Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [110]
And then, suddenly, amid all these old standbys, there is a new face.
He swims up to me through the room of familiar undersea life, a merman, fluid in his movements, slender in his white linen shirt and beige linen slacks, smiling with a slightly mocking smile, his cheekbones slanted like Pan’s, his eyes dark green flecked with light gold, silver, platinum, his tousled blackish curls like a young Bacchus’, and his ears, I swear it, slightly too pointed for him not to be part satyr.
I look down at his feet, expecting hooves, or at least fins, but all I see are cream-colored loafers and no socks.
His eyes lock on to mine.
“Ciao, Leila,” he says, as if he were saying, “Darling, turn over, I want to take you from behind.”
The air is full of gold and silver. Every light mote shines with sex.
“How do you know my name?”
“Tu sei famosa. Ho visto la tua fotografia molte volte nel giornale. Excuse me—my English is terrible. I am Renzo Pisan.”
“Renzo il Magnifico,” I say, looking into his sea-green eyes.
He touches my hair.
“We have the same curly hairs,” he says. It is a very good sign. Pagan hairs. “May I take you on a tour of Venice by boat?”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, at eleven?”
What can I possibly say but “yes”?
(Sane mind: Try “no” for a change!)
19
“Take Two Gondoliers and Call Me in the Morning”
I got nineteen men and I want one mo’
I got nineteen men and I want one mo’
If I get that one more, I’ll let that nineteen go.
—Bessie Smith
He comes for me at eleven the next morning at the Gritti, looking even more like a satyr in the morning light than he did at dusk.
We putter out into the middle of the lagoon, where the seagulls live, dipping and diving for fish and alighting upon buoys and rotted wooden posts.
The sun is behind us in a haze, dispersed in the sky, exploded into atoms.
I lean back in the boat, sunning myself, knowing that there is no place I’d rather be.
We sail and sail. A dreamy, glittery day, with Venice receding behind us in the lagoon. From the lagoon, Venice suddenly seems so small—all turrets and towers low on the horizon, like Cybele’s crown.
He drops anchor in the middle of the lagoon, makes me hide my eyes while he changes out of his dapper linen pants and shirt and into his swimming trunks. I strip to my bathing suit, and we sit in the back of the boat, touching yet not quite touching, in the way that lovers do before the explosion, when the decision to become lovers has been made and has not yet been acted upon.
He strokes my cheek, my breasts; he bends and kisses me, and suddenly we are lost in each other’s mouths, the land of tongue and tooth, nature red in fang and claw threatening to overtake us. He touches me, and I can tell by the way he touches me—as if he were a part of myself longing to know its boundaries—that it is only a question of deciding whether to make love in the boat or at my hotel (where Julian is expected to arrive from California in two days), or to go to his house (where, Cordelia says, he lives with his German wife, who is an honest-to-God principessa). Whatever he asks I will do. He has only to crook his finger and say vieni, come, and I will follow.
We play and play, lie in the sun, speaking in that rudimentary way lovers do—your smell, your touch, your touch, your smell—and then eventually we putter back to his house and make mad love on the divan in his office, with architectural drawings all over the floor.
His house is on a little island (which appears on no maps) near Burano. It is a smallish villa, built by a follower of Palladio, surrounded by gardens filled with Greco-Roman sculpture