patiently wiggling out of the gown and letting it drop around her knees, swinging one leg free and straddling him with it, then tearing the gown from the other leg and throwing it carelessly across the room.
‘Three hundred thousand lire,’ he had bellowed, laughing, ‘and she treats it like a Holiday Inn towel!’
‘The sheet Holeeday Eenn,’ she yelled back and started to laugh too. Then she leaned over Marza, and taking one of his nipples between her teeth, she began to move very slowly around, and he felt it get erect in her mouth before she began to suck it and then she looked at him. ‘Va bene?’ she asked mischievously.
‘Molto bene...’
She slowly ran her tongue from his nipple down to his navel, ringing it with her tongue. ‘E permesso...’
It was a whisper, and she concentrated on his stomach while awaiting the answer.
Marza groaned and then said, almost as quietly, ‘Don’t mention it.’
He lay on his back and smiled at her for a long time, feeling the tips of her fingernails, as light as butterfly wings, stroking his abdomen. Then her tongue, just as vague, a sense rather than a feeling. This was for him. It was a thing she loved to do to start things off. Then her lips brushed across the tip of his penis and he rose to her and then she enveloped him and began humming, a deep monotone, and Marza was lost. She seemed to be everywhere. With her tongue, her fingers, her lips. He began to move in rhythm with her, an almost involuntary response to her erotic overture. He could feel his heart pulsing in his throat. His fingers searched her lair, then she began to move her head and the moaning increased and he could feel the deep rumble in her throat vibrating against him as he grew harder and harder.
‘II tempo si e fermato per me’—’A small death,’ he breathed. ‘Time has stopped for me.’
And she answered, muffled, ‘Time does not exist.’
And then there was no more talking, and finally, when he felt he was about to explode, he slid down, pulling her up toward him as he did, and he ran his hand lightly down her stomach, felt her hair, then he squeezed her between two fingers and began moving his hand in slow circles and then both of them were moving and she was stroking him, still, drawing him closer and closer to her until he felt her fire envelope him. Her arms slid around his back and clutched him and as he was about to burst inside of her he chanted, over and over, ‘I give it up.
give it up... give it up...’ and finally, I love you.’
When they were married, the international gossips had given them a few months, a year at best. She was twenty and had been one of Italy’s brightest movie stars since she was seventeen. Marza was thirty-eight and was making a comeback. He had just won his third race in a row after having been written off as a washout by most of the sports writers and sponsors in the business. For three years he had been considered unbankable, a failed driver it thirty-five.
Then Noviliano, the great automobile maker, had come to him and offered him a fresh shot. A new car, experimental, temperamental, but insanely fast and stable. ‘It needs a man of experience,’ Noviliano told him. ‘I cannot trust this machine to some youngster.’
It was the beginning of the most successful relationship in racing history. Noviliano and Marza and the Aquila 333, a revolutionary automobile with heated baffles on the rear deck to ‘boil the air’ for stability, a cutback design, and a unique alcohol jet-injection fuel system that gave the car a fifty-mile range on everything else on the track, reducing its pit stops by at least a third.
It was a bitch, make no mistake, and Marza drove it like he was part of the frame. Nobody could touch him, and he was absolutely fearless, a man who scorned death. In an interview he once said, ‘I have seen death, two, three times, sitting on the fence waving at me. I say, “Fuck you, man, not yet. You don’t get Marza this time.” I think, if you are afraid of death, you should maybe be a cashier. This is not your game.’
When he met her, he was still on the way back up, and they were saying he would quit or be dead in a year, and besides, she was only twenty and how could he hope to keep her when every male between puberty and senility wanted her?
Marza and the Aquila 333 made racing history, and the car was to spawn one of the most exciting automobile ventures in modern times.
The faster her star rose, the faster he drove. For every hit film she made, he took another chequered flag. There was no competition between them. He delighted in her success and she saw in Marza what few others were ever permitted to see, a champion in every way, who loved her and respected her and treated her as a friend and a lover, not as a movie star. Others were intimidated by her beauty and her success. ‘Intimidation’ was a word he did not know. It was not part of his vocabulary. For Marza, intimidation was unthinkable.
And she adored him for it.
He drove with frightening skill, a man possessed, until Milena finally asked him to quit. He was rich beyond all dreams. There was nothing else for him to prove. And besides, Noviliano wanted him to work on a new idea, a new car that would have speed and grace and drive like a champion with a remarkable jet-injection engine that ‘would triple normal gas mileage. Not a racing car, but a Street car employing all the commercially practical aspects of the racer. Marza’s job was to test it and test it and test it until it was perfect.
The car was to be called the Aquila Milena because, as the Professor — the great Di Fiere, its designer — said, the car was like a rare and beautiful woman. It ‘was a tribute to Marza, having the car named after the thing he loved most in life. And what a car it was — it just might revolutionize the industry. The patent on the injection system alone could make them all millionaires again.
So he quit racing. And she quit acting. He found the perfect place for their new home, a knoll outside Malcontenta, on the edge of Laguna Veneta, overlooking her beloved Venezia, and he built a Greek villa for her, just twenty miles from the factory at Padua.
Turning his head, he gazed through the arched doorway, beyond the terrace and across the lagoon, toward Venezia, watching the sun edge from behind the church spire and slowly bathe the room with a translucent red glow. The best time of day for him. Always had been. He felt good. Today would be the perfect day to test the Milena. After all, he was taking its namesake to Monte Carlo for New Year’s Eve. Running the initial test would be his New Year’s present to himself.
She moved beside him, rolling over on her back; the satin sheet fell away and she lay sleeping before him, naked. He marvelled at her body, as he always had, longed for it again, but dawn was definitely not her time of day. A chill draft swept through the doors, moving the lace drapes in slow motion, as though they were underwater. He pulled the sheet gently back over her so she would not get cold.
