If Only

by Kate Eberlen

  The tram is crowded with workers who have finished for the day and there’s hardly room to breathe, so when they get out at Porta Maggiore, the air feels cool and sweet on her skin. They walk slower than they usually do.

  She knows that she wants him. She thinks he wants her too. But something is holding him back. Or maybe it has to be her. Maybe that is what he’s waiting for. Does she dare?

  A number three tram is rattling towards them. It has to be now. It has to be.

  ‘I was wondering . . .’ she says, as the doors open.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was wondering . . . if you were doing anything tomorrow afternoon?’ she says.

  Alf smiles, then suddenly takes her face in both his hands and kisses her lips with melting tenderness.

  ‘Seeing you, I hope,’ he says, then leaps onto his tram just as the doors are closing.

  15

  Wednesday

  ALF

  He stands in the shade of the building opposite the school waiting for her, and when she comes out, his heart misses a beat at how beautiful she is and how she wears her looks so casually, like a dress she picked up in a charity shop with no idea that it’s couture. She glances up the street towards the place they usually meet, frowns when he isn’t there.

  ‘Over here!’ he calls.

  She doesn’t even look before she crosses the road, causing a moped to swerve to avoid her.

  ‘Why are you standing here?’ she demands, as if it’s his fault that she nearly got killed. She stops in front of him, just too far away for them to exchange kisses.

  It’s taken two weeks to understand that her reticence is because she is unsure of herself in all sorts of ways, almost as if she’s a much younger person, a virgin, unconscious of the signals she is giving, or even wants to give.

  He wants to be able to reassure her, ‘It’s OK, I won’t hurt you.’ But he’s determined not to lie to her. Whatever has happened in her life has damaged her, and he wants to be part of the solution, not the problem. But the restraint is killing him.

  Today she’s wearing a short pinafore over a black vest. The skirt is loose and wouldn’t have a chance of staying up if it weren’t for the dungaree bib and straps that criss-cross over her back. He wonders if she knows that every man who sees her will yearn to put his hands on her waist beneath the loose circle of denim.

  ‘So, what’s the plan?’ he asks, taking her backpack from her hand.

  ‘I was wondering . . .’ She looks at the pavement. ‘Well, I wondered if you’d like to see my apartment. I mean, there’s a little Sardinian restaurant right near which looks really good, and they do a lunch menu for less than ten euros and—’

  ‘I’d love to see your apartment,’ he says, before she talks herself out of it.

  ‘I found a quicker route to walk,’ she says, setting off in the opposite direction from Termini.

  Inside, he’s dancing.

  Her new route follows the Aurelian walls along the side of the clubbing district of San Lorenzo, which is shabby and empty during the day.

  They have to go single file through a dark tunnel to get back under the railway. He doesn’t like to think of her here alone.

  ‘Do you come this way by yourself?’ Alf asks, as they walk past a dodgy-looking guy with a fierce dog at his heels.

  ‘I figure the dealers are unlikely to bother me,’ she says. ‘And I don’t really carry anything that’s worth mugging me for. It looks dangerous, but that’s only because it’s poor. It’s just a city neighbourhood.’

  She’s grown up in London, he remembers. She’s street smart. She’s such an odd mixture of frailty and confidence; she’s always surprising him. He likes that. He likes not knowing what to expect.

  Her apartment building is part of an industrial complex that used to be a pasta factory, she tells him.

  Letty hesitates outside the gate.

  ‘View first, or lunch first?’ she asks.

  View view view, he’s crying inside.

  ‘You decide,’ he says.

  ‘Shall we just dump my stuff then?’ Letty says. ‘Thank you for carrying it, by the way.’

  In the hall, she says hello to the caretaker. He’s a big bear of a man who gives Alf the once over, as if assessing whether he’s a suitable companion for this precious charge, before shaking his hand.

  Just as the lift doors are closing, an old Italian man puts his stick out to stop them and gets in. The lift doesn’t appreciate the interruption to its cycle. The doors open and close a couple of times, and then there’s an agonizingly long wait with the three of them inside before it finally decides to start moving up. And then it stops between floors. They all exchange cautious smiles, but inside Alf’s wondering how long they need to wait before pressing the emergency button. Will it work if they do? What if they are trapped there for the time it takes the fire service to arrive? Why did the old man choose that exact moment? Why didn’t he wait for one of the other lifts? Finally, the lift starts moving again, the old man gets out on the fourth floor, and it’s just the two of them until the tenth.

  As Letty turns the key in the lock and pushes open the heavy door into the apartment, Alf is as nervous as he’s ever been in his life. This will be their first time properly alone, out of the public gaze, he suddenly realizes, and it would be so easy to make a mistake, do something that frightens her off.

  ‘Come in,’ she says.

  The apartment is flooded with sunlight through the wall of window and feels as hot as a glasshouse. Letty turns on the ceiling fan and comes to stand beside him at the window.

  ‘That’s San Giovanni in Laterano.’ She points to the line of statues along the top of the facade, spiking the pale blue sky.

  ‘There’s the Vittorio Emanuele,’ he says, spotting the black quadriga chariots, tiny in the distance, with just a sliver of the top of the white marble monument visible.

  ‘I have never noticed that before!’ Letty exclaims, delighted.

  ‘We could see your building when we were there, couldn’t we?’ he says. ‘So . . .’

  They’re standing next to each other and though there’s no contact, Alf can feel the tremble of her body close to his.

  ‘Would you like a glass of water?’ she asks him. ‘I have a bottle in the fridge.’

  She walks across the room into the kitchen area, puts two glasses on the counter and pours some cold water.

  Alf looks around.

  ‘The sound system is pretty high end for an Airbnb,’ he says.

  ‘I think it’s the landlord’s shag pad between rentals,’ Letty says matter of factly.

  In her own territory, she seems more at ease. He’s the one who’s tongue-tied.

  ‘He likes the Beatles,’ Alf says, flipping through the array of CDs, finding the red album of early hits, including the songs Gary likes singing best.

  ‘Mind?’ he asks Letty.

  ‘Go ahead!’

  But when he looks down the tracks, he can’t find anything that won’t sound like he’s being suggestive. ‘Please Please Me’. ‘She Loves You’. ‘Love Me Do’.

  Alf quickly chooses another album. Beatles tunes aren’t usually that easy to dance to anyway.

  It’s only when they dance that he and Letty seem to communicate perfectly. They speak English, they’re learning Italian, but dance is their language.

  Alf puts on the track ‘Dos Gardenias’ from Buena Vista Social Club, thinking that even if the words are inappropriate, they’re in Spanish.

  ‘Dance?’ he says.

  Her face lights up and she comes out of the kitchen area, leaving the two glasses on the counter.

  It’s a slow salsa. He takes her in a loose hold, his left hand clasping her right, the other gently cupping her elbow, amazed how well she remembers the steps. She hears the music as he does, he thinks, not rushing at it nervously as some girls do, but responding to every bit of it, so that her movement is languorous, as if the rhythm is taking her body with it, her hips naturall
y tracing the figure of eight that most beginners never master. He longs to put his hands on her waist and draw her towards him.

  He lets go with one hand, leads her into a spin, then goes to spin her a second time, but she isn’t expecting it and stumbles slightly towards the vast window. Instinctively he grabs her to stop her fall, and then they’re kissing and he doesn’t even know if it was he or she who made the first move, just that they both want it so much, and when they stop to look at each other, she pulls him back in.

  He slips the straps of her pinafore over her shoulders and it falls to the floor. She is wearing plain black cotton briefs that turn him on more than any satin or lace has ever done. Where the panties end and the vest begins there is a gap, a perfect curve of waist that he has longed to touch. He kneels and kisses her perfect smooth skin, her perfect belly button, his tongue trailing up her body as he inches the vest up and over her perfect breasts, her perfect clavicle bones, her perfect chin, her lips. As he kisses her mouth, she arches her body into his, letting her head loll backwards, drawing his tongue deeper in.

  Suddenly aware that they are right in front of the window, he pauses, looks out, hears her whisper, ‘It’s the tallest building for miles. Nobody can see.’

  And then she’s lying on the floor, her fingers unbuttoning his shirt, spreading it slowly back across his chest as he kneels astride her. Then, vertebra by vertebra she curls her spine up to sitting, her mouth tracing a line from the top of his shorts to his neck, her hands on his head, pulling his mouth down onto hers again.

  His erection is jutting against his shorts. He suddenly realizes that he doesn’t have any protection. He wanted this. He wanted it so much, but he never expected it to happen so soon, so quickly.

  ‘What?’ she asks, her lips red, her long hair muzzy.

  ‘I don’t have any condoms,’ he says.

  ‘Oh,’ she says.

  He doesn’t know if she means oh, she’s disappointed, or oh, she had forgotten about that, or even oh, that’s not what this was about.

  He feels acutely exposed. Suddenly she jumps up, as if she’s remembered something, climbs the ladder to the sleeping gallery and, crouching down to avoid hitting her head on the beams, disappears from view. He’s wondering if he’s supposed to follow her when she appears again, leaning over the rail, bare-chested in her panties, brandishing a selection of condom packets.

  ‘Fragola, ciliegi o naturale?’ she says.

  ‘Ciliegi? Tomato?’ he says.

  She laughs.

  ‘That’s ciliegini!’ she corrects. ‘Cherry tomatoes. Ciliegi is just cherries.’

  ‘You choose,’ he says, thinking of all the times he has imagined how this might happen and how it was never this bizarre.

  ‘Naturale, then,’ she says, carefully stepping down the ladder. ‘I like the taste of you.’

  ‘I showered four times to get the cologne off,’ he says.

  ‘I know,’ she says, sitting down beside him, putting the condom on the coffee table. ‘Or at least, I don’t know how many times you showered, obviously, but you smell nice again today.’

  Always, always precise.

  ‘You feel nice,’ he says, drawing her body towards his again.

  ‘You taste nice,’ she says.

  ‘May I?’ he says, fingering the top of her panties.

  ‘That sounds nice,’ she says.

  Now the pace is less frantic as they gently encourage each other to explore the things that turn them on, finding the sweetest places and moving in lilting rhythm to a climax that obliterates his senses, and for a moment he doesn’t know who or where he is.

  They lie next to each other on the wooden floor, shining with sweat, in a pool of sunlight.

  He doesn’t want to move, or to say anything to shatter the exhilarating feeling that somehow he has lived all his life for this moment.

  Eventually she sits up and puts her hand on his cheek, as if checking to see that he is real.

  ‘Would you like some water?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He holds her hand there for just a moment, staring into her eyes and finding there what he feels in himself.

  ‘Violetta,’ he says.

  ‘I prefer your nickname for me,’ she says. ‘What you called me yesterday.’

  ‘Lets?’

  ‘Sounds so positive,’ she says. ‘You make me feel positive. Thank you.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he says.

  She gets to her feet and, suddenly modest, pulls her vest and panties back on.

  She brings the glasses of water. Puts them on the coffee table beside him.

  ‘Can’t think of a poetic way of saying this. That was the best sex I’ve ever had,’ he tells her.

  ‘For me too,’ she says simply.

  He sits up to kiss her again but midway she breaks off, as if she’s just remembered something important.

  ‘How much sex have you had, though?’

  Typical of her not to simply accept a sweeping generalization. For Letty, all words have to mean something.

  ‘Enough,’ he says. There are some things he’s not going to be pinned down on. ‘How about you?’

  ‘Not enough, it seems,’ she says, kissing him again.

  The second time it’s more experimental. Her body is strong and flexible and easily reaches positions he has never tried before. But what he loves the most is looking up into her face, with her hair falling around them, like they’re in their own private little tent, their bodies moving in sync and so, so slowly that they both cry out with pleasure so intense it is almost pain.

  The Sardinian proprietor of the restaurant is dragging the tables indoors when they turn up for lunch. It’s an unprepossessing, windowless building with graffiti around the door. Like a lot of shops and restaurants in Rome when they’re shut, you’d walk straight past without even knowing it was there.

  ‘Ho sentito che il vostro cibo è buonissimo!’ Alf says, which he hopes means, ‘I’ve heard your food is very good.’

  He’s learned that if you’re paying a compliment, it doesn’t really matter whether the grammar’s correct.

  The proprietor hesitates, looks at them, smiles as if he can see from the glow around them what they’ve just been doing, and allows his romantic side to get the better of him. He beckons them into the restaurant, saying that they can only have what’s left. He’s already told the chef to go home and he’s not cooking them anything new.

  Inside it’s as cool as a cave and painted bright pink. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling, giving it the most unexpected ambience: part Disney, part boudoir.

  ‘Incongruous!’ Alf whispers to Letty.

  Despite the fact he’s told them that they can only have what is available, the proprietor keeps dashing to the kitchen, returning with slivers of raw fish to taste, a batch of mussels he cooks up especially, a delicious bowl of stew with squid and fresh peas. He encourages them to take a quarto of Sardinian wine, giving them the history of the vineyard, and by the end of the meal, they feel they have enjoyed a tasting menu in a very good restaurant for only the – nine-euro – price for lunch.

  He’s pleased when Alf asks to Instagram a photo of his business card with the restaurant details. Alf writes the caption: Cibo buonissimo! #restaurantsinRome. Then, on impulse, he gives the man a hug, feeling suddenly sentimental because their lives will be forever linked. He will always remember this place.

  Ambling back to her building, he walks as slowly as he can, trying to stretch out the time before he has to tell her that he’s not going back up to the apartment. The only thing he wants is to hold her again, feel her skin on his, make love and fall asleep together and, waking, make love again, but the closer they become, the less likely it is that she will forgive his duplicity. No point in trying to explain that it is over with Gina. It has to actually be over. He has to act.

  Even now, he wonders if he has left it too late.

  ‘Can I see you tomorrow?’ he asks, as she puts her key in the lock of th
e gate.

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Believe me, the last thing I want to do is leave you, but . . . there’s something I have to sort out.’ Please don’t ask. Please don’t ask.

  She doesn’t ask in words, but her eyes search his until he looks away.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, stepping closer to her, taking her in his arms.

  The body that was so pliant now stands stiff and straight.

  ‘Ti adoro,’ he says, dropping kisses into her hair.

  ‘No, don’t adore me.’ She takes a step back. ‘I don’t like people adoring me.’

  ‘What do you like?’

  She hesitates.

  ‘Kindness,’ she says.

  ‘I am kind,’ he says, feeling like a total shit. ‘I’ll meet you tomorrow. Promise.’

  ‘Tomorrow then,’ she says, not looking at him.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he says, and walks quickly away. When he turns, expecting to see her wave, she has gone in and he wonders if he has already lost her.

  It’s not Gina’s fault, it’s his. But there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s like being struck by lightning. No. Keep it simple. He’s sorry. He never meant to hurt her. Alf silently rehearses his speech a final time before opening the door to their apartment.

  ‘You took your time,’ Stuart says.

  ‘I thought you were driving Lamborghinis,’ Alf says, unable to disguise his shock.

  ‘By the time I woke up, the coach had already left.’

  Stuart looks as if he’s been drinking. Alf wonders where he has been for the past two days.

  ‘So, what have you been up to?’ Stuart wants to know.

  ‘Some clients asked me to a late lunch,’ Alf says, as casually as he can.

  ‘Buonissimo seebo, I believe?’ says Stuart, pronouncing it wrongly.

  He’s seen the Instagram post.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe you should take us there?’

  ‘I’m not sure it’s your kind of place,’ Alf says casually. ‘It’s pink and very camp.’