Into that one kiss and the fuck that followed. And it was a fuck too, led by her. She drew Henry up over her, and when he was where she wanted him, she ran her hands through his chest hair and down until they circled his penis. She circled it as though she were meeting it and mastering it at the same time. She guided it into her, and only then did she let Henry take over. He started slowly, gingerly. He dipped in and out of her, bringing up still more of her juices. Then as he began, tentatively, to venture deeper, she took the lead again. She dug her palms into his backside, pressed her hands into it, and brought him close, she brought him so far into her that he didn’t know where he was. He didn’t know if he was inside her or she was inside him. Their crotches were joined, soaked; electric.
She came first. She tilted her head back and closed her eyes and let out a long, slow sound whose pitch rose and rose. He too closed his eyes. He was aware of her trembling again, not on the outside this time but, it seemed, at the innermost center of herself. Her trembling, her orgasm, brought him to his, with a rapid heart and a flash of sweat that glazed his entire body.
They did not speak for maybe ten minutes. Finally she said, “I don’t know what that was.”
“I’m not sure I do either.”
To both of them sleep seemed like the easiest path forward.
Costanza slept with her hair spread out over her pillow like the petals of an exotic flower. That was the association that came to Henry when he woke up at three a.m., groggy and disoriented. Slowly his eyes adapted to the dim bluish light, and he took a deliberate inhalation of dried sweat and semen mingled with soap and perfume, and then he understood: he was in bed with Costanza. He had gone to bed with her some hours earlier, and now the whole city was wound down; surely all of the pensione (including Andrew, he thought in passing) was unconscious. But not Henry. Henry was conscious. He hoped he wasn’t going to be awake until morning. He could not endure one of his hyperaware insomniac spells on this night of all nights.
When he looked over at the face on the pillow next to him, he thought, Is this really possible? It was possible. In his stomach, his balls, and his wildly speeding brain, Henry felt a kind of hope about his life that he had not felt since Judith left. No, before that. Way before that. Since he and Judith began.
Costanza’s face, in sleep, was unreadable. He was grateful for that. Her unavailability—her sleep—was the only chance he had for returning to sleep himself. He rolled away from her, drew the covers up to his shoulders, and willed himself to stop thinking. Amazingly it worked.
* * *
When Henry woke up, Costanza was already out of bed, transferring folded clothes from a dresser drawer to a suitcase. She had put on a bathrobe and gathered her hair back off her face. If she’d had a shower, Henry hadn’t heard her.
“Good morning,” he said.
A strong yellow light was waiting to be freed from behind the shutters. Costanza opened them.
“Good morning.”
Squinting, he made a gesture with his hand to convey What’s going on?
“I’m sorry, but I need to get ready for my trip. I have a train to catch in two hours. My cousin Cristina is visiting from Munich this weekend. I haven’t been home since I came to Italy. It was all organized—before.”
Shoes now, into a different corner of the bag.
“That’s it?”
She nodded.
He pulled himself up on his elbow. “We kiss each other the way we did, we touch each other the way we did, and you just want to pack?”
“I have a difficult few weeks ahead. My moth—”
“So we say nothing? Plan nothing?”
She handed him his pants. “I will write to you, Henry, and you will write to me. I’m not capable of more than that right now.”
She didn’t show him to the door, but she might as well have.
Henry, bewildered, pulled on his pants, then his shirt. At the door he stopped. “I can’t leave without saying I have to see you again.”
“You will.”
Then she kissed him—on his cheek—to say goodbye.
And that was it. She did write, though. Not e-mail—letters. Her first one, sent from Recco, was waiting for him in New York when he returned from Tuscany. In it she suggested that he reply to her Fifth Avenue address; she said that, since she was not certain where she would be in the coming months, “it would be arranged” for whatever he sent to catch up with her. All her letters came without a stamp or a postmark; Henry assumed that it was “arranged” for them to travel between Italy and New York by FedEx or the equivalent and then messengered or even walked over to his apartment. He didn’t know what to make of any of this. She had mentioned that her husband’s secretary still had unfinished business with the estate. Maybe he had something to do with the way these letters arrived.
Costanza wrote to him about her time with her mother, which, as she predicted, had not been easy, and her visits elsewhere in Italy, to friends and relatives. He wrote her about the rest of his trip, his return to New York, the winding-down late-summer IVF cycles he was overseeing at the clinic. Underneath all of these circumstantial accounts, at Henry’s end, was an eager curiosity that he had to tamp down. Exerting rare self-control, he had managed not to say outright what was on his mind. He even managed not to ask when she would be back in New York. It was obvious to Henry, even to Henry, that with Costanza it was better to hold back, to do less, where his innate tendency was to do more. And he had been rewarded for all this restraint. On Sunday evening he received a note, essentially the note he had been waiting for these past three months:
Henry, I’m here. Will you come to dinner tomorrow night at 8.00? Text only if you are not able to make it. There will be prosecco. C.
Henry glanced at his bedside clock. Between 6:15 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. there was a universe of time to be lived, thoughts to be tamed, work to be done.
* * *
Before Henry walked through the door of his medical building on York Avenue, he stopped, as was his habit, at the fruit vendor who set up his cart at the northwest corner of the intersection at Sixty-Ninth Street. After all these years the fellow recognized Henry and had bagged and ready for him a single green apple and a ripe, but not overly ripe, banana, Henry’s customary breakfast, or first breakfast, which tided him over until Wanda, his assistant, sent out for scrambled eggs and dry wheat toast in the earliest break between appointments after 10:00 a.m.
On this morning, though, for the first time in a long time, Henry stopped in front of the cart and looked at the fruit and vegetables as if he had never seen them before. In the clean fall light, with the cars and trucks barreling past and a construction worker jackhammering asphalt, the fruit stand struck him as an almost surreal oasis that had somehow dropped out of the sky and landed in Manhattan. With its neatly banked, tightly packed mounds of oranges, apples, and lemons, its spikily crowned, sweet-smelling pineapples, its baskets of grapes and peaches, string beans and broccoli, its tiny transparent jewel boxes of raspberries and blueberries and gooseberries (gooseberries!), this improbable cornucopia reminded him of a European or Middle Eastern open-air market, sized down for a New York street corner. How did all this gorgeous fruit come to be here, and where did it go at night, and who was the fruit seller, with his rheumy eyes and incongruous straw hat and knowing smile, and why hadn’t he ever encouraged Henry to expand his morning repertoire? He loved blueberries. And peaches too. And apricots, and oranges. He loved them, and this morning, he bought them all.
By his midmorning break, Henry had seen six patients, and he was flagging. His usually solid barricade was pitted. Starting with Julia Bergman, with her multiple miscarriages and her heartsick husband, Henry had been letting himself feel. That was a mistake. Not because a physician should be an automaton, but because when he let himself feel, he got involved, and when he got involved, he didn’t think crisply, and when he didn’t think crisply, he wasn’t doing his job. There were hundreds (thousands) of them, but there was j
ust one of him, and if he gave himself to even a handful of them, there would be little of him left at the end of the day. Yet here he was, at the beginning of a new fall cycle, full of all this unusual feeling. He felt for Julia. He felt for “Miss Brown,” the actress who booked her appointments under a pseudonym and was raw and genuine beneath all her polish and secrecy. He even felt for Arlene Brookner, closing a business deal on two iPhones—and scared to death. He was more open to these people, to their quests and their anguish, than he could remember being in a long time. Yet nothing in his morning consultations set them so far apart from the women that had preceded them. They were no different; but he was.
After his last patient, Henry worked his way down his phone list. When he reached the end, it was already seven thirty. That left him no time to go home to shower or change his clothes. He had wanted to bring Costanza some kind of gift, but he had no time for that either. Then he realized he already had one.
* * *
Henry had the taxi leave him at Seventy-Ninth Street, three blocks from Costanza’s building. It was seven minutes before eight. He had just enough time for a brief transition between his workday and the evening ahead.
Henry and his bag of fruit made their steady way along the limestone façades of Fifth Avenue. He moved slowly. It had been such a long time since he’d allowed his hope to rise in this way that he wasn’t so eager to have it leveled off by reality. So he savored it. For four, five, then six luscious minutes he walked up Fifth Avenue, strolling past liveried doormen and dogwalkers airing packs of mismatched breeds. He noticed everything: the gleaming brass door handles, the discreet nameplates advertising the services of plastic surgeons and shrinks, the roof gardens overhead whose furred trees looked like feathers stuck into grand chapeaux, the spotless pavement—even the sidewalk in these blocks was scrubbed clean, by someone. New York was a city of parallel worlds, of unending hierarchies. There was always someone who had more money, more talent, more friends, more connections, a bigger apartment with a better view … but Henry was convinced that none of them, at that moment, felt as buoyant as he did, none felt deep within himself the tiny pod of anticipation that made it seem as though his feet weren’t so much touching that impossibly clean sidewalk as levitating over it.
Her building had a plastic surgeon and three shrinks in offices on the ground floor. The gold on the doorman’s livery was so bright it gleamed. In the elevator cab, which was tricked out with beveled mirrors, Henry tried not to look at his reflection, and succeeded. He tried not to feel his heartbeat, and failed.
On the eighth floor the doors opened, and he stepped into a foyer. To the left of the door was a small illuminated bell, but before he could press it the door was opened by a short man who had carefully trimmed salt-and-pepper hair and brown eyes. He was wearing gray trousers and a white shirt so close-fitting they seemed to have been sewn onto him.
“Good evening, Dr. Weissman. Please come in.”
Henry followed the small man into a second, larger foyer.
“I’m Ivan, Mr. Sarnoff’s assistant.”
Mr. Sarnoff’s assistant: as though the fellow hadn’t been dead for more than a year.
“Mrs. Sarnoff asked me to say that she will be down in a few minutes.”
After noting Henry’s bag Ivan added, “May I take your … parcel?”
Henry handed it over. “It’s fruit. You might want to put it in the fridge.”
Ivan took the bag. “May I offer you a refreshment?”
“Sparkling water, if you have it.”
Ivan guided Henry into the living room, then disappeared.
Where had Morton Sarnoff come up with Jeeves? His background was not so different from Henry’s, as Henry was reminded when, after he returned from Italy, he spent some time reading up online: New Brunswick to Henry’s Brooklyn; a coming of age in the 1950s to Henry’s 1960s; Sarnoff’s father a high school science teacher, which was arguably several modest socioeconomic steps above Henry’s father the upholsterer—though cerebral Leopold Weissman was hardly summed up by his relationship to fabric and thread.
In the early 1990s, after publishing a book of stories and three novels, Sarnoff went into exile in Columbia County, where he lived in an isolated farmhouse. There was a lot of speculation about a stupendous case of writer’s block, or a nervous breakdown following a brief tumultuous marriage to the Actress. He was increasingly described as “the reclusive Morton Sarnoff” (“Isolation is life too,” he said in a rare interview he gave to a journalist who ambushed him at his local Price Chopper. “And so, for your information, is discipline”). Then, just after he turned fifty-eight, Sarnoff surprised his readers by publishing The Life to Come, a large multigenerational family novel. The book was an enormous success. It was adapted into a movie in which Meryl Streep, altering her hairstyle, costume, and voice, played the grandmother, the daughter, and the granddaughter. People went back and read the early work. The dough rolled in; Sarnoff returned to the city; he bought his lavish apartment; he had his heart attack and bypass surgery. He met Costanza, married her, separated from her, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and then he died.
Henry wondered if there wasn’t a sense of vengeance about the whole setup. The man who was almost never referred to without the adjective Jewish appended to his name, as in “the once-prolific Jewish novelist” or “Sarnoff, the tireless chronicler of Jewish family life,” had planted himself right there in WASP central, in a building that a generation back probably wouldn’t have allowed him to sit for a board interview. The Georgian furniture, the Chinese rugs, the dull safe paintings, the plush (though expertly done) upholstery, the general air of cultivation and arrival: What was being beaten down here? The toxic anti-Semitism that was a commonplace of his New Jersey childhood? The high school science-teacher father or the mother who died at thirty-seven of breast cancer? Or was it all simply one big midlife extravagant whim?
Henry had no idea. There was nothing wrong with living well, anyway. The man had a big talent and suddenly deep pockets. He had no kids, so he spent on the pad. Yet something about the dead man’s apartment felt spooked, inhabited somehow—though not by Costanza, wherever she was.
Henry tried out three different chairs and couldn’t sit still in any of them. He stepped over to the windows and looked out at the Met. The fountains were bubbling away. The façade was lit by a gentle ivory-colored light. He wondered if Sarnoff, looking out at this same view, had ever felt he had come as far as he could, in life. A duplex on Fifth Avenue; a half dozen esteemed books; fame; a stunning, intelligent wife: he had a lot. Yet he couldn’t, he wouldn’t, follow her to that next experience in the arc, the step that Henry, personally, believed was the one experience that finally grew a man up. He couldn’t, he wouldn’t, agree to father a child. He was too old, or too stuck, or too afraid, or too selfish, or too committed to his work, too something, and so he let this special woman go.
At the far end of the living room a pair of double doors stood slightly ajar. Henry approached, pushed them more fully open, and stepped inside: Sarnoff’s study. In contrast to the order and understatement of the rest of the apartment, the place was in cluttered, even frenzied, disarray. There were two solid walls of bookshelves. On every horizontal surface, on the desk, on a low cupboard, even on several large patches of the floor, books, periodicals, and files rose in unruly stacks. The desk itself faced a wall, so that Sarnoff sat with his back to Fifth Avenue. On the wall behind the desk hung a bulletin board covered with notes, clippings, a calendar. The calendar was open to June of the previous year. June of the previous year was when Sarnoff had died.
“Nothing has been changed since he passed.” Ivan was standing in the doorway, holding a tray with a glass and a small bottle of Perrier.
“I can see that.”
“I just thought I’d mention it, in case you felt like touching anything.”
“I’m not in the least interested in touching anything.”
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