CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I Loved You Badly
The letter came to Priya’s office eleven days after the package.
She read it to me over the phone because I asked her to, and then she read it again because I asked her to do that too.
It was short. Dante wanted one conversation with me.
He wasn’t asking to discuss the divorce, and he wasn’t asking me to come home.
The time and place would be mine to choose, and if my answer was no, he would accept it and not ask again.
“His counsel added a line at the bottom,” Priya said. “They want it on record that he’s not seeking any delay in the proceedings and that nothing said in the conversation will be used in negotiation.”
“Did he tell them to add that?”
“I’d assume so. Lawyers don’t usually volunteer to make their client’s position weaker.”
I thanked her and hung up and sat in the green chair for a long time with the phone in my lap. Outside, Carol was walking Pickles past the building, and the terrier stopped to bark at a mail truck with enormous conviction.
It took me six days to answer. I went to work.
I cleaned the last of the miniatures for the exhibition, a boy with a spaniel in his lap whose varnish had yellowed to the color of weak tea.
I had dinner with Luca and Nadia, who turned out to be exactly as sharp as he’d promised and who asked me, halfway through the second bottle of wine, whether I was going to meet him.
I told her I didn’t know. She said that was a perfectly good answer for now.
On the seventh day, I texted Dante for the first time since the morning at the gate.
Saturday. Ten o’clock. Café Lucia on Water Street.
His reply came within a minute. I’ll be there. Thank you.
I didn’t sleep much on Friday night.
* * *
Café Lucia was a narrow room with six tables and a counter, two doors down from the gallery, the place where Dana and I bought coffee most mornings.
I chose it on purpose. It was mine. The woman at the register knew my order, and the table in the back corner had a wobbly leg I knew to lean away from, and if I needed to leave, the gallery was forty steps away and I had the key.
I got there at a quarter to ten. Dante was already sitting at the corner table.
He stood when I came in. He’d lost weight, and his face had the pared-down look of a man who’d been sleeping in pieces, and he wasn’t wearing a tie. I had seen him without a tie perhaps a dozen times outside our bedroom in seven years. He looked younger without it, and more tired.
He didn’t come toward me. He waited by the table until I’d reached it and sat down, and only then did he sit too.
“I got you the oat milk latte,” he said. “I asked the girl what you usually order. I hope that’s all right. If you want something else...”
“It’s fine.”
“I wasn’t sure if you’d want me to order for you. I went back and forth about it for five minutes.”
“You went back and forth about a coffee.”
“I’ve been going back and forth about a lot of things.
” He wrapped his hands around his own cup and didn’t drink from it.
“Thank you for coming. I want to say something first, before anything else, so you don’t spend the whole conversation waiting for it.
I’m not here to ask you to come home. I’m not here to talk you out of the divorce.
If you file on Monday, I’ll sign whatever Priya sends over. I mean that.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because I owe you the truth, and I’ve never actually told it to you. Not once in seven years. And I don’t want you to go through the rest of your life, whatever you decide, without having heard it.”
I folded my hands on the table. My coat was over the back of my chair, and in its pocket, where it had stayed for two months, was his handkerchief.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me.”
He took a long moment. When he spoke, he spoke slowly, and I could tell he’d rehearsed this and was trying not to sound as if he had.
“I want to go through it in order. All of it. Because I think if I apologize for everything at once, it becomes nothing. You’d be right to throw it back at me.”
“Go through it, then.”
“Alessandra,” he said. “I decided she’d live in our house before I ever mentioned her name to you.
I had the east wing prepared. I told you over coffee as though I was letting you know the weather.
When you said you wanted to be part of the decision, I told you to be part of it now, after the rooms were already made up.
I made it impossible for you to say no without looking cruel, and I didn’t even notice I’d done it. ”
“You noticed afterward?”
“I noticed about three weeks ago. Sitting in that kitchen at midnight trying to remember what pharmacy my father uses.” He almost smiled and didn’t. “I noticed a lot of things at midnight.”
“Luca told me about the legal pad.”
He looked up. “Did he.”
“Only that there was one.”
“Forty-one items,” Dante said. “I stopped counting after that. Everything you did that I never once asked about. The flowers for Rosalind. My father’s pills.
Luca’s godmother. The seating charts. The linens.
Nico’s girlfriend’s dietary restrictions, which, I found out, you had kept in a spreadsheet for three years.
” He shook his head. “I thought the house ran itself, Vivienne. I actually believed that. Sal told me at his birthday lunch that my wife ran the tightest ship in the family. You were standing twenty feet away, and I stood there accepting the compliment as though your work reflected well on me instead of belonging to you.” I remembered smiling.
I remembered feeling proud. What I did not do was turn around, find you in that room, and give the credit back to the woman who had earned it.
“I was standing twenty feet away.”
“I know. I remember you standing there. I didn’t think about it at all.” He looked at his coffee. “That was a hundred times, probably. That was just the one I can see clearly.”
The woman at the counter called someone’s name. The espresso machine hissed. I let the silence sit, because I had spent seven years filling his silences, and I wasn’t going to fill this one.
“The rooms,” he went on. “The security changes. The new locks. The nanny reporting to me. Rosa asked me on the second day whether she should copy you on her updates, and I told her it wasn’t necessary. I thought I was sparing you the details.”
“You were cutting me out of my own house.”
“Yes.” He didn’t argue. “I was. And then every time something happened with Alessandra, I treated it as urgent, and every time something happened with you, I treated it as something that could wait until tomorrow. The seating chart. The talk you wanted to have after the chair. The anniversary. I always assumed there’d be a tomorrow with you.
There was never a tomorrow with a threat. So the threat always won.”
“You told me she was family.”
“I did.” He met my eyes. “And you asked what that made you. And I said you were my wife as though that settled it. As though wife was a higher rank and you ought to be satisfied with it.” He paused. “I said something else that day too. I’ve thought about it more than almost anything.”
“You said I was the most important person in your life, and you didn’t understand why that needed saying out loud.”
He went quiet. “You remember it exactly.”
“I remember everything you said to me in the last two months, Dante. I didn’t have a lot else to hold on to.”
He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, his voice was lower.
“I understand now why it needed saying. I didn’t then.
I thought if I showed you, it should be enough.
I thought seven years of mornings and the pneumonia and Portofino should be proof you could carry around with you.
And meanwhile you were watching me put another woman’s fear ahead of your anniversary, and letting my mother talk about the wife I was supposed to have, and moving your chair, and I expected you to weigh all of that against things I’d done years ago and decide I loved you anyway.
Without my ever having to say it. I asked you to do all the work of believing it.
” He turned the cup a quarter turn. “That was arrogance. I called it privacy. It was arrogance.”
* * *
We’d been there nearly an hour when the café began filling with the Saturday crowd, strollers and a group of students with laptops, and Dante glanced at the door.
“Would you rather walk?” he asked. “Or stay. Whatever you prefer.”
“There’s a park,” I said. “Three blocks.”
He left money on the table and held the door and then stepped back to let me go through it first without touching my arm. On the sidewalk he walked beside me, a careful foot of air between us, and I noticed he matched my pace instead of setting his own.
The park was the one near Priya’s office, with the dry fountain and the bench where I’d sat and eaten a croissant after she asked me what I wanted. I sat on the same bench. He sat at the other end of it.
“Keep going,” I said.
“The anniversary.” He leaned forward with his elbows on his knees.
“You told me three times. You told me about the tie. You got dressed. And I sat in my study with the lawyers and two of my captains until eight o’clock and never once looked at a calendar.
And then when I found out, I sent flowers and a bracelet, because that’s what I know how to do.
I know how to buy things. I know how to fix a problem with money.
I didn’t know how to sit in front of you and say I forgot the day that matters most to me because I let it stop mattering. ”
“You left the bracelet on my dresser. I left it on yours.”
“I saw it. That morning. It’s still there. I haven’t moved it.” He rubbed his jaw. “It seemed like the only honest thing in the room.”
“The shirt,” I said.