Dagger Key and Other Stories

“Very well. Taylor.” She stressed the T with a flick of her tongue, crossed her legs and lit another cigarette. “You are a man of wealth, of experience. And very handsome. Many beautiful women would be happy to take dinner with you. Especially at a place of elegance like Baldassaro’s. So why have you choosed this one?”

I had a sip of wine. “I assumed that Giacinta invited you for drinks so she could ask questions through you and make a judgment on my character. But this is your question, isn’t it?”

Allessandra made a wry shape with her mouth and gave the slightest of nods.

“Perhaps you would care to go to dinner with me?”

“Another night…” She gave her hair a toss. “It’s possible.”

A Vespa with a pair of young men astride passed along the street—I allowed the angry rip of the engine to fade before continuing.

“You’re a beautiful woman, Allessandra. I’m sure any man would be delighted to have you as a companion. However, I’m looking for a certain type of beauty. Beauty that falls short of the ideal. Innocence that’s been corrupted, but only just. A woman who’s been slighted by the world, perhaps treated roughly, yet maintains a belief in romantic possibility.”

Giacinta, seeming to recognize that Allessandra was flirting with me, plucked at her friend’s sleeve. Her purpose in having me meet Allessandra had less to do with ascertaining my good character than with showing me off, and now she was afraid that she had made a mistake.

Allessandra told her to wait a second and said, “Your picture of…What you say about the woman…uh…”

“Description. Is that the word you’re looking for?”

“Yes. Your description…it fits every woman.”

“Yes, but Giacinta possesses this quality in a way you do not. If I were to send her to a spa, have experts counsel her on matters of diet and exercise, perhaps get some work done to her chin, her breasts, she’d be very much the kind of woman you are. As it is, she’s the absolute embodiment of the quality I’m seeking. Her body and mind flavored by a precise degree of sadness.”

Allessandra’s frown took the measure of some poignant indelicacy, as if she detected a bad smell. “It seems you are a connoisseur, a…I don’t know how to say. Your feeling for Gia is not…” She snapped her fingers in frustration.

“You’re suggesting that my appreciation of Giacinta’s charms may be perverse? Like a preference for dwarves or the morbidly obese? Why don’t you tell her that?”

Once again Allessandra had to hold off Giacinta’s demand that she be filled in, saying forcefully, “Aspetta!”

“I’m attracted to plain women,” I said. “Physical beauty bores me. I’m talking about what’s generally considered beautiful. And now that beauty’s become affordable…” I made a disparaging noise. “That qualifies me as jaded, not perverse. Still, it may be a phase I’m going through. Tomorrow night, for instance, I may feel differently.”

For a second or two, Allessandra looked puzzled. Then she shook her finger at me in mock chastisement and laughed. “You fool with me!” she said. “I know!”

She turned to her friend and delivered herself of a lengthy pronouncement detailing our conversation or, more likely, a fictive version of it, darting sideways glances at me as if to affirm an unstated complicity. Judging by Giacinta’s tremulous smile, I suspected Allessandra was informing her that I’d been attracted to her mental and spiritual qualities, that she could consider herself safe while in my company, and that she could expect nothing more threatening to her virtue than a fine meal at Baldassaro’s—in sum, diminishing the importance of the evening, so that when I asked Allessandra out, something both women were certain I would do, Giacinta would not be so distressed.

Shortly afterward, Allessandra took her leave, seizing the opportunity of a perfunctory embrace to slip her business card into my jacket pocket, and, once she had rounded the corner, an act preceded by a wave, coquettishly fluttering her fingers, Giacinta’s mood grew instantly sullen and uncommunicative. I caressed her forearm, asked if she was all right, and she shook her head, refusing to look at me. “Giacinta,” I said softly, making the name into a form of adoration, and held her hand, pressing my lips to the inside of her wrist, to the rapid pulse beating there, the smell of blood and lemons. With palpable reluctance, she swung about to face me and, after I laid my hand along her cheek, letting her lean into it, only then did she relent and favor me with a wan smile.