The Tragedy of Arthur_ A Novel - Arthur Phillips [59]
I fell in love. I loved Venice first for its surface beauty, just like all the other suckers. But soon enough I loved its ability to hide from prying, to withdraw its essence behind those thousands of cleverly identical façades and squares, to vanish despite a billion grazing eyes, as though the tourists were all walleyed or willfully blind. At first it seemed that no one lived there to man these shops, cafés, and churches. I tried to follow them—merchants, barmaids, prelates—into the spirals of the city. They led me down the alleys, past the street signs that urchins moved or removed from one day to the next, the bridges that shifted their colors from one hour to the next, the buildings whose flags and banners were so easily swapped, the congenially conspiratorial Adriatic, which would as needed bubble up to distract or divert, the throppity-thropping cyclones of pigeons that would, as a last resort, block my view, until, upon this shifting swamp town, the naïve newcomer and the moneyed tourist alike were repeatedly funneled back, tricked back, drained back into the same small area of commerce and snapshots, the impulses Venice allowed you to indulge.
But if you waited and followed, patiently, day after day, finally you saw real stories, real lives. I spent my days now reading secondhand books in dusty yards, eyed up by squat old women in loose housecoats and their feline familiars, guarded and malevolent. I was twenty-eight. I was writing stories about the people I saw, the tourists and priests, about the conversations I overheard. When I wasn’t writing, I imagined Dana and my father reading my stories in print. I told myself I was doing something Shakespeare never did. I was the plein air Impressionist rebel and he the stuffy Salon. I told myself that everything about me and my bizarre leap into Venice would produce something entirely new, free of all that came before, free of my life, free of old musty fiction. Something new would pour out of these sun-dried courtyards and pigeon-splattered squares.
Heidi was my muse, I came to understand in a flash of self-love. I have since wondered if I didn’t imagine her. I don’t remember when I lost my last souvenir of our twenty-four hours—her novel—but with its disappearance and the intervening decades I can almost believe I created her, so perfectly did she make my new life, shove me on to the next thing. It was about then, having cast her as muse, that I realized I would never return to the States but would wander the world wherever adventure and literature led me, learning and loving and writing about the lives of those around me … there may have been a Nobel Prize at the other end of this plan.
I don’t have access to any more of my letters to Dana, but I can guess their tone, and my manic-Romantic idea of myself based on her replies:
Darling Runaway,
Well, well. Venice, is it? O.K. I can see the appeal.
Things have settled down here at court since your flight, but it is only thanks to me. And now you have had your epiphany, and we are all very excited for you. Though I saw it coming, if I may say so. You had to go somewhere and start over.
Miss Margaret Wheeler. I can’t say you handled that with gentlemanly finesse. She started sniffing around here for you after ten days or so. She had already hunted you at your office, where she learned of your resignation before your own sister, resigned to be the last to know anything of importance about you.
She is sweet, though, your ex-Margaret, and I have attempted to bring her a measure of comfort. [Note: I recall thinking this was a lie, because Margaret had always spoken like a committed homophobe. “Your sister’s a dyke? Seriously?” Older and wiser than when I was in high school,