Chapter 47 1965
In early summer, the water outside my window catches the golden clouds from the sky each sunrise and lets them float in the canal for a half hour like lazy tourists.
After sunset, the water invites the moon for a dip and she accepts, a pond of milk in an indigo sea.
During the daytime in between, the market at Campo San Leonardo is lined with thick stalks of white asparagus and lustrous artichokes that float in bowls of water.
I buy some of each, even though I have no idea what to do with them. Marzia will show me.
On my way home, every wall I pass is dressed in purple wisteria. The air is redolent with brioche and sunshine and I start humming aloud, uncaring who hears.
Until I realize the song I’m humming is Theo’s.
I stop on the Ponte Chiodo, which is a stupid thing to do. There are no handrails and it’s too precarious for anyone to go around me. Curses sound from behind and in front and I apologize, move on, Theo’s words still on my tongue.
He’s playing in Rome this week. Marzia and Alessia are going to see him. They’ll visit their brother too, who they tell me has taken leave of his senses and been seduced by the woman who was meant to go to Rome for a Parisian.
“A little passion is good for everyone,” I tell them, smiling.
Lives move forward. Passions start and die. I came to Venice because of the water. Because of Theo and Calliope and Flitter and Bob.
But mostly, I now think, I came because of me.
As I cross through the Sotoportego del Magazen, I’m thinking that I need to leave soon.
Marzia and Alessia are now charging twice as much for the other room, and could do the same with mine if I left.
I’m holding them back the same way I once held myself back.
There’s more I need to find out about myself, like what else can I do besides survive in an unfamiliar city?
What does the water look like farther south?
And—am I only thinking about the water farther south because that’s where Theo is?
I don’t see the person sitting on the doorstep until I almost stand on them.
“Buongiorno, Aria,” a voice says, more forlorn than I’ve ever heard it.
For the second time that day, I stop still. There, waiting for me, is Calliope Burns.
I leap on her, scattering asparagus and artichokes all around us. We hold on to one another for long enough for me to feel that she’s lost her famous curves, is as thin as the child-Aria who first met this woman almost eight years ago.
“You’re dislodging my eyelashes.” She pushes me away and we both cry-laugh because who cares about eyelashes when the day brings you the gift of a person you’d worried you’d left in your past?
I gather up the vegetables as well as her suitcase and take her up to my room. She crosses immediately to the window, stares down at the Rio dei Santi Apostoli, then exhales as if she’s never been so relieved in all her life.
“I can see why you haven’t come back.” She takes in the gondoliers, the light, the way it’s all so different from the Chateau Marmont.
“How did you find me?” I sit on the bed, the shock catching me now.
“Theo and Flitter thought you’d taken a train, but I always knew you’d fly away.
I went to the airport and discovered that the only plane leaving that night stopped in New York, where you’d never go, not after what happened there, then Paris, where there’s no water besides a filthy river.
That left Rome. You might recall that I know some movie people and you’re living in the home of a man who owns a few cinemas. It’s taken months of calls.”
I remember Arturo asking me if I wanted to be found. Now I know why.
She turns around and I gasp aloud because Calliope Burns is no longer shining. She looks empty, a paper bag crumpled, flattened and thrown away. She’s cut her hair so it’s shorter than mine.
“Yes, I look dreadful,” she agrees. “Can I sleep here tonight? Like old times?”
“Of course,” I say. “I have to go to work soon, but I’ll bring burgers back with me.”
It’s exactly like old times. Calliope is sound asleep when I return and I eat her burger as well as my own and wonder how long it will be before she breaks.
It takes a full week before Calliope gets out of bed. I find her sitting in a chair by the window late one night when I come home from work with more burgers.
“You’re feeling better?” I ask, but stop when I see what’s in her lap. My book. Typed in black across the front are the words: Calliope Burns: A Novel.
She stands up, holding the stack of typed papers to her chest, scooches across the bed, and pats the space next to her. “Aria, come and sit by me.”
I can’t look at her. Is she angry?
But she slings an arm around me, brings my head down to rest on her shoulder and leans hers atop my own.
The mirror shows two young women, one who’s twenty-one, the other soon to be twenty-six.
We each have cropped heads: one blonde, the other brown.
The blonde’s skin is so pale I can almost see the blood circulating beneath, except her blood doesn’t seem to be circulating, not really.
The brunette’s skin is tanned from all the walking she’s done; her cheeks glow.
As for the blonde, her eyes are the only things that glow, not with health, but with a frightening, chemical glitter.
I watch the blonde’s mouth open and she says something I refuse to hear. I keep staring at our reflections, trying to make Calliope turn back into a past version of herself as tears run like frightened children down my face.
Calliope wraps her other arm around me and hugs me even though that’s what I ought to be doing for her.
I have a brain tumor.
I have a brain tumor.
That’s what she said.
I pull away. “They can do something, right? You’re Calliope Burns. They’ll be able to do something for Calliope Burns.”
She rubs her thumbs over my cheeks, mopping up my tears like my mother used to. “I’ve had some radiation. It shrank the tumor a little. But it’s just buying me time, Aria. In reality, the woman who wanted to be immortal won’t even live to be thirty.”
I shake my head, refuse to believe this story. “No.”
“Unfortunately, yes. The headaches I was having—that was the start. And the fatigue. And the strange things I was doing, like the fortune-teller. I know everyone thought I was taking something. But something was taking on me.” She smiles a little.
“I told my doctor that the only good thing about having a brain tumor is that it proves I have a brain.”
“That’s a terrible joke!”
“Shall I tell you about Theo instead? That story has a much better ending.”
Do I want to hear about Theo?
“He found his voice again,” I say. “I’m glad.”
She waves a hand dismissively. “That’s not what I mean. I mean—do you really think he’d ever cheat on you? Every man I’ve been with has cheated on me, so I have a great deal of experience in assessing whether a man is a cheater or not. The woman you saw was his ex-lover, Marley.”
My mouth twists. “I know. He was keeping the one woman from his past who he actually loved in a bungalow that he said was being renovated. Nothing suspicious there.”
“But what you don’t know is that she’d been in rehab to kick—”
“I do know that. He told me, and that he paid for her. Further proof of—”
Now she cuts me off. “Of your overactive imagination. I blame the Marmont. Nobody can grow up in a Gothic castle and not become inventive. But the truth is that, after rehab, she needed somewhere to stay where she’d be safe from dealers and friends and parties.
Theo felt guilty about what happened when he broke up with her, so, when she called him one night—soon after she left rehab—with a baggie of heroin in her hand, he went to get her.
He told her he’d give her a bungalow at the Marmont to stay in for six months while she found her sober feet. ”
She almost relapsed her first week out. That’s the worst time of all.
Theo said that to me the night I discovered how much I enjoyed flirting with him. Which would have been the perfect moment to bring up the fact that he’d stashed her in a bungalow. But he didn’t.
To Calliope I say, “Putting a recovering addict into the Marmont is a bit like sending a dieter into a candy shop.”
“Not if you have a full-time nurse, paid for by Theo, and are living in a bungalow nobody can enter because it’s meant to be a construction hazard.
He visited her every day to check in with her.
He took her out one time on his bike to tell her about you, to ask her if she thought he could really have a sober relationship.
She told him yes. There’s nothing between them.
He was hugging her that night because she’d been clean six months and was leaving the Marmont the next day.
The needles you saw were for her methadone therapy.
It’s coming up for a year now and she’s still clean.
So I’d say that maybe what Theo did for her saved her. But obviously he should have told you.”
Maybe what Theo did for her saved her. But it didn’t save us. We loved, but we didn’t trust. We were both too lost to know how. When we were together we felt found—but we needed to feel found alone too.
“It doesn’t matter,” I tell her. “I still can’t go back.
What happened that night made me run. But…
” I say it aloud for the first time. “But it’s not why I’m staying away.
I needed to learn how to live. And lately I’ve been wondering if I need to do something even more than that.
Something like…” I struggle with how to describe it.
“Like I need to unearth my own self from my soul. I need to build those parts of me that don’t yet exist, but could. ”
Calliope’s beam is almost to full power when she says, “I think you’re right.”