I lay there for a while, listening to the lovemaking of two people who very clearly had something Paul and I lacked. It didn’t annoy me to listen to them the way it did Paul. In fact, there was something arousing about it, and I could feel my own need bubbling up inside me.
“Do you want to have sex?” I asked Paul, and he didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he turned toward me.
“You want to?”
We hadn’t touched each other since the night I’d kissed Teo. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but there was a part of me that felt like I was being disloyal to Teo, having sex with my own husband. But listening to Laura and Bobby, I couldn’t help thinking that maybe I needed to rip the Band-Aid off. That if we had sex, everything else would get easier.
I got up out of bed and went to the bathroom, where my diaphragm was tucked inside my toiletry kit.
“Skip it,” Paul called to me from the bed, but I ignored him and inserted it in the dark.
“Aren’t we going to start trying at some point?” he said as I tiptoed back over to the bed.
“Sure,” I said, but I was just putting him off, and we both knew it. I moved on top of him, and he was already hard.
“Don’t you think—” he started to say, but I put my finger to his lips.
“No talking.”
He liked that. Thought it was a game. “Okay, I’ll play,” he whispered.
The room was dark, and without Paul’s voice in my ear, I allowed myself to go back to the alley in Aggius, to feel Teo’s hands on my face, his mouth on my neck. I kept my eyes shut tight, imagining a world in which I’d taken him up on his offer, followed him back to his apartment, and wound up in this exact position. I’m not sure I’d ever been so turned on, and by the time I took Paul inside me, it hardly mattered that he’d barely looked at me all night or that Mary Lou could see right through my charade of a marriage. We were two bodies hungry for something we could not name, and when I came—the first time I’d ever come during intercourse—Paul looked at me inquisitively.
“Well, that was different,” he said, and I mutely agreed.
111.
I SHOWED UP AT FRANCESCA’Sthe following Tuesday, figuring we’d spend much of the lesson talking about the birthday ball. She liked using events from my life—and sometimes hers—as fodder for our conversations. She’d ask me to describe the food, the music, what the guests wore, and in this way, she forced me to stretch my vocabulary, to reach for new words.
But when I arrived at her apartment, it was she who wanted to talk. A friend of Bianca’s—someone she’d come up through school with—had gone into labor with her first child over the weekend, and while the delivery had gone smoothly, the baby had died.
“Like a stillbirth?” I asked.
“No, no,” she said as she banged around the kitchen, presumably looking for the moka pot. “Much worse.”
I wasn’t sure how it got much worse than a stillbirth.
“It’s the same problem as that other baby. I told you about it, yes?”
“The one with the skull?”
Francesca was nodding in that emphatic way of hers. “It had no skull at all. Just missing.”
I cringed.
“He was born Saturday night, and there was panic because Father Guglielmo was at your party.”
I thought of the benediction the priest had given and how, at the precise moment I’d been praying he would stop talking and sit down, this doomed child might have been entering the world.
“This friend of Bianca’s, Carmela. Her husband, Antonio, and his brother are tour boat operators, so the brother went to Porto Cervo and begged Father Guglielmo to get in the boat.”
“Did he make it in time?”
“He did. He performed the Last Rites, and still the baby held on.”
“When did he die?”
She frowned. “This morning.”
