There was also a kind of stuck in her writing itself, a condition not entirely attributable after so many years to having had so little time for it. Her one interest was memoir, the story of her own life—her formation as the daughter of small town fundamentalists, her intellectual awakening as a student, her first marriage to a soldier—but she had now been working on the thing for almost twenty years, writing and rewriting, casting and recasting, dozens of sketches snipped from life, evocative, she thought, each compelling in its own way, but despite her best efforts never finally adding up to anything more than a laundry basket of disparate scenes, affective color, and social rumination.
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She had begun to have the impression as she approached the museo that it was a prison. At first it was just that the boxy palazzo resembled one, but as the weeks wore on her time there came to feel like deathly servitude, hours, days shut away from life, emptied of everything but meaningless time-killing make-work—answering email from the assistant directress, who sat at a table not more than two meters from her own; small meetings with people from other museo offices for the coordination of everyone’s time-killing make-work; and worst of all, the great emptiness at the center of it all, the planning of the Galileo anniversary for a small tribe of wealthy patrons and museo leadership in order to reproduce an institution that contributed almost nothing to the public understanding of its eponymous hero.
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It was a short walk to the museo Galileo—across the piazza, south to the lungarno, then a couple of blocks downstream—but even before she passed grim Dante at the basilica, an icy sweat bothered the small of her back, her underwear was climbing up, and her best pumps began to bite. All early signs of the egg.
Whitney Bitteredge was ovulating.
For three or four days now, as her estrogen went to full amplitude, she would inhabit a body electric: Afternoon light hurt, she was hot then cold, slacks pinched at the waist, anything but silk or cashmere prickled, she was up all night ordering things on the Interweb, her patience wore to a tatter, she didn’t eat, there were migraines, her breasts were tender, she had difficulty concentrating (more than the usual difficulty), she drank more—these and a great twist of more exotic disturbances, all of which would vanish like a jinn on day fourteen.
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Waiting. What was it really? Donati mused. One waits for what is coming. What’s coming from the future. But coming from the future by way of the past, of an expectation formed in the past. So waiting was the future past, or the past future. There should be a verb form for it. One could say, There is an update or There is bread but use the past future to indicate, There is an update coming or There is bread coming.
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As surprising as it might be, he had not understood their dressing and undressing around one another as an element of intimacy until this strange dream. It wasn’t so entirely erotic watching a woman undress. Part of what draws one’s attention is how strange women’s bodies are–breasts, girlish or swinging, the incongruity of narrow waists and wide hips, that great patch of hair at the crotch, their behinds, especially with big-bottomed women. Women’s bodies are baroque.
But there is also something terribly tender in seeing such things exposed, like seeing a turtle without its shell, and he knew now it was something he had quietly and unconsciously enjoyed with her–watching her dress or undress. She dropped her towel and stood naked in the air. He could see all of her but what was under that makeshift turban.
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On his way back to the hotel he passed over the Pont des Arts, where two young people, a man and a woman of perhaps twenty or so, were snapping photos of each other, then of the two of themselves together, along the iron railing above the Seine. A decade or so ago lovers fixed small padlocks to that railing as a token of their bond; there were hundreds, then thousands of them, and then just as the law of quantitative change predicts, when you keeping adding to something like that it will sometime become quite another thing, and on the Pont des Arts that thing was a great wall of locks, maybe the biggest in the world, a terrible steel curtain, dumb, obdurate and stretching all the way from right bank to left. Y remembered reading somewhere that when the ville de Paris finally had enough of it, there were a million locks to cut through.
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What happened next lies without question in that zone of ambiguity between right and wrong. Indeed, for two people with less science than he and M, it might have never occurred. But as hard as it is to reconcile such things with our everyday thinking, there is both up and down spin, a quantum can at the same time be here and there, Schrodinger’s cat is both dead and alive. This stuff is always more complicated, but who among us does not sometimes want to have it both ways?
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One of the gifts of marriage are strange insights for each about the other. Strange because they finally defy articulating; in trying, one founders finally on the reef of its not seeming to matter much outside the marriage itself–such insights, I mean. This was his about her: That she had qualities that seemed hypertrophied in the same way uncanny hearing does in the blind. They were powers born of some terrible impairment. Still worse, he had never been able to identify what it was.
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Y had never been much good at waiting; he always felt like he were coming out of his skin. He needed his headphones to survive the ordeal, headphones and Levine’s Rigoletto in his ears. He’d come back to the thing a few months before, when Ruth Iniesta, Spanish soprano, had come to Firenze to sing a brilliant Gilda. Rigoletto in his headphones and sidewalk musings on the ontology of lines. Sartre in his Critique of Dialectical Reason seemed to have put a bow on the topic with his sketch of seriality, but Y had a feeling there were a great many more elements to be described, like, What it means to be fixed in place so as to be able to observe only the other’s back? Which is also to ask, What does it mean to be fixed in a place where one is also othered (by the one behind) as seen from the back? And so it went until the giant amico africano watching the door beckoned to him thus: Prego!
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