After that first day, we settled into a pattern. At one Claudia would walk over from the Accademia-ten minutes, if she hurried-and we would make love until she had to go back, dressing and leaving me in bed. I think it excited her to leave first, as if the room were in a brothel and she had somehow bought my time. She liked everything about the room-the touristy Murano chandelier, the chipped gold paint on the sideboard-because it seemed to her what such a room should look like, a little tawdry, worn from years of afternoon sex. She never came to my mother’s house and didn’t want me to go to hers. An affair was set apart from real life, something you did in hotels.
I had never had sex with anyone who responded the way she did, not just with pleasure or curiosity but the way I’d seen children eat in Germany, with a greedy determination to fill themselves up, not sure they would ever eat again. The afternoons were for both of us a kind of daily feast, sampling and tasting. Day after day in our cheap hideaway room, warm with radiator heat, we slid against each other, slick with sweat, until, finally exhausted, we felt the world begin to come back a little. Then she would dress and lean over to kiss me in the damp sheets, not saying good-bye but fixing a time for tomorrow, when we’d begin again. Days of it like this, drunk with sex.
We didn’t go out for dinner or have a drink at Harry’s or meet each other anywhere but at the hotel. At first she said she had to be careful, she didn’t want people at work to know, but after a while I realized the secrecy itself, the sense of being illicit, was erotic to her. When she closed the door to the hotel room, she could do anything, away from everyone, even herself.
Then, after a few days, the afternoons weren’t enough. I wanted to know where she went, how she spent her time. Wanted her, in fact, to spend it with me.
“I don’t want to go to restaurants. It’s nice the way it is.”
“But I want to talk to you. To know you.”
“Who knows me better than you? Do you think I’m like this with everyone?”
“I don’t mean that.”
“I know what you mean. I know you a little now too. You like the fans, the masks. Old Venice.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“You know, all the fans, that was to end up here,” she said, patting the bed.
“So maybe we missed something, skipping all that.”
She shook her head. “No.” She pulled me down to her. “Do you think we missed something?”
“No.”
“Then it’s enough. Here.”
“All I did was ask you to dinner,” I said, kissing her.
“I can eat anytime. Wouldn’t you rather do this?”
“Yes.”
But a few days later I got a chance to force the issue when my mother came down with a cold and Gianni, now the attending physician, offered me his seats at La Fenice.
“I’ve never been,” Claudia said, tempted.
“Let’s do it right. We’ll take a gondola.”
“Ouf. A gondola from San Isepo, with everyone at the window. I’ll take the vaporetto.”
“Then you’ll come?”
“I always wanted to see it, La Fenice.”
“Do you have something to wear? We can buy you a dress.”
“No, you don’t buy me a dress. I’m not-” She turned away. “I can dress myself. Even for La Fenice.”
I hired the gondola anyway and met her at San Marco, then maneuvered her into the rocking boat for the short trip through the back canals.
“You’re extravagant,” she said.
“You have to go this way. Where else can you do it? Pulling up to the opera in a boat?”
“You can also walk,” she said, but smiling as the dark houses glided by, surprised to see a different city from this angle. Under her wool coat she was wearing a long evening dress she said she had made herself, gloves, and rhinestone-studded slippers.
“Where’d you get the shoes?”
“Borrowed. A friend keeps them for Carnival every year.”
“Very fancy.”
“Vulgar?” she said, concerned.
I smiled at her. “No, fancy. Perfect.”
The canals got narrower after we drifted past the hotels and began to circle around to the Fenice water entrance. There was no sound but an occasional snatch of radio and the smack of the steering pole hitting the water. A light mist was rising, just high enough to soften the lights.
“My god, it’s beautiful like this,” she said. “No wonder they come.”
“You’ve lived here all your life.”
“Not in a gondola. It’s different.” She turned to me. “You make me a tourist.”
We turned a corner into a small lighted basin and one of those scenes that gives Venice its storybook quality-a traffic jam of boats rocking against one another as people stepped up to the pavement, the familiar taxi drop-off made theatrical by the water. After the shadowy canals, the lights here were festive, opening-night bright, catching jewels and white silk scarves.
“You see, it’s another city. People like that,” she said. A woman covered in white fur was being handed up to a footman.
“Never mind. They’ll all be looking at you. ‘Who’s that up there in the box?’ ”
“It’s a box? Whose?”
“A friend of my mother’s.”
“A rich American?”
“No, Venetian. Not rich either. A doctor.”
“My father was a doctor. He didn’t have a box at La Fenice.”
“This one had doges in the family.”
“Oo la. A doge’s box.”
I smiled at her. “You don’t believe me?”
“You, yes. Maybe not him.”
Then our gondola reached the entrance and I had to help her out and tip the gondolier, and her attention shifted to the crowd inside. We took the stairs to the second tier and followed the number plates to Gianni’s box. Every light in the theater seemed to be on, making the red-and-gold walls glow, almost burning. We were the first to arrive, so took the seats nearest the rail.
“Who else is coming?” Claudia said.
“I don’t know. Maybe he has the whole thing. Here, let me take your coat.”
“A minute,” she said, reaching into the pocket and pulling out a fan, then opening it, her eyes lowered in a mock flirtation over the edge. “Like this?”
“Where’d you get it?”
“With the shoes. A Carnival costume.”
“Not that, though,” I said, nodding at the brooch on the front of her dress.
“No, my mother’s. A friend hid it.”
“Hid it?”
“When I was away.”
She went to the edge of the box and leaned forward, taking in the scene like gulps of air. Below, people were settling in and looking around, nodding to one another, testing their opera glasses, everyone smiling, expectant.
“Look at them, like birds,” she said, her eyes darting around the theater.
I glanced down-the dresses in fact were as bright as feathers-then over at her. Her dress, a dark blue clinging fabric gathered at the waist, would have been dull without the pin, but it opened at the neck in a way that drew your eyes upward, toward the face, flushed and eager, and her hair had been pulled back, exposing her ears, making her look even younger. A different Claudia, girlish and wide-eyed, not the woman in the hotel room. How many others were there?
