‘Good, because I’m tired of platitudes and I might find myself arguing that the rich used to live a lot better. And there were fewer of them.’ He didn’t know quite why he was so angry. Perhaps it was that he had been working well and didn’t particularly want to be disturbed. Perhaps it was simply her rudeness. He glanced at his watch. It was past eleven.
‘I know, I know, it’s late,’ she saw his gesture. ‘But I thought you of all people might have a bed for me for a few nights. I’m between flats.’
He looked at her covertly while he uncorked a bottle of wine. She was examining his pictures, fingering the books on the coffee table. He handed her a glass. Stood over her. ‘Is that an invitation? Or are all the hotels in Milan fully booked?’
She shrugged. ‘It’s what I said. I need a bed.’ Hazel eyes provoked him.
He kissed her. Cool firm lips, opening to his.
She pulled away. ‘You didn’t ask my permission.’
Alexei laughed. ‘You didn’t resist.’
‘No, perhaps not.’ She met him on it, surveyed him critically. ‘You’re not unattractive. A little too male for my taste.’ Her nose crinkled.
Alexei felt uncomfortable, stripped bare, naked before the scrutiny of that gaze. Suddenly he chortled, ‘Where did you learn to do that?’
‘What?’ she pretended not to understand.
‘Stare like that,’ he mimicked her, slowly trailed his eyes over her body.
She chuckled, took her jacket off, threw it on the sofa. A blue sweater, tight around small unbound breasts. ‘By observing men,’ she confronted him. ‘So, do I get a bed?’
‘I haven’t decided yet. I have a lot of work to get through tonight.’
She looked at him queerly. ‘You’re an odd fish, you know?’ She sat back in the sofa, curled her legs under her. ‘Have you got any food? I’m ravenous.’
‘Help yourself,’ he pointed towards the kitchen.
She moved with alacrity. After a moment, she called out, ‘Who does your cooking? Who washes your socks?
He followed her, leaned against the kitchen door and watched her cram cold meat into her mouth.
‘An exploited servant whom I pay nothing and force into my bed every night.’
Her face dropped, ‘I didn’t know. They…no one told me. When is your wife coming back?’
Alexei smiled, put his arms round her, ‘Idiot,’ he murmured, ‘You can’t see the truth for your ideas.’
She flushed, squirmed away from him. ‘Don’t patronise me, rich boy.’
He looked at her coldly, moved to go back to his desk.
‘Do I get a bed?’ her voice followed him.
Alexei didn’t turn. ‘Third door on the left. For one night.’
‘Thanks.’
He tried to concentrate on his script. With little success. He was tautly aware of her presence, the sound of the shower, her movement through the flat.
And then suddenly, she was standing in front of him, wearing his robe, her hair darkened by water. She met his eyes, walked towards him, a little smile tugging at her lips. Soft fingers ran down his shirt. ‘Now. I’m ready now,’ she murmured.
‘I’m not sure that I am,’ Alexei resisted her ‘Now.’
She shrugged. ‘That’s the way it is with men. They always have to choose. Always have to decide. When. Where. How.’ She moved away.
‘It must be pleasant always to have your views so easily confirmed,’ he muttered. ‘A palpable delight.’
She threw him a scathing glance.
He caught up with her at the door. ‘Alright. Now. My room? Your room? On top? Underneath? Standing up? On the floor? Choose.’ He was gripping her arm tightly. She turned to face him, features posed in contempt. With a ragged breath, he found her lips, her throat, the curve of her bosom. He felt angry. He had never felt angry like this with a woman before. And he was keenly aware of the excitement with which she met his anger. Teeth nipping his lips. Nails raking his back, digging, probing. She pulled him down onto the floor of his study. ‘Here, here,’ she whispered, covering his mouth, tugging at his trousers. He heaved into her with a moan, thrust heavily, deeply, wildly, coming into her urgently as if he had waited too long.
She was smiling when he looked at her, small white teeth bared. ‘Nice,’ she said reflectively. ‘A little too violent, a little too much like a man, but nice.’ She had the air of a cat licking her whiskers.
He gazed at the expanse of her body amidst the tumble of the robe. Satin skin. Miniature perfection. He turned away, stood. ‘You’re perverse,’ he muttered. ‘You provoke me into behaving like an animal, so that you can tell me off for being one.’
‘Provoke?’ she looked at him innocently. ‘You don’t have to be provoked. You can walk away. Read a book. You don’t have to prove your manhood.’ She tied the robe tightly round her. ‘That’s the difference,’ she murmured. ‘Men can walk away.’
Alexei did. He went to the kitchen. Made a cup of coffee.
She followed him a few moments later. ‘Are you going to offer me one?’
He looked at her a little grimly, shook his head. ‘No. I don’t think so. That’s women’s work. You can make your own.’
Her nose crinkled.
‘Perhaps,’ he stared at her, ‘perhaps when you have the grace to treat me as something other than a generic male, as something other than a random representative of your hated species, then I might just consider offering you a cup.’
Rosa laughed, a low rumble. ‘You sound a little like me. Those are my lines,’ she mimicked him. ‘I’m a person, not the incarnation of Woman.’
‘It’s gracious of you to notice,’ Alexei stirred his coffee, looked at her reflectively. Standing there, leaning against the counter in his white robe, she did indeed look like the incarnation of fragile, innocent femininity. And yet within that small frame there was all that fierceness, that polemical ardour. He noticed the direction of his thoughts, had enough self-critical awareness to see that his surprise at Rosa’s contradictions was precisely what she was attacking. It didn’t make him relent. Instead, he said, ‘I don’t like politics in the bedroom.’
‘Politics are everywhere,’ she replied, her face serious. ‘Everywhere that power is.’ She gazed at him for a moment, eyes wide, direct. ‘But I’m not unfair. You can choose next time.’
‘That’s generous of you,’ Alexei muttered. ‘But there may not be ‘a next time’.’
There was. Later that night and again and again and again for the course of the weeks that she stayed at the apartment. So that he came to know every fragment of her body, every inch of that smooth skin from the curve of her foot to the hollow at the base of her neck, to the smattering of freckles around her nose. And yet every time he saw her or held her afresh, she continued to surprise him, her face and body like quicksilver.
Over the weeks, he began to think that, despite her polemics, it was the sudden sexual encounter which most excited her. Whatever she proclaimed, however she verbally resisted, it was the surprise embrace, in the shower, in the midst of breakfast, in the stealth of night, that roused her to greatest passion. He felt a little triumphant in this knowledge since it belied what he called her superficial politics.
Then he realised that he was mistaken. It was not the accosting male that excited her, but the heightened pleasure of the transgressive. Anything that broke the rules, implied danger, was illicit, exhilarated her. One evening while they were sitting in the darkened back rows of the cinema, he felt her hand at his groin. She was stroking him, rubbing. In consternation, he felt his penis bulge. He took her hand away. She kissed him on the neck, ‘Don’t be so bourgeois,’ she whispered, drawing his hand to her mound, shifting herself, so that she sat on him, wriggled. He could feel her heat, her moisture. He kissed her full on the lips and again that hand, teasing him until he thought he would burst, there, amidst the other spectators, like a rampant teenage boy.
When the lights came on, her eyes were bright, a green haze. She
pulled him along, ran past people, past a policeman, into the darkness of a lane. She flung her arms around him, leaned back against the brick of a wall. ‘Here,’ she murmured. He came into her with a groaning fury . A few minutes later, when they bumped into the same policeman at the corner of the lane, she smiled a polite ‘good evening,’ and then looked at Alexei with mischievous joy. That night they made love again and again with an increasingly reckless abandon.
Her scent began to trail him through the streets of Milan.
He was astounded by the force she exerted over him. He felt taken and taken over. Yet at the same time, he felt protective of her, wanted to shelter her. Somewhere in the long nights of their lovemaking he had discovered a vulnerability, a hidden fragility which he suspected was at the root of her fire. A vulnerability that had been converted, overlaid with the fierceness of her outrage, and transformed into an indignation with the way things were. She talked in her sleep. Small smatterings of sound. Her blind face clenched. Fear. He had mentioned it to her one morning, and she had refused to share his bed after that. He rued the fact that he had spoken.
In the hours they spent talking and arguing, he realised that part of her fascination lay in her certainty. She was pitiless in her judgments. Intemperate. Sure. He had never had that kind of absolute conviction except when he was filming. An absolute sense of what was right. It both riled him and intrigued him.
Gradually, she ceased to treat him as a mere example of the enemy, the patronizing male sex. She talked to him intelligently, cogently, about his film, which she admitted to liking, about other projects. But she refused to understand how he could work for Gismondi Enterprises.
About herself, she was secretive. All he knew was that she was looking for a new job, that she had done a few days’ work here and there. And that she wouldn’t accept his help in finding one. Nor would she meet his friends. He learned nothing except the blandest facts about her past.
And then suddenly without warning she was gone.
Buoyant with the expectation of seeing her, he had raced home from the office. It was a Friday and he had thought they might drive out for the weekend towards Padua. He wanted to explore some locations for his film.
But the apartment was empty, bereft of any trace of her. Her toothbrush was gone, the small overnight bag. Only a note remained on his desk. ‘Thanks for the room. See you sometime.’
A hole formed inside him. A hole the size and shape of Rosa. He thought he might fall into it. She had left no forwarding address. He had no idea where she might have gone. He knew none of her friends, her family.
Despair overtook him. Into that despair, the thought tumbled that she had gone off to another man. Rosa in bed with another. Red hair fanned over another’s pillow. Limbs askew, clasped round another man. Her shudders, her cries, her nose crinkling in disdain. Rosa.
Jealousy began to fill the hole where Rosa had been. It sat heavily with him on the sofa as he gazed into nothingness. It followed him round the length and breadth of the apartment as he retraced the sites of their love. It angered him and mortified him.
He loathed his passivity. The next day, to break it, he chased through the office files and found her family’s address. He rang, asked for her. A man answered, told him in no uncertain terms that Rosa Venturi did not live there and would never live there again.
Alexei walked blindly through the streets of Milan. He haunted the Galleria where he had once bumped into her.
He remembered the block of flats where he had once driven her. He went there, studied an anonymous list of names, then sat in his car and watched the block for hours.
When he finally returned home, he realised there was nothing for it. She had disappeared.
He could concentrate on nothing. After midnight, he went out again, prowling the streets, hoping to catch a glimpse of her. He was in a rage. How dare she simply vanish like that? Without warning. Without a word of endearment. He was faced with the agonizing notion that he meant nothing to her. Was simply a temporary address.
When a prostitute propositioned him on a tree-lined avenue, he followed her to a dusty hotel room, lost himself in a body which his imagination shaped into another form and punished with the passion of his anger.
Afterwards he felt ashamed. He couldn’t meet the woman’s eyes, left her a large sum. ‘Anytime you want me,’ her voice rang after him.
As he walked home, he could hear Rosa’s voice, lecturing him contemptuously on bourgeois habits, his abuse of women.
After a week of evoking Rosa’s figure at every turn, Alexei threw himself into work with a grim energy which battled against the black melancholy in him. Rosa, he told himself, would not come back and if she did, he didn’t want her. He finished his script, travelled to Rome, to Paris and Los Angeles to investigate co-production finances for his new company, saw two treatments move from page to production. He accepted invitations to the kinds of parties he had eschewed, wild parties where drugs flowed as liberally as food and drink, staider parties where he found himself the eligible darling of the society matrons.
And then, as suddenly as she had vanished, Rosa walked back into his life. It was a Friday evening in April. He had just come home. And there she was a few minutes later, framed in his doorway. Her hair was a little longer, wilder, but the jacket, the jeans, the wide eyes, the freckles were all the same.
‘Hi. Want to come for a ride. I’ve borrowed the most wonderful motorbike,’ she smiled at him engagingly.
Alexei wanted to shout, to berate her. Wanted also to embrace her, to beg her never to leave again. All he said was, ‘Isn’t it a little late?’ His voice was grim.
Her face fell. She shrugged. ‘It’s a great bike. I only have it for a few days. We could go into the country.’
He scoured her expression. Nothing. No guilt. No remorse. She looked a little pale. That was all.
‘Are you going to invite me in at least?’ she touched his hand and as he flinched and pulled back, she walked in. ‘It’s nice here. I’d forgotten how nice,’ she mused.
‘Are you planning to stay?’ Alexei asked with heavy sarcasm.
She looked a little hurt as he said it. ‘If you’ll allow me. Just for a few nights. I’m…I’m between flats.’ She walked up to him as she said it and traced the line of his cheek gently with her fingers. ‘You’re nice too. I’d forgotten.’
He met her eyes and was bewildered by what he saw there.
‘Oh Rosa,’ he crushed her in his arms, kissed her savagely and then more gently as if that kiss could bear all the weight of months of anger and yearning and loss. When he released her, she looked at him wistfully for a moment. Then she smiled. ‘Does that mean you’ll come for a ride?’
When he nodded, she looked as gleeful as a child.
They sped through the city, and then faster, ever faster through the countryside. Rosa in front, her hair flying beneath the grip of her goggles. Alexei behind, holding her, loosely at first, and then tightly, ever more tightly as the bike picked up speed. He could feel the mounting tension in her body, its excitement echoing in his own. Darkened fields, wind, night, and the two of them in the vastness, racing.
She turned a little dangerously off the highway into an uneven side road and then into another, even narrower. She pulled up short, clambered off. ‘Here. Shall we stop here?’ There was a rich depth in her voice.
In the moonlight her face looked ghostly, pale. But her eyes were wide, clear, asking him, urging him. He took her hand, kissed it. She laughed, a strange clear sound in the open night and then she whisked away from him, running, running onto a stretch of field, throwing herself on the bristly earth. He came after her, more slowly, a little reflectively, almost as if his desire didn’t match hers, as if at the last moment, he might turn and go. He stretched out beside her, didn’t look at her, focussed on the stars.
‘Rosa, I don’t want it now. Not if you’re going to disappear again.’
She kissed him, soft lips, fingers caressing his hair
, his chest, his groin, rubbing, rubbing. Each of her gestures clamoured with its double in his memory, intensifying sensation until he could bear it no longer. He moaned and in that sound, he sensed that he was lost. He covered her with his body, thrust into her, thrust to erase time and its passage, thrust to erase the pain of her going, until the waves of her coming encircled his, obliterating everything but the present.
‘You see, Alexei,’ she said afterwards as if she had read the movement of his thought, ‘if everything were as simple as now, the sky, the earth, our bodies, nothing else, no power, no corruption, no injustice, no fascist cops, no poverty, then I would stay with you. Stay for as long as it lasted.’ She looked at him a little sadly.
He took her hand, kissed it. She had changed in the time of their separation, he realised. She was less strident. She was talking to him, not to an example of the male species. And there was something else, too, something he couldn’t quite fathom. A kind of desperation. It had been there in her lovemaking, a desire for release, for forgetfulness, beyond the excitement.
He touched her again. Made love to her gently, achingly. When it was over, she cried. Soft, silent tears.
‘Paradise is a story we tell ourselves,’ Alexei murmured.
He lifted her in his arms. ‘Come. I’ll take you somewhere. Somewhere you’ll like.’
Alexei drove this time, remembering the surge of the machine, its power, from his time in the army. For an hour, they sped over quiet roads, through a sprinkling of villages and then up, up into hills. They stopped in front of a large house of gracious proportions, nestling amidst cypresses in old grounds. Stone unicorns guarded the front steps. A lone dog barked in the distance.
Alexei dug in his pockets for a ring of keys.
‘Is this yours?’ Rosa asked speculatively. She looked around. A wide hall, tapestries, a single sculpted figure, mottled white; a living room with deep rounded chairs, a flowered sofa, polished wood, a fireplace, the logs piled in readiness. Quiet luxury. Peace.
‘Is it yours?’ she repeated.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ Alexei shrugged. ‘Ours for now. Please don’t lecture me.’
Memory and Desire Page 57
