"You know how, in 'Eat, Pray, Love,' 'Under the Tuscan Sun,' 'An Italian Affair' and all those other memoirs? Women go to Italy to put their lives back together." I said this to Jenny over our first gourmet Mac and Cheese planning meeting. "Well, le...
Moon-dappled waves lapped at the ebony hull of the gondola, and the gondolier behind our heads crooned a love song. Leah and I snuggled under a blanket with wine glasses in our hands, excited to have this moment to ourselves. Venice had recently had the worst floods in decades, followed weeks later by a low tide that exposed the bottoms of the canals. Home on Lake Merritt, the tides also ebb and flow. Our city was changing. The straining political wealth gap, gentrification and foreign real-estate investors had made thousands of working people homeless. Amidst an unprecedented development boom, you couldn't drive half a mile without seeing a tent city, people cast out of a place in society. But everything looked twinkly and serene from the middle of the beautiful lake.
"Do you think the business will be recession-proof?" I asked my excited friend. Leah and her husband were in the process of buying the gondola service, and her mind was filled with ideas for arts events in the charming loading grotto and on the dock.
"Well, if people can't afford to travel abroad, they'll look for more adventures close to home," she assured me. "A ride on Lake Merritt is way cheaper than a trip to Venice!"
"It was how I lived my own fantasy," I confirmed, reflecting on the journey I'd taken since my first Lake Merritt gondola ride. On my N+5th birthday last summer, Leah, Alexa, Jenny, the Bunny and I had all taken a different type of gondola ride—up a mountainside at the Oakland Zoo where we could take in the entire bay in one sweeping view. From our vantage point, the fog coming over the Golden Gate Bridge looked like a tsunami wave. Even as we dallied over our delightful "high tea" and the balms of friendship, there was no escaping the looming tensions of change.
"When we really get serious about stopping climate change," I said, sipping my Rosé, "We'll l have to limit air travel anyway."
"A good time to invest in boats," she cheered. "Boats that don't take gas to run!" We clinked our glasses.
A few weeks later, a small crowd gathered on the gondola dock for Valentine's day.
Five years to the day since I'd met him, I picked up Fabio, my hilarious airplane friend from Milan, at the San Francisco airport. It didn't take us long to start giggling. A Maserati Quattroporto pulled in ahead of us and I made him repeat the name. He pronounced it slowly and importantly, with the suave purr that is the unique gift of Italian men, gesturing with his hands—wrists forward, fingertips together. But when he told me what it meant, my swoon turned into a swerve; my forehead nearly hit the steering wheel when I doubled over from laughter. "The Maserati Four-Door? Worst car name ever!"
We made plans to visit Jenny's studio, where she would display her master painting of Sargent's Lady Agnew, that lovely brunette with the famous confident gaze and relaxed posture, alive and restless. The range of pastel colors between the light on her knee, her complicated ruffles, her lifelike hands and her dark eyes, were absolutely breathtaking in their subtlety. I'd had no idea, when we were looking at all that art back in Florence, that Jenny herself was capable of creating equal exquisitry. She had come so far from that egg and cup! Not only had she graduated from her classical studies , she had opened a new atelier and begun teaching the master techniques. Jenny showed off examples of the shading and mixing studies that she and her students had done—and I could easily see that her eyes and color vision were now working better than anyone else's.
In the evening, worlds knit together when Dave and Fabio started laughing over dinner—an American feast that included microwaved rice, Girl Scout cookies and Jell-o. Fabio's sites to visit included Target, Dollar Stores, Ross, and Walmart. He read the yellow stickers around the house with Italian words—"la cucina," "la lampara" from my Italian study guide, and Dave's made-up Italian words on white stickers—"la coldia" on the refrigerator and "il forcativi" on the 4K TV. We all decided "il prominutti" should be a real Italian word for hallways that jut into rooms.
After dinner we went to the dock (no Fabio, not duck) to watch lovers board gondolas for an evening of romance—high-heeled, dressed up, dressed down, mini-skirted, dread-locked, hairsprayed, Asian, Latina, Black, all the diversity of Oakland—while we crazy white people sang Bella Notte and That's Amore as the boats poled silently in and out. We went inside when it got too cold, turned on the music, and danced. Dave guided me in and out of his embrace as Gyorgy played Tu Vuo' Fa' L'Americano on his Spanish guitar. Our feet stepped around each other in the comic way we have, then we'd close in, belly to belly, and float around the space as one, sexy and safe.
Fabio opened and closed the doors to the grotto to keep the heat in, Italian language flowing from his mouth like music. Leah tried to hire him on the spot. We sampled homemade chocolates under my new favorite Venetian chandelier. I'd found a tub of "Prosecco-flavored" cotton candy at Target to bring to the party. It tasted like strawberry. We dissolved it in our bubbly wine and exclaimed at the special effects. "I think we've just invented a new terrible beverage," I said to Fabio.
"What is it?" He would never let me forget about "Pornocello."
"Pornosecco," I laughed.
"Ah, our new million-dollar idea! You will a-make me rrrich and famous," he smiled.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
The yellow bulbs strung around the edges of the dock mirrored the necklace of lights that circle the lake. When she stood still for a moment, I asked Leah, "Do you remember our first big dance performance at the Paramount Theater?" We'd been a long line of dancing girls that included Alexa, Rhonda, Gina, Sara, and so many of the friends with whom we'd entered and lived our adult lives, shaping our shared world with purpose and pleasure. Wearing tophats and canes evoking the last '20s, we'd sung Give My Regards on Broadway with funny adapted lyrics—"each little bulb a dollar, each neon sign a grand or two," our climactic kick line literally kicking off the fundraising project that began the transformation of a lonely, muddy lake, into the athletic, civic, and romantic heart of the city. We'd fought to preserve the beauty of Art Deco spaces from the whitewashing of progress. Leah leaned into my shoulder, smiled, and reminded me, "No, I hadn't joined the chorus yet."
I thought back to the spiderweb of lights hanging outside my Venice hotel room, and the sparkling lights of Naples I'd seen from Vesuvius. Last week I'd tested my brother's new tech venture, a floatation tank experience wearing a VR apparatus. Weightless, I floated above Earth, stretching my eyes to see every detail of the mountains and deserts slowly rolling beneath me from the curved blue horizon. Tears rolling down my face, I got lost in a meditation on the intricate chaos of nature's self-creation. The scene changed to night and I saw the lights of civilization all over Europe, burning brightly, proudly, needlessly, wastefully. Then there was Italy, lit up like a Christmas ornament, the coast outlined with photons, and I saw the light as human warmth, a togetherness in the darkness. É bello stare insieme, illuminato.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I prayed for the world to come back into balance.
Then somewhere on the dock behind me, Fabio coughed.
