CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Choose Me Where They Can See
The Moretti Foundation dinner was held every September in the ballroom at the Bellmont, and for five years I had organized it.
I had chosen the florist, the menu, the seating, the band.
I had written the program notes and hand-addressed two hundred invitations.
The foundation gave scholarships to children from the old neighborhood where Paolo had grown up, and it was the one Moretti event I had always genuinely loved, because at the end of the night twelve teenagers walked across a stage and shook hands with people who’d paid a thousand dollars a plate to watch them do it.
This year I had organized nothing. Dante had hired an events company, and paid them, he told me, twice what he’d assumed the whole thing cost, and had discovered that it had never cost what he assumed because I’d been doing the work of four people for free.
He had asked me in August whether I’d come.
“As what?” I’d asked.
“As whatever you’d like to be. My guest. My wife. Nobody’s anything. You can sit wherever you want. If you’d rather not come at all, I’ll understand.”
“Everyone will look at us.”
“Probably.” He’d paused. “I’d like to be there next to you when they do. If you’ll let me.”
I’d said yes.
I wore blue. Not the emerald, which was still hanging at the end of the rail in a closet at the house, and not anything Elena’s tailor had fitted.
I bought it myself at a small shop near the gallery, dark blue silk with long sleeves, and it didn’t go with the family pearls at all, which was part of why I liked it.
Dante picked me up at my building. He waited in the vestibule until I came down. When I did, he looked at me for a long moment and didn’t say anything at all, and then he said, “I’d like to tell you that you look beautiful. Is that all right?”
“You’re allowed to say that.”
“You look beautiful.”
We drove there together. We walked in together, through the front doors, his hand at my back, lightly, and at the entrance to the ballroom I felt the familiar shift in the room, two hundred people noticing us at once.
Heads turned. Conversations paused. I knew this family.
I knew most of the faces. Every one of them knew I’d left him in March, and every one of them was working out right now what it meant that I’d walked in on his arm in September.
I had been dreading it for weeks. Standing there, I found I didn’t care nearly as much as I’d expected. These people had never known me. They’d known a woman who arranged their flowers. That woman had left in March. Whoever they thought they were looking at, she didn’t live in my apartment.
Elena was at the head table, in gray, beside Paolo. She saw us and inclined her head to me, a small, precise movement, and I inclined mine back.
Alessandra was there too, at a table near the windows with her cousin and two women from the design firm.
She’d been invited as a donor, Dante had told me, which she’d laughed about, because her donation had been redesigning the foundation’s office for free.
She caught my eye across the room and lifted her glass an inch.
I smiled. She did not look at Dante once all evening, and he didn’t look for her.
Dinner was fine. The events company had chosen hydrangeas, which I’d never have chosen, and they looked lovely.
The fish was overcooked. Nobody asked me to fix it.
Twice people I’d known for years came to our table to say how nice it was to see me, in the tone people use at wakes, and Dante thanked them and said nothing else, and I watched them go away puzzled.
Then came the toasts.
Paolo gave the first one, short and gruff, about the neighborhood and his own father.
The scholarship director gave the second.
Then an old man stood up at the table beside ours, a heavy man in his eighties named Frank Colletti, and the room settled with the particular deference that families like this one give to men who were there when the old arrangements were made.
I knew who he was. Frank had sat at the table with my father and Paolo seven years earlier and helped negotiate the end of the feud between the Castellanos and the Morettis. He’d danced with me at my wedding and told me I was a brave girl.
“I want to say something,” Frank said, lifting his glass, “because I’m old enough to say what I like.
” A ripple of laughter. “Seven, eight years ago, this family and the Castellanos were a week from something none of us wanted. And Paolo here and Vivienne’s father sat down with me, and we made the smartest deal I ever saw made.
” He turned toward our table with a genial smile.
“To the best treaty this family ever signed. Still holding, eh? Even with a few bumps.”
The laughter this time was uncertain. A few people raised their glasses automatically. I felt the room turn toward us.
And I was back at Sal’s party, standing next to him with my glass steady in my hand while his mother said some people always find their way back where they belong.
Waiting. Feeling each second stretch. Hoping.
I had waited through that silence for what felt like a full minute, and when it finally broke, it had broken with not tonight, Ma.
The memory came so completely I could smell the peonies.
I didn’t look at Dante. I didn’t want to see him deciding.
I didn’t have to.
He was already on his feet. He hadn’t looked at me first. He hadn’t waited to see what I expected. He stood with his hand still resting on the back of my chair, and his voice carried to the far walls without his raising it.
“Frank. With respect.” The room went completely still. “It was an arrangement. It stopped being only that a long time ago. Our fathers arranged a wedding. They didn’t arrange anything that came after it.”
Frank’s smile faltered.
“Vivienne isn’t a treaty,” Dante said. “She’s my wife, because I want her to be, and I love her.
My wife is the person I choose. Every day.
Nobody at this table or any other table gets to talk about her as if she were a signature on somebody else’s contract.
” He paused. “That’s all. Please enjoy your dinner. ”
He sat down.
For a long moment nobody moved at all. Then, at the head table, Elena set down her napkin and lifted her glass.
“To Vivienne,” she said. Her voice was perfectly level.
There was a beat. Then Paolo lifted his. Then Luca, three tables over, loudly, and Nadia beside him, and then Alessandra by the windows, and the rest of the room followed in a ragged scatter of raised glasses and murmurs. Frank Colletti, looking considerably less genial, lifted his last.
I didn’t lift mine. I couldn’t. My hand was shaking too much.
Dante didn’t look at me for the reaction. He picked up his fork and went back to his overcooked fish as though what he’d done required no acknowledgment at all, as though defending his wife in front of two hundred people was simply a thing a husband did, with no need to check how it had gone over.
Under the table, I found his hand.
He went still. Then his fingers closed around mine, carefully, and stayed there.
“You didn’t look at me first,” I said quietly.
“I didn’t need to.” He kept his eyes on his plate. “I knew what I should have said at Sal’s. I’ve known for six months. I wasn’t going to be late with it twice.”
I sat there holding his hand under the table, the way he had held mine through a hundred family dinners, and I felt something ease that had been clenched since the night of the peonies.
He hadn’t erased that night. Nothing could.
But he’d answered it, in the same room full of the same people, without my asking and without waiting to see whether it was safe.
Later, in the corridor outside the ballroom while he was getting my coat, Elena came to stand beside me.
“That was well done,” she said. “My son.”
“It was.”
“It should have been done years ago.”
“Yes,” I said. “It should.”
She looked at me sideways. “You’re wearing blue.”
“I am.”
“It suits you better than the green.” She adjusted her gloves. “The lamb at Easter was a catastrophe, by the way. I’m told you’ve heard.”
“I heard it was edible.”
“Carmela says it was edible. Carmela eats anything.” She paused. “Perhaps you might show me. Some year. If you wanted to.”
It was, from Elena, very nearly an olive branch. I didn’t take it yet. But I didn’t knock it away either.
“Perhaps,” I said.
Dante came back with my coat, and Elena nodded to us both and went back into the ballroom, and he held the coat open for me and waited until I stepped into it.
In the car, he said, “Where would you like to go?”
“Home,” I said.
He went very still with his hand on the key.
“My home,” I said gently. “The apartment.”
“Of course.” He started the car. He didn’t sound disappointed. He sounded as though he’d expected nothing more, and had been ready for it.
At my building, he walked me to the door of the vestibule and no further.
“Thank you for coming tonight,” he said.
“Thank you for standing up.”
“I should have been standing the whole time.”
I kissed him on the cheek. Then I went up alone, and sat in the green chair in the blue dress for a long time with the lights off, looking out at the street, thinking about the man who’d stood up before I could even turn my head.
* * *