Chapter 19 The Gesture
Alessandro
The sea stayed in the mirror for one bend.
Then the hill took it, and the road went into the first tunnel and came out on the far side of the dark, and there was nothing behind him but his own taillights on wet rock.
He had the wheel in both hands. He didn’t drive that way.
He’d driven one-handed since the first car that was his, elbow on the door, and the other hand had always had somewhere else to be.
Tonight both of them stayed on the wheel, where he could see them.
The autostrada north was empty of everything but trucks.
He took them one at a time, at their speed, in their lane.
Nobody who’d taken a whole day to drive away had any business hurrying back.
The long wall of each went by close on the right, a driver’s face lit green above him for a second and then gone.
The tunnels came and went. In the gaps the hills stood black on black, and the air came over the door cold, and he let it.
He had the whole night and one thing to say.
It wasn’t a long thing. He’d had the shape of it since a dock in August and had never let it out of the car, and it was not going into a phone.
A phone put it in a lobby with the lamp on and the cat on the wood and a check-in due, and she’d have to stand there and take it with Marco’s list in her other hand.
It was going to her face, or it wasn’t going.
The needle had sat at the bottom since Genoa.
The first station was dark and he went by it.
The second had its island lit, white, one car under it, and a man in a quilted vest sitting on an upturned crate by the pumps with his chin on his chest. He stood when the engine came in.
He looked at the car as everyone looked at the car, then at the man in it, and put the nozzle in himself, and stood with one hand flat on the fender while the numbers ran.
“Where to, at this hour?”
“Como.”
“That’s three hours.”
“I know.”
The pump clicked off. The man hung the nozzle up, took the card, brought it back, and tipped his head at the bar behind him, where one light burned over the coffee machine and nobody stood behind it.
“Bar’s open, if you want something.”
“No.”
He pulled out. The island went small in the mirror and then went out behind a curve, and he had nothing in the car he hadn’t left with. The tank was full. That was all he’d stopped for.
The phone lay on the passenger seat where it had landed when he swung the car.
Face up. Every time the road ran straight he looked at it, and every time it was a black rectangle with the dashboard in it and nothing else.
Nobody called a man who’d left. That was what leaving was for.
He’d made sure of it years ago, and it still worked.
The desk number was still at the top of the list. He didn’t press it this time either. Past one. Whoever had the desk at one in the morning, one hand on the cat, was the person he was driving to. He turned the phone over without taking his eyes off the road, and drove on with it dark beside him.
A toll booth. The plain. Milan’s ring road at two in the morning, every lamp on and nobody under them.
He ran the year once, front to back, and his hands did it on the wheel.
A scrap of wet cat first, that weighed nothing and had every claw it owned in his knuckles, and under it the American’s waist inside his arm and the lake coming up over the boards.
Then a plane, the handle warm from an hour of work, a curl of wood on her cheekbone, and his thumb taking it off before he’d decided to.
Then the edge of a boat blanket, tucked under a shoulder no bigger than his palm, with her watching his hand do it.
Then six months with nothing in his hands but a wrench and a glass he wasn’t drinking.
April, a gray plank coming up soft off the end of the dock.
May, a window that stuck, and nine words about it, and none of them her name.
That was the year. Twelve months of things done with his hands within ten feet of her, and every time his mouth had opened it had come out a question.
What if. And what if. He’d given her a pepper for a name and a stack of questions to answer, and then he’d left her to answer them, twice, in the car he was sitting in.
He had never said it plainly. Not under the bridge, not in three months of walking a step behind her through her own hotel, and he’d told himself the whole time it was in his face for anyone to read.
The dashboard laid a green line along the backs of his hands.
Nobody had ever read his face for anything but the grin.
So that was the only thing to fix tonight. One sentence, plain, with nothing on the end of it she could hand back.
He didn’t have a ring. That came to him past the ring road, as a fact, like the tank had been a fact. Nothing was open between here and the lake that sold one, and he wouldn’t have stopped if it had. He left both hands on the wheel.
Four-thirty. The lake road came up off the plain and the fog was already on it, lying on the water and up over the wall, so the headlights went a car’s length and stopped.
He didn’t need them for this road. Wall, villa, white where the water should be.
The inlet went by on the right, no road down to it, the bridge in there with its green pool, and he didn’t slow.
The market town was asleep, shutters down, the square bare where the stalls would stand at eight. Then the shore road.
The last bend. He took it the way he’d taken it a hundred times, and the wall came up close on the right, and over it the olive, gray in the gray, the one thing in the fog with a shape.
The gate posts came up white out of it, and between them nothing, both halves back against the stone.
Open, as it stood all season. He’d gone out through it at this hour yesterday and it hadn’t moved.
His foot came off the gas for the first time since Genoa.
Kate
I spent my victory crying in an empty office. Toward morning the walls ran out of air, and I went out to the yard.
The villa was asleep. The lake lay flat and gray, no sun on it yet. I stood on the top step, facing the gate the red convertible had gone out of the morning he left. The win I’d walked a year toward tasted like a coin. Nothing behind it.
I was listening. Fog lay on the shore road, and the quiet had one engine missing from it.
Then a sound from the road, and I decided I was making it up. An expensive, lazy roar I’d have known out of a thousand.
The red convertible came out of the fog and stopped dead at the foot of the steps, on the one forbidden spot, where it had stopped last summer the day we met. Alessandro got out. His shirt had the whole night in it. He hadn’t shaved, and not one of his grins was anywhere on him.
All of me went down those steps toward him, and my feet stayed. He left. He saw one lit window and didn’t believe you. Don’t you dare. Yesterday you showed the whole lake you can stand alone.
I didn’t move off the step.
“Forget something?”
It came out of somebody else, cold and flat.
Alessandro
He stood at the bottom of the steps and looked up at her. Cold and shut, a face he had no way into.
It had started here, last July. A prickly American had scolded him for a badly parked car and bought neither the car nor the smile, and he hadn’t noticed himself going under.
“No.” He put his foot on the first step. “I didn’t forget anything.”
He took the next one. “The opposite. I remembered.”
Kate
He stopped one step closer than he’d ever let himself get, and he took up the whole step. No smile anywhere. He looked straight at me.
“I spent six months telling myself you were a summer thing. I came crawling back the first warm week because without you and Maddie everything had gone gray. Since spring I’ve been glued to your heels, waiting for you to open the door one inch.
And the other night I gave up. I saw him in your window, I decided I was too late, and I ran without hearing one word.
Like an idiot. The way I always do. The way everybody expects me to. ”
The gravel was wet with dew. Gulls sat on the gray water without moving.
“Then you should’ve kept driving.”
“I’m not going.” He came up one more step. “You missed the main thing. My whole life I’ve left first, so nobody could leave me. And right now I’m shaking with how much I want to stay. Even if you send me off. Even if it’s too late.”
It would have been easy. Two words, too late, and he’d go back down the steps, and I’d keep my win on a shelf where I could look at it. I could do that now. I’d shown the whole lake I could.
He’d said it himself on the terrace, with a candlestick in his hand. Hiding. Behind a husband, then behind a villa. And here I was on my top step, behind the last thing I had left, which was the win.
I came down one step. My voice broke on the first word and I let it.
“I wasn’t missing the man you saw leave my office.
I hated him. Yesterday I finished it.” I had to stop and start again.
“I kept away from you all spring because I was scared. And this week, when he came, I couldn’t have you next to me.
I’d have leaned. I’d never have finished it.
I had to do that one on my own, so that when I came down these steps it was me coming, and not somebody who needed carrying. ”
The tears ran on their own and I let them. They weren’t last night’s.
“I’m whole, Alex. Whole at last. And I choose you. Not because I’d be lost without you. Because with you I want to live.”
He took the last step. He put both hands on my face, carefully, the way you’d hold a thing you’d spent your life looking for, and kissed me.
Under the bridge last September his kiss had asked permission, and I’d run from the question.
This one asked nothing. It took and gave in one motion.
There was salt on my mouth from crying, and he didn’t stop.
I had both fists in his crumpled shirt, pulling him in, and I kissed him back with every month I’d spent on the far side of a desk from him.
He said my name against my mouth. His palms went from my wet cheeks down my back to my waist and pressed me into him until there was no room left between us and no air.
Then I was laughing into it, still crying, and he laughed too and didn’t let go.
We broke for air and nothing else, and stood with our foreheads together, breathing on the same count.
“Now I’m home,” he said.
He stepped back down one stair and knelt on the wet stone. He caught both my hands and pressed them to his mouth, and looked up at me with the face from the boat, the one with none of the grin in it.
“I don’t have a ring.” His voice wasn’t steady and he didn’t try to fix it.
“I drove all night. Rings weren’t on the list. I’ve been around half the world, Kate, and I came back for a woman who told me to help or go enjoy the view somewhere else.
Over a cat. I went in up to the wrist for it and I’ve been in ever since.
Sei la mia vita. This house is empty without you in it, and so am I. Marry me, peperoncino.”
Peperoncino. The word he’d pinned on me in this yard when we’d known each other five minutes. Not a trace of mockery was left in it.
Nobody was choosing for me.
“Yes.”
Something in me came off its string like a kite and kept going up. He put his forehead down on my hands for a second. Then he had me off the step and in the air, spinning. My laugh went out over the villa and the town, all of it still asleep, clean and loud, and put the gulls up off the water.