19. The Night Before
Chapter nineteen
The Night Before
Alex, The Villa, Florence, Italy
Alex, Florence Again
The family jet touches down at Pisa International FBO just after two in the afternoon and by the time the car reaches the villa the children are already arguing about the garden.
Matteo wants to check the fountain. Elena wants to check the fountain too, which she is explaining loudly and at length, though her reason is different and she considers the difference significant.
The volume increases. This is the first proper argument: two children who have decided they are siblings and are now operating with all the friction that implies. Max and I are both in the back seat. Neither of us moves to intervene.
Then Matteo turns, with the gravity of someone escalating through proper channels. “Dad. She’s doing it again.”
"Am not!"
"Are, too!"
"Am not!"
"Daddy!"
Max looks at me. I look at Max. The look contains everything: the word, the fact of the word, the complete naturalness with which it arrived.
He turns back to Matteo. “Work it out,” he says. Matteo accepts this with the expression of someone who expected exactly that answer and is not entirely dissatisfied with it. They are already at the gate by the time I have my bag.
This is not the Florence of four months ago. That Florence smelled of locked rooms and fresh grief and the held breath of a house waiting to know what it is. This one smells of the rosemary along the south wall.
Something Renata is doing in the studio: hot fabric and, faintly, coffee. Lorenzo Jr. is already inside. He came two days ahead with Margot and Renata and the pieces. I can hear him from the entry, which means it is going well.
Upstairs, I put my bag down, open the window.
The garden below has the children in it with the nanny and her assistant assigned from the villa staff.
Elena has found the fountain and is reporting her findings to Matteo, who is pretending not to be interested and is completely interested.
The garden is exactly as it was. The house is different.
The Florence light begins to fade. The Nanny gathers the children to their rooms to change to their pajamas.
In the studio, Mamma's chair is now my chair. The worktable with the Florence light coming across it at the angle she designed the window for. She was precise about light. It is in the estate records.
I open the notebook, find the show logistics page, sit down. The studio has a different smell from four months ago. Cedar pencils still, the cedar case archived in the great room. But alongside that now my own coffee, and the warmth of a space being worked in by more than one person.
It is not her room anymore. It is not not hers either. It is the room, being used, which is exactly what she built it for.
Max appears in the doorway at noon with coffee he has made and does not ask if I want it. He sets it on the table and goes. I drink it and keep working and understand, without making a production of understanding it, that this is what it looks like when someone knows how you work.
Two hours pass. The show is tomorrow. I have built a structure that will survive everything except a collapse of the kind I am no longer bracing for. I close the notebook and carry the coffee cup downstairs and the house receives me back into itself.
One other item, filed and not yet resolved. Clara’s Florentine registry search turned up a name: Studio Legale Benedetti.
An old firm with old clients. Max has the file and has said nothing about it beyond the fact that it exists and that old firms do not surface without a reason. The open question from the 1963 arrangement is still open.
Whatever the answer turns out to be, it will keep until after the show.
For now, Max and I review the activities the Nanny has prepared for Matteo and Elena for the next few days. We approve with minor notations.
Alex, The Rehearsal
Renata has dressed the rail in the great room with the twelve pieces in show order, Margot beside her with the pinning kit. The room smells of chalk and warm fabric. It is the smell I have come to associate with things going right.
The armoire is still in its corner. The cedar case is archived on the display table. This space knows what it is.
Lorenzo Jr. walks the rail from the first piece to the last without touching anything. He is slow about it. He gives each piece the full time, the comprehensive look of a designer measuring the distance between what was imagined and what exists.
The distance is small. In the cases that matter most it is nothing. Renata stands three steps behind him and says nothing, which I have learned means he has done exactly what she would have done.
The opening coat stops me first. Charcoal: Nonno's color, the one the whole workroom named without discussing. Then the dress in deep blue, which is mine, which he designed from three photographs on Papà's desk without telling me until it was finished.
The piece in Mamma's Lyon silk stops me longest. It closes the show. It is not the most technically complex piece on the rail. It is the one that makes the room into a sentence and itself into the last word of it.
"She would have walked straight to that one," I say.
Lorenzo Jr. is still looking at it. "I designed the walkthrough for her." He means the ordering of it: the way your eye moves from the first piece to the last, the way the silk arrives only after you have been prepared by everything before it.
He designed the room the way she would have designed it. Mamma is in this room. So is Nonno. So are the rest of them, all the way back.
Renata says, without looking up from Margot's pinning, "The hem on the closing piece was two millimeters high on the left side. It is not anymore."
"It wasn't," Lorenzo Jr. says.
"It wasn't and now it isn't." She straightens. "The show is ready."
Alex, The Pull
The rehearsal ends at six. Renata and Margot go back to the studio with a final adjustment query that, from the tone of Renata's voice, will be resolved in her favor within the hour.
The villa settles into the warm quiet of a house where good things have been happening all day. From the studio window I can hear the children still in the garden, their voices carrying the low argument of two children who have found a project and disagree about its execution.
Max is on the garden wall when I come out. The show schedule is face-down beside him on the stone. He is not looking at it.
He is looking at the Florence light going gold across the garden, and he carries the quality he has when he has finished processing something and come out the other side. Still and present and not working, which in Max is a distinct register. I have learned to recognize it. I sit beside him.
The children are at the far end of the garden. Matteo is explaining something to Elena with the focused authority of an eight-year-old who has recently acquired expertise. She is listening, which means it is probably about the fountain.
Lorenzo Jr.'s window is lit. Margot is visible in it, gesturing at something behind her. Renata's voice carries from somewhere on the floor below, saying something decisive about a hem. The villa is full of people doing their work.
"I said I would tell you something before Florence was finished," Max says.
"Yes."
"Florence ends tomorrow."
"I know."
He turns toward me. I am already looking at him.
The garden is going dark. The light is almost done.
Everything that has been building since the Florence courtyard at one in the morning, since the Will reading in Seal Harbor, since the summer nine years ago, arrives without announcement at this stone wall. I lead him to the camera padronale.
Alex, Meeting Halfway
From the veranda, Max looks down to the garden, looking like a Roman god in his loose cotton shirt and pants. I change into an understated but luxurious sleepwear.
The light is gone. What remains is the quality of a Florence evening in winter: the stone wall warm from the day, the cypress trees dark against the sky.
The the children's voices gone quiet at the far end and are now in their rooms. The villa has the quiet of a house that has stopped asking what it is and settled into what it has become.
He turns toward me.
There is nothing left to say on this wall that has not already been said. The words have been used. What is left is not a word. His eyes I now recognize as dark with wanting.
I close the distance. He meets me halfway. And I look up towards a kiss, a passionate …
The door bursts open.
Elena comes through first, running, squealing with the full-throated delight of a child who has found the best game. Matteo is right behind her, also laughing, the kind of laugh he rarely lets out, the one that means he has entirely forgotten to be eight and serious.
They stop when they see us. The nanny is right behind them, apologizing profusely. I assure her it's quite all right, and that we will take it from here. She leaves, closing the door.
A beat. Two children assessing the situation with the frank attention of people who have not yet learned to pretend they did not see something.
Then Elena makes her decision. She crosses the room, climbs onto the bed, and bounces once to test it. She looks at Matteo. “See,” she says. “Big enough for all four of us.”
Matteo considers this. He gets on the bed. He does not bounce. He settles.
“We want to sleep over with you tonight,” Elena announces. This is not a request. It is a declaration of what is happening.
Max looks at me. I look back at Max. Not helping. He turns to the kids.
“Get your pillows,” he says.
Squealing, Elena is off the bed and through the door before he finishes the sentence. Matteo follows at a walk, because he is eight and does not run unless the situation requires it, but his face on the way out is the face of someone whose plan has worked exactly as intended.
Before the kids claim their spaces, I watch Max change into his pajamas. He notices my watching, and turns around in his boxers, making muscles. That's countless hours in the gym with a trainer paying off.
He grins slyly and falls on to bed, lies back on the bed and looks at the ceiling. Now I look at him with hunger. He looks back and mouths, "Sorry."
After a moment he says, “This is what Chiara planned for us to be.”
I look at the ceiling too. “Yes, all of it,” I say.
The ceiling is very old and very steady and has been there for five hundred years and will be there long after the show and the filing and everything else that is coming. This is, under the circumstances, a comfort.
Matteo and Elena are back on our bed with their pillows.
Max says, "Same rules: when on the bed, be quiet and sleep."
"Okay," chorused Elena and Matteo.
Alex, Before the Show
The Florence morning light is already coming: earlier than Seal Harbor, gold before six, the light that made Nonno choose this villa and this garden and this window angle that Mamma then designed a studio around.
The bed is empty except for me. At some point in the night the children migrated back to their own rooms, the way children do, without ceremony, without waking anyone. Max is already up. I can hear the kitchen from here.
I lie still for a moment and take stock of what has changed since yesterday morning. The inventory takes longer than expected because the list is longer than expected.
By the time I am downstairs, the kitchen is already running. The morning chef has coffee on the table, and an assortment of fresh cornetto (Italian croissant-style pastry), and brioche with fresh butter, yogurt and fruit laid out.
The children are eating with the focused quiet of two people who have somewhere to be and are not yet thinking about it. It is a Saturday. No school. They have a big day ahead of them, with the nanny and her assistant fussing over them.
The villa staff have the morning well in hand and the room has the good hum of a house that knows what it is doing.
Max is at the table with a file. He looks up when I come in. A pause. Nothing needs to be said about last night. It is simply there between us, the way the coffee is there, and the bread, and the Florence light across the floor.
Giulia comes through the door at nine with her bag and the expression of someone who tried to stay away and could not. She greets Lorenzo Jr. in the hall, greets Renata in the kitchen doorway, stops when she sees Max at the table and me across from him and the children between us.
Very quietly, to no one, "Good, good, good." She accepts the coffee poured for her and sits beside me.
"Good," she says again the fourth time, then raises the cup to me, and drinks her coffee. My sister can be so dramatic.
Lorenzo Jr. appears at nine-thirty with Margot and the look of a man who has not slept and is not sorry about it. "The closing piece is right." He addresses the kitchen at large when he says it.
Then he sees the four of us at the table. He looks at Giulia. Giulia winks. He goes to the coffee without comment, which from Lorenzo Jr. is its own kind of statement.
"It was always right," Renata's voice precedes her as she comes through the door behind him. She has apparently been in the studio since before six. She takes in the kitchen in one pass: Lorenzo Jr., Margot, Giulia, and then the four of us at the table. She raises her eyebrows.
The nanny gathers the children with her assistant to change for their planned day trip. They go with no resistance.
She accepts her coffee. "Now it is more right." The kitchen fills with the sound of all of them. "More right." She repeats to the room.
The show is today. But she is not talking about the show, it seems.