Chapter 4
Yelena
The armored town car smelled of Gianni’s cologne and my father’s disappointment, and I couldn’t have told you which was harder to breathe through.
My father sat opposite, hands folded on his knee, watching Gianni and me.
My fiancé had wedged himself against my side even though the seat could have held his whole family, his thigh pressed along mine, his arm draped across the back of the seat behind my shoulders.
Not around me. Behind me. A barrier, not an embrace.
Sal’s manifest lay folded against my ribs, inside the silk, warm from my skin. Every time the car took a corner I felt the paper’s edge and thought of a Sicilian’s hands sliding it under my folder in plain sight of everyone, and no one seeing it but me.
“Yelena Lvovna.”
The full formal name. I turned my face to my father and arranged it into the expression he preferred, the attentive blankness of a woman receiving instruction.
“Yes, Papa.”
“You corrected your fiancé at the table tonight. In front of the Sicilian. In front of my men.” He didn’t raise his voice. He never raised his voice; the volume never changed, only the weight. “And you allowed the Scordato to address you directly. Twice. You answered him.”
“He asked me a question.”
“Dogs bark. You do not have to bark back.” He looked out the window at the frozen dark going past, the fur shops and the shuttered awnings, and delivered the rest to the glass.
“This alliance stands on one leg, dochka. That leg is the appearance of a family with no seams. When you contradict your husband, you show the Sicilians a seam. When you let one of them speak into your face, you show them where to put the knife.” His pale eyes came back to me.
My eyes, thirty years older and with the warmth bred out of them.
“An enemy’s attention is not a compliment.
It is a survey. Do not give him ground to survey. ”
“Yes, Papa.”
“Understood?”
“Understood.”
He nodded once and was finished with me, the ledger closed.
Gianni, of course, could not leave anything closed.
“You know what I think?” He said it to the car at large, and his hand came off the seat back and landed on my knee.
Landed and stayed. “I think my little bird enjoyed it. All those questions from the family accountant. Compressors, contractors. He looked at you like a man reading a menu, ptichka. Did you like that? Being read?”
His fingers spread on my knee, over the silk. Not gripping. Testing. He wanted the flinch. I did not give him the satisfaction. Instead, I looked down at his hand with the mild, distant interest of a woman noticing lint.
“The family accountant,” I repeated. “Is that what he is? He didn’t count like an accountant. He counted like an owner.”
“He counts other men’s money. It’s what the Chicago branch is for now.” Gianni’s hand tightened a fraction. “Answer the question. Did you enjoy the attention?”
“Enjoy it?” I let the words sit a moment, as though I were genuinely weighing them, and then I gave him my sweetest voice, the one with the razor folded inside it.
“Gianni. He wasn’t admiring me. He was surprised.
A man hears a woman produce accurate figures and it startles him, the way a talking horse startles people—not because the horse is brilliant, but because it’s a horse.
” I turned my head and looked at my fiancé fully for the first time since the restaurant.
“Competence looks remarkable in your company because it’s rare there.
You should hire better lawyers. Then no one at any table will ever be surprised by anything again. ”
For a second I watched it work through him—the sentence entering, searching for something to wound, finding the lawyers and settling there, because Gianni could survive any insult that came with someone else attached to blame.
His jaw moved. My father made a low sound that might have been amusement and might have been a warning, and was probably, being my father, both.
“The lawyers,” Gianni said. “Yes. Idiots. I’m dealing with the lawyers.” His hand left my knee to gesture, because Gianni could not be angry without conducting it, and I breathed for the first time in a mile.
Then the car slowed for the ramp, and he found his target.
“Why are we on the Belt?” He leaned forward, toward the partition, his voice climbing. “Hey. Old man. Why are we on the Belt? The Belt at this hour, with the construction — what are you, a tourist? You take the parkway, everyone knows you take the parkway—“
The driver’s eyes came up in the mirror. He was seventy if he was a day, a good man; he had driven my mother to her chemotherapy and never once let her see him cry.
“—maybe your license expires with the rest of you, maybe it’s time somebody looked at whether—”
“I asked him to take the water.”
It came out smooth. Unhurried. I said it to the window, as if confessing a small vanity, and I felt the whole car pivot toward me.
“You asked him,” Gianni said.
“Before we left. I wanted to see the ocean.” I gave a small shrug, the useless-ornamental shrug, the one that had bought me safe passage through a hundred rooms. “Three weeks of fittings and florists and lawyers ahead of me. I wanted ten minutes of water first. Blame the bride, Gianni. The driver only did as he was told, which I’m given to understand is the whole virtue of drivers. ”
The old man’s eyes found mine in the mirror for one half-second. I did not acknowledge them. That’s the rule; the kindness dies if anyone sees it change hands.
Gianni sat back. He looked at me for a long moment, and something unpleasant happened in his face—not anger.
Comprehension. He was vain and he was lazy and he had never in his life read a contract to the end, but he was not, whatever I preferred to believe on my better days, entirely stupid.
He’d watched me do it now. The wine glass at the restaurant weeks ago.
The waiter tonight. The driver. He was assembling the pattern, and I watched him arrive at it, and I kept my face turned to the black water sliding past because there was nothing else to do.
He leaned in close. His cologne arrived first. His mouth stopped an inch from my ear, and his voice came out low and warm, for me alone, in the register other men used for endearments.
“I see what you do,” he said. “The little rescues. Stepping in front of things. Very touching, ptichka. Very noble.” His hand returned to my knee, and this time it gripped.
“Enjoy it. Three more weeks. After the wedding, my wife does not manage me in front of other people. My wife will have other ways to occupy her hands.”
He sat back, satisfied, and looked out his own window, a man restored.
Across the car, my father watched the ocean and said nothing, and the manifest burned against my ribs like a coal I intended to build a fire with.
Gianni’s men stayed with the cars. He didn’t. I heard his shoes on the marble behind me before I reached the third stair, and I understood the evening wasn’t finished with me yet.
My father had already gone toward his study without a good night, and the house had arranged itself into its evening quiet. Gianni climbed the stairs behind me at a pace calibrated to say I go where I like in this house. Which was almost true. Three more weeks and it would be entirely true.
I could have turned at the landing. Made an excuse. But excuses are ammunition and I was running low, so I walked to my door with my spine straight.
He came in behind me without asking, and closed the door.
The click of the latch was very loud. My bedroom is the one room in the house that has almost nothing of me in it—I keep myself elsewhere, in the nursery, under floorboards—but it was still mine. He stood in the middle of it with his hands loose at his sides, looking around, then looking at me.
“Quite a performance tonight,” he said.
“Which one? I gave several.”
“For my cousin.” He crossed to the window, touched the drape, some proprietary tour of premises he already considered his.
“The numbers. The Italian. The mouth on you, in front of Sal, in front of your father’s captains.
You made yourself very interesting to a Scordato tonight, ptichka.
So.” He turned. “I think you should show me where your loyalty lies. I think you owe me that, after tonight.”
“My loyalty lies where the contract puts it. I have no choice.” I moved toward the dressing table, casual. “Three weeks, Gianni.”
“Three weeks.” He said it like a diagnosis.
“You keep saying this. Your father’s tradition.
The untouched bride. You know what I think?
I think it’s the only clause you actually like.
” He started toward me, unhurried, smiling, and my pulse began to climb the back of my throat.
“We’re engaged. We’re adults. Nobody waits anymore.
This isn’t the old country, this is Brooklyn, and I am tired—genuinely, ptichka, I want you to hear this—I am tired of being handled. ”
“No one is handling you.”
“Everyone is handling me,” he said, with the sudden bald honesty of a vain man in the dark, “and you are the worst of them, because you’re so good at it.”
Then his hands were on my arms and his mouth was coming down and I turned my face so it landed on my jaw instead, hard, his teeth behind his lips.
His cologne filled my head. He walked me backward the two steps to the dressing table and pinned me against it, the edge biting into the backs of my thighs, perfume bottles chiming, and his weight came in against me and one of his hands left my arm and found my wrist and began dragging my hand down his body with a purpose I understood completely.
“No, Gianni.”
I said it clearly and loud. With authority, with certainty.
He ignored it. His grip tightened on my wrist, pushing my hand lower, his mouth at my ear saying something about loyalty and proof and three weeks.
“I said no.”
He didn’t stop, not even for a moment.