Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (12 page)

“Oh, Liv, you are the kindest person I have ever known,” I say. “I'm fine.”

In fact I am as close to unconscious as one can be without actually being in a coma. The film begins. Thank god for that. Now I can sleep. I am hoping to reenter my Elizabethan dream with my two gentlemen of Venice, but alas it does not come. Instead I find myself back in the old apartment on Park and Seventy-third, with the birds on my bedroom ceiling, and Mummy sipping sherry on the chaise longue in her bedroom down the hall. It is night, I have had a bad dream, so I toddle into Mummy's room and find her passed out on the chaise, a bottle of sherry on the floor beside her, a sticky empty glass beside it, and a Steuben ashtray overflowing with fuchsia-lipsticked burnt-out ends of Dunhill cigarettes (intermingled with Pall Malls—for my mother had this theory that smoking could not hurt you if you alternated two brands), and the terrifying feeling that this time, something is hideously different.

I grab her hand. It is limp and cold. Mummy's dead, I think, Mummy's dead. And then I tell myself:
be calm
. You're the mother now. And then Antonia, my daughter, is suddenly there (though she cannot have been born yet), and she is a baby of nine months or so crawling around on the carpet and I am crawling after her. She seems to be putting funny things in her mouth. She has found these pink and green capsules of Mummy's with some odd markings on them—Greek letters, it appears—and she is grabbing them and shoving them into her mouth. I have to stop her,
I have to stop her
. And now I am crawling along the rug, feeling for the pink and green capsules that are lost in the deep shag. I brush the wool this way and that, searching for them, and suddenly they have turned from capsules into segmented bugs, those little crustaceans one finds under rotten logs, and with a panicky feeling I am creeping after the baby to keep her from eating
those!

My mouth feels crawly with insects as if I have eaten the bugs myself—and my cheeks still burn. Wake up, I say sharply to myself, this is a nightmare. Wake up! And when I do wake up I am in my suite at the Excelsior in broad daylight, with flowers all around, and Liv is still holding my hand.

“You were very ill,” she says. “A strep throat, with swollen glands, and your fever is still high. Try to sleep again.”

“What happened?” I ask. “What about…the film festival?”

“It ends tonight,” Liv says with her lovely Norwegian brogue, “but you're much too sick to get out of bed. Just rest. I will take your place at the awards ceremony. I've arranged to stay another night to do it. Now rest.”

I sink back on my pillows. The room looks like my hospital room when I gave birth to Antonia—there are roses and lilies in profusion everywhere. The funereal odor of the lilies unfortunately overpowers the scent of the roses.

“Thank you, Liv,” I say weakly.

“What are friends for?” she asks, getting up and quietly walking out of the room.

I try to get up but I cannot.

From where I lie in bed, I can see three large vertical rectangles of light bounded at the bottoms by little stone balconies that overlook the Adriatic. The empty wine glass from several days ago is still there. But I cannot see the sea itself, or the beach, without getting out of bed. Above me is the spun-sugar chandelier with its whorls and twists of light held captive in glass—that unique Venetian invention: light imprisoned (imprismed?) in molten sand and woven into a lucent braid. I know that if I rise and walk to the window, however wobbly, I shall presently see the white tents of the Excelsior beach club and the fat
bambini
gallivanting on the sand—or shall I? Perhaps the whole present tense has been abolished and I am back at the Lido as it must have existed in Shakespeare's time (for it did even in Byron's): a sandy strip of beach to gallop across on the back of your Arab steed.

Are my two Elizabethan courtiers then racing along the strand? I can almost see them, urging each other on with cries and calls, bets and dares, as the hoofbeats of their horses drum on the wet, hard-packed sand at the edge of the water or sink with muffled thumps into the drier sand farther from the sea.

Or are they damned ghosts that I have seen? For Venice's very air is full of ghosts—just as the clouds that flit across the sky are camel-backed, weasellike, whalelike. If there ever were a place to see a ghost, have discourse or intercourse with a ghost, Venice would be that place.

I must get up, I think, and go to the window to judge for myself whether I am in the present or the past. Are the tents of the Excelsior there, or is it a bare beach with two Elizabethans galloping along the strand? I am no longer sure! They fool me to the top of my bent—or else my fever fools me.

The very air in this room existed in Shakespeare's time, in Byron's, in Browning's. Where does the air go? I wonder. Why, where
can
it go? Is history all a matter of changes in the air? For it lingers from one century to the next, and in its bright strands souls are captured, souls who have some business here below because they are not yet at peace. Shakespeare knew such souls; he wrote about them obsessively; clearly he believed in them. And the Earl of Southampton surely was such a soul—with his love of poetry, his pederasty, his eventual treachery, and his improbable pardon (when all his coconspirators were dead). But was Shakespeare also one of these restless souls? Dead at fifty-three, the cause unknown—one Shakespearologist even claims he was murdered—a gentleman, a property owner, but still with some words unsaid? That I would like to know. That I intend to know.

I get up and in my delirium stagger to the window. There is the sea, with the white arabesque tents of the Excelsior huddled before it, and the
bambini
trading autographs on the sand.

Deeply disappointed, I turn away from the window. Still in the present tense, I think, still here not there, still trapped in this bubble of time called 1984, which was cursed by a mere writer, who, because he called into being a terrifying fantasy about that year, was able to bewitch that actual year when it occurred, decades later. Oh, the raising of visions is a dangerous thing—as Shakespeare also knew.

Still, since I'm up, I might as well have a look at the cards attaching to all these riotous bouquets of flowers.

I start to peek at them: day lilies from my agent, Lance Robbins; yellow roses from Liv; calla lilies from Grisha (does he wish me dead with this funereal display of flowers?); a mixed bouquet of red and pink roses from the venerable communist Carlos Armada; an enormous potted palm from the managing director of the hotel; a low bowl of mixed anemones and tiger lilies from Leonardo; mums and gladioli from Per Erlanger; and then, behind the other floral displays, as if in hiding, two dozen more white roses in a tall, clear glass vase, with this sonnet affixed:

Th'expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and, till action, lust

Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted, and no sooner had,

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait.

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

I read the sonnet slowly aloud to myself and then fall back on my bed, exhausted.

I toss and turn in my fever, soak the sheets, ring for the maid to change them, soak them anew. Where I am I do not really know, unless I am in that realm called fever, speaking that timeless language called fever.

I think of all the artists who have died in Venice and conclude I am done for. If Titian was felled here by the plague, if Dante died of a fever caught on a journey here, if Wagner and Browning both breathed their last above the Grand Canal (not to mention Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Ezra Pound, even poor Baron Corvo), why should I be spared? This is it, I think. I expire amid the contagions of this lagoon, hallowed by history, hallowed by the deaths of poets. Alone in Venice with only two dream courtiers to attend me—this will be my Aschenbach-like fate.

And then my thoughts shift to Shakespeare and particularly to his sonnets, that curious sequence in which he surely bared his heart. If you read the sonnets carefully, the pain is unmistakable. This was a man who loved and was betrayed. This was a man who was hurt to his heart's very quick. Whoever the “straying youth” he loved, there is no question that he loved an arrogant narcissist and that he himself was the unrequited lover, not the beloved. The ache is
in
the sonnets. It is palpable. It is most palpable, in fact, when the poet most tries to rationalize himself out of it, as in the sonnet that describes the young man's seduction of the poet's woman.

That thou hast her, it is not all my grief,

And yet it may be said I loved her dearly;

That she hath thee is of my wailing chief,

A loss in love that touches me more nearly.

Loving offenders, thus I will excuse ye:

Thou dost love her, because thou know'st I love her,

And for my sake even so doth she abuse me,

Suff'ring my friend for my sake to approve her.

If I lose thee, my loss is my love's gain,

And losing her, my friend hath found that loss:

Both find each other, and I lose both twain,

And both for my sake lay on me this cross.

But here's the joy: my friend and I are one;

Sweet flattery! Then she loves but me alone.

Was ever a lover so self-deceiving and so undeceived both at the same time?

Harry and Will, Will and Harry. Have I met them or only imagined them? And who is the Dark Lady? Can she in fact be me?

I am dark now, with auburn lights, but my hair has always been changeable, running the gamut from gold to sable. The changes of my hair have reflected the changes of my life. And as I have fretted over my life, I have always fretted over my hair.

“Titian gold” my mother called it, when I was fifteen, but then it darkened to auburn, then to sable with reddish highlights. I have read that Shakespeare had the same color hair—that his hair was russet or auburn before he went rather bald, poor chap.

Of course, I have never liked my hair. (What woman has?) When I was a child, people raved about its color (it was silky, long, and reddish gold like my daughter's is now). It got curlier and darker as I got older, so that by adolescence it was tarnished gold, forming a curly, cuprous aureole around my head, and by the time I reached college it was positively Pre-Raphaelite. I see myself in pictures from that period (Sarah Lawrence, I mean) looking for all the world like a Burne-Jones angel. Still, that didn't mean I ever
felt
beautiful. On the contrary, I felt ugly. Nor was curly hair the vogue in the late fifties, early sixties, when hair was the most important thing in my life (besides dieting, finding—or avoiding—sex, and amphetamines). I did everything to flatten my curls: “wrapping” my hair, having it “pressed,” “relaxed,” or stretched on giant rollers (we even
slept
in them in those days). The point was to achieve the opposite of what you had: lank, flat hair if you were born with curly; curly hair if you were born with straight.

Ah, adolescence—I do not miss it! Even fever is better. Even fever has its own inner logic. Hair and fever bring me back to Shakespeare who knew both, knew them intimately. And suffered.

Why does the White Goddess make her devotees suffer so? Why are her priests and priestesses so cursed? Is it because she requires the deep cut of pain to release the poem? Or is it because her poets must fall in love harder than their muses so as to make them more open to the Goddess's silver darts? Has She bred a whole race of martians whose main purpose on earth is to love, feel pain, write poems, and die? Yes, I think in my delirium. This is the logic of it, and I am here in Venice to die and rejoin that cursed/blest company of poets. Perhaps when I do, my soul will fly out of my body and rejoin the Dark Lady, Jessica, Shylock's daughter, or whoever I was in that sixteenth-century life I keep trying to remember.

Madness, I think. All this is madness. No, not madness, only fever, which is a kind of madness, a kind of earthquake in the brain and in the body. “Some say the earth was feverous and did shake.” Well, my body is feverish and doth shake, and what other earth have I but this body?

In my fever, I remember things I would rather forget: how my baby brother, Pip, and Antonia's father, Lincoln—since he was named for the great emancipator, he felt free to play the jailer whenever possible—organized the lawyers and accountants who managed Mother's trust against me, so that I became dependent entirely upon the dubious beneficence of LaLa Land and its curious laws. If, not for their treachery, I might have my daughter still, and also the emoluments of Mother's money. Not that I care so very much about money for its own sake, but in my profession it can buy a certain freedom, a certain immunity from the cruel caprices of filmdom. And then there is the question of my grandfather's will…In my delirium I am obsessed by wills of all sorts!

My grandfather's will was at the root of many of my mother's troubles—though I doubt that he intended it to be. It was simply that my grandfather was the sort of man who thought more about keeping a fortune than a family intact. In homage to that he had designed and built for him (by one of those posh New York law firms with twenty partners on the creamy, copper-plate-engraved letterhead—including some who had been dead for decades) an ironclad monument to his cupidity, his appreciation of money above life. This will created what is known as a layered trust, ensuring that his millions (hundreds of millions, actually) would pass through the generations as much united as possible and as undiluted by taxes as the law allowed. None of the children or grandchildren was ever to get her (or his) hands on the capital, but to receive only a stream of income directed, or misdirected, by the trustees and executors.