Episode 8
“F ew of my readers will fail to testify that the sweetest pleasures are those which are hardest to be won, and that the prize, to obtain which one would risk one’s life, would often pass unnoticed if it were freely offered without difficulty or hazard.”
― Giacomo Casanova
Alessandro
I took the stairs two at a time to my room and grabbed the Riva’s keys.
My hope of not seeing Jacopo in the cavana was shattered when I arrived there, greeted by the sight of him standing at a sawhorse, sanding some wood, two work lamps looming over him like he was in surgery.
He looked up as I banged in. Watched me eat up the tile in front of me.
He opened his mouth.
I held up a preemptive finger. “Don’t.”
“Sandro, I was only going to?—”
“I said fucking DON’T.” My voice ricocheted around the watery enclosure. That stopped him.
As much as I wanted to jump into the Riva—or possibly the canal—I stopped long enough to ask, “Are you hurt?”
“No. Not to worry.”
“I’m sorry. Forgive me.”
“There is nothing to forgive. I fell. That’s all.”
I nodded in agreement and leapt down into the Riva.
“If I can?—”
“You can’t.” I opened the porta d’acqua, started the engine, and took off.
Claire
I packed as quickly as I could, throwing things into my suitcase. Not caring about neatness. Not caring about anything. Discombobulated, I kept reaching for things that weren’t there, kept turning in circles looking for things I already had in hand. As I gathered my clothes from the closet, my toiletries from the bathroom, I tried to make sure I didn’t accidentally pack anything of his in my stupor. It took me a whole hour to pull everything together. Myself included.
Only on my way out did I notice the envelope sitting on the sideboard in the hall, Bella scrawled across the front. I peeked inside. Jacopo had delivered the favor I’d asked of him.
I lugged my suitcase and backpack down the stone staircase, making a loud bang on each step. But no one was there to hear it. The palazzo seemed eerily empty.
I realized how wrong I was about that when I opened the front door to the pier. I heard the door to the boat garage open, simultaneously, as if they were connected. I didn’t dare turn around, but I did momentarily stop. Footsteps. Bracing myself, I heard, “Bella. What are you doing?” Jacopo. My heart readjusted and I grabbed a solid breath.
I let the door close, pasted on a smile, and turned. “Ah! Glad you’re here.” I opened my backpack and dug around inside. “Your gift. I was just about to leave it on your boat.”
Jacopo appraised me as he approached. “But why?”
“I’m leaving.”
“Tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Surely you will not leave until the morning, no?”
“No. No, I’m leaving now.”He peered at me in the low evening light of the androne. I kept digging in my bag. “Sorry, they were right here a minute ago.”
“If I may, you seem upset. Can I be of assistance?”
“I’m fine. But could you call a taxi?”
“Where are you thinking to go at this time of night?”
“The airport.”
“But the airport, it is closed.”
“Then just—” I gave up momentarily on the hunt through my backpack. “Sorry, I need some air, I’ll just be—” I didn’t finish. I pushed the door open and dragged my bags outside.
Jacopo followed me all the way to the pier. He gently took my elbow. “I do not think you should leave?—”
“Well, you’re the only one.” I slipped out of his grasp and went back to my bag. Finally, I found it. In the water bottle holder, of all places. I handed him the pile of crumpled lace. “Here. I’m…” I drew a ragged breath. “…Sorry for the presentation.”
And I was. It deserved better.
He took the pile gingerly. He opened it, unfolding, smoothing. He delicately separated the two pieces. He stared at them. He didn’t say anything. “They’re placemats. For your galley table.” He remained silent. “I just thought… I don’t know. That you should have them.”
He didn’t look up from them. He fingered the borders, the fine work there. Then he sniffed abruptly and reached for me. Pulled me into his arms. He husked into my ear, “Grazie.”
My eyes filled with tears again. I choked them back. “You’re welcome. Please call the taxi.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
He pulled back and his own eyes were wet. “It is one more night. In the morning, all will feel better. Don’t leave with…whatever this is.”
“Why not? He did.”
Jacopo winced. He squeezed my arm. “Okay. Okay. Wait here, I call someone.”
He walked a few feet away and brought his phone to his ear. A quick, murmured conversation later, he was back at my side. “A friend’s pensione around the corner. I will walk you.”
“How much is it?”
He waved this off. “On the palazzo, I believe is the saying.”
Considering I’d left my last remaining euros strewn across the bed upstairs, I would take his generosity.
Jacopo grabbed the handle of my suitcase, I picked up my bag, and we moved back toward the house, the hollow sound of our footsteps bouncing off the dock and water. Then he stopped, hearing something in the distance.
“What is it?”
“The Riva.”
We turned back, and in the evening haze, saw it—him—coming toward the pier.
Alessandro
I’d pulled up to the front entrance specifically to avoid Jacopo. And yet here he was, on the dock. Standing with Claire. And her luggage.
None of this was good.
I threw a hasty dock line around a cleat and jumped out of the Riva.
He bent his head to her and I heard him say, “I will give you two some time.” She didn’t look happy about that. “I am in the cavana when you are done.” He gave me a quick look—something between regret, disappointment, despair, acceptance, I couldn’t get a read. Then squeezed her shoulder—oh, now he was her defender ?—and left.
She looked at one very specific spot on the dock, but there was nothing there. I kept my distance.
I waited until the front door closed to say her name. It came out as a rasp.
Because I’d driven as fast and as far as I could into the lagoon until there wasn’t a building in sight. And then screamed. Repeatedly. Torn the shit out of my voice.
The irony wasn’t lost on me: she’d changed my voice, too.
Reluctantly, she lifted her eyes to mine.
I’d seen her face in laughter, in ecstasy, in anger, in confusion. In three days, I thought I’d seen all her faces.
I’d been wrong.
The worst had been saved for last. Betrayal.
One word was all I had. I had come back for one word. Stay.
I opened my mouth to say it. But what came out was:
“He invited me there that night to seduce you.”
Her face didn’t move. Neither did her body. I don’t think she breathed. But I did. A breath gushed out of me as if I’d swum to this pier, underwater, the whole way from the lagoon. “That was the deal. He’d launch my career if I fucked you.” The ugliness of the truth matched the ugliness of my voice.
She didn’t say, “who” or “what” or “wait.” She didn’t say anything, so I kept going. Why stop now? “Your prenup. It stipulated that if you—like you don’t know what it stipulated—then you forfeited any right to…everything. So he wanted an infidelity in his back pocket should he ever want to leave you. I was the bait. The willing bait.”
Claire’s face went blank. Even the betrayal had left.
My hands lifted at my sides, as if they could nudge her into a reaction. “He researched me, Claire. Investigated me. Knew exactly who I was. What I was.” I could hear the self-loathing in my voice. “He never gave a shit about my work. And worse, he never gave a shit about you. We were a means to an end. Nothing more.”
Still silent.
I pushed on. “But when I…when I met you. When we talked. When we were together that night. At a certain point…I decided not to do it.”
Her brows lifted. “You decided not to do it.”
I couldn’t tell if that was an observation, a confirmation, or a question. So I said, “Exactly.”
“Not to do what? Exactly?”
“Close the deal.”
“Close the deal.”
“Yes.”
“ You didn’t close the deal.”
“Exactly.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I didn’t let you close the deal?”
That silenced me. The quiet between us stretched out like saltwater taffy.
She scoffed lightly and looked out at the canal. “The fact that either of you ever thought any of this was up to you is…is beyond hubris. I was tempted, how could I not have been? In the moment. But I was never going to cheat on him.”
“I know. I saw that, that you would never dishonor him like?—”
“Me.” She stabbed a finger against her chest. “Not him, me. I would never dishonor myself like that. Even for you.”
That was meant to hurt me. And it did. Struck me deeper than she probably intended. Her voice was intense, but not loud. Composed. Thursday’s Claire. She’d gone all the way back to the self-protective woman who’d stood on her balcony.
She still wouldn’t look at me. “I may have been fooled, but you were played. Giving him your paintings beforehand? Rookie mistake. I’m assuming you tried to get them back?”
“Yes. I badgered him for over a year. Until his lawyers sent me a cease and desist. He snaked me.”
It came out on a scoff: “He snaked you. You don’t sell your soul to the devil then quibble about the fine print.” She shook her head. “No wonder you stopped painting.”
“It wasn’t because of him.” My hand went to my heart, the most insipid but genuine of gestures. It didn’t matter if she saw it or not. “It was because of you. The guilt. The shame. The self-loathing. That I was willing to betray you for?—”
“How pretty. How convenient. Too bad I don’t believe you. You didn’t know me.” She finally looked at me. “This isn’t about my character, it’s about yours. You were willing to betray yourself. Don’t you dare make this about me.”
“Okay, yes.” I held up a hand. “You’re right. I did it for myself. For a way out of…” I shut my eyes because I couldn’t keep looking at her looking at me the way she was: like I’d morphed into another person. “But I convinced myself it was just another deal. Hell, that’s what I do. For a new roof or property taxes or even…a fucking Rolex.”
“But you make those deals with the women . Not behind their backs.”
That caused my eyes to open back up. “Okay. Yes. You’re right again. I have nothing left. No more excuses.” There’d never been an excuse, that was the truth. I’d known that then and I knew it now.
I could have avoided all of this if I’d just stuck to my original plan. One word. Just one perfect word. Stay . Pandora’s box had been opened and nothing could be put back. So I just lamely said, “Anyway. I hope this gives you some closure.”
Her laugh caught us both off guard. “Me? I already had closure. Last night was my closure. But if you feel better, great. Glad you got this off your chest?”
I didn’t feel one iota better. In fact, I felt a hundred times worse. “I’m sorry, Claire.” So absurdly inadequate.
“For what exactly?” Her eyes were a test. “This convoluted almost-betrayal from five years ago? Or when you left me flat on my back? In your bed, with my skirt around my waist? An hour ago ?”
“I was trying to help.”
“Help?”Her voice went so high it broke.
“I was trying to manage expectations.”
“Whose?”
“You have every right to be upset, but Claire: you literally said, ‘I don’t want us to be over.’ That set off alarm bells?—’”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” she cried. “Of course I don’t want us to be over! Do you?! But that doesn’t mean I don’t know we have to be. Again, make it about me! I repeat: this is about you!” She started pacing. “ Manage expectations , Jesus Christ. You know what my expectations were? That we’d finish that chocolate torta. Make love again. Share a cup of coffee in the morning. Then you’d play me your song, we’d go to the airport, hug and kiss and I’d probably cry a little. Why? Because I’d be sad that this was the end, but God, so grateful for what we’d shared. Forever in three days.” She stopped pacing and just stared at me. “ Those were my expectations and you know why? Because you gave them to me.”
I put my hands in my pockets. “Well, I mean…we can still do that,” I offered. “If you want.”
She laughed. Somewhat hysterically. “Oh, fuck what I want. You…” She studied me like a particularly abstruse piece of art. Then she walked away from her suitcase and toward me. Yes , I thought, yes, closer, please . Murderously closer, even, I didn’t care. She stopped right in front of me, lifted that chin, clenched her fists. “I gotta tell you, if this had been my expectation , having a man stand before me and lie while I can feel him dripping out of me”—she gestured harshly at her core—“I could have gotten that from any self-proclaimed Casanova in New York.”
That sucked the breath right out of me.
We stared at each other, her hurt and confusion and rage so heartbreakingly clear on her face. Until she turned and walked back to her suitcase.
How did we get here? How did I let this happen?
No. I made this happen.
She was right: I was a fraud.
Her hand grabbed her bag and I said what I’d wanted to say since the beginning, “Stay.”
She just scoffed.
“Stay.” No response. “Claire. Stay. Cara?—”
“Don’t Cara me.” She whirled around. Her eyes locked on mine and they were flint. Sparking, fucking flint. “Don’t Casanova me. If you want me to stay, tell me the truth. Be honest. Why did you want to leave?”
I couldn’t answer. Because there was no answer. Because it was the wrong question. The right question was, why did you leave when you wanted to stay?
That truth was ringing out inside me. I couldn’t ignore it any longer. “I didn’t want to leave.”
“So why did you?”
“Because I wanted to stay.”
“What?”
My heart was beating outside my chest. “Because of you.”
“What are you blaming me for this time?”
“It’s not about blame.”
“Well then, what did I do?”
“It’s not what you did. It’s what you are.”
“Talk about tangled. Do you even know what you’re saying?”
“I know what I want to say.”
“Then say it. What am I?”
“My Forever.”
Her eyes widened until they were entirely moonshine. “No, I’m not. You told me you hadn’t met your Forever.”
“Because I needed that to be true. But it’s not.” I spoke quietly, clearly, measuredly. As if I was in shock. I think I was in shock. I think this was what shock was. “I left you because I wanted to never leave. I left you because I’m in love with you. Deeply, irrevocably, impossibly fucking in love with you and I’ve never been more afraid of anything in my life. Look.” I held up a hand. It was shaking. “You are my Forever, Claire.”
Her eyes, her mouth, her entire face—that face—opened like a new day.
I took a tentative step toward her. “Stay.”
“I can’t.”
Closer. “Stay.”
“I shouldn’t.”
Closer still. “Stay.”
“Stop saying that.”
“Never.” Two feet away now. “Stay.”
“Alessandro…” She took a large step back and her foot left the dock. I grabbed her elbow and hauled her into me, holding her close.
“Stay. Forever.”
Her blown-open eyes searched mine. “W-what are you saying?”
I grabbed her head as if I were going to bite off a chunk of it. “I want you. I want us. I want a real forever. I want…I want…I want…” I was malfunctioning, that’s what it felt like. Looping, waiting for my brain to stop buffering, stuck on the thing I’d never allowed myself to contemplate: what I wanted.
Finally—finally—her eyes softened. “Aless?—”
I kissed her. Ravished her mouth. It was all I wanted to do.
She melted into me, gave as good as she got. She climbed me, there on the dock, until her legs were around my waist.
When she yanked back to drag in air, I inhaled her neck. “But what about the lineage, the tradition, Jaco?—”
“I’ll work it out. We’ll work it out.”
“How?”
I pulled her head into my shoulder and cradled it. “I don’t know. I’ve been so busy worrying about how I was going to let you go that I didn’t get around to worrying about having you stay.” There was something exhilarating about throwing life up in the air, about losing control. I felt electrified. “But I’m good at compartmentalizing. That’ll help.”
She took a breath in, held it for a moment. “What does that mean?”
“It’s just a job, you know? It doesn’t have to be my whole life anymore. I can actually have a life. A life with you. Separate from it.”
She went completely still in my arms.
“I’m just spitballing here, but maybe I can cut back a little? Start painting again.”
Her silence let me know I’d lit the very bomb I’d been trying to defuse.
She unwound her legs.
Her feet slid to the dock.
Her eyes came to my throat. “Explain.”
Claire
He lifted my chin, forced me to look in his eyes. “I have a responsibility to everything that—you know, to everything you just mentioned, and?—”
“And what about your responsibility to me?” I eased out of his arms and stepped back. “In this just-spitballing scenario?”
“Our life would come first.”
“I get to come first? Jeez, I’m honored.” I knew the sarcasm made me sound petty and immature and whiny, but was he serious ?
“Claire. No one in the history of my family has ever offered their Forever anything. Dalliances, sure. Illegitimate children, no doubt. But their love? Their heart? Never.”
“But you’re not. You’re offering me exactly what I had before: a man who sleeps with other women.”
“What? No. What? No, professionally. It’s completely different.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is.”
“For you, maybe. For me, no. You say it’s just a job to you and, you know what, you could be right. Porn stars get married. Who am I to say what compartmentalizing you can do in your brain.” I tapped my temple. “But I don’t have a bento box up here.”
“We can work on that!”
“Do you have any idea how humans actually work ?” He opened his mouth to argue, but I cut him off. “Okay, fine, you want to spitball, let’s spitball. Would we live in your apartment in the palazzo?”
“If you wanted.”
“So would I wait upstairs every night for you to come home from work ? Wait for you to shower? Wait for you to be able to get hard again?”
“Claire—”
“Would I be allowed out of the apartment when you have a guest?”
“You’re inventing obstacles?—”
“Do you want children? Because I do. How would that work? ‘Oh, honey, your son wanted to practice his kicks on Saturday, so text me if you’re gonna fuck your guest in the garden, just in case, that would be great.’”
“Why are you trying to sink us before we even get off the pier?” I opened my mouth to argue, but now he cut me off. “Do you want to be with me? Do you? Because I’d rather know now. Please. Before I upend my entire life.”
He was so vulnerable in this moment. He could be any man holding his heart out to any woman. Standing on the dock of his ancestral palazzo, we could just as easily be standing in a restaurant parking lot, or a movie theater lobby, or a closed-door office, or anywhere else these conversations between two people took place.
It softened me. “Of course I do. But I want to be with Alessandro Vianello, my favorite painter and the man I love. I don’t want to be with Casanova.”
He blinked at me. “You love me?”
I threw my hands up. “You think I’d still be standing here listening to this insanity if I didn’t feel the same way about you that you feel about me?”
He stepped back into my space, grabbed my face. “Then what are we arguing about? What else matters?”
“Everything.” I put my hands over his. He looked so confused, so unmoored, so adrift. And that’s when I realized: he’d never been in love before. In this sole respect, I was the experienced one. I couldn’t say what I needed to say to his face so I pulled him into a hug, wrapping my arms tightly around his neck. “You don’t know what love is.”
He tried to pull back. “Of course I do.”
“For three days, you do. Your training did not prepare you to have forever, only to avoid it. You don’t know that love doesn’t solve anything, it only complicates everything. You don’t know what happens when it’s not enough.”
His arms tightened around my back. His voice wavered when he said, “Just say yes. Just let me know I have you and everything else will work out.”
He wasn’t getting it. He couldn’t. This was irreconcilable.
I pulled back. I took his hands from around me but held them. Squeezed them. Looked into his desperate eyes. “I won’t have the person I love, and fight for, and believe in, every day, for free , available for purchase. Something in this life has to be priceless. If that has a price, then everything does. This isn’t one of your paintings . This is you.”
He stared at me. Then he spun away, growling. “It’s not! It’s not me! It’s the fantasy version of—” He turned around, came right up to me. “You are asking me to choose between you and two hundred years of unbroken tradition. This house. The service I give to hundreds of women. My obligation to the closest thing I have to a father.”
“Yes.” I could tell the simplicity of my answer had shocked him. The utter lack of apology in it.
“You can’t ask that of me, Claire.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s…it’s…unfair!”
I finally snapped. “Unfair?!” My voice rang like a church bell into the night. “I’ll tell you what’s unfair. This entire business. What you do for the women you service. You say you’re showing them the path to real love, to real pleasure, to some melding of the sexes, the perfect balance between masculine and feminine power. But then you step off that path and send them into a world where the kind of man you’ve modeled for them doesn’t actually exist! What’s fair about that?”
He was reaching for patience. “Giacomo Casa?—”
“Giacomo Casanova died alone, in exile, living off the generosity of a reluctant patron. That’s your saint? A man whose name has come to mean nothing more than a man who uses women under the guise of loving them? Think about that. What legacy, exactly, are you preserving? What are you sacrificing yourself for?”
“Family!” he hissed. “This!” He flung an arm toward the palazzo. “The principle of something to aspire to! I understand that I am a unicorn, but I am also the last of my kind. Doesn’t that count for something? Isn’t that something worth preserving?”
I was starting to lose patience, lose my composure, lose my head. It would be so easy to just say yes. To kick the can down the road and give myself what I wanted.
But I knew what happened when you ignored the unignorable for short-term happiness.
“You can’t ‘deal’ your way out of this.” He sighed. “No, I’m serious. I think it’s part of your family lore for a reason. Beware your Forever. Why? Because it will destroy who you’ve been made to be. It will destroy the legacy. So why are we standing here trying to make it work? We can’t. You can’t have both or someone would have figured out how to do that in the last two hundred years.”
He clasped his hands in front of his chin. “You’re asking me to be the one to end it, to burn it all to the ground, for you .”
“No! For us. You have been telling me all weekend to listen to my voice, the one that tells me what I want, and, I’m sorry, but that’s what I want.”
We stood there. Faced off. Two gunslingers with no bullets left.
The embarrassment of being this vulnerable was too much. “So I can’t stay. I’m going to go now.” I walked back to my suitcase. I wheeled it past him, neither of us saying anything. But when I got to the door, I couldn’t resist a parting shot. “I thought when a woman loves a man he becomes more.”
“And when a man loves a woman she feels more,” he shot back.
I turned around, slowly, to face him, and shoved my hands deep in my jacket pockets to keep them from shaking. My right one found the forcola and wrapped around it. “When I would remember that night at the gallery, you know what I’d feel? Pleasure. It was wrong and complicated and now I know just how much…but I meant what I said upstairs: it made me feel alive. It was a good memory. But this?” My breath was shaky. “I was prepared to put this weekend in the past. Put it behind me. But you changed that. You made it forever. The curse that hangs like a cloud over the entire history of this palazzo follows me now, too. This time with you…it’s become painful.” I realized tears were streaming down my face. I wiped them furiously away with my left hand before burying it back in my pocket. “Good memories are banked. Like valuables kept in a safe-deposit box. We have to intentionally retrieve them. But bad memories live with us. A constant reminder of the pain we’ve endured and the pain that’s yet to come. We feel the bad memories. Why couldn’t you have just left me where you found me?!” I was panting now, anger rolling off me. “Why couldn’t you have let me give you the paintings without a barter? Why do I have to remember this—you—forever?”
He was rawly honest when he answered, “Because you want to live it, not remember it.”
And I was rawly honest when I whipped the forcola out of my pocket and hurled it at his head and screamed.
He ducked.
It sailed past him and landed in the canal with a faint plunking splash. An insignificant sound so at odds with the magnitude of what I’d just thrown away.
In an instant, my rage cleared. What had I done? I rushed toward the edge of the dock. “No, no, no, no, no.” Alessandro grabbed me from behind, keeping me from diving off. “Let me go!” His arms loosened and I dropped to my knees on the wood, searching the dark water. “I didn’t mean to—oh my God, I’m an idiot. Where is it?!”
He was on his knees behind me, a hand at the crook of my elbow. “Claire, stop?—”
“Where did it go?”
“My love, it’s—” I tugged away from him, but he quickly overpowered me again, gripping my shoulders, spinning me to face him. “It’s gone. Look at me.” I did. “It’s gone.”
“But—” I looked frantically over my shoulder; he shook me back to him.
“It’s ebony. Remember? It sinks.”
A sob tore out of me.
I don’t know if I fell into him or if he pulled me in, but the next thing I knew my face was buried in his strong chest and his chin was on the top of my head, and our arms were around each other. Both our hearts, pounding. “Let it go,” he rasped. And took a deep breath. “Let it go.”
And I did.
I pulled away from him. I stood. Without looking back, I walked to my luggage.
I opened the door.
I left.