Authors: Roberta Latow
Forbidden (9 page)
Amy had placed the card in the pocket of her suede skirt, and put Jarret and Pete firmly out of her mind. There had been no time to deal with emotions, those dead and gone, or those new and tender that with the
right nurturing might one day flower. The tremor had left her hand, and a Chaim Soutine painting, Geneva, and the international art world she loved so much had taken over her life.
Now, the art world set aside, Amy reached into her pocket and drew out the small white card to re-read Pete’s words. She had a window seat and stared through the glass into November sunlight and billowing white clouds. Her mind kept drifting back through the years. She didn’t much mind the memories flooding back, it had been a long time since she had allowed them to. Maybe now was the right time to review those years, see them as a mature woman, when as a young one she had lived and almost died by a
grand amour
. She closed her eyes and drifted back to Jarret Sparrow and Amy Ross’s beginnings.
The tourists were gone, the travellers had arrived, and it was the best time to be in Venice: early October when the children were back in school, and a cross-section of the world’s most interesting people were visiting. They were there to spend time in this splendid city of mystery, intrigue, and irrepressible beauty. Romantics and poets, painters and writers, this was the time of year they passed through the city for a fix of inspiration, to sit in the sun in St Mark’s Square and drink in the Venetian way of life over a Negroni or an espresso.
It was Amy Ross’s third day in Venice. She was journeying towards she knew not where exactly but she did have a final destination: Egypt. She was in Venice for the same reason that she had been to Paris or that she was going to Athens – because she had woken up one morning and there was a deadly sameness about it as there seemed to be about every morning of her life.
It was a good life, a safe life, a fun life. She had an exciting and rewarding job, a good man, great sex. She had worked hard to get those things and even harder to keep them going, but suddenly Amy realised that though she was content, the world had to be bigger than the one she was living in, and she wanted a peek. It was that. Nothing more, nothing less.
‘It’s not that I want to change my life, it’s more that … no, don’t look at me that way. I don’t want to change
you
. I love you, Peter.’
And Amy had meant that when she had said it and still meant it now as she listened to the sounds of Venice, felt the warmth of the sun eating into her flesh, burning away ambition, purpose, seeking. From the moment she had walked away from Peter at the TWA terminal in New York he had vanished from her mind. He and everything else in her previous life: work, friends, hopes and desires, all gone. It was odd and somehow wonderful, like leaving your baggage behind and travelling light, in total freedom.
In Paris, she had stayed in one of the city’s hundreds of small, unprepossessing, just a little on the seedy side hotels. This one, in a seventeenth-century building, was round the corner from and behind the Place Vendôme. Her room had been small and depressing, but that hadn’t bothered Amy in the least. It still had the floral wallpaper on the walls that had been hung in the 1920s, an old brass bed whose mattress was lumpy and caved in in the middle. Its floral cotton bed cover and matching curtains were worn thin from years of wear and tear, but it smelled of potpourri, and had a very French old world charm. The staff, what there was of it, had been accommodating. At breakfast the croissants had been fresh and the coffee strong, the milk for her
café au lait
hot and the peach preserve thick with fruit.
Amy loved Paris from the very first moment she saw it, and liked it all the more for being there alone. She
had walked the streets from early morning until dark, and had been to see again the Monets at the Jeu de Paume, to the Louvre for several hours, and then had done the galleries on the Rue de Seine. She sat and read the
International Herald Tribune
over an aperitif at the Deux Margots, lunched at the Brasserie Lipp, and then, after several days, reluctantly, but because an art dealer friend of hers in New York had arranged it, she had called on an American painter, Richard Olney, living and working there.
Her birthday had fallen on the last Sunday in September and she had spent a magical day with Richard and his friend Jimmy Baldwin in Chartres. What a thrilling birthday: spent with a good painter and a famous and inspired writer, enjoying a cathedral of incredible power and beauty, and a rose window whose colour and design had burned themselves into her mind forever. A great deal of drink at a small table set outside in the sun and then they had dined on a sumptuous lunch with a fabulous view of the cathedral looming up in front of them. What a birthday those two intelligent, erudite and amusing companions had given her! They had given her Chartres as few others would ever see it, given her Chartres and themselves for a day. Later she had given her newfound friends supper in a small café in a rough and poor section of Paris where Jimmy was living.
The two men had opened their lives and their world to her and taken her in as one of their own. Quite used to being round artists, Amy knew about the sacrifices,
the poverty, the obsession to create, but somehow on her birthday with those two men in Chartres she understood it, felt it deeply, and knew that she had never had the passion or the lust to live on her own terms, or fought as these men did and would do to the death for what they were and wanted to be. She had been somehow reborn in Chartres that day.
Sometime during the night in Paris, just before she had fallen asleep, she had wished that she had allowed herself to be picked up by one of the handsome young Frenchmen who were constantly paying her attention. Sexual desire kept her awake. To be taken over by a penis, to come in glorious orgasms … she would caress her breasts and close her eyes and imagine it and fall asleep. Amy was not promiscuous, had never been, was afraid to be. She believed in love and marriage, one-to-one relationships. That’s what most women like her believed in in the late fifties. Sex without love? A great idea but a far-off dream for a New England girl who had little taste for jumping into the unknown.
Jimmy Baldwin had given her the name of a small and cheap
pensione
where writers and painters who went to Venice took up residence. It was in one of the back streets of the city, a place that rarely saw the four-day tourist, though it was only a twenty-minute walk through winding narrow cobblestoned streets from St Mark’s Square, even less by gondola. From the canal-side the old and beautiful but crumbling
palazzo
was impressive and not far from a handkerchief-sized piazza with a thirteenth-century fountain in it, a good, cheap,
small restaurant where one might meet just about any of the expatriates living in Venice and most of the Venetian artistic world or the more interesting travellers spending time in the city.
She had called from Paris but the
pensione
was fully booked until today and so Amy kept her reservation at the Gritti Palace and for several days had enjoyed being in the lap of luxury, though it was an extravagance that only a holiday of a lifetime would allow. They had not seemed at all surprised when she had checked out of the Gritti and asked to have her luggage sent over to the
pensione
. The concierge merely gave her a knowing look. A love affair that demanded discretion was assumed. Ah, the romantic Italian mind. She had been amused.
Only four or five more days in Venice and then on to Athens. Amy was thinking about that when she removed from her purse a charming note that had been waiting for her at the Hotel Gritti Palace on her arrival. It was from a friend of an architect friend of hers in New York who awaited her arrival in Athens and would be delighted to meet her. She was to call upon her arrival at her hotel. Her friend was a sophisticated lighting designer who worked with the great architects of the time: Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Mies van de Rohe, Le Corbusier. He needed no other clients, indeed had no other apart from one of the New York City museums when it ran into problems over how to light an exhibition. A handsome, fascinating man whom she saw quite frequently for lunch or a drink, who travelled
six months of the year and several months ago had returned with his friends from a camel trek across the Sahara. To be shown round Athens by a friend of his was not a thing to be missed, especially after receiving such a charming note. Amy sensed that she had yet to discover Venice and fleetingly had thought to put Athens from her mind and remain longer in the city. Re-reading the note, she changed her mind. Five more days would have to do for this trip. There was far to go and much to see.
It was a strange sensation for Amy, travelling alone. People perceived her differently from when she had travelled with her lover Peter, a group of friends, or with her mother. As she sat in the square she began to understand that she too was perceiving things differently – not only people and places but herself as well. Her solitude was somehow affecting her. There had been moments in Venice when a strange melancholy would grab hold of her and then let her go. She found that disconcerting. Amy was not a melancholy person. She put these feelings down to loneliness, to having no one to share these great experiences with. Strangely Peter, whom she loved, did not even enter her mind as a solution to this loneliness, nor did anyone else.
Amy had always been an acute observer, able to discriminate about what she saw and absorb only what was relevant to her. On this trip she found herself more deeply involved with everything and everyone who crossed her path. She understood what it was to be a woman alone in the world because she was being treated
like a woman alone. All her life she had been loved and protected by people. Even now she had a mother who selfishly would not let her go, a lover who unselfishly would. Amy, this woman out roaming the world alone, knew better who and what she was because she
was
alone and in a strange land and allowing herself to be open and vulnerable and free. She felt a new strength in herself; that strength that others saw in her that she had never quite believed was there. She believed it now. It felt great.
How can it happen, she wondered, that you can suddenly get smart sitting in the sun watching hundreds of pigeons swoop down in a cloud of feathers to forage for food or swirl up and away to ride the breeze like circus performers entertaining their keepers? Everyone was a sucker for the pigeons in St Mark’s Square.
She called for the bill, paid it, and rose. Two attractive men at the next table who had been flirting with her stood up and asked her to have a drink with them. She declined but thanked them and gave them a ravishing smile. Amy was suddenly happier with herself than she could ever remember being. Life seemed more wonderful. She felt she had freed herself from the fetters that had been holding her back. She struck out across the square towards the
pensione
. A pigeon landed on her head, one on her shoulder. She made the fatal mistake of stopping and several more swooped down on to her arm, another clung to her back, one stood on her hand. She shooed them away. ‘Don’t you forage on me! Go be aggressive with someone else. Tomorrow, maybe tomorrow – or
maybe never,’ she told them, and then dropped her handbag. With a swoop of her arms and tossing back her head she gave a peal of happy laughter that echoed round her. The pigeons released her and flew up into the air, the sound of their fluttering wings like muffled thunder.
En route to the
pensione
Amy discovered places she had not yet been: a
palazzo
exhibiting antique glass which she enjoyed immensely, a small cluster of antique shops near one of the hundreds of arched stone bridges that crossed the canals. She was aware of how much quieter it had suddenly become. Away from the Grand Canal there were fewer gondolas and power boats; more Italian and less English was spoken here. It seemed suddenly a different Venice, one for the Italians, one where people lived and died like people in any other city in the world, only they were buried on a separate island and their roadways were water and they travelled on foot or in a boat. The beauty and wonders of their city were taken for granted and here were people just getting on with their lives.
Amy felt herself being swallowed up by this other Venice. It seemed even more mysterious, all this living going on behind the tourist scene. She suddenly understood that Venetians were a very different breed of Italian: born equally of a modern and historic city.
Amy wandered the streets from one shop to the next, one church to another that had to be seen. To several exhibitions in small galleries: Greek icons, Etruscan sculpture, Venetian sixteenth-century miniatures held
her attention particularly. She was amazed to see several one-man exhibitions of New York contemporary painters. Why she should be surprised had more to do with her preconceptions (she had left the contemporary art world, her world, behind) than their being there. Venice was after all the home of the Biennale, the great exhibition that drew people from all over the world, the venue that every painter she knew wanted to be chosen for.
It was dusk and she had tarried too long. Night was descending and she was lost in the maze of narrow paved streets. The shops were no more. Aged buildings and huge
palazzos
silently looming in the half light were their replacement. It was silent except for her footsteps echoing on the cobblestones. She was wearing a beige linen skirt and blouse and with the sun gone was feeling cold and disorientated, just a little frightened.
Quite suddenly she stopped. She could go on no further. Several minutes and a few deep breaths later she no longer knew why she had panicked. After all, how lost can one get in Venice? More composed now, she continued on her way until she came to a three-storey house wedged in between what appeared to be the street entrances of two large
palazzos
. A glimmer of lamplight showed in an upper-storey window. A sign of life. It made her feel foolish for the anxiety she had put herself through. She saw an ancient wooden door, and in its centre a massive black iron lion’s head knocker. Amy used the ring that protruded from the lion’s mouth. The sound was loud and echoed through the quiet street. She rapped several times before she heard a window
open at the top of the house. She was relieved to hear a voice call down to her.
‘
Buona sera, chi è
?’
Amy walked backwards across the narrow street and pressed herself against a building, the better to look up and tell the man of her plight.
‘
Buona sera
. Do you speak English?’
‘Yes. What do you want?’
He spoke perfect English and with a charming accent that Amy did not recognise as Italian. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you. I’m looking for the Palazzo Davanzati.’
‘You’re lost?’
‘Yes, I’m lost. Can you help me?’
‘Wait there, I’ll be right down.’
Several minutes passed with not a sign of life from the house, or any other on the street. In fact the upper window went dark. What seemed like an age but was more like five minutes passed and just when Amy thought the man had not understood her, or had simply decided against helping her, there was the sound of an iron bolt being shot and the front door creaking open on its rusted hinges. It swung back to reveal a young man whose features she could just about make out in the dim light spilling on to the street.