Abhorrent Green Slippery City

as the gondola glided along, dubin dreamed of passionate love in a fantastic city

A Light Fog lay on Venice that end-of-October late afternoon they arrived, via an hour in Rome, where it had been warm and sunny. Dubin and Fanny, after debarking the vaporetto--terribly slow, but he was eager to point out hazy sights, mist-enshrouded palazzi--were following a porter wheeling their luggage along a foggy narrow calle. There, as the mist thinned and they could make out others approaching, it seemed to the biographer that a red-haired girl clinging to the arm of a gray-haired man by her side, both stepping close to the wall to let the newcomers and their baggage go by--Fanny and the elderly gent momentarily stood between Dubin and the redhead half-hidden from him--was his daughter, Maud. He, startled, wobbling momentarily, had been about to cry out her name; but the need for concealment was inexorable, so he had at once turned away from her, pulling his hatbrim low over his eyes; and when no more than a minute later he gazed back at the couple, they were shadows in the fog. The bronze red hair had vanished like the flaming sun sinking in a cloud-massed charcoal sunset.

Moved, regretful, worried--momentarily imperiled--Dubin had felt an impulse to run after them to determine if she was, indeed, Maud; but how could it be during the academic term at Berkeley, where he had telephoned and talked to her only a few nights ago? He was surely mistaken, had more than once confused Maud with another redheaded girl nearby. One is struck by the color and recognizes somebody who isn't there. Fanny, wearing blue shades, had apparently noticed nothing. She chattered amiably. The porter pushed ahead with the bags. Dubin was still shaken, though he had for the most part recovered his calm when they entered the still courtyard of the Hotel Contessa. Behind them, the setting sun appeared as a fiery half disk in the glowing silvery fog, and the evening promised pleasure.

"What's the weather supposed to be tomorrow?" the biographer asked the black-suited segretario at the desk as he examined their passports.

"Improving, professore." His thin nose had twitched: This swinging babe with this ambitious vecchio? Dubin felt he must look older with her than when alone.

"I have no university connection. I'm a professional biographer."

"Please pardon me, I meant as compleement."

He nodded genially, not altogether displeased by the man's curiosity about them nor, at the moment, by the aura of expectancy Fanny whipped up around her wherever she appeared. He was mildly embarrassed by her unseasonable getup--a voluminous long green dress, not her best color, high cork platform soles and a wide-brimmed straw hat--though summer, although it might be said to be lingering in Rome, had departed Venice. She wore her wire-framed glasses, spear-like jade earrings and a small gold crucifix in place of her Star of David.

"For the fun of it," she had explained. "I like to feel at home where I am."

"Will you feel at home with yourself?"

"Some people are freer than others."

That he granted. Fanny on holiday surprised, had overturned his expectations. She'd be a beautiful woman if she appreciated herself.

"This is she," Dubin reflected. "Let her be."

With her unfurled by his side, who would have noticed him in a foggy Venetian street? He was certain it had not been Maud they had passed, yet wondered: If I was hiding, was she?

The portiere beckoned two bellmen. One, an energetic youth, gathered Fanny's three bags as if by instinct, none of which he would yield to the older man, who lugged Dubin's battered leather suitcase; and they, together with the assistant secretary, rose slowly in the wire-doored lift.

The assistant secretary, a closely shaved and powdered man with a sculptured black mustache, led them twice to the wrong room before leading them to the right one. "I deed not recognize eef it was a three or a seven on my paper."

"It's on the key," said Dubin.

"But you are absolutely right," said the astonished assistant secretary, his eyes mostly on Fanny. They had entered an attractive double room through an adjoining single-bedded one that Dubin wanted locked from their side. The assistant secretary offered to return immediately with the key, but Dubin quickly said he would ask the maid to take care of it in the morning. The man unhappily assented, though 1000 lire seemed to settle his nerves.

Their room on the top floor of the Contessa was a magnificent high ornateceilinged one, with French doors leading to a small balcony overlooking the Grand Canal. The fog had lifted and the view before them--Venice afloat in a rising sea on a serene October early evening--and the pleasurable anticipation of his amorous adventure filled Dubin with satisfaction at the rightness of his decision to do what he was presently doing.

They had met by chance on Main Street on Campobello. Dubin, at the tail end of his long country walk, had intended to hurry past her. But Fanny, approaching him as he had hesitated, abruptly told him she was back to pick up a lamp she had bought in town but hadn't been able to carry in her overloaded VW.

"I was hoping I would see you. I lost the name of the hotel I wrote on a piece of paper and you weren't registered in the two others I tried."

"Which did you try?"

"I went to the Brevoort and also the Astor."

"I was registered at the Gansevoort. Why didn't you telephone or drop me a line afterward?"

"It was on my mind," she said, "but I thought your wife mightn't like it. Also, I felt pissed at myself for forgetting the name of the place."

"My wife doesn't open my mail."

He searched her eyes; she seemed contrite.

Two days later, Dubin telephoned Fanny in New York and proposed a week in Italy. "Why not?" she said, after momentary hesitation. "I haven't found a steady job yet, so it's OK with me, if you can make it."

On the plane, he had asked himself, "What am I doing here, a man my age with a girl hers?" The answer came easily and happily: "I am enjoying myself. I have it coming to me."

Fanny was buoyant, affectionate; they joked with each other. She sat snuggled close, straw hat on her lap, head on his shoulder, her sweet-smelling light hair spread like a flag across his chest. She had shown extreme nervousness before the flight, which had gradually disappeared after they had ascended. Dubin's difficulty was afterthought: He regretted having had to deceive Kitty. There ought to be a better way. He recalled Lawrence's remark: "Honesty is more important than marital fidelity."

"Kitty, I am going off with a chick for a week. A night out in living. I want the experience before I'm too old to have it. Don't fret, I'll be back soon as good as new and as loyal as ever."

Fat chance. She'd probably have told him she would not be there when he got back.

Kitty was overendowed in sensitivity; why upset her when you didn't have to? He had lied to protect her.

Fanny and he embraced on their Venetian balcony, Dubin nuzzling her cheek. Her breath, its hot floral quality, enticed his mouth to hers.

"In a little while," she said softly, after a long kiss. "We've been traveling since early morning and I could use a bath."

"Shall I get into the tub with you?"

"I'll be out in a jiff, lover."

While she was bathing, Dubin tried on a pair of striped pajamas Kitty had recently bought him. After a moment of reflection in a closet-door mirror, he removed them and changed into fresh underwear; but he did not admire his girth in boxer shorts, or his thin legs, so he drew on his trousers and buttoned up his shirt.

Fanny, as the tub gurgled and the toilet flushed, stepped out of the bathroom in a short white nightgown. Her body glowed. She had brushed her hair full and bright. Dubin sank to his knees like a man kneeling to be dubbed knight, embracing her legs as he kissed her between them.

She reacted in surprise, momentarily stiffening; then, with affection, ran her hand through his hair.

"I have my suitcases all over the bed, so I'd better finish unpacking like I see you have."

"I thought I'd get my stuff out of the way."

"I will, too. It won't take me long."

" 'Had we but world enough and time,' dear Fanny," the biographer sighed.

"We have all week."

He rose. "You're a practical girl."

"I'm not very romantic, if that's what you mean, although I do have romantic thoughts once in a while."

"It lingers in me. Maybe it's my generation."

"Forget your generation. Even if you aren't my age, at least you act young when you want to."

"L'chayim," said Dubin, holding aloft an imaginary glass.

"It's cool," said Fanny.

She was unpacking the contents of a small store: casual clothing--piles of it she couldn't possibly use--and plastic bottles of creams, lotions, deodorants. This consumer's aspect of hers was new to him and he wondered how it squared up with her abstemious stay in a Buddhist commune.

"It's no rip-off," she said. "I happen to have this uncle who owns a drugstore. And my mother sends me clothes she doesn't want."

Amid her possessions, he noticed a rubber diaphragm in a worn plastic case.

"Don't you use the pill?"

"My uncle says it can give you breast cancer."

"Really? My wife never cared for it."

Fanny also carried a traveling iron and a portable clothesline she could rig up in any bathroom.

"Anything you want to hang on the clothesline, please do it, Bill."

He was helping her put things into drawers and the medicine cabinet.

"Why won't you call me William, Fanny?"

"I don't like to call you what your wife does."

"I hadn't thought of that but I prefer William to Bill."

With a comic groan, she fell back into an armchair, her nightie billowing.

"What do you say we get into bed, Fanny?"

"If you wish, Will-yam."

"Call me Bill, if you like. What do you wish?"

"Are you worried I might call you Bill sometime and your wife might hear it?"

The question startled him. He could not foresee circumstances in which Kitty and Fanny were likely to meet again. Don't consider yourself her equal, Dubin thought.

She regarded him cunningly. "Is something bothering you?"

"My mood at the moment is, as they say, macho, but you are being coy."

"What did you tell her was the reason you were taking off for a week?"

"I said I had some unexpected bits of research to do in Italy and possibly Sardinia to settle a few things on my mind. But since she knows I'm presently working on Lawrence's early life in Eastwood, she may have wondered whether I wanted to get away for another reason, maybe so that I could see my work in perspective."

"Will she believe what you said?"

"She believes me," he said soberly.

"This isn't your first affair since you were married, William? I shouldn't think so."

He thanked her for saying his name. "No, but it is with someone--if you'll pardon the expression--as young as you, a long trip involved and some elaborate deception. Kitty happens to be easy to lie to, which makes it harder to do. I don't like not to be honest with her."

"Sometimes you sound innocent."

"I'm not innocent," Dubin said, "though my experience is limited."

"Like to some one-night fucks with older-type ladies?"

"Not exactly grandmothers--when I was lecturing here or there, or said I was."

"How many?" she asked curiously.

"Several affairs--none prolonged."

"In how long a time?"

"I've been married twenty-three years and have been adulterous about ten."

"Adulterous? What were you afraid of?"

"I wasn't afraid. I was largely satisfied as things were. I got married when I was past thirty and had for years too much to do to go actively looking for sex. I'd begun to work well and had a family to look after."

"Still, you don't have to go actively looking--it's there. It's always there."

"It's there but in a way I wasn't," Dubin explained. "I'm only recently a visitor to the new sexual freedom. How many affairs have you had, Fanny?"

She started at the question. "I never counted."

"Often with married men?"

She nodded. "I was into that for a while, less so now." Fanny gazed at him. "Why did you pick me to go away with?"

He asked if she was looking for compliments.

"I am curious, William."

"Your warmth," he said, "opulent womanliness, openness. Because you touch me with your fingers when we talk. You're a little larger than life, Fanny. I mean, you make life seem larger. I felt that before you undressed and threw your yellow pants at me."

"What about your wife?" Fanny said. "I never really got to figure her out."

"What about her?" he asked guardedly.

"She looks sexy for her age, but is she? My mother does but is as limp as a rag."

"Fanny, you can ask me anything you please about me and I'll answer you, but don't ask me about her--she wouldn't like it."

"Who is she, the Queen of Sheba?" Fanny said irritatedly. "That really pisses me. I have noticed that any time I mention her, you get a tight-assed look, as though you want to hide under the rug. Are you afraid of her?"

"There's no reason to say that. She's a private person with a complicated history, which is her business."

"She isn't sick? Does she have health worries?"

The girl was acute. "Sometimes she does----" Dubin hesitated.

"My mother does, too. What were you going to say before I interrupted you?"

"Not much, really. A few days before I had to leave to meet you, she asked me to call the trip off. She didn't want to be left alone in the house. I said I would not go if she felt that way in the morning. But in the morning, she had changed her mind. She said, 'You've got to go,' so I went."

"What's her real trouble?" Fanny asked.

"Let's just say she's going through a prolonged glandular thing. That's all I intend to say about her."

"You don't have to tell me any more, I don't want to know," said Fanny, drawing up her legs and clasping them with her arms. "Just do you love her?"

Between her ankles, her blonde pelt was visible. Seeing his eyes rise to her face, she lowered her legs.

"I loved her," the biographer responded. "I love her still but differently. Time passes, needs and feelings change. One tries with others to recover past pleasures, past privileges. One looks for diversions."

"Is that what I am to you?"

"What would you want to be?"

"I want you to know I am not a whore."

"My God, why would I have thought so?"

"Attitudes don't always need words."

"I assure you of my respect, Fanny."

"How much respect does a diversion get?".

"Nothing is laid down by rule. There are possibilities."

"Well, what is possible?"

"I suppose it's possible to love one woman one way and another, another," Dubin said, wondering if he wanted it both ways.

"Which way do you think you could love me?" she asked.

"I'm drawn to you," he answered carefully. "That's obvious enough and as much as I want to think of or define just now. Let's stop analyzing our relationship, dear Fanny, and get into bed. An act defines itself."

"I really would like to," Fanny said, "but my stomach is rumbling like ape. When I get this hungry, I can't concentrate on anything, not even fucking. (continued on page 348) Slippery City (Continued from page 142) But I will if you want me to."

"Let's eat," said Dubin.

Fanny pulled off her nightgown, drew on black bikini underpants, then got into a deep-pink minidress. Her hair she wore elegantly up and slightly messy, though the effect was splendid. She wore no bra and her nipples were imprinted on the dress. Then she draped on the gold crucifix.

Dubin wore a black-silk suit, loafers, a soft lemon tie.

Regarding herself nearsightedly in a framed oval mirror on the wall, she screwed on large earrings, concentric gold circles, then slipped on her blue glasses.

"Do you have to wear them?"

"Don't you like them?"

"One loses the quality of your face."

"I hate the glare," Fanny said.

"You are the glare."

She liked that and laughed.

When Fanny, in her vivid dress--not Dubin in his silk suit--appeared in the Hotel Contessa dining room, it burst into life out of emptiness. The vast elegant room, with gold-decorated white walls and a flight of cherubim in blue tones across the ceiling, fronted the dark canal. Before them as they entered, a multitude of empty tables draped in white cloths stretched into semidarkness. Only a brightly lit rectangular section under two small crystal chandeliers was roped off with a white-silk cord and lavishly set for dinner. Into this dining area of about two dozen tables, none presently occupied, Fanny and Dubin were led and courteously seated by the maître d'hôtel.

"I guess we're early," said the biographer.

He had seen the man's discreet yet momentarily stunned glance at Fanny and had noticed that the four waiters who had been standing impassively at the doors had stirred and come, if not to military attention, at least to animated interest in and concentration on her. Though her fine legs were outstanding in short dresses, if he had had his wits with him upstairs, Dubin would have suggested a longer dress for the dining room.

"Not at all, sir," the maître de responded sadly, "the season is at the end. Only a few guests stay."

He was a handsome heavy-eyed man who, as Fanny smiled and he bowed to her, this time let his eyes rest fleetingly on her bosom; he lingered on the crucifix and recommended the pesce. Dubin felt the unpleasant stirring of mild jealousy but did not let it surface. Surprised, he castigated himself.

After studying the menu, Fanny ordered brains and Dubin, bass. She had shrimp and he, melon with prosciutto. Fanny had turned down a drink--too many on the plane--so Dubin called the steward and ordered a bottle of white wine.

He urged her again to take off her sunglasses. "They put you at a distance."

"I'll come nearer." Fanny dropped them into her stuffed purse. He had noticed she had tucked her diaphragm box in the bag before they left the room.

"What for?" Dubin had asked.

"Just a habit." She left it there.

Her eyes were alert but gentle, comfortable, her eyebrows ragged. The nails of Fanny's plain, efficient hands were bitten to the quick. When the wine was poured, she drank half a glassful, gulping as if it were water. She was affectionate, chummy.

"What were you saying when I was in the bathroom?" she wanted to know.

"To you?"

"I don't think so."

"Then I was talking to myself?"

"Don't you know you do it?"

"As a rule, though not always."

"What were you saying?"

"Encouraging myself," Dubin felt.

"Do you have to?"

"More or less, when I'm away from home and operating adventurously."

Fanny then asked him how he had met his wife. "You said you would tell me."

How she harps on my wife.

"I told you she was a widow," Dubin said casually. "She was married to a doctor who died of leukemia. He evidently was an unusual man who had quite an effect on her. I had trouble competing with him in her memory, but that changed after the birth of our daughter."

She listened, chewing absently.

Dubin then said, "I'm sure you understand, Fanny--and I won't bring this up again--that she mustn't know about us, not have the remotest suspicion. Her life hasn't been easy. I wouldn't want to hurt her."

"Would you want to hurt me, William?"

He swore no, quickly, warmly. "I want to be kind, warm, make love with you. I feel tender to you, Fanny, and, hope you feel something similar for me."

She said she did. Her wine-flushed face was bright, lovely. Her eyes, more intensely green, smiled at him. She was enjoying the food and liked the half-hidden stares of the waiters and the attentions of the heavy-eyed maître de, who came by often to see how things were progressing.

"What about you?" Dubin asked. "I know little about you; for instance, what does your, father do?"

"He imports."

"You don't get along with him?"

"It's very mutual."

"May I ask why?"

"Because he's a selfish bastard and doesn't have much respect for me or my mother. She's a gutsy lady, but I don't want to talk about her, either. I'm enjoying this meal."

He lifted his glass in agreement. Dubin drank wine freely and loved the evening. Fanny relished the brains.

One or another of the young waiters appeared from time to time, ostensibly to replenish bread or pour wine. All, he thought, came to view Fanny up close, who seemed to radiate nudity through her clothes and was, she confessed, very happy. He felt she was one of those gifted people who give public pleasure, not a bad thing in life. He would enjoy the sight of her wherever she was.

As they were waiting for dessert, he felt a hand on his knee, then. as it slowly traveled up his thigh, he decided it was Fanny's foot. She had removed her shoe and was caressing him under the table.

"You make my foot warm," she confided.

"Warm or cold, it's a wonderful instrument. Is this what they call footsie?" the biographer inquired.

"Do you like it?"

"Won't the waiters know what you're doing?"

She laughed. "They don't give a shit. It goes on forever in restaurants."

"I should be more observant."

Dubin poured the last glass of wine as Fanny, her face composed as she sensuously stroked his leg, after a paradise of expectation, at last touched his aroused organ. Dubin made no objection. This was Venice, this was Italy; this was what, according to the arts and humanities, it was all about.

He felt in his pleasure a loosening of ties, concerns, restrictions, a sense of trumpets blaring in the woody distance. William-the-Bold Dubin with upraised sword on a black charger under the triumphant blue sky. After a moment, he stepped out of his shoe and began gently to move up Fanny's calf with his adventurous right foot. Deadpan above table, impassioned below, he could feel her womanly thighs yield to his insistent gentle probing. Fanny gazed at him dreamily as, at last, he pressed the soft flesh under her lace panties. Dubin experienced a desire to pull off his black sock, but the perspiring maitre de fortunately came by, inquiring again if they (continued on page 352) had enjoyed their meal. The biographer, with dignity, said they had, indeed, and could he have his check. Fanny nodded. Dubin felt drunk and embarrassed as they got up and walked past the waiters at the French doors, all silently aware of them, one regarding him with a connoisseur's approval as they left the dining room; but other patrons were beginning to come in and it was not so bad. Yet he felt he had overeaten and overdrunk, the weight of food and wine antipathic to self and spirit.

"Can we go out tonight, William?" Fanny asked in their room. Her things were still strewn all over the place. He felt he knew her well.

"Where, for instance?"

"Some place lively where we can dance."

"Like the opera? There are no night clubs in Venice. The theater is closed, this is off season. We could find an Italian movie, if you like."

"Let's have some fun."

"What about a walk in St. Mark's?"

"Could we go to Harry's Bar?"

Dubin agreed. "Put on something warm."

The night was dark, damp, the streets still. House lights went on as they walked up Marzo XXII. Fanny touched his arm and they stopped in midstreet. When he turned to her, she was waiting. He put his mouth on hers. They kissed with wine-soaked tongues.

"I'm wet through my pants," she said.

"Let's go home."

"Wonderful," said Dubin.

In their room, he undressed her, brief episode--dress, underpants, shoes.

She insisted on undressing Dubin and had trouble getting his undershirt over his head.

"Why do you bother wearing them?"

"Kitty buys them."

"Tell her not to."

"They help in wintertime. She shops for me; I hate to."

"I wish you wouldn't praise your wife to me--do you mind?"

"I didn't think I was."

"Lift up your arms."

She drew the shirt over his head.

"Pardon this bit of belly. You wouldn't think I exercise."

"You wouldn't have the belly if you stood straight."

"That's what she says."

"I don't want to know what she says. Step out of your shoes."

"I wish I were younger for you."

"Fuck your age."

"Well put," Dubin said.

When she bent to remove his socks, there was a tearing noise.

"What was that?"

Fanny laughed wildly. "I farted." With a sob, she darted into the bathroom, flushed the bowl.

After several minutes, when she failed to answer his inquiring knock, Dubin cautiously turned the knob and peeked into the bathroom.

"Are you all right, Fanny?"

She was standing at the toilet bowl, retching, a blob of diarrhea dripping down her leg.

Afterward, she was sick, vomited raucously, spilling her supper, weeping, spitting.

"I feel so sick."

"Poor baby, what can I do for you?"

"I also feel I am tripping. 'Seize the day,' Hump your lay."

After he had cleaned her with paper, when after sobbing awhile she lay asleep, her mouth open, breathing noisily, her face a child's face, Dubin washed her legs and buttocks with a warm soapy cloth but could not wholly remove the odor of her sickness.

The biographer remembered Yeats on love's mansion in the place of excrement; but not much came of it.

•

As he was falling asleep, Maud appeared in his mind; Dubin awoke. Was it she he had seen in the fog, ironically with a man old enough to be older than her father? Whoever he was had looked over 60. "My daughter is not for thee." But could Dubin despise an aging man who desired the company of a young woman--endless insistent hunger? The old gent, he guessed, would have to be one of her teachers--probably someone from her dig in Mexico last summer. So soon out of the crib, so quickly grown--bleeding, breasted, gone, lost to me. Out of the house at 18; at 19, as deeply as he into amorous intrigue? How is it possible--the hunger to adventure in contravention to time's good sense? He figured her age, with her friend's, would average a good 40; his and Fanny's, 39. Himself less culpable--if one were to use the word--than Maud's male friend--if it were Maud--because Fanny was three years older than his daughter and no innocent. Life responds to one's moves with comic counterinventions.

He got up and dressed in the dark so as not to awaken the girl.

"I don't want to die," she moaned in her sleep.

A universal lament.

He went down in the lift and through the half-lit hotel lobby, though it was not much past 11, into the street. Where does a troubled father seek his erring daughter? The sky was heavily cloudy, no sign of a moon, the night hazy, cool; he crossed a stone bridge over a narrow canal exuding mist. In an alley, he passed a huge black man touching the wall as he walked; he was blind. The biographer drifted through a maze of crooked streets around La Fenice, peering into lit places, staring at elderly men with young women. Though his search, if it were one, came to nothing, he fantasied meeting Maud--she wandering alone, looking for him--their encounter, recognition, embrace! Afterward, they'd walk together. He wanted to tell her why he was in Venice, though she probably wouldn't want to know. Perhaps they had experienced similar disappointments and might, in the morning, leave together for the States. Dubin doubted it in afterthought. He doubted Maud was in Venice.

Entering Harry's Bar, he sat at a table in the corner. An old waiter with gray sideburns brought him a brandy. Dubin was moved to speak to him but did not. He sipped his brandy, watching those at the bar and the tables, good-looking men and sensuous young women, even when oddly dressed, beautifully dressed. He looked among them for a woman with a sense of past: past time, past pain, awareness of the difficulty of loving. Only the young, the raw young, were present. He did not want to be with them.

Dubin wandered into St. Mark's Square, through the piazzetta to the water. It was a square walk he was making in a circle. There were a few tables in front of Florian's, three or four people sitting quietly in the dark. The cafés were closed, their tables set top on top, chairs stacked. Some of the summer tables were piled up under the gallery arches. On the embankment by the mooring poles, a few gondolas lay like dead fish out of water, to be stripped and stored away in back canals and there await the end of winter. Two gondolas were still moored in the dark water. The tide was rising and the undulating water smacked the boats and sucked at them. A narrow plank boardwalk on carpenter's horses had been laid across the piazza for the winter floods.

Over the sea, the night was large, hazy, starless. A string of dim lights ran along the misty shore of the Giudecca. A dark mass of houses rose behind the shore lights, here and there a lit window. Beyond this island, other islands floated in the water.

An island is a mystery. A man is island, not an easy way to be. We are in essence separate, self-conscious lonely selves. We live in the cosmic mystery, a cosmos of separate, lonely bodies. It is all a loneliness.

Dubin stood at the low wall overlooking the water in front of the small tufted umbrella pines in the giardinetto. A dozen starved cats were consuming the remains of somebody's spaghetti supper on a spread newspaper. An old man in a gray hat approached and asked him for a cigarette.

"I have forgotten my own," he said.

Dubin thought it was the waiter he had seen at the bar, but this was another man. He handed him his pack.

"Thank you, signore."

"For not much. They're bad for your health."

"I have no health." The old man touched his hat and walked slowly along the embankment. He crossed a small bridge and disappeared.

In the street near the Campanile, a long-faced girl in sweater and jeans sat on a stool bowing a cello clasped between her legs. The music was from a Bach suite for the cello unaccompanied. Dubin had the record but stayed to listen. He listened, standing to the side, not to distract the girl. It was late. On the ground lay a small cardboard box with a few lire in it. The girl did not play all that well, but he listened till the end of the movement. He liked the harsh-sweet gutty bowing. He liked the sensuous dignity of J. S. Bach, husband of two wives and father of 20 children, jigging in a state of grace, his music flowing like water ascending and falling in an iron fountain. The pouring fountain was the music. The cellist was not a beautiful girl--her face was thin and dark and she had a meager figure--but she looked handsome playing the cello in the Venetian night and Dubin felt he loved her.

•

In the morning, Fanny said she was so much better, though her gut felt tender. "It was all the wine that did it. I always overreact to wine." Dubin had hovered over her like a mother duck. He had given her a pill that stopped diarrhea and another that reduced nausea. These were the pills that Kitty always brought along when they traveled. And he fed Fanny dry toast with sugarless tea. She was hungrier than she had any right to be, but he wouldn't let her have any more food. "I'm dying of hunger," Fanny complained. She still felt queasy and had occasional cramps, but they weren't bad, and she was decently comfortable and even "cozy." He felt close to her.

It was raining on the canals. They watched the rain through the window, Fanny lying propped against two pillows in their double bed, her legs covered with a blanket. She wore a light black nightgown. She was reading Sons and Lovers and said she liked it.

"I'm up to here: 'He only knew she loved him,' " Fanny read aloud. " 'He was afraid of her love for him. It was too good for him, and he was inadequate. His own love was at fault, not hers.' Why is he such a schnook?"

"He's a young man," Dubin answered, "with a lot to learn."

"Don't tell me if he does or doesn't. I don't want to know the end."

"The end is already there."

"I don't want to know it."

Fanny went on with her reading as he looked through a guidebook of Venice. He felt easy and carefree, as though they'd been living together for years. She smiled, as though acknowledging his thought, and the biographer was glad he had suppressed his doubts and gone off with her.

Fanny told him more about her life--the usual happy unhappiness of childhood. She had an older sister she called a bitch and a father who called her one. "My mother is the best of us all."

"Dubin told her about his father, the waiter, without telling her about his mother; and he told her about his work without mentioning Kitty. She listened with interest, playing with her long hair, winding it around her fingers.

"I like it when you tell me what you know. I like the vibes you have with what you are doing. I wish I had that kind of feeling."

"It comes when you know what you want to do."

She said she would let him kiss her but hated to think what it would taste like.

He got up and kissed Fanny's dry lips and her ears and eyes. She pressed his hand to her breast.

She had tossed the blanket aside and her long nightgown touched her body like an enduring kiss. Extraordinary the grace a bit of draping gives nudity. Her casual movements stirred him.

"But I still have cramps that come and go," Fanny said.

He went into the bathroom and briskly brushed his teeth.

She said she could eat half a horse but, when he advised nothing solid yet, said she would settle for some ginger ale. "Ginger ale is what my mother used to spoon us after an upset stomach."

There was nothing in the midget refrigerator in the room but hard liquór and mineral water, and she didn't want that. Dubin called down for a bottle of soda, but the waiter offered only Pepsi. Fanny made a face: She had this thing about cola drinks--they gave her hives. Dubin said he would hunt up a bottle of ginger ale. He put on his raincoat and borrowed an umbrella from the portiere.

He walked in a steady rain from their hotel to the Rialto before he was able to find a small bottle of ginger ale. He was happy he had found it for her. He imagined Fanny saying when he returned that she had bathed and wanted him to undress and get into bed with her.

"I think you'll feel better after we make love," Dubin, speaking to himself, said to her.

When he returned to their room, she was lying in bed wearing sunglasses. "Jesus, William, I thought you were dead and gone." She said she had ordered a sliced-chicken sandwich because she was painfully famished, had eaten every bit of it and held it down.

He was happy to hear it. Dubin thought he'd take a shower.

Minutes later, she threw up the bread and chicken, weeping, spitting into the toilet bowl; her diarrhea returned. Hours later, he began to spoon-feed her some warmish ginger ale, which, by God's grace--if not her own--she was able to retain. Fanny promised not to do something equally stupid. "Please don't hold it against me."

Before falling asleep that night, she whispered, "Tomorrow, William."

•

Tomorrow appeared exquisitely--warmish, clear, "inspiring," Dubin said. Fanny awoke glum, circles under her eyes, as though she'd long worried in her sleep; but after chancing--against his solemn advice--a Continental breakfast without suffering consequences, she took a bath with salts, vigorously shampooed her hair, opened windows and doors to air the room and, though still pale, became energetic, ebullient.

"Let's zap out and see the sights."

He readily agreed. She put on the crucifix, then removed it and dropped it into a drawer. Fanny took it out again and draped it around her neck. "Does it bother you?"

"Not if it doesn't bother you."

"Not if it doesn't bother you----"

They hurried to St. Mark's Square, she--after shedding a cardigan because of "the heat"--in white jersey over black brassiere, and denim swing skirt, carrying her large suede shoulder bag. Though she wore heavy-heeled shoes, there was a ripple in her walk and people on the street seemed to like to watch her go by.

Fanny and Dubin hurried on in the brilliant sunlight, she keeping pace with his long strides. The biographer wore his blue blazer, with flared reddish-plaid slacks and a striped blue shirt with a watermelon-pink tie. He was growing longer sideburns, gray or no gray. Dubin had occasional thoughts of dyeing his hair. Venice, absolved of fog and rain, had let a golden day rise like a balloon over its annealed islets. The sky floated azure over the green canals of antiquity. The effect was of island, plage, seashore--once more of holiday.

"Fanny," Dubin advised, "take those silly glasses off and look around. Some extraordinary, painters took their light from this sky."

She blew a kiss to the sky, removed the glasses and slipped them into her shoulder bag. She walked close to Dubin and their bodies touched. He had never felt younger.

Pigeons rose wheeling, fluttering over them in St. Mark's Square. There were a few tourists on the square. Dubin enjoyed showing Fanny around, pointing out artifacts, objects of interest in and around the cathedral, reading aloud from his guidebook what had been plundered when and where. She listened, looked where he pointed, walked on. Kitty, on first seeing the cathedral, had cried out in excitement. Fanny gazed almost without curiosity, looking back more than once, as though she did not trust either what she saw or her response. He was not dissatisfied: She was who she was; he enjoyed her company. Fanny liked to lock fingers as they walked--what pleasure the simple gesture gave, what a compliment, flesh on flesh.

She had a Kodak in her bag and pulled it out to snap his picture. Dubin threw a hand up in front of his face.

"Oh, come on--what's a picture?"

"Let's take yours." He borrowed the camera and took one of her, one knee bent, extending her palm to a curious pigeon. Another alighted on her head. "Get off me, you shitty bird." She laughed in embarrassment.

A priest in skirts and biretta, carrying a briefcase and a rolled umbrella, perhaps noticing Fanny's cross, if not her looks and vitality, inclined his head in courteous greeting.

He offered to take a picture of them with his Polaroid.

"Let's, William----"

Dubin thanked the priest; said it wasn't necessary.

"Are you from the States, Father?"

"Newark, New Jersey."

"Small world," Dubin said. "I was born there."

"I was born in Trenton," said Fanny.

"Were you?" the biographer asked in surprise. "We're all from the Garden State--maybe the same garden."

They laughed.

"Where was your wife born?" Fanny asked.

"Montreal," Dubin answered, clearing his throat.

The priest tipped his biretta to Fanny. "Blessings on you, my child."

Later, she squeezed Dubin's hand.

"What made you ask about my wife just then?"

"Just then, I wanted to know where she was born."

They wandered around the piazza, along the galleries, toward the Campanile. He asked her impression. "Does this place get to you? Some people wonder if they're the victims of their imagination."

"I like it all right, though it isn't Fat City. Is it supposed to send you? There's so much pigeon shit and I can smell smog. It's like a whiff of L.A., only oilier."

"That's from the mainland. Still, not everybody likes the square or Venice. Lawrence in a poem refers to it as 'the abhorrent green slippery city of Venice.' In a letter, he calls it écoeuré--without heart."

"Then why did we come here?"

"To be together."

"Yes, but why here?"

"I thought it might produce a bit of magic and blow it around."

"Did your wife like Venice?"

"Again my wife?"

"It's an honest question."

"I'll give you an honest answer. She loves it, though we've never been here but a short time before something unexpected happens."

"What did?"

"Once, I had a manuscript stolen out of a suitcase. I got it back a year later. It was mailed to me in the States and when I reread it, I was glad I had lost it."

"Why?"

"It wasn't that good a piece of work--a blow to my ego."

"What else happened?"

"Once, Kitty got awfully sick here."

"Like me--the trots?"

"She ran a high fever for no reason we could understand--she almost never does--and wanted to leave. She was afraid the plague was back for a visit, but the day after we got home, she recovered and that was that."

"What bugs her? I noticed she goes around sniffing the gas burners."

"She does--it's not important."

"Not important? Man, it's weird."

"Forget it. Think of us here together."

"I wish we had stayed in Rome."

"We'll go back in a day or two. I wanted to scoot up here with you to see if Venice affected you as it does me."

She momentarily rested her head against his shoulder.

"Should we go back to the hotel, Fanny?"

She smiled warmly, self-consciously. "Later, lover."

"How are you feeling?"

"Terrif----"

They stopped in front of a small jewelry shop. Dubin, taking notice of something in the window, asked her to excuse him.

"Can't I go in with you?"

"It'll take a minute. I'll be right out." "Suit yourself."

When he came out of the jeweler's a moment later, Fanny was earnestly talking to a taut-bottomed, erect, red-haired young Italian in front of a lavish glass shop a few doors down.

"This is Amadeo Rossini. He wants us to ride in his gondola," she said to the biographer.

"I thought they were mostly put away till spring," Dubin said genially.

"Not his," Fanny said.

"I am steel een beeziness, signore," the young gondolier said. He resembled a matador in bearing, with black T-shirt and jeans. His pants were tight, buttocks elegant.

"Care for a ride, Fanny?"

"I wouldn't mind."

The gondolier led them, Dubin carrying Fanny's cardigan, up a narrow street to a mooring pile where a single battered gondola, its prow spotted with bird droppings--the boat looked as though it had barely escaped a drastic fate--lay in the green water at the dock, lapped by ripples a parting vaporetto made.

After assisting his two passengers into the bulky boat--he seemed charmed by the vision of Fanny's black bra through her white jersey--Amadeo, wearing his professional red-ribboned yellow straw hat, pushed off with his long oar and the ride began pleasantly in the warmish October sun. Fanny, her color fully restored, lifted her face to the warmth. If there were Indians in Italy, this would be an Indian summer day.

Amid the decay, what beauty! Many of the palazzi were facade-eroded yet stately, elegant, despite asymmetry of windows and columns. Some houses were boarded up--pigeons nesting in the grillwork--in need of restoration; but their shimmering reflections in the greenish water--salmon, orange, aquamarine--excited Dubin. He lit a cigarillo and smoked contentedly, at times beset by thoughts of Venice subsiding in brackish water at the sea's bottom to be nibbled at into eternity by bony pale fish. The gondola was gliding toward Accademia bridge and as he watched the reflections in the water, it was no effort to think of himself afloat in an insubstantial world. With open eyes, Dubin dreamed of passionate love in a fantastic city.

The gondolier broke into song. In a not-bad high tenor, he celebrated love in a gondola. His eyes, when Dubin turned to look, were anchored on Fanny. Hers, dear girl, were shut as she seemed to listen. Perhaps he was singing to her black brassiere? Or was it her crucifix that had inspired his song--he sang to save her from an infidel? No doubt, simply Fanny, sexy Pippa passes. Dubin experienced no jealousy. What he felt in her presence, no doubt the gondolier also felt--but me first by prior contract. I met her once on a country road, wooed her by wanting, flew away with her over the sea. She's with me, my girl. No point feeling sorry for the gondolier--he has youth; I am momentarily graced by her presence. Next week, it's back to hard work.

"Two bits for your thoughts," he remarked to Fanny.

She smiled affectionately. He bent to her. They kissed in the gondola as the youth sang.

Fanny lightly ran her fingernail up along the inside of Dubin's thigh.

"We're visible here; should we go elsewhere?"

"I dig this ride," she gently sighed.

The battered gondola with blue seats and a faded green carpet glided on, the youth singing still, confessing passion and pain to an unknown ear--Trident, maybe? Though he didn't understand the Venetian dialect, Dubin made out a phrase now and then. He got, for instance, "the jealous husbands" from "La bel toseta gall mario geloso" and was tempted to advise the young man to rest his voice but refrained.

The boat was in mid-canal after rounding the bend toward the Rialto before he noticed people staring at them from palazzi windows, others from small craft on the canal. It then occurred to the biographer that theirs was the only tourist gondola out that morning. The Venetians were commercial types, but he beheld no other sight-seers around and felt momentary apprehension, which he ridiculed, but it was there. Had the gondolier on his fat nerve taken them out at a forbidden time? Had he waked that morning short of cash and decided it was still summer? So he hauls his banged-up boat from a back canal and goes hunting for belated tourists? Summer, anyone? Fanny with Dubin had walked into his practical needs? What a nuisance if they were stopped by the police motoscafo. He looked around and saw the municipal garbage scow, trailed by floating lettuce leaves and a few boiled onions bobbing in the water.

There was also a sand barge and a variety of rowboats, blunt- and sharp-nosed, plus assorted topi delivering produce, meat, some cases of beer, even a small coffin for a child or a midget.

A hairy-chested man called to them from a barge filled with gray sand.

"What's he saying?" Fanny asked.

"I think he says get off the canal, they need the water."

"Va fan'gulo," chanted the gondolier.

The hairy bargeman cupped his palm over his arm, thrusting the fist into the air.

Unperturbed, Amadeo went on singing his love song. Now he celebrated a little blonde in a gondola who out of sheer pleasure went to sleep as a gondolier rowed. To what end, he didn't sing. A few people crossing the outer stairs of the Rialto stopped to stare at the battered boat. A woman with flowers waved them. Dubin, facing an audience, felt self-conscious: glad-ragged goat of 56 courting a chick of 22 who would be better served, at least in appearance, by the youth who rowed them.

I should be rowing them. Why, he asked himself, didn't this happen to me when I was 25 and had less to be self-conscious about? Why was I studying law when I should by some miracle have been in Venice? He felt false and hungered for privacy.

"Pull over, please," he said to the gondolier. "We want to get off."

"Oh, not yet, please," said Fanny.

"Pull over to the clock there," the biographer said. "If the cops come by, we may be ordered off the canal."

"You mak' beeg mistake, signore," the gondolier replied, angered. "No one 'as the right to tell me when I weel work or what to do if ees summer or weenter."

But Dubin, still uncomfortable, insisted and paid him off; to placate Fanny, he included a healthy tip over an exorbitant fee. The handsome gondolier lifted his straw hat, bowing stiffly. His copper head of hair remained an enduring vision.

"I wish you hadn't done that, William," Fanny complained on the embankment, her face lightly flushed. "So what if the guy was singing at me? It did no harm."

Dubin denied the singing had bothered him. He said he was restless. "There's so much to see in this city. We'll do better on foot. Distances are deceptive here."

He insisted on showing her where some extraordinary people had lived and worked. Close by, near the Goldoni Campo, where Venetians gather in talky droves every evening, he pointed out the cortile where Marco Polo's house was supposed to have stood.

"He left Venice when he was a boy of seventeen for a fabulous journey through the East," Dubin explained, "that ended a generation plus a Venetian war later, in a prison in Genoa. There he dictated a book of his travels that is, among other things, a masterpiece of observation of an anthropological sort. In folklore, he's become a comic liar--Marco Millioni--but, actually, he said what he saw in a precise, detached, Venetian way, with little poetry and less passion; yet he saw well and kept the Asian world in his head until lie could record it via a literary hack he'd discovered in his cell. Many years later, Columbus read the book and it was another reason to take off for what turned out to be the New World. Isn't it marvelous the way things happen?"

"I read about him when I was a kid," she said quietly.

They then hurried by ways Dubin knew over stone bridges arching quiet canals to the once Moorish neighborhood where Tintoretto had lived and painted. Dubin and Fanny entered the Church of Madonna dell' Orto to see his frescoes. They gazed at his tomb; he was buried by the side of his favorite daughter, Marietta. Dubin told Fanny that Tintoretto was a self-educated, imaginative painter with great force of genius. "Some say he painted too much and was not as good as the Venetian best, but many of his pictures knock me cold. His miracles have the force and sweep of the miraculous. The daughter he's buried next to was herself a fine portrait painter who used to help him in his studio dressed in the then equivalent of jeans. She died at thirty and he mourned her the few remaining years of his life. There's a legend the painted her portrait as she lay dead."

"Didn't lie paint her when she was alive?"

"He probably did. This was a last act of love."

"Maybe he flipped," Fanny said.

Reversing direction when they were again outside, Dubin led her back to St. Mark's and then along the embankment to the Ospedale della Pietà . Fanny was showing fatigue. He asked if' she wanted to rest but she said she would stay with it if it was the last of their sight-seeing that morning. Dubin assured her it was.

Inside the church, he said, "This was once a church orphanage with a music chapel for girl foundlings. Rousseau said not one was without some considerable blemish but once they had played he loved them all. Vivaldi--he had red hair and was known as 'il prete rosso'-- taught them to fiddle and sing and confessed himself in waterfalls of stringed music. He worked there, on and off for forty years, composed in a hurry, and earned piles of ducats. Musicians and kings came to hear his concerts but in the end he ran afoul of the Pope's nuncio, presumably for no longer saying Mass and for being friends with a singer and her sister who had traveled with him for fourteen years. He spent money like water and died a pauper. Like Mozart's, his grave has vanished, but given his music, who needs it?"

She looked weary. "Jesus, all you think of is biography."

"Not all," said Dubin with a choked laugh. He said that since they were so near to where men of this kind had lived, it was only right to stop by to pay their respects. "I get this mind-blowing sense, as you say, of their lives and being. One hopes the quality is catching. I'm a sucker for those who celebrate life by making much of their own. It's a subtle altruism."

"If genius is your bag," she said, "which I am not.

Dubin thought their genius made their humanity more clearly visible. "That makes it easy to learn from their lives."

"I've got my own life to live."

"To live it better, Fanny. To live it well, with accomplishment."

Fanny, though her face had stiffened, assented.

She said she was dead-tired and could they now go home. "At least, in the gondola, it was a ride."

Dubin led her by short cuts back to the Hotel Contessa; but not before he had stopped off at the jeweler's he had visited earlier, where he picked up a bracelet for Fanny, a thin gold band overlaid with a spiraling coil, that surprised and delighted her. She kissed Dubin warmly and as she admired the bracelet on her extended arm, said, "I am really, really happy."

After a, light lunch at the hotel, spaghetti al burro with a small bottle of nongaseous mineral water for her, fettuccini with red wine for Dubin, they went out again. Fanny, after the meal, had complained of cramps, but they soon disappeared. The day's beauty persisted, the flawless sky flared blue; the green canals encrusted with sparkling light; the aura of Venice, expansive, enlivened--sense of island, sea, voyage.

To Dubin's surprise, though not Fanny's, a small fleet of pleasure gondolas appeared on the Grand Canal, as though a carnival had been declared. The biographer offered to make restitution for the aborted ride of that morning by taking her out again, but she, after seriously surveying the scene, shook her head. He suggested if her cramps were gone entirely and she felt refreshed, the Accademia Gallery, so she could see some Tintoretto paintings after the frescoes that morning. But Fanny said she had to do some shopping first and Dubin went along with her. She shopped discreetly--a few modest presents for friends that he offered to pay for because she had only $50 with her. Fanny gratefully accepted.

Wherever they went she cast occasional glances behind. Dubin, looking where she had looked, saw bright sunlight between houses. If you looked through dark glasses, would that people the world? She removed her shades only to examine the colors of objects in the shops.

"Do you feel all right, Fanny?"

"I guess so. I guess what's on my mind is I better have a bath and get some rest instead of tracking along with you to the museum. That is if you expect me to have enough energy for tonight, or maybe this afternoon."

"In that case, do rest, my darling."

She told him, gently squeezing his hand, not to stay too long, and Dubin promised to be back at five.

He took the gallery, picture by picture, at first viewing slowly, then not always seeing, thinking of Fanny: as Venus bathing; Fanny revived, lying lustfully in bed; Fanny with Dubin making love. He stayed until half past four and considered remaining longer to give her more time to rest--he had worn her out with walking that morning--but Dubin hadn't the serenity to wait longer. He left the gallery and as he was recrossing the Accademia bridge, the biographer observed below him in a long gondola on the sunlit canal an auburn-haired girl with a gray-haired man, his arm around her shoulders. They were sitting with their backs to him, the girl resting her bronze head against the man's chest. Dubin, watching them in a confusion of emotion, called from the bridge, "Maud, Maud--it's your father. Maud, it's me!" She did not turn. He hurried down the 50 steps and ran, as Italians watched, across the cameo Morosini and S. Angelo, then into Calle de la Mondola. After ten hot minutes, he emerged at the Grand Canal close by the Rialto. Dubin got there before the gondola and waited, winded--not sure what he could do or say, or not do--for the boat to catch up with him. But when it floated toward the bridge, the gondola--another that followed had in it two young women and a boy--contained only the gondolier poling it. Could this be the one he had seen? Dubin looked into the distance and beheld no others.

He called in Italian to the gondolier: "Where are your passengers?"

The gondolier blew his nose into the water and waved vaguely with his hand.

"Al sinistro."

Dubin went hastily up the bridge steps and down the other side into the market streets. He hurried through crowds shopping and on the first side street spied a red-haired girl about a block away--but not the man. Was it Maud? Though fatigued, Dubin hastened toward her.

When he reached the corner, she had disappeared, but the first house as he turned into the street was a pension and he was convinced that was where she was. He thought of entering and seeking her out but on reflection decided not to. If it was Maud, it would be wise to talk to her alone. The last thing he wanted was to confront his daughter in the presence of her lover--who else? Seeing a bakery across the street, Dubin went in, tempting the reluctant baker with a 1000-lire note to produce a telephone book, then he called the pension number.

"Is there a signorina Maud Dubin registered there?"

The padrone said he wasn't sure and who was calling?

"Tell her her father, William Dubin."

"I can't tell her a thing, if you're really her father, because there's nobody here by that name."

"She's red-haired," Dubin explained, and the padrone laughed and said, . "We've got two different redheads this week. Eh, signore, they're a deceptive lot. You can't tell what they really are until you've looked up their legs."

"I'm much obliged." Dubin lingered at the corner to see if either of the women came out and in less than 30 minutes, both did, one a girl with hair dyed orange, the other a middle-aged strawberry blonde with a middle-aged spectacled escort; neither so much as faintly resembled Maud. Dubin, vastly relieved, though irritated with himself for wasting time he could have put to better use, hurried back to the Rialto, where, since a vaporetto was about to depart and he felt weary, he hurried up the gangplank.

It was an interminable trip. He arrived at St. Mark's at close to seven and broke into a run. What a stupid goddamned waste, he thought in anger.

He absently got off the elevator at the fourth floor and walked up the other flight. Fanny was not in their room. Dubin began to undress for a shower when it occurred to him that the adjoining room was giving off percussive sighs. As he gently tried the door, it opened easily. The bed was made and unoccupied; but not the floor.

On the rug, crouched on hands and knees, was the red-haired Amadeo, his fiery hairy ass not so handsome as it had seemed in Levis, and under him lay Fanny. Dubin saw her gold-braceleted. arm around the young man's broad back. Her eyes were tightly shut. her face drawn, and she looked, he thought, before slamming the door shut, like a woman of 50.

The biographer felt as though he had lost every cent of a large investment and stood at the edge of desolate loneliness.

Afterward, when he brought himself to return to the room late that night, Fanny, dressed in denims and shirt, tense-eyed, pale, her expression sullen, said she had waited hours for him to come home and had more or less decided he was simply not interested, when the gondolier knocked on the door.

"Why didn't you tell him to go fuck himself?" Dubin shouted. "Why did you so quickly and easily demean us both?"

"Don't think you own me because you brought me to this phony city," she wept. "I did it because I felt like it. Because I was sorry for him. Because he's young," she said cruelly, "and I like his ass. And because you don't deserve me."

She accused him of loving his wife. "Why do I always get hooked up with these married schmucks?"

•

After a dismal night, when he slept little--listened for sobbing, a voice begging forgiveness, but heard only silence, her quiet breathing--hungry to embrace her, to blot out betrayal by making passionate love, Dubin slept as though awake and awoke early. What will it profit me to fuck her in anguish? Fanny, her face in a pool of moist hair on her pillow, lay heavily asleep. In sleep her expression was dull, the face and aspect of a stranger. And what, my God, am I doing in the same bed with her, back to back, 4000 miles from my work and home? He detested himself for having fallen into the hands of a child. How could I be so much an idiot? He felt in himself a weight of mourning he could not shove aside, or climb over, or even slightly diminish. He was, the thought, again mourning Dubin for having offered himself to her to betray. He sensed a more intense commitment to Fanny than he had guessed, or permitted, and wondered if he had been almost in love with her. If that's so, I'm glad to be done with it. Love--given who she is, given her promiscuity and my bad judgment--would have led to something miserable. Better momentary pain than long heartbreak.

She woke as he was dressing, looked at him with one eye and reached for her tights.

"I am," Fanny said, "just as moral as you."

"How would that work?"

"Don't give me that apeshit sarcasm."

He said he had asked an honest question.

"He needed me more than you ever did."

"His needs--supposing you're right--hardly constitute a requisite of morality."

"I have no obligations to anyone."

"Maybe you should have thought you had. Listen, Fanny," Dubin went on, "I'm going out for a walk to air my brain. I'll have your breakfast sent up. You needn't get up yet, it's very early. Maybe you ought to think a little bit about yourself."

She fell back in bed.

When he returned after two hours of aimless walking, aimless thought, not much relieved, conscious of his age, appearance, Fanny had eaten and was reading in bed.

"What will you do?" he asked her.

"What do you mean?" Though her face was inexpressive, her voice wavered.

"What are your plans?"

She studied him unhappily. "I think I want to go to Rome, and maybe Naples, but all I have on me is fifty bucks in traveler's checks and about ten in bills and change."

"And your air ticket home." He handed it to her.

"And my air ticket home."

"I've packed," Dubin told her, "and we're checked out. Why don't you get dressed and meet me across the street in Alitalia at eleven? I'm told there are two flights to Rome this afternoon."

"What time is the first?"

"We can find out. If you decide not to go to Rome, you can have your ticket changed to the Air France late-afternoon flight to Paris and from there to New York."

"I've got a friend of mine to see in Rome."

She said it as though the friend were female, but he suspected a man.

He said he would see her at 11.

She arrived at 11:15 in a tight black dressy dress and black pumps--a stunning woman, or so it seemed. Dubin resisted a resurgence of desire--"Carmen, it est temps encore"--born of frustration, the overthrow of his late happy adventure.

They greeted each other politely. Fanny, before glancing up, looked seriously at the floor. Dubin nodded formally. She had on her smoked glasses, reflecting ceiling lights, and her Star of David--Jewish gentleman she was meeting in Rome?--and still wore Dubin's bracelet. Her light hair was full and thick. The girl could not have looked more attractive or, for that matter, more innocent. Why? My need to absolve her? He was moved to say, "Forget it, Fanny--a serious mistake, no doubt of it, but not fatal. The moment's mistake, not for all time. Let's talk it over, if you care to, and stay together for the rest of the week. Perhaps there's something for us both to recover."

But he couldn't bring himself to say it. Pain is divisive. It spoke one word: schmuck.

At my age, Dubin modified it, all young women are beautiful. I will keep it in mind and not hastily forgive her.

She paid for her ticket to Rome, but the biographer insisted she accept $100 in cash. "It's not much, but if you're careful, and with what you have on you, you can stay abroad another week or two."

"Do you want your bracelet back?" She had slipped it off 'her wrist.

He flipped his fingers in annoyance. "It's yours. I bought it for you with pleasure--affection. Do what you please with it."

"You could give it to Maud."

"Maud will have to inspire her own bracelets. Think of it as a parting gift."

"Do you think I deserve one?"

He laughed hoarsely.

"Are you punishing me with kindness?" Fanny asked.

"That wouldn't be kind."

She slipped her fingers through the gold band. Fanny dug into her suede bag and returned Sons and Lovers. He accepted the book.

The hotel baggage porter wheeled her suitcases to the dock on the canal. Dubin said he would see her off. "Why bother?" He said he preferred to.

They waited on the dock for the water taxi to return. It was another beautiful day, sky and water combining light; in the lagoon, a scattering of islands they had planned to visit and never would. If one could embrace the day.

"You'll like Rome," he said.

"Where are you headed?"

He wasn't sure.

"I'll bet you hate me."

"I wish we had done it differently."

She remarked, after a minute, "It was your fault as well as mine." Her lips were firm.

He nodded gravely. "What will you do when you get back to the States?"

She shrugged. "Maybe I might get married, maybe not."

Dubin advised her to go on with her studies.

"They can't teach you in college what I want to learn."

He asked her what she wanted to learn.

"I'm not sure."

"I see." He saw nothing.

The motoscafo was approaching.

"Take care of yourself, Fanny."

"Ciao. I appreciate what you did that time I got sick."

After mutual hesitation, they kissed lightly. Not better than nothing.

The motorboat slowly clocked backward, piloted by a young capitano in lavender pants.

He wore a damp cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a white French sailor's cap with a red pompon. The capitano with gallant care assisted Fanny and her luggage into the chugging boat and seated her on the bench behind the wheel outside the cabin. There were no other passengers. He raised the accelerator, twirled the wheel and at once they were off in the water in a churning wide arc.

When the boat hit mid-canal, Fanny, her hair flying golden around her shoulders in sunlight, turned to wave to Dubin--to Venice? He lifted his hat, feeling as he did, glad at last to be alone, and had then his moment of pure elation.

"After a moment, he stepped out of his shoe and began gently to move up Fanny's calf with his foot.