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  Liz said the purse was good quality, that she would have chosen a similar purse. Was it expensive? she asked.

  The funicular went up. Now you could see the lay of the country out beyond the lakes. The high country stepped down and spread out to the plain of Milan.

  I just put it on the counter, Hugh said. When you get to be my age, you don’t ask how much things cost or anything. You put it on the counter and pay what they ask you to pay.

  At the end of the line, we climbed out onto a wooden platform and walked toward the top of the Mottarone. At 1,500 meters the air was thin enough that we breathed heavily and didn’t say much. Hugh carried his purse. Liz held my arm. We rose up slowly. Atop the Mottarone, we saw the snowcapped peaks of Switzerland, where I would go when Liz left, I decided then. One could always escape to Switzerland, its neutrality. The map showed an imaginary line that zigzagged across the mountains and through the lake. This line separated the two countries. There was an obelisk at the peak with a brass plaque engraved in Italian. Liz asked Hugh what the plaque said.

  It reads, Happy 4th of July, he said, grinning. We had forgotten all about the American holiday. To celebrate, we agreed to have dinner, up high, at the chalet near the terminus of the funicular.

  We sat inside near a window with a big view of the lake. We drank an aperitif and talked a little shop. I almost always avoid such talks; they give me the sort of high-blood-pressure feeling I get from the store clerks. Liz asked Hugh why he was a photog and he responded that he photographed to find out what something would look like photographed. He was probably quoting someone. I agreed, though, that it was always a surprise, no matter what you saw through the little hole.

  Liz said people go through life mostly asleep, and in her photos she strove to shock them awake. Very nice, I said, photography as pig prod. I said her view was pornographic. She said my photos lacked a punctum—that which penetrates—that my work put people back to sleep. She was showing off her new vocabulary. I was sure glad Hugh was there. Shoptalk gave way to gossip soon enough when the food and wine came. Photographers are natural voyeurs, Liz said, during the meal. She finally asked Hugh the question I was afraid she would ask him.

  Are you gay, Hugh? Women can ask men that question, evidently. Liz and I were drinking plenty of wine and Hugh practically none. Since his divorce he didn’t drink much. One of the things that distinguished Hugh was that he was never glib. He pondered your questions and answered them all with equal earnestness. He didn’t seem surprised by Liz’s frank question.

  I was married thirty years, Hugh said. Then he paused for a while. He put a big hand in his hair, all gone to gray. I think I am sexless. What is the word, androgynous.

  The word was not androgynous, but who was I to say. The word was asexual, which is how I might have described Hugh, or perhaps un-sexual. I felt ashamed to think such of a man I hardly knew, and whom I liked. But it seemed right; he could have worn an old wives’ apron or a silk scarf and he would have been the same old Hugh.

  Liz surprised me, then, when she turned the question on me.

  No one has ever asked me that before, I said. I guess I don’t look the type, whatever the type is. I felt for the stem of my wine glass. I was speaking to Hugh. I said, since he mentioned it, I believed I had an androgynous childhood. Two overbearing older siblings. I was like a little girl. They did everything for me. But since I could remember I’ve always desired women. I’ve never imagined sleeping with a man.

  Liz broke in about how she slept with a woman when she was in college, just for the fresh perspective. Since then she only slept with men. She had been married too, before. Now, she only had lovers.

  You seem very sexual, Hugh told her.

  It was a mistake to get married, Liz said.

  If my marriage were a mistake, then my children would be mistakes, Hugh said. Poor little mistakes grown up to big ones now.

  It was getting dark. Out the window the lakefront towns lit up, and the little hamlets on the dark hillsides. The lake was all gone dark, no boats, but you could see its shady outline yawning beneath the glistening eyelets.

  Hugh looked at me. You’re a good-natured fellow, he said, grasping my shoulder.

  We rode the funicular back down the mountain. It was the last night. Liz and Hugh were to fly out in the morning. When we left him, late, Hugh walked home alone to his hotel, and we turned to walk to ours. I looked back. There went Hugh, slump-shouldered, lugubrious, his figure lost before long in the shadows.

  Back in the hotel room I didn’t have much choice. It was a long time coming, I guess. I wasn’t nice to her and she didn’t mind. She was randy as a goat, she said, after. I said, For Christ’s sake. She talked excitedly about it while I was falling asleep. She figured she had done me a favor, that it was good to sleep with your superior. Sex restored the power imbalance that encumbered true learning. In J-school she slept with her photography professor, she said. Yes, this was just what I needed, she was sure.

  Liz was always sure, when it came to me. It was probably that sureness that killed it.

  The Trattoria Inferno is empty, but my waiter’s working, and I know he’ll come to wait on me. I sit on the terrace in the shade of the grapevines, the same seat as last night. Someone else takes my drink order. I order a carafe of the vino bianco, aerified wine, somewhere near champagne. I don’t have to choose this wine. It is the house wine and I’ve had it before. Everything seems to be happening as if it were supposed to happen. All the discomfort from the shopping windows is gone. I sip the cool wine.

  Then he comes out. We both know what I’m doing there. I tell him, Buon giorno, and he hands me a menu. Please, he says. His eyes are lowered. He wears a silver chain on one wrist and a loose silver watch on the other. Please, he says, evidently his only English. He comes back in a moment with the bread. I order the penne al salmone, an easy choice, a type of salad. I try to work out the cost right so I can pay with a fifty-euro note. The meal should be less than thirty euros.

  Prego, he says when I order.

  Grazie, I say.

  He walks away. He is muscular, this young man. His black-and-white waiter’s uniform doesn’t conceal his build, but he is shy. He keeps his eyes lowered, as if this transaction required that. The lowered eyes become him, I catch myself noticing, and I am pleased with the quality of my noticing, so often lacking, especially without my camera. Without my little hole I am blue collar, merely pedestrian.

  I think now about Hugh. Large, ambitionless, androgynous Hugh. Old carp, he keeps rising in my consciousness. Certainly Hugh didn’t care, any longer, if the world saw itself through his aperture. But did this mean he didn’t care about himself, or that he didn’t care about the world? I’ve risen above my station, far enough. Liz, talentless younger woman, is my boss, my lover? My collar is white now, but I am at the bottom of my profession. I have somehow lost a sense of the genuine. More conference claptrap, perhaps, but something important has been eroded, to be sure. Liz is correct in that. I am thirty-eight years old and earn the same as I earned when I was thirty. The value of what I do lessens each year, though I do more work, perhaps better work. I cannot discern. This, perhaps, is the root. All potential is gone now. I am a known commodity. Either a thing grows or it is a dead thing, Liz, ambitious industrialist, says. I see myself in a dozen years: large, lugubrious, alone. So.

  I have often wondered how people come to realize, or even think that, perhaps, if it were to come to it, they might be gay. Now I begin to think I know. That’s not true. I’ve thought it before. But now the idea comes a little more in focus.

  Please, my waiter says, when I catch his attention to ask for more wine. I only want to watch him come and go. The whole of himself is developing with each trip to my table. He wears a white tank top under his white button-down. Surely he is conscious of his physique. He smiles easily, is shy, but eager to please. I will give him a very large tip.

  The dinner is fine. I am alone on the terrace and so occupy myself
solely with my food, and of course with thoughts of him. When one is traveling alone and there is time to kill, one can always safely eat. An American couple comes by along the sidewalk, and she asks me if I speak English. I shake my head. She continues in English anyway all the while gesturing and pointing.

  Restaurante? Il Punto? You know where is? Dove is Il Punto?

  No parlo Inglese, I say, enjoying my little fraud. My waiter comes out and smiles complicitly as he watches me. I wink at him. The couple leaves finally, and I am finished eating. I motion to my new friend and he comes carrying my bill on a small silver tray. Please, he says. He leaves it. I have done well. The dinner is twenty-six euros. I retrieve a fifty from my wallet and put it on the tray. I consider it. I realize it is up to me if anything else is to happen. It is a thrill to consider that something else might happen. Nothing else ever happens. But why shouldn’t it? Liz is gone. I have no obligation. I am a stranger here. It is that sense of being a stranger that makes me what I am. If any place to do this, it is here. And so I watch myself tear off a piece of the white napkin and write on the napkin, Hotel Splendide, 11 p.m. Please.

  With something to anticipate back in Stresa, I just want to get Switzerland done with. The ferry leaves at four and returns at nine. I sit up on the open top deck at first. The boat is very big, and the top deck so high up I can’t even feel the motion of the water. This is what a cruise ship must feel like. You can say you were out on the water without the discomforting feeling of the waves. Taking a cruise must be like looking at a photograph of a cruise.

  I go down and spend the rest of the outward trip on the deck with the crew near the water. Down here, the water sprays onto the deck. The boat must make passport checks at certain ports. The boat cruises into shore, and the crewmen stand ready to cast ropes to the dockhands. But if no carabinieri are on the dock, the crewmen just cast the heavy ropes into the water and pull them in. They call out to their friends on the docks. They seem happy to be crewmen. At the last Italian port the dockhand is a woman, and all the crewmen shout to her. Her name is Susie. It makes the men happy to see Susie and to shout Susie’s name. Susie is the highlight of their trip to Switzerland. The crewmen cast the ropes into the water and drag them back in, laughing and shouting.

  After the feigned passport check at Susie’s port, the ferry motors back out. We cross the imaginary line into Switzerland and dock at Brissago, a small village that was a smuggling port a century ago, though illicit activity has been replaced by tourism. A steward explains this in Italian over the loudspeaker. Most of it I don’t understand. My map shows a valley leading out of the town with a small road winding up into the Alps. We have fifteen minutes to potter about town, but I don’t feel like mixing with that crush of people, all randy to accumulate photographs. I go up to the upper deck and take out my Leica and portable tripod. The upper deck is empty. I shoot several delayed exposures of Switzerland: the green descent of the hills into the green water. One full second seems like a lifetime compared with one two-hundred-fiftieth.

  For the return, I have a table to myself, looking out over the lake. Out in the distance there are other boats, small craft artfully obscured by the fog. These must be the local fishermen, hauling their living from the evening lake. Most of the return trip is devoted to the meal. The food keeps coming in various small courses, and all the wine you can drink. Soon it is dark and the windows reflect only the dinner scene. The smartly dressed waiters bring food without your having to choose from a menu. They put the food in front of you and you eat the food. I am afraid each course will be the last, but there always seems to be another course after that.

  I don’t have time to get nervous about seeing my waiter, whether he will come or not, and what if he does. I keep busy, eating and drinking. My waiter. He smiled when I gave him the fifty and waived off his gesture to get change. Was the tip enough? Did he see the note? Probably he did. It is nice, anyway, not to be sure.

  The ferry docks back in Stresa. I disembark and walk up the cobbled street to my hotel, my one-star at the top of town. I take time to get ready. Because I am leaving in the morning, and because the room is so small, I pack. I leave my camera out on the small table by the bed. I walk back down to the Hotel Splendide on the water.

  This hotel has five stars. I didn’t know a hotel could have so many stars. Many famous people have evidently stayed here. There is a singer with a piano accompaniment. All the people are suited and tied. I hear one American exclaim to another that the big chandelier is Murano glass. I sit in the lounge and drink a brandy. I drink it very fast and order another. When I finish it, if he doesn’t show, I will leave. There is a big grandfather clock. I look at the big hands. It is nearly eleven and then it is eleven and then a little after eleven. I finish with the small brandy and get up to leave.

  He shows. I sit back down on the overstuffed sofa. The clock, and everything, disappears. He isn’t wearing his waiter’s uniform. He has on tight black jeans and a type of boot. His belt buckle is silver and seems very big. His shirt is silver, silk perhaps. It shines, anyway. Is it attractive? I’m not sure. Perhaps the outfit, as a composition, would be considered garish by someone who knew. Despite myself I focus on the belt buckle—the punctum. It arrests me. What do I have on? My usual attire. I have no imagination: khakis, a rumpled blue shirt. We sit together on the big sofa. We order a drink from the waiter, a lemon liqueur, local specialty, his suggestion.

  We sit for quite a while over the lemon drinks. From my vantage point, his body is backlit by the famous chandelier. In a photograph, I can’t help but think, the chandelier would be growing from his head. He catches me staring. He grasps my hand and returns my gaze, causing me to blush. Now we’re both uncomfortable, though neither of us moves. I wonder if he feels as if he owes me this, for the tip, the way I felt I owed him for saving my camera. Here we are, anyway. When we finish our drinks, he lets me pay. It occurs to me for the first time, oddly enough, that he is probably experienced at this sort of thing, my shy waiter.

  We walk up to my hotel, anyway, my suggestion. The light on the nighttime streets is attractive, but the streets stink now. All the freshness of the morning is gone. All the laundry has been hauled in and the shutters are shut tight.

  I can see he is disappointed this is my hotel. We tread up the dark steps and down the dark hall. In the room, though, there isn’t much else that can happen. It is a small room, spare, and the bed is a single bed. The toilet is down the hall, the sink is here. We can’t talk to each other. There is nowhere to sit but the bed. We stand there facing each other. We embrace, first, in the dark room. Not sure what to do, I try to kiss him. Then he turns the light on. I see his tongue come out and pass over his lip. A piercing on his tongue glints in the light. I can’t imagine anymore how he was as my waiter. He pushes me backward on the bed and turns me. I am a much bigger man than he, but he is stronger, and I let him handle me. The bed is next to the wall, more a workbench than a bed. The room is only thirty euros per night. What happens next, I don’t see. He works my khakis down. I hear him taking his belt off. A long time seems to pass as he does something back there. I feel the belt buckle cold against my thigh. The Leica sits poised on the nightstand.

  He fucks me. There is no other way to say it. It hurts me, very much, but I do experience pleasure. Everything that happens, happens from behind, so I don’t see any of it, which, strangely, I like. He holds me by the neck some of the time. We are noiseless. Before very long he is lying down hard on top of me, breathing into my ear. His breathing flattens. A picture of us both comes into my mind. A black-and-white I seem to recognize. Perhaps a Mapplethorpe. Hugh, were he here, might comment on the staging, the meanness of the sink, the degree of openness of the subject’s hand. But the punctum is in the interlocked bodies, too big for the bed. Liz said, casually, she would rather be fucked. So this is what it’s like.

  We make some half-hearted attempt at romance, but he is falling asleep. I’m glad he can’t speak English so he can’
t say anything to me about sharing his soul. You could say we cradled each other.

  Early in the morning and he is gone already. My camera, too, is gone, and the precious film. Did he take it, or did I give it to him? Lost and now lost again.

  On the ferry back to Varenna to catch my train to Milano, plane home, the boat passes right between the two islands, Isola Bella and Isola dei Pescatori. The locals joke that these two islands are the testicles of Stresa, though they’re placed more like ovaries. The water is like mercury, reflecting everything. On Isola Bella there is a grand villa where Napoleon and Josephine once stayed, and where Mussolini was held prisoner, captured trying to escape across the lake into Switzerland. One whole end of the island is given over to a formal garden with manicured lawns and clipped vegetation from every continent. White peacocks strut among the faux Roman sculpture lining the terraces.

  On Isola dei Pescatori, Fishermen’s Island, a line of colorful old dilapidated houses hunker over the lake, their façades reflecting back at them. This is the island for me. The houses look like old fisher wives, mending the fishing nets. The old fishermen, out late last night, must still be asleep. I recall then that I had wanted to be a fisherman. That was the idea, at one time. I would have a charter boat on one of the Great Lakes. I would know the lake to its depths, and I would take people out to the spots where the fish were—places that only I knew—and catch them all their limit of fish. As long as I produce the beautiful fish, my patrons do not question me. They revere me, my secret knowledge, and pay me for it. I think for a moment of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie . . . There are others, but I have been gone a long while. Which one had I wanted to be a fisherman on?

  Cubness

  I always believed that being a Cubs fan built strong character. It taught a person that if you try hard enough and long enough, you’ll still lose. And that’s the story of life.