Introduction

ER physician Elizabeth Hillman has been hurt by the men in her life far too often?which is why she spends her free time safely alone, reading the memoir of Giacomo Casanova, history’s most famous libertine. But when a child in Lizzy’s care dies, she flees to Venice, Italy for a much-needed break?and there, on a lovely rooftop, Casanova appears beside her.

In 2016, Casanova is still Casanova. He seduces her friends, is arrested for child endangerment, and even boffs the cleaning lady. Although his antics upset Lizzy, she’s determined to enjoy his conversation and not fall victim to its legendary charm. But when she and Casanova travel to Paris seeking an answer to a question of love that would have changed his life, an incendiary love affair begins to unfold. Who better to teach modern guarded Lizzy about love and life than an eighteenth-century libertine?

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Excerpt

Chapter 1: Jaded

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Dr. Elizabeth Hillman killed a child. Or failed to save her life, but it didn’t feel like there was a difference. She had committed the most grievous sin any ER attending could commit. “Time of death, 6:15,” she said.

Seven-year-old Isabelle Portman had come into Lizzy’s ER breathing and now lay on the gurney getting colder and more cyanotic with each tick of the clock on the green tile wall. Her lips already matched her china-blue eyes.

The little girl’s pulse had stopped several minutes before, but Lizzy never called the TOD until she saw the light in their eyes go out. Pulses could sometimes be restored with a defibrillator and breathing could be maintained with a respirator, but when that light went out, they were gone. In fifteen years at St. Dominic’s ER, this was the one immutable truth Lizzy had learned for certain.

The short ginger-haired nurse, Debbie Langer, stood waiting with the death kit to prep the body before the next of kin came in to say their goodbyes. Debbie had worked with Lizzy for ten years and knew Lizzy’s ritual well enough to stand by patiently until she stepped away.

“Dr. Hillman, she had a ruptured aorta,” said Debbie. “She was crushed her nearly in two by the tree in the accident. There’s nothing anyone could’ve done. Thirteen other kids will be okay, mostly because of you. Dr. Shidlanka sutured a knee and an elbow or two, but that’s about it. You stabilized the three head injuries, prepped the lacerated liver for surgery, and splinted four assorted broken arms and legs. Not to mention that you triaged the whole group. Shidlanka is just this side of worthless.”

“I should have let him triage. He might have caught the dissection,” said Lizzy.

“Right, and pigs might fly out of my butt. He’s the worst resident we’ve had around here in years. That little girl looked fine when she came in here except for the scalp lac and some abrasions. She laughed one minute, then she just went south. You couldn’t have known. Nobody could have known. If you did know, almost nobody survives a ruptured aorta.”

“If I had caught it and called surgery …” Lizzy’s voice cracked slightly.

“Bullshit. She would have died waiting for them to take her up. We’re not set up for major traumas like that,” said Debbie.

“Where is the family?” Lizzy asked. It was time to give Isabelle’s parents the “despite our best efforts” speech. Like that would make them feel better. Then she would stand there and try very hard to keep herself together while the couple welded into one with agony.

“Waiting with their other kid, the clavicle fracture.” Debbie opened the kit, removed a small square of fluid-soaked gauze, and began wiping the blood off Isabelle’s face.

“The screamer?” Lizzy said.

“Yeah. They’ll be easy to find.”

Lizzy had learned a long time ago never to let anyone in the ER see her cry, and she didn’t have time to go into a bathroom stall to cry in private. She squeezed her eyes tight, blinked furiously, and fixed her “competent doctor” face in place. Following the sound of screaming, she headed through the swinging doors toward the waiting area.

The screams came from a towheaded three-year-old sitting on his mother’s lap. The boy, arm fixed to his side with a sling, clung to his mother as she whispered to him. The father stood nearby, eyes wide and hopeful at Lizzy’s approach.

“Are you Isabelle’s parents?” asked Lizzy, trying to sound strong, kind, and benevolent. Watching her fall apart wouldn’t help them one little bit. The mother looked up at Lizzy, blue eyes the same as her daughter’s, pleaded for good news. The little boy screamed even louder.

“I’m Dr. Hillman.” Both parents inhaled sharply, and Lizzy said, “I’m sorry. Isabelle’s chest was more severely crushed than we first thought, and even with our best efforts, there was nothing we could do.”

The little boy fell silent. The mother and father made the two-person beast of pain Lizzy had seen too many times. She stood there waiting until they separated and the inevitable question came. “Can we see her?” said the mother, no older than twenty-five.

“Of course,” said Lizzy, blinking back her own tears hard. Debbie, who waited quietly behind Lizzy, put her arm around the woman and led her back to her daughter’s body. The father stayed behind with the now silent screamer. Lizzy watched as Isabelle’s mother walked slowly toward the trauma room, leaning on Debbie for strength. Which was worse, Lizzy wondered—watching a child die or telling her parents she was dead? At least this day would soon end.

Looking down, she noticed a bright pink Hello Kitty Band-Aid stuck to the white plastic of her ER clogs. She must have dropped it when all hell broke loose and Isabelle’s BP bottomed out. Normally, that little white kitty face with the bow on her head made her smile, but not today.

She checked her watch. 7:10 p.m., and her shift had ended ten minutes ago. Anyone else who died now in that ER was absolutely not her fault. Lizzy closed her eyes and saw the light leave the little girl’s eyes all over again. She needed to keep her eyes open.

St. Dominic’s was a cushy suburban hospital miles from Chicago proper. They weren’t supposed to get multiple trauma cases, certainly not kids. They didn’t even have a pediatric ER attending, for God’s sake. Some freaky July rainstorm had sent the school bus into the ditch across the road from the hospital, and flooding made it too treacherous to take the children any farther. Why did it have to be a seven-year-old with the face of an angel? thought Lizzy. People died in the ER almost every day; she should have been used to it. If she’d caught the dissection sooner, Isabelle might still be alive.

Would today be the day they finally found her out and took away her medical license? Would men from the Department of Incompetency finally come and take her away? It didn’t matter that her grades had been in the top tenth of her medical school class, or that she had the lowest percentage of morbidity and mortality in the entire hospital. Isabelle Portman was dead, and Lizzy was the doctor treating her when it happened.

Later, creatures of the night, Lizzy thought as she nodded at the small cluster of night-shift undead on her way out the door. Nurses, unit clerks, and various workers stood or leaned around the unit desk, their crisp scrubs soon to be rumpled by twelve grueling hours in the ER. You had to work the night shift to pay your dues in hospitals, but those who did it by choice were most likely Count Dracula’s sorry relatives. These weren’t cool vampires like Anne Rice’s Lestat or even Edward from Twilight: they were just folks too odd to work in the light of day with regular folks.

“Have a great evening,” she said now, smiling a little less sincerely than a funeral director.

“Good evening, Dr. Hillman. Don’t party too hard tonight,” said the resident, Dr. Shidlanka. He thought everything he said was much funnier than it actually was. Another one would take his place in a few weeks. They were all so young and so earnest, though this one sucked at emergency medicine. Most still thought saving lives was fun.

He gave her a smile that said he doubted she would be partying anywhere. Stupid kid, Lizzy thought. As a resident, Lizzy could have given seminars on the art of the party. Now—well, it had been a while.

Her dirty-white Mazda hatchback was so far away. It had seemed like a good idea to park at the far corner of the hospital lot: save gas, burn calories—the pitiful idealism of early morning. What had been a nice crisp walk loomed like the Bataan death march after this shift. With each step she cursed her cheery morning self. It would have been all right on an average day, but this was not a normal day. Today she’d killed a kid.

St. Dominic’s looked so perfect gleaming in the evening sun, surrounded by tall trees. The architects who designed the tower of green glass must have known how much it looked like the Emerald City from The Wizard of Oz. Little blond angels weren’t supposed to roll in the door sniffing back tears and leave by the back door with tags on their toes and sheets over their faces.

The sick hot air wrapped her in its damp, smothering arms a little tighter with every step. Hottest summer on record. They said that every year, didn’t they? How could it be this hot already? It was barely July. She got into the car, cranked the AC to the highest setting, and headed home.

Home: a sleek loft near the Miracle Mile facing the lake. The structure had once been a drab warehouse full of screws, rubber bands, and toaster ovens. The classic ten story adorned brick nestled comfortably between two giant glass boxes. After hundreds of Saturday mornings watching HGTV, thousands of visits to Home Depot, new twelve-foot Art Deco windows, tuck-pointing, and some paint, Lizzy had finished the meticulous renovation she’d dreamed of for years. She could never understand why people hired decorators. Why pay someone to choose things for you? Just Get What You Like would be the name of her HGTV show.

She took her traditional three deep cleansing breaths before she opened the door to her loft. Usually, these breaths helped her leave her workday behind. Today, a hundred wouldn’t have helped.

A chorus of meows echoed off the textured concrete walls when she opened the door. The echo was the only thing she didn’t love about her home. Concrete echoed like a big dog—who knew? Still, she had all the beautiful open space she could ever want, with soaring fifteen-foot ceilings, walls that blazed with warm color, and custom-stained floors. After growing up in a little crackerbox of a house in the heart of Dogtown and all those years in small beige-on-beige apartments, she could finally have all the color she wanted.

But today, even in the hottest part of summer, her home felt cold and empty. There had to be a way to rid herself of this day. Her only hope lie in her daily ritual, which seemed pitifully inadequate.

For ten years, Lizzy had used this ritual to leave work behind. The screaming, the suffering, and even the death had to be left at the door somehow. If you brought it home, the rabid grizzly of it all would eat you alive, bit by crazy little bit.

It began with the deep breaths before she walked in her door. Next, she carefully inspected her scrubs and her body for contaminants. The little pink and white Band-Aid qualified, so she carefully peeled it off and dropped it into the red sharps box she’d appropriated for the discarded syringes and empty med vials that inevitably ended up in her scrubs pockets.

Finally, time for a martini and a bath in her beloved soak tub. Water came out of a spigot in the ceiling, and the overflow vanished over the edge of the tub into a trough where a pump circulated it. The tub, now a year old, was still just as cool as the first time she enjoyed it.

Why couldn’t men be like that? Why did the cool and the fun have to wear off of any man she ever cared about? When did she get so jaded? Lizzy laughed, ripped off her damp hospital-blue scrubs, and left them in a damp pile. An emotional ice pick in the heart would do that to a girl. “J-j-j-jaded.” That little Aerosmith riff described her completely when it came to love.

As she slipped into the delicious hot water, she said out loud, “This is the steamy center in the universe of cool.” Lizzy let the water run for a little while even though the tub was full. It would take a metric crap-ton of water to wash off the tragic funk that still clung to her. She wasn’t sure there was enough in the whole Chicago River. Sure, it might be a waste, but Lizzy had no children to take endless showers or require endless daily loads of laundry. She felt entitled to a little extra water.

Elvis, her sleek blue-suede tomcat, jumped onto the edge of the tub and balanced himself carefully. “Did your brother give you a hard time today?” Lizzy asked as she rubbed his head. She knew Elvis would much rather be an only cat. “Everybody needs a brother, Elvis. Siblings remind you that life sucks, little buddy,” she told him.

Sometimes she was glad her two siblings weren’t around. Bruce had died three years ago of a sudden cardiac event. All her years in medical school couldn’t help him; you had to be present at the event to do CPR or cardiac massage, and he’d been alone in his apartment. If he had been born a little later, and if she had been born with a penis, they could have been identical twins. Bruce, the twin brother of her soul, was part of the reason she’d gone to medical school in the first place. Because he believed she could do anything, she had applied and was accepted. He’d died at forty-six, and a piece of her died that day, too.

Her other brother could have been anywhere. Marty, the youngest and the “golden child,” was adored by everyone. His raven black hair and sparkling blue eyes set him apart from his sparrow-brown-haired brother and sister. Marty also lied as often as he breathed and had disappeared into a tiny glass vial in Crack Land years ago.

Lizzy could feel the stress of the day leaving her body as the heat left the water. This wasn’t the time to open up the closet of pain in her head and drag out a little something extra for self-punishment. She would not think about Mark or James or anything else that had hurt her. Today had been punishment enough.

“If you could just learn to make a martini, Elvis, you would be the perfect male, balls or no balls. God knows I’ve shown you enough times.” Lizzy took a sip from her plastic tumbler and sighed with the liquid pleasure that restored her bruised soul. Gin didn’t taste as good in plastic, but her butt cheeks were much happier sans glass shards.

“If the beaver ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy,” Lizzy said, smiling a little. It felt good to smile. The martini worked its anesthetic magic.

Her vagina was certainly not unhappy—just a little lonely. It had been three years since she’d had any appreciation from a male of the species. Masturbation always left her empty in the place she preferred to be full. Lizzy had gone through a brief intimate infatuation with zucchini, but it couldn’t last. She felt too guilty cutting any of the little green guys up for a salad after they had been so intimately acquainted. She would have to make do with her paper lover, Giacomo Casanova.

Histoire de Ma Vie was twelve volumes, 3,700 pages, of eighteenth-century masculinity. Three months ago she’d ordered the first volume from Amazon. Lizzy had loved the eighteenth century since European History in college, and working the Internet algorithm led her to Casanova’s memoir. “Nowhere are the intimate details of life during the eighteenth century so vividly recorded,” said the book jacket blurb. One volume and she was hooked.

Though he wore velvet trimmed in lace and had his hair powdered and curled, Casanova was all male. Reading his memoir was like having a man for a friend without any risk to her heart. Casanova’s intense love of women made her envy every single one of the well over a hundred conquests he related in his book. He loved women like modern men loved NASCAR, football, and corporate takeovers, and spent his considerable talents and genius in the pursuit of his passion. Casanova worshiped his lovers’ bodies, minds, and souls for as long as he loved them. Sadly, his love, as hot as it burned, never seemed to last.

Theirs was a tumultuous affair, Lizzy and Casanova. She read the pages with wonder and horror. Sometimes when she shared one of his less savory written adventures, Lizzy felt like a child on Christmas morning expecting Santa Claus and finding Freddy Krueger. Still, if she put the book down, he begged her for another chance from the page. She always forgave him and read on.

Casanova would probably have slept with almost any woman, as his hilariously recounted night with the homely actress and her hunchbacked friend illustrated. He preferred intelligent as well as beautiful women and always to be in love. Wasn’t that what they all said? But the truth was, for most men, if you were thin enough with big enough implants, intelligence wasn’t all that important. In Lizzy’s experience, love was just a WMM: weapon of mass misery. She wasn’t thin and she did not need implants—at five feet nine inches, she preferred the term statuesque—and she often found her intelligence a social handicap. In all her forty-nine years, no one had ever called her beautiful.

Casanova found every woman he ever loved beautiful, whether his love lasted one night or one hour. He described their anatomy as beauties or charms, never tits or ass, and while he didn’t dwell on the details, Lizzy knew he knew his way around a clitoris. Though, by his own admission, he was rarely constant in his love, one dose of Casanova might have lasted for quite a while.

“I’ll take one thousand milligrams of Giacomo Casanova, please.” She laughed, taking, another pine-flavored sip. A quick nuke of a Mean Cuisine, and she would be ready for her nightly liaison with her literary obsession.

Lizzy reluctantly left the glory of her tub to dry herself. Self-loathing changed nothing, she had finally decided on her fortieth birthday. Her breasts, large and relatively high and firm, were certainly her best feature, so she had to go with cleavage when attempting to attract. Her butt was way too big but was still high and round. Her stomach, as she realized any time she wiggled into the torture device called Spanx, was certainly too round. She loved food far too much to starve it completely flat.

Looking in the mirror, she saw that her dark green eyes could use a little Visine. The skin of her face was still smooth; her reward for decades of oily skin and acne. She had fewer wrinkles at forty-nine than the girls who’d had perfect porcelain skin in their youth. Hardly seemed worth it, but in the Cracker Jack box of genetics, just like the real ones, you didn’t get to choose your prize. If Lizzy were to choose, she would have chosen a tight little ass.

Lizzy sat at the table in her pink terrycloth robe to eat her pathetic little repast. She’d read somewhere that if you presented the food properly, it satisfied the pleasure centers more completely. She didn’t have to work tomorrow, so her second martini, now in a beautiful cobalt-stemmed glass, completed the presentation. Taking another sip, she smiled as the juniper berry molecules bonded directly with the pleasure receptors on her neurons. Her mother had given her this glass. It surprised her how much it still hurt to think of her mother’s death after a year, and how little gin helped. No one deserved lung cancer no matter how much they smoked.

After scarfing down her meal, she got into her short lavender print pajamas. It was too hot for the long pajama pants; in this season of humiliation known as summer, too much skin had to be exposed. Lizzy noted that the big mama spider-vein on her thigh must have had babies over the winter. One of the little darlings had crawled down and made itself at home on her calf. Though tiny, it was not at all cute.

Taking her friend off the shelf next to her bed, she climbed in to read. Volume four of twelve was the most sensuous. Her eighteenth-century libertine, was in his late twenties and at his peak physically. He was heavy into nuns in this volume. She could hardly wait to revisit it with him. He shared his every feeling along with carefully veiled descriptions of his sexual conquests in his writings. So different than any man she had ever known—the feelings and honesty, not the bragging. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1) Did this books change what you think when you hear the name Giacomo Casanova?

2) How is Casanova different from modern men, or is he?

3) Who changed the most, Lizzy or Casanova and how?

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