Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (8 page)

By now, the crowd on the second floor has dissipated and technicians are carrying away lights. Whatever has occurred there is now ended.

Some press people look as if they are about to accost me for interviews so I tuck my chin under, lower my eyes, and hurry down to the dining room. “Miss Pruitt, Miss Pruitt,” one calls. I pretend not to hear. If nothing else, I can eat. All this excitement has made me ravenous.

Grigory is holding forth at a round table in the corner of the dining room. He is surrounded by some other members of the jury—Leonardo da Leone, Walter Wildhonig, and Pierre de Houbigant, with his beauteous, sphinxlike Oriental wife.

Grigory makes a place for me at his side. He is glowing, animated, ebullient. He looks like a man who has just made wild and passionate love to his mistress and is now about to savor a hearty meal.

“My friend,” he is saying to bristling, mustachioed Walter Wildhonig, “would I dispute
your
right to criticize a film because
you
found it fascist?” (Walter is a famous antifascist.) “No, of course not. I would
never
interfere—”

“But
Don Giovanni
is hardly an example of
ein faschistisches Film
,” says Walter, “
gar nicht
…” (Although Walter speaks English well enough, he lapses into German when he wishes to be emphatic.)

“Besides,” says Leonardo, twitching madly, “as a member of the jury you have no right to make political pronouncements before the judging is over. No right whatsoever.”

“I have the right to represent my government,” says Grigory self-righteously, “the right to represent the noble pursuit of art for which we have been elected. Am I not a poet? Am I not a filmmaker? Am I not a critic of all the arts? My dear colleagues, why invite me here if you would muzzle me? Doesn't the West believe in its famed freedom of speech?”

“Well,” says Leonardo, “we must have one thing above all clear: you will not make any statements to the press until the jury has met and deliberated. Is that agreed?”

Grigory smiles like the Cheshire cat. The rules of these petty bureaucrats do not apply to him. “Do you not trust me, my friends? You know my art. You know my ardor…Why such cynicism? Why such mistrust? Am I not still your beloved Grisha, your poet? Would you muzzle spokespersons for culture as you accuse the Kremlin of doing?” His eyes twinkle wickedly.

Pierre seems to be nodding off during these verbal pyrotechnics, but he wakes up long enough to say: “My dear chap, I think you were quite unfair to Björn. The poor fellow is so sensitive to criticism anyway. Who knows where he has fled now—”

“Where
is
Björn?” I interject.

“Fled,” says Leonardo. “And
Dio
alone knows where. He and Lilli called a
motoscafo e sono fuggiti—
but not before he had a mini-nervous breakdown and withdrew
Don Giovanni
from competition. That was
his
protest. I wanted to call a special meeting of the jury to offer Björn an official apology, but he would have none of it. He withdrew the film, and—poof—disappeared.”

“And what of my film? What of
Serenissima?
Does anyone know?” I asked.

Leonardo shakes his head and gives a mighty vertical twitch. “
Chi sa?
Who knows?” he says. “Björn has been known to vanish for months at a time in less dramatic circumstances. Do you remember when the Swedish tax authorities found a minor discrepancy in his film company's records? He was hospitalized for ‘nervous collapse' that time. Who knows what will happen to him now? You are very wicked, Grisha,” he says, waggling a twitchy finger at Grigory. “You know your customer. Björn is a sensitive plant. That outburst was truly unkind.”

“Kind, unkind, is not the question, my dear Leonardo,” says Grigory. “Sometimes I must be cruel in order to be kind. You Westerners are very good at muzzling your Soviet friends in the name of free speech. But then, you are completely free to criticize
us
, to claim that we silence
our
writers. Such baloney.” (He pronounces it with a very Russian “nyeh” sound so that it comes out halfway between “baloneigh” and “balonyeh.”) I am glum. What will become of
Serenissima
now? It was my hope, my treat, my reward for a year of doing two abominable television miniseries and one violent quasi-science fiction film to earn my bread. (I tried always to have my projects spread, like good investments: one for art, one for money, one for exposure and publicity. Well, there goes art for this year, I think. I do not even want to contemplate what this will do to my career.)

“Besides, Grigory, comrade
mio
,” Leonardo is saying, “if you really wanted
Don Giovanni
to sink without a trace, you would not have made any protest at all. Your outburst will only
ensure
its success—”

“Then let it succeed!” says Grigory. “I am not the man to muzzle the great maestro Björn Persson! But also let me speak. I was invited here to speak, not to be silent. Björn should pay me a percentage of the gross from dollar first—should he not? Isn't that how you capitalists do it?
Publicitas vincit omnia—n'est-ce pas?”

I laugh dutifully, my career for this year “in the toilet,” as they say in my adopted Land of LaLa. A charming phrase, which betrays what American moviemakers think of their industry. That it is all shit. If I ever sink so low that I am driven to write a book about Hollywood, I'll call it
In This Business
and subtitle it
In and Out the Toilet Bowl
like some deranged disciple of Fritz Perls. The Land of LaLa is famous for the speed with which it condemns people to the toilet bowl—only to fish them out six or seven years later in a gaudy comeback, usually accompanied by glossy magazine confessions of drug dependence, broken love affairs, and marriages gone badder than bad. Come back little Starface, all is forgiven, the collective culture seems to say. But first you have to check into Rancho Mirage, give up “substance abuse” (at least for a
while
), shed your current spouse, reconcile with your kids (who are also about to graduate from a trendy rehab—in Hawaii, say), and then confess it all to
People
magazine in the most lurid terms. All you sacrifice for this comeback is your privacy and your dignity. A small price to pay if you had none to start with. Ah, Grisha is right:
Publicitas vincit omnia—
though I know he has his own twisted reasons for saying so.

“Come,” says Grisha to Leonardo, “let us make peace. Let us order some champagne—the most decadent French champagne, Roederer Cristal, let us say—and let us make peace. We have no disputes between us. We are all artists here.”

“Only if you will solemnly promise not to give any interviews before the final judging,” says Leonardo. “Will you promise?”

“Will I promise? Will I promise to be muzzled? Is that the price of peace in the West? Well, then, my dear Leonardo, let us toast. I can drink to that!”

Roederer Cristal is called for—two bottles of it—and chilled champagne flutes are brought.

Grigory will not allow the waiter to open the bottles but ostentatiously opens them himself and pours the champagne most ebulliently. With a flourish he hands each member of the table a glass, then prances up on his chair to offer a toast that the whole dining room can hear. The members of the table rise as if bewitched.

Grigory holds up his glass ceremoniously, admires the pale ashen gold of the champagne while he thinks of an appropriate toast.

“Aha,” he says. “A favorite line from your greatest poet, Shakespeare—from his most moon-drenched, lunatickal play, such as is suitable for nights like these.” He indicates, with one long-fingered Slavic hand, the full moon over the ocean.

“‘I'll speak in a monstrous little voice…'
Midsummer Night's Dream
, Act One.”

The members of the jury pause, wondering whether or not to drink to this peculiar toast. A small voice—whether monstrous or not—has never been Grigory's problem. What on earth is he covering up? I wonder. He is concealing with his words rather than revealing—a true Russian politician.

“Let me counter with a line from
The Winter's Tale
,” I say. “‘There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture…'”

We all raise our glasses and drink, not knowing what on earth, or in heaven, we are drinking to.

Grigory has bamboozled the jury somehow—but how he has done it is not yet clear. We get a little buzzed on champagne, order supper, and consume it along with six more bottles of Cristal—Grigory's treat.

By the meal's end, everyone at the table is cockeyed from champagne. My head is pounding and I am in despair about
Serenissima
. I know Björn, and knowing him, I am worried. He is not so much unstable as terribly stubborn, and he uses his stubbornness craftily. An event like this could become the pretext for six months of seclusion on his part. Let the new film fall around his ears—he won't care. One reason he has endured so long as an artist in a business that has made a fine art of crushing artists is that he knows when to turn off and say to the moneymen: “It's your problem—solve it.” Then he plays the prima donna and stomps off, leaving
them
the dilemma of wooing him back. “I don't want to make the film, anyway,” he has said many times, within my hearing. “I just want to write. If you want me to work on your bloody film, seduce
me
.” This master stroke of reverse psychology works every time. Björn is sensitive but he is also crafty. Which is why he has survived to make so many films.

But I am not crafty enough, especially when I am depressed by a major setback. This must be why tonight, after so many previous protests and so much fine, cunning resistance, I allow Grigory not only to take me as far as my suite but to enter it.

“Ah, Jessichka, I knew you would succumb eventually,” says Grigory, lunging for me cave-man style. He attacks my neck, slobbering over it, nipping and nibbling with bites and kisses.

Why on earth am I doing this? I ask myself. Lust? Hardly. Love? Are you kidding? This is merely despair, which sometimes (think of
Don Giovanni
!) masquerades as lust.

I allow him to take off my knit dress, to run his hands down my lavender lace teddy, to kiss the skin that peeks between my lavender silk stocking tops and my long, lavender satin garters. (Am I doing this just to share my
underwear
with an appreciative man?) But no, it's been a long time since I've gone to bed with
anyone
, and Grigory's kisses on my neck, my breasts, my thighs, begin to stir me.

He slips off the top of my teddy and uncovers my breasts.

“They are like wild berries of the woods, my Jessichka,” he says, “such sweet cloudberries, rosy raspberries, California strawberries…” He sucks on my nipples and I begin to warm toward him in spite of myself. My thighs spread, my clitoris begins to throb, my mouth finds his. Though he reeks of alcohol and cigarette smoke, I am aroused—and so, apparently, is he. He seems mad to lick me, bite me, hug me, rip my clothes off, but after a while it becomes clear that the appendage necessary to consummate all this frenzy is not in the appropriate state to achieve that end. Dutifully I bend my head, unzip him, and try to encourage it with my lips, my tongue, my fingers. I suck and suck, lick and lick, run practiced fingers from stem to stern—but nothing rouses it. Ah, alcohol has increased the desire but taken away the performance, just as Will predicted—Will Shakespeare, who said just about everything there was to say about lust, perhaps because it was also a synonym for his name. (“Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy Will, and Will to boot, and Will in overplus.”) Not so with Grisha. A great strapping giant of a Siberian poet and no will to speak of, or none that
I
can speak of at any rate. What do I feel about this? Mostly relief.

“Darling, let's sleep,” I say.

Grigory groans in assent, banishing the last lingering vestiges of my tumescence. With my help, he struggles out of his clothes and climbs under the covers with me. I have neglected to draw the blinds and I just lie there for a while, wishing I were rude enough to throw him out. (Alas, I am not.) But presently I catch sight of the moon twinkling spookily at me. “It's all in my plan,” she seems to say, “which will be revealed in due course.”

Good night, moon, I think.

Good night, she seems to wink.

F
OR SOME REASON I
sleep later than usual the next morning—despite the open blinds and the sunlight streaming in from the sea.

The first moment I open my eyes I am not quite sure where I am. Not that this is unusual for me. I have lived in so many hotel rooms, in so many cities, that many mornings I awaken unsure of where I am. Often I wake up half wishing, half believing, that I am in my old bedroom on Seventy-third and Park—the nursery, we called it, though it was my room alone. Connected to my brother Pip's by one of those New York bathrooms with two doors, my room had a kind of Audubon-print wallpaper that covered even the ceiling, so I would open my eyes and see arbors with birds above my head in the arborless midst of Manhattan. I loved that room and that wallpaper (someday someone should do a book on the effect of wallpaper on childhood memory), but I loved my room in the country house even better. It faced a lagoon you could sail straight through to Long Island Sound, and though it was in dusty, musty Darien—which my mother derisively called “dreary end”—it was softened by birds and church bells and the sound of rushing water. Sometimes I awaken thinking myself back
there
, and six years old again, with my whole life about to begin. If only I could return and start over, getting it right this time. If only!

Being an actor is certainly a blessing—how else would we endure the pain of life except by turning it into a play? But of course it is also a curse because it necessitates a kind of constant exile. If I feel the history of the Jews in my blood (I have lately been reading about the Jews of Venice for my part as Jessica, a part that now I may never play), perhaps it is because the Jew is the quintessential exile, like the artist. No matter how entrenched, how rich, how established, how necessary to the regime, how seemingly tolerated, there was
never
a time when they could not be expelled at a moment's notice. The Jews of Venice were a perfect example of this. Their moneylending was the lifeblood of the Serenissima, the very basis of its maritime wealth, and yet they were reviled for doing what kept the republic alive. Time and again in history one found the Jews in this appalling double bind, viciously attacked for doing exactly what preserved the society in which they found themselves. No wonder neuroticism was in their very blood. They could never be right. Like poets, like actors, the world needed them—but also needed to disclaim its need for them.