Chapter 20
MARINA
Matteo has a pair of sevens and he is playing them like they are aces, and everybody at the table knows it except Matteo.
"Raise."
"You can't raise. You've already raised."
"I'm re-raising."
"That's not," Nico says, and stops, and looks at me, because he is not sure whether he is allowed to argue with a Vitale about poker, and I nod, and he says, "That's not a thing. You can't re-raise your own raise. Somebody has to raise you first."
"Who says?"
"Everybody. Cards."
"Well, I'm the house." Matteo pushes a pile of dried beans into the middle. "House rules."
It is Monday morning. It is eleven o'clock on a Monday morning in the kitchen of the House of Vipers and I am playing poker for beans with a Vitale and my brother, and Rosa is making bread, and the cat is on the radiator, and somebody tried to kill me three days ago.
That is the thing I keep coming back to.
Not the car. The kitchen. That there is a kitchen, and I am in it, and nobody is talking about the car, and nobody is talking about the man they found on the expressway with his throat cut, which Luca told Salvatore in the lot in a voice he thought I could not hear and I could, and nobody is talking about the fact that I stood at a grave on Saturday with my hand in a man's pocket and he told me the worst thing that ever happened to him, and then something else happened to his face, and he stopped.
There was more. I know there was more. I have read faces across a bar for ten years and I watched something go across his and get put away, and I let it, because he had just told me how his mother died and I did not have it in me to ask for the rest.
So we are here. Beans.
"Call," I say.
Matteo turns over his sevens. I turn over a pair of nines that I had from the first card and have been sitting on like a hen, and Nico laughs, really laughs, with his good side of his face and his sling and all, and it is the first time I have heard that sound out of him since August.
"She's been sandbagging you," Nico says.
"What's sandbagging?"
"It's what she does. She lets you think you're winning."
Matteo looks at me across the beans. "Is that what you do?"
"Only to people who re-raise their own raise."
He laughs. He has a good laugh, he has the kind of laugh that makes other people in the room do it too, and Rosa at the counter does not laugh but she puts a piece of warm bread down at my elbow without a word, which from Rosa is a standing ovation.
He has not touched me since the lot.
Three days. He held my face in Carla's office with both hands and then he took me home and he took me to the cemetery and I held his hand in his coat, and that is all.
He has not come to the third-floor room.
He has not come to the music room, where I have played every night, out loud, with the doors shut, and where I have known he was in the corridor twice and not come in.
It is not the study. The study was one night and a locked door and a thing I decided, and this is something else, this is a man walking round me at a distance like I am a fire he is checking is out.
I do not know what changed. I know when.
Saturday, at the safe. He came out of the study on Saturday afternoon with his face like a shut gate and he has not opened it since, not to me, not to Luca that I have seen, and Rosa says he gets like this and Matteo says he gets like this and they both say it the way you say it about weather.
I am tired of weather.
"I'm going up," I say.
"You've got beans."
"Keep them."
"You can't just leave with the"
"Nico. Watch the sevens. He's going to do it again."
He is on the stairs.
Coming down as I am going up, and we meet on the landing between the second floor and the third, where the window is, and he stops, and I stop, and there is a step between us so that for once I am looking down at him.
"Beans," he says.
"Matteo cheats."
"I know."
"He re-raises his own raise."
"He's done that since he was nine."
I look at him. He is in a shirt with the sleeves rolled and the wrapping is gone off his hand, there are just three plasters now across the heel of it, and there are shadows under his eyes that were not there on Saturday morning, and he is standing one step below me on his own stairs and looking up like a man waiting to be told something.
"What happened in the safe," I say.
His face does the thing. The gate.
"Not that. Fine. Not that." I come down the step.
Now we are level and there is nothing between us and I can smell him, the soap and the coffee and the thing under it.
"Then this. You told me about your mother and then you stopped.
You've been walking round me for three days like I've got something on me.
And I've been playing poker for beans in your kitchen trying to work out whether I'm here or whether I'm just still here, and I can't tell, and I need you to tell me, because I'm not doing this on a landing. "
"Doing what."
"Waiting."
He does not say anything. He looks at me, and I watch him not say it, and then I watch him decide not to say it, and I have had enough of watching men decide things in front of me.
My hand goes to his face.
The way his did in the office. Both hands. I take his face in my hands on the landing with the window behind me and the beans downstairs, and he lets me, he stands there and lets me hold it, and I feel him breathe out, all of it, like he has been holding it since Saturday.
"Say it," I tell him.
"Which."
"Any of it. I don't care. Say one true thing."
He does not answer for so long that the beans downstairs get loud.
"I don't know how to do this," he says.
"Do what."
"You. In the kitchen. With my brother. Playing cards.
" He puts his hand over one of mine, on his face.
"I know what to do when somebody's trying to kill you.
I've got that. That I can do. I can't do the other one.
I stand in the corridor outside that room and I listen to you play and I don't know how to open the door, Marina, I've never once in my life opened a door to a room where somebody was just. Happy. I don't know what you do in there."
I take his hand off mine. I take it in both of mine and I walk backwards up the stairs with it, one step, two, and he comes, because I have his hand, and he does not know what to do and he comes anyway.
"You come in," I say. "That's all. That's the whole trick."
The third-floor room in daylight is a different room.
I have never had him in it in daylight. I have had him in the door of it at midnight and at four in the morning, coat on, and now it is noon and the sun is coming in off the water down the hill and across the bed, and I shut the door, and I do not lock it, and I take off my sweater.
"Slow," I say.
"You said don't be careful."
"That was the study. This is my room. In here it's slow."
He is slow.
He takes the T-shirt off me like it matters.
He takes the jeans off me kneeling, with his mouth on my stomach, on my hip where the bruise is from the asphalt and his own blood was, and he looks at the graze down my arm and puts his mouth on that too, and then he stands up and lets me do him.
The shirt. The buttons, one at a time, with him watching my hands, and the belt, and I have my hands on his chest and the viper under my fingers, black ink over the ribs, and I trace it, the whole length of it, and he closes his eyes.
"You said don't close them."
"That was the study."
I laugh. I did not know I could laugh here. He opens his eyes, and he is smiling, and I have never seen it, not once in twenty-seven days, and it changes his whole face, it takes the weight off it the way Matteo's is, and I put my hands on it and I kiss him with the sun on us.
The bed is a good bed. I knew that the first night.
He lays me down on it and he comes down over me and it is nothing like the chair.
The chair was fast and it was mine and I took it.
This is his, and he gives it, slow, his mouth everywhere, my throat and my breasts and the inside of my wrist, the left one, over the hair tie, he takes the hair tie off with his teeth and puts his mouth on the scar, and I cannot breathe, and he does not stop.
He goes down. He takes his time. He has his hands under me and his mouth on me and the sun on his back, and I watch him, I keep my eyes open because I want to, not because I was told, and I come with my hand in his hair and the water shining down the hill through the window, quiet, with my mouth open, and he watches me the whole way.
Then he comes up and he is in me.
Slow. So slow I can feel every inch of it, and he holds himself over me on his arms and he watches my face, and I watch his, and neither of us looks away, and it is the thing I have never had.
Not the sex. The looking. A man inside me with the daylight on his face watching what it does to me and letting me watch what it does to him, and he says my name, and I say his, and we do that, we say them, over and over, like we are learning them.
When I come again it is his name I say. When he comes it is mine, low, into my neck, and he holds me down into the bed with all his weight after, and I let him, and I hold on to his back with both hands, and I do not think about anything.
Not the car. Not the safe. Nothing. There is a bed and the sun and the weight of him, and that is all there is, and I let it be all there is for as long as it lasts.
He sleeps.
I did not think he did that. Four hours, Rosa said, on a good night, and here he is at one in the afternoon face down in my bed with the sheet across his hips and his bad hand open on the pillow by my face, and I lie beside him and look at it.
The three plasters. The old white line across the knuckles, from a window on Ninth Street twenty-one years ago, and I put one finger on it, very lightly, and he does not wake.
I get up.
Quietly. I find the T-shirt and I put it on and I go to the window, because the sun has moved and I want to see the water, and I stand there hugging my own elbows with the hill going down to the trees and the grey strip beyond them, and a thought arrives that has never once been allowed in this building. I could stay.
Not ninety days. Not until something is done.
Stay.
There is a man in the garden.
Below the window, on the lawn between the house and the trees, standing very still on the grass in a dark jacket with his hands in his pockets.
Not one of the gate men. Not Tommy, who I know now, and not Luca.
A heavy man with a bald head and a face I have seen once, by an Escalade in the drive on the night of the toast, holding a door.
Paulie Gatto.
He is looking up. Not at the house. At the window. At me, in a T-shirt, with the man who runs this family asleep in the bed behind me, and he does not look away when I see him, and he does not move, and he does not do anything at all.
He just stands there on the grass, looking up.