CHAPTER SIX
Before
That night I couldn’t sleep, and instead of lying there, I let myself go back.
I was twenty-two on our wedding night. I remember sitting on the edge of a bed in this same house, in a room that hadn’t become mine yet, wearing a champagne silk nightgown an aunt I barely knew had bought for the occasion.
I’d never have chosen it. I remember the house around me, enormous and unfamiliar, every creak a footstep.
I’d met Dante Moretti four times before that day, always with our fathers present, always across a table.
He’d been polite and very serious, and he’d asked me twice whether I liked the city, and I’d said yes both times, and neither of us had known what to say after that.
He came in a little after midnight with his tie already loose and his jacket over his arm. I stood up so fast I nearly fell over the hem of the nightgown.
He stopped just inside the door and looked at me, and something in his face changed. He put his jacket down on the chair. Then, instead of coming toward the bed, he pulled the chair out from the corner, turned it around, and sat down in it, six feet away.
“Sit down,” he said. “Please. You look like you’re about to run.”
I sat.
He was quiet a moment. Then he said, carefully, as though he’d thought about it beforehand, “I want to tell you something, and I want you to believe me. That contract says you’re my wife. It doesn’t give me any right to your body. Not tonight. Not ever, unless you want me to have it.”
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.
“I’ll sleep down the hall,” he said. “You can lock that door if it makes you feel safer. I won’t take it personally.”
And then I started crying. I was so ashamed of it.
I was twenty-two and had spent the whole day holding myself together, through the church and the photographs and my father giving me away like a signed document, and it was kindness, of all things, that broke it.
Dante stood up. I thought he’d leave. Instead he took a handkerchief from his pocket, white, with his initials in navy thread in one corner, and crossed the room and held it out to me at arm’s length, and when I took it, he turned and looked out the window so I could cry without being watched.
He stayed like that, with his back to me, until I stopped. Then he said good night and went down the hall.
I didn’t lock the door. I lay awake for hours anyway, holding his handkerchief, trying to decide whether what he’d done was kindness or strategy, and somewhere near dawn I decided it didn’t matter which, because no one had ever given me that much choice about anything before.
* * *
The first months were awkward in a way I could laugh about now, lying there in the dark.
We didn’t know how to live together. He woke at five and I woke at seven, and for the first two weeks I lay in bed until eight to avoid him because I didn’t know what we’d talk about at breakfast. He thought I didn’t like breakfast. He had Ines start leaving a tray outside my door.
I thought he was trying to keep me out of the kitchen.
It took a month and a very confused conversation on the stairs before we sorted it out.
He didn’t know what I liked to eat. He’d ask Ines to make things and then watch me eat them with such intensity that I’d eat everything on the plate out of nervousness, and he’d conclude I loved it, and have Ines make it again.
I ate osso buco four times in two weeks.
I hate osso buco. When I finally confessed, standing in the kitchen at eleven at night, he looked at me for a long moment and then started laughing, really laughing, bent over the counter with his hand over his eyes, and it was the first time I’d ever heard him do it.
“Four times,” he said. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“You looked so pleased.”
“I was pleased because I thought you liked it.” He wiped his eyes. “What do you actually like?”
No one had asked me that in a very long time either.
The first Moretti Christmas was worse than the osso buco.
There were forty people at Linden Avenue, all of whom knew each other and none of whom knew me, and I sat through a four-hour dinner answering questions about my father’s business that I didn’t know how to answer, while Elena corrected my pronunciation of a dish I’d been eating since I was a child.
Halfway through dessert Carmela’s husband made a joke about Castellano girls that half the table laughed at, and I felt my face go hot and didn’t know where to look.
Under the table, Dante’s hand found mine.
He’d never done that before. He didn’t look at me. He kept talking to his uncle about the Giants. But his fingers closed around mine and squeezed, three times, deliberately, and then held on.
In the car afterward I asked him what it meant.
“What what meant?”
“Three times.”
He kept his eyes on the road. “It means I was there,” he said. “You looked like you’d forgotten.”
He did it again at the next dinner, and the one after, and at every family event for seven years where I didn’t know anyone or where someone said something unkind. We never discussed it again. We didn’t need to.
He asked me things, that first year, constantly.
Whether the kitchen should be redone or left as his grandmother had it.
Which of two charities the family should support at Christmas.
Whether a painting his father had given him should hang in the front hall or the study.
The first time, standing in front of the painting with his hands in his pockets, I’d been so startled that I’d gone quiet and looked at the wall, and he’d said, “You’re the one who knows about art.
I’m asking,” and waited, and I’d told him the study, because the light in the hall would fade it, and he’d hung it in the study that afternoon.
It was the first decision in that house that anyone had let me make. I remember thinking, that night, that it might be all right here. That I might be allowed to be a person in it.
It took three months before I went to his room.
I remember I’d been sitting in the library for most of an evening pretending to read, working up to it, and by the time I actually knocked on his door, I was dizzy. He opened it half dressed for bed, and when he saw me, he went completely still.
“Vivienne?”
“I don’t want to be afraid of this anymore,” I said. “Of you. Of any of it.”
He was so careful with me that night. He asked more than once whether I was sure.
He watched my face the whole time for anything that looked like retreat.
There was nothing I ever had to endure that night, or any night after.
I remember lying awake afterward with his arm across me thinking that of all the ways my father’s arrangement might have gone, I had somehow been handed the one where the stranger was gentle.
* * *
The second year, I got sick.
It started as a cold in February and became something else in a week.
I remember the cough that wouldn’t stop, and the ache that went into my bones, and the moment I tried to walk down the stairs and had to sit down halfway because I couldn’t get enough air.
Dante found me there. I don’t remember much after that except the doctor’s voice saying pneumonia and something about both lungs, and Dante’s voice arguing with him about whether I should be in a hospital.
In the end I stayed home, with a nurse during the day, and at night Dante sent the nurse home and sat up himself.
I remember the chair he dragged beside the bed.
I remember the cold cloth on my forehead, changed every twenty minutes.
I remember that he read to me because I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t bear the silence, and that the only book in the house he could find that wasn’t Italian poetry or shipping law was a submarine thriller one of his cousins had left behind, and he read it aloud in a low steady voice, all the technical parts about sonar and ballast, for three nights.
I didn’t follow a word of it. I held onto his voice.
On the second night he tried to make me toast, because the nurse had said I should try to eat something.
He’d never made toast in his life. He came up forty minutes later with two pieces that were black at the edges and a little smoke still coming off them, holding the plate with an expression of such grim determination that even with a fever of a hundred and three, I laughed until I coughed.
“Don’t,” he said. “Don’t laugh. Ines has a very complicated toaster.”
“It’s a toaster, Dante.”
“It has settings.”
I ate half a piece to be polite. It tasted like charcoal. He watched every bite.
On the third night the fever broke. I remember it only in pieces.
I remember waking up soaked through, the sheets wet, the room gray with the first light, and the terrible heaviness lifting off me all at once so that I could suddenly breathe.
The clock on the nightstand said 4:07. Dante was in the chair beside the bed with the submarine book face down on his knee, awake, watching me.
He’d been there for three nights. He’d shaved once. His shirt was the one he’d had on on Tuesday.
“Did you eat anything?” I asked him. My voice came out as a croak.
He didn’t answer. He just looked at me with the strangest expression, as though I’d said something in a language he was only now learning.
Then he put the book down and went downstairs, and came back twenty minutes later with more toast, burned exactly as badly as the first batch, and a cup of tea, and sat back down in the chair.
I ate half a slice to be polite and fell asleep again before I’d finished the tea. The last thing I saw was Dante in the gray light with the plate on his knee, not reading, not moving, just watching me breathe.
* * *
There was Portofino, too, our third anniversary, the first trip anywhere with no security visible, just the two of us and a small rented boat neither of us knew how to sail.
We drifted for two hours longer than we meant to, because neither of us wanted to be the one to say we should head back, and a dolphin surfaced near the stern, so close I could hear it breathe, and Dante laughed.
It was a real laugh, surprised out of him, his head thrown back.
I had heard that particular laugh perhaps a dozen times in seven years, and I remembered every one.
He taught me to swim properly on that trip, in the clear water off a little beach below the town, with his hands steady under my back while I learned to float, and when I finally managed it on my own and lay there on the water looking up at the sky, he said, “Look at you,” in a voice I’d never heard him use, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I splashed him.
And there was the morning in our fourth year. We were having coffee in the kitchen, the way we always did, and he was reading his phone and I was reading the paper, and he stood up and said, without looking up, “I should get home before the Marchetti call.”
He was already home. He’d meant the office.
He’d said home and meant here, meant me, the place I was, and he didn’t even notice he’d done it.
I noticed. I sat there with my coffee going cold and felt the word settle into me, heavy and certain, and I never told him, because I was afraid that if I pointed it out he’d hear himself and be more careful next time.
Lying awake that night after Sal’s lunch, I tried to set that man beside the one who’d let a chair go down the hall without asking me, and who’d moved a gala without mentioning it, and who’d stood in his parents’ dining room and accepted his uncle’s thanks for my work without looking for me.
They were the same man. That was what I couldn’t make sense of. He hadn’t changed into someone else. I’d simply never before had to find out what he would do when two people needed him at once, and I was one of them.
* * *