Oh Shenandoah

My fiancé—I still thought of him as my fiancé although I was already planning not to marry him—came out of the bathroom with a funny look on his face. I'd heard the noise in there, even in the living room where I was fussing with a pot of basil sitting out on the window ledge over the canal. I was wondering if it was going to rain or if I should water it.

"What did you break this time?" I asked. Hugo had already dropped the hairdryer, shattering the plastic casing, and knocked the glass shower doors off their rails. These were not good reasons for breaking our engagement, of course. I had other reasons that were going to be hard to explain to him, which is why I kept putting it off.

"The toilet seat cracked." He looked sheepish. "It just fell down. They're not supposed to do that."

I followed him back to the bathroom. Sure enough, the wooden seat had cracked straight across. It was still usable, but the cleaning woman who came in on Saturday was bound to report it to the owner, who'd charge me a fortune.

"We've got to buy a new one," I said. "Pronto."

"In Venice?"

"Venice is full of toilets," I said. "They must sell the seats somewhere."

I was the one who'd rented the apartment, with help from an Italian friend of my aunt, so I felt responsible. I'd told my aunt, and she'd told her friend to tell the landlady, that I was a quiet single asthmatic young woman who was looking for a place to escape the spring pollen that always made her sick. I hadn't said anything about sharing the tiny apartment with my fiancé because I didn't think he'd be able to get away.

I'd met him at the community garden back home. Our plots adjoined, and when we were both there on Saturday afternoons we'd stop work and talk about this and that. He'd been an English major without much of a future. But then he'd been hired by his entrepreneur brother who ran an airport shuttle service. I was going to graduate school in English, living on fellowships, loans, and summer jobs.

I gave Hugo big bunches of basil, my most successful crop, and he gave me red peppers. One July day when it was especially humid he saw me gasping, and took the weed clippers out of my hand and finished the job for me. Then one day in August a wasp got down my T-shirt. I screamed, and Hugo dropped his rake and rushed over. He reached down the neck of my T-shirt and probed with his fingers and crushed the wasp with his fist before it could sting me. I leaned against him. "See if there's another one down there," I whispered. There wasn't, but it took him a while to be sure, and by then we were both shaking and gasping. We went back to his truck, and we drove to his apartment and spent the weekend together. That was last summer.

In March, when I could feel my chest getting tight again, I decided to use my savings plus some help from my parents to spend the month of May, the month that always made me really sick, in a place where I might not need to use my inhaler every day. I'd figured out that Venice had no grass and hardly any trees and was surrounded by water. At first, Hugo seemed fine with the idea. Then, in April, he got wildly nervous about being separated from me. He wanted to marry me. He wanted to marry me right away.

"Let's wait until I get back from Venice. It's only a month."

"What if you meet someone?"

"In Venice? I don't know a soul. I'm just going for my health."

Hugo talked to his brother. His brother was reluctant to lose him for a whole month, but in the end he said it was fine...