Chapter 13 #3
She bowed her head and contemplated her hands in her lap, her own empty glass, the way the folds of her gown sifted and fell with the breeze.
The subtle twinkle of spangles against indigo silk, as if she were a fragment of the night, dusted with stars.
She stood and placed her glass on a wrought-iron table, turned to him, and lifted her hands.
“Shall we dance?”
He glanced around them. “Out here?”
“Sì, conte. It’s the perfect place to escape toxins. A moonlit sky, no one else nearby.”
“There are about a hundred and fifty other people nearby.”
“But not out here with us, not right now. Right now, it’s just you and me and that big fat moon shining down on us. Shadows and silver, and the music. Can you hear it? My plan is to spin you into a corner until you’re dizzy, and steal kisses until neither of us can breathe.”
He accepted her hands in his, pulled her closer. “Darling Margherita, you don’t have to steal them. Don’t you know? Every single kiss of mine already belongs to you.”
SO THEY DID dance, just the two of them, to the tune of If I Had You, just audible beneath the chatter inside the gallery and the stop-and-start snarl of traffic outside of it.
A photographer’s flash sent a sudden hot burst of light over them both, but Rita happened to be facing the photographer in the doorway and got the worst of it.
She stumbled a little. The photographer—one of Lasky’s hired hands, no doubt—called out Grand shot, thanks! before retreating back into the gallery.
The blind spot in her vision was a great blue void. Giuseppe led her back to the iron table, guiding her into one of the chairs.
When she looked up again, the spot was dissolving, and he was kneeling before her.
Her heart actually skipped a beat, went ka-thunk inside her chest, hard and unpleasant.
She realized he was still holding her hand and then couldn’t stop staring down at this tender vision of the two of them joined: his darker skin against hers, his longer fingers over hers, their palms lightly touching.
Rita felt, remarkably, the return of that breath of anger in her that had first stirred to life in California, when Inez had told her about the ring.
He’d promised her he’d wait for her. Back in Naples, he’d promised her he’d wait.
“My pearl. My heart. La mia bellissima ragazza—”
“Giuseppe—”
“No, please. Allow me to finish.” His fingers tightened. “I was going to do this later tonight, without all this”—he tipped his head toward the party—“to distract you. But you look so beautiful, and I am so proud. So proud to have you on my arm.”
Her voice came cooler than she meant it to. “We agreed, I thought. We agreed to proceed slowly.”
The dark slash of his brows raised, then lowered; a faint pinch appeared between them. “It’s been nearly a year. Is that not slow?”
“Well, slower,” she said, sitting up against the hard metal back of the chair.
He studied her, his expression caught between puzzlement and hurt, and for some reason, that made her even more angry.
“Look. I adore what we have. I thought I was clear about that.”
“You were.”
“Well, then! Why does anything have to change?”
“Because I have changed. The world has changed. You’ve changed too, even if you don’t wish to admit it.”
She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, another flash of light burst over them, white-hot.
Damn it. The photographer, maybe the same one as before, tipped an imaginary hat from the doorway and melted off.
Rita the actress, Rita the star, understood instantly how it would appear, what the whole world would think had just been captured in that flare of light. In that one image that could and would be published anywhere. Everywhere.
They both came to their feet. She pivoted a step toward the gallery, intent on the photographer, but Giuseppe still had her by the hand.
“Are you afraid?” he asked, almost incredulous.
“I’m not afraid. It’s simply that it’s not the time or the place for this. I thought we had a very reasonable agreement. An adult agreement.”
“Yes, we are adults. So we cannot continue to carry on as children.”
“Children!”
“Adolescents. Infatuated, with nothing but pleasure before them. No future in mind.”
“I have plenty of future in mind,” she said, smiling through this mean and mulish ire inside of her, because it was still a party, wasn’t it, and there were still loads of people watching, a couple or two spilling in now from the gallery, curious, and that bloody photographer out there somewhere.
She lowered her voice. “My future right now will be to go find that man with the camera and tell him not to publish that shot. After that, we can go home and maybe then have a reasonable conversation. Maybe then I can remind you of everything we said before.”
He looked down his nose at her, now every inch the aristocrat. “I remember everything we said before.”
“Good,” she snapped. She snatched back her hand and walked away.
“Solo gli sconsiderati non considerano il futuro,” she heard him call after her, in his velvet low baritone.
Only the reckless fail to consider the future.
But she didn’t turn around, because her heart was still beating so hard, and her face was burning with rage or shame or both.
THERE WAS NO reasonable conversation later that night or any other night of his visit.
There was only the two of them and a very stiff silence, awkward and awful, even as they returned to the flat, undressed, and climbed into the same bed.
It wasn’t the first time they didn’t make love after a long day, but it was the first time, ever, that he didn’t roll to his side to hold her, his breath in her hair, his arms warm.
They slept as mummies entombed side by side, arms and legs rigid, never touching.
In the morning, Rita awoke before he did, but stayed as she was, staring up at the ceiling.
Her eyes were dry, and her heart returned to its normal rhythm. When she turned her head to see him, silken hair tousled, soft asleep, still with that faint pinch between his brows, all she felt was regret.
I’m sorry, was what she said as she drew her hand down his arm, causing his lashes to flutter, from sleep to watchful awake.
I’m sorry, she said again, scooting closer to him, stroking his cheek. Stubble already like sandpaper, bluish gray, very fine.
Sorry, she whispered, as he lifted that same arm to her, his palm cupping her shoulder, pulling her closer, and that lovely familiar heat rose between them.
His lips were plush and tasted of morning and forgiveness, although for the rest of his visit he never uttered the words Marry me, or Will you, or anything like it, and neither did she.
THE COUNT STAYED a week and a half, a glorious ten days, two hundred and forty hours.
Many of those long, languid hours—she had no idea how many, actually—were spent entangled in her bed, the two of them celebrating the beauty of their physical relationship (why does anything have to change?), the electric thrill of touch and taste and friction that built and built into release.
They dined in bed, they drank in bed (champagne, mostly, followed by glass after glass of water).
They ignored the universe beyond her penthouse; they ignored the newspapers and the ugly, seething fact of war churning just across the ocean.
They ignored the words left unsaid between them.
For ten days, it was just them, only them. Moonlight, sunlight, starlight, and the two of them living in this temporary grace, bathed in it all.
Rita chose, deliberately, to be as delighted with the Count de Cippico in these short days as her heart would allow, because soon he’d be gone again, back to Italy, while she would return to California for her next photoplay.
Fate and nature and their careers were pushing them apart, at least for now.
They’d meet again in two months. Maybe three.
He would come here or she would go there, but either way, they promised each other no more than three months.
Already it seemed too long to her. Already it seemed foolish to spend so much time apart.
Sometimes, wandering around the flat in her robe (or less), she’d catch a glimpse of her own reflection in a mirror—or a window, or the glass pane of some framed picture—and think almost helplessly, What are you doing?
What are your hopes, after all this? What more can he give?
The morning of his departure, Rita went with him to the docks.
Giuseppe had capitulated to her pleas and was sailing on an American steamer headed straight for Cherbourg.
She’d accompanied him onboard to his suite and kissed him goodbye with all the passion in her heart, thinking, This is surely agony. This is surely bliss.
This is surely love.
But all they’d said to each other was goodbye.
Amid the jostling throngs on the pier, she stood and twirled her handkerchief in the air as the steamer eased backward into the muddy waters of the Hudson, guided by tugs. If he was there at one of the railings, waving back at her, she couldn’t pick him out.
The tugs veered away. Slowly, like an elephant lumbering down a long road, the liner slipped toward the horizon, the wharves of Hoboken hazy, fantastical shapes in the distance.
Rita waved until her arm ached. Only when the ship was a dot in the haze did she stop, turning back toward the city and dry land, cramming her handkerchief into her purse.
SIX DAYS LATER, a sharp knocking on her front door jolted her from the script she was reading in the study, her next project for Charles and Lasky, a film they wanted to be even bigger than The Unafraid.
She pushed the pages aside on her desk, waiting for the maid to come to her and tell her who it was.
Not a who, as it turned out. A what, a telegram, a folded sheet of paper neatly tucked into a thin yellow envelope, and even before she opened it, even before she knew anything, Rita’s skin crawled with alarm.
It was from Inez, still at Winter Queen:
ALFRED ENLISTED WITHOUT SAYING STOP DEPLOYING TO FRONT IN A WEEK STOP EVERYONE PROUD SAD MAD STOP COME SAY FAREWELL QUERY