Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (13 page)

Wills are always troublesome (think of the “second-best bed”), but a will such as my grandfather's is more troublesome than most. The trouble is, of course, that the maker has to die (although the nature of the document is such that it appears intended to
deny
the reality of death). And when he does, other living, breathing, fallible creatures—lawyers—must carry out what they presume to be his wishes. And more than likely they stand to gain plenty from their role as “sprinklers” of the estate's balm.

My poor mother had all the disadvantages of being an heiress—a sapping of strength and ambition, a tendency to attract the lowest sort of fortune-hunting rogues, a profound disbelief in her own lovability—and none of the advantages. She could not thumb her nose at the whole male-dominated world as a powerful female dispenser of inherited money might, for she was ever in the thrall of lawyers and investment bankers, who dispensed the bounty—or the curse—of grandfather's money as a sort of commentary upon her values and aspirations.

The money never seemed to bring anyone any pleasure—and it gave a lot of people pain. My grandfather, in the first place, was guilty about it, because it had been made chiefly through selling poison gas to the government in World War I. My grandfather—Wardell Benjamin Bostwicke III was his name—had been, in his youth, a cellist and a lover of Mozart. He was also a man with one of those great and deeply felt classical educations that Southern gentlemen of the old school used to receive at the University of Virginia, and you can bet the irony of fiddling while the world choked in the trenches was not lost on him. He tried to kill himself with his shotgun, in fact, though the family always declared it an accident, but he missed. And when I knew him, he was an ancient man with a still suppurating, schrapnellike wound in his forehead, out of which pieces of metal were rumored to have fallen during rides in the car (a Delahaye), during dinner, or at tea.

My grandfather Bostwicke did one good thing with his money, however; he set up an arts foundation that was supposed to enshrine his love for the classics—Mozart, Shakespeare, the study of Latin and Greek. Unfortunately, upon his demise, his ever-vigilant trustees and executors had found a way to divert much of the money for this foundation into their own pockets, so his intentions had not been carried out. But the potential for putting at least some of the Bostwicke booty to good use was there—if one were prepared to do battle with the successor trustees and find the proper legal minds to help.

My mother had been too embroiled in her own marital woes to undertake this, nor had she truly cared. She was of that lost generation of women, born in the twenties, too young to be flappers or suffragettes, and too old to be liberated superwomen of the sixties-turned-seventies (though whether or not my generation is truly liberated is certainly the mootest of moot points). When I came to inherit at twenty-one, I was of the fuck-you-I'll-do-it-myself school of heiresses. I thumbed my nose at my inheritance—as any true, idealistic child of the sixties would have done. The result was that my baby brother, Pip, and Antonia's father (both of whom were lawyers) managed to quietly usurp every vestige of my control. I had never cared to fight them on it. Now I was beginning to wonder if that had been so wise.

Here comes the doctor, at last. I almost expect him to be wearing one of those long-nosed masks like the plague doctors of the sixteenth century, but he is not. Rather, he is a silver-haired, suntanned Italian bachelor in his sixties who looks more gigolo than medic.

“How are you today, Signorina Pruitt?” he asks me.

“Feverish,” I say, sitting up in bed. (Have you ever noticed how the mere arrival of the doctor makes you feel better, lowers your fever, makes you feel safe? I note all this with amusement, since any doctor can kill you, but in Italy your chances of dying from the medic, not the disease, are infinitely higher.)

Dr. Dazzi (for that is the doctor's improbable name) is the doctor they always call for suffering foreigners in Venice, since he speaks four languages (all of them badly).

“Would you like penicillin or erythromycin?” he asks, as if he were requesting my preference in
gelato
flavors.

“What do you think?” I ask the doctor.

“Is up to you,” says Dazzi. “What you like? You like a shot, or through the mouth?”

“What will get me
well
faster?”

The doctor shrugs. “Mah!” he says, as if this were an existential question, too complex to be determined except perhaps by God, Jean-Paul Sartre, or lottery. My attempts to make him into the authority figure I require in my delirium are failing totally.

“If you take a shot of penicillin,” says Dazzi, “you will get better in seven days. If you don't take it, you will get better in a week. What do you like?”

Torn between my feverish panic and my desire to rejoin the Elizabethans as soon as possible, I opt for penicillin by mouth.

“Good decision,” says the doctor. “I will order.”

He sits on my bed and calls the pharmacy, a really touristy one near San Marco, which dispenses the same penicillin as any other pharmacy at twice the price.

Wearied from this much exertion, I fall back on my pillows again.

“I shall come tomorrow,” says Dr. Dazzi.

“Good,” I say, not really sure I will be there at all. Perhaps by then I will have figured out how to get back to Harry and Will.

As soon as the doctor leaves, Grisha bursts in with piles of fresh newspapers. His fistfight was a great success! It generated more column inches even than his protest against Björn.

“And your illness, Jessichka, was a journalistic coup. Brilliant publicity—I could not have thought of it myself.” He shows me some Italian newspapers in which I have made front page news for being sick and fainting dead away at my own film. One paper speculates about whether or not Robusti will demand an apology. Or will he realize that my fainting was no comment on the film?

“That's the silliest thing I ever heard of,” I say to Grisha. “Why should I protest my own film?”

“Publicity, my dzear girl, publicity…If you learn Grisha's lesson well, you already know this. Well, I must go and dress for the closing ceremonies. May I take my newspapers now?”

“Does this mean good-by?” I ask warily, knowing the answer already.

“Of course not,” says Grisha. But I know he lies. If he exits with those newspapers, he exits my life forever.

Am I happy about this? You bet. But it does seem rather the end of an era. There goes détente, such as it is, I think. As Grisha Krylov waves and shuts the door, clutching his beloved newspapers, the cold war recommences with a fury.

I am lying in bed, cooling my heels while my brow burns and mad fantasies of dead Elizabethans flit through it. They are closing the film festival without me, and soon all the jurors and journalists will disperse, leaving Venice to the Venetians. What's to become of me? Do I wait to see whether Björn turns up? Do I head for Pacific Palisades again? Someone had better send word soon. Until then I shall just lie here slipping in and out of time, waiting to see which century will claim me, whether I love a dead man or a living, whether I myself am dead or alive, mad or sane, Jessica or…Jessica.

T
HE FILM FESTIVAL
is over, the jurors are beginning to disperse; but I am still lying in bed too sick to move. That doesn't mean, however, that my bed is a quiet retreat from the world. On the contrary, it seems to be the center of the universe. The phone shrills constantly and visitors come in and out bearing newspapers, bearing flowers, bearing tidings both good and ill.

The morning papers bring the news that
Women in Hell
has won no awards whatsoever (perhaps in part because of my “protest”); the Golden Lion has instead been won by an obscure Indian film about peasants herding pigs across the Ganges; and the best actress award has gone to an amateur player in a Filipino documentary that worthily recounts labor troubles in that country. Best actor has gone to a broken-down drunk of an American cowboy of the Reagan era who had the guts (or the sheer gall) to appear in a Polish film about the Second World War, directed by a Russian. Even the two best supporting awards have gone to virtual unknowns. As usual, the Venice Film Festival has gone out of its way to put perversity above excellence, and its choices for the major awards are as far out of the mainstream as possible.

Grisha has fled—but not without making further protests about the awards, protests that will certainly ensure the Kremlin's sending him abroad again as soon as possible. And Björn has still not been heard from, at least by me. I am in despair.
Women in Hell
is neither a critical nor a commercial success, and
Serenissima
may now never happen. What do I do? I'm forty-three years old, deathly ill, and washed up. Even my agent, Lance Robbins (né Lou Rabinowitz), has called to “commiserate” with me over the mess at the festival and tell me that maybe he can still get me a part as an aging tart in Aaron Spelling's hot new miniseries if only I will come to my senses and come home. (Lance Robbins, of Malibu, California, is a beach boy of fifty with silver-gray hair, a perfectly muscled chest, a voice that sounds like olive oil on velvet, and absolutely no inkling of why I would want to wait around in Venice for Björn Persson when I could be taping a miniseries called
Vegas II—Vegas I
has already made Neilson history—with Joan Collins and Suzanne Sommers. But then, Lance Robbins only dates twenty-five-year-old starlets with implants, and probably thinks Will Shakespeare is a hot, new restaurant on Melrose opened by Wolfgang Puck. He adores me in his heartless William Morris Agent way, but he also thinks I'm
meshugga
.)

“
Meshugga
,” he says across six thousand miles and nine time zones. “Why sit around for a picture that may never happen when you've got a real deal here with a project that's a definite go. This is a terrific part, Jessica, with real meat in it. You play this hooker in Las Vegas who figures out a system to beat the house odds in roulette and gets pursued by the mob. It's dynamite writing, not your usual schlock. Really top writers—Susan and Herman Blotnik—and a director you can trust: Herbie Plotkin. Blotnik and Plotkin—if you can't trust them, who can you trust in this business? You've got script approval, and believe me I can build all kinds of other sweeteners into the deal. It's not exactly as if you're getting younger, Sweetie. I mean all this high art stuff is very noble, but—”

“Let me think about it, Lance.”

“Well, think about it, but don't think about it for more than a day or so because there are plenty of other actresses dying for the part. Elizabeth is thin again and looks great, and even Raquel is willing to do a miniseries now. It's not slumming like it used to be. And the exposure is incredible. It could turn your whole career around.”

“It's that bad, huh? One film festival and I'm finished?”

“Of course I don't mean
that
, Sweetie,” Lance says, “but Björn Persson, even when he's
not
being temperamental, doesn't get you the exposure we're talking here…Let's face it. Swedish art movies are not network television.”

“That's why I want to do it.”

“Be reasonable, Jessica, you could knock yourself right out of place in line. Rocky, Elizabeth, Joan—they're all working in television now. Well, get better, kid. Watch out for
Death in Venice
.”

“Thanks, Lance,” I say, putting down the phone.

It's only nine
A.M.
in Venice, which means it must be midnight in Malibu, the moonstruck night before.

I can just visualize Lance in his house on the Pacific Coast Highway, with the Jaguar XJ6 and the Mercedes SLC parked outside. He could be calling me from the hot tub on the redwood deck overlooking the ocean while his main tootsie, Elena, a calculating little number with flaxen hair and tits that don't move at all, rubs his back and tokes on a joint, thinking of how she can talk Lance out of making her sign an antenuptial agreement
should
he marry her. Not that he is about to. She does drugs too much, and works too little, and Lance thinks he may be able to do better. Even marriage in the Land of LaLa is subject to high-powered deal-making. And as for drugs, Lance doesn't do much dope anymore—except before sex—because it makes you too mellow, man, and he needs all his greed and graspingness intact for the work he does.

I shut my eyes and astrally transport myself to Carbon Beach. The same moon that shines on the Adriatic here is shining on the Pacific there—and I love the Pacific, no matter how many William Morris agents line its shores. But it seems a greater feat of time travel and space warp to go from Venice to Malibu than from 1984 to 1592. Harry and Will still seem more real to me than Lance Robbins and his Elena in their glass-and-redwood house above the Pacific. William Shakespeare still calls to me more persistently than William Morris.

The phone rings again. It's Per Erlanger, my would-be Shylock.

“Per? How are you?”

“Yessica,” says Per in his rhythmic, Swedish singsong, “may I come to your suite? It's very important.”

“How can I ever resist someone who calls me ‘Yessica'?” I say, referring to an old joke between us. Per laughs appreciatively. I go on, “But will you forgive me if I look like hell?”

“Don't be silly, Yessica. Don't forget that I've seen you in all kinds of hells.”

“True,” I say, remembering some I'd rather forget.

I throw cold water on my ghostly face, brush my hair, my teeth, put on a clean robe, and brush my cheeks with blusher. I contemplate my enormous array of costly cosmetics, set out on the dresser top, but decide I haven't even the energy to do my face. The pots of paint in their glistening bottles and jars must languish while I regain my strength. I still look like death warmed over, but it's true that Per knows me. We are an old story to each other.