Chapter 16 #2
Warm. Broad. The weight of it familiar now, the weight I had learned to recognize.
He did not press. He did not rub. He just laid his palm against the skin at the base of my skull and left it there, and the heat of his hand bled through the cold that had been collecting along my spine since we stepped onto the porch.
We stayed like that.
A crow called somewhere down in the tree line. Then it called again.
After a long time he said, very quietly, “There’s more.”
“I know.”
“Do you want to see it?”
“Yes.”
He stood up. He held out his hand. I took it. I left the vine behind me and I walked with him up the row.
The top of the slope met a wall.
Not a tall one. Dry stone, stacked without mortar, knee-high in places and thigh-high in others, the stones a pale grey-white that did not match the stones of the house.
A wall that had been there longer than the house.
He had cleared the scrub from along the base of it.
He had not rebuilt it. He had left it at the height the years had given it.
Past the wall the tree line began. Bare hardwoods, the last leaves coming off them in the small cold wind.
Below us, the rows of vines ran down the hill in the geometry I had just walked up, and past the vines was the farmhouse roof, small from here, and the smoke of the fire was rising thin and straight from the chimney.
He stopped at the wall. Looked at me. Did not speak.
He shrugged the coat off his shoulders.
He spread it on the ground at the base of the wall where the grass was flattest and the stones blocked the wind. The lining of the coat was the color of old red wine. He laid it lining-up. He smoothed it with the flat of his hand. He did it the way he did everything—once, correctly.
He looked at me.
“Come here.”
I went.
He drew me down onto the coat and I went down on my back and the wool was warm underneath me because he had been wearing it on the drive. The old stones were at my head. The sky was above me. Grey. High. A cloud moving slow from the west across the space where I could see.
He knelt over me.
He unwrapped Donatella’s scarf from my neck and folded it and set it on a stone.
He unbuttoned my coat. Opened it. He lifted the hem of my sweater and slid it up my body slow and I lifted my arms and he drew it off over my head and set it folded on top of the scarf.
The cold air moved over my breasts through the thin cotton of my bra and I felt my nipples harden before he had touched them.
He did not hurry.
He unhooked my bra with one hand behind my back the way he had done it the first night, and he drew the straps off my shoulders, and he laid the bra on top of the sweater.
He unbuttoned my jeans. He drew them down my legs and off my boots and off my feet with a patience that made me watch him, because there was nothing in his face that was performing patience.
He was just doing the thing at the speed the thing required.
He laid the jeans on the wall. My underwear followed. My boots he left on.
I watched him undress.
The shirt over his head. The undershirt.
The trousers. The boots he toed off onto the grass.
He was over me before I was cold. His body warm, his chest bare against mine, his weight taken on his forearms on either side of my head the way he took it every time, and the cold on my skin turned into the warm line where his body met mine, and the world went small around us.
He settled between my thighs.
“Look at me.”
I looked at him.
The grey Wisconsin sky was behind his head.
His hair falling forward. His dark eyes on mine and not leaving mine.
He pushed into me slow, slower than he had pushed into me this morning, so slow that I felt every inch of him the way I had felt every inch of the first time, and the slow of it was a claim that did not need words.
I felt him seat fully inside me and I made a small sound and he caught it with his mouth.
He moved.
Long strokes. Unhurried. His hips finding the rhythm they had found this morning and then slowing it further, because the rhythm here was not the rhythm of a bed.
The rhythm here was the rhythm of the sky moving over us and the wind moving down the row of vines below and the old wall at my head that had been here longer than anyone could remember.
He was inside me and I was under the sky and the earth was under the coat under me, and somewhere in my body, in a place older than language, a thing I had never known was there recognized what was happening.
Women in my line had been claimed this way.
I watched the sky over his shoulder. A single cloud moved across my field of vision.
I watched it go. My great-grandmother had been a peasant on a hill above Corleone and she had married my great-grandfather in a church and she had been claimed in a field before the church, and her mother before her, and her mother before her, and the line went back through the dirt until it could not be followed anymore, and every one of those women had been laid down in the earth by a man who had grown something and had brought her to the thing he had grown to ask her to stay.
I understood, under his body, that I was not doing anything new.
I was doing the oldest thing.
My hand went into his hair. Gripped. Held.
My mouth found the hollow at the base of his throat where his pulse was and I pressed my mouth there and I did not kiss—I just kept my mouth on him and breathed him in and let him move, and he moved, and the slow build of it climbed up through me in a way that was not loud and was not sharp and was not urgent.
When I came I did not cry out.
It unspooled. It came up out of my hips and rolled through me in a long quiet wave and my hand tightened in his hair and my other hand flattened on his back and I made a sound against his throat that was almost a word and was not a word, and his rhythm broke on the second stroke after mine, and he pushed in deep and stayed, and I felt the warm pulse of him inside me again, the thing I had decided last night that I wanted kept, the thing I was apparently going to keep wanting.
He lowered his weight onto me.
Not all of it. He kept his forearms. But he let his chest rest on mine and he put his forehead against my temple and he stayed.
The sky moved.
The wind moved.
After a long time he drew the coat up over both of us. He rolled slightly to the side and took me with him, arms around me, and we lay wrapped in the coat under the grey sky with the vines below us and the old wall at our heads.
“Stay, Sera.”
His voice was low. His mouth against my hair.
“Stay here. With me.”
I didn’t speak.
“This can be your home.”
“It already is.”
I meant it the way I had not meant anything in my life.
The fire had burned down to a steady red bed by the time we came back inside.
He built it up again. Three split logs, set with the care he set everything, a small curl of birch bark under the bottom one, and the flames came up the face of the wood in the soft yellow way a good fire comes.
He drew the couch closer to the hearth. It was an old couch—deep, stuffed with something older than foam, covered in a heavy cotton weave that had been washed to softness over years.
He sat me on it. He brought a wool blanket in from somewhere—a cream one, heavy, the kind with the thick uneven weave of a blanket woven on a hand loom—and he wrapped it around my shoulders.
I pulled my feet up under me.
The grey lamb was on the cushion beside me.
I had brought it from the car without thinking when we came back down the slope, and he had not commented, and I had set it on the couch and it had stayed there the way I had stayed there, and the sight of its small stitched face on his couch in his farmhouse did something to my chest that I did not have language for.
He went down a set of stone steps I had not noticed before, off the kitchen, a trap door at the back that lifted on an iron ring.
I heard him below. A moment. A bottle lifted off a rack.
He came up with it in his hand.
No label. Dark glass. A cork he had driven himself, the top of it uneven, a small chalk mark on the shoulder of the bottle that I later understood was the barrel number and the year.
He brought two glasses down from a shelf above the drainboard.
Plain glasses. No ceremony. He set them on the low table in front of the couch and he sat beside me and he pulled the cork with his hand.
“I spend some much time in Nero mixing drinks. Trying to be clever, inventive.”
The cork came out soft.
He poured.
“But the truth is, the true inventor, the true genius, is mother nature.”
The wine was almost black in the glass. A deep ruby at the edge where the light of the fire caught it. He turned the glass once in his fingers and held it up toward the fire and looked at the color through the glass the way a man looks at a child he is proud of.
“This is mine,” he said. “Nero d’Avola. The barrel from year seven. The first barrel I made that was actually drinkable. I keep twelve of them. This is the one I open when I want to remember.”
He handed me the glass.
I lifted it. I turned it once in my fingers the way he had turned it. I smelled it first—my father’s gesture, the gesture of every Sicilian man I had ever watched taste wine—and the smell went up into my nose and the smell was the smell of my father’s table.
Not similar.
Not a relative of.
The smell.
Dark cherry. Black pepper. The smoky note at the back that Nero d’Avola from the Monreale hills always carried, the one sommeliers tried to put into words and never got right, the one my grandmother had called il fumo della montagna—the smoke of the mountain.
I tasted it.