Ideas of Heaven Read online

  “I remember your poems,” he said. “I used to like them.”

  “I still write, I don’t stop,” I said. Everyone knew everything about me. “I write for occasions,” I said. I still rewrote my old love poems, but I didn’t have to say that. “Love isn’t the only subject.”

  “I know that. People have lives around other things.” He was looking across at Domenico Venier, our host, who was paralyzed and moved in a chair mounted on wooden wheels. Next to him were my mother, who had not been with a man since my father died twenty-two years ago, and my sister, who was a virgin. The three of them were congregated under a dark, misty painting of Venus and Cupid. Weren’t they tired of being surrounded by nothing but the drama of desire? I had never heard any of them complain, although I had complained myself.

  “Only in a convent or a monastery,” I said, “could you pass a whole evening without anyone talking on and on about earthly love.”

  “Not even there,” he said. “Everyone knows there are bawdy monks. And even the most unstained monks have some human interest in the subject. They’re not infants.”

  “So there’s no escape?” I said. “I don’t want to think that.”

  “I would be very interested to read the newer poems,” he said.

  I TALKED ABOUT him when we got home. I thought Cassandra might know more about him. When had we met him before? Was he about my age or older? Zen, everyone knew of the family, but what kind of a name was that? “Shortened from St. Zeno,” Cassandra said. “Don’t you think? Patron of newborn babies, watch out.”

  She didn’t know any more about it than I did. I got into bed and drew the curtains and went over the few things he had said, as if they were a tune I was learning. It was very pleasant to invent delicious scenes with him. But to be aroused was to think of Collaltino, and so I had both of them in my mind at once.

  My father used to say, one nail drives out another. I thought of my breast hollowed out by one wound and bared to another. I had enough sense to be horrified, but this fear was very close to excitement. And what had I suffered for, these past three years, if all of it might have been for someone else all along? Hadn’t I just spent an evening hearing about lovers so resolute they never turned back even when their eyes were put out? It was true that Collaltino and I had broken our ties, clearly and finally. I had no obligation to him. But week after week and month after month, I’d risen to my sufferings and been altered by them, been grateful for the alteration. Where was that understanding going now? I was leaving my faith.

  But I was elated, fixed on this Bartolomeo, recalling the sound of his voice. What is Love doing to me? I thought. That question itself comforted me. So I was ruled by Love, his follower. Chosen to serve. I was like a priest being sent to a different parish.

  THE NEXT DAY a servant came with a note from Bartolomeo, expressing his admiration for my gifts, his gratitude at seeing me, his hope that I might agree soon to have dinner at his home. He wrote quite well, with less bombast than Collaltino. I was not too jaded to enjoy reading the note over.

  When I went to him the next night, my mother was upstairs in the back of our house, nowhere near the landing for the gondola. That was what she always did, kept away so that she could know without knowing. I had a sudden wish at that moment to be more like her, to be in my life and apart from it.

  But I might not have been so afraid. Bartolomeo was really very easy to be with. He had a supper set out for us in a small, jewel-like room, and he led me into conversation with questions, the way a woman would. What time of day did I like to write? Did the time of day someone was born affect how long he lived? Did I look forward to the prospect of living to be very old? Were the Doges elected too old? He had more humor to him than Collaltino had. A small dog begged from the table, and he sent her away with what seemed to be a private joke between them about a morsel hidden under his shoe.

  “I didn’t mind her begging,” I said.

  “You’ll meet her again,” he said. “She’ll know you when you come.”

  I THOUGHT ABOUT him so much after that visit that I wrote an acrostic for his name—no puzzle could have entertained me more—and he was pleased when I gave it to him. “It makes me love my own name,” he said. He gave me a copy of Marcus Aurelius, in a very pretty dark red leather binding, as reading for the old age I’d said I was expecting. After this we had an intense little talk at a salon, while Cassandra played tunes without me, and not long after, we became lovers.

  He was narrower in the shoulders and leaner in the torso than Collaltino had been, and he conducted himself somewhat differently in bed—he was more gradual and elaborate and more thoughtful—but what amazed me was the way desire felt the same, the way the chambers of my body flushed with the same longing and pleasure. As if all sweetness were one Sweetness, and all secrets one Secret.

  Not that the details were washy to me. I had a very sharp vision of him lifting off his shirt, and later lying on the bed with his eyes closed and his mouth slack. I watched as closely as I ever had. I wanted to see the sheen of oil on the skin of his forehead, the creases at the corners of his eyes, the shadows dimming the color on the walls.

  We saw each other very often that winter, and my sister said she’d never seen me get along so well with someone and complain so little. Bartolomeo had an even temperament and it took quite a lot to ruffle or annoy him. I was the one who sometimes flared up in anger when he was late or had to postpone a meeting. A hot irritation rose from my old injuries. Even then, he did not really quarrel but only looked weary. His quiet sometimes distressed me, but he was never anything but kind to me. Cassandra said that I behaved better to everyone at home, because of him.

  ON EASTER SUNDAY, I woke up so heavy with sadness I had no will to move. Bartolomeo had been away with his family for two weeks and would be gone longer; he didn’t know how long. I dressed myself for Mass, but I couldn’t remember why I was bothering to go anywhere. I was an imprudent woman with no future. I was already near thirty, and I was going to grow old with my sister and my mother, in our little house. Bartolomeo’s family, those people he was now sequestered with in the mountains, were listed in the Golden Book; their sons could serve in the Great Council and they could not marry out. There was not the smallest chance I was ever going to be a wife. Even if I were younger, even if I had a real dowry. Bartolomeo might keep me near him for decades, or he might not.

  There was no reason that any of this was news to me, and my mother said I was making myself miserable for no cause. I kept myself well contained all through the service. The music of the Latin hymns made me ache for Bartolomeo, the chords made my heart solemn for him. After a while, as I sat in our pew, with the droning prayers around me and the cool-white shaft of light coming down from the dome into the darkened nave, I passed into a state without any hope at all, where hopelessness itself was a kind of comfort. I thought: so this is the way it is, and that phrase was beautifully clear to me. We were in church for what seemed to be a very long time, and then we went outside into the bright, bright daylight. Children were running around the square, playing and shouting. I thought I was going to be all right.

  We went to eat at my uncle’s house, and I let my uncle tell his same story about the fisherman’s daughter and the baker’s son, and I even laughed at the end. My family was relieved to see me sociable again, especially my mother.

  All my delight it is, and all my joy,

  To live endlessly burning, with no pain,

  Not caring whether he who caused my grief

  Takes pity on me.

  And then Bartolomeo surprised us all by coming back early. By the end of the week he was in Venice and wanting to see me. I could not come soon enough, he said. The mountains had been very tedious without me. Nothing but clear skies and perfect vistas, what good was that to him? His spaniel barked in excitement when she heard me in the hallway, and she kept running back and forth underfoot when he and I were trying to embrace. I didn’t scold him or act petulant about
his being gone. It was very cozy, seeing Bartolomeo again.

  And so we went on. We had our suppers in the beautifully draped little side-room, and sometimes I could hear footsteps above us or on the other side of the house; I did meet one of his brothers and a cousin, but never the females of his family. Even I knew better than to speak about this. At dinner we would have little disputes about which spices made a person more lustful and what would happen if one of us ate too much. He grew freer and more sportive as I knew him.

  SOMETIMES BARTOLOMEO WAS close at hand in the evenings when I was out playing music, but he was not as eager a frequenter of salons as Collaltino had been. More than once when I walked up a stairway out into a crowded, bright room, I found myself looking for Collaltino. I looked at the backs of other men’s heads, other tall blond men who had faces that were not (it always turned out) his. I was furious at him for keeping himself away. He was in some of the poems I wrote even now. I was glad, very glad, that he wasn’t there. My hungers were confused, but they gnawed my heart just the same.

  IN THE HOT and stifling months of summer, Bartolomeo was away from Venice on family business, a term so vague I couldn’t help worrying that he had another lover. He soothed me with gifts when he came back, a necklace of garnets and a missal tooled in gold. Collaltino had given me presents too, but Bartolomeo began, as time went on, also to bring tributes to my mother and sister. Delicate and well-chosen presents, as the year passed through the calendar of feasts. We all grew used to them, a little childish under them, and used to his leaving and coming back. I had to wait each time to be summoned to him, though he could not have been more tactful in the way he handled this.

  Cassandra liked Bartolomeo—she had not liked Collaltino—and she told me there was no reason that the arrangement I had with him might not be permanent. Didn’t we both know a Cardinal who came to gatherings with a woman who had been his mistress for twenty years? “People live on love,” she said. “Sometimes.”

  I said I thought the Cardinal and his mistress were living on something quite different. No matter what they said, most people knew better than to look to love if they had anything else to lean on. Only I, who had nothing else, was in its service. Only I was trying to make my home on the thinnest edge of what was possible.

  I WAS ALWAYS afraid that my singing voice was going to coarsen as I got older, and I made efforts to guard against chills and currents of air that might hurt my throat. Bartolomeo used to tease me and say he was going to train his spaniel to wrap herself snugly under my chin. The first winter we were together I stayed robust and strong, and everyone said that it was because I was in good spirits, but the second winter, I was sick right after the first sleeting rain. Bartolomeo was away in Milan, and I told my family I was just as glad he didn’t have to see me look ashen and clay-lipped. I lost a good deal of weight, and my mother thought she should send me to relatives in Florence, where the climate was somewhat milder.

  They packed me in blankets of fur and I was ferried to the mainland and then set down in the seat of a carriage. I had not been out of my city for a long time, not since I had gone to visit Collaltino, and I tried to look out the window at the countryside and enjoy the flat valley with its sere fields and then the rising hills and the dark cypresses against the sky. I was dreamy and feverish, and a light rain fell all afternoon, followed by a lingering mist that swallowed up the hills. It seemed to me to be proof of Parmenides’ notion that the world of sense is an illusion, because it consists of change. I had been reading him again, since I had the fancy that his pupil, Zeno of Elea, was the real origin of Bartolomeo’s surname. In the rocking coach I did at that moment believe the world around me to be unreal. I felt myself as a very fine, still point, a dot without dimension.

  My fever was worse that night at the inn, and my maid fed me spoonfuls of rice and hot milk with brandy. I slept the next day and the day after, and the rest of the trip was like falling down a long and crooked tunnel. When we got to my cousins’ house, on the outskirts of Florence, I could only just sit up and speak to everyone, and I was glad to be carried into the clean, warm house that smelled of woodsmoke and heated brick.

  Bartolomeo wrote me pleasant letters while I was there. “Rest the body that I love”—phrases like that. I bragged of him to my cousins. I stayed in Florence for a few months, until even my relatives agreed that I was healthy and fattened and buoyant again from their hospitality. In fact I was eager to be home with my family, where I could be more candid and less grateful.

  It was early spring when I rode the ferryboat back to my city. My sister shrieked and crowed when she saw me walk through the door of the house. I said she sounded like a parrot, but I was moved by the sight of her. None of them had known just when I was returning—not Bartolomeo either, who was in the mountains for Easter. It saddened me that I couldn’t see him, although I was past being tearful at waiting.

  I had other friends to see, and I was busy and cheerful those first days. But later in the week I woke up with a terrible pain, somewhere under my stomach and next to my womb. I used to take herbs to ward off pregnancy, which sometimes gave me pains like this, and I thought at first that this was a ghost-pain of remembered pleasure. Whatever it was, it stayed and got worse, and by nightfall I knew that something was wrong.

  My mother thought it was a spasm of heat from my old fevers, slipped down to the matrix of my body. I lay in agony for one long day and then another. Why wasn’t I better, hadn’t I already gotten better in Florence? None of my other illnesses had been like this, and when I moaned now I was suddenly quite angry. Where was Bartolomeo, where was Collaltino, why I was alone in this? I was not alone, my sister and my mother kept near me, but I was harsh to them and told them to go away.

  “What do you want?” my sister said. “What can I bring you?”

  I was flailing around beyond wants. I felt like someone in a nightmare, who’d been stabbed and couldn’t get anyone to notice and take the knife out.

  I sweated all night, as if I were melting. In the early hours of the morning, the room was too quiet, with Cassandra asleep in her chair by the bed. I had a great fear of dying before she woke up, but I didn’t pray and I didn’t ring the bell. I always thought my sister should envy me, because of the greatness of my feelings, and I still thought that, even now. I, who was so sick, thought that. I watched her soft, unweathered cheeks, moving a little with her breath, and I felt sorry for her.

  The pains kept me moving—did I think I could get away from them? In the end I flung my arms above my head, as they had been placed the first time with Collaltino, and I lay like that in submission to the fevers. They were going to win. In this way I was able to be quiet and give myself over to sleep, in the time I had.

  When I woke up, I felt worse. I was still very hot but my skin was dry, like the powder on a glowing coal. I could see how ill I was, but I was not afraid anymore. I always wrote of myself as burning, in the poems for Collaltino and Bartolomeo, and now I had the sense that I had actually set myself on fire and had been smoldering all night—I had done this terrible thing for a reason I could not fully remember but that was entirely necessary. I lay in my bed, trying to remember, and I really was quite contented.

  ASHES OF LOVE

  But Nature, spent and exhausted, takes lovers back

  into herself, as if there were not enough strength

  to create them a second time. Have you imagined

  Gaspara Stampa intensely enough so that any young girl

  deserted by her beloved might be inspired

  by that fierce example of soaring, objectless love

  and might say to herself, “Perhaps I can be like her”?

  Shouldn’t this most ancient of our sufferings finally grow

  more fruitful for us? Isn’t it time that we lovingly

  freed ourselves from the beloved and, quivering, endured:

  as the arrow endures the bowstring’s tension, so that

  gathered in the snap of relea
se it can be more than

  itself. For there is no place where we can remain.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE, Duino Elegies

  I read those poems first in a hotel room in Ljubljana, in what was then Yugoslavia, not that far from where Rilke began the poems at Duino Castle outside Trieste. My girlfriend Peggy lay in bed next to me in her underwear, reading a month-old copy of Time magazine. People passed on printed matter in English to each other, the way they passed on coins from countries they weren’t going back to or leftover bottles of antibiotics. A Canadian in our hotel gave his copy of Rilke to me. “You want this, Tom?” he said, and I gave him a sweatshirt because I thought we were leaving before we hit any cold weather. That part was a mistake. I carried The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke through some pretty funky parts of Central Europe, and I read it with fervor if not always with understanding. I finally lost it years later in an airport, in a penned-in waiting area I spent too many hours in. I didn’t notice until later that the book was gone, and I was too jagged to concentrate on reading anyway.

  Some of the thrill I first had in reading the Elegies was a belief that they were truly good for me. They gave my thinking, such as it was, a shot of purer air. And yet Rilke led a fitful, neurasthenic life and behaved very badly to his wife and daughter. Not that I gave a fuck about any of that then. I was heedless and ambling and had no idea where my own honor was going to lie.

  I was interested in what Rilke said about lovers (he was always citing them as a distinct class of people), because I was one half of a fiercely attached couple. We were in each other’s sight what seemed like every minute of every day. We had screaming fights in many of the most alluring spots in the world, and once I did walk off and leave her on the beach at Split on the Dalmatian coast, when I couldn’t stand to be with her one more second. But two days later at breakfast she appeared so radiantly herself to me, so intensely Peggy, that nothing could have been more essential to me than to be with her at all times.