Chapter 36 #2
The kitchen tilts, not physically, but in the cruel, emotional way a room can become unfamiliar while you are still standing in it.
“Moises,” I whisper.
He gives me a faint smile. It doesn't last.
“Once I thought I was ready to try to live again, I came to Italy. I told myself it was for the work. For the institute. For the art. Very impressive lies. Better than average. I met you, and I was attracted to you. You are beautiful, yes, but it was not only that.”
His fingers move against each other.
“It was your loneliness,” he says. “I recognized it. I thought maybe we could sit near each other inside it.”
The sentence hurts because it is true.
“I wanted to love you,” he continues. “I wanted it the way a man wants to be allowed inside a house he has been standing outside of in good weather. But I knew the door was not going to open. Not fully.”
He exhales, and the sound breaks something in me I have no right to claim.
“And I was not sure I could open mine either.”
“Moi—”
“No.” He shakes his head. “I'm not telling you this to make you feel guilty.
I am telling you because I don't want you to leave thinking you broke something in me that you did not break. You did not break me. You let me stand close. You gave me coffee. You gave me Saturdays. You were honest about the door in every way except the words.”
I don’t respond.
I can’t
Bella has gone still under my hand, which is what she does only when something has moved past tremor into a place my body can't register properly.
After what might be a minute or might be five, I say, “I am sorry.”
He shakes his head. “Don’t. Don’t be sorry. We tried. At some point, I hoped I would be enough, or you would be enough, or that trying would become the same as being happy.”
His mouth curves in a sad, tired way.
“That isn’t how it works, is it? We can't force love in or out of ourselves.”
I look at the pastry bag because looking at him feels invasive now. As if grief should be given privacy even when it is being handed to you.
“I’m happy that you can go back to him,” he says.
It breaks my heart that he can't go back to anyone.
There is no one waiting on the other side of this conversation to catch him. No wife. No child. No life interrupted and preserved somewhere, ready to resume if he is brave enough to board a plane.
I don't even know what is waiting for me.
Maybe nothing.
Maybe this is a trip where I help save Hal, and Creed gets closure. Maybe I’ll get closure. Maybe the men I have loved for ten years have become people who can only love the woman I used to be or love someone else.
Maybe I am about to cross an ocean for a memory that will not know what to do with my face.
I don't know what happens next.
I don't know if I am coming back to Florence. I don't know if I am coming back to the institute. I don't know what is on the other side of this.
I am thirty-two years old, and I have not known what is on the other side of anything since I was twenty-two.
Tonight, I may have to walk toward something I was told for ten years didn't exist.
I think about Creed’s voice three nights ago, low and broken and reaching for me through a decade of silence.
I think about a man on the other side of an ocean whose name my mouth still can't say in this kitchen. A man whose face I have seen in photographs, I told myself, I was not searching for. A man whose body my body has been remembering against every other body I allowed near mine for ten years.
Hal.
I don't say it.
But I feel the name move through me.
After a long silence, Moises says, “I hope you’re happy.”
It is the most generous sentence a man can hand a woman who is leaving him.
“Moises—”
“I mean it.” His voice is quieter now. “I hope you find whatever you are walking toward. I hope you are happy with him.”
Him.
He doesn't know there are two.
Or maybe he does. Not the facts, but the shape of the absence. Moises has always been better at reading what people remove from a sentence than what they leave in it.
“I hope you are happy in a way I could not have made you happy,” he says.
“And I’m telling you that not because I am noble.
I’m not that noble. I have simply had three years to think about who you are and what you would need to be happy.
For at least the last twelve months, I have known it wasn’t going to be me. ”
He stands.
The chair legs scrape softly against the old floor.
“Moises,” I say, because his name is the only thing I have left to give him.
“Livia?”
“Thank you,” I say. The words are too small. Pathetic, really. If words had nutritional value, these would not keep a sparrow alive. “For everything. I hope you find happiness, too.”
I hate myself for how inadequate that sounds.
I wish I had known about his wife. His child.
I wish I had noticed his loneliness under all that practiced joy.
He has always seemed like a man who could enjoy the flowers, the market, a perfect peach, a stupid joke from Marina.
Maybe that was never the case. Maybe that was survival with better manners than mine.
He nods.
He walks to the door.
At the door, he stops.
He doesn't turn around. His hand rests on the frame for one second, then two.
“I hope he treats you like a woman who crossed an ocean to find him,” he says. “If he doesn’t, you call me. I will come from wherever I am.”
My eyes burn.
Not enough to cry.
Enough to hate the body for trying.
He opens the door.
He goes.
The door closes behind him with the soft click of a building that has been here for four hundred years and has watched a great many people leave.
I stand at the kitchen table for a long time after he is gone.
The pastry bag sits unopened on the counter.
Bella is quiet, and I’m not sure how long I’ll stay here.
I try to go through my day and when the sun is setting, my phone rings.
I lift my head.
The screen says Eleonora.
I have not had a call from Eleonora since she introduced herself. Eleonora doesn't call to chat. Eleonora calls to tell you what is about to happen.
The apartment feels suddenly too bright.
Too small.
I answer.
“I’m listening,” I say.
And just like that, Florence begins to let me go.