He got in her orbit, among some of her friends that he knew from previous parties, and he was ready and waiting for their jokes about the crazy professor. As he made his sallies against her friends, she saw his regard for her and smiled. Then she reversed the flow of her movement in the room, and before long was at his side, where they could talk under the noise of everyone else. Marina Gamba, she said. Daughter of a merchant who worked on the Riva de’ Sette Martiri; a fish market owner, Galileo gathered. She had lots of sisters and brothers, and did not get along with her mother, so lived with cousins near her parents, on the Calle Pedrocchi, and enjoyed her evenings out. Galileo knew the type perfectly well—fish market girl by day, party girl by night. No doubt illiterate, possibly unable even to add, although if she helped in the market she may have learned that. But she had a shy, sly sideways glance that suggested a wit sharp but not mean. All good. He wanted her.

By the time the party moved upstairs to the palazzo’s altana she was behind him, shoving him up the stairs with friendly pokes to the butt, and at the turn in the stairs, where there was a long window embrasure overlooking the canal, he reached back and pulled her after him. They collided there in a quick groping embrace. She was as bold as one could want, and they never made it up the stairs, moving in stages out to the long gallery fronting the Grand Canal on the second floor, skipping along it to a somewhat private couch at its far end, a couch Galileo knew well, having used it for this purpose before. Possibly she had too. There they could lie together and kiss and fondle under their clothes, which came apart or down in just the right ways. The couch was not quite long enough, but its cushions could be thrown in the corner behind it, and they did that and rolled around on them in a wild tangle. She was good at that, and she laughed at his wild-eyed ardor.

So all was well and more than well, and he had her on his lap riding him naked and most rapturous, when he leaned back into one of Sagredo’s big pillows and encountered one of the many creatures of the house—something small and furry with needlelike teeth, which had been stirred from its sleep and now bit him on the left ear. He roared as quietly as he could, and tried to pull the thing off without losing his ear or the rhythm of the lovemaking with Marina, who it seemed to him had closed her eyes on his distress to focus on her pleasure, which looked to be in its final accelerando. From the corner of his left eye Galileo could not make out exactly what kind of creature it was—perhaps a weasel or fox or baby hedgehog, hopefully not just a rat, but no matter. He turned his head and buried the creature between Marina’s breasts, which were flying up and down so dramatically that he hoped the creature would become interested and transfer its toothy grip. Feeling the creature, Marina opened her eyes and yelped, then laughed and slapped at it, hitting his face instead. He grabbed a breast and pulled her back toward him, while with the other he pulled at the twitching body of the thing. All three of them rolled off the cushions onto the floor, but Marina kept the rhythm going and even redoubled the pace. They both came in the wildness of this, at which point Galileo shouted, “Giovan! Cesco! Come save me from your damned menagerie!”

He managed to detach the animal by holding its snout shut. Feeling this it convulsed free and instantly disappeared, and the two lovers lay there in the bloody afterglow.

“Giovanni! Francesco! Never mind.”

They lay there. Briefly she licked his blood from his neck. She teased him about being the mad professor, in the same way they all did, but then, when they started to make love again, she added a joke about how he might be able use his military compass to calculate the most pleasurable angles their bodies together might form, which made him hoot with laughter.

“Well, why not?” she said, grinning. “They say you have made it so complicated that anything can be calculated. Too many things.”

“What do you mean, too many?”

“That’s what they say, that you larded it down like your big belly here. They say you made it so hard no one can even understand it—”

“What!”

“That’s what they say! They say no one can even understand it, that you have to take a class at the university for a year to learn it, and even then you can’t.”

“That’s a lie! Who says these things?”

“Everyone, of course. They say it’s so complicated that on a battlefield it would be faster to pace out the distances in question than to calculate them using your thing. They say that to use it you’d have to be smarter than Galileo himself, so it’s totally useless.” And she hooted with laughter at his expression, which combined dismay with pride.

“Absurd!” Galileo protested, although it was pleasing to think that people were saying he was too smart for something, even if it was for being sensible. He was also charmed by her insolence, and her knowledge of him and his affairs, not to mention her breasts and her smiling look.

So they laughed as they made love, the finest combination of emotions possible. All without any talk of an arrangement: just laughter. That’s the way it was with a certain kind of Venice girl. At one point, kissing her in the ear, Galileo thought, this is number two hundred and forty-eight, if you have not lost count. Maybe it was a good number to stop at.

At dawn they lay in the window embrasure, looking out at the slightly misting surface of the Grand Canal, calm as a mirror, only creased by the wake of a single gondola; the world turning pink overhead, still dusky blue underneath. In the dawn light she was ravishing, disheveled, relaxed all through her body, which lay pressed against him like a cat’s. Young but not too young. Twenty-one, she said when he asked. Certainly under twenty-five, anyway; and maybe as young as she said.

“I’m hungry,” she said. “Are you?”

“Not yet.”

“You look like you should be hungry all the time,” nudging her hip against his belly. “You’re like a bear.”

“Are bears hungry all the time?”

“I think they must be.”

When they dressed and joined those coming downstairs to break their fast he shoved a little purse of scudi down the front of her blouse and kissed her briefly, saying, “A gift till I see you again,” one of his usual lines, and she said, “Thanks, maestro,” with another little nudge of the hip and a toss of the head to indicate what fun she had had.

On the barge back to Padua, Sagredo and Mercuriale laughed at him. Sagredo, who was coming out to stay at his place for a week, said, “She’s pretty.” Galileo shrugged them off. She was a Venice party girl, a loose woman, but in a Venetian way that was not so much prostitution as it was a kind of extension of Carnivale, and who could object to that. Next time he was in the city he would drop by her neighborhood and look her up. That could be arranged to be sooner rather than later. He could go back in with Sagredo, who was looking amused—pleased on his behalf, pleased at the world and its conjunctions. Always sensitive to looks, Galileo now recalled several Marina had given him in the night, from her first glance at him, to her amazed laughter at the little beast attacking them, to her look at their parting—sweet and knowing, smart and kind. Something happened inside him then, something new, unfamiliar, strange. Love fell on him like a wall. Sagredo laughed; he saw it happening.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Carnival On Callisto