“You don’t think it’s some scam by the old man and we’re going to get mugged under the bridge?”
“Mugged?” I laugh, jerking my head up. “By who?”
He gestures to the gondolier and does a mock-scary face.
“You’re crazy,” I giggle.
“You say that now, but . . .” He puts his mouth up close to my ear and whispers, “Have you never seen The Godfather?” He draws a finger across his throat and makes a choking sound.
I crack up and punch him in the ribs.
“Ow,” he yelps, flopping back against the cushion. “That’s a mean left hook you’ve got there. I need to be careful.” He grabs hold of my fist.
“Uh-huh.” I nod, meeting his eyes.
“Very, very careful.” He starts slowly uncurling my fingers, stretching out my palm and tracing the lines upon it with his fingertips.
I lie back, enjoying the sensation of his fingers brushing against mine, feeling the mood change like a summer breeze. His touch is light, feathery, gentle, yet its effect upon me is like a thousand volts coursing through my veins. Now I know what people mean when they talk about electricity between two people. It’s as if someone has just plugged me straight into the socket. I feel alive, as if I spent the first nineteen years of my life asleep and it was only when I met Nate that I finally woke up.
“Hey, can you hear that?”
Nate’s voice brings me back. His head is tilted, his eyes searching the air around him, a smile spreading slowly across his face.
“What—” I begin, but he puts a finger to my lips.
“Shh, listen.”
The warm evening air surrounds us with its pillow softness, its scents of red wine and fresh pizza, cigarettes and aftershave, mingled with the sounds of music, voices, a woman in the apartment above us washing dishes . . .
And something else.
In the distance I can hear something. I listen harder. Is that . . . ? Could that be . . . ?
“Bells,” I whisper, feeling a sudden thrill. I glance back at Nate. His eyes are twinkling with excitement.
“This is it.” He grins and my stomach releases a cage of butterflies. “It’s happening.”
With the soft peal of bells being carried on the breeze, we glance up ahead to see the bridge. Arching majestically over the canal, it glows in the golden light, the white marble a blank canvas for the setting sun. Streaks of vermilion mixed with tinges of burnt umber and yellow ochre create a shimmering rainbow reflected in the water. We drift slowly toward it, both filled with anticipation, excitement, laughter, love.
Closer and closer . . .
And now the gondola is falling into the shade and we are gliding slowly under the bridge, inch by inch by inch. We have only a few seconds. Our eyes lock. Our laughter falls silent. The joking stops. Everything stops.
In that split second everything slows right down. Like a movie gone into slow motion, the frame freezes. It’s just me and Nate. The two of us. The only people to exist in the whole wide world.
Two halves of one whole . . . Out of nowhere the old Italian’s voice pops into my head. You will have everlasting and eternal love. You will be together forever and nothing will ever break you apart. As his words echo inside, the air suddenly turns cooler and goose bumps prickle my arms.
Something’s different. There’s an energy, a certainty. A powerful sensation all around me that I can’t describe. It feels like . . . like . . .
I look at Nate. He’s leaning toward me . . . the bells are chiming . . . the sky is blazing . . . and my breath is held so tight in my chest I feel as if I’m going to burst with the sheer exhilaration of the moment, of him pulling me close, of him telling me he loves me.
Magic. That’s what it feels like.
It feels like magic.
“And?”
I snap back to see the barman standing stock-still behind the bar, gripping the beer pumps as he waits anxiously.
A warm glow envelops me. “And we kissed,” I reply simply.
It’s as if the whole bar has been holding its breath. All at once there’s a loud exhalation of giddy relief. There’s even a slight ripple of applause, and someone somewhere whoops.
“So what happened then?” gasps Robyn excitedly. She looks joyous. As does the rest of the audience, I realize, glancing around. Everyone, it seems, loves a love story.
I pause, collecting my thoughts. I feel the moment quickly ebbing away, vanishing back into the past, swallowed up by the present. Like Venice itself, it’s fast disappearing into the water.
“Well, it was the end of the summer, so he went back to Harvard and I went back to Manchester,” I say matter-of-factly. “There were lots of letters, the odd phone call when we could afford it—it was so expensive to call transatlantic in those days and I didn’t even have the Internet.” I smile ruefully. “We dated long distance for almost a year.” I pause. I can see everyone waiting eagerly for the punch line. For the big happily ever after. My stomach knots.
“And then?” The redhead with the martini glass is almost beside herself.
I suddenly feel a huge weight of responsibility for everyone’s hopes. I don’t want to disappoint them. I don’t want to let them down. And yet . . .
I feel a lump in my throat. Even now, after all this time, I can’t think about it without that crushing feeling in my chest. That feeling of not being able to draw breath, as if I’m swimming underwater and my lungs are going to burst.
I can remember it as if it was yesterday. I had just graduated and was sleeping on a friend’s sofa in London while I looked for a studio to rent. It was summer. I remember seeing forget-me-nots in the park as I walked home, remember wondering if they have forget-me-nots in America, thinking as I bent down to pick one that I’d press its pretty blue petals and send them to Nathaniel.
My friend yelled to me as I opened the front door. Standing in the hallway, she held out the phone to me, a bright, excited smile on her face. It was him, Nathaniel, my American boyfriend calling. I rushed toward her and snatched up the phone, trying to untangle the wires that twisted round my hand, breathless with excitement about speaking to him, telling him all my news, hearing his voice.
But the moment I heard it, I knew. In that split second I just knew.
Zoning back to the bar, I take a deep breath and say as nonchalantly as I can, “We broke up. He married someone else.”
The audience gasps. Robyn throws her hand over her mouth. Another girl looks gutted. “No fucking way!” curses the barman in disbelief.
My sister, who until now has been silent, nods, partly in sympathy, partly because she’s heard this story a million times. “Way,” she says matter-of-factly, answering for me. “I saw it in the New York Times. They got the full page.”
There’s a sharp intake of breath around the bar. Feeling all eyes upon me, I focus on my beer, swallowing the amber bubbles, trying to block out my emotions, which are swirling around inside me. . . . Him saying he was sorry, that this long-distance thing wasn’t working and he’d met someone else, that he never wanted to hurt me but it had all happened so fast.... Me dropping the phone, feeling my legs give way beneath me as I crumpled into a heap in the hallway, feeling as if my heart had split clean in half, just like that stupid coin pendant he’d bought me. . . .
OK, stop right there. I pull myself up sharply. I’m getting carried away thinking about this stuff again. It’s in the past, and that’s where it’s going to stay.
“See, that’s what happens when you believe in silly fairy stories about everlasting love,” I say, quickly pulling myself together. And putting down my glass, I force a bright smile. “Right, who’s for more drinks?”
Chapter Four
The weekend comes and goes in a flurry of activity. It takes several trips to move everything from my sister’s apartment to Robyn’s—what started out as two suitcases has transformed into eight garbage bags full of stuff.
Thankfully, Robyn keeps the unpacking simple:1. Rip open a garbage bag.
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2. Chuck everything all over the floor.
3. Spend hours randomly picking things out with cries of “Ooh, what’s this?” (my new butter frosting scented bubble bath from Sephora—God, I love Sephora; it’s my new spiritual home), “Wow, can I try this on?” (a silver sequined scarf I bought from Topshop ages ago that I’ve never worn but still insist on taking with me every time I go away, just in case this time I get an uncontrollable urge for a silver sequined scarf), and “Oh my God, is this really you?” (my old photo albums, in particular a picture of me as a teenager when I was going through my Goth stage and was all liquid eyeliner and dyed black hair).
Robyn, I quickly discover, is what they delicately describe in novels as “loquacious.” In real life it means she never stops talking. Not for one moment over the weekend does she appear to draw breath. If it’s not to me, her mum in Chicago, or her numerous friends, it’s to her two beloved dogs, Jenny and Simon, who follow her wherever she goes, heads cocked to one side, eyes beseeching, waiting for treats to drop from her pockets.
Both are strays that she rescued from an animal shelter. Simon is short and fat and snores like a pig. Jenny is thinner and hairier, with a terrible underbite. Robyn loves them like they’re her children. In fact, the way she mothers them you’d almost think she gave birth to them herself. When Simon isn’t having acupuncture for his arthritic hip and Jenny isn’t being given Chinese herbs for her allergies, they’re sitting on the sofa having their bellies tickled and watching Oprah.
Oprah is to Robyn what the Pope is to a Catholic. Armed with a bowl of popcorn and the remote, she listens solemnly as Oprah discusses infidelity, dabs away tears during Oprah’s interview with a couple who lost their cat to cancer, and high-fives the sofa when Oprah appears in a pair of skinny jeans and announces she’s lost twenty pounds. In forty-eight hours we cover sex, love, and weight loss. By the time Monday morning rolls around, I’m relieved to leave Oprah behind and go to work. Although Robyn promises me the episode she’s Tivo’d, about a man who married a grizzly bear, is going to be a good one.
Work is at an art gallery in SoHo called Number Thirty-Eight. Most of the galleries have moved to far West Chelsea but Magda has been here for years and refuses to move, which is great for me, as I can now walk there, which means an extra twenty minutes in bed.
Well, that was the idea.
Except in practice my terrible timekeeping is made worse by my sleeping through my alarm, and those extra twenty minutes turn into an extra forty. Which means I have to rush like a mad thing in my flip-flops. Seriously, have you ever tried running in flip-flops?
“Morning.” Smoothing down my shower-damp hair, I push open the glass door of the gallery. My heart is hammering in my chest, a sure sign that I need more exercise, if not for my muffin top, then so I don’t have a heart attack before the age of thirty-five.
“Loozy!” booms a loud voice from the back office, heralding the appearance of Mrs. Zuckerman, my boss, otherwise known as Magda. Judging from the strength of her vocal cords, you’d be forgiven for expecting someone over six feet tall and two hundred pounds. Instead she’s a diminutive blonde woman who can’t measure more than five feet, despite her skyscraper heels and carefully constructed beehive, which rises five inches from her scalp in a golden haystack.
“It is so good to see you!” Dressed head to toe in Chanel, she bustles into the gallery, her miniature Maltese dog scampering at her heels. Reaching up, she grabs my face firmly with her diamond-clad fingers and plants two brisk lipstick kisses on either cheek.
This is the way she greets me every morning. It’s a bit of a departure from the clipped “Hello” that I grew used to from Rupert, my old boss in London, but then Rupert was Gordonstoun educated and friends with Prince Charles. He used to walk around the gallery as if he still had the coat hanger in his suit jacket, and he wore one of those rings on his little finger with his ancestral coat of arms or something on it.
Whenever anyone came into the gallery wearing one, he would fiddle with it, as if it was some secret code and they could communicate telepathically through their pinkie rings.
Magda is the antithesis of that old-school pinkie-ring mentality of the British class system. A rambunctious Jewish lady with a thick Israeli accent, despite having moved to New York thirty years ago, she’s not about subtleties; she calls a serviette a napkin and says, “What?” instead of “Pardon?” completely going against the lessons I learned from Rupert, who seemed to take it upon himself to play Henry Higgins to my Eliza Doolittle.
Instead everything is about extremes and exaggeration. Why call a spade a spade when you can call it something completely different? And preferably outrageous. She talks in exclamation points and is forever regaling me with one of her outlandish stories, be it about an amazing dessert (“The apple pie was unbelievable!”), one of her three ex-husbands (“He was terrible, I tell you, terrible!”), or the time she was arrested (“I say to the police officer, ‘Why cannot I break his windows? He broke my heart. It is justice!’”).
Like strong cheese, or Russell Brand, you’re either going to love Magda or hate her. Luckily for me, it’s the former.
“Are you hungry? Did you have breakfast?” Without waiting for an answer, she dives into her large Louis Vuitton tote. Out of it she pulls an enormous paper bag filled with what appears to be the entire contents of a bakery. “I bought bagels. Sesame, poppy seed, onion . . .”
“Thanks, but I’m fine with coffee.” I smile, reaching for the coffee machine. “I’ve never actually been much of a breakfast person.”
Magda looks at me as if I’ve just told her I’m an alien from outer space. “You don’t eat breakfast?” Her eyes are wide with astonishment.
That said, Magda always has a certain astonished look about her. At first I thought she was just permanently surprised by things, but now I’ve figured out it’s due to her eyebrows, which sit much higher on her forehead than normal, a result, I suspect, of having had “work done.” Which in the States is in reference not to a new loft conversion but to a series of nips and tucks performed by a man in a white coat at some fancy address on Fifth Avenue.
“Well, no, not usually.”
Magda is shaking her head violently. “But this is terrible!” she cries, pounding the countertop with her fist for emphasis. “Terrible!”
I swear you’d think she just found out her entire family has died at sea, not that her employee skips breakfast.
“No, honestly, it’s fine. I’m not that hungry,” I try explaining, but Magda is having none of it.
“You must eat. You must eat to survive,” she insists dramatically.
I open my mouth to protest. Trust me, I eat. And I have the thighs to prove it. Remember that movie Alive, in which the survivors of a plane crash have to eat each other to survive? Well, those passengers could have lived for months on my thighs. Years, probably.
There’s no point trying to tell Magda this, I realize, looking at my boss’s determined expression. I surrender and take a poppy-seed bagel.
Immediately her expression changes from tragic to comic, like one of those theater masks. “It’s good, no?” she chuckles, beaming with pleasure.
“Mmm, yes, delicious.” I nod in agreement.
“I have cream cheese and lox.”
Lox, I’ve learned, is smoked salmon in New York.
“No, thanks,” I mutter through a mouthful of bagel.
“You want it toasted?”
“Mmph.” I shake my head.
“I have honey. You like it with honey?”
I’m still chewing.
“Peanut butter? Pickles?”
I had no idea there were so many different ways you could eat a bagel, and I’m sure she would have kept suggesting them if I hadn’t swallowed hard and managed, “Um . . . it’s yummy just as it is,” nearly choking myself in the process.
“Hmm, well, OK.” She clucks her tongue reluctantly. “It is important to keep up your strength as we have
a very, very busy day today. We have some new paintings arriving by an amazing artist from Colombia. Oy, the colors!” She smacks her lips with her scarlet fingernails.
At the mention of the paintings, I feel the familiar tingle of excitement that I always get when I see work by a new artist. A sort of fluttering in my stomach, like when I was little and I would run downstairs on Christmas Day and see all my presents under the tree. The feeling of anticipation, followed by the discovery of something new and wonderful.
I’m sure the paintings will be amazing. Magda’s judgment when it comes to husbands and broken windows might be questionable, but when it comes to art, she has great instincts.
I glance around the gallery. She’s been running this place for more than twenty years, ever since she won it in a divorce settlement from her second husband, a millionaire property mogul. By her own admission, she had no formal art background and just sort of fell into it, buying whatever took her fancy, whatever made her smile, and because of her unorthodox approach, the gallery is totally unique.
When you think of art galleries, you often think of those huge, imposing white lofts with several floors, but Number Thirty-Eight is housed in the converted basement of a loft. Most people walk past it on their way to the big-name designer stores and never think to glance down at the sidewalk, through the railings, and into our windows. They never notice an amazing abstract painting by a new artist, or a series of striking lithographs that form part of our latest exhibition.
But if you do happen across us, and take a few moments out of your busy schedule to look inside, you’ll want to keep coming back. Because unlike with those big, austere galleries, the moment you walk into Number Thirty-Eight and hear the stereo blaring, you’ll realize this is a whole new way to experience art.
Forget silence and speaking in hushed voices—Magda believes in having music playing (she has eclectic taste—last week it was La Bo-hème ; today it’s Justin Timberlake), along with fresh coffee brewing and a popcorn machine. “We are like the movies!” she cries to the curious members of the public who wander inside and find themselves being asked if they want sugar or salt on their popcorn. “Here you can escape, be entertained, use your imagination. And even better, no Tom Cruise!”