7. The Letter, The Diner
Chapter seven
The Letter, The Diner
Alex, The Bellamare Estate
That Night and the Next Morning
Alex, The Letter in Both Hands
Bellamare is dark and Mamma’s letter is in both hands and Max has just hung up on me for the second time in my life. The first time was not his fault. This time is mine.
The first paragraph is in Mamma’s hand. I have read it twice already, in the study before I called him. And I read it again now because her handwriting is the one thing in this room that feels like her presence rather than her absence.
She knew. She knew from before Matteo was born, said nothing, loved me through it, left the letter here for me to find when I was ready. She used my full name at the top. She only did that when something mattered completely.
The second paragraph stays folded. I put the letter on the desk.
I sit on the floor with my back against the bookcase and my knees up, the way I used to sit in Nonno’s Florence library when I was young and needed to think without anyone watching.
The floor is cold through my clothes. Outside, the coast does what it does.
Matteo is asleep. The house is completely still. I do not move.
He said: have a good life, Alex. Not cruelty. Precision. He was telling me exactly what was on the other side of the silence I gave him.
Later, my phone says one forty-seven. I look at it for a while. Then I think: he said he would call tomorrow. It is already tomorrow.
The phone rings twice on his end.
He picks up. He does not say anything. He is awake. He has been awake. He is going to make me bring it all the way.
Starting again with what I said in the sitting room. I have rehearsed it so many time I'm starting to believe it is everything.
He is quiet in the way he is quiet when he is listening rather than waiting. When I finish he says, “That’s not all of it.” Not accusing. Knowing.
“No,” I say.
A pause. “Clara will attend the gown showing.” And he is gone again.
The dead line sits in my hand. Then I call back.
“I need to see you,” I say. “In person. Tonight.”
Silence. Then his voice, level. “There is a diner on Route 1. Keller’s Cafe. Long-haul stop, twelve miles north. Be there in three hours.”
He hangs up.
I wake the driver up then sit back down on the floor of the study with the letter in my lap. I let what I have been holding sealed for nine years go where it goes.
Alex, FLASHBACK: The Library
The library at six in the evening, the long windows going amber. The seminar I enrolled in because the reading list caught me on a Tuesday in May, before I had a reason not to. I signed up for myself. That was the small luxury: doing a thing because I wanted it, not because the estate required it.
The group has sorted itself already into the people who prepare and the people who perform. I am in the first group. I do not mind the second group as long as they are interesting.
He is already at the table with the best lighting by the window when I arrive the first evening, reading without looking up.
Former ROTC by the looks of him, with the focus, which most people in that room find intimidating.
Clarifying, in the way a strong headwind is clarifying: it shows you exactly what you are made of.
I sit across from him anyway, and turn the page of my chapter back to the beginning for the second time. I have read it twice and retained essentially nothing. The reason is not yet something I am going to name.
He sits down across from me on the second meeting without asking. He reads. Fifteen minutes pass. He says, without looking up, "You have read that chapter three times."
"How would you know."
"You turn the page, go back, turn it again. Either it is very dense or you are somewhere else."
"Both."
"Max Grant."
"Alex Strozzi."
He nods and goes back to reading.
There is no established response for someone who introduces himself and returns immediately to his text. I have been the sharpest person in most of my rooms since I was nineteen.
And I am accustomed to a range of responses to that fact. Deference. Competition. The quality of attention people give you when they are deciding whether to be afraid of you.
None of those responses have included indifference, and I need to be precise here: he is not indifferent. He is reading. There is a meaningful difference between those two things and I can feel it from across the table. Indifference would be easier to dismiss.
The seminar begins. The professor asks the first question. Three people answer simultaneously. Max does not answer and neither do I, and we catch each other not answering and look back at our texts. I read the chapter again. This time I retain it.
Alex, FLASHBACK: The Summer
The third session. We are doing something I have not done in a seminar before. We are completing each other's arguments without having agreed to.
I say something about the text that is correct and incomplete. He adds what I left out, without signaling that he is adding anything.
Neither of us acknowledges it. The professor moves on. We look at our books.
He argues back when I am wrong. Not combatively. He pushes against my position when my evidence is incomplete. And he accepts correction without the small performance of reluctance that most people produce at that moment.
The pause, the slow nod, the visible recalibrating that is really just a way of preserving face. He does not do any of that.
He reconsiders and he says so and he moves forward. This is extremely rare. I have been having one-sided academic conversations since I was nineteen. Because no one argues with the sharpest person in the room when the sharpest person could flatten them.
He does not appear to have noticed he is supposed to be flattened.
The fourth week. I laugh. The real one, the full one, the one that surprises me as much as it surprises him. He said the true thing in the exact right words and it landed somewhere I did not expect and I laughed
He registers this with the quality of someone filing something carefully. Not writing it down, not making something of it. Just noting it as a real thing that happened. Then he goes back to the text.
For the first time in this seminar, not elsewhere. I am entirely here, in this room, at this table, in this June with the trees outside the window going green in the late light. It is a good feeling. I let myself have it.
Mid-July. He has been to my apartment twice and I to his once.
The reading list has been discussed each time.
Other things have happened in the spaces around those discussions.
I tell myself I will assess what this is when it is clearer.
The assessment keeps not happening. I understand that this is not because the clarity is lacking.
Alex, FLASHBACK: Late July
Tuesday in late July. The apartment is warm from the day. I am on the windowsill with my shoes off and a glass of wine I have stopped drinking because something is happening that is larger than wine.
He is in the chair across the room, watching me the way he watches things he has decided not to stop watching: directly, without apology, without manufacturing a context for it. He does not need a reason to look at something. He simply decides to and does.
"You are doing it again," I say.
"What."
"Watching me."
"Yes."
"You could just say so."
"I just did."
Looking at him. He looks back. The wine goes down and I cross the room and he gets out of the chair to meet me halfway. Which is one of the true things about him that I will know before the night is done. He always meets halfway. He does not make you come the whole way alone.
What happens is unhurried and entirely itself. I am without the armor I carry in every other room, and I notice this without correcting it, which is its own kind of arrival.
He is precise in his attention in the way he is precise with everything.
He pays attention to what is actually there, not to the idea of it.
This turns out to be the form of precision I most needed to encounter without knowing I needed it.
The apartment is warm. The July night is outside the window.
There is a long time before either of us says anything at all.
After, lying with my head on his arm, my whole body still quivering from the intensity of what just happened, I stare at the ceiling above us and listening to the city outside going quiet in the way cities go quiet after midnight.
I am intoxicated by the scent of him. The feel of him.
And I think I am in serious trouble. I think it the way you think something you are glad about, something you would choose again even knowing the cost.
Staying exactly where I am. He says nothing for a long time. Then he traces the line of my shoulder once, with two fingers, because it is there and it is real. I do not manage this. I do not file it or contain it or decide what to do with it. I let it be.
"I'm in serious trouble." I say.
He doesn't why or what. Somehow, he knows.
Alex, FLASHBACK: August
Papà calls at four in the afternoon. My grandfather passed on a Thursday in August. And I am in the seminar corridor with the afternoon light coming through the high windows sitting on the floor for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes exactly.
Then I begin to organize. A flight. A car from the airport.
A list of what the family will need before I arrive and a list of what they will need after.
I am the eldest. I am good at this. Being good at it requires that I become, immediately, the person who organizes rather than the person sitting on the corridor floor.
No call to Max before the flight. There is no time, I tell myself: the car is in two hours, I need to pack, I will explain properly once I am in Florence and have a sense of the timeline. This is true. Also not complete.
The complete truth is that calling him would require me to be the person on the corridor floor, and I cannot be that person right now. I am already becoming the other one, and the other one does not sit on floors.