16. Practice
PRACTICE
LORENZO
Fabrizio is in my office before the light is, sitting in the chair my father used to make men stand in front of, and he has brought sfogliatelle.
“Lorenzo,” he says. “I said Thursday.”
It is Thursday. He has never once been early or late with me in twenty-two years, and it has not once occurred to me until this exact morning.
He puts the pastry box on the corner of the desk and turns it so the seam faces me, which is a thing he has done since we were boys, and then he looks at my face the way he has been looking at my face since Sunday.
“You have not slept.”
“No.”
“Eat one of those before you do anything else. You will make a decision today and you will make it worse hungry.”
He sets a folder down beside the box and does not open it. He waits to be asked, because being asked is the only kind of permission he has ever wanted from this house.
“Show me.”
Money orders. Eleven of them, photocopied at some counter by some clerk who will not remember doing it, each one made out to a management company in Mount Vernon, each one purchased in cash, each one signed in the round careful hand of Gaetano Presti, who has been dead since June of 2019.
“The last one is from March,” Fabrizio says. “Rent is paid through next April.”
“A dead man is paying rent through next April.”
“A dead man’s name is.” He takes the top of his coffee off and does not drink it. “I did not want to bring you a place. I wanted to bring you a room. It took the extra day.”
I look at the eleven small pieces of paper and I feel the thing I have felt maybe four times in my life, which is the floor of a problem going soft under the weight of an answer.
“Who else knows?”
“You. Me. The clerk who does not remember.”
“Keep it there.”
He does not stand up. That is unlike him.
“Let me go instead,” he says.
“No.”
“Lorenzo.” He says it the way he said it in the ambulance bay with his hands still wet.
“If it is what the both of us think it is, then it is a room where somebody worked on your brother for a long time before he ever touched him. You will not be able to unsee it. I can go and I can come back and I can tell you what is in there, and you will know everything and you will not have to have stood in it.”
For about two seconds I want that more than I have wanted anything since the hospital.
“No,” I say. “He was mine.”
He takes that. He gathers the coffee he has not drunk and stands, and at the door he does the thing he always does, which is turn halfway back with his hand still on the frame.
“Is there anything I can carry?”
“No.”
“Then I will be where you can find me.”
When he is gone I sit for a while with my hands flat on the folder, and then I go upstairs, and my wife is asleep on her side with one arm out of the covers and the kitten asleep in the crook of it like a coin somebody dropped there.
Soldo has been in this house since yesterday and has already found the position closest to the only warmth in it.
I do not wake her. I go down to the kitchen and I take a cup off the hook and I set it on her side of the counter, upside down on the saucer the way she leaves mine, and I do it at twenty past six in the morning, which is not four in the afternoon.
I do it anyway. The arrangement is that at four o’clock, whatever else is true, a cup gets set. We have not spoken much at all. The page she opened is still open and I have stopped expecting to be the one who closes it.
But I may not be home at four.
So I set it early, and I stand there for a second looking at a cup on a counter like a man reading a sentence in a language he is only beginning to have, and then I take the folder and I go.
I do not bring Tazio.
He argues, which he is allowed to do in the garage and nowhere else.
Eleven money orders in a dead man’s name is exactly the shape of a room somebody wants me to walk into.
I tell him he is right. I tell him to have the car three blocks south with the engine off and to come up in forty minutes if I have not come down, and he says forty is a long time, and I say it is, and I take the stairs.
The building is on a street of buildings that have all stopped being what they were.
Downstairs is Wexler Sign and Awning, out of business since whenever, the window whitewashed from the inside with a roller by somebody in a hurry.
The stairwell smells like cold iron and old rain. The second floor has one door.
The lock is a good one. Nobody puts a four-hundred-dollar lock on a room full of nothing.
I have the key in eleven seconds, and then the door is open and I am standing on the threshold of a long bright room with a bank of north windows, and I do not go in.
I count instead.
Twenty feet, door to bench. A workbench along the far wall under the good light, the way you would put it if you were going to be there a long time and wanted to save your eyes.
Pegboard above it. Everything hung. Everything outlined in marker so that a tool has a shape waiting for it when it comes home.
My mother’s kitchen was like this. She hung her pans on a board and drew around each one in pencil, and when I was six I thought it was because she could not remember where they went, and when I was thirty I understood it was so she would know instantly if one was missing.
Twenty feet is not far. I have crossed rooms at twice this length with men in them who wanted me dead. I stand at the door of this one for a long time, because I already know what kind of room it is, and the only thing I do not know yet is how much of it is going to be about my brother.
Then I go in.
Somebody has been good in here.
That is the wrong word and it is the only one. There is no dust on the bench and there is dust on the sills, which means the bench was worked and the room was not cleaned. There are no ashtrays, no chair with a shape worn into it. There is a stool, and the stool is under the bench, pushed in.
Whoever worked here worked standing, and did not eat, and did not sit around admiring anything.
On the pegboard: jeweler’s files, calipers, two vises, a set of hemostats, a bench block, a hand drill with a chuck the size of a pea. Small work. Watch work.
And along the back of the bench, in a wooden tray with dividers, five jigs.
I do not touch them. I put my hands behind my back like a man in a museum, and I go down the row.
Five wooden blocks, each routed out to hold a cylinder. Each one different. Each one numbered on the end grain in pencil, one through five, in a hand that makes its numerals without any flourish at all.
Jig one is stained brown at the bottom of the channel and the stain has gone into the grain and been sanded and gone in again. Jig one has been used more than the others by a factor I would put at ten. Jig one is where somebody learned.
Jig two is cleaner. Jig three is cleaner still.
Jig four has a shim glued into the channel, a strip of brass two hairs thick, because whatever went into it needed to sit a little tighter than the last one.
Jig five is immaculate.
Jig five was cut by somebody who already knew.
And jig five is empty.
There is a rectangle in the tray beside it, in the fine gray film that settles on everything in a room with north windows, and the rectangle is clean, and it is the size and shape of the thing that sat there until recently and does not sit there now.
I stand and look at an absence for longer than a man in my position should stand still anywhere.
Under the bench there is a milk crate, and in the milk crate there are the failures.
I am not undone by the horror of it. I am undone by the craft.
Scrap after scrap. Chambers cut open lengthwise to see how they emptied.
A dozen versions of the same small seal, each one tried in a different material, each one labeled with a strip of tape.
Practice articles. That is the phrase that arrives and will not leave, because that is what my mother called the sample squares she made before she cut into good cloth.
You do not ruin the dress. You ruin the practice article.
Somebody ruined thirty practice articles so they would not ruin the dress.
The tape labels are dated. I go through them from the top of the crate down, which is backward in time, and the dates walk away from me year by year, and at the bottom of the crate under everything the oldest strip of tape has a year on it that I know the way I know my own hands, because it is the year my mother died.
I hold that piece of tape for a while.
Then I put it back, because it means nothing. Men die and years turn and a year is only a number that a lot of things happen inside of.
I put it back exactly where it was, which is the first thing I do in that room that I would not be able to explain.
And here is the judgment I cannot keep out of it, the one I would have kept out of anything else in my life: this is beautiful work.
It is patient, it is documented, it is humble in the way that only real skill is humble, because it assumes it will fail the first eleven times and it builds the failure in.
If a man brought me this work in any other form I would put him on salary.
Somebody spent years in this room being excellent, alone, standing up, in the good light, with the stool pushed in, for the sole purpose of killing men my wife loved.
I have to put a hand on the bench. I take it off again, because prints, because the woman who is not speaking to me taught me to keep my hands off the world before I understood that she was also telling me something about herself.
Four of the jigs have been used.
I make a note of that the way I make notes of numbers, and I go to the drawer.
The pink slip is in the drawer.