“Yes,” she says. “Yes.” Lee wants to say more but her mouth isn’t moving right and she doesn’t want to miss what he is saying. They find the bed; he lifts her onto it. Their robes are off, crumpled on the ground, there is just skin on skin on skin. Lee is on her back; Antonio kneels between her legs and grabs her around the waist, lifting her up and onto him so that their positions are reversed. With no effort he slides into her. She presses her thighs against him and feels the sharp blades of his hip bones as she moves above him, setting the tempo. Each time she lifts herself up he raises his hips to meet her. As he pushes into her she feels the same as she felt with the absinthe, as if she is scraping herself out from the inside and starting over. She leans forward and runs her hands all over him, feels every inch of his body, puts a hand between her legs and circles the base of his cock so she can feel how hard he is. Soon enough she stops thinking of anything. It is all just smoke and heat and licorice, the feel of their bodies as they move against each other. Her orgasm, when it comes, is a wild and terrible wave. She holds it off for as long as she can but it rolls in anyway, an obliteration, and she is lost to it, senseless, the wave is the blackness crashing over her and she lets it come.
Afterward Lee lies next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. The room is dim, and she stares at the wallpaper, letting her vision blur so that the pattern of vines and flowers seems to undulate on the wall. Or perhaps the flowers are undulating; in the gloom she watches, fascinated. Then she shifts her gaze and stares at Antonio’s profile. He is looking up at the ceiling, unblinking. Lee rubs her hand along his arm until he looks over at her.
“What are you thinking?” she asks.
He props himself up on an elbow so he can look right at her. “You know? I’m thinking I don’t really even know who you are.”
In her drunken, sated state, Lee considers this. She could tell him that she doesn’t know who she is, that she never has, that sometimes she just feels like an empty vessel to be filled by whoever she is with or whatever she is doing. She has the sense he might understand.
But instead she says, “Does it really matter?”
He rolls toward her. “I think it does. Because I want to see you again. Can I see you again?”
Lee feels herself sobering up. In an unwelcome rush, she pictures the list of excuses and alibis she will have to create to keep this from Man. It is exhausting just to think about. And yet she cannot imagine herself not doing this again now that she has done it.
She looks at the way the shadows play over Antonio’s chest, the dark line of hair that runs down his stomach. “Of course you can,” she says.
“You’re not with Man Ray? I thought I’d heard…?”
“What if I were?”
Antonio raises his hands above his head in a conciliatory gesture. “You don’t have to explain to me. I remembered you from that other time we met, and then once I thought I saw you with him at the Dôme. You looked… I thought you looked happy.”
Lee pictures what Antonio might have seen. The camera lens zooms back and she is in the middle of the shot, smiling, Man’s arm around her protectively, possessively. Man sees someone he knows, smiles and waves, goes over to say hello. If Lee were to snap a picture of that scene, in it she would be watching Man without wanting anyone to know she was watching him, sidelong and hungry. But what might Antonio have seen? Under the surface, love? There is no way for her to know. The moment is gone; the moment never existed in the first place.
“We were happy,” Lee says, and swings her legs over the side of the bed and searches for her robe until she finds it tangled with Antonio’s by the door. She picks them both up and tosses his to him. He roots around in its pocket and finds his tobacco, then scoots up to the headboard and starts rolling a cigarette on his thigh.
Lee walks over to him and gives him a long kiss, neither of them wanting to break it off first. He tastes like smoke and sugar cubes. The nerve endings in her tongue pull taut a knot in her stomach, and it is all she can do not to lie down beside him again. But instead she moves away.
The truth is that Antonio is a stranger. It is Man she knows; Man the one she has built a life with, who made her into the person she is today. Lee thinks about what it would be like to leave him. She would take all her things from their apartment—and go where? To stay with Antonio? This man here is just another Man, but one she doesn’t know and who doesn’t yet love her. But Man loves her. His anger this afternoon, the camera pressed into her face, is a reaction to her pulling away when what she should be doing is getting closer. She cannot imagine her life without him.
“I said the wrong thing. I can’t see you again.”
Antonio laughs an incredulous laugh. “You are a mysterious woman.”
“I guess I am.”
“If you change your mind…” His voice trails off. She walks over and kisses him again, and rubs her hand down the length of his body. Then she gets up and pushes through the doors toward home.
The sun is spreading pink across the sky by the time Lee gets back to the apartment. In the changing room at Drosso’s, after she left Antonio, she saw herself in the mirror. The only word she could think of was ravaged: lips puffy, eyes ringed with smudged liner, hair greasy and disheveled. In the small lav she turned on the cold tap full blast and pushed her face into it, the water spurting up her nose and in her eyes. She rubbed at her face with her fingers until the remains of her makeup came off, ran her wet hands through her hair to tame it. Then she wadded up her robe and ran it under the water, and scrubbed and scrubbed between her legs and at her armpits as hard as she could. But the rest she could do nothing about: the smell of tobacco on her fingers, the bruised appearance of her face, the scrim of guilt covering her like a thicker, blunted version of herself.
There is nothing right she can say to Man—no good excuse she can devise for where she’s been. As she walks into their apartment she is not so much trembling as vibrating, every inch of her alive with worry. Perhaps Man is still asleep or has already left for the studio; perhaps she can delay their meeting for a little while longer.
But he is sitting at the table drinking espresso when she walks into the kitchen. He looks up at her curiously, as if he hasn’t seen her for several months. Calmly, he brings the espresso cup to his lips and takes a sip.
“Where have you been?” he asks.
Lee takes off her coat and folds it over the back of a chair, wondering if this is what she would usually do. She clears her throat. “Jean is back in town. From Rome. I bumped into him on the street as I was headed to the studio and he wanted to show me some of the film. It’s so good. I can’t wait for you to see it. I’m sorry if you were worried.”
It is a plausible lie. Jean is back. He wrote to her from Rome to tell her he was coming home, but she hasn’t found time to visit him; she could easily have run into him in the neighborhood. Lee was practicing before she arrived, but now her words sound stilted even to her own ears.
“Ah,” Man says, and places the espresso cup back on its saucer so gently it doesn’t make a sound. “I look forward to seeing it.”
“Yes, I can’t wait to show it to you. It won’t be long now—Jean says he has just a few more edits to do, and then it will be ready. The parts I saw, they were good. Really good. I want you to see it.”
Lee is talking too quickly. Man gets up and puts his espresso cup in the sink and walks into the foyer. He grabs his coat, his keys. He opens the door, looks back at her.