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

everything.”
    She seems unconvinced, as does Leonardo.
    â€œThere is an old Italian proverb,” says Leonardo, “two who sleep together conspire even in their dreams.”
    Gaetano scoffs: “I never heard of such a proverb. You invent it, amico mio .”
    Leonardo shrugs, twitches, then puts his arm around my shoulders. “Well, Jessica, what do you say? Benefit of doubt? I will give you that.”
    â€œThanks,” I say, my blood boiling. I want to shout: But the bastard is not my lover! You insult my taste! However, I seem to have forfeited that right. Discretion is the better part of valor, I think, biting my tongue; and Leonardo, now forgiving, leads me toward another party in another palazzo.
    This palazzo (whose name I am not told) has been gutted inside and redone in the starkest modern style. A pure white staircase—banisterless, and reminiscent of the inside of a nautilus shell—leads upstairs from the flowering courtyard to the piano nobile , which is pure white, hung with glassy black Venetian lamps in odd mushrooming shapes, has black leather furniture, white marble floors, and walls covered with white linen. The window shades are huge white linen sails, like the sails of Venetian galleys, and the paintings hung about the room represent a fortune spent at Sothebys: Picassos, Braques, Miros, Rousseaus, even a few Monets and Manets, Renoirs and Matisses. This palazzo is, in short, the modern equivalent of Contessa Venier’s.
    â€œIt is done by Scarpa,” says Leonardo, knowingly.
    â€œBeautiful,” I say, absorbing the fact that the owners, whoever they are, are very rich and very chic. They are also partial to the same Picassos that move me most—the saltimbanques and strolling players—those acrobats about whom Rilke wrote:
    But tell me, who are then, these wanderers, even more
    transient than we ourselves, who from their earliest days
    are savagely wrung out
    by a never-satisfied will (for whose sake)? Yet it wrings them,
    bends them, twists them, swings them and flings them
    and catches them again; and falling as if through oiled
    slippery air, they land
    on the threadbare carpet, worn constantly thinner
    by their perpetual leaping, this carpet that is lost
    in infinite space…
    Of course, they move me because they are myself. I, too, am a strolling player, wandering through time, a vagabond, a saltimbanque of sorts. But the people at the party are also strolling players, the same strolling players as those at the other party. Wandering out to the balcony where the races can still be seen along the Canalozzo, I turn and see, mingling in the crowded salon, Jackie, Paloma, Arianna, Gore, Tina, and company. Can Grisha be far behind? The party has merely moved from one palazzo to another. And again the Beautiful People are somehow cut off from the common folk of Venice whose festa this is. They might as well be painted figures on the wall, or masqueraders dressed for a costume ball. They inhabit one Venice, the street people another.
    â€œJessichka! Jessichka!” comes the call of Grisha Krylov, and at once I start to flee down the shell-shaped stair. But Leonardo sees him too, and before a word is spoken flings a slim, octagonal flute of prosecco in his face.
    â€œPig! Cochon! Tiy sveenya! ” Grisha screams, punching poor Leonardo in the nose. Down he goes for the count, and I take off, making good my escape.
    More headlines for tomorrow, I think—or maybe not. At any rate, I’m safer in the streets than with the glitterati among the Picassos. Funny, I think, how all these starving painters’ paintings are now the ultimate status symbols, conferring greater proof of wealth than gold, emeralds, private islands, or ocean-going yachts. It is the artists who make the true value of the world, though at times they may have to starve to do it. They are like earthworms, turning up the soil so things can grow, eating dirt so that the rest