CHAPTER THIRTY
A Different Marriage
It was October before I was ready to talk about it.
I asked him to come to the apartment on a Sunday afternoon. I told him it was important. I didn’t tell him why, and he didn’t ask, and when he arrived at three o’clock with a bag of almond croissants from Lucia’s, his face had the careful stillness of a man who had braced himself for either answer.
I’d made coffee. We sat at the oak table, him in his usual chair, me in mine. The windows were open, and the street was full of fallen leaves and the smell of someone’s woodstove.
“I’ve been thinking about us,” I said.
“All right.”
“I’ve been thinking about us for seven months, honestly. But I think I’ve finally worked out what I want.”
He didn’t say anything. He put both his hands flat on the table, the way he did when he was forcing himself to keep still.
“I don’t want to go back to the marriage we had,” I said.
His eyes dropped to the table. He was quiet for a moment, and then I saw him begin to accept it. That told me more than anything he’d said in seven months.
“I understand,” he said. His voice was even. “I think I’d...”
“Dante. Let me finish.”
He looked up.
“I don’t want the marriage we had,” I said. “I want to build another one. With you. If you want that too.”
He didn’t say anything for a long moment. Then he put one hand over his eyes, just for a second, and took it away again, and his face was wet.
“Yes,” he said. “God, yes. Whatever it takes.”
“Don’t say whatever it takes. That’s what you always say. Whatever it takes, and then you decide what it takes.” I leaned forward. “I want to actually talk about it. Now. Before anything else happens.”
He wiped his face with the heel of his hand and laughed, unsteadily. “Okay. Yes. Let’s talk about it.”
* * *
We talked for four hours.
I had thought, before he came, that it would be something like a list. Terms. Conditions.
I’d even written some of it down on a legal pad, which I recognized was a little ironic, given his.
But once we started, it didn’t go like a list at all.
It went the way real conversations go, circling and doubling back and getting stuck on things neither of us expected.
“No decisions about me without me,” I said first. “That’s the whole foundation. Money, the house, the family, security, where we go, who stays with us. If it touches my life, I’m in the room.”
“Yes.”
“You’ll get it wrong sometimes. I want you to know I know that.”
“I’ll get it wrong,” he agreed. “I’ve gotten it wrong twice this month already, with small things. The Easter conversation. Saying our house.”
“And you noticed both times.”
“You noticed first.”
“You didn’t argue with me when I did. That’s what I need. I need you to hear it the first time, not the fifth.”
He nodded slowly. “I can do that.”
Security was harder than I expected. He got quiet when I brought it up, and I saw him struggle.
“The threat against Alessandra is settled,” he said carefully. “But my world is still my world, Vivienne. There are always going to be people who’d use you against me if they could. That hasn’t changed because I’ve changed. I can’t pretend it’s gone.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend.”
“I’d like there to be some kind of security. Around you. When you’re out.” He held up a hand. “I’m asking. I’m not deciding.”
“I know you’re asking. I can hear the difference now.
” I thought about it. “Grant’s people can be available.
They report to me. I get told about any threat that involves me, all of it, whether you think it’ll frighten me or not.
I can say no to a detail on a given day.
And there’s never again a list at that gate that I’m not on. ”
“Done. All of that.”
“And if you think something’s dangerous, you tell me why, and we decide together. You don’t just quietly tighten something and let me find out when a door doesn’t open.”
He was quiet a moment. “That one’s going to be the hardest for me.”
“I know. That’s why I’m saying it.”
“Then I’ll say it back. We’ll decide together.” He met my eyes. “Even if I’m scared.”
“Especially if you’re scared.”
We talked about his family. I told him I wouldn’t be organizing Sunday dinners again, or the foundation dinner, or anyone’s birthday flowers. If he wanted his aunt to have flowers, he could set up the standing order himself.
“I already did,” he said. “In June. For Rosalind. And my godmother, and Luca’s.”
“You set them up yourself?”
“It took me three hours on the phone. I don’t know how you did it for forty people.”
“Spreadsheets,” I said, and he laughed.
“My mother,” he said then. “The boundaries stay. Whatever happens with you and me. She doesn’t walk into our house without an invitation.
And if she says anything to you that’s out of line, anywhere, I deal with it.
I don’t expect you to absorb it anymore.
I don’t tell you she’s a lot. I deal with it. ”
“She’s been better.”
“She has. I’m not taking the boundaries down because she’s been better. She’s been better because the boundaries are there.”
That was, I thought, the smartest thing I’d ever heard him say about his mother.
We talked about the house. That was where I surprised him.
“I’m not ready to move back into it,” I said. “Not the way it is.”
His face went careful again. “All right.”
“I want to keep this apartment. At least for a year. As a studio. Somewhere that’s mine, where I can work, where I can go if I need to be alone. I’ll pay for it from my own account.”
His mouth opened. I knew that look. He was about to fix it, to offer to buy the building or have someone renovate the second bedroom into a proper workroom.
Then he closed it.
“You were going to offer to buy the building,” I said.
“I was going to offer to buy the building.” He rubbed his face. “I’m not going to. It’s your apartment. Keep it as long as you want. If you ever want help with anything in it, you’ll ask.”
“The sink drips sometimes.”
“I’d like to learn how to fix a sink.”
“Hector could teach you.”
“Who’s Hector?”
“The super. You’d like him. He doesn’t care who you are either.”
He laughed. It was the real laugh, the Portofino laugh, and I’d heard it more times in the last month than in the three years before that.
“And the house,” I said. “When I come back, I don’t want to walk into it the way it was. I want us to go through it together. Every room. What stays, what goes. The east wing. The nursery.”
He went quiet at that last word.
“The rocking chair,” I said. “It’s still in Mia’s old room?”
“Yes. Alessandra left it when they moved. She said it wasn’t hers.” He hesitated. “Where would you like it?”
It was such a small question. It was the question he hadn’t asked in March.
“I don’t know yet,” I said honestly. “I’d like to think about it.”
“Then it stays where it is until you decide.”
* * *
We talked about the harder things too.
I told him about standing in the kitchen at three in the morning holding Mia while nobody asked if I was all right.
I told him about the two hours in the green dress on the top step at Sal’s party.
I told him the thing I’d never told anyone, that somewhere in the fourth year I’d stopped letting myself want children.
I couldn’t picture raising a child in a house where I didn’t have a say, and I’d been ashamed of that for years.
He listened to all of it. He didn’t interrupt. When I got to the part about children, he put his hand over mine on the table, briefly, and then took it back.
“I didn’t know that,” he said.
“You never asked.”
“I’m asking now. Do you want children?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Not yet. I’d like to find out what I want in a house that’s actually mine too, before I decide.”
“Then we’ll find out. Whenever you’re ready. Or never, if that’s what you decide.” He paused. “I want you to know I’m not going to bring it up every month. It’s yours to bring up.”
“Thank you.”
He told me things too. He’d started seeing someone once a week, a man in Westchester whom Luca had recommended, to talk about his father and about the thing his father had taught him when he was sixteen.
He called it the most uncomfortable hour of his week, and he hadn’t missed one yet.
He’d cried in the man’s office twice and been furious about it both times.
“Does it help?”
“I don’t know yet. It helps me hear myself.” He looked at his hands. “I’d like to keep going. If we’re doing this. I don’t want to fall back into the old way just because you came home and I stopped being frightened.”
“Then keep going.”
“I will.”
We talked about my name. I told him I’d be keeping Moretti.
Legally, for now, because it was my name as much as anyone’s after seven years, and I’d earned it.
But at work I was V. Castellano, and I’d stay V.
Castellano, and if anyone at a museum asked whether I was related to the Morettis, I’d tell them it wasn’t relevant.
“I like that,” he said.
“I didn’t ask if you liked it.”
“I know. I’m telling you anyway.”
We talked about the thing underneath everything else, which was that neither of us could let the marriage run on assumption again.
“I think the worst thing of all,” I said, “underneath every one of the things you did, was that you stopped choosing me because you thought you didn’t have to anymore.
You thought it was finished. I was yours, and that was settled, and you could put me down on the shelf and I’d still be there when you came back. ”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “That’s exactly what I thought.”
“I don’t want to be settled. I want to be chosen. Not once. Not at a wedding. I want to be chosen on a Tuesday when nothing’s happening. And I want to choose you back, on purpose. I don’t want either of us to think we’re finished.”
“We won’t be.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I’ve seen what it looks like when we are.” He looked at me. “I’m not going to forget the gate, Vivienne. I don’t want to.”
* * *
It was dark by then. The street lamps had come on outside. The almond croissants sat on the table, untouched, in their white paper bag.
Dante looked at the window, and then back at me, and I saw him gather himself. He had been waiting all afternoon to ask it, and he’d been careful not to.
“Will you come home?” he said.
He didn’t say it the way he’d said we’re not getting divorced. He said it the way you ask a question when the answer could go either way and you’ll live with both.
“Yes,” I said. “Not to the old one. To the one we’re going to build.”
He stood up. He came around the table and stopped a foot away from me, and waited, and I stood too, and closed the rest of the distance myself.
“I love you,” he said. It was the second time I had ever heard him say it to my face, and it came easily this time, without anything riding on it. There was nothing left for it to prevent. He was simply telling me something true. “I love you. I’ll say it every day. You’ll get sick of hearing it.”
“I won’t,” I said. “I love you too. I never stopped. Even at the gate.”
“I know. I think that’s what made it so hard to watch you go.” He put his forehead against mine. “You never stopped, and I still didn’t give you a reason to stay.”
“You’ve given me reasons since.”
“I’m going to keep giving them.”
I kissed him, and he kissed me back, slow and certain, his hand coming up to my face.
In the kitchen of my small apartment, with the dripping sink and the lemon shower curtain and the green chair nobody else ever sat in, my husband held me as if I were something he’d been given a second time and didn’t intend to set down.
“Stay tonight,” I said against his mouth.
“Are you sure?”
“Ask me again in the morning.”
He laughed, low, and I took his hand and led him down the short hall, and I closed the bedroom door behind us.
* * *
I moved back in November, not all at once.
We spent three weekends walking through the house room by room with a notepad, and he asked about every single thing, and some days it made me want to scream and some days it made me cry, and on the third Saturday we stood in the doorway of the room that had been the nursery, and then Mia’s room, and was now simply a room with a rocking chair in it.
“Your office,” I said. “The reading corner. By the window.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’ve been thinking about it for five weeks. I’m sure.”
He carried it down the hall himself, and set it in the corner by the window in my office, and then stepped back and asked whether it was in the right place. I moved it four inches to the left. He watched me do it and didn’t say anything, and when I turned around, he was smiling.
I kept the apartment. Two days a week I worked there. On the kitchen wall beside Mia’s rabbit drawing, I pinned a photograph Luca had taken at the exhibition: me, beside a small painted woman in a lace cap, and a white card with my own name on it.
I called Priya on the Monday after I moved back.
“Tear it up,” I said.
“The petition?”
“The petition.”
She was quiet for a moment. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. And Priya, I want you to keep my file open. For everything else. Contracts, the Crescent Street building, whatever comes up. I’d like my own lawyer.”
“I’d like to keep being your lawyer.” I could hear her smiling. “Congratulations, Vivienne. For what it’s worth, I don’t say that very often in this job.”
* * *