The flight to Venice was irritating for two reasons.
First, Robert was silent the whole time, except to announce that he wanted pasta and to ask for wine. Being alone on his first international flight in six years, he felt desperate to talk, to speak to someone and have his confusingly painful intuition that he was a knowing, witty man validated through conversation—making a stranger laugh, for example, or sharing his insights into work and travel.
There was only his neighbor to talk to, a teenager who moved athletically between his favorite forms of relaxation: bobbing his head to music, laughing hard at one movie before turning it off and starting another, and sleeping with his mouth open until the plane touched ground.
Second, he felt horny. Not that he wasn’t often aroused, because he was, but he usually resolved this using sex, masturbation, or some slightly unholy combination of the two, which he enjoyed very much while trying to avoid thinking about why. Yet on the plane he felt horny in a new and almost dangerous way: it was not a horniness of his sexual organ, not even of his body, but something underneath these.
◆
He met up with his second wife in Venice, where they stayed at the Hotel Concordia.
On the streets, and in alleys, they held hands. In this they resembled every other couple in the hot, ancient city. Pairs his age, in their early and mid fifties, embraced as they stood unsteadily from their Aperol-soaked lunches. Meanwhile, the younger couples appeared to have their palms almost monstrously attached, forming a three-armed heterosexual chimera. Robert was grateful to participate in this Venetian carnival of hand-holding, particularly because it seemed certain to lead to intercourse with Lisa.
And yet he was afraid. As they entered the grounds of the Biennale, some type of art event that Robert still did not understand, it occurred to him that the very fact that he was worried about the possibility of sleeping with his wife was worrisome, giving on to some larger fear and deeper anxiety. But soon the question of this fear and anxiety, which he felt must be connected to the strange new shape of his horniness, disappeared as it became incumbent on him to comment in his knowing, witty, charming way on the art, because he reasoned this would make his wife feel romantically enough attached to him to wish to have intercourse that night.
He must always be charming: this was like a divine command that, however piously he obeyed it, only brought him farther from matching his words to his inner state. “This one reminds me of my mother,” he said about a gigantic sculpture of a demonic woman spreading open her vagina, giving his thin-lipped smile.
Lisa laughed, and as always when he was being charming, Robert felt validated while also knowing on an unconscious but still present level that he used language specifically to avoid having to state, or even just to discover, what he was afraid of.
“That’s what I was thinking,” Lisa said, tightening her grip on his hand, which helped him suppress the very sense of the suppression of his fears that resulted from being charming in front of his wife.
There was nothing like touch to help him forget that the reason he needed to be charming was connected to the idea that if he were not, no one would be near him; he would be left alone.
◆
After a long period of observing art that was sometimes horrifying, sometimes nice, and that often was made with organic matter and so smelled bad, they proceeded to the national pavilions.
Here the nations that were responsible for colonial domination and those that were dominated came together to display equally unfocused works of art, with exceptions. In every pavilion, it seemed, there was at least one couple who were not only holding hands but performing some gesture of pleasant intimacy, like stuffing literature into the other’s tote bag, or holding the other’s sunglasses while the one extracted a map from their tote bag. Most acts of intimacy in the pavilions revolved around tote bags, which he didn’t see the need for: his madras shorts had more than enough pockets for objects.
Robert and Lisa had stopped holding hands at the point in the main exhibition where the amount of artworks that simply smelled bad overtook those that were horrifying or nice. Now occasionally as they walked through the pavilion, he or she would take the other’s hand, growing stickier by the hour despite repeated washings, and then drop it once they emerged into the heat of the afternoon.
Lisa was seven years younger than him but, in her early forties, not too many. Having met each other on a subscription dating service for mature Jews and then married after a year and a half, they hadn’t quite learned how to talk to each other about issues of any gravity, but he figured this would happen naturally on its own without either of them having to put in any effort.
One couldn’t force it, he told himself. At the same time he didn’t want their relationship to each other to change, because he had the intuition, which he had developed manifold ways to deny, that if it did change it would only be for the worse.
He didn’t get upset with Lisa. Generally when problems arose they left them undiscussed until they went away, as if by magic. This was a wonderful contrast with his first wife, with whom he would argue for hours–although in thinking about this, he tended to excise the fact that they had actually solved many problems this way, excluding those that could not be solved and so led to the dissolution of their marriage.
He suppressed the sense that there was some finality between himself and Lisa, arising from where he could never have said, the sense that she seemed to be slipping away irretrievably and that it was being made all the worse by their inability to talk about it, by continuing to make witty comments as they went along.
It was only once they reached the American pavilion, one of the last left for them to see, that Robert’s sense of dread began to evaporate in the sudden, satisfying way which meant it would soon return.
He was home: the list of donors on the wall, among them Bloomberg and Bank of America, along with the subject matter of the exhibit itself, Black womanhood, together felt like stepping into a well-known river after a long time away. This was his country, its rich, the art of its problems.
But Lisa wasn’t feeling it, like Robert’s daughter, a semi-professional television critic, would have said. “It’s just so American, so ‘look at me,’” Lisa said, moving ahead of him in her sundress, the freckles so lovely on her shoulders, and the thin gold necklace she always wore with the pendant on the end of it. “All of the other pavilions just have one room, one main thing, and why do we get all this space? What gives us the right?” she asked. Robert, unable to think of a witty response, felt not so much that his second wife was slipping away as that he was losing the most basic intuition he had of himself, that he could charm his way through any event.
After Lisa left the American pavilion he stayed for some minutes longer, pacing back and forth through the, true, perhaps too large exhibit compared to others, stopping and staring at the list of donors, the names of companies and wealthy individuals who felt to him like friends, entities he could talk to.
◆
After waking up to the sight of Lisa drawn against the edge of the bed, as though clinging to some sort of shore, and convincing himself that it was fine that they wouldn’t have intercourse this morning by recalling that there were many such mornings in their time together when they hadn’t had intercourse, while carefully excluding the fact that on none of those mornings were they in the most romantic city in Europe, Robert prepared to go out and retrieve “due espresso.”
He figured they could sip espresso on the balcony, like at home in Pebble Beach, speaking about their dinner plans, the antics of the two political parties, and other topics that helped them repel essential questions about the non-viability of their marriage as evidenced by their mutual evasion of the most crucial subjects of communication.
Yet when he came back Lisa was showering, and by the time she was done in the bathroom and he had finished his coffee, drinking it in the dusty sun as birds circled around the crowded rooftops of homes and the crosses of nearby churches, hers was cold.
She reminded him that they had plans to meet Antony, her friend, who lived in Rome and who like her, was an artist, at a cafe. He of course had not forgotten this at all and the thought of it had bothered him the whole morning, but in order to pretend that he hadn’t been obsessively thinking about it while at the same time trying to force it under the surface of his consciousness, he said to her, “Oh yes, I forgot about that. I got you une espresso, by the way.”
She thanked him and came to kiss him on the cheek. This act of physical intimacy helped him stave off the idea that their marriage might be at an end until the sense memory of her lips faded.
Before he came to Venice, Lisa and her friend Antony had spent several days together in Rome, Lisa staying in his loft bed. “He gets so much work done here,” was one of the few texts she’d sent him. “He just imagines something and then he makes it real…I’m jealous.”
Here Antony had retained an Airbnb, a lodging option that Robert never availed himself of–he just trusted hotels, the beds freshly made, the available breakfast.
Antony had a female partner, an experimental dancer who lived in the city of Berlin, a place which when he imagined it, seemed to Robert cold and gray, though he had never been there nor had the desire to go. His daughter, who had been there and enjoyed it, liked to make fun of him for viewing it in his dated fashion, as the site of coordination for the destruction of Europe’s Jews.
“We’re open though,” Antony said, tearing some croissant as Robert experienced the desperate urge to be witty, because unless he were this way in as many situations as possible, he would be left alone. He knew this: it was Robert’s deepest knowledge, so well understood, a light at the center of his inner system, that he could not even think of it directly. If he did, he would never be able to think of anything else, like a type of blindness.
The more desperate Robert’s craving to say something witty and charismatic became, the harder it was to actualize. His thoughts shifted around–should he say something about art, Venice, the Hotel Concordia?–but could not even begin to settle on words that would be adequate to the vast dimensions of the wittiness he felt living within him, which in truth was not wittiness so much as the desire not to be left alone translated into vaguely humorous statements. Each witty remark was like a small, temporary bridge to Lisa that collapsed once it was forgotten.
As the three of them sat under the cafe awning, Antony critiqued America. “I can’t believe you live in Florida. Isn’t that Ron DeSantis?” he asked Lisa. “How do you make work there?”
“Well, I don’t really. Like I’ve told you, that’s part of why I love it here, people can really create here,” she laughed. “But I don’t think it would be different in any other state, America is so full of grief now. I feel that we lost something these past few years and no one can say what it is. That’s what I like about it here in Italy, in Europe. You get the feeling that people here have lost something too, but they can look at it head on. In America they have a million ways of not talking about the most important thing, the thing at the very center.”
“As we talked about in Rome, it’s much better here. People can really create here,” Antony confirmed. As Robert watched the two of them talk, he began to feel horny; yet it was oddly less a sexual horniness, not manifest in an erection or fantasies of out-and-out sex, so much as a desire to be in bed with Lisa and say everything he felt, everything he could not state directly even to himself, and be held. It was hardly even horniness anymore, and yet it was: he could feel the stirring of blood, the eagerness toward the other’s flesh, that he associated with the time once or twice per week when one of them wished to have their polite, mostly silent version of intercourse which was nonetheless satisfying and at moments, particularly when he orgasmed onto his own chest, very fun.
“Yes, Europe has its problems but here if something horrible happens,” Antony was saying, “they don’t just abandon you. That’s why people can really create here. But we talked about that in Rome.”
“Whereas in Florida, it’s: ‘You’re on your own,’” Lisa said.
“Well, you’re not really on your own. The DeSantis death squads are watching!” They both laughed about that.
After moving to Pebble Beach from southern California to be near her father as his lungs succumbed to COVID, Lisa, wishing to remain in the place of grief, had stayed in their panhandle of manufactured subdivisions and quartz-flecked beaches. She and Robert, he recalled to himself now, floating on the ocean of those thoughts that he would permit himself to think, sometimes held conversations where they very nearly dove beneath the genial, highly repressive surface of their relationship to discover what lay underneath it. At such times, they would talk not necessarily about but around the months-long decline of her father, the specific quality of those last days as Lisa was stripped bare, both her parents now gone, only memories of them left and even these too difficult to engage straight-on, before pulling back to far more comfortable territory like the quality of the wine and the horrors of the Republican Party under Trump.
At such moments they would also approach Robert’s intuition that he would be left alone, one which though his divorce from his wife confirmed it to be true, he had easily batted down beneath conscious thought by signing up for the online Jewish dating service less than a week after their separation.
Yet then they would pull back toward the familiar, the discussion of politics and alcohol, and this in itself was pleasurable, like stopping oneself from coming.
The three got up and started walking to the water taxi, which would take them to the second Biennale site. He placed the straw boater hat he had bought from one of the many identical gift shops on his head and, watching his wife and Antony walk together several meters in front, once again experienced the new and more unstable form of horniness.
It was not a desire to be cuckolded, to see them together, though he certainly let himself imagine that—the two of them in Rome, Lisa saying, “Okay, just this once” as Antony removed her pants. Instead it was a desire to be in bed, to hold and be held as he said aloud what he could not state directly even to himself, to hear her say the things she had not yet said to him about grief and being stripped bare.
◆
While Robert wasn’t interested so much in intercourse per se as the experience of being held as they said aloud to each other those things which so far in their relationship had dwelled beyond speech, still, he wanted to have sex. Of course it was pleasurable and he was quite attracted to his wife, more so than ever because of how unavailable she was, but also sex would affirm his hope that at best, nothing between them had changed and he would not be left alone, and at worst, that their relationship to each other could be saved.
They hadn’t had intercourse the evening before, or that morning, so over the course of the day he manufactured reasons for why that might be. This helped him transform the truth, that he didn’t yet know what was happening or why, into something that was both bearable and no longer true. It of course had occurred to Robert that she and Antony had carried on some kind of affair together, but this wasn’t in Lisa’s character.
Just as he liked to be viewed as a static object, a knowing and witty man, so he viewed Lisa that way, as a woman who was always forthright about what she wanted in terms of everything in her life except, though he held back from stating this outright to himself, for their relationship and marriage.
If she’d somehow wished to sleep with Antony, she would, he reasoned, have called and told him. To know this, that his wife would no doubt have asked his permission to conduct an affair with her semi-famous sculptor friend who lived in Italy, brought him comfort as the three of them walked around the second Biennale exhibition, the Arsenale.
It began to appear in Robert’s mind that Antony in fact was what he believed he was, and this without trying–a knowing, witty, even a graceful man. In just this way his initial impression of Antony, that he was an insecure and egotistical blowhard, vanished under the pall of Robert’s own insecurity. Antony spoke well about the art they saw, praising or condemning it in simple judgments: “This doesn’t ask the right questions, I feel,” he said about a giant paper-mache rat’s tail, or, “To me this speaks to the mystical worship of the phallus in the secular West, everyone wants it but they don’t know why” about a giant diagram of a penis driving a team of horse sculptures.
He always made sure to ask Lisa and Robert what they thought as well, as if in a dance, leading the routine but continually bringing his partners back into their triad of unexpressed and yet constantly gestured at desire. Robert tried to come up with something witty about most of the pieces–like for the penis diagram and horse sculptures, “Looks like the Republicans under Trump.” These jokes, which were less jokes as such than appeals for affection, would lead to quiet chuckling from Antony and increasingly no reaction from his wife.
As he clocked Lisa’s lack of reaction a strange development began, which was that he had less and less of an urge to say anything witty. From deep under his consciousness the more or less rational understanding reached his mind, like an echo he caught just before it stopped, that whatever unfolded would not be a consequence of his lack of charisma over the past several hours. The truth, now obvious to him, was that she no longer really even heard him. She hardly responded to Antony either, she was somewhere else.
He and Lisa hadn’t held hands for hours now, he had received no physical affection that would have signaled to him that he would not soon be left alone in an unimaginable state of silence with a deficit of touching and holding: it wasn’t just that in such a state he wouldn’t be touched or held, but that it would be a kind of negative touching, an anti-touch of isolation, even a progressive taking away of the touch he had enjoyed throughout his life.
It was as they were enjoying an Aperol spritz near the sea, having seen the majority of the second-tier pavilions, which consisted of countries that had less obviously one-sided relations to Western colonialism, that Robert began to understand the truth of the situation. This was that Antony desired his wife, but that the reverse was untrue: Lisa had little interest in him in that sense. She kept on gripping the gold pendant on her throat and talking about how America was a place of grief in which no one knew how to grieve, and how in contrast, Italy seemed so light, Europe so free.
Antony agreed with her once more. “You would never see anything like this in America, something where people are unafraid to express their vision without offending or scaring someone. Lisa, like you said in Rome on that lovely night when it rained–America is a fragile place. That’s how these demagogues keep on winning there,” he said. “Can you imagine the Tampa Biennale? The Dallas Biennale? I mean, come on.”
He began to see what she wanted, not to be free of the grief as such, but to be able to speak of it. At the same time, he quite ably denied the finality of the knowledge that he was not the person she could speak of it to, or perhaps more importantly, that it was impossible for her to speak of it, that she was torn apart by a desire which was by definition unachievable–to speak of that which could never really be spoken of, the depth of her sense of loss. He denied this by imagining that tonight at the hotel, he would get her to speak about it. He would convince her that it was time, it was all right to speak of all they had not yet talked about and probably, he denied this even as the thought arose, that they never would.
He pictured their dinners at the many interchangeable Italian restaurants in Pebble Beach, places where after a glass of wine she would start talking about her father dying on the ventilator, her mother dying of heart disease three years before that, how then she would say, “It’s okay, that’s too sad for dinner, we’ll talk about it another time.” She wanted to be able to speak about that which lay at the core of her experience. Antony, Italy, these seemed to give her permission not necessarily to talk about the grief but to admit how much it limited their marriage to not be able to.
Tonight at the Hotel Concordia, Robert imagined, now that they were in the real Italy instead of its, it turned out, depressingly accurate renditions in Pebble Beach, he would help her speak about that which by definition could never enter language, the depth of her loss of the two people who had taught her both how to speak and what it was permissible to say. Perhaps he could also talk about his fear of being left alone, a fear the extent of which he could never frame for himself because it reached beyond the limits of his thoughts.
He was somewhat aware that they had not yet spoken to each other about all they had not yet said for a very clear reason, which was that such things were unspeakable, either for them or in general—it was difficult to tell the difference—and that the unspeakable was leading to the ruin of their marriage. Yet when Lisa lightly took his hand as they navigated to the small, family-run restaurant where he had made reservations, it helped him suppress even this modest amount of understanding.
◆
Once back at the hotel he sat down on the couch as Lisa washed her face. He planned to pour them red wine, of which they had a half-finished bottle on the marble table covered in Venetian-themed tchotchkes, and tell her that he wanted to talk about the grief he noticed she was feeling, in that she kept talking about the impossibility of talking about it in America.
As he sat imagining this, he planned that the grief he would refer to would capture only the loss of her parents, not the end of their marriage. This he continued to deny to himself was also something she was grieving the loss of, if not even the main thing. He imagined that this was something he could plan.
Yet when she emerged from the bathroom, she lay on the couch and nestled close against him. He was surprised at this and began to stroke her hair. Maybe everything he had noticed about the end of their marriage had been imaginary. Perhaps she had just been in a fog and now was out of it. He held her close and they sat there silently for a while, her head against his chest, and then he noticed she was crying.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said, and then after a while, “I’m just sad.”
He let a half minute pass. “Are you sure there’s nothing in particular wrong?” he asked, not wanting to be more specific about this, for example by asking if it was that their marriage was unworkable, because she could very well say yes. It was better not to pursue it.
“No, it’s okay, I’m just sad. Let’s go to bed.”
They got into bed and fell asleep as she continued to quietly cry. “It’s okay, I know it’s hard,” he said, thinking that he could mention that he knew she was crying because of her grief and how difficult it was for the two of them sometimes, meaning all the time, to talk about it. Yet clearly, he said to himself, their relationship had improved; after all, he was holding her so close, closer than he had held her since they had been in Venice, and so it was better not to disrupt this, or more importantly alter his conception of what was happening by adding reality to it.
In the morning, as Lisa showed the first signs of waking up, he had the cold realization that she had been crying because their marriage was unworkable. Yet he easily suppressed this realization by covering his body in clothes, brushing his teeth, and going out to get their “due espresso.” As he went downstairs, hurrying to reach the corner café before a line formed, he imagined that they would sit out on the balcony, watch the birds circling around the rooftops and crosses, and talk around that which had been unspoken so far in their time together. After they were caffeinated, maybe they would speak about it directly.