Permanence Page 8

  “I’ll be showing Mary around Venice,” insists doctor.

  Then something strange happens. The concierge begins to laugh. His defined, stoic manner is completely abandoned as he laughs in the beautiful lobby of this Venetian hotel. “If you are to show this young lady around,” he says, reaching inside his desk and producing a folded document, “may I suggest you invest in a map.”

  Elevators

  I am frightened of riding in elevators.

  The elevator for this hotel is an old brass and chrome relic, with a lever instead of the usual, wall-mounted push-button for floor selection and for making the door close. After surviving an engine failure thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic Ocean, I can certainly risk my life by riding in an elevator. I have a renewed confidence.

  So here’s what I do: I go to step inside the elevator car, where doctor is already standing, his hand gripping the lever, holding the door open for me. But then something happens. Something physical. I go to step inside, but instead I stop cold in front of the open elevator. I have the sensation of walking into an invisible wall.

  I try again. But I can’t get myself to step inside.

  Doctor looks at me like I’ve taken a spell. In a way, I have.

  “Did I fail to mention that I don’t like riding in elevators?”

  “Why, Mary,” says doctor, still holding to the lever, “does this not surprise me?”

  This is the doctor I have come to know in just so many months; this is the doctor I desperately need. This is the doctor who loves me but who does not know everything about my life.

  “It’s just this thing I have with machines and heights.”

  “We’ll work on it,” he says, motioning for me to enter the cab with a wave of his hand. “Now’s as good a time as ever.”

  “They have stairs here,” I say, turning away. “Stairs would be good for me today.”

  Doctor looks at me, his hand seemingly attached to the brass lever. For a split second I have the anxious feeling that he will close the door on me and take the elevator up to our third-floor room all alone. But he produces a look of cool disappointment, as though his treatment of me has failed.

  Doctor releases the lever and steps out of the elevator.

  “Okay,” he says, “the stairs it is. For now.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, feeling shame run the length of my spine.

  “Don’t be,” says doctor, walking ahead of me to the staircase that begins inside the open lobby of this hotel. “It’s just that I’m too tired to argue.”

  “Smile,” says doctor

  We climb the three flights of stairs, listening to our footsteps against the soft carpeting. We carry nothing but exhaustion, like hefting cobblestones on our shoulders. We cling to brass railings. We take, as they say, one step at a time, in order that we may reach the top. The porter is there waiting for us at the top on the landing with our luggage piled neatly by the door to our room. When we make it to the landing he slides the key into the lock of the door and opens it for us. In the quiet of the afternoon I can hear the tumblers fall and the squeak of the hinges that belong to the door. The porter smiles; doctor frowns.

  We step inside.

  Floor to ceiling, French windows border the square-shaped room. When the porter opens them wide, I go to him and step inside the opening and onto the small balcony. I overlook the Grand Canal and the swell of the Adriatic in the distance. The wind fills the curtains like the sails on a ship that are no longer tied down. The fabric flaps all around me. I hear the water and the soft voices of the gondoliers singing, paddles slapping, horns echoing, accordions playing, a man shouting, a radio tinny and loud and then abruptly squelched. Then there is the sound of the door to my room closing and the sound of doctor’s footsteps coming toward me.

  And then its dawns on me, ever so suddenly: I am alone with doctor—no baby, no Jamie, no family, just doctor. Doctor is all I have now.

  Doctor settles his hand on my shoulders. He brings me into him, close. I feel the wind against me, against my face. I feel my stomach. I think, This is doctor’s idea of true affection. I move away from him, through his arms, without saying a word. I move away from the window and sit at the edge of the bed. I can hear the sound of moving water coming from the open window. I suspect I will never be far removed from the sounds and sites of water for as long as I am in romantic Venice.

  Here’s what I do: I stuff a pillow into my stomach. I curl up into a ball on the mattress and close my eyes. I hear more footsteps and then doctor calling my name.

  “Mary,” he calls. “Mary Kismet.”

  I rub my eyes and open them. I roll over so that I face doctor. Doctor lifts his camera to his face.

  “Smile,” he says, snapping a photograph. But I do not smile. This photograph will be a bad photograph. Despite the camera, all I can manage is tears.

  Sleep

  “Sleep,” says doctor, rubbing his soft, open palm against my forehead. “You must be exhausted.”

  I am lying beneath the covers of this bed with doctor sitting directly beside me.

  “Sleep,” he says again, “and in a little while, we’ll find a nice place for us to eat.”

  “That would be nice,” I say.

  “So sleep,” he says, getting up from the bed, making his way to the door.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, raising myself up in the bed.

  “Just out,” says doctor. “For a few moments.”

  “You’re coming back, I hope.”

  “Now, Mary, would I take you all the way over here just to leave you?”

  I smile. Doctor is right. That was a silly question.

  “Of course not,” says doctor. “Now sleep.”

  “I will,” I say, lying back down, sliding further inside the sheets and blankets, feeling their initial coolness and then their comforting warmth. Then the door closes and quite suddenly everything turns dark and gray and empty, the color of my imagination when I close my eyes.

  Our home is burning (the dream recurs…)

  My father was not a bad man. And when I sleep, sometimes my dreams are divided between images of him and my mother.

  But there’s a difference.

  When I dream of my mother I see her lifting me away from the bed I slept in as a child. Our home is burning and I see the flame working its way up the staircase. I hear the rushing, crackling noise of the fire. I smell the acrid smell of burning wood, fabric, and plaster. But I also smell her sweet smell—the rich, alive smell I remember, the smell that came from her flannel nightgown. Even now, just dreaming of her so many years later, I can still feel her soft flannel against my face and her light brown hair, the hair that has become my own, dangling onto my lips.

  If I dream of my father I do not see the fire, nor is there anything to do with the fire, nor is there the crazy collage of images and sensations as when I dream of my mother. My father appears to me as a still image, looking out at me, like the photo of all three of us at Christmas. He is in his mid-thirties and although he does not move or utter a single word in my dream, he still gives me a happy but sad feeling, as though I am reaching out for him but can’t quite touch him.

  I see my father’s eyes.

  These are the eyes that have become my own. Heavy, brown eyes. I see the serious facial expression—the seriousness that years ago my mother said was genetically passed down from him to me. In this way, my father and I are the same.

  Birthday

  Doctor wakes me with a slight tap to the shoulder.

  I think about the time I have spent asleep. Four minutes or perhaps four hours. Outside, the gray, dark daylight of Venice has turned to night. The floor-to-ceiling windows remain wide open. I have dreamt about my mother and father and about fire, but I can feel the air coming in wet and thick from the sea. A raw fish smell fills the room. It is strong and rich in the night. I hear the sound of water slapping against boat hulls. The noise comes to me along with the sudden flashes of light that enter into
this room as round beams and spots.

  Doctor sits at the edge of the bed. I feel the mattress bend with his weight and I move toward him, slightly. A smoky, sour aroma comes from his breath.

  I lean up onto an elbow.

  “You’ve been drinking,” I say.

  Doctor does not smile.

  “No one just drinks in Venice,” he says. “They live. Drinking is a part of living.”

  “I would like a drink.”

  “There’s no better place for it.”

  “There must be so many wonderful things to drink.”

  “When the time comes, we will drink wonderful things.”

  Then doctor reaches into the right-hand pocket of his woolen blazer. He produces a small package he places on the bed. This is a tiny, delicate package covered with red and blue wrapping paper and thin cloth ribbon.

  “For you,” he says, lifting himself from the bed and turning his back to me in order to look out onto the canal. A moment later however, he steps away from the window and heads into the bathroom. I hear doctor milling about in the bathroom. I hear the sound of something falling into the sink. I hear running water, then something crashing to the ceramic floor.

  “What’s going on?” I ask, still sleepy, but lifting myself up so that I can lean back against the bedstead, the small package by my side, untouched.

  “Just stay where you are,” calls doctor from the bathroom.

  “I’m coming.”

  Then I hear the singing: “Happy birthday to you…Happy birthday to you…Happy birthday dear Mary. ..Happy birthday to you…”

  In his cupped hands, doctor carries a small pastry. There is a thin candle in the pastry with an orange-yellow flame that casts shadows against the walls of this room. Doctor comes to me with the pastry and sits at the edge of the bed. He places the pastry with the still burning candle on the mattress beside me.

  “Come on,” he says, “You know what to do.”

  For just a moment I watch the flicker of flame coming from the dwindling candle, the wax melting and running slowly but steadily onto the golden pastry crust. I take a deep breath and crouch down near the pastry. I release a breath and blow out the flame.

  I sit back up again and inhale the smoke as it rises from the burned candle wick.

  “How did you know?” I ask, sticking my finger into the patch of pastry frosting.

  “I’m your doctor, after all. You need me.”

  I smile an ear-to-ear smile, while tasting the semisweet, buttery frosting. Then I bring my hand to doctor’s face, place it gently against his cheek and beard.

  “You are more to me than just a doctor,” I say, bringing my free hand to my stomach. And this we both understand.

  But doctor does not smile and I do not expect him to. He lifts the small, delicately wrapped package in his hand.

  “Open it,” he says. “I want you to.”

  I feel cold air coming in now from the open windows. I hear the sound of water as it slaps against the sides of the boats and gondolas in the canal. I begin to untie the black ribbon that surrounds the package. Then I gently tear away the delicate paper. But for the moment, I can picture the faces of Jamie and baby and the small birthday party we had for me the year before baby died. There is a photo of me holding onto baby, with all of us wearing party hats in the small dining room of our apartment. With his fingers, baby ate frosting off the cake before it was cut. That was a birthday I clearly remember as though it were yesterday. And it was. But that was also a birthday that was one whole lifetime ago.

  Now I have a new life.

  Now I am suddenly afraid of what I might find inside this package (an engagement ring). But at the same time, I’m thrilled.

  I open the package.

  This is not an engagement ring. This gift is a tiny, Sterling silver pillbox no larger than a box of wooden matches. I open the pillbox carefully, separating it with my fingernails into two equal halves joined by a hinge. I close it carefully. It is a lovely, delicate box.

  I take a breath of the cool Venetian air.

  I hold doctor, squeeze him. He is very thin. Too thin, perhaps growing thinner as though losing his health. This is the man I see once a week, whether I want to or not. But this is the man I need so that I could not allow him to come here without me. And I’m sure doctor could not come here without me, because doctor loves me.

  I feel my body crushing a portion of the pastry.

  “Happy?” doctor asks. This is the simple question I have not been asked in so many months. The answer I want to relay is simple. I want to say, “Yes.” But the answer I must give is too complicated to speak of. How can I ever be truly happy without baby? How can I ever be truly happy with the knowledge of how baby died? So I do something even simpler. I say nothing. And doctor docs not pursue the issue of happiness. Instead, doctor forces a smile. “Oh my God,” he says. “You almost forgot.”

  “My thirtieth birthday?” I ask.

  “No,” says doctor. “A wish. You forgot to make a wish.”

  Delicate

  Doctor and I share our first meal together ever, at a small trattoria in beautiful, romantic Venice.

  This is really an outdoor cafe located on a long terrace protected by a canvass canopy overhead. We are seated beside a dark, narrow feeder canal that separates us from a row of connected brick and mortar buildings on the other side. We see the backsides of the buildings, their cracked stucco walls and sharply pitched clay tile roofs. Some of these buildings also serve as restaurants and trattorias. From where I sit, looking directly across this narrow canal, I see a man appear. From this distance, I see he is dressed in a white smock and hat. He appears and reappears for only a few moments at a time, through a doorway that leads only to a stone landing and steps running down into the canal.

  I watch the smocked man, intently.

  He dumps pots of food scraps into the canal. The scraps make a slight splash before sinking.

  I turn to doctor. He is watching me, his bearded face suddenly gaunt in the candlelight, his flesh pale behind his beard, his hair thinning. I recognize a distance in doctor’s eyes that suggests something could be on his mind other than our dinner, something other than my presence. Something complicated.

  But I do not pry because it is not my place to pry.

  I am doctor’s patient, after all.

  We drink a house wine that comes to us in pitchers hand-painted with pastel-colored fruit and flowers. I think. Even the wine pitchers are art in Venice. We drink the wine with vigor as though a reward for having made it all the way to romantic Venice. And it is.

  “Here’s to being alive in Venice,” says doctor, lifting his glass high above our metal table, “if only in our minds.”

  “Now that’s a joke only a psychiatrist can get away with.”

  Doctor forces a smile as though agreeing.

  “Here’s to surviving a flight,” I continue, “that should have cost us our lives.” I laugh, touching my glass to doctor’s glass, the glasses clinking. “I mean, whoever booked that flight for us should be made to pay dearly.”

  “Spoken like a true travel agent,” says doctor.

  I drink to our toast, the white wine tasting light, but tangy.

  “Drink as much of this as you like,” comments doctor. “It rarely affects the brain.”

  We drink heavily, until doctor chokes.

  He places the wine glass back down on the metal table. He sits back in his chair and coughs, his face becoming bright red behind his beard.

  I stand up.

  “My God,” I say. “Are you all right?”

  But doctor waves me away as though nothing is wrong. He doubles over and brings his fisted hand up to his mouth. I am helpless while, across the width of this canal, the man in the white smock tosses more food scraps into the dark water.

  The waiter rushes to our table. He is a young, thin man with black hair pasted back on his head.

  “Okay?” he says, in forced English.”Signore, okay?�
� He gestures with open arms as if he wants to help doctor. But doctor’s face goes from red to white to blue, his horn-rimmed glasses sliding down his nose.

  Doctor is really choking.

  I move forward, lean myself against the table. My chair falls back and slams against the slate. The patrons of the trattoria stare at doctor and me, ignoring their food and drink.

  I reach around to loosen doctor’s tie, but as I reach him, he waves me away.

  I am helpless.

  “No,” says doctor, in a raw voice that comes from deep inside his throat. “I’m all right,” he whispers, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down inside his throat.

  “Okay?” repeats the waiter.

  “Yes, yes,” insists doctor. “I’m okay.”

  Doctor waves us all away and attempts a smile. But I know the smile is a fake. Listen: the smile is contrived and strained. Doctor’s eyes are filled with tears. He removes his glasses and sets them down, atop the table. I step back and retrieve my chair, setting it upright. I sit back down, apprehensively. I am ready to move if doctor begins to choke again.

  I look all around me.

  The patrons of the trattoria manage to pull their eyes away from doctor and me. They go back to their dinners and conversations. But I know this: doctor and I remain strangely out of place.

  Doctor brings his shaking, fisted hand to his mouth. Tears run the length of his bearded cheeks. I see the man appear from across the canal; he is standing beneath a light bulb that dangles by a wire above the doorway of the building. I watch the food scraps disappear when he dumps them into the canal.

  Doctor seems to be recovering. His color is returning.

  Of all things, doctor pulls a cigarette from his breast pocket and lights it while wiping away tears from his face and eyes.

  “I’m okay,” he insists. His voice is too painful to listen to without imagining the same pain in my own throat.

  “It’s only wine,” I say, lifting my glass. “It’s not even solid food.”

  “This is getting to be a habit with you and me,” says doctor, exhaling a stream of white smoke. His voice sounds so painful and strained.

  “Drink this,” I say, pouring him a glassful of the mineral water set on our table beside the pitcher of wine.