We slept more then, for some reason knowing a bit more about each other making it easier for me. When it began to get dark outside again, making long shadows out of the bedposts, we both rose and began to get ready, not saying much. Until we parted at the end of our preparations, it felt to me almost like we were getting ready for a date. Each of us primped, very much paying attention to how we would appear to others, concerned about the impression we would project.
Not surprisingly, washing and shaving took less time than Sophie’s preparations. After months of living quietly together, I became curious about her. I watched her style her hair, select clothes and apply a light touch of makeup. During this she was uncharacteristically laconic.
Thinking of the apartment she had lived above Cheryl and I in, it occurred to me, “You’re not from Venice, though.”
“No.” She dabbed with some lip gloss. “Bologna.”
“So how did you end up in the serene republic?”
She gave a slight shrug, “A job. It was only meant to be a semester. What is the word? An internship.” Sophie stopped what she was doing and considered herself in the mirror, gazing into it as if she had lost something there.
“But my parents died while I was away. An accident. But they did not own their home, so there was nothing to return to. So I stayed in Venice, but I could do nothing for a long time after that. The job fired, school unimportant, Bologna became a distant place I cared nothing for, for I cared for nothing.”
I said I was sorry, or something equally useless, and Sophie thanked me in the way that people who have dealt with their grief do with the well-intended but uninvolved. After that short pause she returned to her preparations.
Watching her reflection ready itself I saw she had the same kind of resting focus I had seen in men preparing for a mission. Asking more questions felt like intruding, so I stopped.
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