The sunbather
Most days, they are the only two people on the beach.
She, lying on a thin cotton towel with the uneven pebbles pressing into her bare back.
He, wading out under a warm sun into cold water.
He is younger than her, but he is not young.
His coarse beard is shot through with silver whiskers.
His hair is shaved close to his skull. His head shines when he surfaces from the waves.
He sits on the stones and he stares out to sea.
It is not her first time in Italy. She came once, as an impressionable student, for a semester in Venice.
She remembers a long evening trailing around the cicchetti bars on the cusp of Carnevale, wading through St Mark’s Square in the pouring rain.
The man she’d been with had lent her his jacket, and she remembers the sodden weight of that dripping velvet blazer like chainmail.
She remembers the weight of the man on top of her, though she can’t recall his face.
Since the divorce, Toronto has felt like dead space to her.
She’s been drawn back to Europe, to memories of first times, of being impressionable.
The warm places. The weight. So, she drinks her morning cappuccino alone outside a café, then she meanders down to the beach for a solitary day on the pebbles, under the relentless southern sun. On these pebbles, she finds him.
He ploughs through the water, his broad, tanned back emerging with each stroke, revealing a glistening canvas of tattoos.
Today is no different. They do not speak, though she will smile and nod as she covers herself with a loose shirt and makes her way up the shingle, doing her best to stay upright and graceful as she imagines his dark eyes on the backs of her legs.
Back to her hotel room, where she will wash off the salt in a warm shower and lie alone in a bed freshly made up with Egyptian cotton sheets.
That evening, she will dine alone once again, then cross the piazza for a drink at a hole-in-the-wall bar.
She hadn’t expected to see him there. She definitely hadn’t expected him to be serving her drink.
He lays down a napkin, then her martini.
Her eyes travel the length of his forearms. There is a darkness to him, an unspeakable sadness that lopes after him like a stray dog.
She will try to start a conversation in terrible Italian, and she’ll learn that his isn’t much better.
He isn’t from around here. She doesn’t want his story.
She has no interest in fixing him, nor in being fixed.
She is interested only in the way that he shone as he rose from the water, her desire to run her fingers across his shorn head.
That night, she will do just that, with her bare legs wrapped around him and her bare back flat against the cold plaster of the bedroom wall.
She will let him take her on the Egyptian cotton, and she will feel things that she hasn’t felt in a very long time.
Things she felt in Venice, in the rain. The next morning, he will leave in the half-light, and she will be glad of it, because they’ll already have said everything there is to say.
But in the time between, as night bleeds into morning, she will trace her fingers across his tattoos as he sleeps and wonder at their meaning.
The statue on one arm. The faded letter ‘E’ on the other.
The coiled snake around a ladder on his shoulder.
Or this, the tombstone on his chest and the writing inside it, around where his heart would be.
Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.