Ideas of Heaven Page 5

  “Whenever that is,” I said.

  ON THE SUBWAY ride home I was too angry to sit still. All those sweet-faced declarations, and look how long Carl had lasted as a holy soldier of celibacy. I felt that he had tricked me and that he’d had the last laugh in a way that made me writhe. A respected behavior, my foot. And I had been ready to tread the same path. I who had never taken the high road in my life.

  When I got back to my apartment, I went to the phone and dialed his number. I wanted to ask him: Don’t you feel like a fucking hypocrite? Do you know what a pretentious little jerk you are? The two of them weren’t back yet, of course. They were probably at the subway station still waiting for the N train to Queens. The phone machine said: Carl and Josh aren’t home right now.

  I breathed heavily on the message tape for a minute, just to leave something spooky for them to listen to. And what would Carl have said to me anyway if I had been able to hammer away at him with hostile questions? I took my chance when it was offered. Anyone would do the same. There was nothing else to say.

  I had a shot of bourbon, which did not calm me down. It made me want to kick something, but I wasn’t ready to throw out my knee from an action that stupid. I had more bourbon, but I might as well have been drinking water. I sat there with my hand pressed against my chest, the way a dog paws its snout if it has a toothache.

  I understood, after a while, that there was nothing to do but go to bed. I got out of my clothes, and I went through the set of stretches I always did before sleeping. I felt confused, because for so many months these had been like a secret proof that I was worthy of Carl. I had been consoled and uplifted by the flavor of his ideas mixed in with them.

  STRESS WAS BAD for my bones, and I woke up very stiff. My knee locked when I tried to get out of bed. Look what love has done to me. I felt like a ham actor playing an old man. I had a hangover too, and it was still very early in the morning. I wanted to phone Carl, but in disguise as something menacing, a growling wolf or a hissing reptile. I was good at making different sounds. Let him be terrified, just for a second. But then he would know who it was. He would say my name, and I would keep growling or hissing. Duncan, he would say, is that you? Stop, please. Ssssss, I would say. Ssssss.

  I was too old to do that, too old for that shit. Instead I ate my simple breakfast and had my simple bath and went out to do my simple errands. A plain and forthright man. I was so calm at the supermarket (who ever heard of someone with a hangover being calm while waiting in line?) that I wondered if the attitude I had developed in Carl’s absence was now going to stay with me and be my support.

  Perhaps I was going to beat him at his own game (or what had been his game) and become so self-contained that I never spoke to anyone. I could work at my job without much more than nods and signals. I could move through the streets and be perfectly silent, quiet as any monk with a vow. Then Carl would know just who understood the beauty of a principled life.

  Oh, in the Middle Ages someone like me might have been a monk, one of the harsh and wily ones, but dutiful. I could be a monk now, old as I was. (I had been raised a Catholic, although not raised well.) I could enter an order the way forsaken young women used to, when they were jilted by lying men and wanted only to take themselves out of the world.

  I don’t know why these thoughts were such a great comfort to me while I waited at the supermarket with my cart of bachelor supplies. But I got through the day, and the rest of the weekend, without doing anything rash. At work on Monday I went about my business in my usual curmudgeonly way. I was in pain but I wasn’t a roiling cauldron. I thought that once the worst of getting over Carl was done, his influence would linger in this elevated feeling about aloneness, just as Andre had left me with a taste for certain music, for Bill Evans and early Coltrane. I was doing well at the moment, better than I would have thought.

  A MONTH LATER I knew differently. I was tormented by longings for Carl night and day. I hardly saw anything around me—sunlight hitting the windows of a building, a man sitting on a park bench, a kid walking in time to his boom box—without superimposing on it the remembrance of Carl and things he had said to me, the most ordinary things. In Sunday school when I was a boy, one of the Sisters had told us that the Benedictine rule said to “pray always.” I had a good understanding now of how such a thing was possible.

  This can’t go on, I would say to myself (how many billions of people have said that?), but it went on for a long time, for months and months. Sometimes I called Carl’s apartment, to see if the machine still announced he was living with that twinkie from Canada, but it always did. Fernando the masseur told me that the only way to get over him was to find someone new. I picked up a man in a bar who was stupid and dull, and that made me feel much worse.

  Since I had not really known Carl that well, after a year his face did begin to lose its vividness in my mind—I had only a few shreds of encounters to hold on to. But it would not be true to say I forgot him. He was like a hum that was always in my ears. He was something that was not going to go away.

  I never thought I would end up the sort of person who hoarded some cruddy xeroxed program as if it were an artifact from Tut’s tomb. As if it were my job to keep the faith. I had become a fool for love, after all. You could say this served me right, but it wasn’t the worst thing that might have happened to me. Not by a long shot. No, I was better for it. I understood a number of things I hadn’t had a clue about before. Why Madame Butterfly believed Pinkerton was coming back. Why Catherine’s grave was dug up by Heathcliffe. The devotion of these years improved me, and it burnt off some of the dross. I was less quarrelsome with other people and clearer with myself. My longing stayed with me, no matter what. Who could have known I was going to be so constant? It wasn’t at all what I expected, and I had some work getting used to it.

  GASPARA STAMPA

  (1523–54)

  There had always been three of us—my brother Baldessare, my sister Cassandra, and I. When my brother died, I wanted to go into a convent. He was only nineteen, gentle and smart. I thought I had had enough of the misery of this world. My mother was against my leaving her, and my sister said I was unsuited. They were right, but in the years after, I was sorry more than once that I had this life instead of a nun’s life.

  We lived in Venice, in a small house in the parish of the Saints Gervasio and Protasio, and there was a tiny roof garden where I used to sit. My brother died in the summer, and the roof was cool. Downstairs various members of my mother’s family were talking, and boys who had studied with my brother in Padua came to visit. I didn’t play any music while I was in mourning, but I heard the patterns of melodies in my head. That was mostly what I did. I worked out fingerings for the lute I wasn’t holding.

  But I got lonely up there. I wasn’t used to being so quiet, and after a while the voices below lured me down. I wanted to see what everyone was doing without me. I came down and sat with them and listened to a ridiculous and moderately funny story my uncle was telling. The room, with its dark green walls and its dull red drapes, seemed cozy in its heavy way, as always. I was ready to be reasonable.

  After this nobody had to beg me to go out at night with the others. I would sit with my sister and my mother in the gondola, with the purpled water of the canal around us, and I was glad enough to be going where we were going. What I liked was the way we were flattered when we got there. Old men clasped our darling little white hands to their chests, young men said extravagant, flirtatious things to us. Oh, they had been waiting, nothing gave pleasure without us, etc. A whole evening at a salon without decently played music can be very, very long. Cassandra was a somewhat better lute player than I was, but I had a better voice.

  I was twenty but I still thought I had a chance of marrying. When I sang the lines from Petrarch, “And blessed be the first sweet agony/ I felt when I found myself bound to Love,” I was full of yearning for an unknown agony. The room was thronged with men. None of them was about to marry me; I was from a fami
ly at the edge of their world, untitled and unmoneyed yet beautifully educated. Maybe one of these men might set up a marriage for me or Cassandra with some poorer cousin of his—that was what my mother hoped—but until then they were our audience. It wasn’t strange that I should quicken with feeling for one of these men, under the circumstances, and maybe no one was surprised.

  It was a Gritti that I first liked, Cesare Gritti. He sat next to me at the table one night and he made a small joke about the quail we were eating, had they flown right into the pot, the kind of thing one of my uncles might have said. I liked him for it. He was older than I was by a good fifteen years. Someone read a lackluster sonnet after supper and we whispered mocking remarks to each other. And when Cassandra and I sat in the corner and sang, he made everyone keep quiet. So the next evening I looked for him at someone else’s gathering, but he wasn’t there, and then I knew, by the weight of disappointment, that I was gone over into a new craving. I looked for him all week, whenever we went out, and when he was there, I brightened, and the evening was full of promise.

  This went on for months. One night, he offered to take Cassandra and me to a small musical procession the next day at Madonna dell’Orto. In the afternoon he called for us, and, after a little quiet talking with me (he did not really have to say much), we went in his gondola to his own house, where Cassandra waited in a room below us while he and I went up to bed. What did I think I was doing? I had by then come to understand that I was never going to have anything unless I took it in this way. I had very little thought of resisting him. I was innocent but also wildly delighted that what I wanted was really coming to pass. The shock of what our bodies were doing left me more at a loss than I had expected, I who was the donor of this favor. He was tender with me, he tried to help me. I had not known that I was going to be thrown into a river of pleasure in which I could not swim or keep on course. How confused I was, in all my new and specific excitement.

  Even then I would not have said we were in love, but we liked each other well enough. We met like this only one more time. He was hearty and gallant, as before, and I felt a new embarrassment at doing something so naked and intense with him. He was never unkind, but when he left for Milan, I was not sorry to have it over between us.

  After this, when I went out to salons at night, I was livelier. I had been lively before—quick in conversation, eager to talk and display myself—but now the rooms looked different to me, more full of hidden heat. My mother used to hold salons, before Baldessare went off to school, and there were never more than a few women in the room, then or now, and none of them were wives. And if I was never going to be a wife, what was I going to be? My sister was afraid I was going to slip into one romantic alliance after another, but what I now knew made me careful for myself. I talked to everyone with greater ease, but I really was very careful.

  I kept my wits about me in this way until I was twenty-six. On Christmas Day of that year we went to Domenico Venier’s palazzo for a holiday gathering. We came in from the wintry cold and were escorted up the marble stairway, and at the top a very handsome, tall blond man came over at once and spoke to me about the singing we’d all heard in San Marco the night before. Any musician is cranky about performances, and I had opinions about how one piece had been arranged. He shrugged—he had liked the singing—and said what an extraordinary ear I had. Everyone was always praising me in some way—it meant nothing—but here I beamed and gushed and would not stop talking to him. His name was Collaltino di Collalto, and although plenty of first sons were given this kind of repeating name, I had to tease him and ask whether his parents thought people had to be told twice who he was. “Only you,” he said. “Only you have to be forced not to forget.”

  “Are we talking about force?” I said. “What sort of man has to resort to that?”

  “By force,” he said, “I mean the power of true feelings. I mean giving in to joy, which is only natural.”

  “Anything natural shouldn’t be called force,” I said.

  It was the sort of lilting debate people liked to have at these gatherings. Can love exist without compulsion? Can a man fall in love by hearsay rather than sight? Is it only a defeated love that leads to higher faith? What did Petrarch’s Laura really look like two centuries ago? But in this particular private conversation the mention of force and giving in set up a reckless train of thought. He was not stupid, he must have seen. “Does it matter what you call an act?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said. “The name is what we remember things by.”

  We were very pleased at this beginning. We felt quite sharp in each other’s company. He was my own age, a count from the mainland, from Treviso, and he had already been in battle in France. He talked to me with great eagerness, but then he was repeatedly drawn away to talk to other people, and it made me miserable each time. Whenever he came back to me, I was delirious with triumph.

  During the music, which was longer for the holiday, with more instruments and more kinds of songs, I tried to stand near him when someone else was playing. We signaled each other with eyes rolled in dismay or nods after some of the madrigals. The best part of the evening was sensing the form of his body without looking directly at him. He was most purely mine then.

  When I was home and lying in my own bed, with the bed-curtains pulled around me to keep in the warmth, I saw that I was close to sick with attraction. I was not as young as I had been with Gritti, and I knew enough to worry for myself. But I could not have kept away from my thoughts of him, my detailed imaginings. I had no other thoughts. My mind had nothing in it but Collaltino, a person I hardly knew. Can love exist without compulsion?

  I saw him a few nights later, at another gathering. He came over to me at once, and said something conventional and enormously gratifying about how exquisite my face had looked when I was singing on Christmas. My cousin who was an abbess in Milan once wrote to me that if I wasn’t wary of flatterers I would lose my own shining honesty. But I didn’t think I had become corrupt, or gullible either. Collaltino was truly taken with me, in his lumbering and coolheaded way, and he hovered around all evening. I could see that he wanted us to come to an understanding. I only wanted him to love me, which seemed like a clear enough idea, but what did I mean by that? There was no future in what he wanted, but I was not, at that moment, thinking very far into the future. Only of my own thirst and how it might be slaked. My sacred thirst.

  My mother was somewhere in the room, and she came over at one point and met Collaltino. He described an ice storm over his family’s groves of hazelnut trees in Treviso, and my mother later said she had never heard anyone talk so well about the weather. My mother was still a pretty woman, and we resembled each other—the straight noses, the high foreheads—and Collaltino might have imagined my face in later years, if he had wanted to reflect on that. But probably he was thinking chiefly about what my situation was. My father died when I was seven, and my mother had an easy and impractical temperament. She was not a plotter herself but she was not going to stand in our way.

  I was not totally lacking in sense, but my longing for Collaltino was so strong that his interest was a reward beyond anything I could pray for. I did pray for it too. He sent me a note, which contained some pleading and humble entreaty along with a bullying suggestion that Love, the most vengeful of gods, would punish us if we didn’t heed him. I wrote that although I had not wanted such a letter, his pleas had made me pity him. We were mannerly but really quite straightforward with each other.

  Our first time alone together was in his family’s palazzo, on a February afternoon. I was late arriving, and when he greeted me in the hallway of his house, he looked eager and a little worried from waiting. It moved me to think of him waiting. I’d had a very cold ride on the water, and my hands were icy when I touched him, which made him shudder. He held them over my head while we lay on a divan, kissing, and one of his own hands (perfectly warm and solid) moved over me. I could not do anything but be his feast, a state I was thorough
ly happy in, until he released my wrists.

  And by then I was in a kind of swoon. I would have done anything he wanted, but what he wanted was perfectly simple. His lovemaking lasted longer than Cesare’s had—he was stronger and had a greater appetite—and the numbness in the tissues afterward was like a glowing trace. I felt broken and quiet. We fell asleep, and when we woke up, he fed me a pear—he cut it and held the pieces out to me, the sort of thing I would have expected him to do, and yet it seemed exquisitely generous. He had me drink brandy, to warm me before I went out, and he sent me home in his gondola. I knew even then that I was at his mercy, but I felt cosseted and wealthy in it. When I came home, full of sunny phrases for what had happened, my sister said, “Petrarch never slept with Laura.”

  “Everyone knows that,” I said. She meant that I would be sorry, but I was very far from that.

  And I really was not sorry. For most of the winter, I had Collaltino’s company at night in the salons, where I blazed and shimmered around him (my excitement was not a secret), and we had our afternoons, with their own luxuries. His bedroom, carved and gilded and heavily patterned and smelling of him, was the stage where our scenes unfolded, so rich (I thought) in private invention. Tullia d’Aragona, a women poet I admired, wrote that physical union, because it can never permit the total penetration of the bodies, can never satisfy the craving for union. But I thought that desire was a pure gift and not a conundrum. Collaltino was attentive and fond, he cried out my name, he laughed in amazement after the moment of climax. I was dazzled by most of it, this was a golden time for me.

  I do not envy you, O holy angels,

  For your exalted glory and great blessing,

  Nor the fulfillment of your ardent longings

  Always to stand before the face of God,

  For my delights are such and so abundant