Free Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Cheaper, too.”
    “I prefer Harry’s.”
    “You mean being
seen
at Harry’s.”
    “Can I help that?”
    “Yes. People can help things.”
    Hugh cocked his hip provocatively. “Really? What things can people help?”
    “Okay,” Noonan conceded. “Not so many things.” Not sexual orientation. And not cancer, if that’s what the weight loss and night terrors were about.
    “A person could choose
not
to paint gallows, I suppose,” Hugh said, still looking at the draped canvas. “That much I grant you.”
    He obviously wanted to uncover it again, which told Noonan everything he needed to know and confirmed what his gut had been telling him for weeks. The pleasure of that knowledge put to flight the last of his dread, as in the end pleasure always did.
    Troubles come not singly but in…what?
             
     
    A RRIVING EARLY at Harry’s, Noonan’s least favorite restaurant in Venice, he nevertheless found Hugh already ensconced at the bar, surrounded by young Italian men and holding court in his flamboyant Italian, which was, in fact, far more fluent than his own. “I’ve had a perfect bitch of a time saving this table,” Hugh informed him in a perfectly bitchy, insincere tone as the maître d’ snaked them through the crowd of diners toward the most perfectly ostentatious table in the room. “Tell me, do you ever dress up?”
    “Sure,” said Noonan, who was wearing threadbare cords, a clean button-down denim shirt, a bulky sweater and boat shoes. “Now’s a perfect example.”
    “I’m starting with the squid ink risotto, and you should, too,” Hugh announced once they were settled. “I can’t believe it. There’s absolutely no one here. It’s tragic.”
    Noonan understood that by “here” Hugh meant Venice, not the restaurant, which was full. And by “no one” he meant celebrities.
    “There wasn’t anyone on the plane either,” he continued. “Everybody’s still scared to fly.”
    Noonan snorted. “Afraid to fly, but not to live in a nation governed by an idiot.”
    “A duly elected idiot. This second time, anyway.”
    “Let’s not talk politics,” Noonan suggested. In addition to Italian, Hugh spoke fluent liberalese, which Noonan would’ve found tiresome even if he hadn’t long suspected him of secretly voting Republican. “My stomach’s iffy enough.” Lately, that sour taste seemed to have moved onto the back of his tongue, yet another “trouble” to find out about in New York.
    “I’m just the opposite. I’m like Audrey Hepburn in that movie with Cary Grant,” Hugh said, his logic, as always, a quarter turn off. “The worse things get, the hungrier I am.”
    “It’s true,” Noonan agreed. “You
are
like Audrey Hepburn.”
    When the waiter came, Hugh ordered his squid risotto and Noonan the pasta
fagioli,
which elicited from his companion yet another personal observation—that he both dressed and
ate
like a peasant. To save further embarrassment, Hugh decided they’d both have the
branzino
and instructed the waiter to be certain that he, not his guest, got the larger portion. “Will I know it’s a sea bass and not a sardine before I taste it?”
    The waiter assured him that he would.
    “I have my doubts,” he said to Noonan, sotto voce, when the waiter retreated. “The Mediterranean is fished out. What they serve on this side of the Atlantic is hardly worth the effort of boning. Still, as long as my portion’s bigger than yours, I suppose I’ll cope.”
    Noonan broke off a hunk of bread. “How’s Lady Brett’s new work?” Anne Brettany was Hugh’s other Venetian client, and he’d spent the morning at her studio in Santa Croce.
    “Well, Anne is forever Anne, isn’t she?” Hugh sighed, as if this were regrettable. “She thinks she’s still in your shadow.”
    “She shouldn’t. She’s good.”
    “She says the reason I always visit her studio first is that I’m saving the best for last. When I ask how she’d feel if I came to see you