Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (3 page)

Pretty standard stuff, really. They'd had an affair, she became pregnant, raised the kid on her own. Morison had pitched in with some money but continued his life as a globally successful artist, painting his pictures and porking whichever model or studio assistant took his fancy, the most recent of whom was only a couple of years older than his daughter, who was twenty-two and had her first record coming out (with cover art by her famous dad). Niki had
already been interviewed by
Vogue
but a ‘rare’ interview with the ‘reclusive’ mum and a never-before-seen picture constituted some kind of scoop. All of this had to be arranged in person, by Jeff, because, rather quaintly, Julia Berman didn't do email. (As Max Grayson, his editor at
Kulchur
, had said, ‘You're there anyway and it's such a simple assignment even you can't fuck it up.’) She was in her mid-fifties now; there were rumours – and had been for years – of a forthcoming, unghosted memoir. Jeff was to find out about that as well, if possible.

In her day Julia had been famously beautiful, a sex symbol, as they used to say. A nostalgic glamour still attached to her even though there's actually nothing more tragic than these old howlers having to trade on looks that have given way years ago. Jeff had interviewed another of these crumbling beauties, on stage, as part of the Brighton Festival. What a fright! Smoking cigarettes, working through her gravel-voiced repertoire of classic anecdotes – the night she was on acid when Hendrix puked in her fireplace!; the time she asked George Best what he did for a living! – while the audience listened politely, united by a single unspoken thought: ugh! She didn't even have a memoir to promote. All she was publicizing was the astonishing fact of her continued existence. Pathetic. So what did that make Atman? Infinitely more pathetic, obviously, since his job was to provide cue lines for her greatest anecdotes, a gig for which he received travelling expenses and four complimentary drinks tickets. However much he despised other people, when he did the math and added things up, Atman always found himself more despicable still. Especially since he'd asked if he could interview another of the guests at the festival, Lorrie Moore, a writer he'd never met but whose work he loved – and was told that, unfortunately, that slot was already taken by someone else. The lesson was that he
was good for tittle-tattle but unsuited for anything serious; more
FHM
than
TLS.
As often happened the act of reading had sent him off on an inner rumble of discontent. He flicked further through the press cuttings and lingered on pictures of Julia taken by – he had to check the caption – none other than David Bailey. No doubt about it, she had been sensationally gorgeous. Slinky as a panther, with outsize purple bangles round her wrists and what used to be called bedroom eyes. No one had bedroom eyes any more (the phrase was almost as obsolete as ‘a well-turned ankle’); they'd been rendered obsolete by the bedroom asses and bedroom thongs of the
Loaded
and Internet era. Jeff had no idea what she looked like now. She had not been photographed for years – hence the last and most despicable part of his assignment: he was meant somehow to sneak an intimate picture of her. So, on top of everything else, he was supposed to be a pap without the advantages of a telephoto lens, just his own little digital camera with its 4x optical zoom. The biggest joke of all – the thing that made him more depressed than anything – was that at a certain level he was considered successful. People envied his getting assignments like this. One of the people who envied his getting assignments like these was Jeff. He bitched and griped but he would have bitched and griped even more if he'd heard that some other hack had got this junket instead. The writing – a so-called ‘colour piece’ – was a bore, going to see this old has-been in her rented palazzo was a drag, but Venice for the Biennale – that was fun, that was unmissable.

He crammed the cuttings back into his folder, read more of
Venice Observed
, dozed, and was woken by the captain announcing that they were about to begin their descent into Venice Treviso. Nothing very noteworthy about that; but when he went on to announce the temperature in Venice – thirty-six degrees – a gasp of astonishment swept through the plane.
Thirty-six degrees, that was – what? – ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit? That was
hot!

Everyone assumed some kind of mistake had been made but as soon as they stepped onto the vibrating ladder down to the tarmac they realized how mistaken they'd been. It was like arriving in Jamaica in the middle of a heatwave. The heat immediately generated a kind of hysteria – a mixture of happiness and dread – among the British passengers. This was not what they had counted on. Some people on the plane must have received texts or calls from friends who'd arrived earlier, saying it was hot but this was … Jesus, this was
hot!
The heat bounced off the tarmac. The air was rippling and roasting. It was difficult to imagine anywhere hotter on earth. Cairo couldn't have been as hot as this.

As expected, Venice Treviso was nowhere near Venice – which made Jeff even more pleased to be one of the first people through immigration. He was ahead of the game, had stolen a march, was ready to go. Except getting his bags onto the plane turned out to have been a completely pointless bit of cunning. There was a bus waiting outside but it had been chartered specifically for their flight and would not depart until everyone had picked up their bags, cleared customs and boarded. He ended up spending a sweat-soaked hour pacing an arrivals lounge the size of a converted garden shed and the temperature of a sauna, before the bus, crammed with Biennale-goers, was ready to begin its crawl towards the city the plane had, nominally, flown into. Jeff was sat next to a red-haired woman he recognized but whose name he couldn't quite remember, a curator from the Barbican, who prodded her BlackBerry for the entire length of the journey. For reasons that were unclear even to him Jeff did not own a mobile phone, let alone a BlackBerry – which meant that he spent increasing chunks of his life in a state of suspended non-existence while
other people took calls, checked messages and sent texts. It was impossible to read on the coach and there was nothing to see from the window. He had been longing for the flight to be over; now he was longing for the bus ride to be over. At what point would the longing for things to be over be over so that he could reside squarely in the present?

Not, it turned out, when the bus journey ended because he then had to struggle through the coach-crowded bus terminal, with his bags, in the baking heat. It was like being in the Italian version of an oily, hugely demoralizing art installation called
This Vehicle Is Reversing.
Once he got on a vaporetto at Piazzale Roma, though, he was in Venice proper. What fun it was, going everywhere by boat – even though the boat turned out to be as crowded as a rush-hour Tube in London. The difference was that this Tube was chugging down the Grand Canal, through the miracle of Venice at dusk! Venice in the grip of an insane heatwave! Venice the city that never disappointed and never surprised, the place that was exactly like it was meant to be (just hotter), exactly synonymous with every tourist's first impression of it. There was no real Venice: the real Venice was – and had always been – the Venice of postcards, photographs and films. Hardly a novel observation, that. It was what everyone always said, including Mary McCarthy. Except she'd taken it a stage further and said that the thing about Venice was that it was impossible to say anything about Venice that had not been said before,
‘including this statement.’
Still, there was always the shock that such a place did actually exist, not just in books and pictures, but in real life, with all the accoutrements of Venice-ness crammed together: canals, palazzos, gondoliers, vaporetti and everything. A city built on water. What an impractical but wonderful idea. Jeff had read several accounts of how the city came to be built but it still didn't make sense. Better to think that it
just appeared like this, fully formed and hundreds of years old in the instant it was founded.

It was almost dark by the time he squeezed out of the vaporetto at Salute, the stop for his hotel (a five-minute walk, he'd been told), which turned out to be nowhere near the hotel – or at least the hotel, if it was nearby, was completely unfindable from this stop. If it hadn't been for the heat and the weight of the bags and a steadily mounting pressure in his bladder it would have been nice strolling around the neighbourhood, but the heat and the bags stopped it being a nice stroll and turned it into an exhausting yomp in a hundred-degree heat. Losing his bearings in the labyrinth of alleys, narrow waterways, bridges and little squares that all looked so much like each other, the five-minute walk took twenty minutes. The hotel, when he finally stumbled on it, was nowhere near where it was supposed to be and, at the same time, exactly where it was meant to be. Jeff produced his passport while the desk-clerk remarked on the incredible eat – eat that the bell-hop sought to counter by bringing, on a glinting silver tray, a glass of water so cold it made his teeth ache like metal.

What a relief to finally get into his pleasingly over-priced room (booked and paid for by
Kulchur
magazine). It was on the top floor and had a view of sorts – not of the lagoon or the Grand Canal, but of the roofs of buildings like the one he was looking out from. What a relief, too, that it was decorated in minimalist, boutique fashion – white sheets, blonde wood – not decked out in the rococo style of most Venetian rooms.
What a relief!
It was one of those phrases that buzzed around his head constantly, phrases that in music would have constituted the themes or motifs that wove in and out of a symphony, fading, disappearing for long intervals, but always eventually returning.

In the way of boutique hotels – and was there a decent
hotel in the world that did not designate itself boutique? – various books had been arranged in aesthetically-pleasing spots around the room. Naturally, they were all about Venice. The room was nicely air-conditioned, not something that he normally needed or used, but in these circumstances some kind of respite from the killing heat – the eat, as he now thought of it – was essential. Unfortunately, he was late for the dinner he was supposed to go to. It had been organized by
Modern Painters
magazine and though it was usually a good idea to avoid these big sit-down dinners – they ate into one's evenings – this had seemed a perfect way of easing into the Biennale. Well, nothing to be done about that. If he went now he'd only be in time for dessert and would be unable to make the quick getaway he was counting on in order to go to the Iceland party (a much sought-after invite: Björk was going to be there, might even be DJing) near the Campo Manin. He called the editor on her cellphone, left a message, apologized, blamed the plane, the bus, the time difference. He stripped, showered, put on a fresh shirt, underwear and socks, left the hotel and ate quickly on his own – dreary salad, bread that might once have been fresh, home-made ravioli – at the trattoria a couple of doors away.

The concierge had assured him that if he took a vaporetto one stop, across the Canal to Santa Maria di Giglio, Campo Manin would be only a short walk after that. And, amazingly, he was right. Jeff found the palazzo easily, arrived at the perfect time, just as the party was filling up. There was the thump of decent-sounding music from inside but, with temperatures still in the eighties, everyone was outside in the courtyard. He took a bellini from a waiter – his first of the Biennale, the first, in all probability, of very many – and drained it in a couple of gulps. Always awkward, arriving at these big parties, before you see people you know, so he traded
the empty glass for a full one, the last of its kind on the tray. He'd almost guzzled that as well when he spotted Jessica Marchant, wearing a kind of Bridget Riley Op Art blouse. They clinked glasses. Jeff complimented her on the blouse and congratulated her on the novel she'd published a couple of months previously. Half the people Jeff knew had written books, most of which he'd not even attempted to read. The majority of the ones he
had
started he'd not had the patience to finish but he'd whizzed through Jessica's in a state of constantly increasing admiration. It seemed a good omen, that the first person he'd encountered in Venice was someone on whom he could lavish praise. The problem was that doing so made Jessica look so distinctly uncomfortable – had he been too fawning? – that she immediately turned the tables, asking him about his long-awaited book.

‘I was hoping everyone had forgotten about that. Including the publishers. I just never did it.’ This was every bit as honest as his admiration for Jessica. Write journalism for long enough and a publisher will eventually suspect that some article that you've written contains the seed of a possible book. A letter forwarded by
Esquire
had led to a phone call, which had led to a lunch, which had led to a contract to write a book on … He pushed the thought from his mind. Even back then he'd had no desire to write such a book but had hoped that the contract and advance – minuscule though it was – would impel him to do so. And it had. For about a month. There then followed six months of fretting before he more or less abandoned the book and went back to writing nonsense for magazines. When he heard that his editor was leaving, Jeff congratulated himself on having, effectively, gained a small amount of money for nothing. Except for a brief call from his editor's replacement, no one at the publishers seemed to expect anything from him. And he'd not even had to pay back
the advance. Perfect. The only mistake he'd made, in that first flush of enthusiasm, was to tell people he was doing the book. Hence the current conversation. He explained that he had given up, abandoned it.

‘I don't blame you,’ Jessica said. ‘It's hell writing a book.’ So many people ended up, inadvertently or deliberately, making you feel bad about yourself (many people thought Jeff was one of those people) but Jessica always made you feel OK, normal. It was as if she had put her arm round him and said that they were in the same boat.