Blood Orange (10 page)

She thought of the house in Mission Hills, the rooms she had
lovingly painted and decorated, the hardwood floors she had stripped
and sanded and buffed. She allowed herself to feel a pinch of regret
for what she was abandoning.

She had not used that word before.

“Mommymommymommy.”

The impulse to hang up was like a hand jerking her out the door
and down the stairs.

Mommymommymommy.

She did not know what to say to Bailey. She had planned the
words for David, scripted their conversation like a phone volunteer
asking for campaign money. She had no spiel laid down for Bailey.
“I love you” was all she could think to say that wasn’t a lie she
would choke on.

“Talk, Mommy.”

She tried to swallow, but something had been added to her
anatomy. At the base of her tongue there was a growth the size of a
walnut.

“Dana.” David at last. “Why didn’t you call? I’ve been worried.
Did you get my messages?”

“I’m fine.”

“I called the hotel, but you were never there. Even in the middle
of the night.”

“I’ve been exhausted.”

“Have you been sick? What’s wrong with your voice?”

“I’m fine.”

“You don’t sound fine.”

“It’s been an incredible week.”

“You weren’t even there early in the morning.”

“Don’t be silly, of course I was there.”

She had anticipated this line of questioning.

“It’s a crazy place, David. The desk clerks are technological idiots. They probably rang an empty room.”

“I thought it was a good hotel. Didn’t you tell me it cost threefifty a night?”

She had forgotten that digging out the truth was what David did
best.

“It is a good hotel. Great breakfasts every day.” She was winging
it now. “But there was a mixup with the rooms when I got there.
The clerks never did get it straight in their heads.”

“I was worried.” He sounded petulant. He wanted her to tell
him he had been a good husband to whom apologies were owed.
He had stayed home with a difficult child while she had a good
time.

Fun.

“Dana?”

“I’ve been frantic to see everything. A week isn’t long. In
Florence it’s no time at all.”

“You sound like you’ve got a sore throat.”

“Yeah. A little one.”

The line buzzed in her ear.

“So,” David said, “you’ve had a good time?”

“Better than I dreamed.”

He laughed. “Gracie said I should watch out, you’d fall in love
with Italy. Little old San Diego’s gonna seem pretty boring.”

“There’s so much here, David.” She wanted him to understand.
“History and art. Just taking a walk, there’s so much … beauty.
You can be in a seemingly wretched neighborhood and there’ll be
an arrangement of pots or some tile or a wisteria vine …” Her thoughts spun forward through all she might tell him; but the effort
seemed pointless. David would try to understand, but to him a picture was a picture and not much else.

She heard Bailey’s voice in the background.

“How’s she been?” She was far off her script now.

“Every day she asks me if this is the day we go to the airport to
get you.”

Bailey did not understand the concept of anywhere that was too
far away to drive to. David had brought home a travel video of
Tuscany. “That was a mistake. She got hysterical. I guess before
then she thought you were staying at the airport for some reason. I
didn’t know what to do, so I called Miss Judy. She was great. The
next day she taught a lesson about vacations. She’s a bloody genius,
that woman, and I think Bay gets it now, that you’re not living at
Lindberg Field.”

“I explained. I thought she understood.”

“The house is lonely without you. Next time you want to take a
trip, I’m going too.”

She had prepared herself for guilt, but not for the sudden desire
to see her husband and wrap her arms around his solid football
player’s body.

She had to get back to her script.

“That’s what I wanted to talk about.” She heard the silence on
the line and the sound of David’s breath. “There’s so much to see,
all the little towns around have fabulous art, not to mention Venice
and Rome…. It feels kind of wasteful to fly over here, spend all
that money, and not see more.”

In the background, “Mommymommymommy.”

“Is there something you’re not telling me?” The lawyer was back
in his voice. The trained interrogator.

She thought of the things she could say.

I love Micah Neuhaus and I’m never coming home.

Never that, never those words. They would hurt him too much;
and no matter how much she loved Micah, she loved David too.
And Bailey.

Dana, the smartest girl in her class, the girl who had always
known where she was going and what she wanted: she knew her
script and had learned her lines.

“Mommymommymommy.”

But when she tried to say something, she was interrupted by her
own small voice, weeping into the musty pillow in Imogene’s spare
room. For weeks she had worn shorts and a T-shirt to bed so she
would be ready when her mother’s lugging Chrysler turned into the
driveway.

“Are you saying you want to stay longer? How much longer?
Another week?”

“No.”

“I don’t get this, Dana. What’s going on? Is there something I
should be worried about?”

“I don’t want to leave, that’s all. But I’m fine, really. I just love it
here, that’s all. You’re right, I fell in love. With Florence and Italy.
David, I don’t ever want to leave. I belong here. It’s part of me
now.

“Dana, sweetheart, it’s a town, a city.” He laughed fondly.
“There’ll be another time. One of these days I’m gonna get a big
case, and when I do I’ll take you back to Florence. I promise.”

The open piazza was bright and bitter-cold and crowded with
student groups. Hordes of boys and girls in signature black, mobs
of young crows cawing Spanish, German, French, and guttural languages Dana could not identify, lined up to enter the Romanesque
cathedral. To the right of the cathedral, Micah was one of a dozen artists who had set up tables and easels. Dana stood apart, so embarrassingly American in the yellow wool coat she would still be
paying for this time next year. Bright as a target, she thought, aware
that the crowds of young Europeans vaguely frightened her. Two
days earlier she had ignored them and seen only the cathedral’s pink
and green and white marble facade like an elaborately decorated
cake.

Micah wore his struggling-artist costume on Sundays. Black
turtleneck, ragged at the cuff and throat, a Greek fisherman’s cap,
torn Levi’s, and sandals. He hadn’t shaved that morning and looked
dissolute and pallid. As he spoke to a browser, Micah’s gold earring
flashed in the sunlight and a chill ran up Dana’s legs. She wrapped
her arms around herself, grateful for wool the color of midsummer
lemons.

As she watched, he sold two watercolor-and-ink cityscapes to a
pair of Japanese tourists. He could produce one of these in a couple
of hours. He bragged that he had the Ponte Vecchio down to ninety
minutes flat.

Micah looked in her direction. A wide smile opened his face,
and he lifted his arm, gesturing her to him. She felt something move
in her, move and stretch and snap.

She was too old, too married, too American.

And he was too young. Not in years but in the way he lived,
thinking only of his pleasure, content to sell mediocre drawings in a
piazza while other men erected bridges, negotiated treaties, and
raised families.

Micah’s hand cupped the air more urgently. “Turn around, let
me see the back.” He twirled a finger in the air. “That coat!”

Two men, passing with easels shoved under their arms, said something in rapid Italian, and Micah responded, and all three laughed.

“What?” Dana asked.

“They wanted to know if you were my American mistress. One
called you Mistress Sunbeam.”

“I’m going back to the apartment,” she said. “I’m cold.”

“You can’t go. I won’t let you. You have to stay.” He motioned
to a stool. “I’m sorry I teased you, honestly. It’s a beautiful coat.
Here. Sit down. You watch the store and I’ll get you a coffee. Are
you hungry?”

“My feet are frozen.”

“What’s the matter? What happened? Did you call him?”

Another group of Japanese tourists stopped at Micah’s table. He
turned his attention to them, though occasionally, as he smiled and
laughed and cajoled and took their money, he glanced sideways at
Dana. When they left he showed her the pile of hundred-Euro
notes.

“Not bad, huh? Give me another hour and I’ll shut down.”

She covered her face with her hands.

“What did he say?” Micah waited for her answer. When she said
nothing, he pulled her hands away from her face and peered into
her eyes. “Okay. Go home. I’ll close up here.”

“You don’t have to-“

“I’ll load up the car and meet you back at the flat.”

He brought fresh rolls and mozzarella, tomatoes, and blood oranges from Sicily. They ate a picnic on the bed. Dana was suddenly
ravenous. Micah sliced a blood orange and nudged her onto her
back, opened her mouth with his fingertips, and squeezed the fruit
onto her tongue as his other hand lifted her sweater and cupped her
breast. The juice was the color of raspberries and filled her mouth
with sugar. Her nipples tingled as they hardened.

He shoved aside bread and mozzarella, clearing a space for them to lie. A knife clattered to the floor. He licked her sweet, sticky
mouth.

I will always remember this. The smell of the fruit, the smell of
him.

It was dark when she awoke, and cold. The wind was up, spitting rain against the window. In candlelight Micah sat across the
room facing the bed, his sketch pad propped against his crossed
knee. She pushed herself up on her elbows.

“What time is it?”

“Almost seven.”

“You shouldn’t have let me sleep. Why didn’t you wake me up?”
The remains of their meal still covered the bed and floor. An orange
had bled onto the duvet, staining it brown.

“I wanted to watch you. Sleeping. You’re so uninhibited,” he
said. “Awake you’re always in control, or trying to be. But when you
sleep your body lets go. You lie on your stomach with your legs
apart. I can see all of you and you don’t care.” He held out his pad.
“Here, look at yourself.”

He had drawn her thighs and buttocks and her sex with the
same precise detail as he rendered the rooftops of Florence. She
handed it back.

“You don’t like it?” His question sounded like a dare. “Why
don’t you take it home and show it to your husband?”

She went into the bathroom and sat on the bidet. He came to the
door

“Go away. I want to be alone.”

“You didn’t care how much I watched you yesterday. You let me
see anything, and now all of a sudden you’re a nun. What did he say
that’s turned you against me?”

She splashed warm water between her thighs, then stood and
dried. She still felt sticky and ran hot water in the old-fashioned tub
so hard the room quickly filled with steam. She added cold and,
when the temperature was right, stepped in and sank until the water
covered her to the chin.

He crouched beside the tub and watched her. She slid under, her
hair floating in the water as in Ophelia’s suicide, and stayed there
until her breath ran out.

His eyes shone with tears. “Tell me you’re coming back to me.”

His hand cupped the round of her shoulder. His thumb bore
down into the soft tissue above her breast.

“You’re hurting me.”

“I could push you under. I could hold you under until you
stopped breathing. You wouldn’t have a chance.” The steam had
reddened his cheeks and brought up the wild curl in his hair. “You’re
not strong enough to stop me, Dana.”

She was afraid.

“I’ve been waiting all my life for you,” he said. “You don’t know
what it’s like to be me. You’re middle class to your core, Dana.
You’re a taker, a user. That yellow coat says it all.”

“I’ve got to get dressed.” And get out of the palazzo and back
into the hotel. She would tell the man at the desk not to let him
come up. The lock on her door would keep him out.

She grabbed for the towel draped over a nearby chair and
wrapped it around her. In the palazzo’s central room a triple-bar
electric heater glowed near the couch. She stood in front of it and
tried to dry herself without letting the towel slip. The heating element burned the back of her legs. She realized that she was barely
breathing.

“Drop the towel.”

“I have to pack.”

“No. I want you to stay here, forever. I want to lock you in these
rooms, feed you cheese and blood oranges and never let you out.”

“Micah, you frighten me.” His eyes drilled into her. “I can’t
leave my daughter. I know what that’s like. My own mother …”
There was no need to explain. They had talked about their lives
until they knew each other’s stories as well as their own. “If I stay
with you I’ll ruin her life. I can’t do that.”

Bailey needed her, and she needed Bailey. When Dana loved her,
she also loved the little girl abandoned on her grandmother’s front
porch. How was it possible she hadn’t understood that before?

Micah’s expression brightened. “I thought you didn’t love me.”

“I don’t know-“

“I’ve got a great idea. She can come here.”

“It wouldn’t-“

“How do you know? You haven’t even heard what I’ve got to
say.” He followed her to the wardrobe where she kept her clothes.
“We can make this work, Dana. I can earn plenty of money. We can
move somewhere better if you want. Bailey’ll love Florence.” Dana
thought of a top winding tighter and tighter. “God, wouldn’t it be
great to be a kid in Florence? She’d be bilingual in no time, and
we’ll send her to one of those convents-“

“David would never let it happen.” Arguing only encouraged
him. She must stop talking and dress, just dress and get out.