Karen looks around the lobby and sips her kir.\u00a0 Her escort has just risen to greet some friends, three men and a woman.\u00a0 He helps the woman take off her alpaca shawl.\u00a0 Fall in Venice can be chilly.\u00a0 Even cushioned in the splendor of the Danieli, a luxury hotel that was once a palace, Karen imagines she can feel on the back of her neck ancient, damp vapors, can smell the green-black moss that marks the waterline on the walls outside.<\/p>\n
The woman sits down in the armchair next to Karen’s.\u00a0 She smiles uncertainly at Karen, then turns to listen to the men, courting them with her ardent attention.<\/p>\n
Karen remembers her first time.\u00a0 It, too, was a fall night, cool and beguiling, but in Los Angeles.\u00a0 She wore a necktie, an extravagant, wide purple tie from the 1940’s that she had gotten from a dumpster on Houston Street in Manhattan.\u00a0 It made her feel sexy.<\/p>\n
They went to one of the city’s most expensive restaurants, she and her new lover Emilio and his former lover, Dennis.\u00a0 Karen remembers there was a lot of wine, different ones with different courses.\u00a0 Dennis did all the ordering.\u00a0 A menu never appeared.<\/p>\n
What she remembers most clearly is the fragrant wedge of melon draped with transparent slices of prosciutto somewhere in the middle of the meal.\u00a0 It was an unfamiliar sequence of courses for her then, one she had read about but never experienced.\u00a0 A lower middle-class girl from suburban Toledo having a palate cleanser.\u00a0 She did not let Emilio and Dennis see she was impressed.\u00a0 It turned out to be a sound instinct.<\/p>\n
That night is ten years behind her now.\u00a0 She still encounters Dennis from time to time at a screening or at someone’s opening.\u00a0 Karen’s escort tonight and Emilio are friends.\u00a0 Emilio is the kind who holds on to people, especially old lovers who are lively companions outside the bedroom.<\/p>\n
Just last month, Karen had spent a long, discursive afternoon with Emilio.\u00a0 She explored with him the intricacies of his current romance; he showed her his most recently-acquired paintings; she recommended a new poet she’d been reading.\u00a0 As she was leaving, he reached absent-mindedly into a drawer and gave her a hand-tooled silver bracelet that had been his grandmother’s.\u00a0 He would not let her refuse it.\u00a0 She said she’d consider it a loan.<\/p>\n
There has been in all Karen’s experiences with privileged men an air of instruction.\u00a0 And she has acquiesced by being observant and sometimes imitative or, within the bounds of their amusement, iconoclastic.\u00a0 Bare feet at the Annapolis Yacht Club; one bare breast at a Dada opening at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.\u00a0 Such men enjoy wit and daring in a woman, the excitement of danger in harness.<\/p>\n
The woman beside Karen in the Danieli occupies her chair like a guest let in by mistake, as if her tasteful dress and new Florentine shoes were rented.\u00a0 Karen feels at home, but she still recognizes the careful poise of the interloper, even after all the clever words, the confident smiles, the unbegrudged kisses.\u00a0 She appears to slouch comfortably, but her spine is straight.<\/p>\n
Karen notices, too, how young the woman looks; her smooth, pale face has not one line anywhere on it.\u00a0 But beauty is not enough here.\u00a0 Karen knows this so well it is not even a conscious thought any longer, but more like the semi-automatic knowings of how to sit down in a short skirt, how to swim without wetting her hair, or how to say fuck judiciously.<\/p>\n
The woman’s tentativeness reminds Karen of a custom in feudal Japan whereby a married woman in love with a man not her husband could send that man another woman to make love to him in her place.\u00a0 Karen is not a married woman, but she is intrigued by the idea of giving this lovely woman to her escort.\u00a0 She knows the gesture would please him.\u00a0 So much so, she realizes, that it will be enough simply to tell him she has thought of it.\u00a0 She smiles to herself, calculating the moment she will say it, anticipating the brightening of his hunger for her.<\/p>\n
The men are guffawing together over some remark one of them has just made.\u00a0 Karen’s escort leans forward in his seat, both feet flat on the floor and wide apart, easy and eager, as if he were on the winning team’s bench at an athletic event.<\/p>\n
Karen catches the young woman’s eye and looks at her with affectionate complicity.<\/p>\n
“Is this your first time in Venice?” she asks her.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
“Drinks in Venice” was published in the journal\u00a0Ignis Fatuus<\/em>, Bisbee, AZ, 1994.<\/p>\n
![\"Venice10_General17\"](\"http:\/\/noellesickels.com\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/03\/Venice10_General17.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"