Page 52 of Casanova LLC

We ascended the rest of the staircase and stepped into a large open room, different from the hallway of Ca’ Casanova’s piano nobile. This was called a portego, I believed, and nearly asked, but: not a house tour. There was a large, circular bar in the middle. Spaced around the outer edges of the room, stone pillars stood as sentries to four open doorways. Now, there was sound: very low lounge music accompanied by some distant moans of pleasure.

I downed the rest of my champagne.

A naked male server appeared as I lowered my glass. He offered me another, which I happily took. No sooner had he left then another server appeared with a tray. I grabbed two caviar-covered blinis and Alessandro picked up two oysters. We wandered over to the bar, perched there, and I looked out into the room. At the meandering naked servers and a few costumed guests in various states of undress. One, outfitted like a jester, had his dick fully out of his harlequin britches.

“You’re thinking,” Alessandro said, in a warning lilt.

“Sorry, but is this even legal?”

“It’s Italy. It’s sex. I think that’s still legal.”

“But…” I wanted to say something else, but I had no idea what it was. Nudity near food? The problematic class structure on display? That I’d already seen more penises tonight than I’d seen in my entire life?

He set his glass down on the bar and cupped my face, trying, I could tell, one more time, to get through to me. “Everyone here wants to be here, whatever their reasons. You and me included. If you want to go, we go. If you are curious, we stay. If you want to participate, you will, if you don’t, you won’t. I must keep reiterating: we only do what you want.”

His supportive, emphatic clarity made me need to swallow a lump in my throat. “I know. But that tangled chain…it doesn’t just magically untangle. It’s not so easy to know what I want.”

He shook his head. “It’s the easiest. It’s just tangled up in some other wants that don’t belong to you.” He pointed a finger at his chest. “What do I want? What would Richard have wanted? Hell, the lawyers, the victims, the judgmental tabloid readers. You”—he rested one hand right over my heart, the other cradled the back of my neck—“are not being you. You are trying to be everyone else’s you.”

The arrow found its target. I suddenly, irrevocably, wanted nothing more than to be me.

“How do I do that?”

“Stop listening to the other voices and you will hear yours.”

“How?”

“Tell yourself that what you want is all that matters.”

“Say that again.”

“The only thing that matters…is what you want.”

It was so simple. Why did it feel so revelatory?

He dropped his hands. “Your voice. Yours. It will tell you what you want.” He glanced out into the room. “It will also tell you what you don’t want, and that’s just as valuable.”

For one crystalline moment, his knowing superiority irked me. It wasn’t in his tone, which hadn’t sounded remotely arrogant. It was just the inarguable fact that he knew truths about people and feelings and sex that we mortals didn’t. Everyone else here was forced to wander around with their parts out, bumping into each other, trying to find the answers he carried effortlessly inside him. “Spoken like an artist?—”

“Why, thank you.”

“You didn’t let me finish. Spoken like an artist who hasn’t painted in five years.”

Instead of being wounded, he simply shrugged again. “We all have untangling to do.”

There was something so sincere in his words. So real. The real him.

I was taken aback by how much I wanted to kiss him, then. For real. I wanted to have him. For real. To love him. For real.

What happens, I wanted to ask him, when you know what you want, but you can’t have it?

For a minute, we both sipped our champagne, looking out into the vast room, as sounds of pleasure built in the air and body parts crossed back and forth between the columned doorways to the left and right.

“Okay,” I exhaled, and picked my glass up off the bar. “I just got a message from myself, and what I want is to know what’s going on in each of these rooms.”

“And I want you to.”

“And I don’t care what you want, so there!” I stuck my tongue out at him.

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