In Italy

In the first place, it was the wrong time. It was June, and starting in April, Venice is jammed. Petrarch, in his letters, described the Piazza San Marco as so crowded that if you dropped a grain of millet there it would never reach the pavement. The first time I went to Venice was in July, a disaster - nothing more than a glimpse of the city called La Serenissima. But the next time it was December. Then, I was just married. We stayed at the Hotel La Fenice and heard singers practising at the opera house through the window, which let in a tongue of cold.

In the second place, I did not want to go at all. My life had come to seem like a series of extravagances punctuated by episodes of extreme austerity. Over the past months, I had given my heart away to someone who immediately lost it, taken it back from someone who loved me, and set if off like a top in another direction and watched it teeter crazily. These things happened almost at once. The result was that I was going to Venice alone. I think I had known I would all along. The ostensible reason was to write a story for a magazine. The magazine ran a column in which writers wrote about a city they knew. This suited me, as I rarely go to new places but instead retrace my steps, looking for breadcrumbs I left long ago that were since eaten by birds. Venice was not on the list of cities and towns that others had chosen: Istanbul, Port-au-Prince, Reykjavík, Santa Monica. I could say anything I liked in one to two thousand words.

In any case, I had been thinking about going to Venice all winter. It was as if something I had lost, or was looking for, was there. I had just published a book about a life that now seemed like a long dream, in which a family of children grew up in a tall draughty house in an impractical neighbourhood, in which I often seemed to be addressing the tasks of daily life by trying to start a fire with two sticks. But now it was a few years later and my heart spun - often on evenings when it was meant to be elsewhere - inside an apartment vestibule above Seventy-Eighth Street, watching itself flash in the mirror, a little Carnevale. Six months before, I had fallen in love with an old friend, an acquaintance, really, a friend of friends, who sometimes had come to dinner with a woman to whom he was or wasn't married, with whom he did or did not live. There was no end to the complications. Soon, a voice said, this will be over: you will not be able to walk on Seventy-Eighth Street. It will be a route on the ghost map of your heart. You will invent circuitous ways to the park, to the subway. You like to pretend that your heart is a top you can spin here and there, wherever you like, but it traces its old routes like a bored child with a pencil! Andiamo, said the voice in my head.

I had begun writing a long letter explaining myself to the man with whom I was inconveniently enamoured, who helped me take off my coat when I rang the bell to his apartment at all hours, whose face was like a portrait by Bronzino. Together, then, we characterised our affair as 'a hole in the head' (although he is Italian and was brought up in Italy, his mother was an American, and as a child he had heard the same locutions as I had). The letter, I thought to myself, might be a book. Then an invitation came, serendipitously, to a party in Venice. I decided to go. I would go to the party, and I would write the story. But when it came to it, and the ticket was bought, I panicked.

Everything about it was wrong. I was jittery in fits and starts. I had too much work to do, and I couldn't leave my youngest child; we lived alone now like two cats in the tall draughty house. I had only recently wrested my heart from the long dream: the smiling faces around the table, the family jokes everyone had thought were funny and now were not, because the helium balloon which levitated them and filled them with hectic air had faltered and landed in a grove of spiky trees. 'Meow,' said my youngest daughter when we met on the landings. There were other complications. I had stopped speaking to someone I loved, to whom I had spoken most days on the telephone for huge swathes of my life. To someone else who loved me better than I deserved, I had gone on speaking but now said nothing because my heart was elsewhere. I could not go to La Serenissima when I was not serene, when I was afraid of the telephone, of putting two words together in any language.

All winter, I had had a catch in my throat. Once a week, I went downtown to a shabby brick building painted pale green and talked about panic. Now it was June and uptown, at the house, the honeysuckle straggled up from the garden and in through the dining-room window. Why was I going to Venice, the city where one is lost at any time of the day, winter or summer? Una città impossibile e incongruenze? I had a set-to with Bronzino, threatening to leave him because it was the last thing I wanted to do. I began to call a spade a spade. What I wanted was for him to come with me. I sent him the invitation to the party, and he sent a note back: Un'altra cosa che non possiamo fare insieme. Another thing we cannot do together. I was unreasonably hurt by this.

The weekend before I went to Venice, I drove up to the country with the eighty-five-year-old mother of a friend, a huge silver poodle, and two little girls, one of them mine. The city was so hot when we left that the girls wanted to try frying eggs on Lexington Avenue. In the car, my friend's mother picked over a newspaper story about the wedding of a granddaughter of a dear friend, recently dead: 'Belinda is turning over in her grave,' she said. 'We are living during the death of privacy.' The girls piped up from the back seat, where the poodle was panting under their bare feet. 'Was Sophie's grandma called "Privacy"? Like Prudence, or Hope?' We brought water bottles in the car, but by the time we remembered them, they were as hot as bottles you put between the sheets in winter.

It was cool in the brick house in the evening when we arrived, and in the morning, dew wet the lawn. It was hot by midday, and I sat in a chaise by the pool wearing an ancient two-piece swimsuit, splotched white and brown, which my children call 'the giraffe suit', and fell asleep reading the first pages of The Ambassadors, in which Lambert Strether arrives in Paris to disconnect Chad Newsome from the supple clutches of Madame de Vionnet. When I awoke, two hours later, my skin was taut and hot to the touch. The last time I had been sunburned to this extent was on a July day when I was eighteen, fishing for blue marlin in the Chesapeake on a boat that belonged to the uncle of my first college boyfriend, and was laughed at by his mother, a wizened gnome of a woman who smoked Parliaments, spoke French to her children, and had graduated from Radcliffe in 1953. The truth of the matter was that I had planned this sunburn: I knew that after the weekend and before I left for Italy, Bronzino would unbutton my dress and see the burn, and I wanted evidence that I spent time apart from him in which things happened.

Although the time I spent apart from him - which was a great deal, as he was often occupied elsewhere - seemed to me a trance, in which I went about my days as he thought of me, an incoherent, disorderly person given to mad outbursts, wearing odd, expensive clothes, who could not catch her breath. I liked the trance. It suited me, the desolation I hushed as one would a cranky child. Before supper, the girls brought us ices that they had made themselves, with lemonade and mint, which dripped everywhere. Later, I talked for a long time to my friend's mother, drinking gin, until for a minute I cannot recapture it was made clear to me what I should do next.

But, like many things light-heartedly planned by a mad person, the sunburn turned out to be much worse than I had imagined. I was up at night with a fever, which ended with my lying in cool water in the not especially scrubbed bathtub, leaning my forehead against the wall because the porcelain tiles were cool, reading old Vanity Fairs and, when they ran out, the first couple chapters of To Kill a Mockingbird. I had always liked the description of Scout eating bread and sugar, and learning the alphabet. I liked the idea of being in the care of someone like Calpurnia, who gave you a hiding. That, I thought, was what I needed. The book, a paperback, was so old that it seemed too old to be a paperback; the browning pages came off in tiny pieces, like dried beetle wings. The little girls were sleeping downstairs, and although I thought it over, I knew that through every fault of my own there was no one I could, or should, call to say how sick I was. 'What in Sam Hill are you doing?' Scout asks her brother, Jem. What in Sam Hill was I doing?

In maps of the brain, the central cortex is shaped like Venice. The amygdala, the locus of emotion and fear, is the quarter of the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo; the hippocampus, the site of long- and short-term memory, is the entry into Venice via the Grand Canal; the cerebellum, which regulates balance, the lagoon bordered by the Lido; the hypothalamus, which controls circadian rhythms, the Piazza San Marco. That first summer I came to Venice, I was nineteen. I was with a boy I thought I might marry, and we sat on the steps...