“I’m Dean,” the man said. “I like your suit.”

“Pleasure, Dean,” said Fredo. “Sit down, huh? The name’s Troy.”

The search for the missing pilot ended several weeks later, when a body was found at the bottom of a ravine by the Cuyahoga River, not far from the hospital, wedged in a sewer grate. Sewage and rushing water had accelerated decomposition. What remained had been feasted upon by river rats. The face and eyes were completely gone, and when the body was first lifted, live rats slithered out of its mouth and rectum. The admitting bracelet (GERALD O’MALLEY, MALE CAUCASIAN, AGE 38) and what was left of the gown were deemed authentic. The coroner ruled that the body’s injuries were consistent with the ones the pilot had suffered, right down to the distinct stitching style of his ER surgeon. Dental records might have been helpful, but the authorities had no idea who Gerald O’Malley had really been. Whoever he was, however he got from the ICU to the bottom of that ravine, the poor fellow was really most sincerely dead.

Chapter 13

THE PLAN HAD BEEN for Billy Van Arsdale and Francesca Corleone to fly from Florida to New York along with Francesca’s brothers, her mother, and her mother’s perpetual fiancé, Stan the Liquor Man, but Billy’s parents gave him his Christmas present early: a two-tone Thunderbird, waiting for him the day he came home from school in his yellow Joe College jalopy, an old Jeepster that Billy loved partially because it mortified his parents but that, in truth, had done well to make it back to Palm Beach from Tallahassee. The chance to hit the road for a long trip in a car like that Thunderbird, he told Francesca on the phone, was too much to pass up. She thought she knew what he was also saying, but she said nothing about it and neither did he. The plane tickets had been bought, but Billy’s parents, who were going skiing in Austria, called their travel agent and had him take care of the refunds.

The night before the trip, Billy drove down to Hollywood. He’d been there once before, at Thanksgiving, a month after he and Francesca had started dating, and seemed to have made a good impression on everyone but Kathy, who was cold to him the whole time and then wrote Francesca the next week to say she was disappointed that Francesca’s self-hatred ran so deep. Francesca’s translation: Kathy was so jealous she could die.

Without Kathy around, though, everyone else in the family apparently took it on themselves to make Billy uncomfortable. Before he even had a chance to give Francesca a hug, Poppa Francaviglia had dragooned him to go next door and help put in a new toilet. In the middle of that, Nonna came in carrying a plate with slices of the oranges she’d grown herself on one side and ones that had come from his family’s company on the other, asking him to taste and see if he could tell which was which. They all went to dinner at a tacky steak joint just because Frankie’s football coach’s cousin owned it. Frankie asked Billy why he’d been a swimmer instead of a football player, had he been cut from the football team? Francesca was about to kick her brother under the table, but Billy said that was exactly what had happened and told a funny story about it. Chip spilled his Coke on Billy. Twice. Is it really possible for a ten-year-old to spill his drink twice, on the same person, accidentally? Everyone but Francesca seemed to think so.

Sandra supervised Billy’s loading of the Christmas presents into the trunk and backseat of his car (the hauling of same being a key to getting Sandra to go along with this trip), then escorted Billy and Francesca next door to her parents’ house, where Billy was being exiled as a deterrent to intimacy. It was only nine-thirty, but they had a long day tomorrow. The only reason Billy was spending the night-he only lived an hour away-was so that they could leave at dawn and abide by their pledge to drive all day and night, twenty-four hours straight through to New York without stopping at any hotel. “And if you do have to stop,” Sandra said now, yet again, “for some, God forbid, act of God, you’ll what?”

“Get separate rooms, Ma,” Francesca intoned. “Call to let you know we’re okay.”

“Call when?”

“Immediately, Ma. C’mon. Stop it.”

“And the receipts for those separate rooms?”

“We’ll show them to you to prove it.” As if that would prove a thing. “Ma, this is crazy.”

Sandra made Billy repeat the same litany. He complied. Sandra nodded and said that was good, she trusted them, and she hated to think what would happen if they ever betrayed that. “I know you want to enjoy a nice kiss goodnight,” she said, “so I’ll leave you alone now, eh?”

Hypocrite, Francesca thought. When her mother was her age, she was already pregnant.

“I love you,” Billy whispered, leaning slowly toward her, and she whispered it back, her lips still moving with the words when he kissed her. As if so triggered, the porch light went on.

“I love your family,” Billy said.

“You’re nuts.”

“You wish they’d get off your back, but everyone who doesn’t have what you have wishes they had it.”

It was not the first time she was afraid Billy was with her only because she was different, exotic, the Italian girl, a means of shocking his parents but less extreme than going out with a Negro. Or an Indian, like her roommate Suzy. But it was the first time she summoned the courage to say something about it. “You sure you don’t just love me for my family?”

He shook his head and looked away. Immediately she wished she hadn’t said it. He must have said or thought this about every girl he ever dated, including Francesca herself. As she started to apologize, he leaned toward her and kissed her again, touching her with nothing but his warm lips, and held it. When she opened her eyes, his were already open.

Before noon the next day, they had registered as man and wife at a small beachfront hotel north of Jacksonville. Francesca was afraid the desk clerk would object-neither of them wore a wedding ring-but Billy tipped the clerk as he registered. “You’d be surprised,” he said as they walked to their room, “how much discretion you can buy for twenty bucks.”

Now Francesca stood in the bathroom and took out the pale green negligee that-knowing her mother would go through her luggage-she’d rolled up and hidden in her purse.

Okay, she thought. Here goes. She watched herself undress, as if it were someone else, there in the mirror. A girl-a woman-in the last moments of her virginity. Unbuttoning, unfastening, pulling off, stepping out. Folding each piece of clothing, placing it gingerly on the marble countertop, as if she is afraid it will explode. Patting her stomach. Rubbing her hands over the small dents in her flesh where her fat bra strap had been, trying to make them go away. Twisting around, craning her neck to see what she must look like from behind. She touches her hair, and it doesn’t move. She brushes out the hair spray-long, even strokes-then looks up and tosses her head to watch which way her hair falls, what it looks like after it does. She dabs perfume onto her fingertips, applies it to all the places any woman at a makeup counter would advise, then bends her head and slowly reaches for the flame of black hair between her legs and dabs it, too. The woman’s breasts are large but (Francesca noticed, sighing) cumbersome, asymmetrical: the bosom of a peasant girl in a painting of a half-harvested field (or like Ma’s, the last person on earth Francesca wanted to be thinking about now). The woman takes in a deep breath, deeper now; her breasts rise, assuming shapes somewhat more like the ones in those magazines. Almost imperceptibly, she reddens. She grabs an obviously expensive silk negligee from atop her scuffed brown purse and holds it in front of her by the delicate ribbonry of its shoulder straps. She juts one hip, then the other. She frowns. The negligee is undeniably beautiful, but, somehow all wrong for this woman, at this moment. She holds it at arm’s length and lets go. It falls, a pool of fabric atop her neat pile of clothes. She stands naked, breathing not so much deeply now as heavily. Naked. Nude. But nothing like a painting. A real woman, young and scared, shaved and powdered, covered with goose bumps and shivering despite the tiny beads of sweat on her brow and under her breasts, her chest covered with a faint, splotchy blush. The woman shakes her head and chuckles silently, then smiles in a way she must hope is wicked, or at least brave. She opens the door. She faces the doorway. “Okay,” she says (Is that me? Francesca thought, that chirpy girl’s voice?), “close your eyes.” She crosses her arms over her breasts, hugging herself, closes her own eyes, and emerges into the uncertainty, the inevitability of the next room.