“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.
Now she was leaning over me, propped up on one arm, touching my face.
“We still have this, don’t we?” she said, not waiting for an answer, bending down to kiss me.
“You’re all red,” I said, reaching up and running my hand over the tops of her breasts, still flushed, as if she had a birthmark.
She smiled a little, feeling my fingers, her eyes on mine. “You should marry me.”
“Okay.”
“We could spend our wedding night here.”
“We could,” I said, my fingers still tracing a line across her chest.
For a second she gave in to the stroking, closing her eyes. Then she opened them again and stared down at me. “You’re not sorry?”
I shook my head, turning my hand over, brushing her with the back of it. “I’ll marry you again,” I said. “Would that do it?”
She nodded. “For all the other reasons. For those.”
I let my hand drop, then reached up with both arms and pulled her to me, kissing her, and for a while it really was the same again, but different.
We tried to sleep, lazy after sex, but the voices from the Lista di Espagna funneled into the calle, seeping through the window like dust, and neither of us really wanted to stay. Instead, like real honeymooners, we took a gondola, winding through the back canals until we lost our sense of direction, content to watch people crossing bridges over our heads, moving at their land pace while we drifted below. Sometimes they stopped to look at us, pointing at Claudia’s corsage, so that, mirrorlike, we became part of each other’s scenery. By the time the gondolier got back on the Grand Canal the sun was setting, the water gold and pastel, and he threw out his arms in an ecco gesture, as if he had arranged it for us, a wedding gift.
After the Gritti lunch, it seemed extravagant to go out, but the house in Dorsoduro felt confining, filled with ghosts, and Claudia said she wanted to do something American, so we ended up going to Lucille’s, just behind Campo San Fantin. The club had opened during the occupation, a little piece of home, and the customers were still mostly soldiers, on leave from bases in the Veneto or attached to one of the Allied offices that hadn’t yet packed up and gone. It had the borrowed, pretend quality of places like it in Germany-America till you walked out the door-and most of the locals avoided it.
When we got there, it was only half full. The band was finishing its first set, so the house lights were down, the other customers just shadows in the smoky darkness. At the table next to ours everyone was in uniform, drinking beer. Lucille, the colored singer who fronted the place, was doing “Easy Living,” trying to pass as Billie Holiday, with a flower in her hair. The soldiers next to us stared at Claudia when we sat down, someone approachable, the kind of girl who went to jazz clubs, and for a second I stiffened, then laughed at myself, a cartoon reaction: That’s my wife.
Lucille finished, and through the applause I heard one of the soldiers say, “Hey”-not flirting, trying to get our attention.
“Hey,” he said again, “remember us?” Moving his finger between him and his friend. “The island that was closed. Jim and Mario.”
“Torcello,” Claudia said, smiling. “Yes. You’re still here?”
“Last day,” one of them said. “Hey, let us buy you a beer.”
Claudia held up her left hand, wiggling her ring finger. “Ask him,” she said, nodding to me.
“What did I tell you?” one said to the other, then leaned forward, taking me in. “That’s great. When?”
“Today.”
“Today? Fucking A,” the GI said, then dipped his head in apology to Claudia. “Congratulations.” He signaled the waiter, then moved his chair closer, half joining us at the small club table. We shook hands.
“I have to tell you, I knew it. I said to him, what else would they come out here for? I mean, with the restaurant closed. We cleared out, remember?”
“I remember.”
Claudia, who seemed to be enjoying herself, shook hands with both of them.
“Mario?” she said.
“Calabrese. My grandfather.”
“Ah,” she said, pointing to herself. “Romana.”
The beers arrived, hers in a glass. She lifted it to them. “ Salute,” she said, smiling, the party we hadn’t had at the Gritti. “So they sent you here? You speak Italian?”
“Two words, maybe. My father didn’t want us to-”
