I fell asleep soon afterward, too tired to be self-conscious that he was still awake and watching me. It was good to fall asleep first, in the warmth of his gaze. When I woke up, his arm was around me, one leg thrust over mine. I loved him very much that morning because he slept so sweetly, and I felt hopeful and full of the certainty that good things were on the way, because surely nothing could come between us as long as we could sleep wound around each other every night.
It had taken me twenty-three years to get into bed with a man, but I took to it with a shameful lack of shame, mostly because for all my immodesty, I always held something back, something of myself, in case one day I should need it. Luca said that I was brutal, but he meant it as a compliment. So I never took offense. Early on, I stopped wearing a nightgown to bed which disturbed Luca’s sense of propriety, and he clung to his pajama bottoms stubbornly, until the day I took a scissor to the only pair he owned. Thereafter, he slept naked too and I could touch him all night as much as I liked and feel his warmth against me.
I especially liked to trace the scar that ran from above his thigh to just below his hip. His scar was like a secret we shared, and like all secrets, it somehow bound us together. He had fallen through a window when he was just a boy and had almost bled to death, and it scared me to think that he could have bled to death in Italy and I’d never have known him. Sometimes, I’d trace his scar too lightly, and he’d slap my hand and say, “Stop it, Darcy. You’re tickling me.” Then I’d trace it harder, and he always knew what that meant. We never had to say much to each other to know when it was time to be together. We were silent then, except for the words Luca would whisper against my throat just before he finished. Foreign words that had no meaning for me, and he would not tell me what they meant. He said if I was going to learn to speak Italian, it just wasn’t right to learn those kinds of words first. But I didn’t want to learn. It would have made me strange to myself to speak Italian.
In the morning, I liked to watch him shave, and it got to be a ritual. I would sit on the commode tank with my feet on the seat, and he would go through the elaborate procedure of soaping his face with a brush and sharpening his razor with a strap and then making narrow strips from his cheeks to under his chin. My eyes followed every stroke. I don’t know why I got so much pleasure out of watching him shave, except that it was probably the same reason that made him like to watch me brush my hair.
We fought a lot, about all sorts of things, and for some reason, at the very point when we were most frenzied and ready to spit on each other, I would begin to want him. And that was how all our fights ended, sweetly and without the need for words. It helped too that Luca had never really lost his accent, so that even when we fought and he wanted to be mean, everything came out sounding like endearments.
Sometimes at night, lying in our bedwhen sleep wouldn’t come quickly, we would talk. With my head on his shoulder, I’d watch the glow of his cigarette in the dark and tell him things that I had never told another living soul. Luca somehow, in his patient, unhurried way, made me remember things I hadn’t thought of in years. He liked to talk about Italy. He had grown up an urchin on the streets of Naples, his mother having died when he was a baby and his father preoccupied with keeping a roof over their heads and food on the table. He hadn’t felt particularly motherless because in Naples all the grown-ups raised all the children. But when he had turned sixteen, his father wanted a better life for his son and to see him educated. So with the money they had accumulated, they traveled to America. But even more than talking about his life, Luca liked to draw me out about my own experiences growing up in Galen.
“You don’t seem to fit in with the rest of the people here,” he said to me.
“I never wanted to,” I told him.
“You sound like it’s a matter of honor not to be like the others.”
“It is…to me. But the funny thing is that you fit in here just fine.”
“Oh, I can fit in anywhere,” he said wistfully. “My father raised me to fit in.”
“How’s that?”
He sighed. “As a young man, he’d had to leave Naples to find work in Switzerland. That’s how the poor people do it in Italy. The men go off for months to wherever there is work. So children grow up without fathers. Speaking only Italian, he was marked as a foreigner. He met a German girl there. He told me about her once. It was long before he met my mother. He wanted to marry the girl, but her father wouldn’t allow it. I think my father thought of that girl till the day he died.” Luca’s voice was
