heir church wedding was on a Saturday. Gabi's Dad had insisted on that. He wasn't about to let his only daughter just slink to the Standesamt and have, what he called, a worldly ceremony. No, he wanted it done right. Before the eyes of God. And since Gabi's Dad payed for the wedding—dress, horse-drawn carriage, lobster and shrimp buffet, church fees—Sebastian had no objections to going through with the sacred rites.

And so, four white horses pulled their fairy tale carriage to the catholic church where Gabi had been baptized almost thirty years earlier. On both occasions, the sun was brilliant in a sapphire sky, and not one cloud marred the absolute perfection of the scene. On both occasions, Gabi's grandmother whispered, oh, when angels travel...more to herself, really, so as to confirm that God really did smile upon this happy day. Happy indeed it was. At least, the two main participants were—happy, that is. Sebastian's parents thought he could have done better. Two days before the church wedding, Sebastian's mother, while looking over the guest list, told Sebastian, you know, Gabi is going to get fat. She has fat genes. Sebastian smiled, nodded, and said, yes, I know. The thought made him happy.

At the wedding, Sebastian drank more champagne than he had ever before in his life. Gabi floated before his eyes, white and satiny, her pale skin illuminated by hundreds of candles. They danced, and Sebastian ran his hands over Gabi's middle, feeling the slight bulge under the satin. He fought against his erection and buried his face in Gabi's neck, sucking the softness of her flesh. Sebastian felt Gabi's strong thighs push into his with each note, each step, as if seeking to come to rest there.

Surrounding the dance floor was all the food, most of which had turned the same soft tint as the hundreds of tapered white candles. The main course was shrimp with lobster sauce. It was the centerpiece of the banquet table, cradled in a thick crystal serving bowl. Gabi and Sebastian were expected to serve themselves first, and they did. Everone watched as Gabi held up her bowl to Sebastian, and as Sebastian put two heavy ladles full into her bowl. They sat down and Sebastian dipped his fingers into her bowl and pulled out a shrimp the size of the thumb on his left hand, which was the biggest, and fed her.

They had not intended to go on eating this way, but the temperature of the sauce was just right for Sebastian. He kept feeding Gabi, watching the food go down her throat like something moving under a blanket, and he kept running his fingers over her tongue and the wetness of her lips. When her bowl was empty, he sighed and turned to his own, still full. He was no longer hungry. He was content.

Noone had as of yet sat down at their table to talk. Gabi's mother looked over to them, occasionally, smiling. Sebastian at first had thought she was too busy with the caterers and the restaurant management to break away and join them. But when he realized that she was not trying to get away, he knew she was simply wishing them happiness by letting them sit alone. He did not see either one of his own parents, though he knew they had to be nearby; the dining hall was not all that large. It was, in fact, crowded and Gabi sweated a little through her dress. Freckles of dampness had appeared below her bust and where her shoulders and torso met, where the satin was tight. Guests circled around them in the waxy heat. One man had even leaned on their table as he talked to a woman Sebastian recognized by her dry, almost lipless mouth. It barely moved when she talked. Sebastian looked down at the man's wrist. On the cuff of his tuxedo shirt were cufflinks: two round bubbles of gold. The buttom holes were too small for the cufflinks and had begun to unravel into tiny pieces of yarn around the gold.

On the Blauer Pfeil to Venice, Sebastian watched through the windows of the sleeper car while Gabi lay asleep. Even unconscious, her body never stopped moving. The motion of the train seemed visible in her, moving through her body in small, caring waves. Sebastian became drowsy watching her, but he was too interested in what was happening outside. As always, the illusion of motion held him. He made a game of it, fixing on the hills furthest away, watching the rough greeness of the trees turn dark as the sun slipped out of sight. The hills, which seemed so crisp and light during the day, gained weight. And meanwhile other things sped by, the closest things to him the fastest of all: signs, some rural houses, cows and horses. He could break it into three layers at most, like it was not he and Gabi but the world traveling on rails. Then they would hit a tunnel, and suddenly he would truly feel alone in his car, and that Gabi was alone as well. Alone with him.

They arrived in Venice at noon. Before he and Gabi even got out of the car, he heard shouts of recongition and command muted through the windows. One woman said "Alberto!" as loudly as she could without screaming. And there were other voices. Their tongues, all sounding as though they were coated with cream, sprang up and rolled heavily up the fluted walls to the ceiling and over to the other side to run in dark channels between the trains. All these people, all the voices thrumming together, made Sebastian sleepy. He did not want to wake Gabi up.

Sebastian had been in Venice years before, and the city had not changed. Or perhaps it had. It seemed darker, denser.

In the afternoon, though, the sun broke through the clouds and colored the palazzos and cathedrals their usual rusty ocre, and at the Palazzo de St. Marco the usual fat pigeons strutted, checking cracks in the pavement for bread.

In a restaurant close to the Palazzo, Sebastian and Gabi ate their first Italian meal together. The linguine with white clam sauce arrived at the table steaming and topped with a mountain of butter and parmesan cheese. Sebastian drove his fork into the pasta and twirled it around a few times and offered it to Gabi. Her eyes contracted with delight as he put the pasta into her mouth. The clams were big; they were at least cherrystones, if not littlenecks or quahogs. Gabi held Sebastian's hand, and they ate in silence, dozing a little between bites, and both remembering and anticipating the saltiness on their tongues and the smell of garlic and cloves and the slipperiness of the butter.

Later, they walked to the pier, and Sebastian hailed one of the gondoliers. The man looked over at them and grinned widely, shouting "Bella!" through big yellow teeth. With arms not much bigger than the oar, he pushed the gondola towards them and stood expectantly in the back of the boat which dipped back and forth.

"Canale Grande?"

"Si."

Sebastian paid the usual fare and helped Gabi into the gondola. They sat in the middle, on red leather cushions, their back supported by a stiff board, which was the same glossy black as the rest of the boat, as all of the gondolas in Venice since the time of the great plague.

They drifted through the canal, its lazy S. pushed onward by the unseen presence of the gondolier behind them. At the Rialto Bridge, the journey slowed, to allow oncoming traffic to pass through, and for a moment, Sebastion thought that their gondolier had abandoned them, and that, if he turned around, he would see nothing but water, or worse, nothing at all. But then, their speed picked up again and the darkness under the bridge swallowed them and released them again on the other side into bright sunshine. Sebastian felt dizzied by the wet air that soaked into his clothes, and the exhaust fumes of the motorboats speeding past made him sleepy. A while back, Gabi had put her head on his left shoulder and closed her eyes, and now her body matched each rolling move of the boat with a rise and descent of its own. He tuned his body to hers and to the waves and dipped his hand into the dark water of the canal. They were alone again.

Sebastian had walked over to the Jaguar farthest on the end of the lot. He saw her sitting in the long, sleek car, her hands stroking the walnut dashboard. She leaned back in the driver's seat, and something in the way the cream-colored leather buckled softly and rose around her hips gave Sebastian the first hard-on he'd had in weeks. Working at the car lot had made people in general more and more unreal, and each customer to whom he made his pitch turned the lot more and more vacant. This woman though, with her eyes just a shade darker than the Jaguar's dashboard, she was there, truly there.

"You don't want this car."

"No, I don't. But look at me, don't you think it suits me?"

"Oh no," he said, really wanting to flatter her. "I really don't believe it does. It just doesn't wear you well. I don't usually address customers this way, but can you trust me."

"Dear, I don't even know you. But," she said, looking at the car from back to front, "I believe you."

He took her to his apartment and they ate. They sat in the tiny dining room at a round maple dining table that was absurdly large for the space it occupied. Sebastian had quickly discovered why the previous renters (or the ones before that even) had left it there when he tried to move it out himself. It was so large it would not fit through the door. He could not see himself dismantling the table, hacking away at the soft wood and breaking it into more manageable pieces, and he liked running his hand over the length of the surface so much that he left the table in its original spot. With Gabi over now, he was glad he had resisted the small impulse to destruction.

He stood up from eating to retrieve some yeast rolls from the oven. He could smell that they were cooked to just the right point—just before they would turn the color of brown beer bottles. That smell, he thought, that was the smell of readiness.

He purposely went around Gabi to get to the kitchen. He squeezed himself between her chair and the wall, arching his back and holding on to her shoulders, steering her a little in her chair. She had gotten some sun on her shoulders from a walk they had taken yesterday, and she held both his hands there for a moment before letting him go, telling him his cold hands felt good. She was the only one, Sebastian thought, who had never complained about that.

They had red wine after their meal. Sebastian thought that neither one of them had drank too much, but he did find himself bumping into things occasionally, though gently. Gabi stayed at the table, content, he knew, with her hands together in a gesture that resembled either a card house or steeple. Both, Sebastian thought, both.

Yet even with her hands together like that, and even with her eyes closed, so closed they seemed to recede into something like sleeping, she had no prayerfulness about her. He believed he could love her just for this. She herself at that moment seemed to be all the presence of mind she needed. That way whenever he did come to her, he would not feel awkward about whatever he wanted to do or ask for.

And he did. He sat down, and took her hair in his hands, long black ropes that were perfectly opaque under the lights. He draped the strands his head, which he had shaved as soon as he started losing his hair at seventeen. He could see himself well enough in her rimless glasses, but she took a compact out of her purse for him to see.

And there he was. His face, whittled to sharpness by the angular, razor-swift pitches he delivered at his job, it became smoother then, in an ageless sense, and the compact made it look small. And getting smaller all the time, Sebastian thought.

Gabi took off her blouse. Right there at the table, she went down the ladder of buttons until she could slip her blouse behind her and let it fall from her shoulders. Her breasts spilled over the rim of her black underwire bra, and she leaned back in her chair, bumping up against the wall.

"Do you want me to take it off?"

Sebastian sat down. He didn't say a word. She slipped the straps down over her shoulders, squeezing her arms together and making her breasts bulge towards him.

"Yes?"

She lifted her breasts out of the bra. She stood, pushing her shoulders forward and then stretching them as far back as they would go as she moved towards him, kneading her thick shoulderblades together. And she kept moving, until her shadow collapsed over him.

Sebastian felt something other than water push against his hand, and when he leaned over the side of the gondola, he saw the dead pigeon, wings outstretched as if still in flight. Its eyes were closed and its head a little crooked, forming a broken question mark. The waves gave the body the illusion of movement, and Sebastian briefly doubted that the pigeon was really dead. But before he could scoop it out of the water, it floated out of reach.

That night they sat drinking Campari on the balcony of their room at the Lido Hotel. Now the sky was the dark color of the canal waters during the day, and the Canal Grande, it seemed as though neither it nor any of the canals had any water at all. The gondolas bobbed and weaved on currents of nothing. Only on occasion could either one of them see a rose-colored ribbon of light dance on the surface or be torn under by one of the gondalas, which were almost invisible themselves. Sebastian looked down and saw their gondolier from earlier, who looked up and smiled his wine-stained, crescent-moon smile, waving. Sebastian lit the two candles on their table and threw the lit match down to him.

Sebastian had been trying to work out in himself why he had not felt the kind of stirring he thought he should. It was because there was no moon tonight. No moon to line the top of the cathedrals, no moon to weigh down the courts of the palazzos, no still moon, expansive but delicate as one snowflake to configure and pattern the dark sky. He began to have a thought about their gondolier, a notion about his having eaten the moon, about rescuing the moon by prying the man's thin lips open, wider...and he put the thought away. He did not want to ruin their evening with poetry.

He looked at Gabi. She had put the wine glass to her lips, was holding it there, not staring down at anything but simply out.

"I like this wine," she said, leaning over to him, "it is a beautiful color and very sweet."

Her hands wrapped lightly around the stem of her glass. Again, the odd sensation that she was deliberately unprayerful in the way she held her hands, her arms, her entire body—it was too relaxed for praying—came over him.

"It is a particular red," he said.

"Gorgeous," she said, smiling, and tossed her half-full glass over the balcony.

They had a couple of hours to go on the train before they got back to Duesseldorf. Sebastian felt something in him come loose to hear Gabi say she herself was anxious to get back home, and he sighed. They had talked awhile about tiling. Both had agreed that they would put down new tile in Sebastian's kitchen and bathroom; they would have a matching marble pattern the color of eggshell. Then, naturally, because they couldn't help laughing, they talked about children. Maybe when we have more space, Gabi had said. And more money. She had looked at his shoes when she said that, with her body flighty turned away, and to Sebastian it was a kind of promise. So he let it go with that. He wrapped his hand around her shoulder, squeezing the round muscle there like an orange.

Her head was in his lap. The train on its tracks, the wheels hugging the railing—the lullaby, he couldn't help thinking, of the machine—came up through his feet into his legs to reside in his knees. She seemed to be listening for something as she lay her head there, and had fallen asleep inside her patience. Years ago, Sebastian would often fall asleep at prayer, but that was not a comparison to Gabi. He knew that Gabi never had and never would wake up in any kind of fear—of where or who she was. Her beauty was in her utter non-belief, even of her location.

And Sebastian was becoming drowsy himself. He parted handfuls of her black hair, winding it tightly around his fingers into continuous, boundless circles. He bent over and smelled her pink scalp, touched his teeth to it, breathed through his nose. There was some essence there, under the eucalyptus scent of her hair; there was some real vapor, like fresh olive oil on a hot stone. It was sacredness; no, it was perfect idleness, spilling into ever-widening circles. They were going nowhere so quickly he himself would lie were he to say that any part of it was necessary. This simply did not happen to people.

When they got back to his apartment—their apartment now—after lugging the suitcases upstairs, Sebastian watched Gabi fish for something under the car seat. He called down to her, asking her what it was she was looking for. "My watch," she said from inside the car. "Need some help?" he asked and she stood up, intending to say no, her lips shaping around the word when she shut the car door on her finger. She cursed, not using a word at all but making a soft animal sound. He ran down to her, pulling at her hand like a jeweler wanting to take her size. He saw the small purple crescent of blood welling under the nail. It was swelling badly, maybe broken, he feared but then noticed all the fingers around it were themselves nearly the same size, and that Gabi did not crying. And they stood there a minute, watching each other.

Sebastian drew shapes, as many shapes of geometry as he could think of, on the phone book. He looked at Gabi, who sat watching the cars scoot by outside. They were waiting on Gabi's girlfriend to bring over a television. Neither one of them watched a lot, but as it turned out they both liked Gary Cooper movies and Sebastian's mother had given them a VCR for their wedding. Actually, she hadn't so much given it—giving it would mean she would have left it on the table, along with all the other wedding gifts—as she had presented it, walking into the banquet hall the way some people walk into parties late, on purpose. She had walked in holding it over her head, on the back of her neck really, like pack mule, and sat it down on the table, kissing on the cheek, first Gabi, then him. Sebastian was suspicious his mother had worn her tight black formal entirely for that—for the contrast of the dress with that heavy, gleaming white package floating over her grinning face.

Sebastian started to think about Gabi's body. He loved It was not, not now, so much gaining weight as it was, well, reconfiguring itself. He considered her arms, which measured at least three or four times the diameter of his own. They were the same arms, but they were unraveling like two white spools of ribbon. He put his hand on one of them sometimes, and felt the small jerk, then the slackening. It always happened. And every night, when Gabi slept, he would push his finger into her arm, slowly, and every night it seemed to sink in a bit further.

Since they had gotten the television, they had started watching movies together. Tonight however, Sebastian had checked out a documentary on the archaeopteryx. Sebastian's hobby was birdwatching, though he didn't really know the names of too many birds. He knew Veery and Indigo Bunting and Crackle, and he owned a very old canary that his mother kept for him since their apartment didn't allow pets.

He understood the archaeopteryx to be the first bird. He even had a print of the famous 1877 Bavarian fossil—a well preserved tablet of a 130 million year old lithographic stone. To others, the bird may have looked like a squashed, scaly pigeon, but not to Sebastian. On the stone, the archaeopteryx had inscribed itself, the perfect picture of flight in the Jurassic age, grace and agony. It almost seemed to have died on purpose, in midflight. The knitting-needle bones of the wings extended them outward; the filamental impressions of the feathers ran like licks of fire down its arched neck and out into the wingtips, which stretched over its head like those of the phoenix; its toothed mouth cried the same word it had since it died.

Gabi had not minded that he wanted to watch the documentary instead of the usual Cooper movie. Sebastian had sensed all day a pleasure, something he had forgotten: a sensation of not knowing where his body started or stopped. And even as he sat writing up sales reports the bottoms of his feet felt the hard, woody pressure of his pencil against the calloused pad of the second digit of his thumb. He chewed his pencil for an hour, sitting still, savoring the taste of the paint and wood flakes, feeling that if anyone opened the glass door of his office, he'd tumble backwards like a single dead leaf. He wasn't in the mood for a western tonight, but he wanted the assuring voice of the narrator and the series of pictures and depictions about the world's oldest known bird. It was something he could fall asleep to. And lying in bed, with his head sunk into Gabi's lap and the strong, wooden voice drifting over him in mellow waves, Sebastian did just that.

As always in the summer, the car business had slacked off to a trickle of customers, most of them "just looking" and dreaming of one day owning one of those overpriced machines. Sebastian doodled in the margins of his desk calendar, drawing a series of transparent cubes, rhomboids, and cylinders as he mulled over how to make more space in his office. Shelves. He needed shelves. He was right in the middle of nailing them up in his head when the mailman walked through the glass doors, the tinkling cowbell jolting Sebatian into spinning around in his chair and accidentally tossing his pencil at the mailman's head. Sebastian would not have been embarrassed if it weren't for the fact that he had been chewing on the pencil, and when the man kindly smiled and picked it up for him, it was wet and mottled, and he handed it back to Sebastian like one might hand a slobbery chewtoy back to a confused dog.

The mailman also handed Sebastian a postcard from his brother, Bastian, who lived in the States and who had not come to Sebastian's wedding. It was because, Sebastian believed, of something mother had said. His brother would not have given him the lame excuse he had, and mother had been just a little too pleasant in her affecting anger over Bastian's "authentic lack of consideration" with his not coming to the wedding. Sebastian knew that his mother had no composure whatsover when she was angry, particularly not the grace to remain pleasant, and he also knew that his mother was bitter about Bastian's having married an American girl or having married at all, for that matter.

The postcard was just a particularly flat painting of a mockingbird, which really looked more like a cornfield crow with plastic surgery. It sat on a cactus, and the overall image looked like something you'd buy in a supermarket to put in your window and plug in. Sometimes Sebastian was not too sure what went on in his brother's mind. Maybe, he thought, Bastian's wife had bought the postcard. She taught Physical Ed to ninth graders.

On the back, the card read: "Mandy and me doing well. Sorry about the wedding. Send pictures. Love, B and M."

On the way home, Sebastian drove to the Karstadt. He needed to get some pillows for Gabi. In the past several months she had really gotten big, and her arms, nearly the diameter of his waist now, got very hot where they lay against her smooth body. The heat (he would often lay his hands there) reminded him of the tethering burn a rope causes being pulled across one's palms.

Gabi, however, insisted that nothing was necessary. When he asked her if she wasn't hot she said yes, I'm burning up, but it isn't bad, and then she would giggle and go back to the book she was reading, or the movie she'd put on pause with a good-humored kind of impatience whenever he started asking her what she needed. What I need, she would say, cocking her head like a parakeet who'd just been asked about the secret to the universe.

But he wanted to buy good down pillows, the ones which Karstadt had advertised in the weekly circular. Bastian and Mandy had mailed them, just last month, a belated wedding gift—a set of all-cotton pillowcases with S and G monogrammed on each. It was touching, and they'd probably been saving for it all this time, so he wanted to say he'd put them to use as soon as they had arrived. As Sebastian wandered through the bedding section at Karstadt, prodding and pushing at pillows, he composed a thank-you note in his mind and tried to recall the wedding gift he had given his brother. All he could remember from that wedding was Bastian telling his bride, you know the word 'gift' in German means 'poison.'

Thank you, dear Mandy and Bastian, for those lovely pillowcases...Sebastian hand-wrote on

a white card with gold-embossed Thank You lettering...we will treasure them forever.

Gabi drew the monogrammed pillows up under her arms. There was so much of her, now, that her skeleton swam. No, it flew; it flew inside her. Sebastian found himself desperate to be inside of her too, where there was so much room. For the first instance since the moment of their exchange of nuptuals, a bright stitch of jealousy pulled through him. He looked at her eyes, clouded by fat but shining black. And then the sense of unraveling quivered in him, and he smiled. His smile took him up in its arch, into a swan dive, a place of feather on bone. They were never, never happier.

© Claudia Grinnell