Epilogue
Gabriele
There is no possibility of me ever perfecting my wife's nose if she won't sit still for five minutes. I’ve been working on it for months, creating one drawing after another and discarding them all because there’s alway something not quite.
I don’t often get the opportunity to sit and draw so her endless fidgeting is doubly exasperating.
She's been reading something on her phone since we came out to the terrace and she's growing increasingly agitated about whatever it is she's reading. I put my sketchpad down.
"What is the matter with you?" I ask.
"Have you read this?" She turns the phone toward me and pulls it back before I have any hope of reading it. "Listen. Beauty and the Beast — Rome's Most Notorious Couple."
"Hmm," I say, not particularly interested in what some tabloid has written about us. There have been plenty of stories over the past few months, most of them wildly inaccurate.
"I'm notorious now apparently." She reads on and shakes her head. "They call me a Russian socialite." She looks up. "I am not a socialite." She goes back to the phone and then makes a sound of annoyance "One year on."
"What?" I ask. She’s lost me now.
"They've written one year on." She sets the phone face down on the table and looks at me despairingly. "From our first public appearance together at the San Giovanni Ball, they wrote one year on." She taps the phone. "It's been ten months."
"Is that the part that bothers you?"
"It's sloppy." She picks the phone back up and purses her lips in disgust. “We should sue.”
“For what? Getting the length of our relationship wrong?”
“No, for calling me notorious. That’s defamation surely.”
“They called me notorious too,” I point out. “Notorious couple”
“Yes, but it suits you.”
I snort indignantly. “Uh, it suits you too.”
She looks at me. "I am forthright, that’s all."
"You told the wife of a sitting senator that her hat looked like a dying bird."
"It did look like a dying bird. The thing flapped like it was fighting for life."
"You also told the cultural attaché from the French embassy that his taste in art was pedestrian."
"It was pedestrian. He had a Monet print in his dining room, Gabriele. A print!"
I look at her across the table and smile.
The terrace is warm already, the morning sun catching the garden she's made of the space behind this house.
The flowerbeds she had planted along the south wall are bursting with color.
She's made it her mission to beautify our home and grounds, even going as far as to build a trellis over the guardhouse which has roses climbing it.
"I like that you're notorious," I tell her. "It makes me look good if my wife's a badass."
She looks at me and grins.
"That's true," she says. Then she picks up her coffee, signaling the subject is closed. She knows when she's won a victory and when not to belabor a point. As she sips her coffee and looks out over the gardens, I think about how far we've come.
Thanks to her I've mended my relationship with my brothers. Damiano didn't fully understand my anxiety. How could he, when he's moved through the world with such authority, expecting everyone to work around him? He accepted it though, and told me nothing would make him think less of me.
Lorenzo simply nodded and said he always knew his big brother was different. Then he joked about my scars because my brother and emotions don't do well together.
Katya found out about Eliza three months ago. She was furious on my behalf, shouting and issuing threats she would never carry out. Then the subject was over for us. Eliza is Adriano’s problem now.
I don't fully understand why anxiety arrives harder on some days than others. It simply does, and trying to fight it only makes it worse. It helps having Katya with me. Everything is easier with her in my life. Well, not easier exactly. She is not what you’d call undemanding.
But she always knows what to say or do to make me feel better about things.
After a while she looks up and catches me watching her.
"What?" she says.
"Nothing."
She holds my gaze for a moment. Then she sets the phone down and looks at me properly, the way she looks at me when she's decided to say something she's been carrying.
"Gabriele," she says.
"Mm."
"I love you."
Hearing that will never get old. I reach across the table and take her hand.
"I know," I say.
She raises an eyebrow. "That's all I get?"
The corner of my mouth twitches. "No." I hold her gaze. "I love you too, Katya."
She leans back in her chair and turns her face toward the sun. I pick up my sketchpad and pencil and start to draw.