Read Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice for Free Online Page B

but a real one is another matter…I’m afraid I’ll fall in love with you and all will be lost.”
    So I said to salve his ego, but in reality I was not only through with love but through with sex. Life was so much simpler without it. My head was so much clearer. And I could concentrate on my work. At night I went to bed with volumes of Shakespeare ranged around my pillow and no lover to jealously kick them onto the floor. I cherished my solitude, my books, my maidenly envelope of cool, clean sheets, my guardian white roses. What could Grigory Krylov offer me but thorns?
    I had not come to this delight in solitude and chastity easily, as you might imagine. I had lived much of my life for love—with results as predictable as they are common: heartbreak, yearning, drinking too much, and stoical decisions never to love again, no sooner made than broken. But this time I was not merely determined but indifferent. Love was my addiction and I was weaning myself away from it one day at a time. Oh, it was safe enough to sleep with Shakespeare—or so I thought at the beginning of my stay in Venice.
    The night Björn’s Don Giovanni was to be presented (with or without Björn) was the night of the Red Cross Gala, when Le Tout Venise came across the lagoon dressed in their best glitter—the ladies in Valentinos, Krizias, Givenchys, Yves St. Laurents; the gentlemen perfectly dressed by those elderly private tailors who still can be found (if not in great abundance) in Italy.
    I had bought a black Zandra Rhodes ball gown in London, with great leg-of-mutton Victorian sleeves (Princess Di’s virgin wedding and Victorian wedding gown had inaugurated a whole new Victorian age—it seemed), and I was looking forward to wearing it to the gala. It was being lovingly pressed by a sweet little laundress at the hotel who had seen my films and who even kindly offered to resew some of the fallen paillettes and black pearls “in honor of my art,” she said—a term that sounds less soppy in Italian. Onore dell’arte— a thing still known in Italy, though less and less as the American tyranny of the bottom line takes over even here.
    The last afternoon screening had finished rather earlier than usual that day, and the Red Cross Gala was due to begin only at eight-thirty or nine. So while my glorious Zandra Rhodes was being pressed, I betook myself to the bar to order a cappuccino in a quiet corner—an act of courage, really, since I might be besieged there.
    I found a little round table in a sort of nook that overlooked the sea, and positioned myself so that I faced away from the bar and toward a plate-glass window that gave out on a terrazzo usually teeming with paparazzi and autograph-collecting bambini , but at this moment empty because of the odd hour. Everyone was either eating or getting sloshed at private happy hours in bars, press suites, or hotel room rendezvous.
    I sipped my cappuccino contentedly, savoring the sweet foam. If only we could live for the little moments that linger only fleetingly on the taste buds, I thought, life could be so fulfilling. The trouble is: we want too much. Grand passions, great historical movements, the need to possess things, people, houses. Sometimes, I think that I have always been happiest in transit—in rented houses, or while flying from one place to another. I know that I have been happiest between marriages—when all was possibility untapped and nothing was nailed down, when tomorrow the prince of princes, the poet of poets, the lover of all time, might walk through the door and lift my life to paradise.
    With this thought, I laughed aloud at myself over my cappuccino. Imagine having such a romantic notion while claiming to be the arch antiromantic of all time. And yet the two are very close, aren’t they? Romanticism and antiromanticism, flip sides of the same coin? Though I had been married and married, my heart always leapt in