Henry’s smile didn’t last long. After he buttoned his shirt cuffs, then reconsidered, unbuttoned them and casually rolled them up, he took one last look in the mirror, where he saw Andrew. As he pivoted around, his entire demeanor changed. He made his way to Andrew’s bed, where he bent over and put a hand on his son’s forehead. “I thought maybe you weren’t feeling well, Andy,” he said, using a nickname that had been retired around the time of the divorce. “You’ve been sleeping ever since I got back this afternoon.”
Henry’s body gave off a scent that was more than just soap. Something new and fragrant, half-sweet and half-spicy. It rose up into Andrew’s nostrils and made them itch. “I think you may have a little fever,” Henry added solicitously. “Do you want me to get you some aspirin?”
Andrew shook his head no.
“You can take it easy tonight if you like. I’ll have Angelo send you up a tray.”
“It’s kind of early for dinner.”
“I was thinking about later.”
“I’m just tired. I got too much sun today.” What was that line from Hamlet? They’d read it that spring in honors English. “I am too much in the sun.” A play on words. Sun and son. Too much in the son: Andrew was pretty sure that was why the clouds were hanging on him.
He pushed back the blanket.
Henry understood what the gesture meant and glanced at the ever-more-orange sky. “I guess I’ll meet you upstairs,” he said forlornly.
As though Henry had a right to be forlorn. She was his friend. She had taken him to smell the mushrooms and to see the two Donatellos and to lunch afterward.
At the door Henry took one last look at Andrew. The look echoed the one he’d given him in the restaurant. Henry was mystified.
* * *
Costanza sat at her favorite table in the far corner of the terrace. Her face was tilted toward the sun, eyes closed. For as long as she could remember twilight had been her favorite time of day. At twilight she felt a shift in herself, a lightening that washed through her as she recognized that the imperfections of the day, whatever burdens or preoccupations she had too readily given herself to, were suspended. Often, when she was working on a translation, after twilight she would sit back down at her desk for a second stint. When she and Morton had been in conflict, she had found it helpful to go away during twilight, since afterward whatever had come up between them felt less fierce. And when Morton was dying, if she arranged to take a break as the sun was going down, she returned to him with more equanimity afterward.
But sitting on the terrace at the Pensione Ricci wasn’t just about making the transition from one part of the day, or state of mind, to another; it was about connecting—reconnecting—to some of the most cherished moments of her childhood, when she and her father used to come to the pensione, just the two of them together, for a long weekend or sometimes for a week at a time. They came to sightsee and to look at art—she attributed her lifelong love of painting and sculpture to these trips—or because her father had, or (she later speculated) had trumped up, something he needed to dig out of a local archive, and every evening, no matter what their plans were, they began on the terrace at the Ricci, at the very table where she was sitting, or whatever its equivalent was twenty-five years ago. Away from Genoa, Alan was more buoyant, more present. Maybe that was because Florence brought back certain happy memories to him. Florence was where, studying during his junior year in college, he met and fell in love with Maria Rosaria (she too was studying there; the language lessons they began to exchange inspired her to become an English teacher … and years afterward his wife). Florence was where he decided to study Renaissance history, and Florence was where, in one of the student rooms on the top floor of the Ricci, he later lived for almost two years while he was doing research for his thesis. That was back in the time when Signora Ricci was still alive, back when an impecunious German baroness sat in the lobby typing the Signora’s correspondence, back when there were no bathrooms on the top floor, and if he had to pee in the middle of the night, her father delighted in telling her, he was expected to use a chamber pot. The top floor of the Ricci was just under the terrace. For all Costanza knew, she was sitting, at that very moment, above the room where her father had lived and studied and written in the years before he married her mother, before he went to battle against the depression that seized him around Costanza’s tenth birthday, before he tried to take his life the first time, before he succeeded the time after that …
Costanza knew it was a kind of magical thinking, but every time she returned to Florence and to the Pensione Ricci, she thought she would find her father there, or manage to awaken him from the dead, or if not exactly awaken him, awaken a new memory of him, though fewer and fewer of these came over the years; but that didn’t discourage her from returning, hoping again for a glimpse of his long, narrow face with its sharp cheekbones softening into inky circles that wreathed his sad, distant, deep-sea eyes. She came to Florence when she got her first big translating job. She came to Florence not long after she married Morton, and on several other occasions afterward, with him and on her own. She had come now that he was gone a year.
Costanza opened her eyes and squinted in the still-bright sunlight. It took her a moment to focus and recognize the figure who was heading toward her. Henry Weissman, in a brilliant white shirt, the tendrils of his hair still damp from a shower, wasn’t walking so much as striding across the terrace. He was so … vigorous. She felt his vigor in San Marco and again in the restaurant. She felt it in the way he moved, the way he spoke, even in the emphatic way he dropped himself into the chair opposite her.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your—meditating?”
“Thinking. Remembering.”
He gave her a look.
“I was thinking about my father. This terrace was one of his favorite places in the world.”
Henry looked at the flowering vines, the tables and chairs, the view. “I can see why.”
“It wasn’t just the beauty. It was a kind of retreat for him. An escape.”
“The way it is for you?”
“It’s different. I come here to … to check in with myself. With my past.”
Angelo appeared with the prosecco, which he set on a low table at Costanza’s knee. Henry told him he would prefer to open the bottle himself. He did, and nimbly. “What shall we toast? Chance meetings?”
“That seems fitting.” She accepted a glass from him. “Though to be perfectly honest, Dr. Weissman—”
“Henry.”
“Henry. I know who you are. Well, what you do. Two years ago, we came this close to meeting.”
Henry looked puzzled.
“While my husband was still well, he and I put together the names of several physicians in your field. People we intended to consult. But we only got as far as the first one.”
“Oh? And who was that, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“A Dr.… Schoenberg, I believe.”
“Schoenfeld. Isaac Schoenfeld,” Henry said rapidly. “What did you think of him?”
Morton—Costanza remembered clearly—said that he failed to take them in. As people apart from their medical situation, Morton meant. He expected everyone, even his doctors, to engage with him, to be charmed or confused or affronted by him. Clearly that was not this Dr. Schoenfeld’s way. But the real problem, she knew even at the time, was that Morton wanted the doctor to convince him to have a child, and that wasn’t his responsibility. Any physician’s responsibility.
“He seemed perfectly professional,” Costanza said neutrally. “The truth is, we never ended up going through with treatment of any kind, because soon afterward my husband decided that he wasn’t interested in having a baby.”
“That must have been very hard for you.”
Hard? Devastating, more like. “It was. But now … now I’m afraid it’s just another tedious story about another complicated marriage.”
“Complicated, I believe. Tedious? Not likely.”
“I might feel that way about my story, but something tells me that yours is a lot more interesting.”
Costanza took this as flirtation, as she suspected it was intended. It felt stirring to dip her toe into the world of human desire again. And—why not?—to flirt back: “And you’re basing that on…”
“Observation and intuition. I use both all the time in my work.”
“I thought what you did was all-science, all-business.”
Henry considered for a moment. There were ways he spoke about his work in public, and there were ways he thought, and much more rarely spoke, about it in private. His instinct told him that Costanza was someone he could—should—speak to candidly.
“It is all-science—all-business, if you like. But even I admit that there’s something intangible, in some couples, that can contribute to their success. A mental state, a hardiness that is not just physical but spiritual—things that as long as they remain unquantifiable I can’t talk about really. Except maybe in quiet conversations like this. But I’m aware of them. I’m aware that, at the beginning, I can often predict which couples will come out with a live birth in the end.”
“Surely you never let any of this on, in your office.”
“It would be unjust, if not unethical.” He paused. “Fertility is its own world, its own country, with its own protocol, its own vocabulary, even its own psychology. People come to me to seek help for something that should be perfectly natural. Something their parents did with ease, their siblings and friends often do with ease. Something they never even think about, until they find themselves thinking about it ceaselessly. There is nothing equivalent in medicine really. The ‘patient’ is not exactly ill, but suffers enormously and often over a long period of time. I know all this, but I have to shut most of it out. I have to see the couple as bodies that produce eggs and sperm that have trouble meeting up as they should or implanting and growing when they do. I have to look at this most organic of processes in as many discrete pieces as I can. And sometimes I’m unable to discover what isn’t working, but I treat the patient as though I know. I cannot do all this and take in people’s yearning at the same time.”
“So you put up a shield.”
“There’s such anguish. You cannot imagine.” The shadow that crossed Costanza’s face immediately caused Henry to add, “I’m sorry. Of course you can.”
“Please don’t apologize. The subject was once of considerable interest to me.”
“But no longer?”
Costanza looked out over the red tile roofs that appeared to hold the terrace afloat, a raft on a roiled terra-cotta sea. “Not at the moment, no.”
* * *
When Andrew stepped out onto the terrace, it took him a moment to locate Henry and Costanza. They were sitting at a remote table shielded by a thick leafy vine. Since the sun was setting behind them, Andrew saw them principally in silhouette. From the way they leaned toward each other, he could tell that they had made a connection. Of course they had made a connection. He had known they would as soon as they started talking in the restaurant—before. At San Marco, when Henry collided with her, they had spoken as equals, or anyway as two people who could be in balance with each other. Or interested in each other. Nevertheless, his stomach sank.
Andrew was a watcher, a photographer. Stealth came naturally to him. He retraced his steps and quietly inched toward the door that led back into the pensione. As soon as he was out of sight, he texted Henry to say that he wasn’t feeling well after all. In his room Andrew brought his camera and computer to his bed, and he opened up the file titled “Charlotte.” Even edited down, it contained maybe four or five hundred photographs altogether. Photographs—many of them—of Charlotte reading. Of Charlotte playing in Central Park with her neighbor’s poodle. Of Charlotte half-giddy and half-terrified the day they went out to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone, clinging to each other like little kids. Of Charlotte at swim practice, her sleek blue suit showing off all her beautiful curves.
Of Charlotte out of that suit one day after practice, when her parents were out of town and Emily was at a sleepover and they went to bed for the first time, and she let him photograph her afterward in the late-afternoon light.
Andrew’s hand drifted down to his jeans and went inside. Charlotte was on the screen in front of him, and when he closed his eyes, she was in his head. But when he started stroking, she began to retreat, as if he were looking at her through the wrong end of a telescope or trying to pin her down in a tangled dream. Charlotte retreated, but someone else came forward, walking in her linen, gesturing at that disconcerting naked David, lifting a forkful of her perfectly wound pasta to her perfectly formed lips.
Andrew’s whole body went clammy. He removed his hand from his pants.
* * *
In bed the next morning, with the first coffee of the day sharpening her brain, Costanza went back in:
May 23rd
Our fifth dinner. She doesn’t like me to call them dates. I say, “As long as we continue doing them, I don’t care what you call them.” “What is it that we are doing, anyway?” “I don’t know about we, but I am falling in love with you.” “Why?” That again. “Why am I lovable to you? Why do you find me attractive?” She really appears not to understand. “Because your mind interests me, because your heart interests me, because your body…” This is why we have language: to make our feelings clear, yes? But mine surprises me by falling short. “Because when I’m with you I tingle. On the tip of my nose, on the back of my legs. Because I smell you even when I’m not around you. Because I want to slide my penis inside you and keep time from going forward and taking me closer to death.”
So the last part I didn’t say, though Howard said I should have. “Death and all that, it’s a real turnoff, Morty—but the sex, go for it.”
Before the evening was over she agreed to go away with me for the weekend. This weekend.
May 25th—Vermont
C. and I have just made love. She is lying in the bed across the room from me, asleep, her face buried in a nest of golden hair.
I, Morton Sarnoff, male of the species, age nearly sixty, survivor of myocardial infarction and triple-bypass surgery, can still make love. I am not done yet.
I can still come without having a heart attack. You don’t know what a relief that is. You don’t know what it’s like to sit in an armchair and look out over a glassy pond and feel life starting up again.
I sat up with my back against the headboard. She faced me. She straddled me. Her skin is white everywhere. Except for her nipples, which are pink. And delicious. Salty. I took turns taking them into my mouth, circling each one with my tongue until they stiffened. At the same time so did I. I never thought I could again be this hard, this long. What was this about? It was about this woman. It was about the moment when we both let out our sounds.
And now I am here in this chair, looking out at this pond, and I am thinking, everything is going to be different now. I am going to be “knitted more closely into life.” Yeats. Or did he say tightly? I’ll take tightly.
I am trying to keep my mind from racing. I think that is why I came to sit here and to write. Only my mind is still racing, and she seems to be wak—
May 26th
She woke up. I put away my notebook.
She got up and got dressed. I got dressed. The sex made us a little more formal with each other, rather than the opposite as you would think.
We went for a walk. She told me how much time she spent in Tuscany as a girl, and in the hills of Liguria. Everything there, everything in Italy, seems so much more connected to the earth. The houses, the garden. Animals. Food. She said nothing tastes the same in America. And yet she lives here. Why? Because in Italy she f
ound that, after a point, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t become what she thought she wanted to be. To know herself, she said, she had to go away.
I said I thought I understood. I said I wished I had gone away more when I was younger. It’s funny how limited, in certain senses, my life has been. My travels have been more interior than anything else.
I asked her what she saw in her future. “That depends,” she said, quoting me to me, yet sounding very much like herself, “on you.”
Costanza remembered the specifics of that conversation well. How couldn’t she? It was one of the handful of moments in her life in which she had been truly daring. She had said what she was feeling in the moment, and it had changed everything.
She didn’t regret having taken that leap, but it was unlikely that she would take a similar one ever again. Her marriage to Morton had been too costly. It had swept her up, it had consumed her, and it had left her—well, that was just the point. She didn’t know where it left her. Not, certainly, where she’d been before they married. It had left her suspended; that much she knew. And now, just as she seemed ready to suspend her suspension, Morton presented himself again. Reading these pages of his reeled her in. The bed, the lovemaking, the walk in the country … it was as though he had somehow guessed, how she certainly couldn’t say, that a year after his death she would be ready to open her life up and, possibly, allow another man to come into it.
Had a man come into her life?
It was too soon to be entirely sure, but she was better at reading the early signs now. And Dr. Weissman—Henry—wasn’t exactly shy about broadcasting them. After that text had arrived from Andrew, it was as if something in him had shifted, and he poured himself, truly poured himself, into the evening. He asked her about her family, and she told him, candidly though in brief, about her parents’ difficult marriage and her father’s depression and eventual suicide. She talked about her work as a translator, which he speculated likely had something to do with the impulse to help a mother and a father who were in so many senses so deeply foreign to each other understand each other. That was perceptive of him; she tucked that insight away for further review, since she had not put it together quite like that before. He asked her about Liguria and what she missed from her life there. And he asked her to tell him about Morton, at least to give him an outline of Morton.
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