CHAPTER EIGHT
The Anniversary
I booked the table at Tavola in January, the week after New Year’s.
It was the restaurant where we’d had our first real date.
Not our first dinner together, because there had been a dozen of those in the early months, formal and careful and ruined by the effort of trying.
Our first date. Five months into the marriage, he’d come home on a Thursday and asked, almost shyly, whether I’d like to go out, just the two of us, somewhere nobody in the family went.
He’d chosen Tavola because it was small and in the wrong neighborhood and his father had never heard of it.
We sat at the corner table by the window, and he ordered the wrong wine, and I told him it was the wrong wine, and he laughed, and somehow that was the evening we stopped being strangers.
Every anniversary since, we’d gone back. Same table. Same wrong wine, deliberately, as a joke. The owner, Sergio, knew us by now. He kept a bottle of the terrible Montepulciano in the back for us, and every year he brought it out with great ceremony and pretended to be offended by our choice.
This year was seven. I’d been thinking about it since January.
I’d told Dante about it three times since Alessandra arrived: in bed on the Friday we lost to the security meeting, in the car on the way home from Sal’s lunch, and in the kitchen on Tuesday morning, when he’d been looking for the parmesan again.
“Thursday,” I’d said. “Eight o’clock. Tavola.”
“I know,” he’d said. “Corner table. The terrible Montepulciano. I’m wearing the blue tie.”
The blue tie was one I’d bought him for our fifth anniversary. He’d worn it every anniversary since. It had become, without either of us deciding it should, part of the ritual.
On Wednesday night, the night before, he found me in the bath and sat down on the edge of the tub in his shirtsleeves.
“What do you want for tomorrow?” he asked.
“You. At the corner table. That’s all.”
“That’s too easy.”
“It’s what I want.”
He trailed his fingers in the water. “Seven years,” he said. “Do you remember what you said to me at Tavola, the first time?”
“That the wine was terrible.”
“That the wine was terrible.” He smiled. “Nobody had told me I was wrong about anything in about ten years. I thought, this woman’s going to be trouble.”
“Am I?”
“The best kind.” He leaned down and kissed my wet shoulder. “Tomorrow. Eight o’clock. I’ll be the one in the blue tie.”
I believed him. He believed himself. I think if anyone had asked him that night whether there was any chance he’d forget, he’d have laughed.
I bought him a gift that year that I was proud of.
At an estate sale in Bedford in March I’d found a first edition of the submarine thriller, the one he’d read aloud to me during the pneumonia, the same cousin’s copy long since lost. I’d had it rebound in navy leather and put a card inside the front cover that said: For the man who read me eleven chapters about ballast tanks and never once skipped the technical parts.
I’d been keeping it in my closet for three months.
On Thursday afternoon I got ready early.
I took my time with it, which I rarely did.
I chose the dress he liked, a dark red one with long sleeves that I’d worn to Tavola twice before.
I did my hair up the way he’d once said made me look like a woman in a painting.
I wrapped the book in brown paper and tied it with string and put it in my bag.
I felt, sitting at the vanity, something close to the nervous happiness of a first date, as though seven years had compressed into one evening I’d been waiting for since January.
Luca had texted that morning at seven. Happy seven years, V. Don’t let him order the good wine. It’ll ruin the tradition.
I’d laughed out loud at the breakfast table. Dante had looked up from his phone and asked what was funny, and I’d said, “Your brother,” and he’d said, “What’s he done now?” and gone back to his email.
At four o’clock, Grant came to the house.
That wasn’t unusual. Grant came to the house most afternoons that week.
At four thirty, Luca came too, and then two men I didn’t know, and Paula called to say Mr. Moretti’s lawyer would be there at five.
I heard it all from upstairs. I told myself it was an ordinary meeting. They’d be done by seven.
At six thirty I went downstairs in the red dress. The study door was closed. I could hear voices, Dante’s low and steady, Grant’s, someone on a speakerphone. I stood outside for a minute and then went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of water and sat at the island with it.
At seven I knocked.
The room was full of men and paper. Dante looked up from the desk, and I watched him see me in the red dress and not know why I was wearing it.
“Hey,” he said. “Sorry, is it late? We’ve got something on the people from Providence.
They were seen in Rye yesterday. Grant thinks...
” He stopped, and frowned at me, and I saw something flicker, not understanding, but the ghost of it, a sense that he was supposed to know something.
“You look beautiful. Are you going out?”
“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”
“Sorry?”
“Nothing. It’s all right. Finish your meeting.”
I closed the door.
I called Tavola myself. Sergio answered.
When I told him we couldn’t come, he was quiet for a moment and then said, very kindly, “Of course, Mrs. Moretti. Another night. I’ll keep the Montepulciano,” in the voice of a man who understood exactly what kind of night this was, and that was somehow the worst part, the pity of a man who’d watched us sit at that table for seven years.
I went back upstairs and took off the red dress and hung it back in the closet.
I took the book out of my bag and put it on the top shelf behind my sweaters.
I ate a bowl of cereal standing up at the kitchen counter at nine o’clock, because I hadn’t eaten since lunch, and I listened to the meeting go on in the study until almost eleven.
At nine thirty Mia came down the back stairs in her pajamas with Gregory under her arm and found me there. Rosa was a step behind her, apologizing. Mia had had a dream.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at me. I’d taken the dress off, but I hadn’t taken my hair down yet, and I still had the earrings on, the pearl drops Dante had given me for our third anniversary.
“You look like a princess,” she said. “Did you go to a party?”
“I was going to,” I said. “It got canceled.”
“Why?”
“Some grown-up things came up.”
She considered this with the seriousness she gave everything.
“Grown-up things always come up,” she said, and climbed onto the stool beside me and asked if she could have cereal too, and I poured her a bowl and we ate together at the counter while Rosa made herself tea.
Mia told me about her dream, which involved a dog the size of a bus, and I told her about a painting I’d once seen of a dog so small it sat in a woman’s hand.
She didn’t believe me. I promised I’d show her a picture.
It was the nicest part of my anniversary, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
He came to bed at midnight and kissed my shoulder and said, “Sorry about tonight. That ran long,” and fell asleep.
He still didn’t know.
* * *
I didn’t tell him.
I thought about it the next morning, watching him make coffee on his grandmother’s stovetop pot. I thought about just saying it. Yesterday was our anniversary. And I found that I didn’t want to, and I spent most of the day trying to understand why.
I think it was because I wanted him to find it himself.
I’d told him three times. I’d bought the tie.
I’d booked the table in January and put it on his calendar in red.
If I had to tell him a fourth time, I’d be carrying his remembering for him, the same way I carried everything else, and I was too tired that week to carry one more thing.
So I waited. Friday passed. He was in the city most of the day and home late.
Saturday he spent with Grant and Luca in Rye, following up on the sighting, and came home at six and played a board game with Mia on the floor of the east wing sitting room for an hour, and I stood in the doorway and watched him lose deliberately at Candy Land to a little girl whose father had died in February, and I loved him for it, and I went downstairs and cried in the pantry where nobody would hear.
On Sunday morning he was at his desk going through the week’s papers, and I was in the doorway with his coffee, when he picked up a contract and looked at the date on it and went completely still.
“Vivienne.”
“Yes.”
“Thursday was our anniversary.”
“Yes.”
He put the contract down. He looked at me, and I watched his face go through several things at once, confusion and then horror and then something close to shame. “Why didn’t you say something?”
“I did,” I said. “I told you three times. You said corner table and the blue tie, and you said you’d told Paula not to schedule anything. Not your father. Not the Pope.”
“I... Christ.” He pushed his chair back. “Viv. I’m so sorry. I don’t know how that happened.”
“I know how it happened. Grant came at four.”
“That’s not an excuse.”
“I didn’t say it was.”
He came around the desk and took my hands. His apology was sincere. He looked stricken. For a moment I almost softened. I almost said it’s all right, the way I always said it’s all right, and let it close over.
“Let me make it up to you,” he said.
* * *
On Monday morning three arrangements of flowers arrived at the house, so large that Ines had to find extra vases in the basement.
White roses, which I’d never particularly liked, and orchids, which I’d once mentioned were beautiful but fussy, and a third arrangement of peonies, which I did love, but which he’d clearly chosen because I’d used them at Sal’s lunch.
At dinner he put a long velvet box beside my plate.
It was a bracelet. A thin line of diamonds, very fine, very beautiful, the kind of thing that would have made most of the women in his family catch their breath. He watched my face as I opened it, the way he’d once watched me eat osso buco, with a kind of intent hope.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“You don’t like it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.” He sat back. “Tell me what you want, then. Anything. We can go to Tavola this week. We can go to Portofino. I’ll clear my calendar for a month.”
He meant every word. That was what made it so hard. He’d make any gesture I named, if I could only find the right name for it.
What I wanted was for him to have remembered without being reminded, the way I remembered Paolo’s pills and Teresa’s peonies and which of his cousins couldn’t sit near which.
I wanted the anniversary to have been a thing he carried himself, in his own head, the way I carried a thousand things in mine.
I wanted to occupy enough space in his mind that a meeting would have to compete with me, instead of simply winning.
I didn’t know how to say any of that without it sounding like an accusation. And it was an accusation. I just wasn’t ready to make it.
“Nothing,” I said. “It’s fine. Thank you. It’s beautiful.”
I closed the box. He looked at it, and at me, and I saw that he knew he’d missed something and couldn’t see what.
Later that night I went up to the closet and took the rebound submarine book off the shelf behind my sweaters and looked at it for a long time.
Then I put it back. It didn’t seem like the right time to give it to him anymore.
* * *