Seducing the Demon (14 page)

I lived in Venice on and off for several years in order to write
Shylock’s Daughter.

Certain books must be written among the spirits that summoned them. Could Mary Shelley have written
Frankenstein
except far from England in a chalet on Lake Geneva that all its laudanum-laced inhabitants believed to be haunted? Could Byron have written Don
Juan
except in Venice?

I remember working on my Venetian novel in a friend’s house in Venice, where my room overlooked a small canal whose water threw shimmering reflections on the ceiling. I’ve always found my dreams are richer in Venice, and every time I slept I awoke with more incidents for the novel. I’m sure that book could not have been written anywhere else.

Arriving in Venice, I am always thrilled by its magnificence and I am convinced I want to live in Venice forever. After a few weeks, the feeling fades. I feel trapped by my watery second home and must escape to terra firma. It is the doubleness of the place that makes it both alluring and repellent. Time stands still in Venice, but do we want time to stand still?

I used to go to Venice searching for my demon. I thought that if I found the magic place, my life would turn magical and my writing would fly beyond the limitations every writer knows.

All through the eighties I rented houses in Venice. The first was in Salute (behind the Church of Santa Maria della Salute), the last on Giudecca—near the Santa Eufemia vaporetto stop. I would decamp from New York when Molly’s school was done in June and return when it resumed in September. The most memorable of these rented places was a decaying sixteenth-century palazzo my visiting friends called “Palazzo Erica” (not its real name). It was one of a row of palazzi facing Venice from Giudecca. Near Harry’s Dolci and the
traghetto
to the Zattere, a brisk walk from the Cipriani pool (where I swam in the afternoon), it had been owned by a retired art historian from the Metropolitan Museum of Art who hadn’t the cash to restore it. Since she had no children, she left it, when she died of cancer, to two of her protégés who hadn’t the cash to restore it either.

I was one of various renters. The “house” consisted of the
piano nobile
(four bedrooms, a
salotto,
a library filled with wonderful books about the history of art), a kitchen with a skylight that leaked copiously in rain-storms, a neglected rose garden with one hugely prolific pear tree in the middle, and a dark but totally separate studio apartment on the ground floor with a bar and sofa bed, where I met my gorgeous but wholly unreliable Venetian lover most mornings while Molly and her nanny, Margaret, were out shopping. That was in my single days.

Leonello had a grace that all Don Juans might envy. His manners were perfect. His maneuvering of his
motoscafo
in and out of difficult docks was an art. His dancing presaged the grace of his fucking. And he was a slow seducer, slow to bed and slow to finish. He was of medium height, with eyes the color of unfiltered Tuscan olive oil, curly salt-and-pepper hair, golden skin and not a word of English besides “O.K.” In Italian, everything is sexier, and I owe whatever conversational skills I have to him—though most of them cannot be used out of bed.

 

 

“Palazzo Erica” was surely haunted. Elizabeth Gardner, the art historian who had come to die in Venice, was padding around her house—coaching me in art history—as were dozens of ghosts from other eras. Some of the ghosts were friendly. Many were sex-obsessed. And some were sinister. Ghosts are just like the living. They come in all flavors. But ghosts are always good for writing.

I knew a cocktail pianist in Venice who said he was drawn back again and again by the deep feeling he had lived there in another life. One night he dreamed of being a sixteenth-century baker and woke up covered with flour. His landlady had told him that the ground floor where he slept had once been a bakery. Do I believe it? Maybe and maybe not. I believe
he
believed it. Venice does that to people.

Many people come to retire and die in Venice. Often when they come, they think they are coming to live. And then they sicken and die like Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s
Death in Venice.
That novella may be why I never bought a house in Venice but only rented. I was sure the city would capture me for one of its ghosts. It has that power.

Venice needs artists to die there and add to its myth. Think of Ezra Pound, Diaghilev, Mahler.... Venice is a ghoul, a sort of vampire—a very beautiful vampire, but beauty is one of a vampire’s many snares. The famous artists usually stay buried in the verdant cemetery island of San Michele. The obscure ones are dug up and tossed on an obscure ossuary island—bones, teeth, hair. Even in death, fame is unforgiving.

Provence is also beautiful and the food is far better than the food in Venice. It has fascinating Roman ruins, like Glanum near Saint-Rémy, the Pont du Gard, the temples of Nimes and the beautiful village perches of the Drôme. But though it is lovely beyond measure, it holds no deep attraction for me.

Venice generates dreams and daydreams too. Sleeping on water—whether in a boat or a city like a boat—floats your sane mind away.

Here is a dream:

Fucking Bill Clinton? Well, I guess I’ll have to stand in line. I’m hardly the only one who finds him sexy. Even after open-heart surgery, he has more life force than most men of any age. Life force is the ultimate sex appeal. I know that Bill Clinton’s Achilles’ heel is lusting for flashy broads (his mother was a flashy broad and men never get over their mothers). I wonder if I’m trashy enough for him, but I can dream, can’t I?

Maybe I can dress up like his dear dead mother, Virginia Kelley (when she was a babe in the forties)—or Gennifer Flowers—or even poor betrayed Monica Lewinsky. Men are pretty unsubtle creatures. I have been involved with brilliant poets who liked me to wear tacky underwear. Insisted on it, in fact. I have known fierce intellectuals (who wrote for the TLS or
The New York Review of Each Other’s Books)
who could only get hard staring at Frederick’s of Hollywood crotchless panties. So I know the drill. No wonder Monica snagged the not impossible him with a thong—uncomfortable and chafing though they are. (They tend to give me diaper rash.)

But the point of the dream seems to be that I have to give up control. I can’t get in touch with Bill. He has to get in touch with me. My husband is cool about our affair, but Hillary has to be fooled and Bill is very nervous about her. She’s a bossy dame, but he needs her.

He loves tawdry broads and flashy fifties cars. He’s a boy straight outta
Grease.
He worships Elvis. But he chose to marry a girl out of Nancy Drew: a smart virgin who can figure out just about any crime—including his. She hasn’t figured
us
out yet, but he fears she
will.
His wife knows full well that he’s torn between trash and virginity, between dumb and smart, between hot and cool. He’s my soul mate. I used to get excited by boys in black leather jackets on Harleys. I would never have married Mr. Motorcycle, but I sure liked to fuck him. In that, Bill and I are the same.

So what’s the dream about? A lot of things. Giving up control. Nostalgia for the fifties. Nostalgia for my sex-filled days at Barnard and Columbia (we’re on 125th Street, after all), nostalgia for my bad boys and Italian studs, nostalgia for my single life. I’m also back at school, learning again, and the former President is my teacher. But so is Hillary. I don’t want to betray her, but she’s married to my favorite political hunk. What a dilemma!

This is really an Oedipal dream. I love both Daddy and Mother, but it’s him I want to fuck. My parents were flirtatious—both of them. And we called them by their first names. My father was Seymour. He was handsome and hot. It was hard to think of him as my father. And he adored me. I always wanted him and sought him in stand-ins all over the world. Men who can play the piano and drums always turn me on.

And my mother. I called her Eda. She was my nemesis and my ego ideal all in one confusing package, like my dream Hillary. Once she actually accused me of being in love with my father.

“You’re mad at me because you adore your father,” she screamed, when I was fifteen and at my most hateful toward her. Of course she was right.

I could go on interpreting this dream forever. But the main thing, I think, is the loss of control. This man is the boss—my President!—and I always want to be the boss. I cannot control him. I have to wait for his calls.

If this book were a novel, I’d describe actually having an affair with a character like Bill Clinton. It would be an anguishing affair because he’s a totally divided man. He’s bonded to brainy Hillary, but he lusts in his heart for women like his mother. No wonder he drove Monica crazy. He would do the same to you or me.

Yet I can certainly imagine myself hanging around Harlem in the hopes of seeing Bill Clinton. Or maybe I could stake him out in Westchester when Hillary’s not around. Heart surgery or no heart surgery, the man’s got to be restless by now. He’s been good too long. Have I?

But the truth is that instead of stalking the ex-President, I’m hosting a fund-raiser for Hillary at my apartment in New York. I can dream, but I also have a sane mind.

 

 

So I go to Venice to dream. Everyone should have a special place to dream. “Poets have to dream, and dreaming in America is no cinch,” Saul Bellow said. I think what he meant by that was that America worships business and money and that these obsessions leave no place for dreams. When I think of all the American writers who escaped to Europe to write, I think Bellow was onto something. But maybe it’s just a question of getting away from home. If Europe is home, you may have to flee to America to write.

Home and away. We all require a place that represents
away.
Even Venetians have to go away. Terra firma has a special lure when you live in Venice. Once a month, you cannot wait to get out of the miasma and back to the traffic.

These days, full-time Venetians argue about curing
acqua
alta. Sea level is rising and the ground floors of many Venetian buildings have been abandoned to the waters. Piazza San Marco can sometimes only be traversed on wooden platforms. Immense underwater sea gates have been proposed and begun, and politicians argue about the cost of construction and whether these gates will make Venice even more of a museum than it already is. Ordinary people can’t afford to live in Venice and the population is falling. Tourism is the only robust industry. A city where there is no industry but tourism grows cynical.

Part of the pathos and charm of Venice is its uselessness. It has been creating festivals devoted to its uselessness for nearly a thousand years. Venice exists as the epitome of
away.
Like the myth of Atlantis, it is kept alive by the human need for a far and magical place.

We would prefer that place to have turrets and minarets and gliding boats with curled prows, but really what we are looking for is transformation. The enchanted lands of fairy tales promise this transformation—Snow White awakened by the kiss of a prince, Hansel and Gretel defeating the evil witch, Dorothy realizing she can always go home. It seems we want to go to a magic place to find the seed of magic in ourselves.

“I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs,” Byron wrote, “A palace and a prison on each hand: / I saw from out the wave her structures rise /As from the stroke of the enchanter’s wand.” The presence of that “enchanter” is the key to Venice. It seems to be a place where the imagination is unbound, where the creator can hear the whisperings of the muses in the soft susurration of the wavelets that lap against crumbling marble steps.

The sensible and driven Erica, who is her father’s daughter, wants to flee as soon as possible.

III
.

THE ITCHING
of a
SCAR,
or
NO BUSINESS LIKE SHOW BUSINESS