Lovers (35 page)

“Is that barge gone?”

“I promise,” he said, amused.

Gigi opened her eyes and found herself floating on the Grand Canal. It was the most astonishing moment of her entire life. She was in the middle of a bewilderment, a dazzlement, a prism of every soft color, a composition of water and reflections unrivaled in the universe for gaiety and charm and iridescence, but above all for the fact that it simply
is
. She was stricken to the heart by the actual existence of the Grand Canal. She looked around her in speechless awe, feeling as if the speedboat had been transformed into a cloud-craft, confused and enchanted by the vistas of palaces and domed churches and darting water craft, all open to the harmony of pure radiance, the bath of light of the silvery, rosy shell of the treasuring sky.

“I know,” Ben said, and put his hand on her shoulder. “You can never get used to it, no matter how often you come back.”

She couldn’t answer him. It was too much. Tears came into her eyes and traveled down her cheeks. He gave her his handkerchief silently. The
motoscafo
bobbed up and down, moving slowly as it crossed to the center of the widest part of the canal, turned right, and proceeded down the canal until it came to a landing stage of an exceptionally narrow palazzo with a many-windowed, faded, immensely frivolous pink and white stone face. A large, glossy black gondola with green velvet cushions was tied up to a green, white, and black striped pole.

Gigi gave her eyes a final wipe and looked up. “Is this the hotel?”

“Not exactly.”

“Are we landing here?”

“We are.”

“Are we visiting someone?”

“No.”

“Are we spending the night here?”

“Yes.”

“So this must be your own humble place?”

“That’s right.”

“You know, Ben, I’m beginning, after all, to wonder exactly what Billy would have said.”

“Are you sorry you couldn’t ask her?”

Gigi considered for a minute. Finally she said, without answering his question, “Somehow I feel as if I’m even more on vacation than before.”

“How long have you owned your
palazzetto?”
Gigi asked as she and Ben watched the sunset from the deep balcony on the top floor. The interiors powerfully reflected the spirit of Venice without trying in vain to re-create it faithfully. It was, in a highly sophisticated sense, a deliberate folly. The rooms, tall and narrow and only two to each floor, had been intentionally underdecorated, the polished floors left largely bare, the fabrics simple, in order to highlight the view of the Grand Canal, visible from every window. Yet, here and there, great gilded mirrors and a few extraordinary pieces of furniture, much of it inlaid in mother-of-pearl or inspired by the shape of shells, evoked far more decorative and eccentric centuries during which Venetians had filled their homes with loot from the entire known world.

Ben’s room, balcony, and bath occupied the top floor of the palazzo, and the guest suite took up the floor beneath; the second floor, with the highest ceilings of them all, had been turned into a salon-library on the garden side and a dining room on the canal side. The pantry, kitchen, and servants’ quarters were all on the first floor. All the windows at the back of the palazzo looked out on a tiny dream
of a wisteria-wreathed garden filled with beds of miniature white oleander trees shaped into topiary balls, bordered by pink geraniums. The walls of the garden were latticed by climbing honeysuckle. The narrow house, which Ben told her Venetians insisted on calling a
palazzo
, although it was only a small palace, a
palazzetto
, made Gigi feel as if she were in a stage set that possessed all the amenities for living, a contemporary sketch based on a thousand years of history.

“About ten years,” he told her. “I got a tip that it might possibly be for sale from a close friend, a fellow member of the Save Venice Committee, and I bought it sight unseen the same day … the same hour. It was in terrible shape, it took about three years to make the place habitable. I kept flying over for the weekend to check it out, and each time I found things in more confusion than before, with scaffolding and green canvas completely covering the façade, and the architect and contractor screaming at each other. I didn’t know what I’d bought. Then one day I came and found that the scaffolding had disappeared, I could see the stonework for the first time, there wasn’t a leak or a damp spot anywhere, an elevator had been installed, the floors and walls had been restored, and even the stove in the new kitchen was working.”

“How long did you stay?”

“I had to leave for New York the next day,” Ben said ruefully.

“You mean you only spent one night here?” Gigi was incredulous.

“Not even that. The place was empty, there wasn’t so much as a sleeping bag or a bottle of wine. I spent the night across the canal, over there to the right, at the Gritti. I was awake till dawn, hanging out of the window looking longingly at my empty
palazzetto
like a disappointed lover.”

“What did you do next?” She was enthralled by a Ben Winthrop she hadn’t known existed.

“Before I left the next morning I hired a decorator, hired a caretaker and his wife, arranged to install them in
their own apartment on the first floor, and the next time I came I gave them a day’s warning and stayed for an entire week. That’s when I bought the motorboat and hired Giuseppe, the captain. It’s not the only way to get around, but it’s the most convenient.”

“How much time a year do you spend here?”

“Almost a month, off and on, in short visits, whenever I have time.”

“I just don’t get it,” Gigi said, shaking her head in puzzlement. “Why do you need to keep a whole establishment running when you’re here so seldom?”

“I don’t need it,” Ben said, “I don’t need it at all, but
I want it
. And it’s worth it to me because it’s a piece of Venice. I own part of the place that makes me happiest in all the world.
If I could, I’d own all of it.”

“So just … being here … staying in a hotel wouldn’t be enough?”

“Never,” Ben said, looking across the canal to the lights illuminating the Byzantine domes, nine hundred years old, of St. Mark’s Basilica.
“Never.”

He turned to Gigi and spoke intently. “It’s the fashion to say that Venice isn’t what it used to be, that it’s merely one vast, decaying museum, only a sight for badgered tourists. For hundreds of years, writers have written tens of thousands of words lamenting the disappearance of the glory of Venice. They complain that there are no more Doges, they moan that Napoleon chopped down the trees in the Piazza San Marco, they’re personally offended that Byron and Casanova aren’t roaming the streets. It’s as stupid as wishing you lived in the good old days of Elizabeth the First. Why didn’t those writers just
use their eyes
, for God’s sake, just walk across the Rialto and pinch the vegetables, have a coffee at Florian’s or a drink at Quadri’s, gossip, laugh at the pigeons, and enjoy themselves as the Venetians always have? Why couldn’t they forget that this place is
Venice
, with all the impossibly romantic expectations that word arouses, and simply love it for itself, its unique, imperfect self? Today those carping writers are all
dead and Venice is still the undisputed glory and wonder of Western civilization—still
alive.”

Gigi looked at him in amazement. Ben was exalted, transfigured. No trace remained of the businessman who could observe a stretch of green fields and acres of woods and see the perfect location for a mall.

“Signor Ben?” said a woman’s voice. The caretaker’s wife had appeared, preceded by a small knock. “The gondolier wants to know if you require him tonight.”

“Ask him to wait, please, Maria.”

“I suppose a full-time gondolier comes with the territory,” Gigi observed.

“Don’t get carried away,” Ben laughed. “I have my choice—either my apartment in New York, my ski lodge in Klosters, and my little place in Venice, my jet, and my boat—
or
a full-time gondolier.”

“You mean you had to draw the line somewhere?”

“We’re not talking about drawing the line, we’re talking about either one or the others … all the others. The gondolier works by the hour.”

“Then I’d better get dressed,” Gigi said, reluctant to stop looking at the marvels revealed by the darkness, which, as it fell and the moon rose, made Venice grow younger by the minute. “His meter’s running.”

She’d had no idea of how frightfully rich Ben was, jet, palazzo, shopping malls and all, Gigi thought, until he’d mentioned the gondolier. He wasn’t joking about employing the man on an hourly basis. You had to be rich far, far beyond rich, like Billy, to cherish one meaningless little economy. Billy insisted that her chefs’ assistants use every roll of kitchen paper down to the very last sheet that clung to the brown-paper holder. It made her feel real—earthy, sensible, reassuringly normal—she’d once admitted.

Trying to hurry, Gigi realized that when she’d packed she’d clearly been in some sort of fugue state, as some shrinks would say, or, popularly speaking, out of her mind. There was nothing there, in all the crumpled bits and
pieces she’d snatched out of her closet, that could be combined except a plain skinny black sweater, a black floor-length skirt, a wide black belt, and a pair of jet earrings. She put them on and surveyed the result with dismay. Her first night in Venice, and she looked ready for a black-tie funeral.

Rummaging through her suitcases in a final hopeless search, Gigi came across a small packet wrapped in tissue paper that Billy had given her. She pulled out a many-times-folded, tiny fabric bundle. She had to keep unfolding it seven separate times before she could spread it all out on the bed, a huge triangle of black net, flecked in a thousand places with gold threads embroidered into tiny squares and trimmed on all three sides with eight inches of scalloped gold lace. It was the scarf of a Geoffrey Beene evening dress that Billy had worn several times. There wasn’t a wrinkle in the entire marvelous spill of it.

Excitedly, Gigi experimented with it. It worked as a mantilla, it worked as a sash, it worked as a cape or a sarong, a serape or a blouse. If you had the right underwear, it could work as a short strapless evening dress. But it worked best as Geoffrey Beene had planned, as a scarf simply
flung
—for that was the only right way to put it on—around her shoulders.

Gigi put on two more coats of mascara, applied fresh lip gloss, brushed her hair until it fairly spun off her head, flung the scarf over her sweater, and ventured forth, Venetian to the tips of her black velvet bedroom slippers, for she had even forgotten her evening shoes.

“What about all the people waiting for me in New York?” Gigi asked Ben the next morning, as they sat on yellow and green wicker chairs in the sun in front of Florian’s and listened to the old musical comedy tunes played by the band in front of the café next door.

“I postponed them all. They won’t expect you till you let them know you’re on your way.”

“What about the agency? What if they call me at the hotel I’m supposed to be staying in?”

“My secretary will field all calls and telex you here, there’s a telex in my dressing room. You can dial direct back to California, nobody will know the difference.”

“So if you push me in the canal, and I drown and disappear, it will be one of the unsolved mysteries of all time.”

“I absolutely adore the joyous way your mind works.” He grinned at her. She was wearing some of the new clothes she’d bought at the Versace, Valentino, and Krizia boutiques, with the rest filling shopping bags at her feet. Venice, the heart of it, was, among other things, Ben thought, the world’s first and most beautiful shopping mall, and the men who’d paid for it had been the greatest merchants the world had ever known.

“There was this scary English movie …” Gigi’s voice trailed off. That movie had been about another sinister, gloomy Venice, not this miracle of April sun and little children running around on the marble pavement, with pigeons eating out of their hands and colors like a rippling pool playing over the façade of St. Mark’s, and the four bronze horses who pranced before it and winged lions everywhere she looked and the sound of bells always in the air.

“How long are we staying?” she asked.

“As long as you like. It’s still only April now … the high season doesn’t end till mid-October, and some people prefer Venice out of season. They say winter is the time to get to know Venice like the Venetians.”

“Be serious. I know how busy you are.”

“Don’t ask me to be serious today,” Ben said, “I’m much, much too happy.”

“Because you’re in Venice?”

“Because I’m in Venice, because the band at the café always plays the music I like, because we’re going to the Accademia after lunch at the Danieli roof garden to see exactly one picture, my favorite Giorgione—you can look at it for as long as you like, for hours if that’s your pleasure,
but then we’re getting the hell out of there because I’m following my Rule of One about how to live in Venice—every day you have to see one work of art,
only
one, spend at least an hour on the water, eat at least one fine meal, and buy one thing, it doesn’t matter what. I’m happy to be here with a friend who’s totally in my power because she can’t go anywhere without me or she’d get lost; because there’s polo at the Lido this afternoon if we’re in the mood; because there weren’t any telexes this morning; because they’ve started to play ‘Tales of the Vienna Woods,’ which always makes me feel like dancing—”

Ben took Gigi’s hands, lifted her to her feet, and waltzed her off across the Piazza San Marco, around and around, scattering the pigeons and delighting the children and amusing the waiters and scandalizing the tourists and finally convincing the musicians that the new season had truly begun.

The next three days were spent according to Ben’s Rule of One, and by the time they were over, Gigi felt she knew the city better than if she’d had a great guidebook and had spent every minute dutifully following its recommendations of the most important things to do and see. She had learned in her bones the essential rhythm of the city, and she knew the euphoria of Venice would always be there for her now, retrievable at will, no matter where she was or how old she grew.