MORE MAGAZINE May 2015
Published as LOVE, WITH STAYING POWER
Last year, my husband and I celebrated our thirtieth wedding anniversary. For both of us, it came as something of a surprise. When we met, in our late twenties, we were rambunctious party-going, bar-tending writers, who argued into the wee hours about figurative art and traditional narrative. Neither of us had much of a plan for life, but if pressed, I doubt that either would have included thirty years of fidelity to one person, twenty-eight years of devotion to our children, forty years of practicing the same craft, week in, week out, and over twenty years of spiritual practice.
My father had been married five times, my mother three times. Most of my family members were dead, except my mother, and we rarely spoke. As an adult, I had never lived in one spot for more than a year. Life had not prepared me for the long haul. And yet, thirty-odd years later, there I was, still married to the same man.
A full ten months before the official anniversary date, in October, my husband suggested we do something completely different for this one. That we go somewhere.
We had only gone somewhere once in our thirty-odd years as a couple, which is to say, only once had we left the country, on our own, without our children. Twenty years back, when our son and daughter were little, we went to London together for a week, so my husband could do research for a book he was writing. We both treasured that trip, and continued to refer to it for a long while afterward. “Remember the tea they sent up each morning? With the cozy …”
In our youth, we had also both, separately, been vagabonds--hitchhiking through Europe, taking up with English medical students and Greek farmers, studying in Italy, driving across the wide United States more than once. But then we got married and had two children and all the wanderlust got swept under the braided rug along with cocktails and dope and dawn in Manhattan.
So my husband’s suggestion woke some part of me, the part who had slept on the roof of a farm on the far side of Mykonos, and had been asleep ever since. But where would we go? What could be grand enough after all this time?
We chose and discarded a few places—Paris, Prague, the Golden Triangle of northern India. We settled on Venice. My husband had never been there. I had been a few times while studying in Florence, but it was so long ago and there was so much Prosecco involved I barely remembered it. The more we read, the more we both sensed that the city offered something grand indeed, something we couldn’t name but wanted to discover.
We decided to stay for a month. Online, we found an apartment at the less elegant end of the sestiere of Dorsoduro, between the Zattere and Piazzale Roma, near the docks. We renewed passports. We wiped out credit card travel points. I lugged Henry James Italian Hours and a large black case of Pimsleur Italian CD’s home from the library. The neighbor who loves our dog agreed to house-sit.
And then, over the New Year’s weekend, a little over two months before our date of departure, I became ill. It started out as the flu and turned into an undiagnosed bacterial infection that left me crawling from our bedroom to the stairs, with a fever of over 101* every afternoon. I could eat a few crackers. I could sip water. I had never been that sick. This went on for two weeks.
After a few fruitless conversations with various people in my doctor’s office, my husband put me in the car and took me to the emergency room in the nearest town. They gave me IV fluids and sent me home. A week later he put me in the car and drove me to the university hospital, forty minutes away, where a doctor diagnosed the infection and prescribed antibiotics that knocked out the bacteria and went on to make me sicker.
When I went off the antibiotics, the infection returned, but in a much less drastic form. My body began to fight the bacteria on its own. I scoured the Materia Medica and found a homeopathic remedy. And slowly, slowly I began to get better.
Throughout my illness, my husband cared for me, patiently, thoroughly, relentlessly. Along with calls to the doctor and trips to the ER, he made soup, made rice pudding, made a Thai concoction of chicken and spice and rice and coconut milk, guaranteed to cure all stomach ailments—most of which I could not eat. He walked the dog. He got in wood. He talked to friends and family members. I couldn’t speak to anyone other than our children--our daughter in DC, our son in Brooklyn. My husband kept the world running but at a distance. As I began to feel better, he read to me every afternoon. We fell into the tidal rhythms of convalescence—a little stronger, a little weaker, a need for food, a need for words. He stuck with the project, without a moment of hesitation or complaint, until he saw that I was going to be all right.
I am not a trusting person. And even after all those years of marriage and family life, there was always a part of me that assumed I would, at some point, be heading out the door on my own, just as I did when I first left home at age thirteen. I was perennially beset by a longing for something different, convinced I’d missed my calling, certain my destiny lay elsewhere. My mental bags were always packed.
But during those two long months of illness, I had no choice but to depend on my husband, for everything. And then, as I got better, I began to depend on friends and family members and neighbors, who also made soup and walked the dog and got in wood and sent emails and mailed books and called and stopped by. And on my children, who traveled to Vermont to surprise me on my birthday. They arrived just ahead of a blizzard, and we spent the weekend snowed in together, reading and watching movies we hadn’t watched in years.
I am convinced that the power of love and comfort created a chemical shift in my body during that visit. My appetite returned in full force. My daughter made me French toast at eleven o’ clock at night. My son made me laugh.
When I recovered enough to reflect on all that had happened, I felt grateful, blessed, baffled. I had been married to the same man for thirty years and had never felt closer to him. I adored my children more every day. I never tired of my work. I was not going to walk out the door. I was someone I never planned to be, a woman indelibly claimed by a history of long loves.
Of course this transformation didn’t actually happen in a couple of months. It happened as a result of a million kindnesses, a million fights, a million apologies, a million laughs. It happened over years, as life washed over and through me, changing and aging me and making me a little more grateful, a little more awake. But it had taken a minor trauma to wake me completely and make it clear to me: I could unpack my mental luggage.
And pack my rolling suitcase. We were going to Venice.
The day we arrived, the clouds poured rain. I had dusted off my college Italian with the Pimsleur tapes and found I was just up to negotiating a ride in a sleek and expensive water taxi to our apartment. The acqua was so alta that the roof of the pilot’s cabin lightly scraped the underside of a stone bridge. When we reached our little canal, there was no place to dock, so the driver tied up to a barge and my husband and I scrambled over the tarp with our three pieces of luggage. We arrived hungry, drenched and exhausted.
Because we were early, we had to wait to be let into our apartment. We rolled our suitcases to a café at the end of the fondamenta and ordered a Genovese, a tostapanne with ham, tomatoes and cheese, and two cups of hot tea. Never has food tasted so good. As my wits returned, I began to notice the everyday beauty of our modest neighborhood—the aquamarine canal reflecting the peach-colored walls of the buildings, the green shutters, the geraniums and violas in the window boxes, the two arched stone bridges across which students from the nearby architecture school made their stylish way to and from class.
The longer we stayed, the more in love I fell, with the city and with my husband. I had that strange feeling of having returned somewhere—not because of my wine-soaked trips in college, but because of something longer ago and farther away. Venice was my city. It had resided in me all these years but I had not known it.
Also, though we met some lovely friends of friends, my husband and I were, for the most part, alone. In some ways the trip felt like a very rich continuation of my convalescence; we ate, we strolled, we napped, we read. No longer linear, or circular, time came to resemble the tidal waters of the lagoon surrounding us—we swam effortlessly through a sea of decades and centuries, days and years, from the 6th century foundations on the island of Torcello to the glorious 10th century mosaics of the refurbished basilica; from the 20th century supermercato to the Zattere, built in the early 16th century to receive the giant timber used to construct ships and buildings; from the 16th century Campo del Ghetto Nuovo, the first Jewish ghetto (so-called for the geto, or foundry, which had formerly been sited on the island) to the 20th century interiors of Fortuny with his Wagnerian stage sets and pleated silks.
Venice is always remembering itself. The view is not onward and upward, toward the tips of the newest skyscrapers, but inward and over, across the Grand Canal to the life the Doges lived in their halls of justice. It is a physical place that refutes the contemporary credos of faster-better and never-enough. A finished city, as my friend Michael called it, with preservation its only pressing need. As such it exists without the weight of aspiration. While there, I wanted nothing more than to wander the streets with the person I loved.
Of course, a few small longings crept in. I wanted the pristine cotton sachet bags in my favorite shop on Calle Lunga San Barnaba, a small square of patterned silk to tie around my neck, postcards from every chiesa and scuola. For about fifteen minutes I wanted to buy a little red house on Torcello, in the middle of a small field, with a view of the lagoon. But these were simply the desires of a confused and overflowing affection. If I love it, I must own it.
If long love teaches us anything, it is that possession is not part of the bargain. My illness threw my mortality into stark relief and made everything I cared for more precious, in part because I finally understood it was all certain to disappear. Death is the mother of beauty, writes Wallace Stevens in Sunday Morning.
Venice, too, is vulnerable; its voluptuous waterways may be its undoing. Its grandeur rests in part on its crumbling walls. There, age is inextricably tied to beauty. What is long-lasting feels rare and valuable.
Of course the city’s vulnerability makes it seem heart-achingly human. It mirrors the weird reality of sturdiness and fragility that is the basis of life. We keep surviving all sorts of insults and injuries, until we don’t.
Our final two days, spring arrived in full force, and we lounged on the Zattere among Ca’ Foscari students and dog owners (the dogs of Venice are surely some of the most appealing of their species), in no hurry to go anywhere or buy anything. Our last night we wandered through the Campo Ghetto Nuovo on a Friday evening. Jewish families from throughout the city were gathering to celebrate Shabbos at one of the synagogues, just as they had done in the 17th century. We had dinner at a small restaurant in the Campo dei Mori, named for the statues of the Mastelli brothers who built houses there in the 12th century. Arm in arm, we walked home slowly in the warm spring night, under a new moon reflected in the canals, along with the lights of a popular enoteca whose young crowd spilled out onto the fondamenta.
And though I wanted none of it to end, I longed for nothing.