“No, that’s all right,” I said, getting up. “Thanks for dinner.”

“Oh, you’re going,” my mother said, evidently a new idea to her. She leaned forward to be kissed.

I bent over for a quick peck, and as I stood back I stopped, suddenly dismayed, seeing once again what Gianni must be seeing, not a carefree girl this time but a woman slack with drink, pliable, draped against the couch, her soft white throat tilted up. What he’d waited for all evening, what came after brandy. Did he take a room here, part of the Monaco service? My heart sank a little as I looked at her, a physical drop. When had this happened, this fading into someone else? While I’d been away, not paying attention. And each year she’d become a little more vulnerable, until all it took was a kind word and table manners, someone like Gianni.

I looked at him, half expecting a leer, something predatory, but he was smiling blandly, at ease with himself. What he must be used to, another of the lonely women who floated through Venice, away from home, a little drunk, easy. Without daughters at university and family names. Without anything, except money to buy a little pleasure, an evening out. This one had come with a son—an inconvenience, but now he’d been charmed too, taken care of, and he was leaving. Would they come back to Dorsoduro? Appear at coffee in the morning without even a blush, all of us grown up?

For a second I stood there, trying somehow to put myself between them. It’s not what she is, I wanted to say to him, but wasn’t it? Isn’t it what she wanted too? Who had actually paid for dinner? I couldn’t remember there being a bill, the sort of discreet arrangement a lady might make. But how do you protect people? And after all, what was the harm? One of those things. Unless it wasn’t. I looked down at her again, wondering what bargain she was making with herself. A fling? But maybe she hadn’t even thought about it, just followed an impulse, the way she’d come to a city where she could read menus and street signs but whose real language was unknown to her.

“Darling, you say you’re going, then you don’t go,” she said, laughing.

I smiled, shaking my head. “Just thinking.”

“Oh, god.”

I held up my hand. “All right, I’m off. Don’t be too late,” I said, imitating her.

“You don’t have to worry,” Gianni said without a hint of guile. “She’s in safe hands.”

The next day I found a hotel near the Rialto with cheap off-season rates and a side view of the canal. The old-fashioned radiator in the room actually produced heat, a luxury that winter, so I took the room for a week, using a chunk of my separation pay. Not what the army had intended, precisely, but in fact the room did finally separate me from the war. Every afternoon we sealed ourselves away behind the fake damask walls, too absorbed in each other to imagine anything outside.

After that first day, we settled into a pattern. At one Claudia would walk over from the Accademia—ten minutes, if she hurried—and we would make love until she had to go back, dressing and leaving me in bed. I think it excited her to leave first, as if the room were in a brothel and she had somehow bought my time. She liked everything about the room—the touristy Murano chandelier, the chipped gold paint on the sideboard—because it seemed to her what such a room should look like, a little tawdry, worn from years of afternoon sex. She never came to my mother’s house and didn’t want me to go to hers. An affair was set apart from real life, something you did in hotels.

I had never had sex with anyone who responded the way she did, not just with pleasure or curiosity but the way I’d seen children eat in Germany, with a greedy determination to fill themselves up, not sure they would ever eat again. The afternoons were for both of us a kind of daily feast, sampling and tasting. Day after day in our cheap hideaway room, warm with radiator heat, we slid against each other, slick with sweat, until, finally exhausted, we felt the world begin to come back a little. Then she would dress and lean over to kiss me in the damp sheets, not saying good-bye but fixing a time for tomorrow, when we’d begin again. Days of it like this, drunk with sex.

We didn’t go out for dinner or have a drink at Harry’s or meet each other anywhere but at the hotel. At first she said she had to be careful, she didn’t want people at work to know, but after a while I realized the secrecy itself, the sense of being illicit, was erotic to her. When she closed the door to the hotel room, she could do anything, away from everyone, even herself.

Then, after a few days, the afternoons weren’t enough. I wanted to know where she went, how she spent her time. Wanted her, in fact, to spend it with me.

“I don’t want to go to restaurants. It’s nice the way it is.”

“But I want to talk to you. To know you.”

“Who knows me better than you? Do you think I’m like this with everyone?”

“I don’t mean that.”

“I know what you mean. I know you a little now too. You like the fans, the masks. Old Venice.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“You know, all the fans, that was to end up here,” she said, patting the bed.

“So maybe we missed something, skipping all that.”

She shook her head. “No.” She pulled me down to her. “Do you think we missed something?”

“No.”

“Then it’s enough. Here.”

“All I did was ask you to dinner,” I said, kissing her.

“I can eat anytime. Wouldn’t you rather do this?”

“Yes.”

But a few days later I got a chance to force the issue when my mother came down with a cold and Gianni, now the attending physician, offered me his seats at La Fenice.

“I’ve never been,” Claudia said, tempted.

“Let’s do it right. We’ll take a gondola.”

“Ouf. A gondola from San Isepo, with everyone at the window. I’ll take the vaporetto.”

“Then you’ll come?”

“I always wanted to see it, La Fenice.”

“Do you have something to wear? We can buy you a dress.”

“No, you don’t buy me a dress. I’m not—” She turned away. “I can dress myself. Even for La Fenice.”

I hired the gondola anyway and met her at San Marco, then maneuvered her into the rocking boat for the short trip through the back canals.

“You’re extravagant,” she said.

“You have to go this way. Where else can you do it? Pulling up to the opera in a boat?”

“You can also walk,” she said, but smiling as the dark houses glided by, surprised to see a different city from this angle. Under her wool coat she was wearing a long evening dress she said she had made herself, gloves, and rhinestone-studded slippers.

“Where’d you get the shoes?”

“Borrowed. A friend keeps them for Carnival every year.”

“Very fancy.”

“Vulgar?” she said, concerned.

I smiled at her. “No, fancy. Perfect.”

The canals got narrower after we drifted past the hotels and began to circle around to the Fenice water entrance. There was no sound but an occasional snatch of radio and the smack of the steering pole hitting the water. A light mist was rising, just high enough to soften the lights.

“My god, it’s beautiful like this,” she said. “No wonder they come.”

“You’ve lived here all your life.”

“Not in a gondola. It’s different.” She turned to me. “You make me a tourist.”

We turned a corner into a small lighted basin and one of those scenes that gives Venice its storybook quality—a traffic jam of boats rocking against one another as people stepped up to the pavement, the familiar taxi drop-off made theatrical by the water. After the shadowy canals, the lights here were festive, opening-night bright, catching jewels and white silk scarves.

“You see, it’s another city. People like that,” she said. A woman covered in white fur was being handed up to a footman.

“Never mind. They’ll all be looking at you. ‘Who’s that up there in the box?’ ”