Permanence by Vincent Zandri

us wearing party hats in the small dining room of our apartment. With his fingers, baby ate frosting off the cake before it was cut. That was a birthday I clearly remember as though it were yesterday. And it was. But that was also a birthday that was one whole lifetime ago.
    Now I have a new life.
    Now I am suddenly afraid of what I might find inside this package (an engagement ring). But at the same time, I’m thrilled.
    I open the package.
    This is not an engagement ring. This gift is a tiny, Sterling silver pillbox no larger than a box of wooden matches. I open the pillbox carefully, separating it with my fingernails into two equal halves joined by a hinge. I close it carefully. It is a lovely, delicate box.
    I take a breath of the cool Venetian air.
    I hold doctor, squeeze him. He is very thin. Too thin, perhaps growing thinner as though losing his health. This is the man I see once a week, whether I want to or not. But this is the man I need so that I could not allow him to come here without me. And I’m sure doctor could not come here without me, because doctor loves me.
    I feel my body crushing a portion of the pastry.
    “Happy?” doctor asks. This is the simple question I have not been asked in so many months. The answer I want to relay is simple. I want to say, “Yes.” But the answer I must give is too complicated to speak of. How can I ever be truly happy without baby? How can I ever be truly happy with the knowledge of how baby died? So I do something even simpler. I say nothing. And doctor docs not pursue the issue of happiness. Instead, doctor forces a smile. “Oh my God,” he says. “You almost forgot.”
    “My thirtieth birthday?” I ask.
    “No,” says doctor. “A wish. You forgot to make a wish.”
    Delicate
    Doctor and I share our first meal together ever, at a small trattoria in beautiful, romantic Venice.
    This is really an outdoor cafe located on a long terrace protected by a canvass canopy overhead. We are seated beside a dark, narrow feeder canal that separates us from a row of connected brick and mortar buildings on the other side. We see the backsides of the buildings, their cracked stucco walls and sharply pitched clay tile roofs. Some of these buildings also serve as restaurants and trattorias. From where I sit, looking directly across this narrow canal, I see a man appear. From this distance, I see he is dressed in a white smock and hat. He appears and reappears for only a few moments at a time, through a doorway that leads only to a stone landing and steps running down into the canal.
    I watch the smocked man, intently.
    He dumps pots of food scraps into the canal. The scraps make a slight splash before sinking.
    I turn to doctor. He is watching me, his bearded face suddenly gaunt in the candlelight, his flesh pale behind his beard, his hair thinning. I recognize a distance in doctor’s eyes that suggests something could be on his mind other than our dinner, something other than my presence. Something complicated.
    But I do not pry because it is not my place to pry.
    I am doctor’s patient, after all.
    We drink a house wine that comes to us in pitchers hand-painted with pastel-colored fruit and flowers. I think. Even the wine pitchers are art in Venice. We drink the wine with vigor as though a reward for having made it all the way to romantic Venice. And it is.
    “Here’s to being alive in Venice,” says doctor, lifting his glass high above our metal table, “if only in our minds.”
    “Now that’s a joke only a psychiatrist can get away with.”
    Doctor forces a smile as though agreeing.
    “Here’s to surviving a flight,” I continue, “that should have cost us our lives.” I laugh, touching my glass to doctor’s glass, the glasses clinking. “I mean, whoever booked that flight for us should be made to pay dearly.”
    “Spoken like a true travel agent,” says doctor.
    I drink to our toast, the white wine tasting light, but tangy.
    “Drink as much of this as you