The apartment I rode home to that night was no palace. I lived up in Yorkville, at Ninetieth and Second, above an Italian restaurant that reeked of garlic and sent at least one stray mouse a day up the pipes and into my kitchen. More than once, I’d enlisted the waiters downstairs to kill one of the little bastards, which they did, horribly, with the help of my long-bristled broom and a heavy stomp. I had only a refrigerator and a hot plate, a bathtub in the kitchen, and a bedroom so small that my bed touched three walls. Once, I’d noticed a footprint on the wall at the foot of the bed. Joe’s—it was too large to be mine. I’d had to scrub it off right before my mother arrived for a last-minute visit.
My mother had never met Joe, knew nothing about him, in fact, and that was all right by me. He might’ve come from humble stock himself, but I worried that, if he met my mother and saw her missing tooth, her hands chapped from scrubbing the houses of the richer set in Ossining, New York, he’d look back at me and finally realize I’d been working as a waitress when we met at the New Yorker party.
Shortly after I met Joe I’d stopped waitressing, when I found a job at a law office on the Upper West Side, doing the typing and filing for an old, kindly divorce lawyer. The money wasn’t bad, but I wanted more out of life. I wasn’t writing a romance by coincidence. I was writing one because the things sold. If my mother had taught me anything, it was that we girls couldn’t rely on men to take care of us forever. Any of them could become drunks, like my father, or be called to war, like my brother. I planned to be able to support myself. Hell, more than that—I planned to buy myself a fur and real silk stockings. I wanted it to be my smug, smiling face on the back jacket of a best-seller, and since my name wasn’t Jerome or Norman, I’d have to write something for the girls.
The Downtown No. 2 party had been on a Sunday evening, and for the next few nights I didn’t see Joe. I went to bed alone in my cold cream and rag rollers, unable to sleep, wondering if Beverly had said anything to Harry about me, replaying what I’d heard Joe say to Harry that night. It had sounded as if they were beholden to someone who’d given them money. Joe was Italian, but the likelihood of them going to the Mafia for magazine funding seemed far-fetched to me, and the idea of rich-boy Harry running to a moneylender was something out of science fiction.
Joe finally phoned me on Tuesday evening.
“Hello, handsome,” I said. “Interesting party the other night.” I’d been thinking about how to press him on what he’d said to Harry. “If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought you and Harry were in trouble with a loan shark.”
“What? Sorry, I’m calling from a pay phone on Fifth. Just had a meeting…” Car horns honked behind him, right on cue. “Listen, I’ve got a proposition for you. How would you like to go with me to Rome?”
“Rome!” My desire to probe him vanished. “As in Italy?”
Joe laughed. “Yes, as in Italy. Not Rome, Georgia. Are you in?”
“Rome!” I’d been trying to peel an orange in one go, but the rind ripped and dropped to the floor. I sucked my fingers. “When do we leave?”
“Next Monday.”
“Oh…” My mind scrambled. I’d have to ask my boss at the law office, and I wasn’t sure how much vacation Mr. Franklin would allow me. “You don’t give a girl much notice, do you?”
“Listen, Lou, it’s a trip to meet with some investors, and I had to twist their arm to throw in another ticket on the jet.”
“The jet,” I repeated, breathlessly. I’d never flown before, never gone any farther from New York than Chicago. “Just think. Next Monday, we’ll be orbiting the Earth.”
A sound whooshed into the receiver, like rain on a tin roof, and Joe cursed. “Damned truck—now my pants are all wet. We won’t be orbiting exactly, Lou. We’re not going all the way around.”
“No need to pack my space helmet, then.”
A burst of laughter. “I love you, Lou.”
I felt my cheeks turn crimson, a silly grin spread across my face. We’d only said it to each other a handful of times. “I love you, too.”
Joe and I did it all wrong upon arrival at Ciampino Airport—slept off our jet lag when we got to our hotel, an oleander-shaded yellow building near the Colosseum, just after ten in the morning Italian time. Then we woke at 6:00 p.m., with ravenous appetites. I stepped into patent heels and threw on black sunglasses, even though the light was beginning to wane. I already felt like a woman of mystery; we’d checked in, blushing and smirking, as “Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Clemens” so that they wouldn’t give us a hard time about sharing a camera matrimoniale.
“So, Mr. Clemens, what’s on our agenda?” I asked Joe after we found a spaghetteria around the corner and tucked in. The spaghetti with cream, salmon, and capers was the best thing I’d ever eaten.
“This takes me right back to my grandmother’s house,” Joe said as he cut his pasta. He’d ordered amatriciana, which turned out to be red sauce with what looked like bacon and seemed more at home in a Jersey kitchen than at a Roman table, at least to me.
“Oh Lord, Lou,” he said, watching me lift a huge ball of spaghetti to my mouth and bite it, a few leftover strands dangling. “If anything could make me lose my appetite right now…”
“I know, I know,” I said, mouth full of pasta. “Real Italians don’t twirl. You forget I’m not a real Italian.”
“You’re not even a faux Italian,” he replied, grinning. The humidity brought a curl to his combed hair. He seemed more Italian to me here in Italy, and even more desirable. I’d already known he spoke the language with his parents, but he never did it for me. I’d loved hearing him converse with the driver, concierge, waiter, though he seemed to feel the opposite; his cheeks flushed as the words tripped off his tongue, and when we checked in he’d told me to stop staring at him.
“Our agenda, Mrs. Clemens,” he said now, “is as follows: Tomorrow I have meetings in the morning with potential investors in the magazine. Then, tomorrow night, we shall have dinner with a mystery guest.”
I raised my eyebrows. “A mystery guest! Am I allowed to ask for clues?”
Joe thought for a bit, a dimple showing in his cheek. A breeze caught the flowered tree above his chair, dappling his face with setting sunlight. “Clue number one: he’s American.”
“Jack Kennedy.”
He laughed into his napkin. “You think I’d be this calm if that were the case? No, he’s a writer. Clue number two: you’ve read his book.”
“That isn’t much of a hint,” I scoffed. “Could be anybody.” I blotted my lips, inspecting my napkin. “Say, what was that with the driver this morning?”
His forehead wrinkled. “The driver?”
“When you tried to tip him. He wouldn’t take payment.”
To my surprise, we’d been greeted on the tarmac by a driver in crisp uniform, holding a sign that read mr. joseph martino. Joe had tried to pay him when we reached our hotel, but the man smiled, said something in Italian that Joe could understand but I could not, and drove off.
Joe shrugged. “Maybe they don’t tip here.” He continued shoveling pasta into his mouth.
“But who paid him to begin with? Had you arranged it in advance?” I asked, and when he didn’t answer, I giggled. “And he wrote ‘Martino’ instead of ‘Martin.’ ”
“My family’s name probably was Martino, before Ellis Island,” he said.
“Oh, but you should change it back! Martino is so much more interesting than Martin.”
“Martin sounds more American,” he said firmly, as though this explained itself. He took a healthy sip of red wine. “You should know that, with a name like Leithauser. That can’t have been easy during the wars.”
I considered this. I’d always blamed my father’s drinking for his auto upholstery shop having gone out of business, but perhaps the name “Leithauser Custom Interiors” had something to do with it. He’d had Hummel figurines perched on the dusty windowsills: a boy fishing, a little girl with the Big Bad Wolf.
Joe was waiting for me to respond, but we’d veered dangerously close to questions regarding my family. “What’s in a name, anyway,” I said, and I reached to offer Joe a forkful of my pasta.
“Let’s just go in for a quick dip,” Joe murmured.
By two in the morning, after wine had loosened our joints and tongues and set us laughing again as we explored the city on foot, we’d returned to the hotel to find we were not at all tired. I liked Joe when he was three sheets to the wind. He grew bolder, sillier, more likely to take charge. He’d led us to the white wrought-iron railing of our hotel pool, the two of us trying not to make noise and having a bad time of it. The courtyard had a view of the illuminated, fortresslike Castel Sant’Angelo, but by now the pool was locked up, dark, the lounge chairs piled atop one another, the water as smooth as glass. Behind the pool, the city glittered and hummed. The traffic never seemed to stop.
“We don’t even have our bathing suits,” I hissed, but before I knew it Joe had hoisted me up, his warm, sweaty hands under my foot, and I placed the other atop a curlicue in the gate.
“Shh, shh,” he said as I yelped. He hopped over behind me, to land lightly on his hands and the balls of his feet.
We plunged into the pool in our underwear, breaking the still surface into choppy waves. The water felt different, somehow, from American pool water—slicker and softer, as if we were wading through oil.
“Let’s go up on one of those lounge chairs,” Joe whispered into my wet hair, giggling like a schoolboy. I could feel him grow hard against my leg. He may have been a gentleman, the boy in the library rather than on the football field, but put a drop of blood in the water and all sharks act the same.
We kissed deeply, hands cradling each other’s faces. With every kiss my resolve crumbled. I thought about the diaphragm I’d packed, which remained in its case in the hotel above. “Joe, we can’t. Not right now.”
Joe responded with a lingering kiss. “Please,” he whispered against my mouth. “Please.”
I tasted wine and cigarettes and his own particular sweetness. His skin felt slippery and firm, warm in the chilly pool. Ding-ding rang the warning bells in my brain, and yet I could not tear myself away from him.
We began to make love right there in the pool, engulfed in the delicious fear that someone would come shine a flashlight on us at any moment. Soon we moved to a lounge chair, bodies intertwined, blissfully unaware of how uncomfortable the positions of our elbows and knees would normally feel. I burrowed my face in Joe’s wet hair, which still smelled of pomade.
Afterward, we found white towels in a bin near the shuttered bar. We lay on the same lounge chair, breathing, watching clouds illuminated by streetlights. It had to be at least three in the morning by now, maybe even four. The clouds parted, and the moon appeared, so full and white that it made me gasp. The Italians called her la luna, one of the few words I knew in the language. It may have been the wine, or the magic of the place, but for the first time I thought of her as “she.” “I’d like to go up there,” I murmured.
“Castel Sant’Angelo?”
“No. The moon.” I rolled onto my side. “What if you looked up there and saw…writing, in the dust?”
“Ha! What would it say?”
“Send help! SOS!”
Joe laughed a little, closing his eyes. I shimmied onto my back. “I’d like to be an astronaut,” I said. “Can you imagine the view of the Earth? The way you’d bounce? There’s very little gravity.”
He sighed. “That sounds nice. To be weightless.”
I rolled over, thinking of what he’d said to Harry at the party, the anxiety that had been in his voice. “What do you mean?” I asked. “Have you been feeling heavy?”
He hesitated. From somewhere behind the hotel walls came a shout, followed by a sprinkling of youthful Italian voices. A light went on inside one of the rooms.
“Come on,” Joe said, taking my hand. “We need to find a way back over the fence.”
The next morning, he came out of the bedroom with his tie untied, holding a copy of Popular Science. “How’d this get in here?”
I’d been drinking peach nectar from a champagne flute, my freckled legs extended into the balcony’s sun. My hair was still in rollers. I reached over to fix his tie, but first, I took my magazine. An illustration of the planet Saturn decorated its cover. “It’s mine. I brought it from home.”
“You read Popular Science now?”
I knotted the tie tightly. “A girl can only take so much Glamour.”
“What’s the matter with Glamour?”
I sighed. “Glamour—the magazine ‘for the girl with a job’—is mostly made up of ads for silver patterns. Doesn’t seem like they expect the girls to keep the jobs for long.”
“You have to admit, most girls don’t.”
“I guess.” I reached up to kiss him. “Good luck. Who are you meeting with again?”
“Some people from an outfit called the Congress for Cultural Freedom.”
“The what?” The name struck an odd chord. It sounded more like a government agency than a donor. “Congress like U.S. Congress?”
“No, nothing like that.” He took control of his own tie, messing up what I’d fixed. “It’s an independent organization formed in Western Europe for funding the arts abroad.”
“All right, say no more.” I pointed to a spot on his chin. “You missed some whiskers.” He disappeared back into the bathroom, and a second later I heard the buzz of his electric razor.
When, at last, he was gone, I let my hair down and styled it in loose waves, a brushed-under bob like Grace Kelly’s. I pulled another silk scarf out of my suitcase, which I’d spread open on the bed. I’d maybe gone overboard in my preparations, splurging on a new wardrobe in a black-and-white scheme, red for accents: full skirts, Juliet hats and matching gloves, a see-through robe to wear for Joe, a quilted dressing gown for room service.
I put on a snug cardigan and white linen trousers, the sunglasses and scarf, and went out. Part of me wanted to explore the city by myself on foot and eat gelato out of a tall paper cone, but I’d been longing to write for days. I posted myself near the open front window of the first café I found. Stainless-steel espresso pots gleamed on the stove, and the air smelled of flaky pastry.
The waiter didn’t even bother with Italian. “Good day, madame. What can I serve you?”
“Umm.” All my Berlitz went out the window. “A pastry, please, and un cappuccino.”
His eyes rolled. “Un cappuccino, coming right up.”
A man in short sleeves and dark sunglasses had come in and taken a seat a few tables away from me, newspaper opened in front of his face. Something about him seemed American, though I couldn’t say what. Maybe his full face and puffy, whitish hair; the Italians seemed to wear theirs shorter. But his newspaper was in Italian. When I got up to fetch an extra napkin from the counter, I noticed that he had an English-language book hidden behind the Italian newspaper. I tapped it and he looked up, startled.
“Shh,” I said. “Your secret is safe with me.”
“I—oh.” He closed the book sheepishly. “Grazie.”
“De nada,” I said. “I only speak Spanish.” We both laughed. I caught the waiter’s grimace as he frothed milk behind the bar. Without a doubt, we were confirming every unflattering preconception he had about Americans.
I went back to my table, pulled the cap off a brand-new pen, and began to write.
A little starship, no bigger than a Volkswagen bug, shot through Earth’s atmosphere and into the starry beyond. Its target: our rocky satellite.
There were three men inside, but they would not stay long. Their purpose was to transport a young traveler to her temporary place of residence, then return to Earth to report back to the press.
As the craft approached the moon, it slowed. Its pointed cone of a nose dipped up in the air, and the rockets in back shut off. Two robotic feet emerged from the bottom, and slowly, with a few puffs of steam, the ship landed with a gentle bounce. Several yards from where it touched down sat a sealed glass dome, inside it a ranch-style moon station, comfortingly similar to the kinds of kit homes available for purchase from Earthly catalogues. In fact, perhaps it was one of those kit homes.
At the top of the dome and above the glass door, red flags flew, adorned with the hammer and sickle.
The men disembarked gracelessly, dressed in protective suits with oxygen tanks, carrying a fourth person: our heroine, drugged and blindfolded for the journey. The men in charge claimed this was to ensure she could not steal any state secrets or technology, in case she was a double agent with plans to return to her mother country. For, as much as the men seemed ecstatic to have recruited an American defector, they despised her for her treachery. They treated her, our heroine observed privately, the way she imagined many men treat whores: with both gratitude and disgust.
After the men slowly walked her to the station—more of a swim than a walk—they pressed a series of buttons and carried her inside. Someone else waited there for her. He watched as they removed her oxygen and protective suit—inside the dome, oxygen flowed freely—and strapped her to one of the two captain’s chairs on the observation deck. Through the glass, Earth was a swirled crescent, Europe and Africa bathed in daylight.
The three men left. The rocket ship pushed through the moon’s thin atmosphere with little resistance and disappeared in an arc of white smoke. A half hour went by, until the man in the space station began to see movement: first the girl’s eyelids fluttered, then her fingers clenched and unclenched, reaching out in front of her, grasping at nothing.
There was a weight on Katherine’s chest, on her arms. Someone was holding her down. Her heart picked up a staccato pace. When her eyes opened, they were foggy, unable to focus. Bright lights overhead. A medicinal smell.
“Hello?” she called in a panic. “Hello?”
They had said she wouldn’t wake up alone. Where in God’s name was her cohort? Why was she strapped down? She tugged at her restraints. Under her scalp, her skull throbbed. Something was not right about the gravity in here; her stomach felt as if it was in free fall inside her body.
“Help!” she called again, breathing hard, and then he was there. He held a little metal cup with a straw inside.
“Drink,” he told her.
She wished she could get a handle on his face. The light played tricks here on the moon; she could already see that. Somehow the two of them were in full sun and a nighttime darkness at the same time. His face was harshly shadowed, but she had the sense that he was close to her own age, possibly a few years younger. He had dark hair and a long Slavic nose, the slope of which invoked memories of Russian prowess in winter sports.
“What is it?” she said, indicating the cup.
He uttered a low chuckle, more of a growl. “Water,” he said in his thick Russian accent. She still had not gotten used to those accents. She took a sip. It was cold and tasted wonderful.
“Thank you,” she said. “Now will you undo me?” She tugged at her wrist cuffs.
“Not yet,” he said, to her surprise. He leaned forward, toward the panel of gizmos in front of them, a sea of buttons and levers and blinking lights. One of his arms lifted stiffly—his broad shoulders were encased in a hard-shell uniform that looked primed for walking in space—to point at a shiny black eye embedded in a round white orb. A green light blinked beneath the glass lens.
“Say hello,” he said pleasantly. He enjoyed this, she could tell. Her being tied down, while he was free, holding the cup.
“What in the world is that?” she asked, indicating the green light.
“It’s a visio-telespeaker,” he replied, as if she should have known this. “Say hello.”
“A camera?” She kept her eye trained on the lens. “Say hello to whom?”
The man didn’t answer right away. Instead, he waved at the camera and put his arm firmly around her shoulders. This was all supposed to be voluntary—her idea, even—her defection, her choice to join the Soviet space program. But right now, it did not feel so voluntary. Right now, she felt like a hostage.
Especially when he replied, “Say hello to everyone.”