Текст книги "Alibi"

Автор книги: Joseph Kanon

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

I got back just as Celia’s bags were being put into the taxi. My mother was standing at the water entrance with Bertie, and when she turned and hugged him for a second, I thought I saw him wince, pressed too hard maybe, where he felt sensitive. I wondered if he’d told her yet. But the embrace had been quick, fleeting, two friends at the station, not someone who thought it might be the last. Then he said something and she laughed and they were back in their own time again, cocktails and patter songs, before the war.

“Just in the nick,” my mother said, seeing me. “I thought I’d miss you.” She kissed my cheek. “Don’t get into any trouble.”

“Don’t buy any clothes,” I said back.

“All right,” she said, smiling, “a little trouble. Celia says I haven’t given Paris a chance. Not really. She says I left too soon.”

“So you might stay for a while.”

“Well, we’ll see. It’s odd here for me. And the trial. They’ll want to take my picture, and why? I have no position, really. I’m just someone he knew,” she said, her voice drifting a little.

“Don’t worry about anything. I’ll take care of the house.”

“You know all the papers are in my desk? I don’t know why I’m talking like this. We’ve got the house through spring, and I’ll probably be back in a week. It’s just—well, what’s here now?” She touched Bertie on the arm. “Except me pals,” she said in stage cockney.

“You’ll miss your train,” Bertie said, giving her another peck. “Have fun. Just don’t try to keep up with Celia. And no cinq à septs, please. It’s unseemly at our age.”

“Yours, you mean,” she said, laughing. Then she looked around, swiveling her head to take in the line of palazzos across the canal. “It is so beautiful, isn’t it?” Then she was hugging people and getting into the launch with Celia, waving to friends and settling in beside the stacks of luggage, leaning out the side of the boat for a last look as they headed up the canal.

I turned to Bertie, whose eyes, surprisingly, were moist.

“And you’ll be next, I suppose,” he said.

“Not yet.”

“That’s right,” he said airily, turning back to the house. “Otherwise engaged.” He started walking again. “You stick, I’ll give you that. Where is she, by the way? I thought she’d be here playing daughter.”

“Couldn’t. She’s working.”

“Working? Where?”

“In a shop.”

“A shop,” he said. “Adam. Really.”

She’d left the shop early, however, called back to the hotel. When I got there, she was already packing, moving things from the wardrobe to the bed, stopping in between to look out the window, her movements anxious and darting. A cigarette was burning in an ashtray on the end table, half forgotten in the rush.

“What’s going on?”

“The police were here. Back again, about that night. You think Cavallini’s a fool? Maybe not such a fool.”

“But I just saw him. It couldn’t have been him.”

“Another one, then. What’s the difference? They know something.” She went to the window and peeked out. “Why come again? The same questions. What time did I leave? They know.”

I walked over to her, taking her by the shoulders. “Calm down. It’s not that. They don’t know.”

“How do you know? Are you inside their heads now?”

“Just listen. They turned up someone who saw Gianni that night. That’s what I came to tell you. An old woman. She also saw you.”

“Saw me?”

“On your way to the house. At exactly the time you said. They’re just checking with the hotel to verify her story. Nobody suspects you of anything. They just want to make sure it all fits.”

Her shoulders, tense under my hands, softened a little.

“Yes?”

“Yes. Calm down.”

She went over to the night table and picked up the cigarette. “She saw him? Where?”

“Where she saw you. San Ivo. Out her window. She’s an invalid, watches the street.”

“Then they know where he was going.”

“It’s also the way to Mimi’s. Depends which way you turn.”

“Oh, so he turns one way and I turn another? You believe that?”

“They believe that.”

“And when it occurs to them that he could have gone the other way, like I did?” She started walking to the wardrobe, then turned back, her pacing like visible thought.

“It won’t. He went to Mimi’s. You came to me. That’s all there is to it.”

“No, not all. They’re looking again. They’re looking at me. Who hated him. Who follows him to your house—yes, that’s all the woman proves, that I was there too. Who better?”

“But you were with me.”

“Yes, doing what? How long before they see it?” Another move to the window, still anxious.

“Listen to me,” I said quietly, lowering my voice. “I’ve been over everything—the hall, the canal gate, the boat. Every inch. Everything’s been scrubbed. There’s nothing there, no evidence at all. Nobody saw him. Nobody can prove he was there except us.”

“So maybe there’s another invalid.”

“Nobody except us. All we have to do is keep our heads.”

“Oh, and I’m losing mine, is that it?” She went over to the wardrobe, turning her back to me. “It’s me they’re asking questions about, not you.”

“They’re just making sure about her,” I said calmly. “That’s all. They don’t suspect you.”

She kept her back to me, staring at the wardrobe, then reached in, pulled out a dress, and carried it over to the suitcase on the bed. “Yet. And now what?”

“Come home with me.”

She shook her head.

“My mother’s gone. She’s not coming back.”

“I can’t.” She looked up. “I can’t stay here, in Venice. Today, I thought, It’s getting closer. Oh, I know what you say, but I can’t help it. They’ll find out somehow. If I don’t leave now, I’ll never get out. So maybe it’s true they don’t suspect. But how much longer? And then we’re trapped here.”

“What do you mean, ‘leave now’?” I said, the only phrase I’d really heard.

“Now. Just get on the vaporetto and go to the station. Unless they’re watching,” she said, jerking her head toward the window. “But then at least I’d know.”

“I can’t leave now.”

“No,” she said, going back for another dress, then folding it into the case. She tucked a toiletries bag into the side, then looked around, the room suddenly bare, just a few hangers dangling in the wardrobe. “Look how easy it is when you don’t have anything. Remember how we left San Isepo? Not even an hour. You can pack up your whole life and leave.”

“And go where? It wouldn’t make any difference, you know,” I said, trying to keep my voice emotionless. “You’d have the same papers. If they really wanted to find you—”

“They would, I know. But then it’s easier to run. Where can you run in Venice? It’s a prison here. And they’re always looking. And, who knows, maybe someday they ask the right question: What if he turned the other way?” She stopped, then closed the lid of the suitcase. “Today it was like a warning. If I stay here—”

“But if you leave without me, they’ll wonder.”

“No, they’ll be happy for you. A woman like that, a puttana? What else would she do? That’s the way it is with them.”

“Stop it.”

“Then come. It’s our chance now, before it’s too late.”

“And leave Moretti to them? You could do that?”

She walked over to the window. “Today it’s him. Then something else. And we stay and stay. Under their noses.” She gestured out, as if the police were lurking beneath a tree in the campo. “This cat-and-mouse. Waiting to be caught.” She turned. “Maybe that’s what you want, to be caught. There are people like that. They want to be caught.”

I said nothing, waiting it out.

“But I don’t.” She looked away, then busied herself closing the wardrobe and checking the bathroom, her silence itself a kind of apology. When she came back to the window she looked up, across the roofs of San Polo to the campanile of the Frari. “And now it’s going to rain,” she said, weary, a last straw.

“Come and sit,” I said, moving the suitcase.

But she stayed at the window, looking out. “If I don’t go now, it’ll be too late. I’ll get caught in the rain.” She paused. “Listen to me. What difference does the rain make? I’m talking with my nerves. No sense.”

“No one’s going to get caught,” I said evenly, as if I were stroking her arm.

“But I’m afraid.”

“You? You’re not afraid of anything.”

“Yes, now I’m afraid all the time,” she said, facing me, moving away from the window, her hands so jittery that she folded them under her arms, holding herself to stay still.

“Of what, exactly?”

She began pacing again, but near the bed, in tighter circles. “Everything. That I’ll say something.” She stopped in front of me. “No. That you’ll say something.” She lowered her head. “I’m afraid you’ll say something.”

I looked up at her, stung, and for a minute neither of us spoke, everything fragile, even the air. “All right,” I said finally. “Then marry me.”

“What?”

“A husband can’t testify against his wife. Isn’t it that way here too? They could never use anything I say.”

For a second she froze, then her shoulders twitched, that peculiar shudder that moves between laughing and crying, unable to settle on either. She sank down onto the bed next to me.

“Wonderful,” she said. “Marry somebody to keep him quiet. To protect yourself.”

“No,” I said, reaching over and brushing back her hair. “For all the other reasons. The usual ones.”

“The usual ones,” she said, looking down at her lap. “With us, after this, the usual ones. But also just in case. Just in case. Brava.”

I dropped my hand. “I just meant you’d never have to worry.”

She stared at her lap for another minute, then got up, turning to me. “No, and then neither would you. Is that why you want to?” She went over to the night table and lit a cigarette, her eyes avoiding me. “A wonderful marriage. Because we’re afraid of each other.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Just the way I always imagined it.” She went back to the window, blowing smoke and staring out, letting the quiet settle over the room. “I was right,” she said finally. “Now it’s raining. Where did your mother go?”

“Paris.”

“So you want me to come to Ca’ Venti. Yes, why not. I can’t stay here.” She smiled wryly. “I was going, but—”

“You can still get a train if you want,” I said, staring at her. “You can do whatever you want.”

She came over to the bed and put her hand in my hair. “Oh, no strings.”

“No.”

“No. But it’s too late for that, isn’t it? We’re tied now, with this thing. No matter what. So why not Ca’ Venti? Maybe it’s my fate.”

“What is?”

“You. I never thought, when it started—” She took her hand away. “But that was before.”

We waited until the rain stopped, not saying much, then took a vaporetto to Accademia and walked the rest of the way home. In the downstairs hall she hesitated for a moment, looking through to the water entrance, and I saw that she was imagining Gianni there again, his head on the steps. But then Angelina appeared, wanting to take her suitcase, asking her where to put it, making us feel, oddly, as if we were checking into a new hotel.

Without my mother, the house seemed even larger than before, and instinctively we avoided the big reception rooms, staying in the sitting room with the space heater. At one point Claudia wandered out to the room where the engagement party had been, but it was empty and gloomy, barely lit, and there was nothing to see, not even in memory. She fiddled with the radio for a while, the static somehow like our own strained jumpiness, then made drinks. When we weren’t talking, you could hear the clock.

Dinner was roast chicken and a creamy polenta, nursery food, and afterward we sat with a fire and listened to the house quiet down, footsteps in the upstairs hall, running water, then nothing. When we made love later, I thought of how it had been after the ball, the clutching, everything unexpectedly exciting. Now it was more like having too much to drink, a grudging pleasure that made it easier to sleep. We stayed in my room, Claudia curled beside me, just what we’d always wanted.

We both slept fitfully. Claudia tossed next to me, restless, and I drifted in and out, sleeping and then lying on my side with my eyes open, making out shapes in the dark room. Nothing was wrong—we were safe—but my eyes stayed open, my mind picking over things at random. Moretti, who had to be saved somehow. Cavallini, searching the canal for the right mooring. Claudia in the hotel room, anxious, looking out the window to see if they were coming to get her.

I turned onto my back and looked up at the ceiling and the faint moving reflections of the moonlit water outside. It was back again, the uneasiness of those first weeks, waiting for the sun to come over the Redentore. But that had been the dread of being suddenly at loose ends, a kind of decompression. This was a formless worry. Claudia moved next to me, rolling to her side. Not formless. I saw her again in the hotel room, turning to me. And then neither would you. I’d always thought of it one way, me reassuring her, safe as long as I held her. But of course it had to work the other way. I was only safe as long as she held me. And now she was frightened, ready to run off, sure they knew. Afraid I would say something. Afraid she would say something.

She moved again, rolling farther away, and I slid quietly toward the edge, slipped out from under the blankets, and tiptoed toward the closet, grateful that the marchesa had scrimped on the squeaky parquet floors, a luxury for the public rooms. Here, on noiseless carpet, I could get my clothes and leave the room without a sound. I stopped at the door, checking, but Claudia hadn’t moved. I dressed and made my way to the stairs, not even aware of the dark, everything familiar from the sleepwalking nights.

But why would she say anything? For that matter, why would they believe her? I had lost a fortune—the one man in Venice Cavallini didn’t suspect. Unless he wanted to. Nothing was predictable. You met a girl at a party, and the next morning, on a boat, you have the first clear idea you’ve had in months. I thought of her as we pulled into Salute, intrigued, the start of it. Then looking out the hotel window for shadows. Lying in the same bed now, afraid of each other. But these were four-in-the-morning thoughts, irrational, gone in the daylight, like mist burning off. I turned the door latch carefully, making only a click as I stepped into the calle. Nobody was going to say anything.

It was breezy on the Zattere, and my head felt clearer, wide awake now. Across the channel the giant brick Stucky factory loomed over the gardens of the Giudecca. There were shouts and clanging sounds up ahead at the warehouses behind the maritime station. The city would be awake soon—bakers, the first dog-walkers, everything normal. I would check in with Cavallini. Maybe Rosa’s lawyers had managed to get Moretti out. If we could just get Cavallini to back away, the boy might not even be tried. A case any defense could fight, a trial nobody wanted. Then we could leave, go anywhere Claudia liked. I went into the workers’ café opposite San Sebastiano, feeling better. Nobody would say anything. The barman nodded, as if it had been a day, not weeks, since I’d last stopped in, and handed me a coffee still foamy on top. I stood at the window, looking across at the church. Veronese’s church, the dreary stone façade, then the riot of color inside.

She must have been standing outside the steamy door for a few minutes, hands stuck in her pockets, before I noticed the movement in the corner of my eye. She was biting her lip, not sure whether to smile, pleased with herself for having found me but slightly embarrassed. Or maybe waiting for me to be pleased. Then someone opened the door and she was in anyway, standing next to me.

“I thought you were asleep,” I said.

“I thought you were.”

“Coffee?”

She shook her head, then glanced around, taking in the other customers in their blue coveralls and caps.

“What is this place?”

“It opens early. I come here sometimes.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I couldn’t sleep, that’s all. How did you find me?”

“I looked out the window. I saw you on the Zattere. I didn’t know what to think.”

“I went for a walk.” I paused. “I was coming back.”

She looked away. “I just didn’t know where you were going. I was worried.”

I held up the coffee cup. “Sure?” She shook her head again and I finished it. “Come on,” I said, guiding her with a hand on her back. A few of the men turned, amused, making up their own stories.

“I didn’t want to be alone in the house,” she said outside, explaining. But it wasn’t the house. “It’s so stupid. To be like that,” she said, shaking a little, just as she had in the hotel.

“You’re cold.”

“There’s only the coat,” she said, drawing it closer. “I didn’t have time to dress.”

I glanced at her. Once it would have been fun, nothing underneath, our secret in the café, something to laugh about when we got back to bed, warming ourselves. Now I thought of her throwing it on, racing down the stairs, making sure of me.

“Come here,” I said, folding my arms around her. “You’ll freeze.”

She let her head fall against my neck, so that I could feel her breath, quietly shaking like the rest of her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, then tipped her head back, and I saw that there were tears, the shaking stronger.

“Claudia—”

She took a breath. “Nothing. It’s nerves.”

“Ssh,” I said, moving her closer. “It’s the cold, that’s all.”

She rubbed her face against my coat. “I didn’t want to be with anyone again. Remember, I told you? At La Fenice? I was afraid of that. And now? I’m afraid when you’re not there. So the joke is on me, yes?” She wiped her eyes.

“No joke,” I said, lifting her head. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“No? So it’s what you wanted. You wanted us to be together.”

“Don’t you?”

“Oh, me,” she said, brushing the question away, another tear. She looked up. “You’re still so sure?”

“Yes,” I said, suddenly filled with it, a certainty you could touch. Seeing her face at the water gate, her eyes looking at me as we moved the tarp. And after, at the hotel, clutching each other, no one else, no doubt at all.

“Yes, and at the nurse’s, I saw your face. You thought for a minute—yes, you did—is it all a story? Something I made up. The hospital. The camp. What if she’s—”

What I had thought, just for a minute.

“Why would I make it up? But you thought that.”

“Claudia, I’m not going anywhere.”

She looked down. “So we can watch each other.”

“No,” I said.

She raised her head, waiting.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said again.

She looked at me, then nodded, a kind of concession, her eyes moist again. “No, we can’t. Not now. It doesn’t matter why, does it? It’s the only way we’re safe.”

“That’s not—” I said, but she was leaning into me, away from the wind off the Zattere.

“I know. It’s all right,” she said, her voice muffled. “So come home.” She turned, crooking her arm through mine, something she’d done a hundred times before, and suddenly I felt as if we had been snapped together. I looked down at the arm, curved around mine like a link in a chain. Tied now.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Claudia and I were married at a magistrate’s office in a ceremony that lasted less than fifteen minutes. Mimi and Bertie were the witnesses, and because there was no party, no real wedding, they insisted on taking us to lunch afterward at the Gritti. I had called my mother and told her not to come, and after a squeal of protest I think she was relieved not to have to make the trip. We’d have a proper celebration later, she finally agreed, but why the rush? Claudia wore an off-white silk dress with a coral belt that we bought in the Calle Frazzaria, off San Marco, and Bertie somehow miraculously found a corsage of hothouse flowers that set it off like a giant tropical brooch. A man took souvenir pictures after we signed the registry, and we are all smiling in them. It was not the wedding any of us would have imagined, but Venice made up for the missing bridesmaids. The weather was beautiful, warm enough to eat outside on the Gritti’s floating dock, with all the canal traffic going by. We joked that Salute, gleaming across the water with its marble icing, was our wedding cake.

“And you’re already here for your honeymoon,” Bertie said. “Think of them all, pouring out of the station. All swozzled and cranky before they even begin. Well, cheers.” He lifted his champagne glass. “Auguri.”

“What do you suppose they do?” Mimi said.

Bertie sputtered, smiling. “Mimi, dear—”

“During the day. I mean, you don’t want to look at Tintorettos on your honeymoon, do you?”

“Gondola rides,” I said. “With accordions.”

“What does Signora Miller want to do?” Bertie said, tipping his glass to Claudia.

“Signora Miller,” she said, trying it out. “It is, now, isn’t it?”

“Mm,” Bertie said. “I’m a witness.”

“It started with you, you know,” I said. “Your party. You introduced us.”

“I wish you’d introduce someone to me,” Mimi said.

“Oh no,” Bertie said, holding up his hands. “Anyway, as I recall, Adam, you introduced yourself. Bold as brass. And now look.”

“Yes,” I said, looking at Claudia, pretty with her flowers, the bright sky behind her.

“Signora Miller doesn’t want to do anything,” she said, as if Bertie had been waiting for an answer. “She’s happy to sit right here.” She looked over the blue midday water to the palazzos on the other side. One of the traghetto gondolas was weaving its way across, graceful as a dancer on point. “I could sit here forever.”

“Yes,” Bertie said, following her gaze. “Wouldn’t it be nice?”

We finished the wine, talking idly, then Bertie excused himself, and a few minutes later I followed. In the men’s room he was leaning on the marble counter, dabbing his face with a cold towel.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes, certainly. Why wouldn’t it be?” He looked at me in the mirror, then blotted his face again.

“I mean, are you in pain?”

A longer stare now in the mirror, then a resigned look away. “Somebody’s been reading medical reports.” He wiped his hands on the towel. “It’s all right now. It won’t be soon. Does that answer it?”

“No. Talk to me.”

He shook his head. “There’s no point. If you’ve read my file, then you know everything I know.”

“I don’t know what it means.”

“It means enjoy the beautiful day outside. I intend to. And that doesn’t mean going on about things that can’t be helped. Or things that—well, things. So let me enjoy it, please. I mean it, Adam. And not a word to Grace, either. Rushing back on trains and making me a cause. I know just what she’s like.”

“Bertie—”

“No,” he said, putting his hand on my arm. “Now let’s not ruin the day. It’s supposed to be the happiest day of your life.” He looked up at me. “Hers, anyway.”

“Did you get another opinion?”

“Yes, I’ve been through all that. Gianni was a perfectly competent doctor, you know, whatever else you may think he was. If he was.” He turned away. “Find anything else in his files?”

I shook my head. “Just you.”

“Serves you right. Snoop.” He threw the towel in the wicker hamper underneath the sink. “Better go before Mimi comes in after us. Don’t think she wouldn’t.” He started for the door, then stopped. “I almost forgot. Here.” He took an envelope out of his breast pocket and handed it to me. “For the happy couple.”

“Bertie.”

“I know, I shouldn’t have, but I did. Now put it away before you-know-who sees it.”

I stepped closer and put my arms around him, surprised a little when he hugged back.

“All right, all right,” he said, breaking away, touched. “It’s not a funeral, it’s a wedding. Such as it is. So let’s have a drink, and if you’re good, I’ll get Mimi away and you can have the day to yourselves.”

It took two drinks but then they were gone, taking their conversation with them. We sat quietly for a while in the sun, rocking on the wakes of the passing boats. The waiters, paid by Bertie, had disappeared inside.

“Is there anything you’d like to do?” I said. “See Tintorettos?”

She kept facing the water, squinting a little against the sunlight.

“I’d like to see my father,” she said finally. “Would you mind?”

I shook my head, waiting, not knowing what she meant.

“But it’s so far to walk. These shoes. Do you have money for a taxi?”

I patted my jacket pocket. “We’re rich. Bertie gave me a check. Where?”

But she was already getting up and walking over to the landing platform. A bellman helped her into the motorboat, then I followed, both of us sitting back against the cushions as the boat headed up the canal. The motor was too loud to talk over, so we watched the city go by, under the Accademia bridge, past the turn where Ca’ Maglione stood, brightened now with pots of geraniums on the balconies, then up the busy stretch to the Rialto, the water crowded with delivery boats. The view from Bertie’s window. What would happen to the house? I wondered. One of the assistants, perhaps, unseen but devoted, there in the end while the rest of us were kept away. Bertie’s real life, whirling in its own mystery.

We got out at San Marcuola and walked the rest of the way to the ghetto, Claudia’s high heels clicking loudly on the pavement. Away from the canal the streets became somber and dingy, and people stared openly at our clothes, the corsage almost startling here. Then up the narrow calle where her aunt used to gossip window to window, and over the bridge, ducking our heads in the low sottopasso to the open campo, as stark as before, the trees just beginning to bud. She stood for a minute, looking. No one passed us, the only campo in Venice that seemed lifeless, left behind.

“I always say I’ll never come here again, and then I come back,” she said.

We went over to a bench in front of what had been the old people’s home. She sat for a minute with her back against the wall, then leaned forward and took off her shoes.

“Mama mia, these shoes. What?”

“Mama mia,” I said, grinning. “A real Italian.”

“Ha, like the others,” she said, rubbing her foot. “At Signor Howard’s, speaking English. You don’t know real Italians.”

“I married one, didn’t I?”

She stared at the campo. “I don’t feel Italian here. Something else. They didn’t think we were Italian when they came for us.” She sat back, frowning. “Why do I come here? It’s always the same.”

“Maybe that’s why.”

“No, it’s foolish. But at the Gritti I thought, what am I doing here? My father can’t see me here.”

“But he can here?”

“No, that’s why it’s so foolish. But I wish he could. I thought, Today I wish he could see me. This dress. These shoes. Married. Just to show him I am alive. He never expected to see that.” She paused. “Well, did I? I never thought I’d leave that place. And now, flowers,” she said, touching the corsage. “So maybe I came to see myself. All dressed up. Show off to the neighbors.”

I lit cigarettes for us. “Maybe you will see somebody. You never know.”

She shook her head, the empty campo its own answer, then pointed across to one of the tall buildings. “That’s where it would have been, the wedding. See the windows on the third floor? There. And then after, a party somewhere. Big, with everybody. He liked parties.”

“Would he have liked me?” I said, just making conversation.

She shook her head, smiling. “No.”

“No?”

“No.” Laughing now, a private joke.

“Why not?”

“You’re not Jewish.”

“Part.”

She waved this away. “Americans. It’s different.”

“How?”

“It’s different.” She turned, a new idea. “And now me. I’m American too, yes? Passport, everything?”

“Everything.”

“I forgot about the passport,” she said. “Now I can go anywhere.”

“Almost worth getting married for.”

“He would have liked that, anyway. You know, for him, that generation, America was like a dream.” She looked again at the synagogue windows. “He would have made a big fuss. Introducing you. All the relatives.”

I kept looking at the campo, saying nothing.

“Well,” she said, moving somewhere else in her mind.

“Are you sorry it wasn’t like that?”

“Me? I’m supposed to be dead. Sometimes, at the Gritti, it’s easy to forget. Then I come here and I see it again.” She opened her hand to the square. “We’re all supposed to be dead. Not married, dead.” She paused. “And now who’s dead? The man who killed him. So that’s one thing I did for my father.”

“He can’t see that either,” I said.

“No, but I’m glad. I’m glad it was me.”

“It wasn’t you,” I said quietly.

“Yes, both of us. Do you think they’d take one of us without the other?”

I glanced at her, suddenly back in the registrar’s office. “Nobody’s taking anybody.”

“No. Well,” she said, getting up, dropping the cigarette, “not today. Anyway, such talk. On a wedding day. Of course, it’s not that kind of wedding, is it?” she said, nodding toward the windows again, where the relatives would have been.

“What kind is it?”

She ground out the cigarette with her toe. “Our kind.”

We walked toward the station, intending to get a taxi back, and in a few minutes were on the Lista di Espagna, crowded with people just off the train.

“Let’s go back there,” she said, pointing to the hotel on the side street where we’d first made love. “Do you want to?”

“Do you?”

“Yes. Not your mother’s house. There.”

The desk clerk raised his eyebrows at Claudia’s corsage, as if we were newlyweds from Maestre who’d wandered into the wrong place, but he gave us a key. Claudia was playful on the stairs, backing me against the wall on the landing, the way we’d been that first time, too eager to open the door. But the room was different, stuffy, in the back, and we had to draw the blinds against sun this time, not the cold rain that had made us feel hidden away, illicit. When she took off her clothes, first unpinning the flowers, I thought of her unbuttoning her blouse that day, the jolt of it, before anything happened. Before we were different. She felt it too, I think, that sudden moment of everything being different, because she looked for one second as if she might dart away, but then she stepped over to me, naked, and pressed herself against me, and that was the same again, different but the same.

We made love in a kind of rush, grabbing, so that our minds were free of everything but what was happening to our skin. You could feel it being pushed away, every thought crowded out by physical excitement, gathering speed, until sex was something happening to us, not in our control at all. When she came, a ragged burst of gasps in my ear, the sound seemed dragged out of her, involuntary, and then I was coming too, almost surprised by it, as if I’d been caught in some unwilled convulsion. I stayed in her afterward, not sure it was over, then finally rolled off, blinking at the ceiling, returning, still not thinking about anything. The way she’d once described it, something to prove you’re alive, just feeling it. When she’d told me it could be anyone, as long as you could feel it.