Page 42 of Casanova LLC

“Constantly.”

“What about?”

“Things.”

“Anything specific?”

“Not really. Just things.”

“You should probably stop.”

“Oh, okay.”

“If you want to, that is.”

“Easier said than done.”

“Why?”

“Because you never know what might happen.”

“When?”

“In the future.”

“We can’t predict the future, Claire.”

“Is this where you remind me of no assumptions, no expectations?”

“Doesn’t seem like I have to. If you want to think about something, think about what you want.” Then he was standing and lifting me up onto the dock and leading me forward and that’s when I realized we’d arrived. “This way.”

I followed him in a daze.

He took me to the Doge’s Palace and when our docent told the tale of the original Casanova’s daring escape from the prison, Alessandro and I listened with the kind of rapt attention that only happens when you know you can’t look at the other person or you’ll start laughing.

Afterward, as it drizzled off and on, we walked around and he fed me bites of food along the way, delicacies and specialties he knew of in each crevice of the city. We ambled, and talked more about my pleasure, or lack thereof. And how my thinking about what might happen was preventing me from feeling what was happening. It was so comfortably casual. A strolling conversation between swallows of delicious food. And I talked to him like a cross between a therapist and a friend. Or a lover. I told him I felt knotted up inside. Tangled. Always had, but especially since Richard’s death.

He listened with magnetic intensity, creating an impenetrable force field around us. He likened me to a delicate chain in a jewelry box. How it starts out free of entanglement, but somehow ends up knotted. So you pull at it, to disentangle it, and the more you pull the worse it gets. So you stop pulling, stop trying so damn hard to untangle it. And then, like magic, it unravels right before your eyes.

And sometimes, he joked, a little oil helps.

He had taken all my scattered thoughts and corralled them. Then loosened them. Even freed them. I felt like I might be seeing a way forward. How we might begin to untangle me.

I wanted that. More than I’d ever wanted anything.

“Claire?”

I hadn’t realized that I had stopped walking. That I was standing there, in the middle of a passageway, lost—or should I say found?—in thought. I quickly caught up to him and he put his arm around me, to protect me from the weather. It was late afternoon and everything was closing for riposo. I half hoped that he’d suggest we go back to the palazzo, get out of these wet clothes, and… But no such luck.

He took me to an out-of-the-way museum that specialized in lesser-known Impressionist painters. He came alive here—we both did—talking nonstop about the techniques, the colors, the light, art, art, art, everything art. At our core, we were two process nerds and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had someone to enjoy this part of myself with.

When he’d paused before a Pissarro, I said, “I want to see your new paintings.”

He looked taken aback. “Mine? Oh, well. I don’t actually have anything new.”

“In Venice, you mean?”

He looked toward the exit. “Anywhere. They’re all with you. Or Sotheby’s, I suppose.” He started walking, out of the last exhibit room, and into the small lobby.

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