car he is driving (while in law school, Richard had admired a red Triumph Cubby had bought on a whim; “Take it,” Cubby said, punching Richard's arm. “You know what a lousy driver I am. You're doing me a favor”), how could he say no for less than dire reasons? This, of course, only further enrages Lena, who sees Cubby's guilelessness as part of his unquestioned privilege. “Yes, it's great that Cubby's so generous, but it's nothing for him to give you a car. For him, it's of no more significance than my offering the plumber a cup of coffee. But in return, you feel like you have no right to ever have a say. It's like he's the benevolent monarch and we're supposed to be the loyal serfs.”

Richard had been pained to realize that Lena had accurately diagnosed the problem. This time, he hardly had the phone receiver back in the cradle after having agreed to meet Cubby in Venice before his neck muscles gripped and he realized he'd done it again—inflamed Lena's view that he is a coward with Cubby. In the two days since, Lena's anger has moved through its characteristic phases: from a silent but palpable rage to yesterday's brittle politeness to this morning's tentative but still distant banter. Now Lena raises a hand over her head. Catching the waiter's eye, she points at her empty coffee cup.

“I know. I know. I should have talked with you first. I should have suggested he come to Florence. I got swept up in feeling sorry for him. He seemed so excited about the idea of Venice, I didn't have the heart to say no.”

Once he's said it, Richard senses that he's made a miscalculation, that Lena is not ready to discuss the incident any further.

“If she comes down with that skirt on, I'm going to kill her.”

Then Richard gets it. This is Lena's revenge for Cubby: she'll torment him by fighting with Brianna. “Please, Lena,” he blurts. “
Don't
.”

He is taken aback by how shaky his voice sounds, by the strength of his reaction—as though the timelessness of the city has erased fourteen years.

Lena's eyes contract and then fill with tears. She winces and Richard realizes that she's been unaware of what she has been doing. He imagines Lena's brain clicking as she surveys the events of the past day, feels guilty to have thought Lena would purposefully wound him by hurting Brianna. She takes his hand between her own two and lifts it to her lips.

She murmurs into his fingers. Richard reaches over and kisses her lowered forehead. “Forgive me,” she whispers.

Lena lets go of his hand and dabs at her eyes with a napkin. “There she is,” she says.

Looking over his shoulder, Richard can see Brianna wending her way toward them. Dressed in black leggings and an oversized T-shirt, her thick hair falling loose over her shoulders, she looks like a Thoroughbred horse with strong, well-defined limbs. Richard watches while the vaporetto ticket man turns to get a better view of his daughter.

When she reaches their table, Brianna gives them a big smile. She kisses Lena and then laughs as she wets her finger in her mouth and rubs at the smudge of lipstick left on Lena's cheek. “Spare me,” Richard jokes, backing away from Brianna's brightly colored lips.

Brianna gobbles hungrily on the bread and takes a long gulp from Lena's water glass. “Cubby called,” she says. “He missed the flight from Rome but he's going to take one this afternoon. He said he'll call us at the hotel around six to make a dinner plan.”

Richard braces himself for a torrent of I-told-you-so's. When Lena remains silent, he steals a glance in her direction. In return, Lena flashes him the second of her shy-arrogant smiles for the day—more pleased, Richard sees, to have been so easily vindicated about Cubby than angered by Cubby having missed his plane. Relieved to not discuss Cubby in front of Brianna, Richard realizes that Lena is not going to comment: she considers it beneath her to land such an easy blow.

Lena pushes back her chair and strikes her La Principessa pose.

*   *   *

It's Lena who suggests that they go ahead with the plan to visit Murano. Richard knows that this is, in part, a ploy to keep them out of the Piazza San Marco with its associations to her father, Guy, and the three summers they lived nearby while he worked on his biography of Canaletto. Now Lena views Canaletto as plebeian (“Quotidian!” she once neighed), her father's interest in Canaletto flowing from the same character eddy that had led him to Frankie, the library cataloguer for whom he left Lena's mother, Isobel, by then diabetic and obese with an unpleasant odor that emanated from her skin, three months before Lena and Richard were to be married.

Although Lena has not been able to excise her childhood love for Italy, she has funneled it into a passion for Florence and Tuscany, dismissing as crude anything that came before or after the Renaissance—Canaletto, St. Mark's (referred to by Lena as
that ode to the Byzantine barbaric
), and most of Venice relegated to the ash heap. From the venom with which Lena delivers her proclamations, Richard can detect the extraordinary effort it has taken her to destroy the sense of wonder she once felt about this city under siege from the sea, its palaces and churches decorated with the plunder of the East. Last night, watching Brianna, mesmerized as they headed south to the hotel by gondola, Richard could only extrapolate from Brianna's glazed fascination, from the way she clutched his arm, how Lena, so much more high-strung, must have first experienced this place under Guy's tutelage.

Even at twenty-four, Richard had felt transfixed by Guy. The first time Lena took him to her parents' house, Guy had given Richard a tour of the paintings that lined the walls. They'd paused in front of a Canaletto reproduction in Guy's study with its alphabetized ceiling-to-floor library of books. Guy pointed to a tiny round sign in the painting that marked the same Hotel Sturion where he, Isobel, and Lena had lived the summer Lena turned ten. In Richard's own parents' home, there had been one bookshelf that held a set of
World Book
encyclopedias, the King James Bible, the telephone book, and a dozen or so best sellers acquired over the years as Christmas gifts from his father's sister, who belonged to a mail-order club. Except for a painting of an oceangoing sailboat that hung over the living room couch and a deer's head mounted in the basement rec room, the walls of his parents' home had been bare.

At Murano, they get off the vaporetto. Lena dodges the guides hawking tours of the glassworks and then ducks inside one of the shops that line the main street to look at a blue glass bowl she's spotted in the window. Richard holds up a finger, signaling he'll be back in an hour, and Lena makes a cross with two of her own, meaning make it half an hour. Richard nods, and Lena smiles in return, her mood softened, he senses, by the salty air and the glimmer of sun now pushing through the clouds.

He takes Brianna's arm, leading her away from the commercial bustle and toward the church of San Donato. Tomorrow and during most of their first week in Florence, he will be occupied with lawyers representing the Swiss and Italian bankers he is trying to interest in financing an electric power plant outside Nairobi. Lena will attempt to get Brianna to spend as many days in the Uffizi Gallery as Brianna can tolerate while Lena raves about the transcendent qualities of Botticelli and Raphael, unaware, Richard thinks, of how like Guy she sounds. In exchange, Lena has promised Brianna that she'll buy her a pair of ankle-high Italian boots (though in private she has worried to Richard that the Italian footwear won't come in Brianna's size). When Richard is done with his business, they'll rent a car and spend a week touring the Tuscan hills to the east and the Chianti district to the south.