been pressing him to eat, and the wine was like water after the brandy.
He didn’t know this house.
He knew the district, however, the houses all around, many a warm bedchamber with a courtesan he liked well enough, but this house…
The candles hurt his eyes; the table was crowded with food that was no longer hot, and beyond loomed the frame of a bed carelessly hung, it seemed, with gold-threaded curtains. The heat of the enormous fire was too warm.
“Too warm,” he said. She had bolted all the shutters. And something bothered him, or perhaps several things, that there were so many spiderwebs under the ceiling, and that it was so damp here, it smelled of decay.
Yet all these riches in the midst of it, the goblets, the silver plate; there was something about all of it that reminded him of a stage set when you’re so close to the stage you can see the rafters and the wings.
But something bothered him, something in particular. What was it? It was…her hands.
“Why, they are enormous….” he whispered. And hearing the sound of his own voice, and seeing those long, long white fingers had brought him up out of a stupor, anxious suddenly, and pieces of the afternoon were missing.
What had she said? He couldn’t remember getting out of the gondola.
“Too warm?” she whispered. That same husky voice that made you want to touch her throat.
And as his vision cleared he saw her, almost as if for the first time. Not her hands, but her. If there had been any other moment that he had seen her, he could no longer recapture it, and he thought, out of habit, that surely, surely, his men were nearby.
But her. He was looking at the blurred outline of her, blinking now and then, straining against the drunkenness as he lifted the cup. The Burgundy was delicious though it was weak.
“You will not mind, my dear,” he said as he pulled the cork from the flask in his hand.
“You ask me that again and again.” She smiled. It was like breath, that voice; it was like part of her, and when had the voice of a woman ever been like that?
She wore a French wig. Flawless, white curls spilling over her shoulders, pearls embedded in ringlets, and oh, she was so young! So much younger than he had imagined her in the gondola where she had seemed ageless or ancient, and unquestionably Venetian, though he did not know why.
“A child,” he said to her gently now, his head suddenly pitching forward so that he felt his limits sharply, and with an attempt at dignity brought himself back up. Her lips were not rose, not pink, but some deep natural color. No, there was no paint. In the gondola, he would have tasted it and smelled it She was just this vision, and those eyes, staring at him.
And the dress with its tight embroidered band across her breasts. He wanted to slide his hand between her breasts and that tight band and tear it loose, just set them free.
“Why have you waited all these years to come to me!” He laughed playfully.
But her face suddenly changed.
It was as if all of a piece she had moved. Yet it happened so quickly, he was unsure of his perception. And now she settled back and that long luscious mouth spread easily in a smile that crinkled her black eyes at the edges.
She answered: “It seemed the perfect time.”
“Yes, the perfect time,” he said. Oh, if you only knew, if you only knew. He held his wife in his arms every time he held another woman, he held his wife closer and closer only for that moment of horror to see it was not Marianna, it was nobody, it was just this…just this whore.
Better not to think of all that now. Better not to think of anything.
He reached out and shoved the glaring candle to his right
“All the better to see thee, my child.” He mocked the French fairy tale.
He laughed and laid his head back against this heavy and very high-backed oak chair.
But as she bent forward, bringing her elbows onto the table and her face into the light, he found himself suddenly shocked. He drew in his breath and stiffened, his shoulders rising slightly.
“Do I frighten you?” she whispered.
He didn’t answer her. It was absurd to be frightened of her! He felt a little cruelty come into him, remembering that she would disappoint him, that behind this mysterious expression