The Guncle Abroad

Chapter Nine

People often said Paris was the City of Love, and while it was a fine city for lovers Patrick firmly believed such a title belonged to Venice. He was feeling good about their trip, confident his lessons were taking root and that both Maisie and Grant had a growing appreciation for love. But if he had yet to truly astound his niblings, Venice was certainly the city to capture their sense of wonder. It was a city for romantic love, platonic love, famous love, anonymous love, sacred love, secular love, familial love—Venice ticked all the boxes. It was even a city for lust—it had been home to Casanova, for heaven’s sake—but they needn’t dwell on that. What more could anyone want? And since they were slightly ahead of schedule and Venice was not far from Lake Como, their ultimate destination, it made perfect sense as the final stop on Patrick’s instructional tour. If he couldn’t get the kids to understand love after visiting Venice, he had failed in spectacular fashion.

The train ride from Salzburg was roughly six hours and this time they made the journey by day; arriving in Venice was a breathtaking experience and Patrick didn’t want to sneak the kids in under the cover of night. The train took them due south through Austria’s lush and green farmland before crossing the mountainous border into Italy near Slovenia. They had a private car this time, seats still facing one another, but with a large picture window of their own to look out. All the rooms were on one side of the train with a sliding door to a narrow corridor on the other. The doors were glass and the corridors also had large picture windows, so they had decent views of the landscape on all sides. Maisie had her nose in a new book and Grant kept his eyes peeled on the corridor.

“Who are you expecting?” Patrick asked, following the boy’s gaze.

“The trolley cart,” he replied.

Another wizarding reference. “Again? Aren’t you getting too old for Harry Potter?”

Grant looked at his uncle like he’d lost his mind. “I’m eleven. That’s exactly when you get your letter from Hogwarts.”

Patrick winced. He often forgot how young Grant still was. Like the boy wizard, he had lost a great deal and been forced to grow up too fast, although as a custodial relative Patrick hoped he was quite the opposite of the Dursleys. Annoyed with their obsession with books, Patrick snatched Maisie’s from her hands.

“Ow. You gave me like a thousand papercuts.”

“Would you please look out the window?” They were passing the quaintest little villages tucked in swooping valleys between mountains.

“Neat,” she said flatly. “Can I have my book back now?”

Patrick glanced at the cover. Another Agatha Christie, this time Appointment with Death. “Subtle,” he said, handing it back to her. She was going to be a real joy at her father’s wedding.

“What country is this?” Grant asked, squishing his face against the window.

“Italy. If you’re counting, that makes five.” Patrick ran a quick tabulation in his head to be sure. Maybe six, if their train had dipped through Germany on their way to Salzburg.

“Yeth!” Grant said, falling back into his lisp. He pumped his fist for exclamation.

“Big fans of Italy, are we?” Patrick asked.

“We’re going to see Dad in Italy.”

“And Livia,” Maisie said, trying to temper her brother’s excitement. She raised her book in front of her face. “Don’t forget about her.”

“Who could forget about her?” Grant asked, but his enthusiasm remained undimmed. “Don’t worry. Uncle Patrick is going to stop the wedding.”

“Over my dad body!” Patrick joked.

“You said you would!”

“I say a lot of things. I said I would write a stern letter to the Recording Academy for never giving ABBA a Grammy. Doesn’t mean I did.”

“You promised!”

“I never said I would dramatically throw myself on the altar to stop a wedding, don’t put words in my mouth. I said I would talk to your father and voice your concerns. Privately. If you still didn’t understand after our trip why he was getting married.”

Maisie swung sideways and tucked her feet up onto the seat. “Well, we don’t. We don’t know why anyone would want to get married.”

“I do!” Grant offered, and Patrick laughed, as it sounded like the kid was taking his own marital vow. “Cake.”

“Ah, yes. Many a marriage entered into for cake.”

“Cake is not a reason,” Maisie said, her aversion to sweets rearing its head yet again. “So I remain unconvinced.”

Patrick massaged his temples to stave off a headache. So much for his confidence.

Their train pulled into Venice in the late afternoon, just as the sun’s low rays caressed the colorful buildings that lined the canals. Patrick dragged the kids straight into the heart of the city; there was not a moment to wait. The canal water’s tint always made him stop to take it all in, the green surprisingly vibrant. He raced them through St. Mark’s Square on the way to the Grand Canal.

“Pigeons!” Grant cried as he pointed into the square, which was flooded with hundreds, perhaps thousands of birds.

“If the goal was to see pigeons, I would have brought you to any Chipotle parking lot back home. But we’re not here to see pigeons, so keep up!” Grant protested until Patrick promised them they’d be back to admire the panoply. For now he had one destination in mind, and time was of the essence.

The mouth of the Grand Canal spilled open in front of them and it was one of Patrick’s favorite views of Venice. In this city built on the sea, the most consequential street was not a street at all, but rather a two-mile waterway that snaked through the city and formed the letter S. The Grand Canal was bustling with private boats and activity, and the buildings that lined the canal once belonged to Venice’s most successful mercantile families. They rose proudly from the water in warm shades of oranges and pinks and reds that reflected beautifully across the cooler colors of the canal. Even standing in the middle of it, it was hard to accept that Venice was real; it was like the three of them had stumbled into a Renaissance painting and now themselves were hanging in the Louvre.

Oh my god, Maisie mouthed, too stunned to summon her voice and put it to her statement of wonder. Finally, Patrick thought. He’d shown them something that had left them speechless and they stood quietly savoring Guncle Love Language number one. There was nothing quite like the sound of silence.

“Is this where Livia’s from?” Grant asked, breaking the spell after he watched at least a dozen speedboats go by.

“She’s from Italy, yes, but a different city. I think her family’s from Rome.”

“Does Rome have boats instead of cars, too?”

“No, Rome has regular streets with cars, although a lot of people ride Vespas.”

“Oh,” Grant said with disappointment, as if he had come close to finding something admirable about his stepmother-to-be before all hopes were dashed.

They started to walk along the waterway’s cobblestone banks, dodging tourists and merchants alike.

“Livia has a sister, you know,” Maisie announced.

“I didn’t know,” Patrick admitted.

“She’s a lesbian,” Grant said, “like you.”

“Whoa whoa whoa.” Patrick pulled them against a wall as a gaggle of tourists with an obnoxious number of shopping bags turned sideways in order to squeeze by. “I am many things, but I am not a lesbian.”

“He meant she’s gay like you. She’s going to be our launt.”

Patrick inhaled sharply, clutching imaginary pearls. “There’s no such thing as a launt.”

“There’s no such thing as a guncle!” Maisie clarified. “I mean, not really. It’s just a silly word.”

“It’s a lot more real than launt!” Patrick didn’t know quite why his feathers were ruffled, like he was one of the many pigeons in St. Mark’s Square waiting indignantly to be fed, but they were. Launt. The very idea, ridiculous!

“I thought you hated the word ‘guncle.’?”

“Onomatopoeically! But the reason for its existence is sound. I mean, look where I’ve brought you. Look at all the things we’ve done! Is a launt going to take you around the world? No! Will a launt treat you to world-class cuisine? Of course not. You’ll be lucky if a launt shoves you in their Subaru to take you to a farmers’ market for artisanal dog treats.”

“A launt will get us a dog?” Grant asked excitedly.

“I GOT YOU A DOG!”

“Oh, yeah. I meant another dog.”

“Why do you need another dog?” They were on the move again, walking past a bank of gondolas, where an older couple carefully stepped into a boat with the help of their gondolier. “Look at them,” Patrick said, discreetly pointing toward the couple.

“I like their stripes,” Grant admitted of the superbly costumed oarsmen.

“No, not the gondolier. The couple. See how they look at each other?” The man could hardly take his eyes off his wife, even though Patrick imagined they had been together for decades; indeed, her face glowed in the last of the day’s sun. Maybe they came every summer, maybe they had saved their whole lives for a trip like this. Maybe they lived here. But there was no mistaking how they felt about each other. “That’s Venice. That’s love.” Patrick took a deep breath. “You really can’t understand why two people would want to get married?”

Maisie turned to challenge Patrick. “Why do you feel the need to be our favorite?”

“Did you not hear anything I just said?” Patrick took one last look at the elderly couple; they held hands as the gondolier pushed them away from the dock with his oar. Patrick then turned back to his niece. “I don’t. I don’t need to be your favorite.” That, of course, was a lie.

“Then why do you care if we have a launt?”

“Because we’re not doing launt. Launt is not a thing. Now stop trying to goad me.”

Grant scratched his chin. “What’s goad mean?”

“Provoke me into action. Your sister is impressed with Venice, and she’s seeing and understanding love and she’s afraid she’s losing out on our deal. And if she knows I won’t try to stop the wedding on your behalf—”

Grant interjected. “You already said you weren’t.”

Patrick ignored him. “—she’s trying to get me to make a disaster of it by creating a nonexistent rivalry with...” Patrick could hardly get himself to say the word. “This launt.”

“Whatever,” Maisie dismissed, caving a little too easily for Patrick’s tastes. What did she know that he didn’t? Who was this sister of Livia’s and why did Maisie wear such an inscrutable expression? It was as if she were saying, You’ll see.

Grant pointed at the gondolas and broke his chain of thought. “Can we ride in one of those?”

“Tomorrow. Tomorrow we can ride in a gondola and explore all the canals, and there’s even a bookstore I want to show you.” Patrick gave Maisie a friendly tap on her back. “But tonight we’re eating pizza to our heart’s content. Who’s hungry?”

Grant thrust his hips to one side and pointed a finger in the air like a tiny disco king—all he was missing was a crushed-velvet suit. “Finally!”

“Let me guess,” Maisie began. “It’s the world’s best pizza?” She said it with just the right amount of sarcasm to make it truly funny. Patrick put his arm around her and they continued along the canal. Let’s see a launt teach her delivery like that.

Pizzerias in Venice were a dime a dozen, it would be impossible to throw a stone without hitting one. But good pizza, well that was harder to find. The city offered world-class cuisine, but there were also plenty of places that were just as forgettable. Patrick, however, had done his research and reserved them three spots at the counter at Antico Forno, a small pizzeria not far from the Rialto Bridge. Despite Maisie’s ribbing, he had no idea if this was the best pizza in Venice, let alone the world—there were as many pizzas as there were regions and people’s favorites were so subjective. But he had a good feeling about the night ahead and would do his best to serve as proxy for Livia’s views on Italian cuisine.

“Buonasera!” the proprietor at Antico Forno exclaimed as they took their seats at the counter.

“Buonasera,” Patrick greeted him back. Maisie pulled out her phone to have SayHi at the ready before their conversation could go any further.

The scents inside the cozy restaurant were intoxicating and the whole space had the air of a small movie set, something directed by one of the Coppolas. Marble pillars out front, tiled flooring aged just so, and red-and-white-checkered curtains framed the pies in the window.

“Okay, you got me,” Maisie marveled, reluctantly as she may have sounded. “This really isn’t like anyplace I’ve seen.”

“Except Pizza Hut,” Grant replied, and Patrick threw his hands over the boys mouth, hoping the man behind the counter’s English was limited, even though everyone in Venice seemed to speak it fluently.

“It does not look like—” Patrick couldn’t even bring himself to repeat such a claim.

Maisie reached across Patrick to shove her brother. “I was talking about the city, doofus.” Grant shoved her back, but didn’t otherwise take the bait.

“You know what would be cool?” Grant asked. “If instead of canals they had waterslides.”

Patrick handed them each a menu. “Then you’d be wet everywhere you went.”

Maisie picked her T-shirt away from her body. “We’re wet anyway. The whole city is... damp.”

“Of course it’s damp, it’s a city of water.”

Grant studied his menu. “They misspelled ‘pizza,’?” he observed, pointing at the menu, which said pizze.

“P-i-z-z-e is plural in Italian.”

“I thought margherita was a drink,” Maisie said, taking her own issue with the offerings.

“It’s a drink and a pizza. Also different spellings.” Patrick explained how the margherita pizza with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and basil was red, white, and green—just like the Italian flag.

“How do you know all this stuff? Like how do you know all these places?” Maisie asked. It was just dawning on her, the idea of being a citizen of the world.

“I mean, I don’t. Not really. London I’d been to a few times, but I didn’t really know the city until this year when I was living there to film the movie. Austria I’d never been to, we discovered that one together. I’d been to Paris with Emory once when he filmed a French commercial for Peugeot, and years ago I came to Venice with Joe. Granted, that was a long time ago, but a city like Venice you don’t forget. You’ll see when you come back on your own when you’re older.”

“What happened with you and Emory?” Grant asked, almost exasperated, as if he’d been over it and over it in his head.

“Shall I order for us?” Patrick asked, knowing the best way to answer a question you wanted to avoid was with another question. He flagged down their waiter, who adopted a boisterous persona for those he deemed tourists; Patrick imagined locals grew tired of playing the part. He requested margherita and quattro formaggi pizzas for the three of them to share and was surprised to see both Maisie and Grant staring at him so intently once their order was in. “What, did you want antipasto, too?”

“We want you to answer Grant’s question.”

“About Emory? It’s complicated,” he sighed, adding, “in an uninteresting way,” hoping he could get them to drop it.

“You’re the one who wanted to teach us about love. Doesn’t that include what happens when love ends?” The world was a globe, as round as it was wide, but somehow there in a tiny restaurant across a vast ocean, Patrick finally found himself cornered.

“It didn’t end.”

“Then you still love him,” Maisie pressed.

“Of course. Very much.”

“Then what happened?”

“I told you.”

“You didn’t, though.” Grant pulled his shirt up over his mouth, looking like a little bandit. Indeed he had Patrick at gunpoint.

Many of the kids’ friends had parents who were divorced. Those kids knew that sometimes love faded, they witnessed fighting and anger and separation before being swapped back and forth every other weekend. Maisie and Grant’s own circumstances were very different. They lost their mother, and their grief came from love that endured. If Patrick was going to teach them about love—really teach them—he owed it to them to be honest. Love also had its shortcomings. So he said simply, “Sometimes love isn’t enough.”

“Why?”

Patrick closed his eyes and inhaled the scents of dough and tomato and basil emulsion. He listened to the din of the crowd, excited chatter in English and Italian and who knows how many other languages. Passersby bustling past the door on their way to their own dinner plans.

“Why? Because I’m going to be fifty, that’s why. It’s time for me to get serious.” Patrick remembered during their first summer together when the kids heard his age and proclaimed that forty-three was almost fifty. He was horrified then, but it was the unvarnished truth now—he was undeniably middle-aged.

“What does that have to do with it?”

Patrick chuckled. “I know this will come as a shock, but Emory is quite a bit younger.” He whispered “younger” like it was a dirty word. “Yes, we do all kinds of things and travel to all kinds of places, but at my age I can’t just have fun all the time. I have to be serious. I have to grow up.”

“Age shouldn’t make a difference,” Maisie stated plainly. “Not if you really love each other. Besides, Emory is five years older than he was when you first met. He’s growing up, too.”

“Yes,” Patrick said. In theory he agreed. And certainly that was Emory’s point of view. “But the problem is, so am I.”

There was an unspoken agreement, Patrick thought, in dating someone younger that they would participate in the illusion that you were their age, too, or at the very least that you somehow met at a neutral age in the middle. And Emory had kept up his end of the bargain, at least for a while. He never commented on the graying around Patrick’s temples or the salt that grew in his beard. When they played tennis, Emory would get winded, too—or at least pretend he did—allowing for Patrick not to feel his full age. But every once in a while the truth of their ages would show. Emory would rebound more quickly on the court. Patrick would pass a mirror and feel not so much betrayed by his reflection as confused. A reference would go over Emory’s head or one would go over Patrick’s. Emory would mention watching Friends as a kid, and mean not as a young adult but as an actual child. And every so often he would look at Patrick with a curious head tilt and his eyes would grow the faintest bit wet. Of course, Patrick was not privy to Emory’s thoughts and if he really wanted to know, all he had to do was just ask, but he was always worried that Emory was performing complicated math—how old Patrick would be when Emory was Patrick’s age now, that sort of thing, and he was afraid each time that the answer made Emory die a little inside.

“That’s not a real problem,” Grant finally said.

“Then what is a real problem?”

Grant thought for a moment before saying, “Quicksand.”

“Mmmm,” Patrick hummed, stifling a laugh. The kid did have a point. Only, for adults most quicksand was emotional.

A puzzled look fell over Grant’s face. “Why are we laughing?”

“We’re not laughing, I’m laughing.”

“Why is that funny?” Maisie asked. “Emory is an old soul.” She said it with confidence, as if that were her own observation, when clearly it was not.

“Who told you that?”

“Emory.”

“When? When did Emory tell you that?”

“Before we left on this trip,” Maisie replied. “He said I was one, too.”

Maisie and Grant still talked to his ex?The thought had never occurred to him and now that it was staring him in the face he wasn’t so sure that he liked it. “You shouldn’t be talking to Emory.” His appetite suddenly dimmed.

“He’s our friend!” Grant protested.

“Don’t be silly. He’s too old to be your friend.”

Grant threw his hands in the air. “He’s too old to be our friend, he’s too young to be yours. I guess Emory is fucked!”

“I guess that’s right. Wait, WHAT?”

Two pizzas appeared on the counter in front of them. The focaccia crust had deliciously bubbled and charred, with crushed tomatoes peering through chunks of buffalo mozzarella, and Patrick decided he would force himself to have at least one slice. He reached for the stack of plates as Grant and Maisie eyed their meal. “Don’t use language like that in public, it’s not polite.”

“You do!” Grant charged.

“I do a lot of things,” Patrick admitted with the slightest twinge of regret. “Now, mangia.”

Venice was an entirely different city by night. The crowds cleared out, the streets emptied, and the canals all fell quiet. Restaurants closed around ten, and save for the opera at the Teatro La Fenice, there wasn’t much in the way of nightlife; people who were looking for a more traditional scene with bars and nightclubs shuffled over to Mestre on the mainland. What remained was a city that was eerily peaceful and even more mazelike without the sun to light the way; the night glow came from below, off the waters of the canals, reflecting light from the endless docks and bridges. Patrick walked the kids over a series of footbridges back toward St. Mark’s Square, checking the navigation on his phone every few hundred feet. They ate gelato, the perfect nightcap: Grant had two scoops of cioccolato al latte, while Maisie—who, despite her foray into Parisian hot chocolate, was never a fan of the flavor—opted for stracciatella; Patrick had pistacchio.

“What do you think? Venice always seems both romantic and sinister at night.” It was perhaps all the Venetian masks that hung in store windows suggesting people still engaged in licentious behavior after dark.

“Gelato is supposed to be sinister?” Maisie asked, not falling for it. She took a look around. “I guess it takes a dump like this to underscore how boring sin can be.”

Patrick grabbed her in a headlock. “Is that supposed to be sass?”

Maisie laughed. “Yes! I’m kidding.”

The student becomes the teacher. Patrick took a spoonful of her gelato as punishment.

“Are we going back to see the pigeons?” Grant asked.

“It’s past pigeon bedtime. Just as it’s past yours.”

“There are so many bridges!” Grant exclaimed. “I think they dug too many canals.”

“They didn’t dig the canals. Venice is a city of islands. Three big ones and more than a hundred little ones.”

“That’s a lot,” he remarked, his mouth full of chocolate. “So what love language is this?”

“Ah.” Patrick thought, scrambling for just what he wanted to say. “Are you ready for this? You’re about to get Rickrolled.”

“What’s Rickrolled?” Grant asked, bracing himself for something awful.

“It’s a meme where Rick Astley’s ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’ appears in unexpected places. But I’m extending it to include his other hit, because once again, Americans like all the wrong songs.” Maisie looked at him like she wanted to mush her gelato onto his nose. “Guncle Love Language number five: ‘Together forever with you.’ That’s it. That’s mostly what marriage is. Spending time together. And wanting to move heaven and earth to make that happen. With the right person, time flies. Forever goes by in a blink. But the good news is, you’re the pilot. And when you have a good copilot, it makes the journey all the more bearable.”

Maisie remained conspicuously silent as they walked, the only sound the patter of their feet on cobblestones and the echo of other conversations several bridges away.

“Something on your mind?” Patrick asked.

For a time, Maisie didn’t answer. Then, out of nowhere, she asked, “All these love languages, but what’s so great about love in the first place?”

“How do you mean?”

“You’re teaching us everything about it, except why.”

“Why do we love?”

“Why should we love?”

“I think that’s an excellent question.”

“Like, aren’t there people who just don’t bother?”

Patrick could tell, like now for instance, when one or both of the kids was genuinely interested, and he prided himself on feeding their starved little minds with an adult perspective. “There are people who are aromantic, people who don’t feel romantic love. And that’s fine. That’s a valid way to be for some. But are there people who don’t love anything or anybody? Their families, their pets, books, travel... Taylor Swift?” They stopped at the center of a bridge and looked down at the water that gently lapped the sides of the canal, rippling reflections of light dancing below them. “That doesn’t sound like any way to live.”

“It sounds like a way not to get hurt,” Maisie opined.

Patrick agreed. It was that. “Listen to me. Even after everything you’ve been through—and you kids have been through a lot—would you prefer to not have loved your mother? Just so that it would have hurt less when you lost her? Of course not. In fact, I dare say if she somehow came walking over this bridge right now you would love her even more.”

“I wish she would.” Maisie leaned forward, rested her chin on the bridge’s railing, and exhaled, making her own bridge of sighs.

If wishing made it so.

Patrick extended his arm across her shoulders as Grant stepped up on the railing’s lower rung and asked, “Can pigeons swim?”

Patrick missed the days where he commanded their attention for greater stretches of time. “Can pigeons what?”

“Swim. How deep is this canal?”

“Are you even listening to me?”

Grant looked over the rail, seemingly weighing the benefits and drawbacks of dropping his spoon into the water to see how deep it would sink. Patrick glared at him: Don’t you dare. “It looks bottomless.”

“It won’t be bottomless after I throw you in it.” Patrick grabbed Grant under the armpits and raised him a few inches off the railing; Grant kicked and squirmed and laughed.

“Look, if you want to live your life without the bother of romantic love, I will support you. Whatever floats your gondola. I’m coming around to that way of thinking myself.” Patrick realized as soon as he said it that that last part at least was a lie. “But. You can’t go through life not loving anything at all. Because then you’re a sociopath. Or the people behind the Razzies. You understand?”

The kids acknowledged that they did, then returned their focus to their gelato under the moonlight, leaving Patrick alone with his thoughts. All these rules he was making up. This entire leg of the journey, now that it was coming to a close. Was he selling the kids on the merits of love—or was he secretly selling himself?

They spent two more days in Venice, until Patrick was convinced the kids loved the city as much as he did, Rick Astley stuck in his head the whole time.