Bridge of Sighs

you should divorce,” he suggested.
    Lichtner polished off his Campari with a sneer. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”
    “Actually,” Noonan said, summoning as much sincerity as he could muster, “I don’t care one way or the other. Leave or stay. Divorce or stay married. Do what makes you least miserable.”
    “I never said I was miserable,” Lichtner replied, his back up now.
    “I’m sorry, I thought you did.”
    “Maybe right this second,” he conceded miserably. “But Eve and I have weathered worse than you. Far worse.”
    “You aren’t going to tell me about it, I hope.”
    “And it’s not like I’ve been a hundred percent faithful to her,” he added proudly.
    “What percentage would you estimate?”
    Lichtner ignored this. “I’ve never screwed the wife of a friend, though. That’s where I draw the line.”
    “We’re friends, you and I?” Noonan said.
    “We’re not?”
    It was amazing to watch a man so all over the emotional map, each new feeling at war with the preceding as well as the subsequent, each important without being satisfying, sustainable or, for that matter, even reliable. Noonan couldn’t be sure whether he was observing a person or a condition common to men their age. “It hadn’t occurred to me, I guess,” Noonan said. Not that it would have mattered.
    “That day in church, you broke my heart, Noonan. I felt really close to you then.”
    “How close
were
you? How many pews?”
    Lichtner shrugged, looking pitiful. “Hey, you don’t want to be friends? Nobody’s forcing you.”
    When the waiter came by, Noonan shook his head. A second drink would reinforce Lichtner’s notion that they were friends, something he was determined to avoid. The other man took out some money. “I’m sorry I punched you,” he said.
    “Me, too,” Noonan said. It still felt like the other man’s fist was trapped in his chest.
    “You’re sorry you screwed my wife, or you’re sorry I punched you?”
    Just sorry, Noonan thought, no more able to pin it down now than he’d been earlier with Evangeline. Did you get credit for being sorry if you couldn’t explain what you were sorry about? Noonan had spent enough time in catechism as a kid to doubt it. There you learned to diagram sins like sentences, and unless you could explain what you’d done wrong and why, forgiveness was withheld.
    The students were still chanting when they rose to leave.
“Dottore! Dottore!”
they shouted. “Fuck yourself! Fuck yourself!” A girl dressed like a wood nymph chugged her flagon of beer, then set it down triumphantly. Nearby, the penis who’d been chugging when they entered was now slumped forward in his chair, flaccid.
    Outside in the
campo,
Lichtner looked like he might cry. “I can’t go home.”
    “Sure you can,” Noonan said. He’d gone out for a drink with a man who’d just bushwhacked him because it seemed like the decent thing to do, but enough was enough. “Just don’t punch Evangeline, because then you
will
be sorry. That I can pretty much guarantee.”
    “The thing is, I’m not supposed to be here. In Venice. My plane doesn’t land until morning. How about letting me crash on your sofa? It’s really the least you can do, if you think about it.”
    Noonan did think about it, and arrived at the opposite conclusion. Still. “How come you don’t have a suitcase?”
    “It’s in a locker at the Ferrovia.”
    “Go get it, if you want. I’ll leave the door unlocked.”
    “Yeah, right,” Lichtner said. “Like I can trust you.”

IKEY’S
     
    I ’M UPSTAIRS working in my study when I hear water running outside and realize Owen must be drawing water. And over at the window I see I’m right. My son is down on his knees, surrounded by gallon plastic milk jugs. (How appalled my father would’ve been by those!) His hair is thinning, as my father’s did in that same spot on his crown, and so, of course, has mine. Owen is filling one of the plastic jugs at our outside spigot. When it overflows, he sets it down, screws the plastic cap on tight and places another under the stream. He’s quick and efficient in his motions but doesn’t bother to turn the water off between jugs, so the knees of his pants are soaked. I count seven one-gallon containers, a week’s worth of water for drinking and making coffee and cooking spaghetti and potatoes or whatever.
    He and Brindy, his wife, live just over the town line in a tidy, modest house not far from Whitcombe Park.