CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
The Empty House
Luca called on a Thursday, two weeks after I left, and asked if he could come by.
“Just me,” he said. “Nobody sent me. I’d like to see where you’re living.”
I almost said no. I wasn’t sure I was ready for anyone from the house to walk into the apartment, to see the lemon shower curtain and the lopsided bookshelf and decide what they meant.
But Luca had been kind to me for seven years in small, unremarked ways, and he had kept my address to himself when I asked, and I found I wanted to see him.
He arrived at seven with a bottle of red wine and a paper bag of cannoli from the bakery on Arthur Avenue where I used to buy them for his mother’s birthday.
He stood in the doorway and looked around the living room for a long moment, at the green chair, the small table, the bookshelf with its matchbook shim.
“Huh,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
“It means this looks like you. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a room that looked like you before.” He set the cannoli on the table. “The house always looked like my mother’s idea of a house.”
I didn’t own wineglasses yet. I poured the wine into two of the mismatched mugs I’d been collecting, one with a chipped blue glaze and one printed with a cartoon lighthouse, and Luca accepted the lighthouse without comment.
I took the green chair and he took one of the kitchen chairs and turned it around to straddle it, the way he’d sat at the Sunday table when he was twenty-three and newly back from college and I was the bewildered new bride who didn’t know which fork to use.
“You remember my first Sunday dinner?” I asked.
“You sat next to me because nobody told you where to sit, and my mother moved you.”
“She moved me three seats down.”
“And you spent the whole meal talking to my grandfather about painting, and he told my mother afterward that you were the only person at that table who’d asked him a real question in ten years.” Luca smiled into his mug. “She never forgave you for that, I think.”
“For talking to your grandfather?”
“For him liking you.”
We sat with that for a moment. Outside, Carol’s terrier barked twice at nothing.
“I’m not here to carry messages,” Luca said. “I want to be clear about that. He doesn’t know I’m here. If you tell me to leave the subject alone, I’ll leave it alone and we’ll talk about the Mets.”
“You hate the Mets.”
“I’d suffer through it for you.”
I laughed, and then I heard myself ask, before I’d decided to ask it, “Is he eating?”
I hated the question the moment it was out. I’d left. I’d told myself on the mattress every night for two weeks that his well-being was no longer mine to manage. And still the first thing I wanted to know was whether someone was making sure my husband ate dinner.
Luca didn’t make anything of it. “Some. Not much. He looks like hell, honestly. I’ve seen him three times this week. He’s not sleeping. He’s in the office until two in the morning and back by seven.”
“That isn’t my responsibility anymore.”
“I know. I’m only answering what you asked.”
“I know you are.” I set my mug on the windowsill. “I hate that I asked.”
“You loved him for seven years. You don’t turn that off because you moved three miles.”
“I didn’t move out because I stopped loving him.”
“I know that too.” He was quiet a moment. “Can I tell you something that isn’t about him? Or isn’t only about him?”
“Go ahead.”
“Aunt Rosalind’s birthday was Saturday. Nobody remembered.
Not my mother, not Dante, not me. Rosalind called Ma Saturday night to thank her for the flowers, and Ma had no idea what she was talking about.
” He turned his mug in his hands. “The flowers came from a standing order you set up four years ago. Every year, same florist, same card. From Elena and the family. You never told anybody.”
“It seemed easier to just do it.”
“You did it for me too. It hit me sitting in Ma’s kitchen Saturday night.
Every Christmas for five years, my godmother got a gift from me, and they were nice gifts, thoughtful ones.
She always wrote me a thank-you note, and I’d think, that’s nice, and never once wondered who picked them out. ” He shook his head. “That was you.”
“You were busy with law school.”
“I was busy with being twenty-five and assuming things got handled.” He looked at me directly. “I’m sorry, Vivienne. I don’t just mean for what he did. I mean for what I didn’t notice. None of us did. We all let you carry it and called it the house running smoothly.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. I had spent seven years wanting someone in that family to see it, and now that someone finally had, the recognition carried more grief than vindication, arriving so long after it could have changed anything.
“Thank you,” I said eventually. “It means something that you’d say it.”
“He’s finding out too,” Luca said carefully.
“That’s all I’ll say about him, unless you ask.
He called me last week at eleven at night because Dad’s pharmacy called the house about a refill and nobody knew which prescription it was for.
He didn’t know the name of it. He didn’t know which pharmacy.
He’d lived with that for seven years and never once asked.
He sat at the kitchen table afterward with a legal pad and started writing down everything he could think of that you used to handle. He was still writing when I left.”
I pictured it without meaning to. Dante at the kitchen island at midnight with a legal pad, his careful block handwriting, the lamp over the stove the only light on in the house. The picture hurt in a place I’d thought had gone numb.
“His pain doesn’t erase mine,” I said quietly.
“No. It doesn’t.”
“I need you to understand that, Luca. I’m glad he’s seeing it. I am. But the fact that he’s suffering now doesn’t mean I wasn’t suffering for years while he didn’t notice. I’m not going to go home because he finally made a list.”
“I didn’t come here to ask you to.”
“I know. I’m saying it out loud so I hear it too.”
He stayed another hour. We talked about the woman he’d started seeing, a public defender named Nadia who, he said, was smarter than him and not shy about pointing it out.
We talked about his father’s hip, which needed replacing.
We talked about the gallery, and he asked real questions and listened to the answers.
We did not talk about Dante again. When he left, he hugged me at the door, longer than he usually did.
“The chair’s great, by the way,” he said. “Ma would hate it.”
“That’s partly why I bought it.”
After he’d gone I sat in the green chair with the last of the wine and the cannoli box open on my lap.
I ate two, which was one more than I needed.
I thought about Dante at the kitchen island with his legal pad, and then I made myself stop thinking about it, because thinking about it was the old habit, the one where his discomfort became my job to resolve.
* * *
I spent the following Tuesday in the workroom with the water-damaged miniature, the one Elliot had held back from me until he trusted my hands.
It was a young woman, perhaps twenty, painted around 1790 on an oval of ivory no larger than a hen’s egg.
At some point in the last two centuries, water had gotten behind the glass and left a tide line across her face, a brown stain running from her left temple to her jaw.
Most of her features were visible only as suggestions.
“We don’t know if she can come back,” Elliot had said, handing her over. “Take your time. If she can’t, she can’t.”
I took my time. I tested solutions on the bare margin at the back of the ivory, then on the least important corner of the background, then, very slowly, on the edge of the stain.
The first solution did nothing. The second lifted grime but left the tide line.
The third, weaker than I’d have guessed, began to soften the brown at its edge without touching the paint beneath.
I worked with a swab rolled to the width of a pencil point and a magnifier set so close I could see the individual strokes of the artist’s brush.
A quarter inch took an hour. By two in the afternoon I’d cleared the stain from her temple to her cheekbone.
By four I could see her left eye, gray-green and slightly amused, as though whoever had painted her had caught her in the middle of a private joke.
Dana leaned over my shoulder with a cup of tea. “Look at her. She’s laughing at us.”
“She’s been laughing at somebody for two hundred years. We just couldn’t see it.”
“Do we know who she is?”
“Not yet. I’m hoping there’s a maker’s mark under the backing.”
“You really love this, don’t you.”
“I forgot how much,” I said. “It’s strange, getting it back.”
Dana squeezed my shoulder and left me alone with her, and I worked another hour until the light from the high window went orange.
When I finally set down the swab and sat back, the young woman’s whole face had come clear, pale and bright under the lens, her mouth just barely turned up at one corner.
I sat with her a long time before logging her into the inventory. Nobody had seen that face clearly in a century and a half. Now somebody had, because I had been patient and careful and hadn’t given up at the first stubborn edge.
On the walk home it occurred to me that I hadn’t checked my phone all afternoon. I hadn’t wondered whether anyone needed me. I had simply been working, fully and completely, on something that was mine.
* * *