by CD Reiss
“They raised you too American.” Loretta plucks a coin of hard salami from the tray and leans back with one leg crossed over her thigh, comfortably reclining on a couch.
“But we’re in America.”
“Are we?” She shrugs and looks over the view of the town. “Look at it. When the sun catches it the right way, it could be Abruzzi or Trecase, just south of Vesuvio, not a country that didn’t exist three hundred years ago. We come from a culture with a history…how long? Four thousand? Five thousand years old. Pompeii was destroyed in 79AD…almost two thousand years ago, and we know because Pliny the Younger’s letters survive. Letters written and sent far away. A system for doing this existed. We—our culture—was reading, writing, painting, sculpting, conquering, before Stati Uniti was a twinkle in God’s eye.” She takes a sip of wine, then looks at me with the compassion of a teacher telling a student their thesis is built on a shaky intellectual foundation. “The culture we built has survived invasion, war, famine. It’s real. These American ideas are just ideas until they outlive our reality.”
It’s my turn to look away, over the little town that hasn’t changed much in a hundred years, when the first wave of Neapolitans settled close enough to a small city to have jobs, but far enough away to maintain their way of life.
“How’s that worked out for you?” I ask. “These traditions. You happy?”
She tsks and pours us both more wine. It’s relaxing me enough to eat. I pile hard cheese on a slice of bread, then a jarred pepper and eat it in one bite.
“Are you?” she asks as I chew. The food awakens a dormant hunger, and I take a plate to pile with more.
“I could have been.”
“Sure,” she scoffs.
“You didn’t answer me though.” I lay a slice of mozzarella and a slice of tomato on a crust of bread. “Are you happy?” I say before eating and pinching crumbs off my fingers.
“It’s a silly question. Ask me if I’m safe. Ask me if I have everything I need. Ask if I know where I belong.”
“If I cared about all that, I would have asked about it.”
She laughs, and I smile into my glass.
“Touché, my American guest.” She holds up her wine. “Touché.”
Our glasses clink again.
“These tomatoes,” I start. “Amazing.”
“Thank you. I grow them from seeds I brought over.”
I look around for a garden, but don’t see anything but a flagstone terrace, a brick oven, and cast iron.
“Come,” she says, dumping fruit from a large porcelain bowl before she stands. “I’ll show you.”
She hands me the bowl. I have it in one hand and my wine in the other as I follow her down a set of stone steps to a terrace garden of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplant. Herbs like basil, oregano, and rosemary grow from long planters.
Below us, Secondo Vasto is only twenty feet closer, but it seems as though I’m seeing it from a completely different angle.
Loretta reaches into a six-foot-high tomato plant tied to a wire cage and retrieves a green plum tomato with a little red at the base. I hold out the bowl and she drops it in.
“Do you know who those men were?” I ask. “The ones who tried to take me?”
“That’s a question for Santino.”
“You don’t know?”
“Santino doesn’t answer to a woman…or anyone for that matter.” She drops more into the bowl. “Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell you if he asked me not to.”
I need to be more subtle. Less like a child diving straight into questions. I’ve never been great at finesse, but I never needed it so much.
Seeing a spot of red between the leaves, I place my glass on the stone ledge and reach into the bush for the fruit.
“I used to be in charge of my aunt and uncle’s garden.” I pull out a thick, half-ripe beefsteak, shaped like two fused tomatoes. “After my sister died. I tended it just like she did. I liked watching things grow.” I drop my find into the bowl and pick up my wine.
Loretta drops a plum tomato into my bowl. “I always let late fruit drop so there will be volunteers. Volunteers may not be where you want to grow—they may not be the variety you would have planted—but they’re always the strongest.”
This feels as if she’s talking about more than just fruit. I finish the rest of the wine in a gulp.
“Santino,” she says, making it a point to look at the plants as if this is a casual conversation, but as soon as she says his name, I know it’s not.
“What about him?”
“You haven’t given yourself yet.” She states it as a fact, because it is. She also says it as if it was ever up to me.
“He hasn’t taken it, and now I guess I know why.”
She pauses with her fingers cupping a tomato she was about to give to me, as if caught off guard with something she has to think harder about than expected, then she laughs and drops the last fruit in the bowl.
“I’m not why,” she says with a little shake of her head. Maybe she’s lying. Maybe there’s a half-truth where he’s fucking her, but not monogamously. But it doesn’t matter.
“Well, I offered.”
“What did he do?” Her concern is sisterly, and if it’s not real, she’s an incredible actress. I not only believe that as far as Santino and I go, she has my best interests at heart, but that she wants to help me.
“He said if he wanted me, he’d take me.”
“And you understood that to mean he didn’t want you?”
“Is there something else to understand?”
She nods not in agreement, but in acceptance that there’s plenty more to understand, and she’s going to have to be the one to teach me what I don’t know.
“Don’t forget your glass.” She takes the bowl from me and heads up the steps.
I take my wineglass and follow, gathering the long skirt in my fist so I don’t step on it and land face-first on the stones. When we get to the terrace, she lifts a tray of antipasti with her free hand and goes into the kitchen.
Taking her cue, I grab the pitcher of water and my plate before joining her inside. She packs up the food, and without asking if I should or being told, I clear the outside table of the olive bowl, bread basket, and wine bottle. She puts the food away, and I put the plates and glasses by the sink, take the dish towel outside, and wipe down the table.
When it’s all inside, I rinse while she tells me which things go in the dishwasher and which are finished by hand. I arrange the former on the racks and stack the latter by the sink.
She starts the hand-washing and I stand by with a towel to dry.
This is what we do, and it’s done the same no matter whose house we’re in. It’s not until she hands me the first delicate glass to dry that the conversation continues.
“When you offered yourself to Santino,” she says as if we never paused, “you weren’t offering enough.”
I’m one hundred percent sure Santino hasn’t told her a single thing about what I offered or how I offered it. Not only would that be disrespectful, for a man like my husband, it would be awkward. Loretta must know from her short observation of him and me together, and her longer scrutiny of me alone.
“Well”—I rub a glass dry—“he was pretty clear on how much access he expected, and I said he should just do what he wanted…but he didn’t, so I can only assume he didn’t want to.”
She tsks with a short shake of her head. “That’s not consent.”
“If that’s not consent, I don’t know what is.”
“You invited him to rape you.”
That description defied semantic logic, and yet, I know exactly what she means. I hadn’t met him halfway or offered something I wanted to give. I’d only been willing to get it over with, knowing it would be as terrible as I imagined.
“He’s the king,” Loretta says as she hands me a wet, gold-rimmed tray. “If the king wants to remove your resistance, the king takes it away. If he doesn’t want to remove it himself, he’
ll wait until you can’t resist any longer.”
“What’s the point?”
“The point is his satisfaction.”
“Of course.”
“Now, little girl,” she scolds. “He’s not some pathetic college boy who wants a warm place for his seed. He doesn’t just want to stick it in. He wants surrender. He wants you to renunciate your will to him. And not from fear, or exhaustion, but trust, so that when he dominates you and hurts you, you’re both stronger. And for that, he needs total consent.”
Placing the tray on the counter, I barely hear the part about being stronger, because I’m stuck on the phrase before. “Hurts me?”
“He’s Vesuvius. When he explodes, he leaves destruction behind.”
“But I don’t want to be Pompeii,” I whine.
She takes the tray and opens a cabinet. “Maybe that was a bad analogy.”
“I hope so.”
On tiptoes, she puts the tray on a high shelf. “It’s more like Rome. Sacked and empty. But it comes back stronger.”
“None of those places agreed to be sacked or covered in ash or any of it.” I dry the last wineglass as if I’m being graded on my skill for it. “They were just minding their own business when they were hit.”
Of course, that’s not entirely true. Pompeii was built at the base of a live volcano by blithe men with illusions of invincibility, and Rome had been pissing people off for centuries. Loretta doesn’t point any of this out. She just puts away her tableware.
“What did he call you?” she finally says. “Forzetta?”
“Is that his name for you too?”
She smiles then tightens her mouth in a good-humored denial. “No, but it tells you something. He trusts you can take it. That you’re Rome, not Pompeii. When you finally give him what you know you have to, and you do it the way you must, he’ll treat you like a toy he wants to break and throw away. But he doesn’t throw his toys away.”
She spreads her arms, as if not only indicating the house and the space around it, but his presence in her life.
“I don’t want this.” I spread my arms the way she does, imitating and mocking her.
“Forzetta.” Loretta laughs throatily. “Re Santino uses his volunteers the way the roots use the dirt. As if his life depends on it. Your body is the dirt and his cock will root inside you and destroy you.”
“Just stop!”
“You don’t like that I use the word cock?” She opens her plump lips widely at that last word, enunciating it fully. “You are like a child?”
“I’ve dealt with plenty of…cock.” I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from blushing, because Loretta sizes me up as if she knows the back-seat fumbling I did with Will Gershon isn’t anything near plenty, but to me, it’s quite enough. I barely got out of there with my virginity intact.
“You will worship his. You will worship his cock like the filthy volunteer slut you are. Because that is the power of him. He saves pleasure for when you deserve it. Intense pleasure you can only dream of. He eats fica like a thirsty man in a desert.”
She can really serve up a hot metaphor, and I’m eating them like a hostage on a cookie. I am so turned on, I can’t breathe. Never in my life have I wanted to meet a man’s expectations more than I do now.
“Both of us, we share this in common.” Loretta puts her hand on my arm. “Whether you realize it or not, you and I need to be under rule of a king who plays rough, and we both start out ashamed of how well this role suits us.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Flames tear through my core and it’s confusing, because the shame touches my most erotic places, and I need to feel it as much as I feel the fire. I shrug her off and want to tell her to stop just stop, but I’m suddenly achingly tired. Exhausted. My eyes burn and shoulders droop, my entire body begs for rest.
It’s daylight. Barely past lunchtime. It’s too early to even nap, much less sleep like a dead thing, but I hear Professor Windham’s voice in my head.
A common side effect in people who experience a trauma is exhaustion.
“I think I need to go to bed,” I say, leaning on the counter.
“It’s been a long day already.” Loretta snaps the dishwasher closed and it spins to life. “For anyone, what happened today is rough. Come this way.”
From blatant inappropriateness to concern in two breaths. No wonder Loretta’s obsessed with Santino; they’re both insane.
She leads me back to the guest room where I showered and changed, opens the top drawer of the dresser, and pulls out a simple heather-gray nightgown.
“Does he always bring women here covered in blood?” I can barely keep my eyes open, much less stand up.
“No. Never.” She lays the nightgown over the bed. “You’re just lucky I don’t throw things away so easily. Lift your arms.”
I barely have the energy to lift them, much less resist her command.
She pulls the dress over my head, and I drop to the bed in my underwear. I almost flop down, but Loretta keeps me in a sitting position so she can get the nightgown over my head.
“Arms,” she says, and I push my arms through the short sleeves. She turns down the sheets and tucks me in, then pulls the curtains closed.
She’s his age, his level of crazy, and clearly deeply married to the entire concept of the camorra. It’s an entire world I never knew or understood, but also one in which Loretta is fluent. So why me? Why did he, a man who has his pick of any woman, waste his time on me?
He nearly murdered someone over my life. I’m not exciting, I’m not well-versed in Italian, my looks are nothing next to someone like Loretta.
Objectively, she’s the better choice.
There’s no way I can be a lover like Loretta. I’m a freaking virgin. All the masturbation sessions in the world can’t teach me how to pleasure a man. My increasingly common fantasies won’t either. The mere idea of touching someone like Santino, even if he magically turns into a nice guy who wouldn’t have kidnapped me, is terrifying.
“Don’t worry, Violetta.” Loretta lightly pats my cheek, jarring me out of near-sleep. “If the king wants you, he will teach you how to use his cock.”
How can she read my mind?
Are we that much alike?
I don’t want to talk anymore. I want to bury myself in unconsciousness. Loretta pats my cheek once more with tenderness and saunters out, shutting the door.
Today has hurt in so many ways and I want to forget it all. I won’t bother asking Santino any more questions he won’t answer, and I’m not going to get killed by men I don’t know over something I don’t understand, nor am I going to submit to him the way she has. I’m not ever going to become Loretta in this relationship.
I won’t let him turn me into a used doll stuck in a toybox on the side of a hill.
Never.
19
SANTINO
Forzetta.
She’s a trick of the mind. An innocent in need of protection with the soul of a warrior tucked into the smallest chamber of her heart.
I saw that warrior climb out of the car with a mask of fierce defiance on her face. She’s safe with Loretta, but only from other men.
She’s not safe from herself.
Café Mille Luci is quiet in the front, as always. It’s uninviting by design and may have the occasional curiosity-seeker, but it remains a setting for people whose families have been in town for two or three generations. It’s my place, and by extension, it’s a Cavallo business.
So after someone tries to take Violetta from right under my nose, I go there.
Blaming the Tabonas is too obvious. Attacking her can ignite a war that would set Secondo Vasto on fire, and they know it.
They wouldn’t.
Yet, it was done, and that requires a response.
When I enter, Gia approaches.
“Santino! Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Lock the door.”
She nods and obeys.
“Stay away
from the windows,” I say before going to the back hallway. “And tell me if anyone comes.”
My men are on the other side of the door. The best, most stable of them are guarding my house and my wife. I wait, listening to the ones who can’t stand still from the other side of the door to the back room as they imitate the gangsters they’ve seen on TV, instead of the actual made men who raised them.
“We could hit them hard at their compound.” Carmine’s voice comes through the door, feigning the accent of a borough he’s never seen. “Go in at night and pop pop pop.”
“They can’t come for us and not expect some shit to happen.” Gennaro snorts. I hear his heavy footfall as he paces the room. “What they did was fucking disrespectful. That’s a death sentence right there. So you gotta ask why.”
Gennaro’s the most sensible. He’s leading them to the right way of thinking, but I doubt they’ll follow.
“They’ll know it’s coming,” Vito adds in his deep basso. “Hitting the compound is a suicide mission. We gotta hit them when they least expect it.”
“How many guns we got?” Carmine asks. “Got enough to storm the laundry? Just take them all out?”
When I’m not there, nothing they say surprises me. They’re trustworthy, but too eager to prove themselves.
“Now you’re talking,” Vito growls. “Blow their heads off. Let them know who they’re dealing with.”
As much as I want to send the men who hurt my wife to burn in hell for eternity, these men are too reckless and impulsive to plan a response. I’m going to have to be the reasonable one. A wrong move could expose Violetta to danger where I can’t protect her.
“Who they’re dealing with?” Gennaro asks. “We don’t even know who we’re dealing with.”
God bless Gennaro for seeing through the noise. On that note of sense, I enter the room, and they all go silent. Vito’s limbs are wound in a knot on the leather couch. Gennaro’s mid-pace, and Carmine’s arm is bent as he’s about to throw a dart at the target.
