14. Three in the Morning #3
A man with a long apron is pouring from three different bottles. Alex listens with the attention she gives Renata. The new wine is the year’s, fast and young.
The Chianti Riserva (Reserve) is two years older and is for people who do not understand the new wine, a position he holds firmly. The riserva he pours only for those who ask, which he says in the tone of a man revealing a confidence.
Alex asks. He pours.
“You are flattering him.”
“I am flattering nothing. I asked because I wanted it. His happiness is a side effect.”
The riserva is excellent. It is also not what I want, which is more of the new wine. The man is told. He gives a long look and pours it without comment, and the small satisfaction this produces will have to be examined later.
Bread is on the table. The porcini-and-garlic thing is a slow-stewed mushroom on grilled bread, the bread soaked through, the mushroom still tasting of the forest floor.
Roasted chestnuts in a paper twist. The chestnut man shakes his pan over coals at the next station, and the sound is not unreasonable.
We eat standing up. Alex has a chestnut in one hand and the wine in the other and she has not stopped smiling since the dance ended. She catches the tracking.
“You are watching me,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Fourteen minutes of smiling. Noticing it.”
She tilts her head a fraction. The chestnut goes from one hand to the other while she takes a slow sip of the wine and considers the question of whether to push the point or let it go. Push, evidently.
“You have been counting. Does it bother you?”
“No. It is doing something else. Something not yet named.”
“Try.”
“Rather not.”
She looks at me over the rim of the glass with the kind of amusement of a woman who has decided that polite professional Max is going to be teased now. And that he is going to enjoy it, and that he should stop pretending otherwise. The pretending continues.
“Coward.”
“Fair.”
She laughs, smaller this time, lower. The laugh of a woman finding out she is not in trouble for something.
“All right,” she says. She looks at me directly.
“Then I will. You are looking at me as if you have just realized that the thing you have been managing for nine years is something you could have been having instead. And I am looking at you as if I am noticing the same about myself, and that perhaps neither of us has to manage it tonight.”
A beat. The wind moves through the lanterns and the sound of the band carries from the stage and somewhere a child is laughing at a thing only the child can see.
“Alex.”
“Yes.”
“That was a lot of words.”
“Was it?”
“It was. Stand still while I think about them.”
She stands still. The wine glass at her mouth. Her eyebrows raised, slightly, in a way I know better than my own handwriting.
“Going to need to kiss you in this piazza now. Ten seconds for procedural objection.”
She does not object.
The piazza is loud. The music has started up again. The chestnut man is shouting at someone about coals, and an old woman near the bakery is singing along three notes flat. None of it is in this room.
This room is exactly her face, exactly her mouth, exactly the cold of her cheek under my hand, and the moment she leans in in a way she has not leaned into anyone, I think, in nine years.
When the kiss breaks her hands are flat on the front of my coat.
“Procedurally fine,” she says.
“Noted.”
Her eyebrows rise. The signal she gives when she has caught me at something.
“You have been waiting to use that word all evening.”
“Professionally limited.”
She laughs again, the dance laugh, and we walk back to the car under the lanterns with her arm through mine. The drive home is slower than the drive out. Neither of us turns on music.
There are a group of teenagers chattering loudly while looking at the car. The biggest one of them keeps on pointing at the badge of the Quadrifoglio, excitedly talking as if declaring a great find. they move back when they see us, with approving nods.
"So much for hiding in plain sight," I say.
The hills are darker on either side of the headlights, the villa is forty minutes off, and her hand has not left mine on the gearshift.
At the gate the car stops. The engine ticks.
“Max.”
“Yes.”
“That was the best evening I have had since I was twenty-four.”
“Same.”
The car goes back in gear and we go up the drive.
She is out of the car before I have set the brake. By the time I have closed the driver's door she has my hand and is walking, not slowly, toward the loggia (the gallery).
The villa is dark except for one lamp Lorenzo Jr. has left on in the entry. She stops at the door, turns, and her hands are flat on my chest and her mouth is on mine before either of us has said anything.
This kiss is not the piazza kiss. This is the kiss of a woman who has decided where the evening actually begins, and the answer is not on the gravel.
Inside, the door closes. We move to the camera padronale joined in a passionate kiss. She is all over me as soon as I close the door. As I am, all over her.
The villa holds the rest.