Alibi: A Novel (7 page)

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?

She caught my stare and pulled up the fan again, giggling, having fun.

“Oh, you brought glasses,” she said as I lifted them out of my pocket. “Can I see, please?” Suddenly twelve.

I watched her as she scanned the audience.

“There’s Rusconi, from the Accademia. My god, what a wife. Two of him. Do you think Signor Howard’s here?”

“No idea,” I said, still watching her, face tilted up now as she took in the upper tier.

“Where do they all come from?” she said. “You always hear it’s a small town, but I don’t know any of them.”

“Maybe it’s small to them. Same people.”

“The musicians are coming,” she said, almost fidgeting now with anticipation.

There was a final rustle of feathers below as the lights dimmed for the overture, then the music started and I moved my chair closer to hers. She was sitting erect, years of table manners and piano lessons, a well-brought-up girl. The back of her neck was pale and thin, and when I reached to touch it with my fingers, she turned with a shy smile, as if in fact we’d been flirting over fans.

The opera was
Così fan tutte
, and since the program notes were in Italian, beyond my guidebook vocabulary, I just sat back and listened, not even bothering to follow the story. Real fans and full-skirted gowns began to appear on the stage below, as natural there as the gilt-and-red wallpaper. How did they stage tragedies in a room like this? Nothing worse than mistaken identity and harmless jealousy could happen here. When Claudia leaned over to whisper, “They’re pretending to be Albanians,” I almost laughed out loud at the silliness of it, then felt a kind of giddy release. Even Claudia was smiling broadly, almost grinning, maybe the way she used to be all the time, after the piano lessons.

The four lovers were singing an ensemble piece when the door opened behind us. I turned to find a middle-aged woman in a prewar evening gown, trailed by a white-haired man with a bushy fur-collared coat, like the cartoon plutocrat on Monopoly cards. Everything about her was lacquered—glistening lipstick and nails, dress shiny with beadwork. She looked at us, her eyes moving from surprise to displeasure in a second, obviously put out to find strangers in her box. I got up, gesturing to my front-row seat, but she waved her
hand in a kind of dismissal, pretending to be concerned about distracting the people next to us, and took the chair behind.

We spent the rest of Act I speculating about one another—only Claudia in all that rustling and craning of necks seemed to be paying attention to the opera—but it was only when the interval finally came that we could stand and introduce ourselves in the light. Their name was Montanari. I mentioned Gianni and insisted that the woman move to the front row, but she was interested only in Claudia now, literally going over her from head to foot, eyes cold and superior behind the public smile. Then she raised her head, finished, with that peculiar satisfaction of finding someone wanting. Claudia, who had started with a polite nod, moved back a little against the rail, caught by the woman’s gaze, her color suddenly draining away.

“Grassini,” the woman said carefully, repeating Claudia’s name as if she were trying to place her, the way her eyes had judged the rhinestone slippers cheap, the dress ordinary, everything somehow wrong.

And for a second I saw it too, not the young skin and high spirits that had made everything seem right before, but someone found out, in the wrong box. There are tiny moments that change the nature of things. I glanced at Signora Montanari, the withering, stupid eyes, and suddenly I wanted to fold up Claudia in some protective cape, safe, so that no one could look at her again. I touched her hand at the rail, asking her to read my face. Never mind about the dress, never mind about any of it. You’re not just someone I sleep with.

But Claudia’s color had come back and with it her assurance. “Yes, Grassini,” she said evenly. “Perhaps you knew my father, Abramo Grassini.”

The woman blinked. “Ah. Abramo. No.” She turned to me. “And you’re a friend of Gianni’s?” she said, still assessing.

“Yes,” I said easily. “He’s with a patient. I’m sorry about the seat. Will you have a drink with us?”

“No, no, we’re meeting some people.” She gathered up her cloak, eager now to leave. “Please,” she said, evidently offering us the run of the box.

“What was that all about?” I said when she’d left.

“She knows I’m a Jew,” Claudia said.

“Don’t be silly. How could she possibly know? She just doesn’t want to share the box.”

“No. She knows. Once you see the look, you don’t forget it.” She picked up the fan, opened it, and put it against her face. “Well, so much for this. Let’s go.” She reached for her coat.

“Later,” I said. “Right now we’re going downstairs and have some champagne. Then we’ll come back and listen to the rest.”

“She doesn’t want me here.”

“Well, I do. Would you rather please her?”

She looked up, a small smile. “One grandfather. It’s easy for you. But for me, it’s not—comfortable.”

“I’ll sit between you. Come on, let’s have some champagne.” I held out my hand to her. “Tell me the rest of the story. Why they’re pretending to be Albanians.”

Another smile.

“It’s our box,” I said, taking her hand. “We’re not leaving.”

In the end it was the Montanaris who left, midway through the second act, after Fiordiligi sang in the garden by the sea. Signora Montanari had taken the rail seat next to Claudia, and it may be that she finally realized, distressed, how they must appear from below—one young, her pale skin catching the stage lamps, the other expensive and brittle, attractive now only to men on Monopoly cards. Or it may be this was just my idea, the story I made up as Signor Montanari nodded off at my side. But when Fiordiligi finished and Signora Montanari made an apologetic headache motion and slipped out with her surprised husband under the applause, I felt as if we had won something. I moved down to the rail seat.

“We’ve run them off.”

Claudia shrugged, a wry smile. “One victory for the Jews.”

But she seemed happier now, relieved, and the music went with her, buoyant, heading into the finale. As things sorted themselves out onstage, something for everyone, it seemed to me that we had gotten our earlier mood back, frothy again, like the interval champagne.

Outside it was cold and damp, and I put my arm around her as we walked.

“You looked lovely, just sitting there, waiting it out like that.”

“It didn’t feel lovely. Bitch. Probably a Fascist too.”

“No, there aren’t any, haven’t you heard? Same thing in Germany. All disappeared somehow.”

“You think it’s funny.”

“No, but I spent months chasing them, so I know what it’s like. Anyway, she’s gone, so let’s have a drink. The Gritti’s right up here—they’ll be open.”

The street was filled with people coming from La Fenice, wrapped in coats and furs, like the shuttered stores.

“No, it’s late.”

“All right, I’ll take you home.”

“No,” she said, putting a gloved hand on my chest. “I’ll go. It was wonderful, the opera.” She looked up. “So, shall we meet tomorrow?”