Bridge of Sighs

photo taken, filled out my application at the post office and mailed all the necessary documents to the State Department, all under the watchful eye of my wife and son, who seem to believe that my lifelong aversion to travel might actually cause me to sabotage our plans. Owen in particular sustains this unkind view of his father, as if I’d deny his mother anything, after all she’s been through. “Watch him, Ma,” he advises, narrowing his eyes at me in what I hope is mock suspicion. “You know how he is.”
    Italy. We will go to Italy. Rome, then Florence, and finally Venice.
    No sooner did I agree than we were marooned in a sea of guidebooks that my wife now studies like a madwoman. “
Aqua alta,
” she said last night after she’d finally turned off the light, her voice near and intimate in the dark. She found my hand and gave it a squeeze under the covers. “In Venice there’s something called
aqua alta.
High water.”
    “How high?” I said.
    “The
calle
s flood.”
    “What’s a
calle
?”
    “If you’d do some reading, you’d know that streets in Italy are called
calle
s.”
    “How many of us need to know that?” I asked her. “You’re going to be there, right? I’m not going alone, am I?”
    “When the
aqua alta
is bad, all of St. Mark’s is underwater.”
    “The whole church?” I said. “How tall is it?”
    She sighed loudly. “St. Mark’s isn’t a church. It’s a plaza. The plaza of San Marco. Do you need me to explain what a plaza is?”
    Actually, I’d known that
calle
s were streets and hadn’t really needed an explanation of
aqua alta
either. But my militant ignorance on the subject of all things Italian has quickly become a game between us, one we both enjoy.
    “We may need boots,” my wife ventured.
    “We have boots.”
    “Rubber boots.
Aqua alta
boots. They sound a siren.”
    “If you don’t have the right boots, they sound a siren?”
    She gave me a swift kick under the covers. “To warn you. That the high water’s coming. So you’ll wear your boots.”
    “Who lives like this?”
    “Venetians.”
    “Maybe I’ll just sit in the car and wait for the water to recede.”
    Another kick. “No cars.”
    “Right. No cars.”
    “Lou?”
    “No cars,” I repeated. “Got it.
Calle
s where the streets should be. No cars in the
calle
s, though, not one.”
    “We haven’t heard back from Bobby.”
    Our old friend. Our third musketeer from senior year of high school. Long, long gone from us. She didn’t have to tell me we hadn’t heard back. “Maybe he’s moved. Maybe he doesn’t live in Venice anymore.”
    “Maybe he’d rather not see us.”
    “Why? Why would he not want to see us?”
    I could feel my wife shrug in the dark, and feel our sense of play running aground. “How’s your story coming?”
    “Good,” I told her. “I’ve been born already. A chronological approach is best, don’t you think?”
    “I thought you were writing a history of Thomaston,” she said.
    “Thomaston’s in it, but so am I.”
    “How about me?” she said, taking my hand again.
    “Not yet. I’m still just a baby. You’re still downstate. Out of sight, out of mind.”
    “You could lie. You could say I lived next door. That way we’d always be together.” Playful again, now.
    “I’ll think about it,” I said. “But the people who actually lived next door are the problem. I’d have to evict them.”
    “I wouldn’t want you to do that.”
    “It is tempting to lie, though,” I admitted.
    “About what?” She yawned, and I knew she’d be asleep and snoring peacefully in another minute or two.
    “Everything.”
    “Lou?”
    “What.”
    “Promise me you won’t let it become an obsession.”
    It’s true. I’m prone to obsession. “It won’t be,” I promised her.
    But I’m not the only reason my wife is on guard against obsession. Her father, who taught English at the high school, spent his summers writing a novel that by the end had swollen to more than a thousand single-spaced pages and still with no end in sight. I myself am drawn to shorter narratives. Of late, obituaries. It troubles my wife that I read them with my morning coffee, going directly to that section of the newspaper, but turning sixty does that, does it not? Death isn’t an obsession, just a reality. Last month I read of the death—in yet another car accident—of a man whose life had been intertwined with mine since we were boys. I slipped it into the envelope that contained my