Caleb laughed. “They were erotic, but not dirty. ” He paused. “They looked playful, maybe a little instructive. I guess they made me feel lonely, and the old man's ugly talk only made it worse.”
        Emma's heart clenched as she thought of her husband, standing alone and lonely in some crumbling, stone house with a dirty old man. She spoke quietly, hoping he wouldn't hear the longing in her voice, her own sad certainty that he would never love her as much as his first wife.
        “You must miss her very much,” she said.
         “The last fresco was the most faded, but I could make out a woman sitting on the end of a dark couch, a man reclined beside her,” Caleb continued. “The woman was beautiful, pale and round-hipped. The man was lean and dark as the earth. The two of them sat with their heads bent together, smiling, like they were telling each other secrets. I tried to recall my wife's voice, but I couldn't hear it. I couldn't remember her face or body, or how it felt to love her. She was gone completely, and I couldn't feel anything. That's when I saw that the man and woman in that ancient, scratched-up painting were more alive than I was. That's when I knew I needed to leave that country. I took a job working for some men in Naples. They paid for my passage back to the States.”
         Emma remembered the longshoreman's tale of the “strange” men Caleb had worked for in Italy, the banjo filled with money. “What did you do for those men?”
         “It was a long time ago,” he said. “It doesn't matter at all because we'll never have to worry about it again.”
        Caleb stood abruptly and walked down to clean the pan in the spring beside the waterfall, leaving Emma to ponder the meaning of his story. Had he told it to instruct her in the details of lovemaking? Was he testing her to see if she could handle the sad and sordid parts of his past? She recalled the yoke over her shoulder that the held buckets of water she'd carried from the coal camp pump every laundry day since she was seven. She'd been raised to carry heavy things. She could bear the weight of her husband's history, if he'd allow it.
        Watching him stoop over the pool of water, washing the cast iron pan, she wanted to lie beside him, her face in his hands, listening to all his secrets. She pulled his sweater over her head, then her dress, lying back to feel the last of the day's heat rising from the stone. Caleb turned from the river, his eyes wary at the sight of her bare skin. He walked over and sat beside her, and she rolled toward him, but the glass of champagne remained between them. He held her back, his hands finding a purchase on her ribcage, as though his hands were memorizing her body.
         “It's okay,” she said. “I'm built like a farm hand.”
        Caleb turned away and stood, taking off his shirt and trousers. The moon shone through the canopy, lighting the woods and water as he walked to the edge of the pool. Wading in, he floated on his back, his hands treading the dark water's surface, turning green, then white, then transparent. He flipped over and swam to the waterfall, toward the black joints and faults in the limestone on either side of the high cliff. When he ducked under the water, Emma held her breath. After he disappeared, she walked cautiously over the slippery black rocks toward the spring. She watched the giant trout circle slowly, their hooked mouths gulping as they surfaced to snap up a butterfly and sink again. Emma recalled the touch of Caleb's hand as he pulled her to him, the feel of his solid chest against her back. She recalled her mother's advice, Don't go with him if he makes you nervous. She liked the tingling nervousness her new husband had sent through her body. She would follow it.

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