34. A Real Question #2
I get her back onto the bed with my arm under her shoulders so her head does not hit the frame, and she laughs at me, breathless, and starts to say something about eleven years of being careful with furniture, and stops when I put my mouth against the side of her throat.
Her hand comes up into the back of my hair, and she is not gentle with it.
“Tell me,” I say against her collarbone, and my voice is not mine. “You wanted it in words. So use them. Tell me what you want, and I will not guess, and I will not decide, and I will not be clever about it.”
She goes still under me.
“Lorenzo.”
“I am not going to move until you do.”
And I stop. Completely. Hand in her hair and my mouth an inch off her skin and I do not move at all, and I feel her understand that I mean it, and I feel the exact second she decides.
“Look at me while I say it.”
I lift my head.
She is flushed to the collarbones and her eyes are wet and absolutely steady, and Valeria Rinaldi says:
“I want you to say my name.”
I do not move.
“That is what I want. You sat in a room full of men and they talked about me for eleven minutes and you did not say it once. Not one time. You said the widow. You said the Rinaldi woman.”
Her voice does not break, and her hand is shaking in my hair.
“And I have thought about that every night for six weeks, lying two feet from you in the dark, and it is the only thing in this entire business that I cannot get out from under, and I want you to say my name in this bed until I stop hearing that room.”
“Valeria.”
“Not like that. Not carefully.” She pulls my head down until her mouth is at my ear.
“I want you to say it when you cannot help it. I want to be able to tell you are not choosing to. I have been arranged around by men my whole life, and I want one hour where somebody cannot manage himself in front of me, and I want it to be you, and I want to know it is my name doing it.”
Then she takes a breath and says the rest of it, plainly, with her eyes open, all of it, and she does not soften a single word, and her hand tightens in my hair in the middle when she has to make herself keep going.
“Say it again,” I tell her.
“Lorenzo.”
“I heard you. Again. I want to hear it twice.”
And she does, slower, and her voice cracks straight down the middle and she keeps going anyway, and that, not the kiss, not what comes after, is the moment I know I am never going to be the man in that dining room again.
I say her name.
I say it into her throat and against her shoulder, and it is not a decision, it stops being a decision somewhere in the first minute, and I hear it come out of me in a voice I have never used in forty-five years and I do not have any control over it at all, and she hears that, and I feel what it does to her go through her whole body.
“Again,” she says. “Again.”
I take my time about the rest.
I have been an efficient man for eleven years and I am not efficient about this.
I get her out of clothes she has been in for seventeen hours one thing at a time, and every time she reaches to help, I move her hand away, and the third time she says, unsteadily, “You are enjoying this,” and I say “Yes,” and she says “Good” in a voice I have never heard out of her.
I stop at the top of her thigh and ask her something.
“No,” she says. “Not that.”
And I stop, instantly, and take my hand away and put it flat on the bed beside her, and I say, “All right.”
She lifts her head.
“You stopped.”
“You said no.”
“I said no, and you stopped.” She is staring at me. “I did not have to explain it.”
“No.”
“I did not have to make it sound reasonable first.”
“Valeria,” I say, “it was a real question.”
And something goes out of her then, some held thing she has been carrying so long she has stopped knowing the weight of it, and her face comes apart, and she pulls me up the bed by the shirt and kisses me with her whole mouth and both hands and she is crying and she does not stop kissing me while she does it.
“Then this instead,” she says, against my mouth, and tells me.
So I do that.
There is a scar low on her left side, white, old, and I put my mouth on it.
Her whole body goes rigid.
“Do you want me to ask?” I say.
“Not tonight.”
“All right.”
And I do not ask, and I do not go carefully afterward either, because a minute later her hands are back in my hair and she is saying my name into the dark with no arrangement in it whatsoever.
She is loud. I did not know that about her.
Four years in this house of listening to her be measured at every table and she is not measured now, and every time I say her name, she gets louder, and at some point she gets a hand round the back of my neck and holds on and says, “Do not stop saying it,” and I do not.
Her hand finds mine. Our fingers go together and stay, and that is somehow the thing that undoes me, that and the fact that her eyes are open and on my face the whole way through, because she has told me she wants to see it, and she does.
She says my name at the end.
I say hers, and it is the last thing I have got, and there is nothing arranged in it at all.
Afterward I do not move off her for a long time, and she does not ask me to.
Later she is lying with her head on my chest and her hand flat over my sternum, the window open, the birds not started, and it takes me a while to notice she is crying again. Not badly. Steadily, without any sound, into my collarbone.
“Say it,” I tell her, because apparently this is what we do now.
“It is not sad.”
“Say it anyway.”
She is quiet a moment.
“Nobody has ever asked me,” she says. “Not once. Not the boy at nineteen. Not Giulio, not in four years, not one single time. He never asked me for anything, and he never asked me anything either. He arrived, and I arranged my face.” Her hand does not move.
“You asked me twice tonight, and you waited both times. And you stopped when I said no, and you did not make me justify it, and I have been lying here doing the arithmetic on how much of my life I have spent guessing, and it is all of it, Lorenzo. It is every year I have had.”
I do not tell her it is all right.
I put my hand over the top of hers on my chest and hold on, and after a while she stops.
“The scar is from when I was twenty-six,” she says, into my collarbone. “I will tell you in the winter.”
“All right.”
“You are not going to ask.”
“You said not tonight.”
“It is half past four. It is not tonight any more.” She is almost laughing. “That was a trap, and you walked round it.”
“I have had a long day.”
“Ask me something now,” she says, thick. “Anything. Something small. I want to see if it works twice.”
I think about it.
“Do you want tea?”
And my wife laughs into my chest so hard the bed moves, and says, “Yes, you idiot, obviously, it is four in the morning,” and I get up and go down in the dark, leaving a piece of my mother’s string on the floor with my trousers and a dead man’s ring face up on the table.
The kitchen light is off.
I put it on and stand in the doorway a second, and the room does not have anybody in it, and it is not going to, and I make two cups of tea badly because I have never made them in this house in my life.
Soldo comes out from under the table and stands next to me while the kettle goes and leans his whole weight against my leg, which he has not done to anybody since Ciro.
I put one cup on a saucer the right way up.
Then, because the other one is going upstairs, and because there is nobody left in this house to see me do it, I turn the second cup upside down on its saucer and leave it on the counter on the side where he sat.
And I go up to my wife.