The Wonder Spot (9 page)

. . . . .

Venice didn't confide in me for a long time, and even when she did, it sounded less like a confidence than just a story she wanted to tell because it was interesting.

The first one she told me was about Georges. Their families had rented the villa together in Antibes; he'd come for the last week. As she spoke, I realized it was Georges she'd been thinking of that first night in the Pines when her voice got dreamy and she'd said, “This morning I was in Antibes.”

“He's incredibly smart,” she said. “But sweet, too. That's rare, I think.”

I thought of Doug, the busboy I'd made out with on my last night of work, and it occurred to me that he was not particularly smart and not that sweet, either. “Yeah,” I said.

Georges had beautiful manners. “He always stands when a woman enters the room,” she said. “I love that kind of thing.”

“Me, too,” I said, because suddenly I did love that kind of thing, though I wasn't sure I'd ever seen a guy my age stand for a woman unless he happened by coincidence to be leaving at that moment.

Venice told me that Georges spoke six languages fluently, and though English was one of them, the lovers spoke French.

She said that they didn't sleep together until the last night, and she closed her eyes, remembering.

“What?” I said.

She repeated something he'd said to her in French.

I told her that it sounded romantic but I spoke zero foreign languages.

She said, “He kept saying, ‘Please don't sleep,' and every time I'd doze off, I'd wake up to him saying, ‘Don't sleep, my love. Don't leave me before you have to.' ”

“Wow,” I said.

She said, “I know.”

Maybe she could tell I doubted the story because she got his powder-blue aerograms out, and line by line she read and translated his romantic French.

“Wait,” I said. “
Ma puce
means ‘darling'?”

She told me that, literally translated,
ma puce
meant “my flea,” but, “It's like our ‘honey'—no one thinks of actual honey.”

I got her to give me the literal translation for every “darling” or “sweetheart”:
Mon chou
meant “my cabbage,”
mon lapin,
“my rabbit.”

After she told me about losing her virginity to a Swiss ski instructor, she looked over at me. I knew she was waiting for me to tell her my story, and it occurred to me to make one up. Instead, I admitted that I'd never skied.

. . . . .

Our resident adviser invited Venice and me into her homey room, saying, “I just want to have a little chat.” She asked if we wanted tea or coffee, and she also had hot chocolate and chicken noodle soup.

I was sort of excited at the idea of chicken noodle soup. “I'll have some soup,” I said. “Thanks.”

Venice gave me a look:
Let's not make this any longer than it has to be.
She said, “Nothing for me, thanks.”

Betsy plugged in her hot pot. She asked how we were liking Rogers, and who our favorite professors were. She was a nice girl from Syracuse, and you could tell that she took her job as resident adviser seriously.

She handed me the mug of soup; it was hot, and I blew on it.

She said, “You guys are spending an awful lot of time together.” She was struggling. “You know, this is the time for making new friends,” she said. “Meeting everybody.”

We both said we'd made other friends, which was a little truer for me than for Venice.

Betsy said, “I just want to make sure you're open to other relationships.”

I said, “I'm open.”

Venice couldn't make herself say words like these, but she nodded and widened her eyes to convey openness.

Betsy said, “College is when you make the friendships that will last for the rest of your life.” She looked miserable saying this.

She went from cliché to cliché, as though stepping from one flat stone to the next across a roiling river, until finally Venice said, “I think I understand what you're trying to say,” though neither of us did.

A few days later we found out: There was a rumor that Venice and I were lesbians.

It didn't bother Venice at all, and I tried to act nonchalant, too. I asked if she wasn't afraid the rumor would prevent some hypothetical man from hypothetically falling in love with her.

She said the rumor wasn't going to prevent anyone from anything, just the opposite: According to Georges, ninety percent of men had lesbian fantasies.

I said, “But what if he's in the other ten percent?”

She said, “The other ten percent are gay.”

Then Venice met Hugh, and that was that.

. . . . .

Technically, Hugh wasn't as handsome as Venice was beautiful. He had dark hair and always a few days' worth of dark beard. His skin was bad—red and rough and maybe damaged from acne; there were scars. Yet this seemed to make him more attractive, as it never would a woman. Like Venice, though, Hugh was admired from afar, and he affected women as strongly as she did men, and maybe more deeply—not that he had any idea.

He lived off campus, in a dingy apartment with worn-out upholstered chairs and an olive vinyl sofa, but leaning against the walls were his own beautiful landscape paintings. The apartment had an unheated sunporch facing the lake, and Venice said he'd bundle up and paint out there, wearing his winter coat and gloves he'd cut the fingers off of.

The two of them were always inviting people over to his apartment before and after parties. He always offered Pimm's—he'd been to London the year before and had brought back cases of it. If you wanted to drink something else, you brought it.

It was Venice who kept these evenings going. Hugh was no good at parties, even in his own home. He seemed older—much older—than his guests, almost grandfatherly. He reminded me of someone deaf, or nearly so; he had trouble keeping up with conversations, and contributed the non-est of non sequiturs. I once heard him interrupt a joke about Reagan to say that Millard Fillmore's birthplace was in
nearby Locke, New York. He didn't seem to know how awkward he was, or if he did, didn't care; I don't think he cared what anyone except Venice thought of him. He trusted her opinions and sought them out; when she didn't like something he said, he wanted to know why—he was really eager to hear.

They didn't call each other Honey or Babe, let alone Flea or Cabbage; to each other they were Venice and Hugh. They hardly touched each other in front of other people. Their kisses hello or good-bye didn't say,
Sex.
But there was something private between them, enviably private. They were a couple in a way that didn't exclude anyone but seemed superior to every other relationship in the room.

. . . . .

I never saw Venice get upset. Even after her worst fight with Hugh—he'd read an aerogram from Georges—Venice just said, “Hugh's being idiotic.” So it was shocking and terrible one afternoon to find her crying in our room.

I didn't know what was wrong, and for a long time she was crying too hard to tell me. Finally, she got out enough words to let me know she'd gotten into Brown.

She hadn't told me she'd applied to transfer, and I wondered if she'd told Hugh. Not that it would matter; Hugh was graduating, anyway, and Brown was closer than Rogers to Manhattan, where he was looking for a job.

“You don't have to go,” I said.

She gave me a look that reminded me of the first night when she'd wanted a drink and I'd told her about the soda machine.

Then more tears.

I told her I'd do anything if she would just stop crying, and right away she said, “Play your fiddle for me.”

“Shit,” I said, but I got it out of its case and looked through my records for one to play along with. The only songs I knew were the cowboy and miner ballads of the variety called High Lonesome, but I put on the happiest one I could think of—one about a cowboy's love for his horse.

I hadn't played for anyone in a long time, and I wasn't sure I could do it now. I had to stand with my back to her, which in itself was embarrassing.

When I stopped playing, Venice smiled—a huge relief, even though I wasn't sure if she was smiling with me or at me.

. . . . .

That summer, Venice sent me a postcard a week from Europe. She'd seen Georges in Tuscany and described it in six languages, including pig Latin:
“Elt-fay othing-nay.”

In late August, she called from Capri to invite me to spend Labor Day weekend on Long Island, where Hugh's family had a house. I'd never gotten a call from Europe and wasn't sure how expensive it was, and I found myself saying yes because it was faster than saying no, which would have required an explanation.

Hugh and Venice picked me up at the train, in his grandparents' old station wagon. Venice gave me the front seat, and I looked out at the bushes of blue hydrangeas, the huge shade trees, and the houses with their silvered cedar shingles.

Hugh's was on the bay side, across Dune Road from the beach. The house was big but shabby; his family had managed to hold on to the house but had no money to keep it up. You'd open a drawer and the pull would come off in your hand.

I was worried that I'd feel awkward as the guest of Venice, as a guest of a guest, a guest once-removed. But Hugh introduced me to his mother and grandparents and sister as his “great friend,” and that was how I felt.

. . . . .

My favorite time of day was the late, late afternoon with the sun golding up the ocean and sand and sea grass and dunes. Venice said it was called “magic hour” in the movies. She knew because she'd read a few scripts by then, given to her by a director she'd met that summer.

One magic hour, after swimming, we got dressed on the beach in jeans and sweaters. We unpacked a dinner picnic of leftovers—cold crabs and cold corn on the cob and tomatoes Venice had flecked with
fresh basil. Hugh made a fire, and we drank wine and stayed out there on the beach late into the night.

When we got back everyone was asleep, and Venice went off to Hugh's bedroom, as she did every night. She'd come back to ours just as the sky was getting light, and sometimes I'd wake up and remember where I was and I'd feel as happy then as I ever had.

. . . . .

The three of us were happy as quahogs until Labor Day. It was overcast, and I thought that was what made the morning seem slow and thick.

Without much enthusiasm, Hugh suggested sailing.

Venice looked dubious; she noted the lack of wind. Then she said, “Our train leaves at four.”

Hugh said, “I know what time your train leaves.”

Venice seemed oblivious to his tone, and maybe she was at first. However upset she'd been when she'd gotten into Brown, I knew she was excited now about going. She wasn't talking about it, but she radiated the exuberance you can feel about going to a new place or starting a new thing.

Hugh wasn't going anywhere or starting anything; he hadn't found a job yet.

Finally we went sailing, without any of us really wanting to. It was a little boat, not much bigger than a Sunfish, and it looked old. As I got in, I asked Hugh when it had last been used.

Hugh seemed to wonder himself for a minute, and I thought,
Three drown in boating accident.

Both Venice and Hugh knew how to sail, and all I really did was watch them and the bay, lower my head when the boom crossed over, and look forward to going back to the house and taking one last outdoor shower before getting on the train.

The sky clouded over, and there was no sun at all anymore, and no wind, either. Finally Venice said, “We should head back.” Hugh didn't answer, just turned the boat around.

They had to tack—zigzag—the whole way back across the bay. Hugh kept sighing, and he seemed annoyed. He was giving Venice
orders, like, “Just get over there,” and she was obeying them. She didn't seem angry or upset or embarrassed, as I would have been. I thought maybe the windlessness was more dire than I realized, and the two of them were following emergency sailing procedures, which included the captain acting like a jerk and his mate ignoring him.

But neither changed, even once we got close to shore and out of danger; again, I wondered if Venice was thinking less about where she was now than where she'd be later.

We were pulling the boat up onto the sand when I saw how wrong I was. Behind Hugh's back, her face was full of sympathy. Venice knew exactly what he was feeling: The life he'd known was about to end; it would end as soon as she got on the train. She knew that he was scared of losing her and scared of not finding a job, and this was her way of telling him he didn't have to be.

On the beach she did a cartwheel, and he did one, too, a failure, but she laughed and got him laughing.

Back at the house, Venice took the first shower. I was packing when Hugh came and stood in the doorway and said, “Why don't you stay another night?”