Chapter 9
NAOMI
The constellation, it turns out, was worth the lawsuit.
By eight the ballroom has stopped being a room.
The ceiling is a slow drift of suspended lights, the tables float on candle glow, the second string quartet, whichever one won, is playing something silvery under six hundred conversations warming up.
On the big screen behind the stage, the montage loops its summer on the coast, which is, as promised, boats.
The producer was right, nobody has complained.
Boats at anchor. Boats at sunset. One boat, twice, from two angles, that I’ve now seen six times, like a returning character.
I’m at the press table by the kitchen doors, exactly where a fire commander seated me, with the best air in the building and a sightline down the whole glittering length of the night.
The midnight-blue dress is doing everything the tailor promised.
My badge says VALE, LUMIèRE, FULL ACCESS.
My glass says pinot noir and contains grape juice, courtesy of a barman Alessia has personally converted to my cause, no questions invited.
Ten weeks and four days. The count comes with me everywhere now, a small exact companion under the silk.
I work. It’s good work, the kind I’m built for.
I interview the tenor, who is charming and lies fluently about his diet.
Off the record, the secret of the high C is “olive oil and spite.” On the record it becomes “discipline and gratitude.” Both go in my notes, one goes to print, and we part fond of each other.
I get four quotes from the hotel association’s chairman, three usable.
I photograph the table settings before the guests ruin them, note the constellation for the feature’s opening line, and let the room’s beauty do what beauty does at this pitch, blur the question of who paid for it.
Somewhere out there is a wine exporter, presumably, a foundation or two, and all the coast’s polished money in one crowd.
The perfume cloud from center-floor arrives in waves whenever the doors move.
At my kitchen-door table the air smells of bread, of steam, a waiter comes through every eight minutes, and the passenger approves of the draft.
Alessia sweeps past at twenty to nine with an earpiece and a clipboard, not stopping, speaking to me out of the side of her mouth like a spy in a comedy.
“Status.”
“Fed. Hydrated. Professionally luminous.”
“The tenor?”
“Lied to me beautifully.”
“Perfect. The category’s at nine.” She’s already gone, redirecting two waiters and a florist with one hand signal, the whole night moving through her like current through a wire.
The category. At nine sharp the stage lights come up, the coast’s hospitality awards begin with Beach Club of the Year, and I get my second-best moment of the season watching Dario, front third, in a dinner jacket with a shawl collar he must have been assured was directional, arrange his face for a win.
The Lido Azzurra loses. It loses to a family-run lido in Cetara with forty loungers and one grandmother.
The applause is warm and real, which makes it worse for him.
I watch Dario clap, palms barely meeting, the smile bolted on, and something in his posture goes past disappointment, a man adding the room to a list he keeps.
He excuses himself from his own table before the next category.
It’s the first thing he’s done all season that I understand completely.
Twenty minutes later I catch sight of him again near the donor tables, leaning into conversation with someone whose back stays to me, gesturing with his glass, salesman posture from crown to heels.
Losing hasn’t slowed him. Dario metabolizes humiliation into networking.
“Notes on the shawl collar,” Alessia murmurs, materializing with a tray she has no reason to be carrying, stealing my untouched wine glass and replacing it with a fresh juice-not-juice.
“Directional,” I say.
“Toward what?”
“Away.” She snorts, unprofessionally, and is gone again into the machinery of her night.
The winners from Cetara come past the press tables on their victory lap, and I flag them down, because the feature just wrote its own best paragraph.
The grandmother is four foot ten of black dress and triumph, holding the award like a fish she personally wrestled ashore.
Her grandson translates, unnecessarily, since she answers before he finishes every question.
“Ma’am, forty loungers. How do you beat the big clubs?”
“Clean towels,” she says, in English, daring me to write it down. “Fifty years. Same towels.”
“Not the same towels,” the grandson clarifies, panicked.
“Same standard,” she allows. “Write the towels. Not my age.” Her eyes drop to my badge, then to my glass, then to my face, with a frankness that has watched three generations of everybody. “You should eat something. You’re working too hard for two.”
“For Lumière,” the grandson corrects, gently.
“That’s what I said.” She’s already turning away, award aloft.
“And eat the pasta course. The rest is decoration.” And she’s off toward the dance floor, leaving me holding my notebook like a shield, heart doing something complicated, because grandmothers on this coast read occupancy better than any surveillance on earth.
The mayor gives me forty seconds on the record about tourism corridors, all of it unusable, then one sentence off the record, delivered into his wine, statesmanlike. “Half these new patrons couldn’t find their own foundations with a map.” None of it printable. All of it interesting.
Alessia drops into the chair beside me somewhere past nine thirty, ninety seconds off her feet, shoes easing half off under the table where nobody can see.
“Status.”
“Three usable quotes, one grandmother, zero incidents.”
“The dream.” She follows my glance to the stage stairs, where the flat-eyed guard has rotated with another just like him.
“The extras? Agency men, twenty of them tonight, the donor office insisted. Apparently this year’s donors like their security visible.
” She reclaims her shoes, already rising, the earpiece pulling her back under.
“Ninety more minutes and we’re legends. Don’t leave without me, the debrief is cold pasta at my table. ”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
Clara finds me at twenty past nine, resplendent in structured black, working the room with the calm of a woman who owns a piece of every conversation. She air-kisses me an inch from each cheek and inspects my table like a health inspector.
“You look credible and tan. Good. The kitchen doors, though, N, truly.” She’s scanning while she talks, always scanning.
“Listen, quick thought. The donor office gave me the patron list, and I want the sidebar to have one big name from the giving side. Have you seen Ottavia Greco tonight? The Greco woman. She’s down for a table of ten, gives every season, nobody has a photograph of her, which is either fabulous or a problem.
If you spot her, thirty seconds, that’s all I need. The woman gives like a Medici and photographs like a rumor. If she doesn’t exist I want that story instead, but quietly, that’s a spring feature.”
“I’ll keep an eye out.”
“You’re my favorite writer this quarter.
” And she’s absorbed back into the crowd, leaving me with a name in my notebook, Greco, table of ten, no photograph, which goes down as color for the sidebar and stops mattering immediately, because there’s a security guard by the stage stairs who has been looking at me for slightly too long.
Not the appreciative version. I know that one in all its dialects.
This is flatter, a surveying look, the kind I give a cracked lintel.
When I hold his gaze he doesn’t perform the caught-out smile, he just moves his eyes along like a man continuing a sweep, and the little hairs on my arms deliver a minority report.
When I look for him again a minute later he’s gone from the stairs entirely, which soothes exactly nothing.
Nerves, I tell them. Three hundred people, one badge between me and all of them. The passenger makes every room feel one degree off balance.
At twenty to ten the dessert service starts staging behind me, sugar, citrus, the kitchen doors swinging, and I turn to note it, limoncello again, the whole summer again, when the room changes.
The dip. Half a tone, conversations lowering, the sound of a crowd deciding whether to be nervous. I know it before I find it, I knew it at the Lido in July, my body kept the imprint, and I turn my head slowly toward it, a noise on a dark road.
He’s at the far end of the ballroom.
Black dinner jacket, this time. The linen was a costume, I understand that now, this is the actual animal in its own colors, black on white, still in the exact way he’s still while three hundred people perform around him.
A glass in one hand he isn’t drinking from.
The crowd reorganizing around his corner without knowing it’s doing it, the way it did at the club, the way water arranges itself around a rock.
Two months have sharpened him, or memory blurred him soft and the original stands corrected.
The shoulders are the same country. The stillness is the same law.
He lifts the untouched glass an inch to someone who greets him, returns it to being scenery, and even his courtesy has edges I can read from sixty meters.
Khristofer. In my ballroom. Sixty meters and one summer away, the one door on this coast I built no handle for.
Every system I have fires at once. Heat, first, treacherously, July arriving in my bloodstream ahead of all the smarter responses, his hands, the low voice, there she is. Then the smarter responses arrive, the way the floor of Alessia’s bathroom arrived.
He can’t see me.
It’s pure reflex, the same reflex that gets a hand off a hot pan. I know what those gray eyes do. They read rooms, they read people, they read me across a terrace once and found everything usable in one pass.
And I’m standing in a fitted dress with a secret at ten weeks and four days.
If those eyes find me, they’ll take their reading.
I don’t know what they’ll see, and finding out in front of three hundred witnesses is not on my schedule.
He’s not looking at the press table yet.
He’s watching the front of the room, the stage side, somewhere among the big tables, with the patience I remember, a man at an aquarium.
I have thirty seconds of not being seen, and I use every one of them like a coward.
I stand, smooth, all business, a woman with a purpose. I take my clutch, my notebook, and I walk, not toward the lobby, which would cross his sightline, but back, through the staging area’s swinging door, into the service corridor where the kitchen noise falls away behind the baize.
Concrete cool. Cable runs along the ceiling.
The bass of the party goes muffled and cardiac through the wall.
I put my back against it, breathe the way the stairwell taught me, and I could laugh at myself, I nearly do.
Two months of wondering whether I’d ever see him again, an ocean of maybes, and the actual event of him gets forty meters of corridor, my heart going like a kicked drum.
The universe has a sense of humor with structural problems.
My phone buzzes in the clutch. Alessia. She’ll have seen me leave the floor, she sees everything, she’ll want a status.
I get the phone out and start a message instead of answering.
Found a quiet corridor. Status, hiding from.
My thumbs stop, because there’s no end to that sentence I’m ready to send through a baize door, and I delete it letter by letter while the party keeps time through the wall.
I’m reaching for the phone when the corridor’s far door opens. A man in catering black comes through, which is normal, and he doesn’t have a tray, which is not.
The details arrive in the wrong order, the way details do when the body already knows.
His shoes, dress shoes, wrong for service.
His eyes, doing no work at all, fixed on me the way nobody looks at strangers.
The service door behind me opening, which I hear rather than see, a second set of steps taking their time, and every alarm I own goes off at once, too late, all of it one second too late.
“Miss Vale,” the first man says, pleasantly, closing the distance. “There’s a car.”
I don’t answer. Behind me the second set of steps stops taking its time.
“Quietly, ma’am,” the first man suggests, reasonable as a ma?tre d’. “It’s a party.”
I move, fast, sideways, toward the gap between him and the wall. I’m quick, I’ve always been quick. He’s quicker, and the second man’s arm comes around me from behind like a gate closing, a hand clamping over my mouth, professional, gloved, no fumbling anywhere in it.
I fight. I fight with everything the range of a silk dress allows, heel, elbow, the twist Bianca’s self-defense phase taught us both one bored winter.
My elbow finds something, a voice grunts, the hand over my mouth doesn’t move.
The first man catches my wrist and takes the clutch from my fingers, scissors from a child.
The phone tumbles loose. My heel skids on the polished concrete, the world tilts, and the phone hits the floor screen-up with a crack I hear through the man’s fingers, through my own pulse, the glass going to spiderweb.
The screen lights as it lies there. ALESSIA, it says, glowing up through the broken web, ringing, ringing, on the floor of a corridor smelling of citrus and concrete, getting smaller, because I’m moving now, backward, off my feet, through the far door into the service elevator’s steel light.
The last thing I see of my whole gorgeous professional night is her name going to voicemail through a cracked screen.
The doors close on the corridor, on the cracked light of her name, on the party.
The elevator descends with a competence I’d rate five stars in any other review, and I do what’s left to do.
I keep my feet under me, I memorize both faces, I mark the two turns the service ramp makes before the night air hits.
Ten weeks, four days, I tell the steel walls. We keep our feet.
Nobody upstairs even heard.