Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice by Erica Jong Page A

bourgeois of this most bourgeois of cities (despite its patrician past, and reputation) is, in fact, the true Venice (if there is such a thing as one true Venice). They are people with whom Shakespeare—if indeed he were here—would be very much at home, for he knew their like in London. They were his audience, his kinsmen, his friends.
    I wander through the calli , along the fondamenta , through the campi of this city with the true Venetians on this their day of days, but nowhere do I find the young Earl of Southampton again (for that is who I presume he is). At one point I turn a corner into a rio terrá , a little filled-in street, and I think I see him, but it proves after all to be a slim, young American girl with long, blonde hair, an embroidered peasant blouse from Yugoslavia, loose black velour pantaloons, and pale tan ballerina flats on her slender feet. Perhaps it was she all along and I was merely hallucinating.
    For I am not much more certain of my own sanity these days than I am of Björn’s. I am feverishly suggestible in the best of times, and all these hallucinatory movies, my nightly immersion in Shakespearean studies, the anniversary of my mother’s death, missing Antonia, these crazy crowds, these press conferences—not to mention the hot pursuit of Grisha Krylov—may have addled my already exhausted brain. Anyway, whenever I have been pressed to the breaking point in my life, I have generally retreated into the past. At Chapin I fell in love with ancient Greece and Shakespeare’s sonnets, in college with Shakespeare’s heroines. At the worst of times in California, when the frenzied high school competitiveness (I have a better car than yours, a better house than yours, a better body than yours) of the film industry began to get to me, I would take off somewhere, anywhere, and play Shakespeare. One gig, no matter how obscure or badly paid, with a real company of actors who all loved word-drunk Will as much as I did, and I would feel sane again, centered again. For I would know that it was the work that mattered, the word that mattered, and not who had the best deal, the best agent, the best car, the best house, the best body. So he had been my salvation many a time, and if ever I met him (even in a dream), I would want to repay that debt. Somehow.
    The regatanti and regatante race on the Grand Canal (or Canalozzo, as the Venetians call it in their curious dialect), and I am tossed about the city on the tide of the crowd. At one point I find myself in a certain campo , crisscrossed by screaming Venetians, and there who should I run into but a passel of my fellow jurists—Carlos Armada and his girlfriend; Leonardo da Leone and his; Benjamin Gabriel Gimpel and his wife; Gaetano Manuzio; his wife, Elisabetta; and his mistress, Barbara. (Elisabetta and Barbara are walking arm in arm, one pondering the paving stones, the other examining the sky.)
    â€œ Ciao, Jessica!” waves Gaetano gaily.
    Leonardo just scowls.
    â€œI’m very cross with you, Signorina Pruitt,” he says formally.
    Now, whenever anyone says they are cross with me, I cringe—as if I were still in kindergarten. In fact, I seem to fall forty years back through the rabbit hole of time and find myself in kindergarten again, with no escape in sight.
    â€œWhy cross with me?” I ask.
    â€œBecause of your Soviet friend and his shenanigans,” says Leonardo.
    â€œBut I had nothing to do with that ,” I say. “In fact, I strenuously disapproved. I lobbied for sanity and restraint—but, alas, too late. He had already rallied the press around him.”
    Carlos springs to my defense. “It’s true,” he says, “ verissimo . Jessica was not consulted in this folie , this I know. It was a solitary folly, not a folie à deux .”
    â€œAnd how do you know?” asks his girlfriend suspiciously.
    â€œBecause, tesoro , I am a poet. Poets know