Lovers (37 page)

“Yes,” Fabio Severini answered. “These three ships were my first commission. After my academic training, I was lucky enough to be granted an apprenticeship under the great Giuseppe de Jorio, in Genoa. Of course, I would
never have attracted such a large commission if these ships had not been built by my father. Perhaps I would have first built a racing boat or a small yacht for some rich man. I will never know.”

He leaned over a railing and continued to talk, as if she weren’t there, never taking his eyes off the hulks of the doomed ships. “I’ve devoted most of my life to learning the only trade I’ve ever cared about. Some people consider that there is no finer thing to be than a ship owner, like my father. Our family has owned ships for hundreds of years, some of them the pride of Venice. But in my opinion it is equally fine to be the man who designs the ship.”

“Of course,” Gigi murmured, not knowing what else to say.

“I designed a new freighter, a freighter with proud and unusual lines. Why should a freighter not be as beautiful to look at as any ship that sails on the ocean? That was my philosophy. I spent ten months here supervising the men who welded these hulls together in the drydock, plate by plate, watching the ships grow upward, deck by deck—and now? Three boxes that float. Three boxes—marvelously shaped, totally seaworthy boxes—that soon will not even float, but will be reduced to raw metal. Their engines are still in Trieste, built under the license of a Swiss company. We pray that they can find a buyer. If not, our family business will be completely ruined. We paid one-third the price of each ship for each engine, the normal ratio. My father doesn’t blame me, he blames himself for building three at once. The problem was not in the design but in misjudging the market.”

“Boxes? I don’t understand. Are they empty inside?” Gigi asked, without caring about the answer but unable to endure the silence that had fallen between her and this unbearably sad young Venetian.

“Yes, empty. The interior is always finished last. These ships are almost finished, but nevertheless they are useless. There are two celebrations in a shipyard when a ship is built, one when the first plate is put in place, another when
the workmen that made it present the ship to its owner. There will be no second celebration.”

“Couldn’t they be converted to some other use?” Gigi asked, watching over her shoulder to see if Ben was anywhere close to concluding his deal.

“If we had the luxury of time, certainly,” Fabio answered. “A ship is like what you call a stretch limousine in the United States. It can easily be changed, even made longer. It is built in many modules, one size module for a tanker, another size for a passenger ship, another size for a freighter, determined by the use you are going to put it to. But conversion takes money. A great deal of money. Not long ago the Mariottis—they’ve been in business forever—converted a huge container ship, which had sailed for years, into a passenger ship for eight hundred people. They scooped it out, leaving only the engine and hull intact, and then put in the decks, public rooms, and staterooms. Even a swimming pool. With all that work, they still cut in half the time that they would have needed to build the ship from scratch. Ah, look, my father is waving to us.”

As Gigi and Fabio rejoined the men, she saw them shake hands on what must be a deal. The elder Severini looked at her and smiled in a combination of relief and despair.

“Good-bye, Mr. Severini and Mr. Severini,” Ben said. “We’ve got to hurry back.” As they carefully piloted their bikes over the many potholes and cables of the shipyard, Gigi risked a backward look and saw the father and son leaning over the railing and looking wordlessly at the three freighters. The father had put his arm over the son’s shoulders. Ben was right, she thought, she wished she hadn’t insisted on coming.

T
he sunset of the day on which Gigi and Ben had visited Mestre was of such outrageous beauty, even for Venice, that Ben directed Guido to take the gondola out to a vantage point in the middle of the lagoon and attempt to stay in one place as long as possible.

“He’s on his mettle now,” Ben explained with a grin. “While the boat’s moving, it’s relatively easy to avoid the worst of the waves from bigger craft, but you can’t anchor a gondola, and there’s a lot of water traffic around at this time of day. We should probably be wearing seatbelts. It would add a new scandal to Venice history.”

“Is he thinking ‘crazy Americans’?”

“Something ruder and more specific. Hold on!”

Gigi and Ben rocked as the wake of a
vaporetto
churning out to the Lido hit the gondola. Gigi glanced up at Guido, standing on his perch way above their heads, swiveling to look in every direction of the compass, his attention
firmly fixed on identifying potential threats, particularly those coming from the police
motoscafos;
they were the only sailors in Venice who constantly broke the speed limit.

“Oh,” Gigi sighed, “I know you don’t believe in making comparisons to the past, but, Ben, wouldn’t it be glorious if there weren’t a single motor in Venice, if every boat on the water were a gondola? Just for a day?” The sound of her voice was so full of wistful need, so touched by her yearning for something impossible, that Ben Winthrop instantly seized on the moment he’d been waiting for, the moment when Gigi was ready, even if she wasn’t aware of it, to respond to him.

“I’d rather turn back time to another day,” he answered. “Not even a day, but one particular night and one particular minute.”

“When?” she inquired idly, looking up at the lavender clouds mixed with pink and gold and trying to decide, before they changed, what color this sunset would be called if such an evanescent color had a name.

He took her chin in both of his hands and turned her face up toward his. “The first night I kissed you,” he said, and leaned forward and gave Gigi the gentlest kiss she had ever received. “The night I kissed you too soon,” Ben said, and kissed her again, even more gently. “The night I upset you,” he added, and kissed her a third time, so gently that his lips barely brushed hers. “You taste like the color of the clouds,” he told her, surprised to find himself so moved, surprised to find himself saying these words. “I’ve tried to remember what you tasted like ever since that night, and now I know … the most beautiful April sunset.”

“In Venice?” Gigi faltered, unable to find any words that wouldn’t sound flirtatious.

“Anywhere in the whole wide world.”

“Oh.”

“Do you think you might give me a kiss?” he asked humbly.

Gigi leaned forward to kiss him very softly, as he had
kissed her, when a wave slapped the gondola suddenly, jolting her forward, Ben caught her in his arms and she found herself with her nose mashed on his earlobe. Guido’s voice, apologizing and swearing, was heard above them.

Gigi burst out laughing. “My intention was friendly,” she whispered to Ben, extricating herself from his neck but remaining in his arms, “but a gondola’s too … tippy.” Would this count as flirting, she wondered?

“Guido, take us back to the palazzo as quickly as possible,” Ben shouted.

Never had a gondola ride been so bumpy or seemed so long. Guido plied his oar at his highest speed. Ben held Gigi wrapped tightly in his arms, his face buried in the top of her head, kissing her hair over and over as he had prevented himself from doing for so long. She could barely think in words; rocked like a baby, she was all darkly vivid sensation, as if she were made of humming wires and intoxicating impulses that were shot through with honey and heather and pink wine. Under Guido’s glance they walked decorously from the landing steps into the palazzo. Gigi stopped inside the front door and turned to Ben with sudden shyness. She’d definitely gone too far to retreat to her former position, she thought with what was left of her rational powers, but what about all her good resolutions? Ben’s eyes were tender and imperative, Gigi thought as she looked up at him, eyes she didn’t know, certainly not a boy’s eyes.

“Now what?” Ben asked her, with a certainty that belied his question.

“I’m not … sure,” Gigi answered, wishing desperately that women could still faint and answer such impertinent questions the easy way.

“I … I don’t …… oh, Gigi, if you don’t like me a little, I don’t want to make love to you … not without knowing the consequences …”

“That’s a chance you’ll just have to take,” Gigi murmured,
as inscrutably as possible, since she couldn’t look away from his eyes. “I guarantee nothing …”

“You’ve already broken your own rule,” Gigi said softly as they entered Ben’s bedroom, where his bed stood on a raised platform that faced three long Gothic windows framed in lacy stone. “The Rule of One—
one kiss—”

“But today we didn’t visit a work of art—we have to make up for that—and my rule never said anything about one kiss,” he said in a husky voice he hardly recognized, “never, ever just one kiss.” He led her to the center window and turned her so that her back was toward the Grand Canal, while he stood slightly away from her. “I’ve thought of kissing you right here, with my eyes open, so that I could experience two great pleasures at the same time.”

“But diluted,” Gigi objected with a low, mocking laugh. “You can fulfill either the sense of touch or the sense of sight, but not both at once—unless you’re kissing a statue …” She moved toward him, reached up, and pressed her mouth to his in a snowstorm of tiny, chaste, determined kisses that made him close his eyes in rapture. “Choose,” she commanded, and he kept his eyes shut and claimed her mouth so thoroughly that soon her lips felt as if they were made of some new, never-before-known material, roses on fire.

“Oh, Ben …” she sighed. “I shouldn’t flirt with you like this.”

“You’re right,” he agreed, his voice shaking with impatience as he took her to his bed. “It’s too much and not enough … let’s skip flirting. We can flirt later.”

“Later?” Gigi wondered. “Later …?”

“You’re flirting again,” he muttered as he undressed her. “Good God, you’re beautiful … oh, hopelessly … incorrigibly … unforgivably … so beautiful … so much more than I’d imagined …”

“You imagined?” Gigi breathed accusingly, with her last resources. “Is that what you’ve been doing, daring to imagine me like this?”

“Nothing else. I might as well have been in downtown Mestre since we came, for all I’ve really noticed of Venice, oh, Gigi …” His lips claimed her breasts as completely as they had claimed her mouth, and soon, so soon that they were equally astonished yet equally unhesitating, he claimed her entirely and, in claiming her, caused her, unmistakably, to claim him. They were both so dense with desire that they could have ignored a cyclone, so light with desire that they could have floated out of the Gothic windows on a puff of air, so fierce with desire that they could have bitten each other to draw closer together, yet still so tentative that they trembled with each rapid step in the most ancient of dances.

An hour later, when the sunset had long passed, Gigi spoke again. Her voice sounded strange in her ears, as if it had been taken apart and put back together in some better, more interesting way. “Now that you know the consequences of making love to me … are you glad you took the chance?”

“I’m still not a hundred percent sure that it was enough of a chance,” Ben Winthrop said consideringly, his hands parting her unresisting thighs with a masterful grace that had nothing to do with his tone of voice. “I’m going to have to risk it once more … to make absolutely certain.”

“Shouldn’t we … start in the gondola … like the first time?”

“Not unless you want to.” He kissed her as gently as he had in the gondola. “We could just pretend.” The fish had bitten, Ben thought. And caught the angler.

“Why pretend?” Gigi gasped as he entered her again. “Oh, Ben, this is real life, isn’t it?”

Hours later, blazing with erotic secrecy, they sat in a semicircular booth, ordering dinner at that most elegant of all Italian hotels, the Cipriani. Its indoor restaurant enjoys a charm possessed by no other hotel restaurant in the world; a surrounding view of water and sky with the noble Palladian
vista of the dome and tower of the cathedral of San Giorgio Maggiore across the lagoon in the background.

“Being here is exactly like being on a ship,” Gigi said, breaking the silence in which they were held, happy prisoners, a silence made up of having too much to say and not knowing where to start, or even if they should.

“Uh-huh,” Ben agreed, his eyes on her, not glancing in the direction of the floor-to-ceiling windows from which they were separated by several tables.

“No, it is. Just look, do look and you’ll see what I mean.”

“I do know this is one of my favorite places,” he declared while he intently observed Gigi’s bright head as if it were a rare and ingeniously made flower on which a petal was missing. Was this it? Was he in love? He’d never felt like this before, God help him, Ben thought in a confusion of intense happiness and equally intense wariness. He was so habitually thrifty with his emotions that he was deeply mistrustful of them.