24. Before #2
“The first time was about four years ago, a woman in Warwick, and then nothing came of it and I never heard another word.” She frowns. “And once more. Recently.”
“How recently?”
“I would have to look at the tin.”
“Signora, please look at the tin.”
We stand in that garden for four minutes.
She comes back out with one envelope in her hand and her reading glasses on, and she holds it out at arm’s length the way people do.
“The ninth of July,” she says.
Ten days before my brother was killed.
“It says a file may be needed for a woman in New York, and it gives no name, only that she is a widow twice over and likely to be a third time, and that she is not to be approached until after, because she does not accept help while she can still stand up.” Renata Alba lowers the letter and looks at my wife with an expression I will not forget.
“It says she will be difficult. It says she is not to be lied to, ever, about anything, because she reads paper for a living and she will find it, and that the fund is to tell her the truth from the beginning even where it is ugly.”
Nobody says anything.
“It also says,” Renata says, “that she has been paid for out of the general fund already, in full, so that nothing has to be decided in a hurry afterward.”
Valeria does not move.
“Paid for,” she says.
“That is the word.”
“In advance.”
“In advance,” Renata Alba says. “Signora, are you quite well?”
She is not.
She gets into the car and she sits with her hands in her lap and she does not say one word for eleven miles, and I drive, and I do not touch her, because I have not been permitted to touch her since the morning after we lost Ciro Tebaldi.
Somewhere around Attleboro she says, “He wrote it before.”
“Yes.”
“Ten days before Giulio. And then he went and killed my husband.” Her voice has nothing in it. “He did the kind part first.”
I do not have anything.
“Do you understand what that means?” she says. “It is not a cover. Nobody covers themselves with a letter to an old woman with finches in a biscuit tin that nobody was ever supposed to read. That is not a lie he is telling the world. That is a thing he actually believes.”
“Valeria.”
“He thinks he is looking after me,” she says. “He has thought so for ten years. He is going to kill you, and he is going to do it kindly, and he has already paid.”
We drive the rest of the way in the dark.
And when we come up the drive at half past nine there are twenty-two men on my house and a coat on the floor at the south door with a very small cat asleep on it at last, and my wife looks at that through the window of the car for a long moment and then puts her hand over her mouth and finally, for the first time since I gave her a bag of keys, comes apart.
She lets me hold her in a parked car in the dark for about ninety seconds.
Then she sits up and wipes her face with the back of her wrist and says, “That does not mean anything.”
“I know.”
“I mean it, Lorenzo.”
“I know,” I say. “Take the ninety seconds anyway.”
I go up at twenty past ten.
She is in the bed already with her back to my side of it and the lamp off, and she says goodnight into the dark in a voice that is neither cold nor warm, and I lie down in my two feet of air with my hands on my own chest like a man laid out, and I am asleep faster than I have been in five weeks, which I am going to pay for.
Because there is a dream owed tonight and I know the shape of the one I am owed. Giulio at the kitchen table, thirty-eight and alive, stirring the third sugar in slow so that Nonna has to watch him do it, the spoon going round and round and ringing on the cup.
I do not get that one either.
I get her.
I get my mother’s kitchen at four in the afternoon with the light coming in low off the water and a cup upside down on a saucer between us, and she comes round the end of the counter and takes my face in both hands and says, ask me for something.
And in the dream I do. That is the obscene part. In the dream it costs me nothing at all. I say the whole sentence out loud in the middle of my mother’s kitchen like a man who has been doing it his entire life, and she laughs at me, low, delighted, and then she stops laughing.
She gets my belt open standing up with her mouth on mine, and she does not hurry any part of it, and she tells me what she is going to do before she does each thing, which is the most Valeria thing my sleeping head has ever built.
I am going to get you in my mouth and I am going to take as long as I want, and you are going to tell me out loud when you are close, because I want to hear you lose the sentence.
And then she is down on the tile with her hair loose and my cock in her fist and she looks the whole way up the length of me before she takes it, and she does take her time, and it is filthy and slow and she keeps her eyes on mine for every second of it, and I hear myself say fuck, Valeria in a voice I have never used in a room where anybody could hear me.
I get her up onto the counter before I am finished, because in the dream I am allowed to want the whole thing at once.
Her skirt is up round her hips and her heels are in the small of my back and she is so wet that it is on my fingers to the second knuckle before I have done anything to earn it, and when I get my mouth on her she puts one hand flat on the cupboard behind her head and swears at me in her father’s language.
Tell me what you want, I say, into her, against her, with her thigh over my shoulder. Out loud. All of it.
And she does. She tells me in words, in order, with her hand in my hair, and there is nothing careful anywhere in it.
She tells me she has thought about my hands since the elevator.
She tells me what she wants me to do to her and how hard and how long and what she wants said to her while it happens, and I do every single one of them, and she comes with my name in her mouth and her heel hard enough into my back to leave a mark I will look for in the morning.
Then she pulls me up by the shirt and says now fuck me properly, husband, and I am inside her on my mother’s kitchen counter with her ankles crossed behind me and her mouth on my throat and the cup still upside down on the saucer four inches from her hip, and she is saying it the entire time, filthy and level and exact, the way she says everything, and I am so far gone I can hear myself begging and I do not care.
Say it, she says against my ear. You do not get to have this and not say it.
And in the dream I say it.
I wake at ten to three with my heart going and the front of me wet and my wife two feet away in the dark, asleep, with her back to me, breathing slow.
I lie there for a long time.
Because a man is not responsible for his dreams. I have been told that.
I have never once believed it, and I do not believe it now, at ten to three, in a bed I am keeping the arrangement in, having just taken from a woman who is not speaking to me the one thing she has never given anybody in her life, which is the sound of her asking for what she wants.
She did not consent to that. Nobody asked her.
I get up without moving the covers off her, and I go and stand in the bathroom with my hands on the edge of the basin and the light off, and I do not put the light on, because I do not want to see what I look like.