CHAPTER TWELVE
The Marriage I Remember
I couldn’t sleep that night, so I went down to the library and sat in the window seat with a blanket, and instead of adding up what had gone wrong, I made myself remember.
I needed to. I had spent three weeks adding up small hurts until they’d started to feel like the whole of the marriage, and I knew they weren’t.
I’d been there for the rest of it. I made myself go back through the rest of it on purpose, the way you walk back through a house you’re thinking of leaving, room by room, to see what you’d actually be losing.
* * *
Our first date was at Tavola. Five months into the marriage.
He came home on a Thursday in October and stood in the kitchen doorway with his hands in his pockets, and asked, looking at somewhere over my left shoulder, whether I’d like to go out to dinner.
Just the two of us. Somewhere nobody in the family would be.
I said yes before I’d thought about it.
He chose Tavola because it was small and in the wrong part of Arthur Avenue and his father had never heard of it.
He’d clearly researched it. He’d clearly also researched wine, because when the waiter came he ordered with great confidence a Montepulciano that turned out to be very sweet and slightly fizzy and entirely wrong with the osso buco he’d ordered for me without asking, because he still thought I loved osso buco.
“This wine is terrible,” I said, after the first sip. It came out before I could stop it.
He looked at me. I thought I’d ruined it. Then he took a sip of his own and his face did something extraordinary and he said, very seriously, “It’s so bad, Vivienne,” and I laughed so hard the couple at the next table turned around.
We stayed until closing. He told me about his grandfather, who’d come from Palermo with a stovetop coffeepot and nothing else, and who’d taught him to fish off City Island.
I told him about Dr. Fenwick, and the Memling, and the fact that I’d wanted to be a museum curator since I was eleven, which I’d never told anyone in his family.
He asked me questions about it all the way home in the car, and at the front door he stopped and said, “I had a good time,” as though it surprised him, and I said, “So did I,” and it surprised me too.
Sergio, the owner, came to our table every anniversary after that with the same bottle of that same terrible Montepulciano and pretended to be insulted when we ordered it.
* * *
In our second year, in the spring after the pneumonia, Elena and Paolo celebrated their fortieth anniversary, and Dante and I decided to cook them dinner ourselves, as a gift. Neither of us could cook. That seemed, somehow, beside the point.
We tried to make Zia Lucia’s gravy from memory.
We burned the garlic twice. The braciole came apart in the pot.
The pasta was underdone, then overdone, because we’d put the second batch in to compensate for the first and forgotten about both.
At seven thirty, half an hour before his parents were due, the smoke alarm went off and Ines came running from the laundry room and stood in the kitchen doorway with her hands over her mouth.
Dante looked at the pot. I looked at Dante. He had tomato sauce on his forehead.
“We could order pizza,” I said.
“We could order pizza,” he agreed.
We ordered four pizzas from the place on Central Avenue, and put them on Elena’s good china, and when his parents arrived we presented them as though we’d made them ourselves.
Paolo laughed so hard he had to sit down.
Elena was appalled and then, very slightly, charmed.
After they left, Dante and I sat on the kitchen floor with our backs against the cabinets and ate the last cold slices out of the box, and he said, “That was the worst dinner party in the history of this family,” and I said, “Best one I’ve ever been to,” and he looked at me sideways and bumped his shoulder against mine.
* * *
The docent training ended in June of our fourth year with a small ceremony in a side gallery at the museum.
It wasn’t much, just twelve of us and some plastic cups of white wine and a curator who read our names off a list. I hadn’t mentioned it to Dante.
It had seemed too small. He had a meeting that afternoon with the port authority, the kind of meeting that had been on his calendar for three months.
I stood with the other docents while the curator read out the names, and when she got to mine and I went up to take my certificate, I heard someone at the back of the room clapping, alone, a beat too early and too loud.
It was Dante. In his suit, standing against the back wall between two Hudson River School landscapes, with his phone in his pocket and no one from his office anywhere in sight.
Afterward I asked him how he’d known.
“Ines,” he said. “She saw it on your calendar.”
“What about the port authority?”
“I told them my wife was graduating.” He shrugged, as though that settled it. “They moved it to Thursday.”
He took me to dinner afterward and made me tell him everything, every painting I’d be leading tours through, and at the end of the evening he said, “You should have told me,” and I said, “I didn’t think you’d come,” and he looked at me for a long moment and said, “I’ll always come. Tell me next time.”
* * *
There were Sunday mornings. So many Sunday mornings that I couldn’t separate them anymore.
They blended together into one long unhurried morning in bed with the papers spread across the duvet and coffee on both nightstands.
I’d do the crossword and he’d read the business section, and every so often he’d read a sentence aloud in someone’s voice: his father’s, or his uncle Sal’s, or a newscaster’s, so perfectly that I’d lose my place in the crossword laughing.
He always did the clue I couldn’t get, without looking up, and never once asked whether I wanted help first. I’d pretend to be annoyed. He knew I wasn’t.
There was the ice storm in our third January, when the power went out for two days and the generator failed and Grant couldn’t get a technician up the hill until the roads were cleared.
Dante sent all the staff home to their families before the storm hit, and so it was just the two of us, in the biggest house on the road, with no heat.
We moved into the library because it had the fireplace, and dragged the mattress from the guest room down the stairs, which took forty minutes and a great deal of swearing, and lived in front of that fire for two days like people camping in a museum.
We cooked soup on the grate and read by candlelight, him on one end of the mattress and me on the other with our feet tangled together under the blankets, and when I got bored with my book he read me the quarterly shipping report in Paolo’s voice until I laughed so hard I knocked over a candle and nearly set the rug on fire.
On the second night, lying in the dark with the fire burning down, he said, “I don’t want the power to come back,” and I said, “Neither do I,” and we lay there listening to the ice ticking against the windows and didn’t say anything else for a long time.
There was Christmas at Linden Avenue two years ago, when Elena handed me a wrapped box in front of the whole family and I opened it to find a cookbook called Simple Italian Cooking for Beginners. Everyone laughed a little uncomfortably. I thanked her and said it would be very useful.
Under the table, Dante’s hand found mine. He squeezed it three times.
He’d done that since our first year, at every stiff family dinner, at every function where I didn’t know anyone. Three squeezes. We’d never discussed what it meant, and it didn’t need discussing. It meant I’m here, and I see you, and we’ll laugh about this in the car.
We did laugh about it in the car. He did Elena’s voice saying for beginners until I had to beg him to stop because I couldn’t breathe.
* * *
In our fifth winter, Dante’s grandfather died.
He was ninety-four and it was expected, but Dante had loved that old man more than anyone else in his family, and he went through the wake and the funeral mass and the long line of mourners at Linden Avenue with his face like a closed door.
He shook two hundred hands. He comforted his father. He organized the cars.
That night I found him in the garage, sitting in the driver’s seat of his grandfather’s old Buick, which nobody had driven in six years, with the door open and his hands on the wheel.
I didn’t say anything. I got in on the passenger side and closed the door, and after a long time he said, “He taught me to drive in this car. In the church parking lot on Sundays. He’d yell at me in Sicilian the whole time,” and then his face came apart, and I had never seen him cry before and didn’t know what to do, so I put my arms around him across the front seat of that old Buick and held on until he was finished.
He didn’t mention it afterward. Neither did I. But for months after, when he came home late from something hard, he’d find me wherever I was in the house and just stand close to me for a moment without saying anything, as though checking that I was still there.
* * *
Two years ago my father had heart surgery at Hackensack.
Dante did not like my father. He’d never said so, but he didn’t have to.
He’d sat across from him at the negotiating table seven years earlier and watched him trade his only daughter for the settlement of a feud he’d started, and there were things Dante couldn’t forgive in a man, and that was one of them.
He came anyway. He drove me there at five in the morning and sat beside me in the surgical waiting room for nine hours on a molded plastic chair.
He brought me coffee every two hours without asking.
He made calls in the hallway and came back and sat down again, and when the surgeon came out to tell us it had gone well, Dante stood up first and shook the man’s hand and asked four intelligent questions about recovery that I hadn’t thought to ask.
When my father woke up, Dante went in with me.
My father looked at him from the bed with gray, frightened eyes, and Dante put his hand briefly on my father’s shoulder and said, “You’re going to be fine, Tony.
Vivienne’s here.” That was all. Then he went back out to the hallway and let me be with my father alone.
In the car afterward I thanked him.
“For what?”
“For coming. I know you don’t like him.”
He was quiet for a mile. “I don’t have to like him,” he said finally. “He’s yours.”
* * *
And there was the pneumonia, which I kept coming back to, though not to the toast or the thriller.
What I remembered on the window seat that night was something the day nurse told me on the fourth morning, when I was well enough to sit up.
She was changing the sheets, and she said, casually, “Your husband’s something.
Three nights and he didn’t let me take a single shift. I offered. He said no every time.”
“He had work,” I said. “He must have been exhausted.”
“He had me cancel a flight to Chicago,” she said.
“The first night. He said it wasn’t important.
” She smoothed the pillowcase. “I’ve done this job twenty-two years, Mrs. Moretti.
I can tell you when a man’s sitting up with his wife because he’s supposed to and when he’s sitting up because he can’t do anything else. That one couldn’t do anything else.”
I’d never told Dante she’d said it. I’d kept it the way I kept the word home, somewhere private where he couldn’t take it back by noticing.
* * *
I sat in the window seat until the sky started to go gray over the garden.
I had not invented this marriage. I needed that to be true, and it was.
Every one of those memories was real. He had stood at the back of a museum gallery clapping too early.
He had sat on the kitchen floor with tomato sauce on his forehead eating cold pizza.
He’d cancelled a flight to Chicago and not told me.
He’d squeezed my hand three times under his mother’s table, more times than I could count.
The man who’d done those things was the same man who’d moved the rocking chair, and forgotten Tavola, and said enough, Ma, as though it were a joke.
He hadn’t stopped loving me. I didn’t believe that for a second, sitting there in the dawn.
He’d simply come to believe that what we’d built was finished, that it would stand on its own now without either of us holding it up, so he could turn his attention elsewhere and trust it to be there when he turned back.
And I had let him believe it. That was the part I couldn’t get away from. For seven years I’d held it up so quietly that neither of us had noticed I was doing it.
Mr. Hinge started up in the oak outside at six fifteen. I went upstairs and got back into bed beside my husband, and he reached for me in his sleep without waking and pulled me in against him, the way he did every morning, as though his body knew exactly where I was.
* * *