Chapter 11 Off Season
Alessandro
Five o’clock. The lake hadn’t picked a color yet, and the mountains across it were only a darker gray on the gray.
He came down the back stairs with the car keys in his fist. Any other morning they’d have gone up in the air on the landing and come down into his palm on the last step. He kept his hand shut around them.
The kitchen light was on. Rosa stood at the stove in her silk robe with the small pot going, the one that made two cups, her hair already brushed.
He had never once in his life come into this kitchen and found it empty.
As a boy he used to try. Down in the dark with his shoes in his hand, and there she’d be, and Grandpa at the table with the paper, not looking up.
She poured two cups and pushed one across the table at him. Then she looked at the keys.
“You’re doing it again.”
“I’m doing the opposite.”
He’d built the sentence on the stairs, a piece on every step, and it came out over the cup in the order he’d built it. If he stayed, she’d have to decide about him. If he went, she got to decide about herself. He wasn’t going to stand in the yard and be in the way of it.
Rosa drank. She had a way of drinking coffee that was the same as saying nothing.
“That’s a pretty sentence. Say it to her.”
“She’d say I don’t know.”
“Then you’d have an answer.”
He turned his cup a quarter turn on the wood.
Yesterday, under the bridge, she’d said I can’t, and then said it again with her hand out of his.
Marco would have it around the house by lunch: the signorino, gone by fall, like he’d said.
Marco would be right about the leaving and wrong about the reason, and Alessandro wasn’t going to stay in the yard to argue it.
Behind her the window had gone from black to the color of dishwater, and the far shore still wasn’t there.
“Tell the American I’m not in her way.”
“Tell her yourself.”
He didn’t.
He drank the coffee standing, as he’d drunk it for five years, next to a car with the engine running. Too hot. He drank it anyway.
“When the storms come,” he said, “keep an eye on the north corner.”
“I’ve watched that roof thirty years without you.”
She didn’t get up. She sat with both hands around her cup and went on sitting. In July she’d come down the front steps to him and kissed both his cheeks more times than anyone could count. Now she stayed in her chair, on her side of the table. That was how he knew what she thought of it.
He rinsed the cup and set it upside down on the rack, so she wouldn’t have that to wash as well.
The lobby was dark except for the lamp on the desk.
It stayed on all night, for whoever came down, and under it the kitten was a small orange heap on the wood.
A month out of the lake and he already owned the desk.
Romeo lifted his head. He got down for two people in this house, and the other one was three years old and asleep in the staff wing, so he got down now, landing heavier than a thing his size should, and walked ahead to the front door with his tail up, like Marco walking a guest to the stairs.
At the door he sat, on the tiles just inside it, and looked out at the yard, and stayed there. Alessandro pulled the door to behind him.
The yard was wet, with the air off the water in it.
The olive stood where Grandpa had put it the summer he married her, and Alessandro’s palm went to the cracked bark as it had gone there the day he arrived, without asking him first. The bark was cold and held the damp.
He left his hand on it longer than he meant to.
Across the yard the staff wing was one dark wall. Her window was the third from the end, garden side. He’d known which one since July and never stood under it, and he didn’t cross the gravel to it now.
The car was where it always was. He got in and shut the door like there was a child asleep in the back.
The gravel was loud. At five in the morning, with the lake flat and the house asleep, the tires on it sounded like the whole villa being shaken awake, and nothing in the villa moved. He didn’t look at the place he’d left. He looked at the road, and then at the mirror.
In the mirror, through the glass of the front door, the desk lamp still on with nobody at it.
Kate
The last guests went in October. By November the terrace furniture stood under canvas covers tied at the legs, a row of gray humps along the water, and the lake had gone the same color as the canvas. I wrote the empty rooms into the ledger anyway, a line a day, out of habit.
The olive got picked in November, as Rosa said it had been for a hundred years.
In practice that meant a net under the tree and whoever was still in the house.
There was one ladder. Pietro had it, because he’d been standing next to it before anyone else came out.
Chiara and I took the low branches. You didn’t pick, it turned out.
You shook, and the olives came down on the net with a sound like hard rain, and the ones that missed the net skittered across the gravel and nobody went after them.
Maddie was in charge of the bucket. It was the storm bucket from the storeroom, galvanized, with the dent in one side, because it was the only bucket the villa owned and nobody in a hundred years had thought to buy a second one.
She held the handle with both hands the whole morning and let no one else near it.
Rosa sat in one of her wicker chairs, which Pietro had carried down from her terrace before he’d let anyone touch a branch, in a camel coat with the collar up and her hands in the pockets. She didn’t touch an olive. She ran it.
“Not that one. Again.” Chiara shook it again. “Done. Next.”
“How can you tell?” I asked.
“Long enough, kiddo.”
Pietro said something down the ladder about my grip on the branch. I got all of it, including the word Chiara wouldn’t have translated.
Then the counting started. Maddie knelt at the edge of the net, picked the olives up one at a time, dropped them into the bucket and counted them in, out loud, in Italian.
Uno. Due. Tre. Her summer program in town had counted in Italian, as it did everything, and she’d come home in July counting the stairs in a language I didn’t have yet.
I let go of the branch to listen. Quattro, cinque, sei. Sette.
My hand was already up. Every count she’d ever done had stopped there, boats at a window while a suitcase got packed behind us, and my hand knew the number before I did.
“Otto,” Maddie said, and picked up the next one. “Nove.”
I put my hand back on the branch.
Rosa was looking at me. Not at the bucket and not at the child. She looked for as long as it took Maddie to get to twelve. Then she said the sack went to the mill in the morning and I was taking it.
“Pietro takes it.”
“Pietro’s cooking. You’re taking it.”
“Pieno!” Maddie shouted, with the bucket at her knees, and Pietro came down the ladder to tip it into the sack, and she watched every olive go as if he might keep one.
The mill in town, the next morning, was a long shed with a line of men in it who all knew Rosa’s name and none of whom asked mine, and the sack went in at one end and a tin came out the other.
Back in the kitchen Pietro cut the bread. Rosa poured the oil onto it herself, green and cloudy from the press, and pushed the plate across the table at me.
I ate it. “It’s bitter.”
“Sweetest on the lake,” Rosa said.
“It’s bitter, Rosa.”
“Give it a year.”
I didn’t give it a year. It was bitter that afternoon and it was going to be bitter next November, and I said so, and Pietro put a second piece on the plate without looking at me and went back to the stove.
Afterward I went out to the yard. The net was rolled and the ladder was gone back to wherever Pietro kept it. The bucket was still under the tree where Maddie had left it the day before, with a few olives in the bottom that nobody had counted.
Nobody had said his name all day. Nobody had said it the day before either, on the net, with the branches going.
The tree didn’t need anyone to. There was a place on the bark, at the height of a man’s shoulder, where a palm had gone flat against it in July and asked whether it still bore anything.
As far as I was concerned the print was in there now, in the cracks, like a hand in wet cement.
It bore. I didn’t put my own hand anywhere near it.
I picked up the bucket myself and carried it into the storeroom and set it back under the shelf, where the storms would find it. Through the open door Maddie was out on the gravel with the ones that had missed the net, counting them into her fist for Rosa, and got to seven, and went past it.
Otto.
Alessandro
The harbor at Monaco did what it did in November, which was pretend it was still August. The yacht was one he’d slept on before, more than once.
Everyone on the deck below him was someone he’d known for five years and hadn’t missed, and the music came out of somebody’s phone through the boat’s speakers, one song after another that all turned out to be the same song.
He was up top by himself with his back to the rail.
The glass in his hand had been full since ten.
The ice had gone to water and the water had gone warm, and he kept holding it because a man on this boat with nothing in his hand got asked what was wrong.
His phone lay face-down on the rail beside his elbow, on teak worn through its varnish by other people’s elbows.
Below, somebody laughed the laugh people laughed on this boat, at nothing, for the sound of it.
He’d been good at that laugh. He’d been the best on the deck at it.
There was a time he could have told you, without turning around, which of the faces down there would be gone by Christmas and which would still be here, at this table, telling the same story with the names changed.
Most of them were still here. That had been the point of the place once.
Nobody ever left it for long, and here he was.
The woman came up the steps and leaned on the rail a foot from him. One shoulder bare, a bracelet on the near wrist, and the bracelet caught the light off the water before anything else about her did. She looked where he was looking, which was at nothing.
“You’ve been somewhere else all night.”
“I’ve been right here. That’s the problem.”
She turned that over. Down below the song changed to the same song. “Who is she?”
“Nobody you’d believe.”
She laughed, one short laugh, not unkind.
“Then good luck to her.” She touched his arm with the hand that had the bracelet on it and went back down the steps, and he stayed where he was.
A year ago he would’ve been behind her before her foot found the second step, and known what to say by the third.
He didn’t need to check whether he still remembered how.
He remembered. That wasn’t the thing he’d lost.
The host’s voice came up the companionway with the smell of the food. “Alessandro. We’re sitting down. Come eat something before it’s all gone.”
“In a minute.”
He turned the phone over.
The number at the top of the list was the villa’s desk, the landline, looked up in October in a hotel room on this coast and put in the phone and never pressed.
It had stayed at the top ever since because he kept opening it.
Eleven forty. Marco went home at eleven; Marco had always gone home at eleven.
Whoever was at the desk now, under the lamp, with the cat asleep on the wood, would be her. If anyone was.
He could see the desk from here better than he could see the table below him.
The lamp lit a circle of the desk and not much more.
The rest of the lobby went dark to the stairs.
She’d have one hand on the cat without looking at it, the way she did by eleven.
That phone had a sound in that lobby, a hard double ring that came back off the stone floor, and she got it on the second ring.
He’d stood at the foot of the stairs one night in August and counted, for no reason he’d have said out loud.
He didn’t press it.
He put the words in order instead. He’d been putting them in order for two months, in the car, in rooms like the one on this coast, and the order kept changing, so this time he said them, low, to the harbor, where the water could hear how they sounded.
“It’s me. Nothing’s wrong. I only wanted.”
That was as far as it got. From her end it was a man on a boat in Monaco at eleven forty at night, music behind him, a glass he wasn’t drinking, calling a hotel desk to say nothing was wrong.
To a woman with the ledger still open under the lamp and a bucket to remember if the wind turned.
He’d left that desk so he wouldn’t be in her way. This was in her way with a longer cord.
He turned the phone over again and laid his hand flat on it, the way his grandmother laid hers on a bottle she’d decided not to open.
The harbor was lit end to end. The big boats had their lights down on the water and the hill had its own, and none of it landed on him.
In the old days he’d have been able to name every boat along the quay from up here by its lights alone, and half the people on them, and which of them owed him a dinner.
He looked down the row. He got two names in and quit.
Five years he’d come here for the colors.
That was the honest word for it, the colors, a night here looking like a night was supposed to look.
He looked at it now, the lights, the water, the faces coming up out of the companionway and going back down.
Every color he used to come here for had gone the flat color of the lake at five in the morning, the morning he’d stood in his grandmother’s kitchen and said nothing worth hearing.
He said the word for it, once, to nobody. Gray.
Below, the host was laughing at his own story. Somebody’s phone found a new song that was the old song. The woman with the bracelet had found someone to sit beside, and good for her, and good for him.
He took the bills out of his jacket, folded them once, and set them under the glass he hadn’t drunk from, enough for the table and enough over it that nobody could say he’d left without paying for his chair.
Then he put the jacket over his arm, went down the outside steps past the lit windows without looking in, and stepped off onto the quay.
The stone was wet from the harbor. The car was up the hill where he’d left it, on the wrong side of a sign, and his hand went into the jacket for the keys and found them.
He didn’t toss them. He put them in his pocket.