Partita in Venice

"...this beautiful and moving fictional narrative...is the work of a gifted writer. Read it and you will plunge into an enchanting spiritual universe..." --Elie Wiesel

In this comedeo-tragedy, Tommy Manning has gone to Venice as blithely assured as if he were the lead male in An Affair To Remember. But his rendezvous isn’t quite working out like a Hollywood script. For instance, this haunting young woman named Happy - just how will he ditch her if Zoe, his flame from years gone by, should show? And just why is it that he’s spotting Zoe along the canals so often, anyway? And bothersome conscience? After all, Jack Bennie showed up as a gondolier when Tommy took Happy for a cruise along the scenic canals, so why shouldn’t another friendly poltergeist?...But then, Tommy, ghosts don’t really exist - and when they do, they’re more terrible than we ever expected.

Combine the romance of Venice with the roguish humor of Tommy Manning and his seemingly ingénue girl de jour for a battle of wits. Then combine the ever-approaching fiesta night’s prearranged reunion with the mounting, appalling evidence for a come-uppance Tommy will never forget.

“Zoe.”
    That’s what she said when he asked her name, saying it with a shy downward glance, as if she couldn’t bear looking into his eyes for too long. But he looked at her. Even though she was on her haunches, gathering—with his help—the items that had fallen out of her knapsack, he sculpted her with his glance. He looked at her wavy brown hair, curved his gaze around her butt, zigzagged up to her bare thighs and knees, then coasted down her legs to her sneakers.
    She seemed pleased that the room was noisy again; the silence she had created a few minutes earlier, broken. No longer was she the center of attention. The crowd in the American Express office had other things to do. Like watch the gondolas or hang out in Piazza San Marco.
    “I always wondered what’s in a girl’s pocketbook,” he said, picking up her fallen drugstore. “Now I know what’s in her knapsack . . . ten pocketbooks!”
    Zoe, she said.
    Zoe, he thought as he scanned her again like lines on a page, reading her from left to right, enjoying the paragraphs of her body.
    But the name was rather odd. Zoe. Heavy in its gravity, that bottom-of-ladder Z; downended like the low part of a see-saw. Who nowadays had names that began with Z? Girls were called Ann and Brenda, Cheryl and Debbie. Loads and loads of Debbies. If you forgot a salesgirl’s name, odds were if you said, Debbie, you got your girl. Ginny too. Most names floated to the upper ranges of the alphabet. You rarely ran across an Ursula or Veronica. Maybe a Wendy or two. But at the bottom of the finite scale of letters, beyond which there were none?Names with Z? Never. Zelda had gone out with the Fitzgeralds.
    Zoe.
    He liked the surprise of the name. Even more, the music of the name.
    Zoe.
    To counterbalance the gravity of the alphabetical location— he tilted the see-saw up, way up—was its light vibrato, its airiness, soft and smooth as down.

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