"Say it."
"Say what?"
"You think I'm stupid. What else would I be? But I'm not." She took another swing at him, but this time he saw it coming and ducked out of the way.
"Whoa there," he said, probing his lip with his tongue.
She came at him, and it was so unexpected that she took him backward into a chair, which fell over, tangling his legs and causing him to fall as well. He rolled toward the center of the room to get clear, then jumped to his feet. "Hey!" he shouted. "You could have really hurt me!"
"Come on," she said. "Fight back like a man." She flailed with her hands in the direction of his face, and he put up his own hands to defend himself, and then, unsure what else to do, threw a punch in her direction that bounced harmlessly off her forearm. She was still moving forward, still trying to hit him. He grabbed her by her wrists, which worked for a few seconds, but then she bit his arm, so he had to let go. She then landed a roundhouse right to the side of his head. When he recovered his balance he charged her and grabbed her around the throat in a choke hold.
"You have to calm down," he said. "You have to calm down." Her eyes were moist and full of hatred. "You. Have. To. Calm. Down." Slowly, he released the pressure. Neither one of them did anything at all. He watched a spider bungee jump out of the high corner of the ceiling, then make its way quickly back up into the shadows.
"Desire?"
"All right," she said, at length. "I'm calm."
It was loud in the square, with the mingled sounds of voices and laughter and music spilling out of the bar across the street. Their tablecloth was red and white checked, their waiter obsequious, yet obviously dismissive of yet another couple of American tourists. Neither of them had said a thing about what had happened.
A middle-aged man with an accordion, accompanied by a younger man who had a violin, set up a few yards away from their table and proceeded to play a medley of gypsy-sounding music. When they were done, Desire waved them over and gave them five euros.
"Thank you, thank you, beautiful lady," said the older one, who was clearly in charge. The other simply bowed.
"You are too kind," said Desire, her personamus swinging into play.
"American?" asked the accordionist, pleased to report the obvious. "On holiday?"
"I'm here professionally," said Desire. "You may have heard of Black Days? In Castelpoggio?"
They looked at each other briefly, and the younger one said a few words in Italian that seemed to trigger something for the other, who the Professor had now come to see was certainly his father. They had the same eyes, the same heavy brow, the same aquiline nose. "Yes, yes," he said. "Of course."
"Well, I'm one of the black people. Desire Jones," she said. "From Atlanta, Georgia."
"Atlanta!" he repeated. "Very nice! You are a singer?"
"Si," said Desire. "Bravo." The Professor massaged his forehead. Within moments, he was alone at the table, watching Desire confer with them on what they could play that she might sing. There were another eight tables besides theirs, two of them unoccupied. Perhaps a dozen people, total.
"I'd like to do a little blues number for you," she said, stepping forward in front of the two men. "Accompanied by my new friends, Matteo and Giorgio." The older man played a quick flourish of notes on his accordion.
And then she was singing it again, "House." In this context, with its rudimentary melody underlain by the wheezy, French-café-in the-fifties sound of the accordion, the song was even more painful to him. Plus, the violinist kept doubling Desire's vocal at the same pitch. Bad idea, he wanted to tell him. No one sounds good that way. The two men flanked her, one on either side, smiling at him, at the other diners at their tables respectfully enduring this interruption. They formed a strange sort of family portrait.
He pulled forty euros from his wallet and tucked the bills under his water glass, then stood. Her eyes met his—they simply acknowledged him. For three days he'd been longing to say to her, If you're so damned psychic, what the hell are we doing in Italy at all? Then he walked away.
At the statue of Giordano Bruno in the middle of the square, he observed a group of young people standing around smoking and laughing and wondered if they understood that they were at a place of execution, that the man on the platform above them had been burned alive there. He was just getting ready to ask one of them for a cigarette—he was doing his best to figure out how he might say this in Italian—when, like birds, they moved as a group, suddenly, all in one direction. He watched them go. They were headed back in the direction from which he'd come, and looking that way, he realized that a little audience had begun to form near Desire and the two musicians. She was singing something else now, and although he'd put quite a bit of distance between them, her voice carried enough that it was audible over the din of the crowded square. The song was Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine." It was one they'd practiced in preparation for Black Days, the two of them sitting for hours going over it and over it in the living room of her apartment in Marietta that always smelled of fried fish and potpourri. That living room, too, was the first place they'd been naked together, with just the blue-gray light from the parking lot outside filtering through the Venetian blinds to see by, her small Christmas tree still set up alongside the television. And it was where she'd finally told him her real name, Janice, whispered it tentatively in his ear like a password, before they'd put their clothes back on and stepped out into the cold, early morning to see about getting something to eat.
More titles in the Flannery O'Connor Award For Short Fiction
David Walton, Evening Out
Leigh Allison Wilson, From the Bottom Up
Sandra Thompson, Close-Ups
Susan Neville, The Invention of Flight
Mary Hood, How Far She Went
François Camoin, Why Men Are Afraid of Women
Molly Giles, Rough Translations
Daniel Curley, Living with Snakes
Peter Meinke, The Piano Tuner
Tony Ardizzone, The Evening News
Salvatore La Puma, The Boys of Bensonhurst
Melissa Pritchard, Spirit Seizures
Philip F. Deaver, Silent Retreats
Gail Galloway Adams, The Purchase of Order
Carole L. Glickfeld, Useful Gifts
Antonya Nelson, The Expendables
Nancy Zafris, The People I Know
Debra Monroe, The Source of Trouble
Robert H. Abel, Ghost Traps
T. M. McNally, Low Flying Aircraft
Alfred DePew, The Melancholy of Departure
Dennis Hathaway, The Consequences of Desire
Rita Ciresi, Mother Rocket
Dianne Nelson, A Brief History of Male Nudes in America
Christopher Mcilroy, All My Relations
Alyce Miller, The Nature of Longing
Carol Lee Lorenzo, Nervous Dancer
C. M. Mayo, Sky over El Nido
Wendy Brenner, Large Animals in Everyday Life
Paul Rawlins, No Lie Like Love
Harvey Grossinger, The Quarry
Ha Jin, Under the Red Flag
Andy Plattner, Winter Money
Frank Soos, Unified Field Theory
Mary Clyde, Survival Rates
Hester Kaplan, The Edge of Marriage
Darrell Spencer, CAUTION Men in Trees
Robert Anderson, Ice Age
Bill Roorbach, Big Bend
Dana Johnson, Break Any Woman Down
Gina Ochsner, The Necessary Grace to Fall
Kellie Wells, Compression Scars
Eric Shade, Eyesores
Catherine Brady, Curled in the Bed of Love
Ed Allen, Ate It Anyway
Gary Fincke, Sorry I Worried You
Barbara Sutton, The Send-Away Girl
David Crouse, Copy Cats
Randy F. Nelson, The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men
Greg Downs, Spit Baths
Peter LaSalle, Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of
Contemporary Somnambulism
Anne Panning, Super America
Margot Singer, The Pale of Settlement
Andrew Porter, The Theory of Light and Matter
Peter Selgin, Drowning Lessons
Geoffrey Becker, Black Elvis
Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World
Linda LeGarde Grover, The Dance Boots
Jessica Treadway, Please Come Back To Me
Amina Gautier, At-Risk
Melinda Moustakis, Bear Down, Bear North
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