A Thousand Days in Venice by Marlena de Blasi Read Free Book Online

What’s it like?”
    â€œOh, I don’t think there’s much that’s gorgeous about it. He lives in a 1950s condominium on the beach. Actually, I haven’t seen it yet,” I say.
    â€œYou mean you’re selling your home and cashing in your whole life without. . . .” Her query is overruled by the gentleman who aims to comfort the crowd.
    â€œMaybe it’s Venice you’re in love with. If I had a chance to moveto Venice, I wouldn’t give two hoots for what the house was like.” They sally and banter without me.
    When the brigade exits, one agent stays behind to write an offer to buy my house herself. The offer is serious, reasonable, not so many thousands of dollars less than the price Fernando and I had talked about with my attorney. She tells me she has long been planning to end her marriage, leave her job, and start an agency of her own. She says that finding this house with the lipstick-red dining room is the last button necessary to activate her renaissance program.
    â€œI won’t be leaving behind any magic dust here,” I warn. “If you buy this house it doesn’t mean you’ll fall in love with a charming Spaniard or something like that. It’s just a pretty little, regular house,” I say inanely, wanting to protect her from her impulse and, perhaps, me from mine. “Why don’t you think about it and we can talk later,” I continue without looking at her and as though I was big and she was little.
    â€œHow long did you think about it before you said yes to your Venetian? This is all happening just as it should,” she says with a voice that came from a misty place inside her. “I’d like you to tell me what furniture you are willing to sell,” she continues. I learned much later that, with some deft caressing of the zoning laws, my red dining room became the office from which she operates her independent agency.

    I call my children. I call my attorney. Fernando calls me. I call Fernando. Was it all going to be this simple? I pull off my good black dress and pull on jeans and boots, remembering I had to place an order with the meat purveyor before ten. I ring up Mr. Wasserman without thinking first what I’d cook for that evening’s menu. I hear myself telling him I’ll need baby lamb shanks, fifty of them. I’d never yet cooked baby lamb shanks at the café. Used to my orders for game and veal, Mr. Wasserman misses half a beat, then assures me they”ll be delivered before three. “How will you cook them?” he wants to know.
    â€œI’ll braise them in a saffron tomato broth, lay them over French lentils and add a stripe of black olive paste,” my chef’s voice announces without consulting me.
    â€œWrite me in for two at seven-thirty, will you?” he says. After a look at the ice-encrusted car, I walk the mile or so to the café, though I’d never once walked to work before. Of course I’d never been romantic about old smoke from an Italian cigarette left behind in my bedroom, either. And those baby lamb shanks. Tramping through high snow that is falling still in earnest, my old white Mother Russia coat trailing, making a soft, scraping noise behind me. I wonder when I will begin, if I will begin at all, to feel sad about all these endings I was sealing. Would there be some late lapseof courage? Is it, indeed, courage that was shaping my way? Is it bravado? Did I fancy myself some aging armchair swashbuckler setting off, at last, to adventure? No. My friend Misha says I am
la grande cocotte
with flour on my hands. Or ink stains. No, I’d never been an “armchair” anything. And let’s go back to why I must anticipate anguish or muddy what was feeling immensely clear. There is nothing I want more than to be with Fernando. Anyway, June seems far off, safely, sadly far away.
    As I near the corner of Pershing and DeBalivier I remember there is to be a