Michael Smith - Rivers

She took off the T-shirt that she slept in and she pushed back the white drapes and stood in the open window in only the panties she had bought the day before that had CIAO written across the bottom.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

She stretched her arms and she was beautiful in the morning light. “It’s Italy. Nobody cares,” she said. “It feels good.”

He stared at her freckled back and shoulders and all he wanted to do was snatch her back into the bed and do wild things to her. He was about to go for her when she moved from the window and opened the armoire next to it. She found shorts and a tank top and her running shoes and she began to dress.

“Only a short one,” she said. “I gotta sweat out some of this wine we’ve been putting away.” On the nightstand was an empty wine bottle and on the floor by the bed was another.

“You’re gonna get lost,” he said.

“Probably. But I’ll figure it out.”

“Well,” he said and he rolled over. “I’ll be right here when you get back.”

She tied her shoes and found her running watch in the suitcase. Then she kissed him again and went out the door and he listened to the sound of her footsteps on the stairway.

HE AWOKE TWO HOURS LATER and heard the tenor voice outside. Elisa hadn’t returned. He checked his watch twice to make sure she had been gone that long and he believed she should have been back by now. A short run for Elisa usually meant forty-five minutes. Maybe an hour.

He took a long shower and then shaved and brushed his teeth. When he was done he thought of standing naked in the window like Elisa but realized her curves provided a much more desirable picture. He put on some jeans and a white T-shirt and then he stood in the window and looked out at the courtyard. Healthy vines grew out of terra-cotta pots and up a trellis and red blossoms stuck out from window boxes on the building across the courtyard. The handful of wrought-iron tables were filled this morning with the absence of rain and a young waitress moved between them delivering coffee and plates of bread.

What she has done, he thought, is run until she got lost, then found herself a young Italian stud. They are now on a little boat that will take them to his bigger boat and by this time next year she will be speaking Italian and standing naked in her own bedroom window with her hunky young Italian traded in for a new hunky young Italian.

He smiled but didn’t laugh because it didn’t seem an impossible scenario with the fairy-tale look that had been in Elisa’s eyes since they had arrived.

He sat down on the bed and turned on the television and watched the replay of a soccer match from last night. Milan and Barcelona. He couldn’t tell which was which but he listened to the constant chantlike choruses from the crowd and felt almost hypnotized. He watched for half an hour and then he began to worry some, so he turned off the television and put on shoes, socks, and a shirt, and went out to walk around and look for her.

He turned right when he came out of the hotel. A short walk and he arrived at a busy plaza. Tucked in the corners of the plaza were kiosks for newspapers and magazines, cigarettes and postcards, tourist maps and T-shirts. Restaurants and cafés lined the streets and waiters in white shirts and black ties moved from table to table and tourists walked slowly from café to café considering the best place to sit. In the center of the plaza was a small fountain where angels arched their backs and reached toward the heavens and at their feet children tossed in coins and splashed one another playfully. Branching out from the plaza were numerous streets and alleys and Cohen looked around and tried to imagine which one Elisa might have taken, but he realized it didn’t matter, as in this labyrinthine city your first turn had little bearing on where you eventually wound up.

He crossed to the other side and bought a pack of Lucky Strikes at a kiosk. He unwrapped the pack, lit a cigarette, and watched the plaza scene for another moment before picking a random alley to follow and try to find his wife.

Cohen moved along the street and crossed a canal and then he crossed another canal and he seemed to have merged into more of a local neighborhood. He passed a grocery store, a Laundromat, an appliance store, and a flower shop. A woman came out of a doorway with a dog on a leash and in another doorway a bicycle leaned against the wall. Cohen walked until he was out of the neighborhood and into a retail shopping district, a series of store-lined streets with sleek, scantily dressed mannequins and shiny jewelry and Venetian-made glass vases in the different windows.

He looked for a running woman. The day was warming and he was sweating some on his face and neck and now he was really worried. He noticed the dead ends where the water was stagnant and the alleys covered in shadows and he realized there were a thousand places to drop and disappear. He kept walking and smoking and looking and he came to a plaza that he recognized from the day before and it seemed he was making some sort of circle back toward the hotel. Maybe she’s back, he thought, but the thought only lasted an instant and he decided to call out. He cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled, “Elisa!”

Movement in the plaza paused and people looked at him.

He took advantage of the quiet and again yelled, “Elisa!”

From a window somewhere an unfriendly voice yelled back so he kept walking. As he walked he continued to call out, the echo of his voice sometimes shooting along a passageway and sometimes falling dead in a dead end. He called out and walked more briskly and even looked into the canals as his imagination pictured a floating running shoe or running watch or her beautiful bare back afloat in the still tepid water.

He came to the intersection of five streets and in the middle of the intersection was a statue of a conquered winged lion with a woman in a long, flowing gown, wielding a spear, sitting on top of the lion. Cohen climbed up on the lion, stepped from the lion’s head into the woman’s lap, and managed to get on her shoulders so he could have a better view. A store owner came out of a gift shop and yelled at Cohen, pointing and waving and clapping his hands. Another Venetian passing by joined with the store owner. Cohen ignored them and from his perch looked down each street, screamed out her name. The store owner came closer to Cohen, waving his arms and shouting and Cohen jumped down from the statue and yelled back at the man and the man backed off. Cohen then turned in a circle, looking at all the streets, trying to decide what to do and sweating more now than before.

He realized he hadn’t left a note or word with the front desk and that if she had returned, she would be wondering what had happened to him. So he started running. He ran in what he thought was the general direction of the hotel, hoping to find a familiar street that would take him there. He called her name. Screamed her name. He paused at the ends of streets and looked both ways, he looked down into the canals when he went over a bridge. He hurried but tried not to miss anything.

He ran down a long alley and then cut across a canal and ran along another long alley and up ahead he saw people passing on the street. He believed that it was the street of his hotel and he was right. He turned onto the street and after several minutes he recognized buildings and the hotel sign came into sight and then he saw, almost to the doorway, Elisa walking with her arm draped around a short woman in a long skirt. Elisa leaned on the woman and they inched along and Cohen raced and he caught them as they made it to the door.

“Elisa,” he said, out of breath. He saw that she held a rag on her forehead and it was dabbed in blood and he grabbed and hugged her though she still leaned on the woman.