“Can you tell her I’ll call her back in just a few minutes?” He motioned for Claire and Gwen to follow him up the stairs. “Allow me to show you in. Giancarlo tells me you’re studying seventeenth-century Venice.”
Claire nodded as they walked up the stairs to the main floor of what was clearly a palazzo, one that was decorated in an exquisitely refined, classic style. Even Gwen, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly agape, was dazzled, although Claire figured she was probably unaware that the furniture was eighteenth century, the Oriental carpets antique, the piano a rare Bösendorfer concert grand, the mammoth chandelier Austrian crystal, or that the age-darkened paintings were portraits of actual Baldessari ancestors. As Maurizio briskly led them into this grand salon, they were met by a woman who entered from a doorway at the far end.
“Renata, these are Giancarlo’s guests,” he said.
“From America, yes?”
Claire introduced herself and Gwen, all the while wondering at the way everyone said “America” or “Americans,” as if they were special and rare, as if they’d just sailed from the uncharted New World and were about to relate strange tales of brown-skinned natives and wondrous crops of tobacco and corn. Or was this a feigned enthusiasm, meant to cover up a basic European dislike of them?
“We’re delighted that you could join us,” Renata said. She possessed a lush and timeless sort of beauty, accentuated by a simple black dress that displayed her voluptuousness to excellent effect. Her chestnut hair was swept back from her face and pinned up in a tangle of curls, showing off the delicate diamond and sapphire necklace circling her throat.
“Excuse me, please,” Maurizio said, “but I must return that call. It’s so busy right now with the conference.”
“Maurizio!” Renata exclaimed. “You promised that you would be done with your work by the time the party started…”
“I will,” he insisted as he rushed down the stairs.
“And don’t keep poor Enzo here all evening,” she called after him. “His assistant hardly ever has any time off,” she confided. “But then Maurizio works too much. It is a very big mistake to put an office in your home.” Renata shook her head with mock exasperation, then walked over to one of the room’s two tall windows and opened the drapes.
There wasn’t a window behind the curtain, but what Claire thought of as a French door (in Venice, she wondered, would it be called an Italian door?), which opened onto a balcony. Beyond the balcony was the Grand Canal. Claire had been completely disoriented by the time they’d arrived at the Baldessaris’ house and hadn’t realized where they’d ended up. They were in a palazzo on the Grand Canal. The palaces across the water gleamed under the warm brilliance of the evening sun as a few gondole bobbed in the wake of a vaporetto chugging its way toward the Salute. She had to make a conscious effort to keep her involuntary “wow” to herself. She glanced at Gwen who, now that her initial astonishment had passed, seemed to be taking it more in stride than she was.
“What a delightful surprise,” Renata said, “that you should meet Giancarlo by chance, and also be attending the conference.”
Was Claire imagining it, or did Renata’s seemingly gracious welcome carry an undercurrent of insinuation, as if to imply that she had somehow engineered such a shocking coincidence? What Renata might suppose her motive to be, Claire couldn’t even begin to guess.
“Funny, isn’t it? I mean odd funny,” Claire said. “We just happened to have dinner in the restaurant where he works, and here we are.” Maybe she was being oversensitive, but suddenly it seemed important to make light of it all, especially her attraction to Giancarlo.
“How long will you be staying in Venice?”
Again, Renata’s question seemed innocuous enough, but Claire had the distinct feeling it wasn’t. “Until Saturday afternoon. I have to take Gwen to Paris to meet her parents.”
“Oh!” Renata’s eyes opened wide and ricocheted between them. “So the two of you are not—Gwendolyn is not your daughter?”
“I’m Gwen’s chaperone for the week.” Claire had rehearsed it, after deciding that this explanation would prompt the least number of questions in reply, unless she was speaking to someone unusually nosy or rude. Indeed, it seemed to stop Renata’s intended line of inquiry; unfortunately their Italian hostess quickly adapted to the change and steered the conversation into even more treacherous waters.
“Then you have no children of your own?” Renata asked pleasantly.
“No, I’m not married.”
“How sad. Years ago a study proved that if a woman wasn’t married by the time she was thirty, she had as much chance of being killed in a terrorist attack as she did of ever walking down the aisle. But that can’t be true anymore. There’s so much more terrorism now, I’m sure that the odds must be much worse.”
Claire managed to stammer, “Well, I was married, once…”
“You’re divorced? So it’s true that American women are perfectly happy without a husband and children? For me, it would be terrible, I would not—”
Gwen suddenly doubled over and began coughing uncontrollably. She straightened slightly and gasped, “I think I swallowed a bug.”
“I’ll get some water,” said Renata, looking vaguely shocked.
The coughing attack stopped as soon as Renata left the room. “She hates you,” Gwen announced.
“She has no reason to hate me.”
“I didn’t say she had a reason, I just said she hates you.”
“You didn’t really swallow a bug, did you?”
“Duh.”
“Duh? That’s a reply?”
“You know what I mean. She’s never going to leave you alone with her precious son.”
“You’re only fourteen. You don’t know anything about anything.”
“At least I know when somebody doesn’t like me.”
“Had a lot of practice, have you?”
“Funny ha-ha. Not as much practice as you’ve been having.”
Renata returned with a glass of water for Gwen, who drank thirstily, then used her sleeve to dab at her convincingly watery eyes. Claire shifted the brown bag to her other arm, regretting it as soon as she did, for it caught Renata’s attention.
“May I take that for you?” their hostess asked.
The gift seemed rather meager, under the circumstances. “It’s just a bottle of wine,” Claire began.
“And dessert,” Gwen added.
“How thoughtful,” said Renata, without the slightest trace of sincerity. She turned toward the dining room and summoned a uniformed waiter. Good god, Claire thought, they have servants. Renata handed him the bag and instructed him to take it to the kitchen.
“I’m sorry my oldest daughter, Giulietta, is not here to meet you. She’s in Rome now, at the university there. These young girls, they want to be so independent, but I tell Giulietta, you must have children while you’re young, don’t put if off, twenty-five at the latest. She’ll be twenty-three next year and I’m starting to worry. I would just hate to see her wait too long—sometimes women are so old by the time they have their first child, you can’t tell if they’re the child’s mother or grandmother!”
How would she endure an entire evening of this? Claire wondered. Was Giancarlo really worth this humiliation?
Renata seemed to think of her son at the same time. She glanced up at the clock as it struck the quarter hour and said, “Giancarlo should be here by now. He works too much, just like his father. His firm keeps him so busy. Currently they’re supervising a big project in a palazzo near the Accademia.”
“Catering it?”
“Renovating it, of course.” Renata smiled as she realized the source of Claire’s misapprehension. “Oh yes, you met him at the trattoria. He didn’t tell you what he really does?”
“No.”
“Giancarlo is not a waiter. He just helps out his friend Sergio, who owns the restaurant, sometimes. Giancarlo is an architect.” The pride in her voice was boundless, as was the implication that he
was much too good for her. No, definitely not worth the humiliation, Claire decided.
Then Giancarlo appeared at the top of the stairs, looking slightly flushed and out of breath and even more handsome than ever. That hair. There was something about the juxtaposition of the ringlets and his well-tailored Italian suit that was truly devastating. Giancarlo was almost superhumanly attractive, and possessed a kind of charisma that was even more noticeable here, in his native environment. All three women naturally turned toward him, like flowers toward the sun. So, what’s a little humiliation? Claire wondered.
Giancarlo greeted his mother with a quick kiss on the cheek, then took Claire’s hands in his. “I’m sorry I could not be here sooner, but I’m so glad you could make it. My mother has made you feel welcome, I trust.”
Claire mumbled something that sounded like yes and felt Renata’s eyes upon them, observing them with a curiosity not unlike that of a lioness watching over one of her cubs.
Chapter Twelve
“WHY DIDN’T YOU tell me last night that you were an architect?” Claire asked Giancarlo as the wine was poured.
“I didn’t want to seem as if I was trying to impress you. And I wanted to know if you’d agree to come to dinner if you thought—”
“That you were a waiter?”
“Yes.” Giancarlo smiled, and Claire felt her heart flutter again.
She took a breath and looked around the magnificent room in which they were to dine: the high, baroque ceiling; the candlelight; the soft lilt of Vivaldi in the background; the uniformed waiters who hovered in the shadows. Besides Maurizio and Renata, the dinner party included Gabriella, four professors from the conference, and Giancarlo’s teenage sister, Stefania, who sat next to Gwen.
Only one thing marred this spectacular setting. Sitting directly across the table from Claire was the person she least wanted to look at: Andrew Kent. His presence at the Baldasarris’ had come as a shock. Giancarlo, after introducing them to Stefania, had taken them on a brief tour of the palazzo. When they returned to the salon, she’d felt mortified to find her nemesis talking to Maurizio, who waved them over.
“We’ve already had the pleasure of meeting,” Andrew said with an ironic but not unfriendly smile, “although not formally.”
Claire tried to smile back, wondering if she would be able to get away before he asked—
“Maurizio tells me you’re studying the seventeenth century,” he continued. “What’s the subject of your dissertation?”
“Well, it’s the, um, rise of piracy in the Adriatic and its, ahhh, myriad effects on Venetian shipping.”
“Myriad? One would think that piracy could have only one possible effect.”
“It was bad, generally.”
“As I suspected.” He took a sip of champagne and stared at the floor for a moment, then looked in her eyes. “Do you think you’ll shed any light on the human condition?”
He was mocking her again. Claire felt the anger rush to her face, and tried to formulate a few choice words that would convey her displeasure and still be considered polite. Fortunately Renata ushered everyone out of the salon and into the dining room before Claire said something she would regret. Then Giancarlo steered her to a seat beside his own, and as she sat down she realized that Andrew Kent was taking the chair directly opposite hers. She couldn’t very well move; instead, she resolved to keep her eyes away from the other side of the table and concentrate on Giancarlo. Not that this was any hardship, she thought, stealing a glance at his profile.
“But why?” Claire asked him. “Why pretend to be someone you’re not?”
“Venice is a small town,” Giancarlo replied. “Here everyone knows me, they know my family, know my…situation. Sometimes people have liked me for reasons that had nothing to do with me at all. But then, Venetians have a reputation for being devious,” he said, smiling.
From his spare details, Claire intuited an endless barrage of marriageable daughters sent by scheming mothers to conquer the Baldessari citadel, represented in the flesh by its male heir. The troubles of the wealthy and beautiful did not usually move her, but Giancarlo’s revelation convinced her that at least sometimes he felt quite alone; and with that she felt an acute sympathy.
He also turned out to be a delightful conversationalist. They discussed his work (he’d been an architect for two years, with a firm that specialized in historic renovations), her work (Claire improvised a few pirate stories), the problems of living in Venice (flooding, tourists), the advantages of living in Venice (no cars), and the eternal question of just how long Venice would remain above sea level without intervention. Would the Italian government ever decide what to do about it? Claire asked.
“Every time we think something’s going to be done, we elect a different government, and they start debating it all over again,” Giancarlo said. “It is called, in a turn of phrase you will appreciate, ‘Passing the bucket.’”
Renata turned to them and asked Giancarlo a question that seemed to be about the palazzo he was currently renovating. Claire’s Italian was fair, but the Venetian accent made comprehension more difficult. She didn’t even try to follow the conversation as Giancarlo spoke to his mother and Gabriella Griseri.
Renata’s proximity certainly put a damper on what amounted to their first date, Claire reflected. She realized that she had refrained from laughing too much, or leaning too close, or from any of the other things she might do—or did, ages and ages ago, in the misty memory of her dating life before Michael—to indicate her interest. Giancarlo had seemed similarly careful, which suddenly struck her as odd. He wasn’t the one who’d gotten the pre-dinner grilling. If he sincerely liked her, she reasoned, he wouldn’t care what his mother thought.
As he continued to talk with Renata, Claire brooded a bit. What if Giancarlo’s interest in her was of a more general kind? So far, he’d done nothing overtly romantic. Hadn’t Maurizio said he had asked Giancarlo to invite her? Maybe Giancarlo’s appearance at her hotel that morning had been prompted by his father, not himself. Why hadn’t she thought of that earlier?
Then she remembered the way Giancarlo had looked at her when she was descending the stairs to the lobby, and his expression had seemed unmistakably enamored. Or had she just imagined it? Claire realized that she couldn’t be certain. She’d been out of circulation for so long, she couldn’t tell if a man liked her or not.
Hoddington Humphries-Todd, on Claire’s left, leaned toward her. “Why, for a party of only eleven people, must we sit at a table roughly the size of a cricket field?” he asked with a good-humored grin. “I can hardly hear anything anyone else is saying. Damned annoying. Especially when there’s so much of interest going on.”
Humphries-Todd, or Hoddy as he’d insisted she call him when they’d been introduced earlier, was tall and elegant, with an attractive, chiseled face. As one of Europe’s reigning experts on Pietro Aretino, the sixteenth-century writer, Hoddington Humphries-Todd was a regular feature of the Ca’ Foscari annual conference, and of the Baldessaris’ intimate, first-night dinner party. He nodded discreetly at the two women seated at the far end of the table. “It looks to me like my good friend Ines”—Claire knew he was referring to the dark-haired, gamin-faced woman, a professor of Venetian studies at the Sorbonne—“has taken up with Katarina von Krupp.” He nodded at the woman sitting next to Ines.
Von Krupp, Claire recalled, taught at the University of Berlin. Her short, ice blond hair and man’s white summer suit gave her a dashing if sexually ambiguous air.
“It’s too bad, really, because her previous lover, a Welsh clog dancer named Gryffyd, was much more to my taste. Fabulous legs.”
Claire studied the two women, both of whom were engrossed in a conversation with Maurizio. She didn’t notice anything particularly intimate between them. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely,” Hoddy insisted. “I have a knack for detecting romantic liaisons. Especially those that are in the early stages or, better still, illicit, obsessively pas
sionate, tragically doomed, or on the verge of breaking up, preferably in a dramatic way in a posh public place. Although every once in a while I can be caught napping. For instance, take Andy”—he glanced across the table at Andrew Kent—“and Gabriella. I didn’t know about that until this evening, and apparently it’s been going on for some time.”
Claire had been surprised, too, to see Andrew Kent show up with Gabriella Griseri. They’d arrived last, Gabriella with her long hair unbound and falling like a silky black waterfall around her shoulders.
“She looks radiant in a suspiciously postcoital sort of way,” Hoddy remarked. “And what about you and our lovely young Giancarlo?” he said with eyebrows raised.
“Oh…we just met,” Claire replied, trying to think of something that would deflect Hoddy’s interest in her private life. “Aren’t you giving your paper tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow afternoon at four,” Hoddy confirmed. “It’s called ‘The Three Amici: The Friendship of Aretino, Titian, and Sansovino.’ It’s mostly about Aretino, but I tossed in the other two because I thought I might draw a bigger crowd that way.”
“You’re not serious,” Claire said, laughing.
“Completely. Conference organizers like a full house, and I like free trips to Venice. Works out well for all of us. Are you familiar with Aretino, or are you strictly seventeenth century?”
“I’ve read the Dialogo, his satire about courtesans.”
“Ahh, the Dialogo. Ostensibly it is about courtesans, but Aretino manages to lampoon just about everyone in Venetian society. I think he actually felt a strong affinity with courtesans; he often compared their existence to his own, as a courtier. He lived rather magisterially with a group of women who were probably courtesans, who were called ‘Aretine,’ or ‘Aretino’s women,’ although his relationship with them was somewhat unclear.”
“Have you ever heard of a courtesan named La Celestia?”
“Sounds vaguely familiar, though I’m not sure why. Why do you ask?”
“I read about her in Fazzini’s Diary today. Along with another called La Sirena.”
The Rossetti Letter (v5) Page 17