Chapter 43 1964
I stop inside the airport terminal with my child’s suitcase in my hand, terrified that there are no flights leaving so late at night—terrified that the Chateau Marmont’s grasp reaches this far. Then I see a lady in a blue suit and hat, her white gloves bright in the lights.
“I need to buy a ticket,” I say.
“Where to?” she asks tiredly, as if she’s seen it all before in dreamtown LA: the girl with a suitcase and no ticket, running from something.
“Anywhere.”
“There’s a flight to Rome via New York and Paris at 21:00.”
I hand over some of the money I got from pawning Miss Devine Rey’s engagement ring on the way here, as well as the green booklet I got last year when Calliope was renewing her passport.
She’d given one set of forms to Flitter and one to me, telling us that we all needed to know we were unsnared birds, free to cross oceans.
Perhaps she really can see the future.
Not long after, I’m sitting on an airplane beside a tanned and rather beautiful man and only then do I let myself burst into tears.
I search despairingly in my purse, but it holds only money and my passport.
My arms are bare—I don’t even have a sleeve to mop up my tears.
I rifle through the seat pocket, searching for Kleenex.
I don’t notice the plane take off, don’t realize we’re flying, don’t comprehend anything until the beautiful man leans across and says, “Here.” He’s holding out a folded white handkerchief.
“Thank you,” I sob, curling into the window with the handkerchief and letting it all out. Too much for one square of cotton.
The man summons the stewardess and asks for Kleenex, sends her away when she brings just one and begs her to fetch the whole box.
From LA to New York, I make my way through that box. I cry for Nathalie, for Judith Crown, for my aunt, for seven years’ worth of starlets. I cry for them because, if I started crying for me, no amount of Kleenex would be enough.
After we refuel in New York, the desperate stewardess gives me a blanket, suggests I sleep, tells the man beside me that unfortunately there are no spare seats and she cannot move him. She thinks I’m like the Marmont—something to run from. Maybe I am. Maybe that’s why Theo—
I shut my eyes tight against all thoughts of him. Him and Marley.
Flitter and Bob.
Calliope. What will she do now that she can’t be the orphan in a movie that carries just a woman’s name? Become the madwoman instead?
And me. What will I do?
“Signorina.” The man beside me offers his folded jacket to rest my head on. “Sleep.”
I do. I’m so exhausted that I don’t even dream. Perhaps dreams only exist on land; perhaps in the sky, where castles in the air live, dreams don’t bother you.
I wake as the airplane touches down in Paris. A place entirely new. There’s no story in Paris about Aria Jones. Nor in Rome, where the flight will terminate. I could do absolutely anything once I get there.
Except be with Theo.
My stomach cramps with memory. Theo. Marley. The embrace. The syringes. Bob. Flitter. Me, running.
For the first time tonight, the rational part of my mind breaks through: Why didn’t I ask Theo what was going on?
Because Bob was there. Because Flitter, who was meant to be my sister, didn’t care that the thing she was selling to Bob was me. Her soul too. And Calliope’s.
But what if the Theo who told me I had beautiful green eyes, the Theo who loved me because of the way I ate hot dogs—what if he could have explained it to me somehow?
I can almost hear the Marmont’s water pipes hissing from across the sea, insisting on this simple truth: How could Theo possibly explain that the bungalow he said was being renovated was actually inhabited by his ex-lover?
A woman with embraces in her arms and needles on her table?
How could anyone ever say that a recovering alcoholic found in that situation a half hour before their wedding was innocent of wrongdoing?
The warning signs I ignored flash red like the dawn sky as we take off from Paris: bottles of vodka in the freezer, impulsive and regretted weddings, a man who can find sex faster than he can buy a pint of milk.
As if to make sure I’ve really learned my lesson, a movie begins on the screen at the front of the airplane: He’s Just a Rebel Without a Girl. There are Calliope’s cheekbones and her half smile in the first film she made for Bob’s studio after she tarnished her dream.
Later, the stewardess’s voice comes over the loudspeaker. We’ll soon be landing in Rome.
But Rome isn’t the beach. I need the water; it’s all I’ve ever wanted.
I need to not think of Theo.
The handkerchief twists in my hands.
“Signorina, can I get you anything more?” the beautiful man asks.
“Water,” I say.
He summons the stewardess and asks for a glass of water.
“No.” I shake my head. “I mean where is the water in Italy?”
I know the answer. I’ve read encyclopedias and atlases and the works of di Lampedusa and Manzoni. But I can’t recall details, just water, and the way it can drown you.
“Venice?” the man says and my brain seizes on that.
Venice. La Serenissima. City of masks.
A place that lives on top of everything that has ever been drowned.
I’ve never wanted to believe in fate. To do that means I accept that my parents were meant to die and I was always supposed to be stupid enough to fall in love with a man who told lies the same way he smoked cigarettes—with charm and ease, one foot grinding out the ash at the end.
But something has put me on a plane beside a man who lives in Rome, and who also has a house in Venice where his two sisters live.
They have a spare room that they rent out.
“The house is on the Rio dei Santi Apostoli,” he tells me. “A canal.”
“Water,” I repeat.
On any other night I’d tell myself that this is the kind of story only the guileless movie heroine wearing a white cotton dress would believe. But my life has gone so far astray that I write down the address. “Thank you. And I’m sorry about your handkerchief.”
“If one of my sisters was sitting on an airplane crying her heart right out of her body, I’d want someone to give her a handkerchief too,” he says.
I start weeping all over again.
On the train from Rome to Venice, I stare out the window, can’t take my eyes off the crammed-together houses set among antique palaces, the church spires that rise up like swords, the fig trees waiting patiently to fruit.
Perhaps I’m still in shock, but the woman who couldn’t make herself take a bus downtown has no fear about being in a foreign country so far from home because…
I don’t have a home. Maybe I’ll find one here.
Maybe I’ll find a place so magical that I’ll never think about Theo again, never remember the way his fingertips would land on my skin with such friction and heat that they birthed new stars all over my body.
Everything leads back to Theo.
Then to Flitter and Bob.
And Calliope. Who learned to jerk men off so she could keep them outside her body.
There are worse things to be than Aria Jones, jilted fiancée.
We pull into the Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia. I step down onto the platform, my suitcase banging against my shins, and study the map that the beautiful man drew for me before he disembarked in Rome. I follow the directions to the Grand Canal.
There I find the water. So much water. Water that’s alive in a way I never knew water could be.
Water taxis dart like swallows through the blue.
Houses in shades of pink, ocher, and cream, ornamented with red awnings, pillars, mosaics, and gold, dip their feet into the canal.
Words I can’t understand sing through the air, as does laughter, gulls’ cries, the plucked string of a violin, and a voice answering with a barcarolle. I see one gondola, then another.
I had no idea there was so much world in one small city.
In Venice I could be like Calliope, could give myself a new name, could leave Aria behind. But…
There, and there, and over there too, palaces edge the canal, palaces so ancient I’m certain that if I prized out a brick, the building would bleed history all over my hands.
How many people over how many hundreds of years have stood in this exact place and felt not just their mouths drop open, but their spirit fall open too?
Calliope once told me how insignificant we would all be unless we were famous.
But with the Grand Canal undulating beneath my feet in a city where my insignificance in the whole spool of time could easily overwhelm me, I tilt my head up toward the sky.
I don’t want a new name. I like Aria Jones.
I mightn’t like what’s happened to her, but Aria is more a part of me than Theo Winchester could ever be, even if we had married.
And Aria Jones is standing on a Venetian bridge watching a gondolier flick his boat to and fro like a fish.
This is a dream that Aria Jones never even thought to dream.
So I keep walking along roads that have no cars, no giant glittering showgirls. There are fruit stands lit up with oranges and apples. There are no studios or backlots, but bell towers and churches. Reverence and worship of a different kind.
I take a wrong turn twice, going left too early and then too late, before I arrive at the Sotoportego del Magazen, a strange little colonnaded corridor that runs alongside the Santi Apostoli canal and beneath a building.
It takes me to the doorstep of the house where two sisters will have received a telephone call from their brother, letting them know to expect me.
I haven’t eaten since I left Los Angeles two days ago.
I haven’t slept, except for the hours between New York and Paris.
I’ve just walked for twenty-five minutes, carrying everything I have left in the world.
All of me is sore, especially the pain in my shins, and I concentrate on letting it hurt more than my heart.
I knock on the door.
Two women stare at me. One says, “Aria?” The other says, “You need to sit down.”
And I do, right there on the doorstep, too tired to go any farther.
I wake up in a small, plain room with blue-painted walls, a white quilt on the bed. Through the window, I hear Italian voices calling out “òe!” and the response “òe pope.”
Fabric rustles in the doorway. Two faces peek at me.
“Buongiorno,” I say and the women giggle.
“Marzia,” the first one—the younger one—says.
“Alessia,” the other chimes in. Her hair is shining black and pulled into a bun whereas Marzia wears hers loose, breaking in waves over her shoulders.
“Soup,” Alessia tells me, bringing over a bowl of something that makes my stomach roar.
Marzia giggles again at the sound. She reminds me of Flitter.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
“You don’t like?” Marzia asks, her eyes huge and brown.
“I do.” I shovel it into my mouth like a storybook orphan fed just one bowl of gruel each day.
When I’m done, Alessia disappears and brings back another bowl.
“Oh no,” I tell her. “I can’t eat all your food.”
“You pay for room and board,” Alessia says. “And this is the soup that heals broken hearts.”
I choke, push the soup away, close my eyes, fall asleep.
When I wake, I think at least another day has passed.
I lie there listening for the sounds of Venice.
But what I hear in the swish of the blue curtains in the breeze, as if I’m destined to always be in communication with the souls of old houses, is Calliope’s voice telling me that I might as well be dead for all the living I’ve done.
As much as everything hurts, I don’t want to be dead. So my only choice is to get out of bed and make a start on living.