Read Online Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice by Erica Jong - Free Book Online Page B

our eyes meet and we contemplate carnality. He runs his index finger along my lower lip, caressing its curve as if he were touching those other, lower lips. We kiss. His kiss is very young for one so old and we are both stirred by it. So much so that we draw back, in surprise, from the intensity.
    â€œMy mistress would be very cross,” he says, looking hungrily at my breasts, “not to mention my wife, my comrade in arms…Better not.”
    â€œBetter not,” I say, drawing a deep breath and deciding not to complicate my life with passion. “But you certainly are an old lion.”
    I kiss him fondly on the cheek, then look up at the moon, my mother, who approves.
    A little while later I slip back into the hotel, wearing a CIGA toweling robe, a towel around my head, big black sunglasses (belonging to Carlos), and cradling my folded gown in my arms like a baby. I run up the stairs unrecognized despite the crush of people. With hidden hair, with face bare of make-up, no one seems to know me.
    Something exciting is afoot in the press suites I pass on the second floor, but I cannot tell what it is. I see huge banks of lights and hear the murmur of hundreds of voices. A great number of people are milling about outside the double doors. Whatever the event is, it is apparently S.R.O. One voice is amplified above all the others. Do I detect Grigory’s slithery Russian syllables?
    Afraid to linger and be unmasked, I continue up to my suite, lay my precious Zandra Rhodes out on the bed, and take a shower to wash off the moonlit Adriatic. Then I carefully make up my face, change into an elegant Missoni knit dress, slip on another pair of come-fuck-me pumps (purple glove-leather Maud Frizons, these), and head downstairs again.
    By now, the crowd on the second floor has dissipated and technicians are carrying away lights. Whatever has occurred there is now ended.
    Some press people look as if they are about to accost me for interviews so I tuck my chin under, lower my eyes, and hurry down to the dining room. “Miss Pruitt, Miss Pruitt,” one calls. I pretend not to hear. If nothing else, I can eat. All this excitement has made me ravenous.
    Grigory is holding forth at a round table in the corner of the dining room. He is surrounded by some other members of the jury—Leonardo da Leone, Walter Wildhonig, and Pierre de Houbigant, with his beauteous, sphinxlike Oriental wife.
    Grigory makes a place for me at his side. He is glowing, animated, ebullient. He looks like a man who has just made wild and passionate love to his mistress and is now about to savor a hearty meal.
    â€œMy friend,” he is saying to bristling, mustachioed Walter Wildhonig, “would I dispute your right to criticize a film because you found it fascist?” (Walter is a famous antifascist.) “No, of course not. I would never interfere—”
    â€œBut Don Giovanni is hardly an example of ein faschistisches Film ,” says Walter, “ gar nicht …” (Although Walter speaks English well enough, he lapses into German when he wishes to be emphatic.)
    â€œBesides,” says Leonardo, twitching madly, “as a member of the jury you have no right to make political pronouncements before the judging is over. No right whatsoever.”
    â€œI have the right to represent my government,” says Grigory self-righteously, “the right to represent the noble pursuit of art for which we have been elected. Am I not a poet? Am I not a filmmaker? Am I not a critic of all the arts? My dear colleagues, why invite me here if you would muzzle me? Doesn’t the West believe in its famed freedom of speech?”
    â€œWell,” says Leonardo, “we must have one thing above all clear: you will not make any statements to the press until the jury has met and deliberated. Is that agreed?”
    Grigory smiles like the Cheshire cat. The rules of these petty bureaucrats do not apply to him. “Do you not