Lovers

by Judith Krantz

  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?”

  “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.

  11

  The 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.”