Across the Table

by Linda Cardillo

  I was downstairs by four-thirty, reviewing the reservations and taking calls. It was going to be a busy night.

  “You’re looking better,” Manny said when I poked my head in the kitchen. “You want a bite to eat before we open the doors?”

  “No, thanks. Not hungry.” I didn’t tell him I hadn’t been able to eat all day.

  I kept things moving, not rushing people, but mindful of those waiting for tables. I started watching the door around ten o’clock. I didn’t know when to expect Peter and tried not to panic with each passing quarter hour. The euphoria I’d experienced during the day was draining out of my veins, reminding me of the cost of a night like the one I’d had.

  By eleven I was convinced he’d fled, overcome with regret or self-loathing. He had a wife and had decided to go back to her. He was lying in an emergency room somewhere paralyzed, as Deborah Kerr had been in An Affair to Remember, unable to keep her assignation. I thought I was going to be sick to my stomach. I was blowing out candles when I felt two familiar hands around my waist and heard my name whispered in my ear. I turned to face him. He kissed me, urgently. The taste of last night lingered in the familiar softness of his mouth on mine.

  “How was your day?” he murmured, planting a second kiss on my bare shoulder.

  “Distracting. I felt like I was underwater most of the day.”

  “Me, too. When will you be done here?”

  I nodded toward the two tables still occupied. “Not until they leave. Are you hungry? Manny made roast pork in almond sauce tonight.”

  “I’ve had no appetite at all today. It’s as if I have no room for anything else except you.”

  “I’ve been the same way. Is this what addiction feels like?”

  The last of the guests finally left. I spent another thirty minutes supervising the breakdown of the dining room, then said good-night to Manny. He didn’t miss the fact that Peter was with me.

  “Have fun.” He grinned.

  I took Peter by the hand and walked upstairs with him.

  “I’ve been thinking about slipping the rest of this dress off you ever since I walked into the restaurant tonight and saw your shoulders. They set off such a wave of memory of your body.” He was already unzipping the dress. It fell to the floor and I stepped out of it.

  We made love for hours, as hungry as we’d been the night before but with a deepening awareness of each other’s needs. And we broke the silence. In moments of repose, as our bodies came back down from their heightened states where nothing existed except pleasure, we spoke to each other.

  “The minute you walked into the studio in August I felt a jolt of recognition. I thought the pain I was feeling was that of a failed teacher who’d lost his star pupil. I saw what I thought you’d become—a comfortable suburban matron who ‘appreciated’ art but no longer created it herself.”

  “And you’ve been trying to save me ever since?” I was propped up on my elbow facing him, stroking him gently with my free hand as if I were sculpting clay.

  “I tried. But you were remarkably resistant to saving. I began to see a strength in you that I hadn’t perceived before.”

  I frowned. “Is this seduction just one more way of convincing me to return to art?” My hand stopped sculpting.

  He grabbed the stilled hand and kissed it.

  “God, no! I asked you out because I realized my interest was no longer that of a teacher for a student, but a man for a woman. I was probably drawn to you ten years ago and unable to admit that my anger with you for giving up on your talent was muddied by my jealousy.”

  “I knew back then that your disapproval was intense. I even felt it in August. It never occurred to me that it was so personal.”

  “I was a selfish jerk. Forgive me.”

  “Forgiving you is easy. Despite your blurred intentions, you were encouraging me do to what I loved. Forgiving myself is a lot harder. I’ve made a real mess of my life because I didn’t trust my own talent. And I’m afraid that by coming back here, I’ll slip into another kind of complacency.”

  “At least in coming back, you’ve reentered my life.” He smiled, then continued. “Don’t beat yourself up about returning home. First of all, you need to heal and be taken care of, and it seems that your family—especially your brothers—are more than willing to do that. Second, and more important, this place, this life, is the root of your talent. It’s what nurtured you. Tap into it again.”

  “I don’t know if it’s there anymore.”

  “Is that doubt enough to stop you? That doesn’t sound like the Toni I’ve seen emerging over the past several months. Or the Toni who’s made love to me the past two nights.”

  I felt my face redden. “I don’t know that Toni. She’s a revelation to me.”

  “Then get to know her. Even if it’s just to let her move your hand sketching—the way she’s been moving your hand over my body.”

  “You’re talking like a teacher again.”

  “No. I’m talking like a man who’s in love with you.”

  When we woke in each other’s arms the next morning, the lovemaking was languorous and unhurried, gentler than the night’s quenching of an endless thirst.

  “Let me cook for you,” I said when we finally stirred, the winter sunlight cutting across the bed and the sounds of the street rising up—metal shutters clattering open at the greengrocer’s and my uncle Sal’s butcher shop, delivery trucks backing into narrow alleyways.

  I surveyed my refrigerator, filled with provisions for feeding three children—yogurt cups and peanut butter and applesauce, leftover meatballs and fusilli. Not much for entertaining a lover. But I found some eggs and day-old bread and cinnamon. I didn’t have any vanilla left, the bottle emptied the last time I’d made chocolate-chip cookies. I dug around under the cabinet in my pantry and unearthed an old bottle of Drambuie. I splashed a dollop into the beaten eggs and presented Peter with a platter of French toast garnished with my mother’s peach preserves.

  I set the table in the dining room and used my good dishes, not the sturdy but scarred pottery that had withstood years of children. I felt as if I were creating a bubble, insulated from the rest of my life, where for one more hour it was only Peter and I, sipping coffee and holding hands in the midst of warmth and sweetness and nourishment.

  “What are you doing today?”

  “Picking up the kids at my aunt’s. Grocery shopping for me and my parents, who get back from Florida this afternoon. Spending time with the kids. Saturdays they know they have me to themselves.”

  “Do you want to bring them over to the community center later? We’re holding an open house. The kids can get their hands dirty—finger painting for Vanessa, clay and woodworking for the boys.”

  “Is this a ploy to get me to volunteer?”

  “No expectations. I know how much you have on your plate. I just thought it might be fun for the kids.”

  “Okay. We’ll try to stop in.”

  “I should leave and let you get on with your day. I know this is a tough question, with your parents returning, but when can I see you again?”

  I looked at him. There was nothing I wanted more at that moment than to have him back in my bed, in my body. And there was also nothing I feared more, to be as consumed as we had been by each other.

  I kissed him. “We’ll find the time, when it’s right.”

  When he left, I stripped the bed and put the sheets in the washing machine, grabbed my coat and went across the street to bring my children home.

  We did go to the community center after lunch. Joe was the least enthusiastic. He would much rather have gone to the rink and played hockey, and dismissed the art studio as stuff for babies. But when we got there, he gravitated to a table where some older boys were making monster masks and he stopped moping that we only did things that were fun for Ben. I knew Ben liked to draw. Much as I did as a child, he’d use any blank space as a drawing tablet—the margins of his notebook, the backs of envelopes. He could go throu
gh a pad of newsprint in an afternoon, sketching rocket ships and imaginary space creatures. The teachers at the community center had wrapped an entire wall in paper and handed kids multicolored markers when they walked in. Ben chose a corner, sat cross-legged on the floor in front of it and began a meticulously detailed air battle.

  Vanessa, as Peter had predicted, found her calling at the finger-painting table.

  The room was humming with color and activity. A Raffi album played in the background. I looked around for Peter but didn’t see him, which was both disappointing and something of a relief. My reaction to being near him was still too visceral and I didn’t trust myself to disguise my pleasure. There were too many people from the neighborhood here, parents from St. John’s, customers who ate at Paradiso. I wasn’t quite ready for it to be so clear that Toni Dante Templeton had a boyfriend.

  Vanessa was growing bored with the finger painting and starting to make a mess. I cleaned her up and collected the boys to go home. One of the volunteers, a student from the Museum School, snipped Ben’s drawing off the wall and rolled it up for him. Joe put his mask on. Vanessa’s painting was still wet, so the student hung it on a clothesline strung across the room and I promised I’d stop by on Monday to pick it up. She handed me a sheet of paper with the studio hours and class schedule.

  “Please come again!” She was cheerful and efficient and the kind of person I’d be happy to have working with my children. We trooped home and I asked the boys if they’d like to go to the studio again. When they both answered in the affirmative I began to see a way to spend time with them and offer help to the program.

  We welcomed my parents home from Florida late in the afternoon and the kids spent the evening with my mother as she unpacked and I worked the Saturday dinner shift. As the late diners started dessert, I hurried upstairs to retrieve the kids. My mother went down to set up for the next day.

  I carried Vanessa to her crib, ushered the boys to their bunk beds and retreated to my room. The bed was still bare, not yet made up. The light on my answering machine was blinking.

  I listened to Peter’s voice, apologizing for not being at the studio. He’d been called to the Museum School because of a burst pipe that had left several inches of water in the press room. No damage to anyone’s work, but a mess to clean up.

  “I know you need to spend time with your parents. I won’t disturb you this evening. But give me a call when you get in if you want to talk.”

  I hauled the sheets out of the dryer and made the bed before climbing into it and calling Peter.

  “Where are you?”

  “In bed. I thought it wouldn’t seem so empty if I settled in with at least your voice close to me.”

  We talked for two hours.

  The next week I started volunteering one afternoon a week at the community center. After facing the indifference of high school students, the exuberance of the children was infectious. They played with their art unselfconsciously, and their playfulness became one more source of encouragement, one more incursion into the wall of restraint I’d built around myself.

  The Sketchbook

  PETER GAVE ME A gift for my birthday. A small bound sketchbook and a set of charcoal pencils.

  “Carry it with you. Use it like a journal and record what you see, only for yourself.”

  “Thanks, Teach.” I was ready, I realized, to resume what had been a daily practice for me before I’d married Bobby. The book was beautiful, with heavy pages of pale cream that beckoned to be filled. I put it in my knapsack. The first time I used it I was pushing Vanessa in her stroller through the square to Old North Church. It was an unseasonably warm day and the old men were out on the benches arguing with one another and punctuating the air with their gestures.

  Vanessa had dozed off, so I parked the stroller and pulled the notebook out of my backpack. I quickly sketched two of the men, one using his cane as an extension of his arm, the other shading his eyes from the sun with a rolled up copy of the Herald. It took me just ten minutes, and then we were on our way again.

  Within a month I had filled the notebook. It surprised me. But I had trained my eye to see small squares of life. Some were as minute as a gnarled hand grasping a plum tomato from the basket on the sidewalk in front of the greengrocer’s. Others were more expansive, like the shanks of prosciutto hanging from hooks in the window of my uncle Sal’s shop or the cityscape framed by my bedroom window.

  One night after the kids were in bed, I sat with the book and examined the pages. Some were better than others, but on the whole I’d captured a substantial number of images I was pleased with. The next day I went downtown and bought myself some sheets of watercolor paper, inks, brushes.

  I chose one of the images in the notebook and recreated it in pen and ink with a soft wash of color.

  It was on my dresser drying when Peter saw it there. We’d found a rhythm to being together that seemed to balance feeding the hunger we had for each other with the demands of everything else in our lives—especially my children’s hunger for me.

  I had introduced Peter to my parents a week after they returned from Florida by inviting him to the Sunday dinner my mother continued to prepare; it was how she got us all to sit down at the same table at least once a week. Bringing him to that meal was my way of hiding him in plain sight. He had a number of labels attached to him—former teacher, current colleague, neighbor, Paradiso regular. Enough to distract and deflect from the primary roles he played in my life, those of lover and friend. Even though most thirty-two-year-old divorced mothers of three probably had sex lives, to my parents sex remained something reserved for the marriage bed. I assumed Manny, who was still living under their roof, fulfilled that side of his life away from home in the beds of any of the lovelies who were ratcheting up the popularity of Paradiso. For me to spend even a couple of hours away from home in Peter’s bed was nearly impossible. Too many questions. Too much judgment. But bringing Peter in the front door, making him a very visible presence, actually reduced speculation.

  He got to know my boys at the community center and turned out to be an adept craftsman who was helping them collaborate on a scale model of a spaceship Ben had designed and Joe was constructing in their bedroom. When the children were around, Peter and I exchanged penetrating looks full of the promise of things to come. Once they were asleep, we shared a few hours made more pleasurable by the anticipation.

  It was late spring when Peter saw the pen-and-ink wash on the dresser. He hadn’t noticed it when he’d first come into the room because we’d been too intent on getting each other out of our clothes. But afterward, as he was dressing in the soft light, he saw it and picked it up. I hadn’t shown him the notebook. As he’d promised when he gave it to me, it was mine alone. Not an assignment. Not an expectation. He turned to me with the sheet outstretched.

  “It’s wonderful.”

  That was all. No questions about how I felt to be creating again. No suggestions about what to do now that I’d plunged back in. He let me be, which was an even greater gift than the notebook itself.

  I knew the piece was wonderful. I’d once found a quotation from the author James Dickey when I was a student that I kept tacked to my bulletin board—about the moment of revelation when, as a writer, you realize what you’ve created is “damn good.” I’d had that moment. And I wanted more of them.

  I bought another sketchbook. And filled it with more images from my life, my neighborhood. Manny hovering over a saucepan, the veins in his arms tracing a path of intensity as he stirs and then lifts the spoon to his mouth to taste; my parents sitting side by side at Joe’s fourth-grade concert, my mother’s diamond-bedecked fingers entwined with my father’s withered hand.

  I kept going.

  In August 1983, my parents rented a place down on the Cape for a couple of weeks and offered to take the children.

  “You need a break. Have some fun. Make plans with your girlfriends,” my mother said.

  Peter took me out to dinner the
first night they were gone.

  “I have something important I want to talk to you about.” He didn’t elaborate until we were seated on an outdoor terrace. We’d driven all the way to Gloucester.

  “Hear me out,” he said when I asked him to stop keeping me in suspense. “Don’t respond until I tell you everything.

  “Walt Bergeron has decided to retire.”

  Walt was Peter’s colleague on the faculty, a printmaker like himself.

  “He’s ill and wants to spend whatever time he’s got left making art instead of teaching.”

  “I’m so sorry for him.”

  “I am, too. He’s a good friend as well as a colleague. And I understand why he’d up and leave. But it also creates a huge gap in the department just before term begins. Which is why I wanted to talk to you.”

  I started to speak, but he reached up with two fingers and touched my lips gently.

  “Please wait. I want to offer you the chance to join the faculty, teach printmaking. You’re more than qualified, especially with the ten years you’ve taught in Bedford.”

  The prospect of having students who wanted to be learning, the opportunity to be back in a studio… It was tantalizing. But I saw one major obstacle.

  “How can I take the job when I’m your lover? You’d be my boss, right? That sounds like a situation the school would frown on.”

  “But if you weren’t my lover anymore, they’d have no reason to complain.”

  I felt tears rising. “Are you asking me to choose?” I was incredulous.

  “No, Toni. I’m asking you to marry me.”

  He took my trembling hands in his. Now he was the one with tears in his eyes.

  “Please say yes.”

  Peter and I were married on Thanksgiving Day in the courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. It wasn’t a church and we didn’t have a priest, but my parents put aside their expectations, recognizing that even with those blessings there were no guarantees that a marriage would flourish.

  My mother was anxious that I was marrying again “too soon.”