At Ground Zero, peering at the monstrous hole in the ground and the early signs of reconstruction, he held her against him and tried not to cry. It wasn’t because of sympathy or compassion with the victims of the tragedy, but because he felt he had never been so close to her than he was now.
Under the arch in Washington Square, he kissed her.
She had reached Barcelona Airport early and gone through security and passport control with more than two hours to spare before her flight left for New York, and had spent the time sipping coffees at one of the multitude of shiny bars in the duty-free zone, leafing soporifically through some of her Catalan literature textbooks and daydreaming. When her plane was called, she had been in no rush to make a beeline for the gate, only to realize to her dismay, once the back of the queue where she had been standing reached the final control point, that she could not find her passport. Her heart stopped. Where could she have mislaid it? It had been in her hands when she had checked her lone piece of luggage in.
She had run back breathlessly to the duty-free zone and the café. There was now someone else sitting at the table she had occupied. She felt her heart jump, her stomach convulse with anxiety. She asked the man if there had been anything on the table when he sat down. He looked at her with a puzzled look. She had automatically asked him in Italian, which he visibly couldn’t understand. She switched to English. No, the table had been empty. He suggested she walk over and ask the attendant at the bar.
Which she did.
The young girl on duty had only just begun her shift. She completed the order she was working on and finally moved to a back door to enquire with a colleague. A few minutes later, an older man with grey eyebrows and leonine features walked out with a broad smile on his face. Giulia’s attention was immediately drawn to his right hand. In which he held her passport.
Immense relief swept through her whole body. She felt faint. Held her breath.
“Thanks, thanks, thanks, so much,” she said, in Spanish this time.
The man grinned back at her, and silently handed her the lost passport.
She thanked him again a dozen times or more in her joyful haste and began to run back to the final control checkpoint. However, when she reached it, she was informed that the plane’s crew had already locked the aircraft’s doors and that she had missed her flight. Her solitary suitcase had already been unloaded. She pleaded her case, began sobbing uncontrollably, but it was to no avail. An airline attendant escorted her back sympathetically to the luggage area where the bag could be retrieved and then to the American Airlines desk.
There were no more flights to JFK today, but in view of the circumstances and even though they had no obligation to do so, they agreed to put her on the same flight the following day, which fortunately still had some empty seats.
Tears still drying across her hot cheeks, forlornly pulling her bag behind her, Giulia found herself once again in the departure and check-in area of Terminal A. She pulled her mobile from her handbag, checked the printouts of the emails they had exchanged and rang his hotel in New York. He wasn’t in his room. Why would he be? She left a message for him to call her back.
By the time he did, she was back in her dormitory north of Plaza Catalunya, and she had exhausted all the tears a human being could expend in the space of half a day.
Hiccupping between words, stuttering, crying out of control, she informed him that she had missed the flight.
She could almost feel the weight falling like a hammer across his own heart all those thousands of miles away.
But his voice remained calm and soothed her once she had managed to explain that she would still be coming, arriving on the same flight tomorrow.
“It’ll be all right,” he said. “It’s just a day, a night less. The main thing is that we can still be together. Just try and get a good night’s sleep and be at the airport nice and early, and don’t linger over coffees this time,” he said, a hint of affection and humour in his deep voice. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
“Yes.”
“And don’t forget to take a cab from JFK to Washington Square,” he added. “I’ll pay for it. Don’t want to waste any more time, do we?”
“I want you so much.”
She barely had time to drop her luggage to the floor before he wanted to undress her. He had been waiting in the hotel lobby for her fifty bucks taxi ride from the airport to reach the city, reading a magazine, distracted by every new arrival. As she ignored the doorman and ran towards him, he smiled broadly. She embraced him, squeezed him against her, and all the pain and anguish of yesterday’s disaster faded away in an instant.
They called the lift, and although not alone in it, she felt his hand caressing her arse through the thin white linen skirt she was wearing.
“I want to see you. All of you,” he said as he took a step back from her once they entered the fuchsia-coloured room.
She quickly slipped out of the skirt and he pulled the Strangers in Paradise T-shirt over her head. She was braless. Had never really needed one. He sighed as he saw those nipples again whose shade he could never quite capture in words, an ever-so-subtle variation between pale brown and pink he had never witnessed on any other woman he had witnessed naked before.
His breath caught in his throat.
She laughed and approached him. Pushed him back onto the bed and straddled him.
Outside, the cold February sun illuminated the recently refurbished arch, like a stone rainbow at the southern extremity of Fifth Avenue, towering above Washington Square while dogs ran loose across the park and small children laughed and shrieked on their swings and hardy squirrels scampered over the sparse grass and the chess players in the southeast corner of the park pondered and ruminated on and on and all was well with the world.
Pearls of his come like miniscule diamonds scattered across the curly jungle of her pubic hair, her inner lips swollen and a darker shade of bruised pink; catching their breaths, the bed a field of lust and sheets creased in every direction of the zodiac.
“Is it your first time in New York?”
The familiar smell of her cunt wafting like a upright fountain towards his nose, reviving his senses, joyful, loose, full of the flavour of life itself.
“No, I came when I was a teenager. My father was talking at a medical conference at Columbia. So he brought the whole family along. I shared a room with Tommaso, my younger brother. He was a pest then. We stayed in a big luxury hotel near Central Park. Did a lot of shopping.”
His hand strayed unconsciously towards her nipples, picked one up between two attentive fingers, caressed the rough tip, kneaded her flesh like soft dough, weighed each orb with abominable tenderness, the feather-like compactness of her slight elevations. He sighed. How could skin be so white?
“Look,” he said, almost slurring his words, nodding towards the window where the outside light was fading, “dusk approaches. We must absolutely take a walk across the Square before night falls and then we can find somewhere to eat. If we stay in this bed any longer, I’ll want to make love to you again, and right now I’m just too raw . . .”
She had been sitting with her neck supported by the bed’s headboard. She slouched down, stretched herself lazily across the rumpled bedcovers, yawned languorously, opened her legs in a wider angle. The wetness at the core of her delta shone. He couldn’t take his eyes away from her cunt. He silently lowered his head towards her core and systematically licked the drops of come still lingering around her opening.
“You tasted a bit salty, earlier,” she remarked. “Where did you have lunch?”
“At Live Bait, a Cajun restaurant near the Flatiron Building.”
“Oysters?”
“How did you guess?”
“I had a glass of white wine with my meal on the flight,” she grinned.
His tongue dipped into her cunt.
“Oysters and wine,” he said.
“I must call my mother, just to let her know I arrived safely,” Giulia said. They’d shar
ed split pea soup, pierogi and meat-stuffed cabbage at the open-24-hours Veselka Ukrainian restaurant on Second Avenue. He knew she would like it. She was not allowed spicy food as it badly upset her stomach.
“Do you want me to leave the room while you speak to her?” he suggested.
“No. It’s fine, but stay quiet.”
Her mother knew she had travelled to New York with her mysterious new boyfriend, but her father had been kept in the dark and she was terrified he would find out she was having an affair with an older man. After all, he had insisted that whilst in Barcelona she stay in student digs supervised by Catholic nuns. But she hadn’t even told her mother about the difference in age that stood between them. Giulia was a talented liar.
Midnight was nearing. She threw off her shoes and walked over to the corner of the hotel room and unzipped her luggage and pulled out a deep-blue silk nightie.
“Look,” she said.
“It’s beautiful,” he touched it. “So soft.”
They had always been in the habit of sleeping naked.
“My mother bought it for me, when she learned I was going to spend a few days, a few nights with you,” Giulia confided in him. “She felt I ought to look nice in bed,” she giggled.
“A most understanding mother!”
“She is nice.”
“Little does she know what her dear daughter is concealing from her, or does she?”
Giulia gave him a look of protest, as if he were pushing his luck, emphasizing her duplicity. For a moment he did wonder what her parents would make of him. Likely scream with shock, he guessed.
But her parents were not present in this room by Washington Square. They were.
“Come here, let me hold you,”
And again the warmth and softness of her body was intoxicating, releasing waves of terrible tenderness through every square inch of his body, his veins, his brain cells, as if he had lived his whole life until this very moment waiting for her, to fulfil him, to make him a better man.
He undressed her.
She slipped the nightie on.
It ended around mid-thigh and, at the top, its elongated V-neck revealed the quiet onset of her slight cleavage.
He delicately raised the hem of the silk garment and ventured a finger into her cunt. She was wet already. He pushed her gently back towards the wall, and entered her with agonizing slowness.
He was home.
She never did wear the silk nightgown again that week in New York.
Mid-afternoon. February.
They had seen a mediocre thriller at the Union Square multiplex movie house and, sitting in a generic cafe on Broadway just a hundred yards away from the intersection with Houston, were debating the merits and virtues and otherwise of Bruce Willis, who had starred in the film.
“I like it when you tell me stories,” Giulia had said.
The waitress who had served them had a piercing in her right eyebrow and wore black from head to toe. He vaguely recognized a tune by Bruce Cockburn amidst the background muzak. When they had walked in, it had been to the strains of The Walkabouts playing Neil Young’s “On the Beach”. They were bathed in coffee fumes and a reassuring warmth. Giulia could spend her life in cafés; it was that Italian upbringing of hers.
“Will you tell other women stories about me when we are over?” she asked him
He wanted to be truthful and say no, but already she knew him too well. He was who he was, and aware that the temptation would be too strong not to talk about her, to improvise tales of beauty and fury, of lust and longing, songs of adoration and missing.
He lowered his eyes, nodded.
The punk waitress refilled Giulia’s cup.
She sipped pensively from the hot cup and watched him.
“I don’t know,” he answered. “At any rate, not in the same coffee houses. Let’s go walk.”
Under the Washington Square arch he stopped and took her hand and said, “I’m so happy right now. Kiss me.” Her lips still tasted of coffee and her tongue of sugar and her dark eyes shone in the early evening penumbra and his whole body shivered. A band of assorted buskers played ragtime jazz across from the fountain. On the south side of the park, on the pavement outside the massive university buildings, hawkers were selling rag-tag secondhand books on trestle tables and old issues of Penthouse and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Impulsively he bought her a copy of an old Philip Roth novel about an older man who was in love with a younger woman. A few years later, they would film it and it would remind him of her, even though she looked nothing like Penelope Cruz, despite their common Mediterranean roots.
An anorexic sun was setting in the distance, disappearing in the shadows that lurked around the Empire State Building. Traffic roared down Fifth Avenue as if every inhabitant of Manhattan was in a rush to reach home before dark settled. Coloured and Asian nannies were fleeing the park at the speed of lemmings, frantically pushing cots in front of them as if their life depended on it, returning their charges to their nearby apartments where their working parents were about to return from their offices.
They sat by the dogs’ enclosure.
New York.
February.
Early evening.
“I’ll write a story about a couple, call them Conrad and Julie maybe, who love each other terribly, obscenely. But they cannot stay together. Too many things separate them. The weight of years, the presence of others, frontiers, past and future adventures, the weight of the world and expectations, different ambitions, a life almost lived and a life that still requires mad adventures . . .” he said gently, as she buried her head across his shoulder. “So they part, as it must be and will be. Years later, his life has fallen apart in bad ways and he is sitting in a bar in Paris in the Latin Quarter, a place he never took her to, when a man, a stranger, enters the joint and tells him he needs his help to find his missing daughter. And passes a photograph of the missing girl to him across the plastic-topped table. And it’s Julie. He tries to tell her father he is no detective. But the man won’t listen to him, and pleads for him to accept the case. So Conrad reluctantly takes on the job and begins his quest for . . .”
He paused for breath, his imagination running ahead of him into all sorts of tangents and plots and illogical directions.
Looked up at her. There was a tear falling down Giulia’s right cheek.
“Or maybe,” he changed his tack, “it will be the tale of a man and a woman on a train that takes ages to reach China and she falls asleep with her head on his shoulder, just as they are nearing the border and—”
“I prefer that story,” Giulia said. “But you must never give your female characters my name. That would be disrespectful to me. I won’t like it.”
He interrupted himself. “Please don’t make me promise that,” he thought, knowing all too well it was a promise he could never keep. But she said no more.
“I could write a thousand stories,” he said. “I will write a thousand stories. But, right now, we are together and there is no reason to even think of the future. This is a moment out of time, Giulia. Our moment.”
She wiped the thin teardrop away.
“Let’s go back to our room,” she asked. “I want to be with you between the white sheets.”
He is watching her shower, her black curls unfurled all the way down to the small of her back, steam rising through the narrow hotel room bathroom, white plastic divider pulled to the side, water splashing against the tiles.
“One day I will go to live in San Francisco,” she says, above the muted roar of the jets of water streaming across her skin through the plastic shower head.
The spectacle of her nudity is too much to bear. He pulls off his grey T-shirt and steps out of his trousers and steps into the bathtub and joins her. The fit is tight. Silently she hands him the soap bar and he lathers the foam across her back and spreads the thin bubbles across her, lingering tenderly over her arse. He soaps her crack, his fingers maliciously slipping and sliding do
wn her wet valley, cleaning her, scrubbing her with all the care and attention of a slave attendant. He cups his hand under the shower head, fills his outstretched palms with water and finally washes the soap’s foam away from her skin. Unsteadily, trying to retain her equilibrium in the reduced manoeuvring space left by the bulk of their two bodies in the bathtub, she swivels on her axis and turns around. She faces him. Her nipples eerily shine, a combination of dampness and the light from the inlaid electric bulb in the ceiling. He lathers up the soap he was still holding in his left hand and begins to scrub her front.
“I’ve already cleaned there,” she says.
He ignores her and continues. Painting an invisible fresco across her small, velvet breasts, spreading the softness all over her slight hillocks and the imperceptible valley separating her chest into two parallel and identical landscapes. Giulia moans quietly. His hands move downwards, bypassing the mini-crevice of her belly button and its familiar mole and making an assured beeline for her cunt. He kneels down in the bathtub, his face now facing her opening. One pair of fingers part her, while his other hand places the soap bar on the side of the tub and invades the thicket of her pubic hair, travelling through the obstinate curls, treading her jungle, spreading the wetness, massaging the ground below like an alchemist in search of a magical formula. Her dark lower lips open up like a flower to a deep and moist cavern of redness. Her inner lips are still beautifully swollen from the incessant lovemaking of the past two days. He wipes the last remaining bubbles of soap away and his tongue nears her vortex.
“In San Francisco, I will find myself a black ambassador and I will marry him,” she says.
He never quite knows when she is joking, or trying to provoke him. He says nothing and begins to lick her. Wetness against wetness. He closes his eyes. A blind man now, worshipping from memory, on automatic pilot, homing in like a bird of prey towards the fountain of life, the taste of Giulia coursing through the bridge that his lapping tongue has now become towards the very centre of him, dragging pleasure and bittersweet tastes alongside, an essence he would never truly be able to explain. In the darkness of his genuflection, his hands wander upwards. Her nipples have the gentle hardness of pizza crust, the beating sound of her heart reverberates through her chest, boom, boom, boom. He is out of breath and realizes that for several minutes now, his tongue planted deep inside her, his nose buried beneath the hard shield of her curls and stomach, he had actually forgotten to breathe. He gets up from his uncomfortable squat. Turns her round. Under the warm waterfall that splashes relentlessly over the both of them, he pulls her arms away from her body and positions her so that they are now both now leaning for support against the wall above the taps. Without being asked, she spreads her legs open. He takes his cock in one hand and guides it towards her and enters her.
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