What She Carries

A day alone in Venice, the man a continent away, and what a woman carries when there is no one to see her carry it.to see her carry it.

The Garden

Her Highness had come over on the launch alone, which was the first new thing.

There had always been two of them in the small, varnished cabin, his hand resting somewhere near hers without claiming it, the lagoon opening in its slow grey-green answer to whatever the sky was doing. Today there was only her, and the boatman who knew her by sight if not by name, and the late October light coming off the water in a way she had never seen, because she had never sat on this side of the bench by herself. The bell of San Giorgio Maggiore began its half hour and stopped early, as though it had counted wrong. The Cipriani’s white facade slid into view on the tip of Giudecca, and the boatman said something soft in Veneto to a colleague on the dock that she did not need to understand.

She stepped off. A young man in the hotel’s livery reached for the small canvas bag she had insisted on carrying, and she let him take it, because to refuse would have been a performance. The concierge said signora, your suite is ready, and welcome again, and that was the whole transaction of arrival.

He would be in tomorrow. He was closing something in Riyadh that had been a year in the building, and the call had come on Thursday: stay two more nights, take Saturday for yourself in Venice, the suite is held, the boatman knows you. He had said it in the voice he used when a thing was both an instruction and an offering, the voice she had learned to translate over many cities, and she had understood that what he was handing her was a day of nothing required. She had thought, on the plane from Geneva, that she would not know what to do with it.

She walked through the gardens instead of going up. The garden in late October was a quieter thing than the high-season postcards: the oleander past, the cypresses standing in their narrow dark uprights as though holding the corners of the property in place. A few late roses were still going along the path to the pool, the petals so loosened by the season that they would drop at a finger’s pressure. She did not touch them. She walked past slowly, hands in the pockets of her cashmere coat, and registered the wet boxwood and the salt off the lagoon and, from the kitchens, the smell of lemon being rubbed onto fish skin.

It was that last smell that stopped her.

It was only lemon on cold flesh in a kitchen on an island in October, and she had stood beside him in kitchens in a dozen cities, and the smell belonged to none of them in particular. But she stopped on the gravel and half turned her head, the way she turned it when she was about to say a small thing to him, and there was no one at her shoulder to say it to. She stood a moment longer than the moment asked for. Then a gardener came past with a wheelbarrow and nodded, and she nodded back, and kept walking.

The Pool

The pool was empty.

This was the famous one, the long, blue-tiled rectangle filled from the lagoon and warmed against the season. In late October there was only her and a single staff member rolling the unused canopies into their sleeves, and the water was the unlikely turquoise that heated salt makes, and the steam rose off it in a soft low ribbon because the air above had gone cool.

She had brought a book. She sat on the lounger nearest the lagoon end, a small Italian edition of a poet she had been working through slowly for the better part of a year, marking nothing, returning to certain pages without remembering why. She read three lines and looked up, because she had reached the end of a stanza and, without deciding to, had lifted her eyes to find him and hand him the line she liked. It was a habit so old she had forgotten it was one. There was the pool, and the steam, and no one to hand it to. She read the stanza again, alone this time, and it was still beautiful, and something in the beauty had gone thin at the edge for want of a second person to hold it.

A small bird came to drink from the pool’s edge, dipping and swallowing and tilting its head, and then lifted off over the water toward the Zattere, the long strip of Dorsoduro waterfront across the Giudecca canal, its buildings honey-colored in the autumn light.

The Zattere. She knew the word meant rafts, because he had told her so, in this city, on the first of the three times they had walked it together: the quay had been built for the timber that came down the rivers from the Dolomites, lashed together, broken apart here for the shipwrights of the Arsenale. She had liked the idea of a quay named for what arrived at it rather than for who used it later. She had not remembered, until just now, that the fact was his and not hers. She had carried it so long she had begun to think she had always known it.

The steam rose off the pool. The bird did not come back. She put the book down on her stomach and closed her eyes.