The Mountain Cage (36 page)

“Have to remind myself,” he said, “to call Bernie after breakfast.” Bernie was Alan’s close friend and attorney. Lately, Alan had not told her much about his ever-more-frequent meetings with Bernie. Maybe he was thinking of declaring bankruptcy. He would come home one day and tell her that his business had finally gone belly-up. He would say that he had kept it from her because he did not want her fretting over everything and making herself sick, even though she had been worrying about everything and making herself sick all along anyway.

“Is it so important it can’t wait?” Miriam asked.

“Yeah, it is,” and she knew that he would not tell her what it was.

The gondola glided around a corner into another canal. Miriam was growing used to the odor of decay, and the dark green water was still. For a moment, she was at peace, taking pleasure in the silvery light and the soft sound of water lapping against stones. Had they come here when they were younger, while they were still living together or after they had first been married, by now Alan would be trying to kiss her. She would have protested, wondering what the gondolier might think, and Alan would have assured her that the man had probably steered plenty of lovers deep in the throes of passion along this canal. They would have giggled and cuddled and then gone back to their hotel room to make love before dinner.

She could not imagine that happening now. They should have come to Venice when they were younger, when they would have loved Venice for what it was and not only as an escape. She thought of how Venice was slowly sinking, of the hordes of tourists who came here trying to recapture the sense of beauty, joy, or romance they had lost, whose demands had turned so much of this city into more of a theme park than a place of romance, who roamed over these islands and along the canals in herds. One day, they would all come back to find their beloved city under water, forever lost to them.

She turned toward Alan, about to speak, then forgot what she was going to say. His brown eyes stared into hers for a moment, then looked away. He had lost some weight recently, and now the tanned and leathery skin of his face sagged more, making him look older.

A longing for what she and Alan had once been to each other overwhelmed her. He had once loved her enough to resent every moment away from her; she had always trusted him to be at her side when she needed him. Now their troubles had poisoned even the wellsprings of love she used to think could never be tainted.

A movement caught her eye; she looked up. A woman was watching from a window up ahead, gazing down at the canal. Somebody was home in one of these houses after all. Miriam caught a glimpse of masses of pale hair, then lifted a hand to wave. The woman moved her hand in an arc, as if wiping an invisible window; the gesture seemed oddly familiar.

I know you, Miriam thought. She blinked, and the woman was gone.

Alan touched her hand. She was suddenly worried about him, afraid that he was keeping too much from her. Tell me what’s wrong, she wanted to say. Tell me about all the problems, and we’ll work them out together, the way we used to do. It doesn’t have to be like this; I can meet you halfway. I won’t pick at you, and in return you can listen to me, stop turning away from me, stop looking at me with that not-quite-smile on your face that tells me you’re sorry you ever married me. All we have to do is remember how we once felt about each other, and everything else will fall into place.

The sounds of voices suddenly washed over her in a wave, nearly deafening her. The gondola drifted toward another bridge, this one crowded with Asian tourists. Miriam raised a hand tentatively; the people on the bridge grinned and waved and chattered among themselves. The water was slightly choppier, rocking the gondola. Up ahead, beyond the walls on either side of them, she could now see the broad, greenish expanse of the Grand Canal.

They ate breakfast in their hotel, in the indoor dining room next to the outdoor tables where they had eaten last night. Miriam had gotten used to the strong Italian coffee, but still had to put milk in it to make it palatable, something she never did at home. Alan had asked the waiter to bring butter and was putting some on one of his hard rolls. His doctor had warned him about his cholesterol, but the butter would probably do him less harm than his cigarettes.

At the tables on the opposite side of the room, which each bore a marker near the floral centerpiece with the words “American Express,” a tour group of older gray-haired people were eating bowls of cereal. Despite their advanced age, the tourists all looked fit and energetic and blatantly cheerful. Almost all of them were couples. Miriam wondered how they had managed to live for so long and stay married to their spouses without looking as though they had regrets.

Alan finished his coffee. “Maybe you can buy a map of the
vaporetto
routes,” he said, “while I go upstairs and make that call to Bernie.”

She would not ask him about the call. They had managed a pleasant dinner the night before, largely because a couple in the American Express group, a retired engineer and his wife from Tampa, had struck up a conversation with them from their table. They had not gotten off to a good start that morning. The noise of boat traffic, loud talking, and singing gondoliers outside their open window had kept Alan awake for much of the night. Miriam would not allow herself to ruin breakfast with questions about his business.

“Vaporetto
routes?” she asked, not sure of what Alan had meant.

“Vaporetto,”
he said as he crumpled his napkin. “The public boats, the water buses. The plural is
vaporetti.”
He got to his feet. “Go to one of those booths and get a map. Just say,
‘Vorrei comprare una carta di vaporetti.’
That ought to do the job. If you want to be polite, throw in a
‘per favore’
and say
‘grazie’
afterwards. Even you ought to be able to manage that.”

He turned and walked away. How odd that she could feel hurt by his remark. She should be used to such comments by now.

Miriam stood up and headed toward the lobby. The retired couple from Tampa waved at her as she passed their table. She wondered if she and Alan would ever be able to afford to retire. She thought of what he had said last night, just before they had gone downstairs to have dinner. “You know what would solve our problems? If I dropped dead. Darrell could take over the business and then he could decide who to lay off next year. The insurance would take care of you, and Jason and Joelle would just have to look out for themselves. And I wouldn’t have to be bothered any more, which would be one hell of a relief.” She had been too shocked to do what she should have done, embrace him and tell him that she could not bear to have him think that way.

She went outside. The narrow street was already crowded with tourists; they seemed to be everywhere. She wandered toward the open area where several vendors had set up their booths and asked in English for a map and schedule of the
vaporetto
routes. The man in the booth handed them to her; so much for Alan’s sarcastic language lesson at breakfast.

She walked toward the Grand Canal. In a few minutes, she would go inside and wait in the lobby, trying not to look too impatient when Alan finally met her there.

“Miri,” a voice said. “Miriam Feyn.”

Miriam looked up. Near the stone steps leading down to the water stood a tall, slender woman in a red T-shirt and baggy jeans. Her unruly long hair was gray, almost white, but she still wore it as she had when younger, in a mass of waves that fell nearly to her waist.

“Vera Massie!” Miriam said, and hurried toward her. “I can’t believe it!” They clasped hands and then hugged each other. “We just got here yesterday, on the train from Milan.” She stepped back, gripping her old friend by the elbows. “We actually got to Venice at the same time.”

“Actually, I’ve been here for a while,” the other woman said.

“You mean you live here?” Miriam asked.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Miriam felt a pang of envy. Maybe Vera was leading the kind of life they had once imagined for themselves. The other woman guided Miriam toward the courtyard of the pink hotel across the way; they sat down at one of the tables.

No one else seemed to be sitting here. Miriam looked around for a waiter, then turned back to Vera. “Vera Massie,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

“Vera Langella,” Vera said. “I thought of hyphenating it, but I never much cared for the name Massie anyway. Frankly, I was glad to have an excuse to ditch my last name when I got married.”

“Well, I’m not Miriam Feyn any more, either. I tried, but after a while, it was just too much trouble to keep telling people my last name was Feyn and not Loewe. Finally gave up when my daughter started kindergarten. Her teacher kept calling me ‘Mrs. Loewe,’ and seemed to resent it when I tried to correct her.”

Vera smiled. “You have a daughter.”

“A son, too.” Miriam glanced toward the Canal. The traffic had been heavy only a few moments ago. Now the broad waterway was quieter and even emptier than it had been at dawn, when she had looked out from her window to see shards of golden light dancing on the still green water. “I remember when you used to say you’d live here and have a gondolier as a lover.”

“Yeah, and that I was going to live in a
palazzo
. Afraid I didn’t manage either the
palazzo
or the gondolier.”

Miriam could see her hotel room window from here. She lifted her head, thinking she had seen Alan looking outside. She noticed then that the vendors in the open area did not seem to be doing much business; the knots of tourists buying marionettes, postcards, and maps had disappeared.

“I didn’t manage much of anything,” Miriam said. “I’m a claims manager for an insurance company, and my husband’s a builder and contractor—he owns his own business. He’s in our room, calling his lawyer, and he won’t tell me what that’s about, so it probably means he’s doing even worse than I think he is. My daughter dropped out of college to live with a guy named Rich who wears his hair in dreadlocks and works at Burger King while he’s waiting for his band to make it. My son’s out at Hazelden going through his second thirty-day program for substance problems.” She wondered why she had told her old friend all of that. Maybe it was because of all the times Vera had nursed her through her black moods in college, finally convincing her that things weren’t as bleak as they seemed.

“What do you think of this guy your daughter’s with?” Vera asked.

Miriam thought of Rich’s gentle brown eyes. “Oh, in some ways, he’s not so bad. He’s reasonably mannerly, and he seems to care about Joelle. I just wish he were more ambitious, and those dreadlocks—” She sighed. “God, I sound just like my mother when she met Alan. She used to say he’d be so nice-looking if he just did something about his hair.”

“And your daughter? What are her plans?”

“I don’t really know. Right now, she’s doing some sort of free-lance computer stuff, graphic design and such. I don’t really understand it that well, but she gets paid for it, however modestly.”

Vera said, “Things could be a lot worse, then.”

“I suppose.” Miriam leaned back in her seat. “I just hope she doesn’t get pregnant. She’d probably go ahead and have the baby, even if Rich bailed out. That does seem to be the style nowadays.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t bail out,” Vera murmured.

Maybe he wouldn’t, Miriam thought. She already felt a bit more kindly toward Rich. “Actually, I’m more worried about Jason. He had everything going for him, a fellowship at Stanford and a wonderful fiancée, and he threw it all away. Let me reword that. He snorted and freebased it away. I think he might have died if a friend of his hadn’t gotten him into detox.”

“What happened then?” Vera asked.

“He came home. Promised he’d stay clean. Alan found him an apartment near us and gave him a part-time job. Within a couple of months, he was out scoring again. I found out after he stole some of our silver to pay for the drugs.”

“What did you do?” Vera asked.

“Alan was so pissed off he was ready to call the cops. Before he could, Jason came over, really wrecked, and said he was sorry, that he knew he was out of control, and that he had to go back into treatment.”

Vera rested one arm on the table. “Then your son was acknowledging his problem. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so. He flew back to Minnesota a week before we left for Italy. Alan refused to cancel our trip. He figured we were better off taking the opportunity to travel while Jason was safely in Hazelden. God knows how we’re going to pay for everything when we get home. We’ll probably be paying off this trip alone for years, assuming we don’t go bankrupt first.”

“At least you’ll have had it,” Vera said.

“Oh, yes.” Miriam could not keep the bitterness out of her voice. “We’ll remember it every time the Visa bill arrives. And there’ll still be a lot of sights we’ll miss, because there just isn’t the time to see everything.”

“You know what I always say?” Vera lifted her arms and pulled her long hair back from her face with both hands, exactly as she used to do in college. “You shouldn’t try to see and do everything, no matter how much time you have. You should always leave something for when you come back again.”

Miriam’s mouth twisted. “What if you know you’ll never come back?”

“You shouldn’t look at it that way, Miri. It used to help me when I’d tell myself that I’d come back to do something I hadn’t done, that I’d left unfinished, even if I knew the chances were against it. What did I have to lose by hoping?”