She believed she’d left the fear at her father’s grave, but it’s here with her now, fear for her son, and there’s a sadness in Floria’s face that makes Leonora certain that she, too, is fearing for Anthony. Floria’s fingers are longer than her own, rounder, causing wider gaps than when Leonora laces her own fingers, and when Floria disengages her fingers those gaps feel carved, feel forever, and Leonora readies herself for any accusation Floria will make against Anthony.
“He’s divorced now,” Floria says.
“Oh—you mean Julian.”
“Don’t you think he has forgotten me?”
Leonora divides the last of the clear Sambuca, a few drops more for Floria. “Maybe he’s waiting for you.”
“Don’t be silly.” Floria rests her forehead on the table. “I’m so tired.”
“Want me to get the couch ready for you?”
“No. I’ll close my eyes for a few minutes before I leave. Sometimes I’m sure it’s the most significant love I’ve known. Because it…stayed like it was that one day.” Floria’s voice fades. “We…never had a chance to disappoint each other or…”
“In a marriage you would have found plenty of chances for that.”
Floria sighs. Takes a deep breath. Another. Lets out a delicate snore.
She’s still fast asleep at the table when Victor brings Anthony home. He frowns when he sees her here but doesn’t say anything. Neither does Leonora. They’re silent as they untie Anthony’s shoes—wet from rain—and help him out of his suit. Limp with exhaustion, he allows them to lead him to his bed, tuck him in. Leonora suspects he is acting younger than he is to keep them both here with him.
Victor kisses his forehead. “Sleep tight.” He follows Leonora into the hallway.
“Go now,” she tells him.
“Can’t we sit down for a while?”
“I already sat down today.”
“I mean sit down and talk.”
“I already talked today.”
“Please?”
“What for?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know what I want to say to you. Only that I don’t want to go yet.”
“Want want want…”
“It’s not like that.”
“Why don’t you go home to Elaine and—”
“It’s not home.”
“—and figure out with her what you want.”
“This has nothing to do with Elaine. And it’s—”
“That’s one hell of a statement to make on the day of your engagement to her.”
“I know,” he whispers.
“I can’t help you with that, Victor.” Leonora steps around him, places both hands against his shoulder blades—How long since I’ve touched you? How long?—and shoves him toward the door. All day she’s been by this door, waiting for someone to leave or to arrive. Opening it. Closing it. Opening it now for Victor, who is still talking.
Talking about talking.“How do I know what I really have to say to you until I start saying it?”
She seals his mouth with her palm, and doesn’t yank it away when he kisses her fingers, her arms, her neck. She pushes the door closed, shakes off her robe, helps him with that ridiculous cummerbund. There, with her back against the front door, it’s urgent between them, rougher than ever, lust and danger, while Floria and Anthony are sleeping nearby. She feels weightless as he lifts her, heavy as she opens herself and sinks around him—and it could always be like that, like that again—yet, just as she’s about to come, she feels disoriented because, it’s all new and it’s not.
And then she knows. And is livid. “You’ve learned from that woman.”
“I love you.”
“You have fucking learned from that fucking woman.”
“The only one I want to be with is you.”
“Why don’t you try fucking her with both of you standing on your heads?” She snatches her robe from the carpet. Wobbles for an instant and, absurdly, finds herself thinking how it’s almost time for the bare floor of summer, and she reminds herself to call the carpet man to pick up the rugs and clean them, keep them till fall. “Remind me to call the carpet man.”
“Let me stay?”
She flings the cummerbund at him.
“You have learned, too. Think about that. We both have learned.”
She’s jostling him out the door. Locking it behind him. When she checks on Anthony, he’s sleeping on his stomach. At the kitchen table, Floria is snoring softly, and Leonora covers her with the orange-and-green afghan that Riptide crocheted for her.
In her bedroom, Victor watches from the wedding photo, his eyes burning her skin.
“No,” she tells him.
We both have learned.
“Don’t you dare,” she tells him, feeling smutty though he’s her husband. Though she did not feel smutty with James.
But his eyes remain on her, probing.
And so she makes him stop. Lifts the silver frame off the wall, lays it face-down on the maple dresser. There. Now he can no longer see her. He’s out of her life. Even more so after tonight.
In the morning, her head feels light with an almost pleasant Sambuca headache that floats behind her cheekbones like part of her breath. She wraps the wedding photo in an old towel, but as soon as she slips it behind the records in the living room, she starts missing herself, missing how she looked as a bride, graceful and substantial. She reaches for the photo, unwraps it. And there she is. Graceful. Substantial. The only thing wrong with the photo is that Victor is in it. It makes her think of the used-furniture shop on Jerome Avenue. She has never been inside though she passes it on the way to the beauty parlor, and she has noticed a hand-printed sign in the window:
RESTORE YOUR BELOVED PHOTOGRAPHS!
INDIVIDUALS, PETS, FURNITURE, PLANTS,
AND SETTINGS CAN BE REMOVED OR ADDED.
WE REPAIR CRACKS, TAKE OUT STAINS,
AND REPLACE MISSING PARTS.
YOUR ORIGINALS ARE SAFE WITH US.
ALL WORK DONE ON PREMISES SINCE 1921.
She used to wonder what kind of people would remove others from their photos; but when she steps across the puddle in front of the shop and opens the door, she has no trouble at all handing the intricate frame to the man behind the counter and asking him to remove Victor.
When the man nods, his hairpiece slides a tiny bit forward. Shiny and black, it looks as if cast in one piece. His eyes are knowing and sad, as though he spent all his hours doing away with unfaithful husbands, and Leonora has a feeling that, the instant you enter his shop, he can tell if you’ve come from the end of a marriage. What gives you away? The slant of your lips? Your bitten fingernails? That rage in your eyes?
For his services, he asks a high price, but Leonora reminds herself what Victor is spending on engagement parties, on new suits and shoes. While she’s been saving money on little things, feeling cheap. Saving money forever. Storing a box of ice-cream cones in the car, so that, when they drive to the Carvel’s on Webster Avenue, Victor can buy just two vanilla swirls and take some off each top to put into a cone for Anthony. Three for the price of two. Pennies saved. And nail polish—how she uses bottles right down to the dregs and then adds polish remover to make them last longer, even though the polish won’t coat her nails evenly and always flakes off. Pennies.
As she pays to have Victor eliminated from her wedding, she promises herself to buy the most extravagant bottle of nail polish on her walk home.
That evening Victor calls, asking to talk.
Every evening he calls.
Every evening she tells him to talk to Elaine instead.
Every evening he says he has broken it off with Elaine.
Every evening he says he wants to come home to her and Anthony.
At the end of the week Leonora returns to the used-furniture shop. In the filigreed frame, she’s the only one left, still graceful and still substantial in her white gown; but where before Victor’s arm was linked through hers, stands now a waist-hig
h pedestal, the kind you see in museums, and her left elbow—forever angled in that initial position—rests on the marble top. In back of the pedestal hang the airbrushed folds of a long curtain.
“Is this how you wanted it?”
For an instant she thinks he’s asking if this is how she wanted her marriage all along. “It’s how I want it now,” she tells him.
As she walks out, the wrapped photo under one arm, a woman in a flared coat comes out of the coffee shop at the end of the block, raising her face into the mild wind, smiling to herself. Leonora sniffs the air—buds and new green. The woman’s stride is graceful, fluent, and Leonora can tell this is a woman who enjoys being alone. It makes Leonora want to be alone like that, too. Already she sees herself stepping from some coffee shop or theater, wearing a flared coat, her face radiant with the pleasure of being alone. She feels her stride getting lighter, and as the woman approaches, her smile deepens, as if she knew Leonora’s thoughts, and her arms rise in preparation for a hug. A bit too effusive for Leonora. Still, she slows down, bracing herself. Just then a thin man with sunglasses—he must have been a few paces behind her all along—rushes past her and into the arms of the woman, whose light was all along for him. Because of him?
It takes the breath from Leonora, and she has to lean against a brick wall as the two embrace and kiss. Traffic moves past her, women with strollers, people with pull carts to do their shopping, while Leonora is trying to preserve that first glimpse of a woman rejoicing in being alone. But where before she’d only been aware of the woman, she now is overwhelmed by all else around her: the stutter of a jackhammer, a shrill argument in a courtyard, two little dogs yapping. The scent of spring carries soot and exhaust fumes. Against the left side of her body, she feels the silver frame, and as she tightens her arm to keep it from falling, she feels as though she’s the one who has stepped from one frame into another and has ended up behind an airbrushed curtain. Where she’ll find Victor.
And that’s when she knows she’ll call him.
The first evening they’re back together, he arrives with a Bernice Peaches carton full of groceries as if he’d never been away. That part of being together feels familiar; but in bed his body feels unfamiliar, and she won’t let him near her. Despite the sex in the hallway the day of his engagement. Because of the sex in the hallway.
After she switches off her bedside lamp, she adjusts her pillow, punches it as she usually does to get it right, waits for him to ask.
And he does. “Are you quite settled?”
It comforts her, the ritual of that question—Are you quite settled?—makes her realize how she missed the history of the ritual, starting with that same question years ago. When Victor repeated it that following night and the night after—Are you quite settled?—or even in the car if she was fidgety, she got annoyed, as she does whenever he repeats himself, but out of that annoyance a certain tenderness arose, until she finally came to expect that habit. Are you quite settled?
It’s like that between them with other things that have changed from the incidental to the frustrating, from the frustrating to the endearing. And that’s why she has let him come back. Because of the habits. Because of Anthony. Because of the inevitable tenderness between them. Because time will not be theirs forever. Because of the woman in the flared coat. Despite the woman in the flared coat.
She knows she will be hard on Victor. Will make him sweat his way back to her. It’s for herself she’ll do that—not for him. Quite likely, she won’t trust him when he is away from her, at least not for many months. Until, gradually, she won’t have to remind herself to be hard on him. And maybe there’ll be a day when she won’t question where he’s been without her, a day when she won’t need to hold back with her love.
When she wakes before dawn, he’s lying on his side watching her as though he hadn’t slept at all. Moon paints his slick face, face of the moon, slick and bleached, face of a man whose skin is slick and bleached as moon—
He lays one fingertip against the base of her throat. “You turned to me while you were sleeping, mia cara.”
She swallows. Feels her throat against his skin.
“Your body turned toward me. I didn’t move. Your throat—” He stops. His eyes are on the wedding photo above the dresser.
She waits for him to question why it no longer includes him.
“Your throat,” he says, “came to lie against my wrist. I felt your pulse in my wrist. It was…beautiful.”
Her pulse flickers against his fingertip the way he must have felt it in his wrist—beautiful, airy—and she’s suddenly glad he’s here. His touch makes it possible for her to imagine what it’ll be like to have his entire body against hers, soon, a hundredfold the sensation of her skin against his fingertip now. Not yet, she decides. And feels herself opening up. Opening—
But he says, “I thought this is what it must feel like to carry a baby.”
“Don’t,” she warns him. He has been so careful with her. Grateful to be back home with her and Anthony. And he still doesn’t understand how these words are slicing through her.
“That kind of nearness”—face of a man whose skin is slick and bleached as moon—“like the baby is already living beneath your own skin…”
She sees herself alone, in this very bed, after Victor’s death, reminding herself how his face looked the first night he was back after cheating on her—face of the moon, slick and bleached, face of a man whose skin is slick and bleached as death—
“I was thinking,” Victor murmurs, “how that’s something only women experience, but when your throat was against my wrist, I understood what it must be like, being pregnant.”
“You can’t,” she says. “You can’t understand.” Is this what their marriage has been like all along? Even during those moments when she believed they knew each other? Is it all that simple to him? What about the nuances? The grooves and the folds?
“Not the same, of course,” he says. “Just almost like it.”
“It is nothing like being pregnant,” she tells him firmly.
What she does not tell him is that pregnant means afraid. After losing the first one, you no longer know how to carry a child without fear. The child and the fear start living inside you at the same instant, and both grow within you until the child will bleed from you. While the fear recedes to your womb, ready to swaddle the next child. The shame of having yet another child fall from you. The whispers: “Leonora lost another one….” Each child falling from you sooner. Four lost. Only one born: Anthony. Who was your first pregnancy. An eight-months baby. Living. A pregnancy still untainted by fear. Anthony, who started inside your womb one month after you married Victor. Since then, all others have fallen from you: after five months; after three months; after two months; and the last one barely taking root in your womb before your body cast it out. Amazing to think you could be raising five children so far. God forbid. Given the choice—
Don’t think it.
Still, given the choice—would you want to raise one or five? But what if you had other choices? Two children? Three? You could handle two or three children. But the question you must push yourself toward is this: five or one? And the answer is savage. One. Given the choice. Given the four babies that fell from you. No. You would have chosen the one.
“Feeling your pulse in my body,” Victor tells her, “was sacred.”
Book Two
Floria 1975
At the Proper Hour
The Italian words of her childhood that come back to Floria have to do with music and food. Her father listening to his opera records: sacred time. Her mother cooking: sacred time. Un bel di vedremo. Fragole. Scarola. La forza del destino. Costoletta. Una furtiva lagrima. Insalate. Tarantella. Dolce.
It’s her first trip to Liguria, and she has come alone to Santa Margherita, to this hotel that was a convent for centuries. Perhaps the nuns scattered during the war years and forgot to reconvene. Some may have married. A different altar. No longer a bridegr
oom in spirit only.
There is an odd allure to being inside this convent as a woman who has conceived and borne children. Cats approach her window as she rolls down her black stockings, as she empties her suitcase. She has packed lightly: her black nylon slip doubles as a nightgown, her black raincoat as a bathrobe, and her black sandals as slippers.
Two cats lean against her window as if expecting the glass to yield to the pressure of their bodies: a ginger cat with white paws; and a brown cat whose fur, beneath the brown, reveals the blurred markings of a much wilder and larger cat. Far below the cats lies a courtyard, and across the courtyard rise the clay roofs of red-and-ocher buildings. Beyond them curves the harbor, where veins of land fuse the hills to the sea.
Sundown blurs into dusk, and an old woman appears in the alcove of a nearby roof: first her head, then her arms, her waist, as she climbs laboriously from a stairwell. Her shawl—the same implausible shade of turquoise as the scalloped bay behind her—shrouds her hair and the shoulders of her red bathrobe. As she flings food scraps into the dusk, pigeons plummet from all directions of sky like falling children, flicker around her till they become extensions of her: one body with countless heads and wings, easily startled into separate birds if anyone were to move abruptly.
In the hills beyond the old woman, Floria can make out the village where her father was born. Nozarego. The name reminds her of Nazareth, conjuring olive groves, money changers in the temple, donkeys on dust-brown paths. In Nozarego, the largest structure is the church where her father celebrated his first communion. The following year his family moved to Mestre, a city as sprawling and ugly—so he has told Floria—as Nozarego is contained and beautiful. When his family took a freighter from Genoa to New York, he believed he’d eventually return to Nozarego; but he hasn’t been back, though he likes villages better than cities and sees the Bronx as temporary. Too noisy, he likes to say, too confusing, too drab. And yet, he came to love the Bronx for giving him employment in a salvage yard, for letting him afford an attached house on Castle Hill Avenue, where he renovated the deep space beneath the stairway into a music room with an angled ceiling.