Lovers (36 page)

As Gigi sat down to breakfast on the morning of her fourth full day in Venice, she found herself unexpectedly alone in the dining room on the second floor of the palazzo. She drank her orange juice slowly, fascinated as ever by the patterns of the busy water traffic immediately outside, patterns she was beginning to recognize, almost to anticipate. She finished her juice, put down the glass, and suddenly realized that her growing familiarity with Venice was matched by her growing confusion about Ben Winthrop. Dressed in colorful Italian sweaters and casual trousers by day, and elegant Italian suits at night, he wore them
with such ease that his normal look, his still slightly Bostonian, professor-mixed-with-businessman look, had disappeared so entirely that she could barely believe he’d ever possessed it. His longish hair still had a mind of its own, refusing to grow in the direction his barber had planned, but his gray eyes held infinitely more blue than she’d ever realized before, perhaps because of the constant reflection of sea and sky, but the change in his appearance was merely a detail compared to his attitude.

It wasn’t merely that Ben was in a devil-may-care mood, or that he was a busy man deliberately creating a rare free place in his life in which to relish every minute of a holiday, she reflected; it went deeper than that. Was it because he’d lost that “game face,” that lack of self-revelation which was so much a part of his business persona? Since they’d been in Venice he hadn’t, for a minute, struck her as the tough cookie she’d judged him to be when they’d first met, a gracefully and purposefully expressionless man who looked at everything with thoughtful consideration, his eyes weighing and judging.

Ben had become a boy, Gigi thought, a lean, powerful boy, his face getting tanner every day, a boy just under puberty, not quite thirteen, with learning and appreciation of art beyond his years, a boy in his enthusiasms, a boy in his unpredictability, a boy in his lack of self-consciousness, and, most of all, a boy in his relation to her. He hadn’t shown the slightest inclination to kiss her again; when he grasped her to steady her arm as she climbed in and out of the
motoscafo
or a gondola, it was with a boy’s helpful hand; when he stood protectively behind her on the slow-moving but aggressive ferry boat, the
vaporetto
that was as crowded as a subway, it was with a boy’s sheltering body. When they returned to the palazzo at night after dinner, he escorted her to the door of her rooms and left her with a boy’s kiss on the top of her head; when she appeared dressed in her new clothes, he greeted her with a boy’s innocent admiration.

But how was it possible to reconcile this comrade, this
pal, this gallant boy, with the very adult man whose kiss, so possessive and fierce, had frightened her only months ago?

As Gigi was reflecting on Ben in the dining room, he had stopped dressing to spend a minute on the subject of Gigi, to take stock of their situation, before the beginning of another day with her.

He congratulated himself that from the moment he and Gigi had started on their flight to Venice he had managed to maintain the flawless façade of a companion and buddy. Not once had he allowed himself to take advantage of Gigi’s moments of high emotion or excitement, or even of the underlying condition of blissfully surprised joy in which she accepted all the details of the romance and beauty of their, surroundings. He had
given
her Venice, Ben told himself, Venice at its most desirable, and, as he had planned, asked nothing in return, behaved like the best damned brother or uncle any girl could invent in her wildest dreams. He had not permitted himself to react a single time to the closeness and warmth of her marvelous animal presence, he had treated her a thousand times less personally than he would treat a glorious beast, if he owned one, although his hand burned whenever he touched her and he was overcome, a hundred times a day, by longings to grab her by her sweet, fragrant cap of hair and draw her close and cover her with kisses. Each day he had maintained his determination to turn his lips resolutely away from her, and each day she had remained unperturbed, unquestioning, finding, as far as he could tell, his behavior perfectly natural.

What woman could have resisted the challenge he’d set her, he wondered, thoroughly dissatisfied with himself. He’d planned this trip to Venice with all the attention to detail he would have devoted to an important business deal, after letting months go by in which he and Gigi had worked together efficiently, lulling any ideas about his motives that Gigi might have entertained after that one mistaken
kiss he’d been too quick to give, that kiss to which she’d reacted so badly, that kiss that had shaken his pride.

Gigi had accepted the fact that he’d trapped her into a trip to Venice with a certain swagger, a fearlessness. But, once established here with him, what woman on earth could not have been piqued by his seeming imperturbability in the face of what she
had
to know were her charms?

If Gigi were the kind of woman who played sophisticated games, he would have admired the perfection of her performance, but Gigi was what she seemed to be, he’d bet anything on it, and even if she had tried to, she would be unable to deceive anyone as experienced as he. Her reactions were pure, they welled up as soon as she felt them. How was it humanly possible that she hadn’t made some effort, at the very least, to get some idea of how he felt about her? To ruffle him, to pierce his equanimity, to upset his self-composure.
To make him make his move?
All of the tests he’d set for her, all of the traps, had failed because she hadn’t noticed them, but had gone blithely about her business of enjoying whatever careful plans he made so that each day had its own rounded perfection. Yet, Ben thought, he had baited the hook so very well that it was simply inconceivable that this fish wouldn’t bite.

And now the telex had suddenly sprung to life after days of blessed silence. “Just what I need!” Ben exclaimed bitterly, ripping the paper out of the machine so roughly that it tore.

Just what is it that you
do
want? Gigi asked herself as she munched her second piece of toast. You wanted freedom, and you have it in wild abundance; you hate possessiveness, and here there is no one who is trying to own you; you wanted to escape from the persecution of constant sexual tension, day and night, and you’ve acquired the company of the world’s most correctly behaved and best-informed tour guide; you loathe being the object of jealousy, and now you have a boy who treats you like Huck Finn—shouldn’t this be perfect, you ridiculous, perverse
nut case? To be whisked off to Venice without obligation—to how many women in the world had that happened? Or could it be possible … that Venice without a little … flirting … was not Venice as it should be, not Venice whole? Did the nature of the city demand an undercurrent of flirtation, just as it demanded the ebb and flow of the tides, without which the canals would stagnate?

Gigi was aware that she was a flirt by nature, but she had not allowed herself to flirt with Ben Winthrop, not for a second. You do not flirt with a skyjacker who is also a major client, a man whose hospitality you are accepting under circumstances that are, as she didn’t need Billy to tell her, highly compromising, and, above all, a man who has kissed you once, kissed you unforgettably, dangerously, passionately, so that if you flirted with him you’d be asking for trouble. Ben had his Rule of One, and she had hers: No flirting with Ben Winthrop.

And yet, and yet … when they had taken the long
vaporetto
trip up and down the entire winding length of the Grand Canal, each time the ferry stopped, bumping clumsily into one of the many floating landing stages, and Ben had been watchful to hold her upright, she’d yearned to lean back against him, turn her head, nestle into his chest, and stay there, instead of pulling away as soon as he’d cushioned the shock of the landing. Each time she’d watched him drink a cappuccino, she’d ached to hold his free hand; when a sudden brief shower had sent them into a church portico to take refuge, she’d just been able to resist the impulse to button her head inside Ben’s oversized jacket; when he glanced down at a check she looked at his eyelids and thought only of touching them with her fingertips—but that wasn’t flirting, Gigi assured herself, it was a natural need for tactile contact with a member of the opposite sex, something any woman would feel in this outrageously over-the-top city in which romance seemed a duty. A man and a woman in Venice together without a touch of romance was unthinkable. Even unpatriotic, considering her half-Italian heritage.

The only men she had flirted with in Venice—the only men who’d flirted back—were every waiter in every restaurant, Giuseppe, the
motoscafo
captain, Guido, the gondolier, and—by far the most satisfactory—Arrigo Cipriani.

Yesterday, before lunch, she and Ben had been suddenly beset by a craving for a real American hamburger. They’d strolled to Harry’s Bar, the only place in Europe where it was properly made. There she’d met the owner, a friend of Ben’s, and one of the great, subtle, almost subcutaneous flirts of the world, Gigi quickly realized, in spite of his dignified mien. By the time lunch was over he’d given her his red necktie, his signature, the only kind anyone had ever seen him wear, to sport with the navy blazer and white shirt she was wearing with her jeans, whipping a replacement out of his pocket. This morning she’d put the tie on again, liking its jaunty look, and it hung around the neck of a sky-blue cotton shirt that she was wearing under a Burberry argyle sweater she’d bought yesterday.

Thank goodness she had her charge cards with her, Gigi thought, as she ate her breakfast on the morning of the fourth full day in Venice. It was equal to Beverly Hills in temptations, the dollar was twice as strong as the lira; and most boutiques were open seven days a week. Two days ago she’d been unwary enough to linger outside the window of Nardi, the most famous of the Venetian jewelers, and Ben had dragged her inside to try on the huge emerald drop earrings set in diamonds that had caught her eye.

When she’d explained that she couldn’t let him buy them for her, that a skyjacking, even the most luxurious one, simply did not include gifts of precious jewelry, he’d been obviously crestfallen, but later in the day, when she’d allowed him to buy her a small, Swiss-made traveling manicure set, he’d been as pleased as he’d been disappointed at not being allowed to spend a fortune on the earrings. He could pay ten gondoliers for a century of full-time service for the price of those earrings. Didn’t he have
any
sense of the value of money?

“Damn!” Ben came into the dining room and sat down next to her. “A telex came last night. I should rip that machine out of the wall.”

“Do we have to go back?”

“Oh, nothing like that, that can’t happen unless a mall explodes—I left instructions. This is something else. I’m involved in shipping, and suddenly there’s a chance to pick up three freighters if I go out to Mestre this afternoon. The owner’s badly overextended himself and he needs to sell them immediately for the value of the scrap metal. If I don’t get them this morning, someone else will this afternoon.”

No, Ben hadn’t lost a sense of the value of money, Gigi thought, it just wasn’t her kind of sense. Scrap metal—what a reason to interrupt a day in Venice!

“I’ll leave you here with Guido as your chaperone, and I’ll be back in a couple of hours,” he continued.

“How far is Mestre?” she inquired.

“Half an hour tops, right on the mainland. I’ll go to the railroad station by speedboat, have a car and driver meet me at the station, look over the ships and be back in time for a drink before lunch.”

“Why can’t I go with you?”

“To Mestre? It’s totally hideous. Gray, grimy, industrial. You shouldn’t waste a minute there.”

“Really,” Gigi insisted. “I need to see something hideous, just for a change of pace.”

“Then I’d love it, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

At the gate to the shipyard, Gigi and Ben were met by a guide who gave them each a numbered bicycle, a hard hat, and a pair of “safe shoes,” like Dutch clogs with iron tops and rubber bottoms, that they put over their own shoes before they were allowed into the shipyard proper. The freighters were in a drydock about a mile away, and everyone used bicycles to get around the enormous yard, in which large metal ships of all kinds were being built nonstop in a terrible din.

At the drydock they stopped on the concrete and looked at the freighters on the vast floor of the drydock, far below them, just above water level, three identical, un-painted gray metal ships. They looked sad, Gigi thought, not only because they had been hauled up out of the water so that the vast amount of hull space below the waterline was visible, but because they were about to be torn apart and chopped up. Yet she could tell that their bows and sterns were elegantly, even poetically, designed, and there was something strikingly pleasant to the eye about the sweep of their lines, something as strong and graceful as their destiny was pathetic.

“Where
is
that owner, Severini?” Ben asked impatiently. “I want to finish this fire sale and get back by noon.”

Within a few minutes two men sped up and jumped quickly off their bikes. They were obviously father and son, both exceptionally graceful, well-dressed, and equally grim.

“Mr. Winthrop, please do forgive me, I was on a long-distance call and then, to my horror, I found that all but the smallest bikes were gone. May I present my son, Fabio? He is a naval architect. We had to requisition these bikes, or we’d still be standing at the gate.”

“I’m glad to meet you both,” Ben said. “This is Miss Orsini, a hopelessly curious tourist.”

“One would have to be, to come to Mestre,” said the senior Mr. Severini.

As she shook hands with him, Gigi felt his pain, his panic, and his decency. He was a man in very grave financial trouble, no matter how well dressed. She and Fabio Severini walked away a short distance so that the business discussion could proceed in private.

“A naval architect?” Gigi asked. “In other words, you design ships?”