Your dad isn’t your dad. It wasn’t ever possible that he could be. But what I want you to know is that I wanted him to be. Oh, how I wanted him to be. I still wanted him to be even when that decision was taken that, though he wouldn’t be, you would still have a father. I only wanted him to be, in a way, even more then. I still want him to be now.
That same year, that same busy, roller-coaster year of 1978, we went to Venice for a weekend. It was June. It was our anniversary, as it will be again very soon, but it wasn’t a special anniversary. It was our eighth. Is there some humble metal for eighth anniversaries? Nickel? Steel? Zinc? And it was one of those several weekends of ours that were effectively subsidised by my employers, Walker and Fitch.
Simon had even said in his wrong-footing way, “Fancy a weekend in Venice?” All I’d have to do was meet someone from Montebello’s — a convenient Friday lunch, say. It could all be done in a day, in fact. But Simon was clearly dangling a bait. A weekend for two possibly, I dared to ask, in my most insinuating mode. He went through an act of looking totally askance. But we came to a not unfamiliar deaclass="underline" that we—Mike and I, that is — would find the extra air fare. A room for two was hardly any different from a room for one.
Though it didn’t have to be the Rinaldi Palace. This really was a present from Simon. “Since it’s your anniversary, Paula. I really didn’t know. And since you’ve been with us for nearly as long.”
I think he did know it was our anniversary coming up, though maybe he was simply thinking: she’s had a tough year, she’s still getting over her dad. Sweet Simon, I’d learnt it wasn’t hard to be nice to him. And all I had to do was meet Signor Masi from Montebello’s and be nice to him over a long lunch. Simon perhaps knew what he was doing — he might have gone himself.
I said to Mike, “You’ll have to kick your heels, Mikey, while I go and meet this man.” He looked scrutinisingly at me. “The things girls have to do,” he said, “for the sake of art.” It was Venice, I said, there’d be things he could do. I said he should go and look at the Tiepolos in the Scuola dei Carmini, one can’t look enough.
A Thursday night to a Saturday night: our anniversary on the back of a business trip. But it was rather more than that. It was our way also of marking, confirming—“celebrating” isn’t really the word — our decision: to go ahead, with “A.I.D..” My first appointment was booked, in fact, for the following week. It had all been fully resolved.
And yet. And yet we made love that weekend more busily and intensely, I believe, than we’d ever done in all our semi-wishful resortings to hotels. As if the opposite of the situation were really the case and this was our last chance, a desperate, last-ditch bid for the real thing. Maybe the unique magic of Venice…Maybe a room (last-ditch?) overlooking the Grand Canal…
And maybe I was the more intense. No, I know I definitely was. Mike had made his commitment. He wanted this weekend simply to endorse his assent — to reassure me. I think he was even bewildered by my intensity. He’d never known me quite this crazy for it.
And perhaps even Signor Masi registered, and possibly misinterpreted, that our long (altogether too long for me) lunch in one of Venice’s finest restaurants was touched by a tingle of sexual impatience. Had it helped to swing the deal Walker’s wanted? Did Mike even think, when we teamed up again in our hotel room in the late afternoon, that this Signor Masi had turned me on? He hadn’t, actually. He was large and round and bald and (I have to say it) over fifty, though his name was, potentially, a turn-on. It was Sergio, Sergio Masi. I never mentioned that to your father.
For whom I was just crazy, anyway. What must you think of your mother? Shut your ears again if you wish.
It was late afternoon. We very quickly abandoned all possibility that we would simply change and go out for the evening. No, not yet. We pulled close the shutters onto our balcony, so the room had that faintly fiery glow. My linen dress was soon over the back of a chair. The hubbub from the Canal below was like something simmering in some magnificent kitchen. I’m not supposed to say these things to you, but I was very soon in a position on top of your father, though it went against all mechanistic wisdom about the best position to be in for getting pregnant. It went against, so to speak, the gravity of our situation.
Outside, the evening was just blooming and Venice was turning gold. All that treasure, all that glow. Camparis were being sipped at little sunset-catching tables. What setting could be richer, fuller? And yet I thought, even as I straddled your father, of all that wasn’t there then, of all that was missing. What could possibly be missing?
Otis, for a start, wasn’t there. He wasn’t missing in that awful former sense, but he was consigned once again to Felix Lodge. How callous of us. And in his barely recovered condition. And how we’d suffered when he had been missing. This afternoon passion had nothing to do with him, with his purring, furry prompting. Or perhaps it had everything.
I thought of what can be missing even when you can seem to have everything — all of Venice lying at your feet. In a little while we ourselves would be sitting, showered and coolly dressed and mellow with recent lovemaking, at one of those little tables, in the even richer light. A good-looking couple, in their early thirties, on their anniversary. A glorious evening in Venice, let’s not waste it. Seize it, treasure it.
Mike would have zipped up my dress, kissed my neck, grabbed the room keys, patted my bottom as he opened the door.
It was then that those dried-up tears came back for a brief unstaunchable while. It’s a watery city, after all. That’s what I said later, laughing it off, to your father. I cried in every sense that weekend. Cried out, as a woman will cry out, in the throes — audible, perhaps, even to those passing in the marbled corridor of the Rinaldi. I don’t know where I stand on the volume scale, but I was louder, maybe, than I’d ever been, that weekend.
But I just cried too, in the other way, if the two cries can sometimes be hard to separate and though I tried to hide it. I stayed on top of your father — perhaps you really shouldn’t be listening — even when I’d finished my crying out aloud and even when I’d begun to feel that warm stuff from him, that stuff that was the essence of the matter, beginning to trickle out of me. I was trying to stop it. And Mike, looking up, would have seen that my eyes were squeezed tight as well. I was trying but failing to stop them from trickling too.
22
I’VE GOT TO THE NUB, but there are harder things still to come, things your dad won’t even touch on tomorrow. I think it’s important that since you came into the world as you did you should know every twist and turn of the journey. I’m your mother, and now the truth is going to be uncovered, there should be no little residues of secrecy. A clean breast, as the saying goes, though it was my breast that fed you long ago and fed you from the beginning with the lie about your dad.
It was a factor from the very start, I mean even in those weeks before we went to Venice, it was a key part of the “debate”: the question of lying. You can’t get away from it. The biological necessities are plain, but the issue of dissimulation gets trickier and trickier, the more you think about it. When do you tell, how long do you leave it? Well, now you know our answer to that. But who else, if anyone, do you tell meanwhile? It was principally your Grandma Helen and your Grandpa Pete. Your Grandma Fiona was a more academic proposition.
To tell or not to tell. Suppose, having set out, for the best and most carefully considered reasons, on a course of pretence, your deception is suddenly rumbled? And how good, anyway, will you be at pretending? It’s no easy ride. It’s a little like being a secret agent and never being able to relax your cover story. What starts out as the simple task — which isn’t simple at all — of acquiring offspring becomes a task of reconstructing the world.