He steps down onto the street, lights a cigarette, and walks. Back toward the bar and then home, to his empty bed and the darkness that lay upon it like a pall. He looks for all the world like a young Clint Eastwood, a lean gunslinger with neither horse nor hat, in search of a new war to fight, a new frontier to conquer. He leaves behind a woman sleeping in her bed, her discarded underwear now balled up in the pocket of his jacket. Why did he take it? As a trophy? There was no reason to take it. No reason to stay and no reason to leave. She would wake in the blue dawn light and know that he was gone and that he had taken something from her which she would not get back. Maybe that was the reason.
He looks up at the moon, shining vividly despite its distance, and he sings to himself as he walks. Blue moon, he sings. You saw me standing alone. Without a dream in my heart.
Fifty-six hundred miles away, in Vicenza, Italy, there is a different woman. Dark-haired and blue-eyed and beautiful. He has a final letter from her in a drawer in his apartment which he has never read, never even opened. The contents of which frighten him. He used to look at the moon and think she was sleeping under it, happy and satisfied in the arms of another. Now he thinks he can see a more awful truth. That she is not always happy or satisfied. That she sometimes cries herself to sleep. That she still prefers this life to the one she might have had with him. That she is moving on every day, every day forgetting him. He knows he has lost her. What he does not know is what she has lost. Or if she has lost anything at all.
His knuckles brush against the lacy fabric in his pocket. The woman he met tonight, the twilit gloom of her bedroom, the desperate press of her body in the dark, all of it is another log on the fire he has been stoking for years against the cold. A cold that will never leave him. He gazes at the moon, low and bright in the lightening sky. Buonanotte, he whispers, as if she could hear him. Buonanotte, he whispers to the love of his life. To the first and the last and the only.
The city wakes around him, the moon sinking toward a paling western sky. Doors opening and cars starting. School children shuffling out to their stops and dogs straining against leashes. Lives carrying on as usual, to which he is a man of no account. He walks on ignored, his shadow long and solitary on the stirring street, toward the next war to fight, the next frontier to conquer.
