“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.
