Backlight, page 17
"Reservation for Pallavicini," Francesca told the clerk.
"Yes, madam," the clerk replied. "Your keys are here. I'll arrange for your luggage to be brought up."
"Has Mr. Pallavicini arrived yet?" she asked.
The clerk checked his paperwork. "I'm sorry, madam, he has not. I'll be happy to show you to the room, and when he arrives, we'll let him know you're upstairs."
Francesca nodded, her brow knit in confusion. He'd known what train she was on. He'd made his flight so that they would arrive at the same time. Bruno always had his shoes shined, boarding pass printed, bags packed to fit in the overhead compartment. There was no reason for him to be late or to have missed his flight. It was cold but not snowing. Fine weather for flying. Unless he never intended to arrive at all and this was an elaborate send-off. She steeled herself against the thought and followed the clerk to the elevators.
"Just this way," the clerk explained. "In the morning, you'll have a gorgeous view of sunrise on the canal."
Francesca smiled and nodded, fighting a stinging in her heart.
BIG DOUBLE DOORS OPENED into high ceilings, Renaissance frescoes, and contemporary furniture in a room overlooking the Canal Grande and a white palazzo that looked like a wedding cake, festooned with flags: the courthouse.
"Your room, madam," the clerk said, and then she was alone.
Francesca stood before the windows and looked out on the darkening island. In the Grand Canal she watched boats crossing from bank to bank, some gondolas but more commercial boats, waterbuses like she'd ridden, bringing commuters home from work, water taxis taking tourists to dinner, boats delivering packages and picking up garbage. She turned from the window to the minibar, pawing through the tins until she found pistachios, choosing them because the shells might distract her. She set the shells in two piles: catastrophe and dismissal.
She opened the double windows and welcomed the rush of cold air in the room; the discomfort matched her anxiety. She leaned over the iron rail and smoked, watching people traveling to their destinations, their homes, the people who loved them. It had never occurred to her to want stability. And now, deprived it, she didn't want anything else.
She flushed her cigarette butt and brushed her teeth. In the event she was stranded here, alone, she studied the room service menu, reviewed the drinks on offer. Her bag remained unopened on the rack where the porter left it; she was afraid unpacking would guarantee his absence. She returned to the window, watching for the airport launch to cross over again to stop at San Silvestro, with Bruno aboard.
She didn't hear the key in the door and when it opened; she started with a gasp.
"It's not as bad as it looks," he said. It took a few seconds to register, the purple-blue rare-beef bruise behind his glasses, covering the left side of his face from his brow to his cheek, the broken blood vessel flooding his eye, the white tape at the edge of his eyebrow. He dropped his bag and crossed the room to embrace her.
"What happened?" she asked, aghast. He looked like he'd been left for dead in an alley. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. These aren't even stitches," he said, pointing at the white tape.
"But what happened?"
He stroked her hair and kissed her forehead, cringing when he pursed his lips. "I haven't been sleeping well this week. Work has been stressful. I had a lot I wanted to finish before this weekend."
"I'm not following." She tilted his chin to look at the left side of his face.
"I had a fight last night—"
"You got into a fight?"
"No, I had a fight. It had been scheduled for weeks."
"Who schedules a fight weeks in advance?"
"It's not like that, it's like a boxing club. We have a weekly schedule." He walked to the bar. "Do you want a Campari?"
She nodded. "A boxing club." She didn't like the sound of that. Not one bit. "You're in a boxing club?"
"Sure. I've done it for a while. It helps with the stress." He handed her a glass with her pomegranate-colored drink.
"But not kickboxing. Actual boxing. Against other people."
"And training, too. But yes, actual boxing against actual people." He took ice from the silver ice bucket and pressed it against his cheek.
Francesca ran into the bathroom for a washcloth. "Use this," she said, wrapping some ice and giving it to him.
"I was slow last night. I must have been tired. I thought I had him, but all of a sudden, he caught me with a left hook. Almost knocked me out."
She widened her eyes in disbelief. "Knocked you out like Rocky? Do you wear mouth-guards? Were you bleeding? Are those even your own teeth?"
"Just this little cut above my eye. Yes, of course I wear mouth-guards. They are my teeth."
"I don't like this." She curled up beside him on the couch, inspecting the rest of his face. "Aren't you worried about brain damage? CTE? Ending up like Muhammed Ali? Why can't you just do triathlons or something?'
He turned to her with an intensity in his dark, kind eyes. "I like it. I like fighting."
"Did you win?"
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Who were you fighting?"
"I don't know his name. Stocky guy. A lot faster than he looked."
She drank her bitter Campari. "How did you go into work today?"
"I went in early and hid in my office most of the day. Claudio knows—he was the one who got me into it—I didn't have any meetings, just a couple of calls."
"I'm afraid to kiss you," she said, threading her fingers in his.
"Be gentle," he said. He pulled her close to him, letting her snuggle into his chest, her ear to his heart, listening to it beat.
"Do you bet money on these fights?" she asked, her voice muffled by his shirt.
"No. It's just for fun."
"Fun," she sniffled.
"Are you hungry? I had an idea for dinner but I wonder if we should just do room service."
"I'm terribly hungry—I already devoured all the pistachios. Room service is fine. It looks like I've battered you."
He smiled with the unbruised side of his face. "When I called this morning, they said they'd have pasta e fagioli, bigoli, and then langoustines. Do you want that or would you prefer something else?"
She had a hard time looking at him with his face like that. She had to force herself not to look away. "That's fine. It's cold. I suppose you've already chosen a wine?"
"I looked at the list. I have a couple in mind." Of course, he'd done it all ahead of time. Conscientious Bruno. Always doing his research.
He phoned down to order their dinner, and while he was up, poured them more drinks.
"You never seemed much of a fighter before." She remembered, vividly, a summer when she'd seen him crying behind the boathouse, when her brother had hit him and he hadn't hit back. If she was nine, he would have been sixteen, then. Tall and skinny, thick glasses, knobby knees, scrawny, stick-figure arms. He couldn't have hit back if he tried.
He drank his scotch. "That's why. I needed to toughen up."
She wondered if he remembered that day, too. Why had Ricci hit him? She was afraid to ask then. She was still afraid to ask.
"But don't you worry? Look at your face. It's frightening."
"It frightens you? Am I hideous?"
"It frightens me you could be hurt. You don't need to be tough." He could be hurt, and he could hurt. She wasn’t sure how to process that thought. She focused on his body from the neck down, the suit, the tie, the watch, the shoes. All polished. "Aren't you afraid you'll hurt someone else? What drives you to hit another man?"
"Most of the time, it's clinical. If you do it right, you can win a fight and not be hurt."
"But when you hurt someone else—"
"He's choosing to be in the ring, too. He knows the risks."
"That's not like you," she said quietly.
"It's sweet that you think that."
A sharp knock sounded on the door. Bruno rose to answer it, and two uniformed porters carried in silver dinner trays.
"Thank you, just on the table is fine." He pressed some bills in their hands and closed the door behind them. "Do you want another cocktail or shall I open the wine?"
"Let's try the wine. Do you have your notebook?"
"Now you're making fun of me," he said, applying the corkscrew to the bottle of Nebbiolo.
"No, I'm trying to find the part of you that doesn't bash people's faces in."
He stopped with the corkscrew. "Is that the only part you like?"
"I don't understand how I could like the other part." And yet, in a perverse way, she did. Those muscles, now familiar, used in a primal, intensely physical way. His strength and swiftness an asset to him in the ring. He must be good if she'd never seen him like this, beaten.
He had finished opening the wine and poured it, pausing for just a moment to inhale a taste.
"Let it breathe a few minutes," he said.
"How do you just switch it off?"
"Which part?"
"Just now, you're being normal again, nerdy about the wine. But when I look at you, you're a man who just bashed someone's head in."
He shrugged. "I don't know."
"Did you expect I wouldn't find out?"
"Obviously not, I couldn't very well say I walked into a door."
"But you didn't care enough to tell me before now?"
"It wasn't an issue before now. And honestly, it isn't an issue now." He spoke with weight, his words landed a blow.
The soup was warm and savory, nourishing against the damp, penetrating cold; she ate despite her unease. The taste felt like home; the warmth felt like home. But his face. How could she eat and look at that face? The bruise alone, in its spectrum of colors, the broken blood vessels spreading out from his bottom eyelid in the shape of the Indian subcontinent, it was bad enough. But Bruno inflicting pain on someone else—a stranger, too, she imagined—just random violence? How could he?
"There's things about you that I haven't particularly liked," he said quietly, as if he'd read her thoughts on her face.
"Like what?" She pushed her half-eaten soup to the side and sat back in her chair. "Go ahead."
"I wasn't finished," he replied. "I meant to say there's things I haven't particularly liked, but that doesn't keep me from loving you. I didn't intend to list your flaws; you seem to enjoy doing that yourself."
He took the cover off a dish of bigoli with fegato.
She turned from him and gripped the bottom of the chair to steady herself. "That's a backhanded way of saying it."
"Saying what?"
"That you love me. I'll always be able to come back to it, or tell my friends how romantic it was, to hear you say you love me despite all my flaws."
"Francie. I'm sorry it came out wrong. But you're making a big deal out of something that's not a big deal."
"It's not a big deal that you love me?"
He smiled, and then winced at the pain on the left side of his face.
"It is a big deal that I love you. It isn't a big deal that sometimes I like to box. That's all I'm trying to say."
"What don't you like about me?"
"Francie! I just said I love you. Why do you care?"
"Just name something."
"You're being petty." He refilled their wineglasses.
"Is that what you're going to write in your notes? Lovely Nebbiolo, petty Francie?"
"I think that part will stay off the record."
"Tell me. What don't you like about me?"
"I wish you'd stop smoking."
"I've slowed down a lot," she protested.
"You should stop entirely. It's awful for your health."
"So's getting hit in the head all the time." She crossed her arms over her chest.
He had finished his pasta and uncovered another dish. "Do you want langoustines?"
"I've never liked having to tear them apart," she admitted. He dissected the langoustine clinically, efficiently separating the pink exoskeleton from the lobster's body, disposing of the antennaed head, and gave her the meaty tail.
She ate the langoustine, drizzling it with olive oil and sprinkling it with salt and pepper, cutting it with her knife and fork.
"You're not going to stop?" she asked when she'd finished. She walked to the window. The lights across the canal twinkled through the heavy mist; the stillness of Venice permeated their room, hanging heavy in the air. She felt him behind her, his body heat and then his touch, the firmness of his embrace, muscles built by boxing wrapped around her softness.
Yet she broke away. His touch was too firm, his grasp too tight, and her breath was too shallow to reach her lungs. She remembered an elbow across the back of her neck, face down on a pillow. She remembered another strong hand binding her wrists together, pinning them above her head. She remembered the strength and speed of a man when she was immobile, and she ran to the bathroom.
Her heels rang on the marble floor and her face was sallow in the bright vanity light and she turned the cold faucet all the way to drown out his voice calling her name. What makes you think he’s not going to hurt you, she heard Regina saying. What makes you think you can trust him?
She pulled her phone from her pocket and punched in a message. Maybe you were right, she wrote. Maybe this is too fast.
Selim would have pounded on the door. Paolo would have sulked and run away. The professor—who knows what he would have done, confronted with Francesca’s heaving emotions, probably made himself a coffee and painted a nude.
“Take all the time you need, Francie,” Bruno said over the rushing water, his voice muffled through the door.
Her phone vibrated. Not Regina, but Giulietta, sending a photo of Leo holding a completed Lego vehicle, beaming. Finished it in one day, she wrote.
Do you trust him, G? Francesca typed. Do you think I can trust him? But she couldn’t bring herself to send the message. Giulietta couldn’t decide for her.
She splashed her face and turned off the faucet, buried her skin in the plush white towel, pulled her hair back into a ponytail. You can handle this, she told herself. You can make the right choice. And then she opened the bathroom door.
BRUNO WAS STANDING at the rail looking out on the canal. At the sound of the door, he turned.
“Francie.” He stayed in his spot, allowing her space. She cut through the distance to return to his warmth.
"I don't want anything to happen to you," she whispered.
He nodded. "It won't." He scooped her up in his arms and carried her into the bedroom. She stripped off his shirt, careful to lift it clear of his face when she pulled it over his head, slipping out of her jeans and sweater and dropping them on the floor.
"I want to make love to you," he said.
She traced the taut muscles on his torso, concentrating on everything below his neck, not raising her eyes to look at his face.
"When I was with Selim," she began, focusing on a tiny mole below his left nipple, "I used to think we belonged together because we were both such flawed people. It took me a long time not to feel that way anymore."
"Francie."
"We deserved each other; he couldn't give me all of himself and he didn't want all of me. Of course, we kept parts of ourselves from each other. I want you to know me, but not if it means you don’t like me."
"Francie, that's not true—"
"I know you didn't mean it like that. But I already feel like I've made so many mistakes, and there's no reason you could love me. That's how I used to feel. Don't make me feel like that again."
He took her hand and kissed the tips of her fingers like he had nothing else to do in the world. Like he could do it for the rest of the night.
"I do love you," he murmured into her hand.
"No exceptions?"
"No exceptions."
She laid back on the pillows, and as he began his conquest of her bared skin, she retraced his words. He loved her. Despite her flaws. At least he was honest. She looked past his body to the long windows; outside, in the cold Venetian night, it had begun to snow, big, wet flakes falling past their window to dissolve in the chilly water of the canal. And then she lost herself in his touch.
FRANCESCA WOKE BEFORE Bruno, the windows full of rising sun reminding her of waking up in Paolo's light-filled loft. She looked at Bruno, his black eye shut. He must be exhausted to sleep this late. She slipped out of bed, rushing to find a sweater against the morning chill. Looking back at the bed, Bruno's still body splayed in the sheets showed a peace at odds with his battered face. She shuddered and tiptoed into the living room to order coffee.
At the waiter's knock, Bruno stirred, and she brought his coffee to him.
"Are you awake?" she asked, sitting beside him on the edge of the bed.
"Barely. Is it late?"
"Why does it matter? We're on holiday." She gave him the white china mug as he sat up.
"We only have two days; I don't want to waste any of it," he said.
"I don't think we're wasting it," she said, walking her fingers up the inside of his thigh. He squirmed against her.
"Your hands are cold," he said, twitching his face into a smile.
"So we don't need to rush out of bed, then. What are these big plans you have, anyway?"
"You're always saying how much you like the museums and galleries here. I thought you could show me."
"But this room is so pretty, it seems a shame to leave it." She looked at its Murano glass chandelier, the silver wallpaper and gilt moldings, the heavy curtains framing their view of the canal.
"I'm glad you like it. We'll be back later, though. We should go out." He kissed her forehead.
"I'll get dressed."
She pulled on a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved, slouchy tee. She dug around in her suitcase until she found a fine gauge navy cashmere grandpa cardigan. Bruno joined her, finishing dressing. He wore jeans, too, and a half-zip sweater over a checked shirt. He was wrapping a knit scarf around his neck.
"Do you have a map?" she asked.
"Of course," he replied, pulling a paper map from his briefcase. "Can you fit it in your bag?"
She held open her big Bottega hobo, showing him all the room inside. "I think so."
