12. Her Name
HER NAME
LORENZO
“You came back, Don D’Amato,” Renata Alba says through the screen door, “and you brought the widow. Good. Wipe your feet, the birds do not like wet shoes.”
“Sit by the window. You will have coffee. I am not asking.”
There is an IBM Selectric on its own table under a fitted vinyl cover, dusted, squared to the table’s edge, in the room of a woman who has not typed for three years and will not let the machine know it.
Valeria walks past the chairs and stops in front of it.
“May I?”
Renata looks at her for a moment, then takes the cover off and folds it like a flag.
My wife rolls a sheet from the side table into the platen, sets her fingers, and types one word. Beneficiary. Then she bends and looks at it the way she looks at wire confirmations.
“The crossbar of the e fills in,” she says. “Every one.”
“Since eighty-eight. They offered to fix it and I said no.” Renata sets down the tray. “By then I knew every page that machine had made, and if somebody ever tried to put words in its mouth, I wanted to be able to tell.”
“You built an audit trail out of a broken key.”
“I built nothing. I refused a repair.” The old woman pours. “You are not going to ask me why.”
“No. I keep paper too.” And my wife puts a spiral notebook down on the table between the sugar and the finch seed and opens it at the back, where the pages are still empty, and turns it round so that Renata Alba can see how much of it is used and none of what is in it.
Something happens between those two women then that I have nothing to do with, and I sit in it and drink an old woman’s coffee and keep my mouth shut.
The second amendment comes out of a manila envelope with RA initialed at the foot of every page, small, upright, furious.
“2001. They brought it to me on a Thursday. I typed it, because typing was my job, and I initialed it the way you initial a thing you do not agree with, and I told the trust officer to his face that they had taken a fund built for widows and turned it into plumbing.” She smooths the envelope flat.
“Then I went to the 9 o’clock at Saint Bartholomew’s and made my copies, which was also my job, although nobody had assigned it to me. ”
“Why hand it to us now?” I ask.
“I am not handing it to you.” She does not look at me at all. “I am handing it to her. That instrument was written for women who were going to be left. Thirty years, and she is the first one of them who has ever knocked on my door.”
Valeria takes the founding page out of her bag then, unfolds it, and lays it on the table with the black oval facing up.
“The fourth signature.”
The finches keep talking. Renata puts one finger on the edge of the page, not on the oval, the way you touch a photograph of somebody.
“You are the second person to bring me this page,” she says.
“A young man came in the spring of last year. He telephoned first. He wore a good gray suit and he asked his questions in the right order and he wrote nothing down, and he brought a two-pound bag of thistle seed for the finches, the correct kind.”
Valeria’s cup stops halfway.
“The seed is still on the shelf,” Renata says, tilting her head toward the porch rail, and it is, half used, folded closed with a wooden clothespin.
“He seemed like a man doing something he did not expect to survive, and I gave him the copy, and the name was already gone from it, because I took a pen to it at this table before it went in the envelope. Mine too. Both copies, the same afternoon, years ago.”
“Signora.” Valeria’s voice is the careful one. “Whose name was it?”
“The name is not information.” Renata folds her hands. “It is a grave, and I promised her.”
She does not say who. She does not soften it, and she does not offer to be persuaded.
My wife reaches across the table and puts her hand over the old woman’s folded ones, and leaves it there, and Renata lets her.
At the door, Renata catches my sleeve.
“You still look like your mother when you are ashamed of something,” she says, quietly, just to me. “Whatever it is, it is getting heavy. I can see it from here.”
We collect Tazio from the car, where he has spent ninety minutes rehearsing, and drive for his mother’s door, and he practices out loud at us for most of Connecticut.
“What did I tell you?” Valeria says, eyes shut, head back against the seat.
“Ask her what she thinks about when she is falling asleep.” He signals a lane change with great care. “And then be quiet for as long as it takes her to answer.”
“And?”
“And eat the lasagna either way.”
We deliver him at 12:52 p.m. with eight minutes and one clean shirt to spare, and drive home ourselves, and somewhere past Bridgeport she puts her hand in mine on the gearshift and leaves it there, and for sixty miles neither of us says anything at all.
Then my phone buzzes on the console. One message. Tazio.
She answered the question.
Valeria reads it over my arm and starts to smile, and she puts the phone face down like something settled.
“He is nineteen and braver than both of us,” she says.
“He asked a girl what she thinks about when she falls asleep.”
“And I have two shoeboxes I am not allowed to open until I can see straight.” She puts her head back against the seat.
“I have run every number this week, Lorenzo. My father’s rate.
The exact minute a man died on top of my hands.
I am tired in a place I did not know had a floor.
Tonight I do not want to count anything. Not one thing. Take it.”
“Say what you are handing me.”
“The whole night. The decisions. Me.” Her eyes stay shut. “You have watched me run everything since Thursday. Tonight I want to find out what happens if I stop.”
“Then it is mine,” I say. “All of it. From the front door.”
At 9 p.m. I run the bath deep and hot, and when she comes in, she is holding her mechanical pencil, out of habit, the way other people carry cigarettes.
I hold out my hand. She looks at it.
“The pencil, Valeria.”
“I was not going to…”
“The pencil.”
She puts it in my palm. Then I hold my hand out again and wait, and she looks at me for a second and a half and goes and gets the notebook off the bed and puts that in it too, and that costs her a great deal more than the pencil did.
I set them both on the windowsill, out of reach, and something in her exhales that has been clenched since I met her.
“You will get it back in the morning,” I say. “Tonight there is nothing to write down. Get in the water.”
She gets in. I sit behind her head on the tub’s edge with the jug and wet her hair, and she lasts almost ninety seconds before it starts.
“Your watch. You are going to ruin your…”
“Off the clock, Signora D’Amato.”
“The conditioner is the one on the…”
“I know which one. I have watched you.” I work my fingers from her temples back, slow, and her sentences die one at a time, mid-word, like lights going off down a hallway.
“That is the last instruction the management accepts tonight. Every one after that, I take the whole night to pay what I owe you.”
“That is not a deterrent.”
“No.”
She laughs, low, and then goes quiet under my hands, and I wash my wife’s hair in a steamed-up bathroom while the week comes off her in the water, and it is the closest I have come to praying since the crypt.
When I pour the last jug through, shielding her eyes with the edge of my hand, she catches my wrist and holds my palm against her cheek, and neither of us calls that anything.
“Now,” she says, “the rest of it. You said there was a balance.”
“There is.” I move around and kneel on the tile in front of her. “Outstanding since Thursday. Interest accruing daily, your terms. Sit up on the edge and put your feet on my shoulders, and I will pay what I owe like a man with excellent credit.”
She rises out of the water with the steam coming off her shoulders and does it, hands braced behind her, and she is shaking already, and not from cold.
“Tell me to stop and I stop.”
“Do not stop.”
I start at the inside of her knee and go up slow, telling her everything on the way, that her skin tastes of heat and bathwater, that her thighs have started trembling before I have arrived anywhere, that she is soaked in a way no bath explains, and when I reach her I hold her open with both thumbs and look and let her hear exactly what I see.
“Swollen. Glossy. Standing up and asking me by name before my mouth has said one word to you.” I breathe on her and she jerks. “Say what you want, and take your time saying it.”
“Your mouth. On my pussy. Slowly, and do not stop talking. I want to hear you enjoy it.”
“There is my wife.”
I put my tongue flat against her and drag up, and the sound she makes goes off the tile like something breaking loose, and she tastes like salt and clean skin and ten days of holding on, and I tell her so with my mouth still against her so she gets the words and the hum of them at once.
“You taste like the bath and underneath it like you.” Flat strokes, slow. “Warm. Alive. Mine to drink.”
“Lorenzo…”
“Your heel just found my spine.” The point of my tongue now, small circles, two fingers curling in and up. “Push harder. Use me. There it is.”
“Oh God. There. Right…”
“I know where. I have been thinking about where since the elevator.” Against her, humming it. “Listen to yourself. That sound has never been in a boardroom. That sound is mine.”
“Do not stop. Do not you dare…”
“Never. You are being so good, Valeria. You have not given one instruction in four minutes. Do you know what that does to me?”
She tries to help anyway. Of course she tries, her hips finding a better angle, managing it, and I take my mouth away and hold still until she whines.
“You are working. I can feel you supervising.” I kiss the inside of her thigh, soft, while she shakes. “Nobody is grading you. Stop it.”
“I do not know how.” It comes out of her cracked and honest.
“Then ask me to teach you.”
Silence, one breath, two, her thighs trembling on my shoulders.