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“You see, I’d like each room to be painted in an almost imperceptibly descending tint of terracotta.” I’d spilled a sackful of color chips onto the floor. “And the dining room, I would like it to be in this clear, bright sort of primary red,” I continued, brandishing a swatch of damask.
    â€œRed, really red, like your lipstick?” asked one of them incredulously.
    â€œAh, that’s exactly it. Lipstick red,” I smiled in perfect satisfaction at his quick comprehension. Besides, what’s so odd about red? Red is earth and stone and sunset and barns and schoolhouses, and certainly red can be the walls of a little candlelit room where people sit down together to supper.
    â€œIt will take six, maybe eight coats to get an even coverage witha color that dark, ma’am,” warned another. “It’s gonna make the space feel smaller, closed-in,” he said.
    â€œYes, the space will be warm, inviting,” I said as though we were in agreement.
    I remembered going to visit the painters during their work, bringing them cold tea and the first fat ripe cherries still warm from Sophie’s tree. And when the opus was finished and nearly every one of the workers, all of them spiffed and scented, came to the house-warming, it was the painting squad who photographed the rooms from a hundred angles, two of them coming back again and again to shoot the spaces in changing light. The sweet little house, made with so much love, had, after all, been an obsession, short-lived. All I wished for now was to be free of it, to leave it fast behind me, to go and live in a house I’d never seen, a place Fernando wincingly described as “a very small apartment in a postwar condominium that needs a lot of work.”
    â€œWhat sort of work?” I’d asked brightly. “Paint and furniture? New drapes?”
    â€œMore precisely, there are many things to put in order.” I waited. He proceeded, “Nothing much has been done since its construction in the early fifties. My father owned it as a rental property. I inherited it from him.”
    I skewed my imaginings toward the grotesque, hoping to avoidlater delusion. I pictured small-windowed square rooms, lots of Milanese plastic, mint green and flamingo pink paint peeling everywhere. Weren’t those the colors of postwar Italy? It would have been nice if he’d told me he lived in a third-floor, frescoed flat in a Gothic palazzo that looked over the Grand Canal or, perhaps, in the former atelier of Tintoretto, where the light would be splendid. But he didn’t. It wasn’t for Fernando’s house that I was going to Venice.
    I missed him desperately, even sniffed about for some remnant of his cigarette smoke. As I walked through the living room I could see him there, his Peter Sellers grin, arms folded at the elbows inward toward his chest, fingers beckoning me. “Come here to dance with me,” he’d say, as his newly acquired, enormously esteemed Roy Orbison disk sobbed through the stereo. I would always lay down my book or my pen, and we would dance. I want to dance now, barefoot, shaking in the cold. How I want to dance with him. I remember the people waltzing in Piazza San Marco. Was I really going to live there? Was I really going to marry Fernando?
    Terror, illness, deceit, delusion, marriage, divorce, loneliness had all come to visit early enough in my life, interfering with the peace. Some of the demons just passed through, while others of them pitched tents outside my back door. And they stayed. One by one they went away, each leaving some impression of the visit that made me stronger, better. I’m thankful the gods were impatient with me,that they never waited until I was thirty or fifty or seventy-seven, that they’d had the grace to throw down the gauntlets when I was so young. Gauntlets are the stuff of every life, but when you learn, young, how to pick them up, how to work