The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [58]
There were two hotels in the square. Neither contained her. There were restaurants, cafés, gelato palazzos, but she was not. I didn’t dare cross one of the bridges. The smart thing was to wait, on view, in the open.
A richly symbolic young man’s moment: across one of these bridges I would find my German stimulant. Across the others, perhaps some other life entirely. But to sit here immobile cannot go on much longer! Cross! Cross! Cross a bridge! If now it seems an author’s invention, an overdetermined moment of thematic import, at the time I just felt panic, no consciousness at all of beauty (Venetian or symbolic, literary or life changing), no sense of a Moment at all, only frustration that made my eyes sting and my fingers fist and un-fist spasmodically, an anger at Heidi for her alternating carelessness, cruelty, idiocy, sluttishness, prudishness, guile, incompetence.
When the rain came with the darkness, I and the bags waited under lit awnings until restaurateurs and hotel night managers asked me to “move along, signore, per favore, to go on.”
I checked into one of the two hotels, took a room on a high floor opening onto the square, ready to witness her return, lost or grieving or teasing, and then for us to gaze at each other in wrestling doubt and lust. Morning came, mocking gray. I left notes at both hotels, tried to reconstruct our path from the vaporetto, but I was soon lost in identical streets. I found a staircase jetty that may have been the site of our first steps in Venice, posted a note for her in the tourist office, struggled through the shifting city’s float-away alleys and mirror tricks, soaked my feet when the sea would strike up through the paving stones to test for weakness and claim dominion.
She’d taken me for the free airline ticket and was now laughing with her two Voguemen. She was lost and seeking me. She was in trouble and counting on me. These were the choices. I was certain of each. I tried to report her as missing. I went to the police station and tried to explain. You did not know her last name? You had known her less than twenty-four hours when she vanished? At the time, you were lovers, signore? You met when she left her previous lover in a London prison, because he had irritated her by taking her to too many Shakespeare plays? All of your conversation in that twenty-four hours—perhaps two hours total—was built on a mutual distaste for Shakespeare? The playwright, signore?
I had opened her suitcases, of course, before calling on the smirking carabinieri. No documents, no money. Just clothes, toiletries, a novel in German with a photomontage on the cover of a bullfighter and a cadaver on a morgue table. She would never leave all this behind, I argued, though I had left far more behind in London for her, traded it all for a new chapter of life.
I knew then that’s what she’d done. Once I was over the pain of not being able to have sex with her again, I didn’t blame her, wasn’t even that hurt by her rejection of me on such limited acquaintance. She had neatly and pleasantly moved on. And had been kind enough to convince me to do the same, before it was too late for me. Sadly, I realized she had had more effect on me than any woman in my life in New York except Dana. And the significance of that grew as I spent days alone. I was pathologically grateful to Heidi, and if she should read the German edition of this book, then I send her my sincerest regards. But don’t read the play, Heidi! You won’t like it!
And then, only then, did I arrive in Venice. I had been too busy looking at the Teutonic beauty with the wind-burned cheeks on the vaporetto ride, at her shadowed hips on our last walk, and I had been too busy squinting for a crowd-screened girl in the days after. Now, having accepted that I was not worth her time, that I had been brought here by her but not for her, that I had been chosen by her to be released from my old life, I set off into Venice at last.
I still occasionally saw a flash of blond two bridges away that I allowed to blur into Heidi for a hot,