She did not know the way. They had arrived for dinner in their separate cars, never having before, as it happened, met. They had drinks and dinner. When it was time to leave, the hostess, remarking that they both lived in the same neighboring town, and knowing Marge’s sense of direction to be poor, suggested that Joe lead the way back. So they drove through the night, he in his old Packard, she in her battered Ford. Along the curves of the back road, on the highway, on the dark back roads again, she maintained the distance between them perfectly. When a car passed her, and seemed about to stay behind him, she passed the car easily in her turn. Watching at intervals, for miles, through the rearview mirror, he saw her driving smoothly, keeping that steady distance; he had not needed to slow down. It turned him on.
Years ago, when we were not even the same people, years and a lot of separations ago, Aldo and I went to the particular bar in Venice where he and his friends had gone all one summer, when they were still boys, at boarding school. The bar was not crowded. Italian workingmen came in, had one quick drink, and left. There were only four bar stools. Aldo and I sat down. We ordered drinks. Aldo was certain the bartender recognized him, that he was holding back any sign of recognition until the regular customers were gone. Over our third drink, Aldo began to speak his Italian, of which he was proud then. After a time, the bartender, who turned out also to be the owner, did remember, or claimed to remember, the young Americans who had come to his bar so often, seven years ago. He called to a back room, to his two brothers, who came out and sat on the stools beside us. Aldo ordered Scotch all around. He was congratulated many times on his fluency in Italian. The brothers pronounced it incredible for one who had spent so short a time in Italy. He was, for a moment, hurt by the qualification. Then he took it to be a joke, and happily smiled. One more round of Scotch. Then, the bartender, with solemnity and in friendship, brought out the house brandy and treated us to a drink. The house brandy was greenish brown, with the texture of the filling in a many-year-old bonbon. It seemed, after all those drinks, not bad. It was also the particular house drink that Aldo remembered with such fondness. Seeing how happy the first glass seemed to make him, the brothers insisted that we drink several rounds of it.
Our pensione was extremely squalid. I have no memory of crossing Venice to return to it, although we did get there. The pensione was not on any canal. It is probable that we walked. We were the only transients. There were six permanent tenants, women, staying in the place. They were not young. They wore black. They sat, most of the time, in the dark parlor, which had stained, stuffed chairs on a floor of dirty linoleum. They discussed us. Sometimes they fell silent when we came in. Sometimes not. Often we heard them through the wall of our bedroom. I was certain, it only stood to reason, that they also heard us. Aldo said that was paranoid. If they heard us, that was their problem. He had to like the place. It was the one they had all stayed in that boarding-school summer. Or he thought it was. And if it wasn’t, it was certainly like it. Or near it, anyway. It wasn’t the sort of neighborhood you could forget. From the moment we first arrived, in any case, and gave the concierge, or proprietress, or whatever she was, our separate passports, and she hesitated, and then thought what she could charge and decided to admit us, it was clear that the six old Venetian women had a lot to talk about.
When we got back to the pensione from the bar with the house brandy, we went through the parlor to our room. We went to bed. Late that night, I woke up. Sick. Sicker than I had ever been in my life before, or have been since. There was a small sink in our room. Within a short time, I had exhausted the possibilities of this sink. The pensione had only one lavatory. Under somewhat better control, I managed to put on Aldo’s raincoat and go there, to be sick. Then, I went back to our room, tidied up, brushed my teeth at our sink, went to bed and passed out. When I woke up, just at dawn, I felt almost well. It seemed only right to check on the condition of that lavatory, though, before the other guests got up. Aldo was still asleep, I thought, but looked healthy. I found my own trench coat this time, and set out down the hall. Four of the women were in the doorways of their rooms; the other two sat in chairs they had put outside the lavatory door. They stared. They smiled. They clucked. It seemed somehow horrible. The lavatory was clean. I walked back to our room. The woman across the hallway nodded, cooed, made a cradling motion with her arms, and said, very slowly and distinctly in Italian, Perhaps he will marry you now. I smiled at her. I went into our room and shut the door.
Maybe it was a hangover. It was certainly the most wretched moment of my life. I got back into bed. Aldo moved, woke up, groaned. “I feel awful,” he said. I said I did too. The house brandy, I thought. He shook his head. He did look worrieder, sadder even, than I had ever seen him look. He said, “I don’t know whether I can tell you.” It was unlike him. For a minute, I thought he was leaving, then realized he wasn’t. “It’s only me,” I said. He said, “Well, you especially. I don’t know what you’ll think.” He asked me to look away. I shut my eyes. He coughed. He said, “I made love to you. While you were out cold.” Pause. I said, “No. I remember. I would have thought I was awake.” He said, “I don’t mean then. Later.” I didn’t say anything. He said, “Twice.” I waited. Silence. I said, “Well, I guess I missed it then.” He said I honestly didn’t have to be as nice as that about it. He clearly meant that. Miserable as I was for my own reasons, I could tell he did mean that, whatever it was. I said, “Well, I guess I don’t understand.” He said, “You don’t?” I said, “No.” He said, “Really?” I didn’t say anything. He coughed. He said, “Necrophilia.” So I was in despair because six fat women of Venice I would never see again thought I was pregnant by a man who did not want to marry me, and he was in despair because he thought he was a necrophiliac. Both despairs were genuine. It may be that we were retarded. We were younger. We were other people, anyway, in another world.
Some images yellow and dry out like parchment. Some casts of mind become obsolete. “And fold their tents like the Arabs, and silently steal away,” for instance, is a thoroughly dated idea. In its obituary of King Faisal, the Times mentioned, as an example of his modernism, the fact that in the 1930s he abolished slavery. As an example of his gift for poetry, there was the line, “See you. There be Arab.” Something lost in translation there, perhaps. Everywhere.
Three holidays. On New Year’s Eve in Zurich, it is customary to bring in a live and healthy piglet. Precisely at midnight, everyone kisses it on the snout. While this occasions what seems to be terror in the piglet, it is meant to bring people a year of luck. One year, my parents and I were, on a New Year’s Eve, in Zurich. We were having dinner in a hotel restaurant. The other guests, except for the Germans, had all been relatively restrained through dinner, although most people seemed to be drinking steadily. Shortly after eleven, there was, at all the tables, that awful and rising tension. It grew. People drank more. At one minute to twelve, a dignified old headwaiter dashed in through the doors of the kitchen. The piglet was struggling under his arm. At midnight, he began to hold it out to one guest after another. Nobody seemed to skip it. Some people shyly or desultorily pecked at it. Some people seemed actually reverent about it, as though they were praying or making a wish. Some of the young Swiss and Germans who were drunkest tried to turn the thing into an amorous joke. Distinguished-looking men tried to look as though they didn’t care one way or another about it. But everyone was kissing the snout of that struggling pig. My mother was worrying about germs, but very apparently worried. When the piglet got to her, she hesitated a moment, then kissed the tip of her finger and touched the piglet’s nose. That seemed to lighten other people’s quandaries. I just patted the piglet. A couple at the only table that came after ours just gave it a hug.