CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SALVATORE
I come to the house at seven and she is already dressed.
Black. Long sleeves, high neck, nothing on her except my grandmother's earrings, which Bruna has clearly produced from somewhere without asking anybody, and her mother's ring on the right hand.
She is standing in the hall with her coat over her arm.
"Do I look like a wife," she says.
"Yes."
"Do I look like a wife from Bensonhurst or a wife from Oyster Bay."
"There's no difference to them."
"There's an enormous difference to them," Adelina says, "and I worked four nights a week for six years in a room full of these men and I know exactly how much difference there is, so try again."
I stand in my own hall.
"Bensonhurst," I say. "You look like a woman who has worked, and it's in your hands and it's in how fast you clear a table, and there is nothing either of us can do about it in two hours."
"Good," she says.
"Good?"
"I'm not spending a Sunday pretending I went to a school."
We do it at the dining table with the leaves out.
I put nine glasses on it in the shape of the room.
"Him at the head. Teresa D'Amico there, left. Rocco Agnelli there. Nunzio Ferraro there, and Nunzio will talk, and if you take one thing out of the next twenty minutes let it be that everything Nunzio Ferraro says in that room is being said to Vincenzo and not to you."
"Where am I."
I move a glass.
"There," I say.
"Next to Castellano."
"Next to Castellano."
She looks at the table for a second.
Then she says, "And where are you," and I move the last glass down to the other end, five places away, on the diagonal, and she looks at that too.
"Right," she says.
Here is what I expect.
I expect to spend forty minutes explaining a room to a girl who has never been in one, and to fail, because you cannot explain it, and then to spend two hours at a table watching her get things slightly wrong and knowing that every single one of them is being written down.
Here is what happens.
"Teresa D'Amico's going to be the dangerous one," Adelina says, about eleven minutes in.
I stop.
"Why do you say that."
"Because she's the only woman who's ever sat at it, and she got the seat when her husband died, which means for about two years every man in that room was waiting for her to be bad at it.
" She has both hands flat on the table looking at nine glasses.
"So she'll be kind to me. She'll be really kind.
She'll ask me about my mother and she'll ask me about Matteo and she'll tell me something about herself that sounds private and isn't, and at the end of it she'll know everything and she'll like me, and she'll still say whatever she was always going to say. "
The radiator knocks.
"That's exactly right," I say.
"I've met her about four hundred times. She comes into Da Gio on a Thursday. Different woman, same job." Adelina moves a glass an inch. "And this one, Agnelli, he's money, you said. He won't talk to me at all."
"He won't look at you."
"He'll look at me when I'm not looking at him. That's a different thing and it's worse."
"And Barone," she says.
"What about him."
"You haven't said anything about Barone, and he's the only one that matters, and you've been talking for forty minutes." She is looking at the glass at the head of the table. "Why."
I sit down.
There is a thing I have been avoiding since Friday and it is about to happen at my own dining table with nine glasses on it, and there is nothing at all I can do about it, because she asked, and because she asked properly.
"Because he's dying," I say.
She does not say anything.
"Pancreatic. Diagnosed in July. Nobody has said it out loud in front of me and nobody is going to, and everything that is happening in this city right now is happening because of a date that old man has been given and has not told anybody."
"How long."
"Months."
"Salvatore." She sits down too, across the table. "How do you feel about that."
And nobody has ever asked me that question in my life, about anything, and the fact that she asks it in a completely ordinary voice, in a dining room, on a Sunday, about a man she is going to eat lunch with in ninety minutes, is the reason I answer it.
"He put a gun in my mouth when I was seventeen and then took it out again," I say.
"And he has had his hand on the back of my neck ever since, and the last time my mother was ever in a room with me I was eleven years old, and there is a part of me that is going to stand at that man's grave and not know what to do with my hands. "
The house is very quiet.
"Okay," Adelina says.
"That's all of it."
"I know." She straightens a glass. "That's why you keep not saying things. Because when you do, they come out like that."
She is better at it than I am.
I want that written down because I have thought about it every day since. I have been in those rooms for eighteen years and I read them the way I read a street, which is exits, distances, hands, who is armed, who is lying.
She reads what they want.
In forty minutes at a dining table with nine glasses she gets to things I have had to be told by Tommaso, and she gets to them off six years of Thursdays on Eighteenth Avenue, and when I say so she goes red from the throat up and says, "It's just tables," and moves a glass.
"It isn't just tables."
"Salvatore."
"I've had a consigliere and eighteen years and I did not have Teresa D'Amico until about four minutes ago."
"You did have her. You've got a whole thing about her. You said she's the only one you respect."
"I respect her," I say. "I did not know why she'd be kind to you."
And my wife looks at me across a dining table with nine glasses on it, in black, in my mother's earrings, five days into not speaking to me, and something goes across her face that neither of us is ready for.
She looks away first.
"We should go," she says.
I drive.
Frankie takes the second car and goes ahead and we do not speak from the gate to the parkway, which is eleven minutes, and then she says, without looking at me:
"Say the thing you said in the kitchen again."
"Which thing."
"About having nothing. About Castellano." She has her hands in her lap. "You said he sent us glasses."
"He did send us glasses."
"Say the rest of it."
I change lanes.
"There's no rest of it."
"There is absolutely a rest of it," Adelina says, "because you stood in my kitchen on Friday and told me I was going to like a man and enjoy sitting next to him and that you'd have to watch, and you said it completely flat, and I have been thinking about the way you said it for two days."
"Adelina."
"Was that the one true sentence?"
And I take my foot off the gas without deciding to, and a car goes past on the inside with its horn going, and about four hundred yards further on there is a service road with a chain across it and a sign about a water authority, and I put the car up it and stop.
"No," I say. "That wasn't it."
"Then what."
"Not in a car on the way to that house."
"Then when?" She has turned in the seat. "When, Salvatore? Because there's always a reason it isn't now. Not today, not this morning, not in a car, and in the meantime I'm living in your house with your dead mother's coat on and I cannot work out whether I'm a person or an."
And I get a hand into the back of her hair and put my mouth on hers.
She does not stop me.
She gets a fistful of my shirt and pulls, hard enough to take a button off, and there is a noise in her throat that is about ninety per cent fury, and I get the seat back with my other hand and she comes over the console into my lap in a black dress at twenty past twelve on a Sunday on a service road off the Belt Parkway.
It is nothing like the first one.
The first one took three hours and she said every single thing out loud and I did exactly what she said in the order she said it.
This one takes about nine minutes and there is not one complete sentence in it.
She gets my belt. I get the dress up round her hips and my hand between us and she makes a sound with her forehead against mine that takes the top off my head, and she says, "Don't," and I stop dead with my hand exactly where it is.
"Don't stop," she says. "Don't you dare, I said don't, I didn't say."
"Say it properly."
"I hate you."
"Say it properly, Adelina."
And she says it properly, right into my mouth, in about four words, and I do it, and she puts both hands flat on the roof of the car.
Afterwards she does not move.
She sits in my lap in a black dress with her face in the side of my neck and her heart going, and the engine is off, and out past the chain there is a water authority sign and a hedge and the noise of the parkway.
"This doesn't fix anything," she says.
"No."
"I'm still going to."
"I know."
"You lied to me."
"I did not lie to you," I say, "and I am going to say that once and then I am going to stop saying it, because a man who says it more than once is lying."
She sits up.
She looks at me a long time with her hair completely destroyed and her mouth swollen and eleven minutes of the Belt Parkway going past the end of a service road, and she says:
"You've got a button off."
"Yes."
"There's a button gone off your shirt and we are going to a lunch."
"There's a coat."
"You cannot sit at Vincenzo Barone's table in a coat," my wife says, and she is already getting her bag, and she has a needle and thread out of it in about nine seconds, because of course she does, because she has carried a needle and thread in a bag since she was fifteen years old and worked in a restaurant where the aprons went.
She sews the button back on in the car.
With the button in her teeth and the shirt still on me and her knees in the seat, and it takes four minutes, and not one word gets said in the whole of it.
We come up Todt Hill at one minute to one.
There are seven cars on that drive. There is a dark green one on the end with its nose out.
Adelina puts her hand flat on the inside of the door and does not open it.
"Hey," she says.
"What."
"Whatever happens in there."
"Adelina."
"No, listen to me, because I'm not going to get to say it for two hours.
" She does not look at me. "I'm angry with you and I'm going to be angry with you at that table and I'll be angry with you in the car on the way home.
But I'm not theirs. I want you to have that.
I don't know what else I've got to give you today but you can have that one, and it's true, and it'll still be true at four o'clock. "
And then she gets out of the car before I can say anything at all, and straightens her coat, and walks up Vincenzo Barone's drive.