15. Claire
CLAIRE
Tessa calls while I am trying to get peach juice off a memory-card case.
This is not how I imagined professional opportunity would find me.
“Do not put me on speaker,” she says the second I answer.
“You are already on speaker.”
“Claire.”
“My hands are sticky.”
Across the small table at Casa Ginestra, Matteo lifts his eyes from his laptop.
I point at the phone. “Work.”
“I assumed.”
Tessa says, “Is that him?”
I turn off speaker so fast I nearly drop the phone into the sink.
He looks much too pleased.
I leave the kitchen before he can enjoy himself more.
The terrace is already hot even though it is barely ten. I sit on the low wall with the phone against my ear and wipe my fingers on a dish towel I apparently brought with me.
“Tessa.”
“What? I asked a neutral question.”
“You asked it like a person holding popcorn.”
“I am at my desk.”
“You have eaten popcorn at your desk.”
“Not the point.”
I hear paper move on her end.
Her voice changes just enough that I stop preparing a defense.
“I have something.”
“Assignment something?”
“Yes.”
That gets me upright.
Tessa gives me the useful version first. A magazine I have worked with twice wants me for a three-week editorial assignment in Japan.
Neighborhood food markets, early-morning vendors, small family businesses, mostly Osaka and Kyoto with several days outside both.
The original photographer had to pull out.
The dates begin five days after my rental at Ginestra ends.
The money is good, and the access is better.
The subject is exactly the kind of work I would complain about while secretly rearranging my entire life to take.
“Why me?” I ask.
“Because they liked the Marseille market story, and because their first choice fell through.”
“Inspiring.”
“You asked.”
“I was hoping for destiny.”
“I can lie if you need more romance in your career.”
“Please don’t. I already have enough romance causing problems in other departments.”
Tessa goes quiet for exactly long enough to be dangerous.
“I heard that.”
“You heard nothing.”
“I am writing it down.”
“You are an editor. Of course you are.”
“When do they need an answer?”
“Today.”
“Yes.”
Tessa goes quiet.
“What?”
“That was fast.”
“It is a good assignment.”
“It is.”
“So yes.”
“You want to hear the schedule?”
“After yes.”
She laughs.
I ask about flights, usage, final-image count, second-shooter travel, and whether the hotels are actually booked or still theoretical. Tessa has answers to most of it and says the contract will come later today.
I am writing dates in the margin of my notebook when the terrace door opens behind me.
Matteo comes out carrying his coffee and the dish towel I abandoned.
He puts the towel beside me.
His eyes drop to the dates.
I cover the page with one hand.
“Privacy.”
“You left the notebook open.”
“Still privacy.”
He sits at the other end of the wall.
Tessa hears his voice.
“Tell Bellandi I said hello.”
“No.”
“I can hear you,” Matteo says.
Tessa laughs in my ear.
Traitor.
I move three feet farther away. Matteo’s mouth curves anyway.
“When?” Tessa asks.
“Five days after I leave here.”
Matteo’s fingers pause around his coffee cup.
Then they move again.
He keeps listening to Tessa instead of interrupting.
He only reaches for the dish towel again and folds it once over his knee.
The fold becomes unnecessarily exact.
Tessa is still talking, so I keep listening.
“Yes,” I say again. “Send it.”
“Done. I’ll flag the contract when it lands.”
“Thank you.”
“And Claire?”
“What?”
“Eat actual food today.”
I look through the open kitchen doors at the half peach on the counter.
“I had fruit.”
“That is not what I said.”
“Goodbye, Tessa.”
“Tell him I said goodbye.”
I hang up.
Matteo takes one sip of coffee.
“Japan?”
“You heard that through the phone?”
“You repeated Osaka.”
Right.
I had.
“Three weeks.”
He nods once.
After a tiny delay, he says, “That sounds like good work.”
“It is.”
“Then congratulations.”
He leaves it there.
I saw the flicker anyway.
I sit down again.
“You are being very reasonable.”
“That sounds like a complaint.”
“It might be.”
“Would you prefer unreasonable?”
“I would prefer easier to interpret.”
“No, you would not.”
Annoyingly, he is right.
I take the dish towel and throw it at him.
He catches it without spilling the coffee.
“You are impossible to provoke today.”
“You threw a dish towel.”
“And yet no emotional collapse.”
“Disappointing?”
“Deeply.”
He puts the towel beside me instead of throwing it back, so I stop trying to provoke him.
By late afternoon, Bellamare has become too hot for anyone to pretend the terrace is usable.
Luca moves lunch into the shade beside Casa Bellamare and calls it an early dinner when nobody arrives at the same time.
Adrian disappears after eating. Sebastian takes a phone call near the lower path, still holding a piece of bread.
Nico is repairing the wobble in the old table again because apparently fifteen years have not produced a more permanent solution.
I have my camera with me because I had been photographing near Ravello before Luca waved me toward food.
It rests against my chair.
Matteo is across from me with his sleeves pushed up and his phone facedown beside his plate.
He has not mentioned Japan again.
Neither have I.
Luca crouches beside Nico.
“That is not the same leg.”
“It is the same floor.”
“The table moved.”
“The floor did not.”
Matteo reaches for his water. “The table should have been replaced twelve years ago.”
Four people object without coordination.
He closes his eyes.
I grin.
“There’s the beloved table.”
“It has one short leg.”
“It has history,” Luca says.
“It has a defect.”
Nico sits back on his heels. “You said the same thing the first summer.”
Matteo points at him. “Because it was true the first summer.”
Luca’s face changes.
“Oh, no.”
Matteo sees it too. “Do not.”
I turn toward Luca immediately.
“Please.”
“Claire.”
“I am not involved.”
“You became involved before he finished the sentence.”
Luca ignores him. “First summer. We are twenty-three, maybe twenty-four.”
“Twenty-three,” Matteo says automatically.
Nico makes a sound under his breath.
Luca continues. “The table is already bad.”
“It was worse.”
“It was a table.”
“One leg was nearly two centimeters short.”
I blink.
“You measured it.”
Of course he measured it.
Nico says, “Three times.”
“The first measurement was approximate.”
Luca is already laughing. “He spends half an hour measuring the table instead of putting something under the leg.”
“That is how you determine the correct thickness.”
“We had cardboard.”
“It was damp.”
“We had a book.”
“It was Sebastian’s.”
“That improves the book,” Nico says.
I start laughing.
Matteo manages to look offended on behalf of both measurement and literature.
Luca puts one hand on the table. “Finally he makes the perfect piece. Exactly the right thickness. Slides it under. Table completely level.”
“As it should be.”
Nico’s mouth twitches.
I know something is coming.
“What happened?”
Luca cannot answer because he is laughing again.
Nico does.
“Sebastian sat on it.”
“The chair,” Matteo says.
“The table.”
“The chair collapsed into the table.”
“Because Sebastian leaned back.”
“Because the chair was broken.”
“Because Sebastian broke everything that summer.”
Luca has both hands over his face now.
Matteo is trying not to laugh.
His mouth keeps failing at seriousness. He looks from Nico to Luca and gives up.
Then he laughs.
His head tips back, one hand still around the water glass. Luca says something through his own laughter that I miss, and Matteo reaches across the table to shove his shoulder.
By the time I notice what I am doing, the camera is already up.
One frame.
The shutter is not silent, and I lower the camera immediately.
Matteo does not seem to hear.
Nico does.
His eyes move from the camera to me.
He says nothing, which I like less than a comment.
I set the camera against my thigh.
The conversation keeps moving. Luca accuses Matteo of rebuilding the chair the next morning. Matteo says someone had to. Nico corrects that a carpenter rebuilt it. Matteo says he arranged the carpenter.
“You supervised,” Luca says.
“I prevented improvisation.”
“You stood there with coffee.”
“Exactly.”
Everyone starts again.
I do not lift the camera.
A few minutes later Matteo reaches under the table and removes Nico’s folded napkin shim.
Nico stares at him.
“What are you doing?”
“Testing something.”
The table rocks immediately.
Luca points at it. “History.”
Matteo puts the napkin back.
“Defect.”
“You have learned nothing in fifteen years,” Nico says.
“I have learned the napkin works.”
That gets Luca laughing all over again.
The image is on the card.
For the next twenty minutes I am aware of the camera against my leg in the same way I become aware of a chipped tooth after my tongue finds it.
I took the picture without asking.
That matters because Matteo once asked me to delete one.
I could tell myself this moment is different.
The first candid caught something closing in his face. I knew before he said anything that I had stepped somewhere private.
This one catches him laughing with men he has known for fifteen years, barely aware I exist for the second the shutter closes.
It still does not make the choice mine.
I keep it.
I do not take another.
Back at Ginestra, I upload the afternoon’s images before I shower.
Professional discipline.
Also cowardice.
The card loads forty-three frames.
Terrace shadows. A woman carrying flowers above Ravello. Two boys leaning over a fountain. Luca’s hands breaking bread. Nico crouched beside the table leg.
Then Matteo.
I stop scrolling.
Technically, the photograph is imperfect.
His hand is moving, so the fingertips blur. Luca is half cut off at the left edge. Nico’s shoulder blocks part of the bowl in front of them. The background is brighter than I would choose if I had been planning the frame.
I enlarge it anyway.
Matteo’s face is turned toward Luca.
He is laughing hard enough that the lines beside his eyes show.
There is nothing Bellandi about it. He is simply Matteo at an old table while his friends remind him he was ridiculous at twenty-three.
I sit back.
My finger hovers over delete, then moves to the private tag.
It stays out of exports and working contact sheets.
Then I go make coffee, remember the time, swear, and make water instead.
When I come back, the photograph is still on the screen.
I minimize it and open the Return folder.
The folder is still ridiculous.
A doorway in Maine.
The station bench in Lisbon.
The worn blue stool from the bakery above Minori.
The old Bellamare crate with the name almost rubbed away.
I move through the selects slowly.
One frame from the Ravello stationery-shop shoot stops me. The grandmother is sitting behind the counter with one hand on a drawer her granddaughter wants to replace. The drawer is scratched and ugly. Her granddaughter is leaning beside her, smiling at something outside the frame.
I had marked the version without either woman higher.
Cleaner lines.
Better light.
I change the rating.
The version with both women moves up.
I keep going.
The two coffee cups on the windowsill.
The older couple carrying folding chairs toward shade.
Stefano’s green-stained hands.
Nico’s hand under the stupid table while Luca argues above him.
I make a new working sequence.
I drag six frames into it, then remove two.
The older couple stays, along with the bakery stool and the stationery-shop women.
I hover over the empty Bellamare terrace shot I loved on my second day.
It is still beautiful.
I leave it where it is.
I do not name it.
Naming things too early is how folders become FINAL SELECTS 4.
The candid of Matteo stays outside Return.
I open it again and crop nothing.
The slice of Luca at the edge matters.
Nico’s shoulder does too.
So does the crooked table edge.
Crop them out and Matteo becomes the subject.
But he is laughing because they are there.
I make one small exposure adjustment and stop.
My phone buzzes.
Tessa has sent the contract.
Below it is a second message.
Tessa: Still yes?
I type back before I can make the question about anything else.
Me: Yes.
Five days after Ginestra. Still yes.
I look at the date in my notebook again.
I close the contract without signing. I’ll read it properly tonight, when I’m less likely to accept a clause requiring six tripods across Japan.
The screen returns to Matteo.
I want him to see it.
I reach for my phone to message him.
Someone knocks lightly against the open gate.
I know the rhythm now.
Two taps, pause, one.
Matteo.
My hand hovers over the laptop.
I could close it.
Instead I leave the photograph full-screen. “Come in,” I call.