THE M.S. DIANA SET OUT FROM THE PORT OF ROME, her destination Valetta. Powering south from Civitavecchia, she had stops planned in Sorrento and, on the coast of Sicily, Naxos, Siracusa and Porto Empedocle. Built in 1960, she had been newly refitted. The ship had a Bridge Deck, a Baltic Deck, a Mediterranean Deck, a Caribbean Deck and, just above the waterline, an Atlantic Deck. In the old days, under sail, the journey might have taken months; now the trip from Rome to Malta was scheduled for six days. In the old days, in the times of war, these waters had been treacherous; now it was late September, and a pleasure cruise.
The ship's manifest listed fifty-seven cabins and a passenger capacity of 108, not counting crew; it was 87.4 meters long and 13.2 meters wide. The M.S. Diana's decor had been conceived of in the Swedish mode; she was remodeled in Gothenburg, with-so the brochure claimed-stylistic influence from France. Her owner was American, her flag Liberian, her crew came from Croatia. Their names, it seemed to Lawrence, made a kind of music; they introduced themselves as Vinko, Darko, Marko, Ivo, Miho, Vlatka and Andrea. He tried to remember their names.
Three nights before, he had flown from Detroit and in the morning reached Rome. There he checked into the Grand Palace Hotel, on the Via Veneto, and willed himself to rest. Across the street was the American Embassy, fenced in and heavily guarded; up on the next corner loomed the Excelsior, and down the way was the Piazza Barberini, with its Bernini Fountain and cascade of loud cars. He was sixty-four years old, recovering from angioplasty, and his doctor had suggested that he take a trip.
"You're fine," he said. "You've done just fine." "I don't feel"-Lawrence hesitated-"ready, really."
"The risk of stenosis is just about over. It's a statistical possibility, of course-we should wait a year to be certain-but the risk is minimal. And I'm not suggesting you go somewhere very far away. Not, I mean, some third-world country or up the slopes of Everest ..."
"I'm not sure I'm up to it." "Depression," said his doctor, "is a common side effect. In men our age, in fact, it's damn near unavoidable. Why don't you take a cruise?"
He knew Tommy Einhorn well. They were neighbors in Ann Arbor, and they played tennis together, and he thought of Tommy as his friend as well as doctor; the advice was kindly meant. "I'm not the cruising type," said Lawrence.
"No?"
"All that forced gaiety. The Princess Line. Calisthenics up on deck, the samba by the swimming pool; whatever it is they insist that you do ..."
"No one's insisting on anything." Dr. Einhorn leaned back in his swivel chair and pressed his fingertips together. "It's only a suggestion. Let me repeat it: your heart's just fine. It's better now than it has been for years."
"Let's hope so," Lawrence said. "And these new Cypher stents are just the ticket." "Ticket?"
Einhorn laughed. "The ticket for the ticker, hey. Not bad. I must remember that."
SO HE HAD LOOKED FOR and then booked a trip to places it seemed safe to go, first stipulating that the cruise ship must be small. By "safe," Lawrence told the travel agent, he meant not so much safety from the threat of terror as somewhere where the medicine was adequate and from which, in case of trouble, he could leave. He signed up for travel insurance. The cruise itself had begun in Marseilles, with stops in Nice and Monaco, but he elected the single-week option and flew alone to Rome.
He had not been there in years. The airport, once so brightly new, seemed faded and shopworn, a little, and the train to the termine reeked. Years before, he had spent time in Italy, studying Renaissance architecture, and he ventured out to his old haunts-the Spanish Steps, the Borghese Gardens, the Campidoglio and back streets of Trastevere-with a kind of dutiful inclusiveness; to have been young in the Eternal City and to come there now again as an aging tourist was bittersweet at best. He felt not so much nostalgic as aggrieved.
The traffic had increased. The streets were clogged with Vespas, buses, taxis, and the air was rank. Lawrence monitored his breathing and waited for a telltale signal from his chest. It did not come. The Pantheon was ringed by motorcycles, and the Trevi Fountain-past which he could remember wandering at night, and where Anita Ekberg laved herself in La Dolce Vita, gown clinging wetly to her breasts-was now a photo op. Everywhere were groups of sightseers and, waving umbrellas or pennants, their guides.
His sleep was fitful, troubled, and the room too hot. He ate by himself, poorly, expensively, and the waiters addressed him in English. The elegant Italians and the girls in their scant dresses paid him no attention; only beggars waited for him, holding out their hands. The line in front of St. Peter's was so long and daunting that he did not revisit the cathedral or its chapel but walked by the Tiber instead.
For two days Lawrence wandered the streets. He tried to recapture his old rapt excitement, the fascination of the buildings and the beauty of the hills and the Colosseum and Forum. It did not work. What he focused on instead were pigeons and the dog scat in the paving; by the time he transferred to the M.S. Diana he was ready-more than willing-to escape.
THE PORT OF CIVITAVECCHIA bustled with tankers at anchor. Lined up by the dock itself were cruise ships in their pastel glory, towering confections like wedding cakes on water, with names emblazoned on their bows and smokestacks: Marco Polo, The Star Princess, Island Queen, The Attica Swan. Last and least of this procession was the M.S. Diana, and this pleased him; its scale was small, its aspect self-effacing, and the driver who delivered him extracted his bags from the trunk of the taxi with something very like pity. "Ecco, signore. Va bene?"
"Va ben," he said. "Mille grazie," and tipped the driver lavishly as if to prove a point.
At the gangplank they were waiting. A man in a white uniform saluted, and a blonde in slacks and sailor's cap said, "Welcome, welcome aboard! I'm your cruise director." She produced a practiced smile; then she consulted a passenger list and checked off Lawrence's name. Inside they collected his passport and gave him a key to his cabin and, carrying his luggage, conducted him downstairs. He had a fleeting sense of brightwork, wood, an elevator in its cage and carpeting and corridors, and then the man who led him to his cabin turned and, half saluting, said in thickly accented English, "Haf a pleazant trip!"
In his room he found a set of thermal clothing and, underneath the portholes, a yellow life preserver. There was a bottle of complimentary red wine on the cabinet between twin beds and a bowl of fruit and sheet of paper asking, "Why is a ship called 'she'?"
There was a drawing of a clipper ship and, beneath it, a barbed anchor; Lawrence read the printed answer:
A ship is called a she because there is always a great deal of bustle about her; there is usually a gang of man about, she has a waist and stays; it takes a lot of paint to keep her good looking; it is not the initial expense that brakes you, it is the upkeep; she can be all decked out, but it takes an experienced man to handle her correctly; and without a man at the helm, she is absolutely uncontrollable.
She shows her topsides, hides her bottom and when coming into port always heads for the buoys.
Love her, take good care of her, and she shall take good care of you.
He unpacked his clothing first. He hung up his jackets and exercise clothes and stowed the empty suitcase underneath the bed. He arranged his medications in the bathroom and laid out his sketch pad and books on the shelf; he liked the cabin's clean enclosure, the wooden containers for stemware and bottles, the way that the cabinets locked. After the nightlong bustle of the Via Veneto this organized silence was welcome, and he lay back in his shirtsleeves and attempted to take stock.
BEFORE THE TROUBLE with his heart he took good health for granted. Lawrence watched what he ate and did not smoke and, although he could have dropped ten pounds and refused a second cocktail, did his best to stay in shape. He looked, he liked to joke, not a day past sixty-three. In truth he did seem youthful, and his students and those colleagues in architecture school who did not know his actual age would have been surprised by it; he had retained a wide-eyed and infectious pleasure in the act, the fact of teaching, and he paced up and down the studio with spring in his long stride. He was more of a professor now than a practitioner-more engaged, he liked to say, in the theory than practice of architecture. But the profession still compelled him, and the New Urbanists still referenced his early work. He had most of his muscle and much of his hair and was known, in Ann Arbor, as a bit of a boulevardier; he had three children and two ex-wives and a series of companions with whom he sometimes slept. For a long time, however, he had lived alone.
When the symptoms of angina came he at first ignored them, believing the bright pain in his chest was only acid reflux or, maybe, a pulled muscle. Lawrence went to spinning class and worked out on the treadmill three mornings a week, and the shortness of his breath seemed somehow a function of hard exercise; he had always sweated easily. Now he woke up drenched in sweat. The strange taste in his mouth increased- as though he sucked on tin, then brass-and stairs became a problem; then the band of pain became a vise, extending from shoulder to shoulder. When he begged off from tennis with Tommy Einhorn, Tommy asked him, "Why, what's wrong?"
This was the start of July. In the emergency room they asked for his symptoms and as soon as he described them wheeled Lawrence down to the cardiac unit, where whitecoated attendants were waiting. They recorded his pulse and blood pressure and temperature and gave him oxygen and heparin and a set of EKGs. It was likely, said the attending cardiologist, he had a blockage in an artery or arteries, and they would perform an angiogram in order to determine where the trouble lay. This was routine procedure, nothing to be concerned about, but he had arrived just in time. An angioplasty or heart bypass might well be indicated, he was told, for he had unstable angina and should be hospitalized.
Because they did not wish to operate short-staffed on Independence Day, Lawrence waited the long holiday weekend, lying aggrieved in the hospital bed and dealing with visits from residents and interns and Dr. Einhorn's colleagues. They said that he was lucky, very lucky, and if one of his organs was slated for trouble, well, let it be the heart; we can do much less, these days, about the liver or lungs or the brain. It's a plumbing problem, mostly, and time to fix the pipes. They said he should be grateful to be alive in the twenty-first century and living in Ann Arbor, where the medical facilities were fine.
"You know the first three symptoms of heart trouble?" Tommy Einhorn asked.
"No, what?"
"Denial, denial, denial." "Very funny."
"Very almost not funny at all, my friend. This is the riot act I'm reading you."
"All right. Okay."
"We're prepared to handle it," said Dr. Einhorn, "if you have an infarction. But now you're stable and you're being monitored; only folks in crisis get to go to the theater this weekend."
"All right."
"You have to be patient. A patient patient," Einhorn said. "Hey, not bad. I should remember that."
THREE BELLS SOUNDED IN HIS CABIN, and a man's voice boomed from a speaker by the porthole. The purser introduced himself. "Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard," he said. "On behalf of the captain and crew of the M.S. Diana we wish everyone a most delightful trip." Then over the intercom system all passengers were informed that there would be a mandatory life preserver drill before they could depart. They were instructed to report to level 4 in fifteen minutes, please. Departure was scheduled for seven o'clock, and in the morning, from Sorrento, we will travel to Capri.
Lawrence roused himself. Not sorry to have been interrupted in his meditation on disease-the long wait in the hospital, the procedure itself, its aftermath-he laced on his sneakers and slipped on a jacket and found his way up to the deck. The wind was high. Passengers were milling about and awaiting instructions and laughing together and huddling in corners to hide from the wind. The man beside him on the deck was wearing bracelets on his wrist and an antinausea patch.
"Cold enough for you?" he asked. The cruise director, smiling, nodding, said, "Everybody, your attention, please!"
Lawrence was provided with a life preserver and shown how to fasten it, then told that in the unlikely event of an emergency he should report to lifeboat station 6. He watched a demonstration of the whistle and inflatable flotation device; he was instructed what to carry with him from the cabin and what to leave behind. His concentration flagged, however, the way it drifted in an airplane when flight attendants enact their preflight pantomime; heart trouble happens to others, he could remember thinking, and most of the time he'd felt fine.
Emergencies happen to others, he could remember thinking, and his own was in the past. The document they sent him home with began with the assertion: "Successful PCI of culprit LAD/D1 Lesion ..."
"You've had," the cardiologist declared, "your last drink of buttermilk and your final piece of steak."
"You were lucky," Dr. Einhorn chimed in. "The left anterior descending was ninety percent occluded. But it's just like real estate-what counts is location, location. And yours was in the spot they call the widow-maker."
"I'm not married," Lawrence said. "You were lucky," his neighbor repeated. "No joke. We caught it just in time."
HIS SONS LIVED IN PHOENIX AND VAIL. Ten years before, their mother had remarried-a professor in the Political Science Department-but Janet stayed, it seemed to him, unbending, unforgiving. Lawrence tried to let bygones be bygones, to suggest that their marriage was far in the past and they should-for the sake of the children-be friends. The wound of his old infidelities stayed fresh with her nevertheless; if they met at a concert or the farmers' market Janet turned away and gave him, pointedly, her back. When John or Andrew brought their wives and children to town they apportioned the length of their visits and, to keep from playing favorites or offending either parent, stayed in the Campus Inn.
His daughter by his first wife was living in Chicago. As though there had been some contagion, some gene that spawned failed marriages, his daughter too had been divorced and now lived alone. In part as a result of this, Catherine was very helpful during his time in the hospital and, afterward, at home. His sons had flown to see him, and remained in touch by e-mail or the telephone, but she bore the brunt of it-the grocery shopping, the first week of driving, the details of Lawrence's medical leave. It was as though they shared again the rhythms of domestic life, and he enjoyed the way they did the crossword puzzle together, the way she matched her stride to his during their afternoon walks.
When Catherine returned to Chicago he found himself regretting it, for he had grown accustomed to her presence by his side. Therefore he invited her to join him for the trip. "You've been wonderful," said Lawrence; he wanted to show her how grateful he was and would enjoy the company. But she had used up her vacation in July and could not take another week away from work.
"My treat. I'll pay for it," he repeated. "Daddy, that isn't the point."
"The point is," he cajoled her, "your father misses you. And you haven't ever been to see-the cruise is billed as-the 'Treasures of the Western Mediterranean.' Don't you think you need to see them? The Isle of Capri? The temples of Agrigento? Malta?"
"It's called my life, remember? And I need to get back to it."
"I know that, sweetheart, I do understand."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Spring and Fall by Nicholas Delbanco Copyright © 2006 by Nicholas Delbanco. Excerpted by permission.
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