She’d repaired its dust jacket with a piece of clear tape.
“Thank you.”
“I thought it might make Florence come more alive for you.”
You make Florence come alive for me.
The sentence flashed in his head, then fizzled out.
He opened the book. Touching the book that she had just touched was a little like touching her.
He came to the chapter on Donatello and scanned a few paragraphs. The skimming redirected his mind.
“It says—it says here that when Donatello was working on a sculpture for the front of the campanile at the Duomo, he liked to talk to the marble. He said, ‘Speak, damn you, speak!’—to the stone. Do you really believe that?”
“I don’t really believe that, no. But it does capture the essential puzzle of this whole room, which is how to get inanimate materials to tell a story.”
Andrew studied her for a moment. “I think that’s your puzzle too.”
Costanza’s head fell to an angle. “You think of me as inanimate?”
“Not at all.” Andrew blushed. “What I mean is … I mean you want to hear my stories, but yours…”
She looked confused.
“Yesterday, for example, you were married, but today you’re not.” He indicated her hand, which was ringless.
She looked down. “Isn’t it more accurate to say that yesterday I was wearing a wedding ring?”
He shrugged. “I guess.”
She rubbed her ring finger. “Andrew, you have to understand. In Europe we’re raised differently. There’s much more indirectness, much more … discretion.”
“So you’re not married?”
“What if I were to tell you that my husband is dead, but I sometimes still feel married to him?”
He thought for a moment. “I suppose I’d understand that.”
Privately he wondered how long her husband had been dead, and whether they’d been in love, and stayed in love, unlike his parents, and if they’d had children, and what their children were like; but something told him that he had asked enough questions for the moment.
She lifted her wrist, turned her watch around. “It looks like it’s nearing time for lunch.”
He was crestfallen. “You have another lunch date today?”
“Yes. With you.” She slipped her arm through his.
* * *
The restaurant Costanza took Andrew to was on a side street deep into the Oltrarno, in a cool, slightly musty room with exposed beams and thick plaster walls. The tables were of uncovered plain wood. When they sat down across from each other, Andrew became aware of a brief pause in the conversation as the people at the table next to them tried to work out, or so he conjectured, the connection between this elegant European woman and this long-haired American kid.
The waiter put a name to it. He brought them half a liter of wine and poured her a glass. “Anche per tuo figlio?”
She indicated yes. The waiter filled Andrew’s glass, then went away.
“He asked if your ‘son’ wanted wine too, didn’t he?”
“Tuscans are very frugal,” Costanza said. “They don’t like to waste.”
Andrew’s hand circled around his glass. He took a sip of the wine. It was red, and sharp. He drank it, but it bit him.
She too sipped. “Well, it tastes real anyway. Like the food here. Will you let me order for you?”
The waiter came back and rattled off the dishes of the day. “What’s good today are the fusilli with zucchini and tiny tomatoes. Light, for the summer. We’ll have that, and then we’ll see what we feel like afterward. It’s the way here.”
Andrew lifted his wineglass but did not drink from it. “Is it the way here for people to make quick assumptions?”
“It can be, yes.”
“You’re too young to have a son my age.”
She did the math. “Not necessarily.”
“Is it okay if I ask how old you are?”
“Andrew, you ask so many questions. It’s very—”
“American. I know. But maybe you’re just becoming less European.”
“In the last day and a half, after nearly seven years in New York? I don’t think so.”
It had not occurred to him before to ask where her actual home was. “You live in the city too?”
“The city—yes. It would appear that you and I are neighbors.”
He sensed a tightening in the atmosphere. He believed that it meant something that she spoke to him the way she did, so coyly and so—what was it?—playfully? He could feel it deep inside his body. He felt it without entirely understanding it, but he wanted it to continue.
“And … and do you have kids?”
The sparkle in Costanza’s eyes dimmed. “I wanted to, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
The waiter appeared. He set two steaming bowls of fusilli in front of them. Costanza reorganized hers with her fork, folding the vegetables in more evenly and helping the pasta to cool.
“I think my mother might have liked to try for a girl, but that wasn’t meant to be either,” Andrew said, to break the silence.
“Because of the divorce?”
Andrew shrugged.
“Was it bitter?”
“She wasn’t bitter. Not about leaving.”
“There must have been someone else then.”
Andrew nodded. “You understand a lot.”
“The truth is, I understand very little. But I’m good at surmising.” She ate a bite of pasta. “Is this the man she’s married to now?”
“Charlie. My stepfather.”
“What do you think of him?”
“At the beginning I didn’t like him at all. I thought he was the reason she left. Later I realized that the marriage would have ended anyway. At least that’s what my mother wanted me to believe.”
“What do you believe?”
Andrew thought for a moment. “I was only eleven then. In those days when my parents fought or wanted to have a serious talk, they would go down to the street and get into our car, so I’m sure I missed a lot.” He paused. “I’m not sure why, but I’ve always wanted to know. What happened, what went wrong. Justin, my brother, couldn’t care less. I’ve tried asking him because he’s older and should remember more, but he says the past is the past.”
“People tend to fall into two groups. Those who feel the past on them always, like a shadow, and those who are free.”
“You belong to the first group, don’t you?”
“I think we both do.”
They finished their pasta in silence. As the tables flanking them began to empty, the balance of the sounds in the room changed, and Andrew found himself listening to a table behind him, a distant table where someone was laughing, then speaking at a rapid-fire pace. He cocked his head. He knew that laugh; he knew that pace; he knew that voice.
When the waiter returned to see if they wanted anything else to eat, Andrew said no. So did Costanza. She asked for the check, which the waiter brought and which she paid.
Costanza watched Andrew, watched him listening, then looked over his shoulder.
“It’s my father, isn’t it? With his students?”
She nodded. “Florence can be an awfully small town sometimes.”
Andrew turned around himself, just enough to see. He sighed. “I should probably say hello.”
He stood up and took in the whole scene now. Henry was sitting at a long table in the back of the restaurant, flanked and faced by eight young people. Eight pairs of eyes were on Henry, eight heads were bobbing as he spoke, nodding and absorbing. And laughing. A young woman was taking notes, her hand moving agilely across a gridded notebook. A man opposite Henry was holding out a microcassette tape recorder, capturing his every word.
Andrew took several strides forward and into his father’s bubble. Costanza dropped a few bills on the table, then followed.
“Hey, Dad.”
Henry, being midsentence, continued to address his audience even as he lo
oked first at Andrew, then at Costanza. Then his expression, professorial and authoritative, dissolved into confusion.
After a few seconds Henry’s language caught up with his face. “Andrew?” But possessing a highly developed public persona, Henry quickly recovered. He stood up. “Ragazzi,” he said, sweeping his hand in Andrew’s direction, “this is my son Andrew. And this—this is—”
“Costanza,” Andrew said.
Henry studied her intensely, with eyes that sought an answer to the mystery of her connection to his son. They sought—and they failed.
Costanza seemed to bask in Henry’s confusion for a beat longer than was necessary. “Please don’t let us interrupt your lunch,” she said. “We were just leaving.”
“But—but won’t you stay and join us for a coffee?”
A coffee and not just coffee: Andrew sensed that his father had tailored his phrasing just for her.
“It’s the least I can offer,” Henry added, “after having missed our drink the other night.”
“I wasn’t sure that was an invitation,” Costanza said.
“It was.” Henry gave Andrew a rapid penetrating glance. “Won’t you join us now? Just for a moment?”
It was her turn to look at Andrew. His discomfort was stamped on his face.
“Some other time maybe.” She turned to go.
“This evening then? At seven? On the terrace at the Ricci—for prosecco, if you care for it?”
She glanced at Andrew. “The appointment is for all of us?”
“All of us, naturally.” Henry was speaking to Costanza, but his eyes were on his son.
* * *
For the first time in days, Henry did not hurry. Instead he slowly made his way to the Boboli Gardens, and there amid the moss-tipped statues and murky fountains he tried to figure out when his sons had begun not just to drift away from him but to drift away from his understanding of them, which was something altogether different.
He remembered a phone call that came for Justin when he was home over spring break, from one of his music professors, or maybe TAs: David. Justin took the call in his room, and when he came out again, his eyes were red and puffy. He said that this professor, or TA, David, had felt Justin’s recent performance was not as good as it should have been. The playing was too restrained. Too cautious. Just repeating these words had made Justin tear up again.
Then after Henry had planned their summer trip and bought the plane tickets, this same David, according to Justin, felt that he should stay at Bard over the summer and do that composition course. Justin followed David’s advice rather than travel with his father to Europe, as he had each summer in the past four years.
David felt he needed a better violin.
David felt he shouldn’t lift weights at the gym more than once a week, as they could deform his arms.
David said to watch out for scalding water should he ever wash the dishes. Better: use rubber gloves.
David was a vegetarian, David believed vegetarianism was good for violinists.
David—it came to Henry in a flash of insight—might possibly be something more to Justin than merely his TA.
Once Henry allowed that thought to form in his mind, so many other things fell into place. Justin’s lack of a girlfriend since he started at Bard. The curiously intense friendship he had had with a cello player he had met at music camp the summer between his junior and senior year in high school, and spilling into the fall afterward, when every night he was on the phone to this kid—Carter?—for hours after dinner, until, abruptly, the calls stopped. His total lack of interest in sports (but did that matter, or was that an outdated kind of thinking?). Yet he had had a girlfriend his senior year, or half of senior year. The redheaded one with a nose ring; Henry had already forgotten her name.
When Henry paused to think about it, to think that Justin might be drawn to boys, or girls and boys both, he decided he didn’t care. Mostly he didn’t care. What he cared about more was the not knowing—the hiding, and being hidden from.
And Justin was the son he thought he knew better. Andrew was the cryptic one. All that photographing, all that quiet observing and secret tallying up that Andrew did. Those long solitary runs he took. Everything about him was withheld, inward. Like Judith when she went into one of her moods. Even that dreary girl he brought home, the one with the stringy hair and glasses—she was so shy she might as well have been mute. The one time Andrew left the room she took a book out of her bag and buried herself in it. What about her could possibly have attracted his son? What about her could possibly have caused the pounds to melt off him after something between them went awry?
Henry saw this by accident a week earlier, through a crack in Andrew’s bedroom door. Henry was walking down the hall and happened to glance up. Andrew was changing his shirt, and his upper body looked gaunt. At the time Henry had thought it was all the running. Or the pressure of high school, which in Manhattan, in this generation, was just insane. Or some new body-obsessed teen style—the concave torso—he’d failed to track, like the brims on baseball caps tipped to one side or pants being worn low to show off a brand of underwear. Now he felt that he had again missed, again misunderstood. Andrew must have been so distressed by this girl that he had stopped eating.
Suddenly Henry was noticing all kinds of things about Andrew. In just the last two days alone Andrew had caused Henry to rethink what he knew about his younger son. Henry could walk across every single inch of the Boboli Gardens and not get over how Andrew seemed to have made sure, and quite deftly too, that Henry didn’t end up meeting Costanza for a drink the night before on the terrace of the Ricci. He had finessed. But why? Could he possibly care for this woman in that way? Andrew?
Then he appeared with her at lunch. Andrew had had lunch with the remarkable-looking woman Henry had spoken to in San Marco and thought about more than once since.
Henry didn’t know if it was the red wine or the heat, which, as he aged, he tolerated less and less, but he began to feel woozy. A splintered but still serviceable park bench fortunately stood nearby, and he landed on it with a weary thud. Damp and ruddy faced, Henry sat stroking his itchy beard as he looked out at the gardens.
He had invested so much in being the boys’ father—a lot when they were small, a lot certainly for a man of his generation who worked as hard as he did, and a lot more after Judith left him. He knew what people thought. Judith had articulated it a number of times, and with resentment: he had filled the hole she left with the boys. He had turned them into his companions. He bought them subscriptions to the opera and the philharmonic. He traveled with them. He didn’t conceal from them the contents of his mind or the gradations of his temperament. Henry contended that such openness promoted honesty and friendship between fathers and sons. Real honesty and real friendship, both utterly unlike what he had with his own father … and both, he was beginning to see, not quite what he thought they were.
“You simply take up too much air”—Judith again, still audible after all these years. “You’re so busy being Henry, Henry, that you don’t leave room for the boys, any of us, to put forward our own notions or ideas. And the worst part is that it’s unconscious. It’s simply the way you’re made.”
He had never really been able to hear those words before. Take up too much air? Simply the way he was made? Those were the kinds of things he said, and thought, about his own father. But Leopold was a finished project, long ago fully baked. Surely he instead was more pliable than that. Surely he could still learn. Surely he could leave room for the boys to surprise him—and not only the boys. Life, generally. Surely, if he slowed down, if he paid closer attention, if he tried to take up less air, really tried, surely he could still surprise himself.
* * *
Groggy from the food, the unaccustomed wine, and his long hot afternoon, Andrew had succumbed so completely to a sticky summer nap that when he woke up, he wasn’t sure where he was. Slowly and through half-shuttered eyes he took in the mirror, the chande
lier, the desk where his computer stood closed, and finally the window and its view of the hills of Bellosguardo, which were at that moment washed with a soft orange light.
Andrew realized that the color meant that the sun was starting to go down. He was lying in his bed at the Pensione Ricci, and the sound he was hearing, footsteps coming into contact with dry parquet, was being produced by his father, who was tiptoeing around in his bare feet, getting ready to meet Costanza for a drink.
Henry removed the towel that had been tucked around his waist and used it to dry his body, his hair, the skin behind his ears. Even though they shared a room when they traveled, it had been a while since Andrew had seen his father naked. Previously when Henry had gotten dressed in front of him, Andrew had averted his eyes or picked up a book or his phone. Now he looked at his father’s unclothed self as though it held a key to his character: the flesh as commentary. What did it say? Superficially at least that Henry had been enjoying his long lunches a little too much: he was probably ten pounds overweight. And that his body wore a haze of dark hair, which was more ubiquitous than Andrew recalled. And that time was knitting some gray or white strands into the thatch on his chest and the smaller, contained field around his penis. And that his penis, which Andrew first remembered seeing when he was five or six years old, when it struck him as a supersized, imponderable, and somewhat terrifying thing, a thing belonging to a giant, not a man, was from his more grown-up perspective no longer quite so large after all. Yet Henry-the-body was greater than the sum of its component parts and made an impression that was similar to the one made by Henry-the-man: he was a being of stature, a life force undiminished by the imperfections of his corporeal self.
A lot of this had to do with the way Henry moved. Even impeded by his efforts to be quiet, Henry aggressed into his clothes. He didn’t step so much as lunge into his gray shorts. Khaki pants and socks (beige with tiny blue dots) followed. Then came one of the new Zubarelli shirts. First Henry held up to the mirror one that was boldly striped and highly colored, then another that was a more sedate blue check. Finally he settled on a plain white one. Like a pedestal under a statue, its purity offset his Roman head with its imperially wayward nose, newly trimmed beard, and enigmatic smile.
What Is Missing Page 4