“Darling, why does it matter so much?”
I smiled apologetically, feeling I’d been overemotional, getting too upset, as women will. “Well, it doesn’t, really.” Wanting
to seal this crack, to make it all as it was.
But I didn’t like what he’d said. I thought, I too will be old one day.
On our way back to the hotel, he must have taken a wrong turn; the street grew narrower, the houses almost meeting overhead.
Washing lines were stretched across the street with washing hanging from them, and we could hear what sounded like a Western
on someone’s television. We came to a dead end, a promontory with water on three sides. Opposite us over the water was a tall,
strange house, each window with a window box, but nothing much grew in them, no flowers, just a few plants, herbs, mostly,
straggling, untidy. There were little plastic windmills stuck in the earth in each window box, like the windmills that children
stick in sand castles, yet they didn’t quite have the cheeriness of toys. They were all yellow but in many different shapes,
a star, a flower, a sickle moon, and others less obvious, serrated, sharp, like parts of a great machine. The shadow of the
house reached out across the water and over to where we stood. Where the sun was shut out, the canal looked different. Without
all the surface flicker and luminescence, you saw how dirty the water was, how full of mud and rubbish.
He had his arm round my shoulder: He felt my hesitation.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I don’t like it here,” I said.
He seemed amused. He pulled me to him and kissed me lightly, sliding his hand under the hem of my skirt, easing a finger up
the inside of my thigh.
Something made me look up. Over his shoulder, I saw a woman right at the top of the house, leaning out to water one of the
window boxes. She paused for a moment, looked down at us with a hard, cold, curious stare, then pulled back into the darkness
inside the house. A cool wind stirred the windmills, so the whole house seemed alive, and the windmills turned like Catherine
wheels, spinning so fast they made new shapes, the serrated circles becoming whole, entire, making a buzzing sound like the
whirring of insect wings. I shivered. And then it passed as suddenly as it had come. We went back to our room, and he took
off my clothes and mane love to me, tying my wrists to the bed with the white silk scarf, and I forgot my feeling of unease.
Afterward, there was music through our window. I went to lean on the windowsill, still drugged and high with sex. A man with
hair down his back and a rucksack covered in badges was sitting by the canal and playing the flute. A gondola drifted past,
and the walls of the canal were bright with the fluid dance of reflected light from the water. And I thought, How can these
things coexist — the life I used to have, and here, all this silk and shimmer, everything silvered, luminous? How can these
things come together in a single life, a single story? I couldn’t reconcile them. It was as though to believe in one world,
you had to disbelieve in the other; as though those other things — my mother, The Poplars, the cruel room with the door panels
covered with brown paper — as though all those things had simply ceased to exist.
I still think back to those moments in our early life together: that moment with the sound of the flute by the Ponte della
Liberta; and the first time we made love, when he put the pendant on me, his gaze so hot and complete, my thirst for his touch.
Yet now, amid the dailiness of caring for the children — all the demands, the practical things, the routine, pleasant lovemaking
— those moments too have receded, as though they too belong to another life.
Chapter 12
W E PUT ON OUR BEST CLOTHES for the hospital: Daisy has her new red denim jacket; I wear my long black coat. In my bag I have a piece of paper on which
I’ve written a list of Daisy’s
I smiled apologetically, feeling I’d been overemotional, getting too upset, as women will. “Well, it doesn’t, really.” Wanting
to seal this crack, to make it all as it was.
But I didn’t like what he’d said. I thought, I too will be old one day.
On our way back to the hotel, he must have taken a wrong turn; the street grew narrower, the houses almost meeting overhead.
Washing lines were stretched across the street with washing hanging from them, and we could hear what sounded like a Western
on someone’s television. We came to a dead end, a promontory with water on three sides. Opposite us over the water was a tall,
strange house, each window with a window box, but nothing much grew in them, no flowers, just a few plants, herbs, mostly,
straggling, untidy. There were little plastic windmills stuck in the earth in each window box, like the windmills that children
stick in sand castles, yet they didn’t quite have the cheeriness of toys. They were all yellow but in many different shapes,
a star, a flower, a sickle moon, and others less obvious, serrated, sharp, like parts of a great machine. The shadow of the
house reached out across the water and over to where we stood. Where the sun was shut out, the canal looked different. Without
all the surface flicker and luminescence, you saw how dirty the water was, how full of mud and rubbish.
He had his arm round my shoulder: He felt my hesitation.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“I don’t like it here,” I said.
He seemed amused. He pulled me to him and kissed me lightly, sliding his hand under the hem of my skirt, easing a finger up
the inside of my thigh.
Something made me look up. Over his shoulder, I saw a woman right at the top of the house, leaning out to water one of the
window boxes. She paused for a moment, looked down at us with a hard, cold, curious stare, then pulled back into the darkness
inside the house. A cool wind stirred the windmills, so the whole house seemed alive, and the windmills turned like Catherine
wheels, spinning so fast they made new shapes, the serrated circles becoming whole, entire, making a buzzing sound like the
whirring of insect wings. I shivered. And then it passed as suddenly as it had come. We went back to our room, and he took
off my clothes and mane love to me, tying my wrists to the bed with the white silk scarf, and I forgot my feeling of unease.
Afterward, there was music through our window. I went to lean on the windowsill, still drugged and high with sex. A man with
hair down his back and a rucksack covered in badges was sitting by the canal and playing the flute. A gondola drifted past,
and the walls of the canal were bright with the fluid dance of reflected light from the water. And I thought, How can these
things coexist — the life I used to have, and here, all this silk and shimmer, everything silvered, luminous? How can these
things come together in a single life, a single story? I couldn’t reconcile them. It was as though to believe in one world,
you had to disbelieve in the other; as though those other things — my mother, The Poplars, the cruel room with the door panels
covered with brown paper — as though all those things had simply ceased to exist.
I still think back to those moments in our early life together: that moment with the sound of the flute by the Ponte della
Liberta; and the first time we made love, when he put the pendant on me, his gaze so hot and complete, my thirst for his touch.
Yet now, amid the dailiness of caring for the children — all the demands, the practical things, the routine, pleasant lovemaking
— those moments too have receded, as though they too belong to another life.
Chapter 12
W E PUT ON OUR BEST CLOTHES for the hospital: Daisy has her new red denim jacket; I wear my long black coat. In my bag I have a piece of paper on which
I’ve written a list of Daisy’s
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