She had no way of knowing how long he had been standing in the doorway, watching her work. As soon as she noticed him, though, he said, “And you might be…?”
“Costanza. I am Costanza.”
He was puzzled. “Costanza, the caterer? Henry must really be putting it on for my welcome-home dinner.”
“No, Costanza the friend. Of your father’s. Who happens to be preparing said meal.”
She wiped her hand on a dish towel. She thought that he might understand and walk across the room to shake it, but he remained rooted in place.
“Friend, as in girlfriend?”
She hesitated. Then: “I suppose.”
“And already you’re cooking?”
“I’ve been cooking all my life, Justin,” she said dryly.
He took a quick survey of her work so far. “It’s green.”
“Yes, it’s pesto. A specialty of Liguria, where I’m from.”
“You’re Italian.”
“Half.”
“Well, I don’t do green. My father will have forgotten to mention that, I’m sure.”
She tried to work out whether he was joking. He didn’t appear to be. “You haven’t tasted my green. You might like it.”
“I might not. But don’t worry. I can always send out.”
As far as first impressions went, Justin was making rather a bleak one. He approached the counter.
“So you two met where?”
“In Florence.”
“The summer trip. More to it than he reported.”
She wasn’t sure what to say. The conversation seemed to have its own rhythm, far from pleasant. No, not its own. Justin’s.
Apparently he wanted to continue their friendly talk: “Do you have extra green sauce?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve invited a friend. What time is dinner?”
“Your father said he’d be home by seven.”
“My friend’s train gets in at seven fifteen. I expect you can wait.”
“I expect we can, Justin, yes.”
“Super.” And with this he left the room.
* * *
After she finished preparing the dinner and set the table, Costanza took herself on a little tour of Henry’s apartment. By any point of comparison other than Morton’s, Henry’s home was roomy and gracious in the best old-fashioned way. The layout—unlike that of Morton’s duplex—was fairly straightforward. A large square foyer led to the right into the kitchen and straight ahead into the living room. Between the living room and the kitchen was a library that, Costanza suspected, was originally meant to be the dining room; it opened onto the living room through wide double doors. One of its walls was fitted, floor to ceiling, with bookshelves. The titles ranged beyond medicine to politics, natural history, art history, history, and some fiction; two shelves, she noted, were dedicated to the Holocaust and the Second World War alone. A drop-leaf table stood against another wall, but it seemed clear that Henry and the boys customarily ate in the kitchen. A desk sat in the alcove by the window and a pair of club chairs floated in the center of the room—and that was it. At least the living room was furnished with a sofa, another pair of chairs, and a few side tables. Henry had mentioned that his father was an upholsterer, so she wasn’t surprised to see that the upholstery was pristine, yet both rooms seemed not only underfurnished but also underlit. As in the bedroom there were shadows where pictures had once hung. In the living room and the library, in addition, ghostly rectangles darkened the floors, which had evidently once been covered by rugs.
Henry and his wife had lived apart for five, six years now. How long did it take for the dark parts of the floor to catch up with the light ones? A decade? A lifetime?
Costanza returned to the foyer. The long corridor that led out of the foyer in the opposite direction of the kitchen reached all the way to Henry’s bedroom at the far end. In between was a row of doors. All were dark except for the first one. She approached it and knocked.
“Come in.”
Andrew was sitting at his desk, shifting folders and papers around. Stacks of photographs spread out next to him and continued in a chaotic swirl across the floor.
“I didn’t even know you were here,” Costanza said. “Why didn’t you come say hello?”
“I didn’t want to disturb the master chef.”
“Well, it’s not so masterful really. It’s pretty basic, what I’ve done.”
“I know, remember? Pine nuts, garlic, basil, cheese, oil—and salt.”
She smiled. “It didn’t seem to appeal to your brother.”
“He doesn’t ‘do’ green,” Andrew said. “Wait. You met Justin? Where?”
“He popped in briefly.”
“Really? What did you think of him?”
Costanza hesitated. “He seemed nice.”
Andrew gave her a skeptical look.
“He seemed—surprised to find me in the kitchen.”
Andrew nodded. “I bet.”
On the wall above his desk hung a cork bulletin board, where dozens more of his photographs were arranged in thematic clusters. Costanza stepped toward them. “When did you start taking these?”
“About six years ago. When my mother left. In fact I took the first one the actual day.”
He indicated the upper left-hand corner of the bulletin board, where a faded photograph, curling inward and slightly blurry, depicted a slipper whose cushioned interior held the imprint of a woman’s foot. Costanza studied it as Andrew continued, “Over the next few months I went around taking pictures of things she left behind, either intentionally or by accident. First came the slipper, then the rest.”
The rest, arranged in a long vertical line below the slipper, included a comb with a missing tooth; a pile of sweaters spilling out of a bag marked CANCER CARE THRIFT; a college psychology textbook with a round brown stain on its front cover; a silver soup ladle with an elaborate scrolling G engraved on the handle; a box of hair clips; deposit slips to a savings account printed with HENRY WEISSMAN OR JUDITH GERTZ WEISSMAN; an open drawer full of spools and scraps of ribbon; and a white wedding veil, yellowing within its sheath of dry cleaner’s plastic.
Andrew followed her gaze. “She took, or maybe got rid of, the dress but left the veil. I could never figure that out.”
To the right of the photographs relating to Andrew’s mother were a number of views from windows that had been arranged in thematic groups. The ones from Florence Costanza recognized, but there were other windows, apparently New York windows, as well. In one extended series an older woman, photographed in profile, was sitting on her couch. There were about twenty pictures of her, in her pajamas, her bathrobe, her bra, in a summer shift, in a turtleneck sweater. In every single photograph save one she was reading.
“And these?” Costanza glanced up at his window. “They’re not taken here.”
“On the West Side. I photographed her for almost two years, across the courtyard from our kitchen. Ninety percent of the time she was sitting in the same place, on the same blue sofa. And she was almost always reading. She reminded me of Charlotte and her family. I liked the way she repeated, every day, the exact same thing.”
“But presumably she wasn’t reading the same thing, so every day—every minute really—was different, to her.”
Andrew took this in. “Maybe that’s why she looks slightly different in every photograph.” He paused. “Earlier this summer, before we left for Italy, her apartment was dark for several days. You can see it in the last pictures. I photographed the darkness. When we got back, it was empty. Just a white box. A dingy white box. I think she must have died.”
“She might have moved.”
“If she’d moved, I’d have seen her packing. Or dismantling things.”
Costanza looked around at the room. “Like you’re doing now.”
“Believe it or not, this is me organizing. My stepfather suggested I put together a portfolio of my photographs. He said it might be smart to send them arou
nd with my applications. Something ‘extra’ to show how special I am.”
Costanza brushed past the sarcasm. She looked at the photographs scattered on Andrew’s desk. One in particular drew her attention. In it a debonair middle-aged man stood in a street where the buildings looked decidedly Italian. His face radiated an odd equanimity. She picked it up. “He seems familiar.”
“This is one of the photographs I don’t really understand. He’s a colleague of my father’s. We ran into him in Florence and I felt, I don’t know, that I just had to take his picture.”
She recognized him now. “He’s Dr. Schoenfeld, isn’t he? I consulted him once. Morton and I did.”
Andrew nodded. “I intended to shoot him as he was walking away. From behind. I like to photograph people from behind. But then he turned around. It was as if he knew I was looking at him. He waited for me to take his picture. Posed, almost.”
Costanza continued to study the image.
“If you and your husband went to see a doctor like Schoenfeld, then you must have been pretty serious about trying to have a baby.”
“I was, but Morton…” She put the photograph down. “Let’s just say the timing wasn’t right.”
“People say that, but I’m not sure what it really means.”
“It means that things happen, or they don’t, for a reason. If they happen, they were probably meant to all along. If they don’t…” Costanza looked away.
“Would you say you were meant to move in with my father all along? When you only met him three months ago?”
Now it was Andrew’s turn to look away, to look anywhere but at Costanza.
“I would say … I would say that your father and I were meant to find out what we’re finding out. And besides, Andrew, I’m not moving in. I’m just staying here for a little while.”
* * *
Back in the kitchen, Costanza turned the flame on low under the pasta water. Then she found a bowl and started to assemble the salad. The evening was gradually beginning to take on some of the grit, and a little of the gloom, of the real. Prickly Justin … complicated Andrew. Was there no perfection to be had, even in a single meal? Probably the mistake was seeking perfection in the first place. She had wanted to mark the evening, but what it was to her, or to her and Henry, was going to be different from what it was to Andrew and to Justin. Happiness, she knew, was not a particularly insightful state of mind. It had been so long since she had even had a taste of happiness that she had forgotten how blinding it could be.
When Henry walked into the kitchen just after seven o’clock, Costanza took one look at his face and sensed that something wasn’t right. Maybe it was his habit to come home every day from seeing patients with this same air of worried abstraction. His work was often upsetting, surely. But he didn’t even take in her preparations. The food, the scents, the table, entirely passed him by. He said merely, and with exasperation, a single word: “Justin.”
For a moment that seemed to be all Henry was going to say. But he went on, “He just texted. He’s bringing someone to dinner.”
“I know. He was here briefly earlier. You seem disappointed.”
“I had hoped to have him to myself—I hoped we could have him to ourselves. It’s been so long. More than two months.”
“But he’s in town through the weekend, isn’t he?”
“The days will fly. They always do. He’ll find excuses to go out…” Henry seemed to catch himself, or to listen to himself. “I haven’t even said a proper hello.” Then he kissed her.
“That was proper.”
He smiled finally. He looked around. “You’ve been busy. I don’t think there’s been such a nice table set in this house for years. It’s only missing one thing.”
He slipped into the hall and returned with a bouquet of flowers. They weren’t precious hothouse flowers but wildflowers, grown outdoors somewhere in a field. Black-eyed Susans, deep gold with black centers, autumnal and spirited. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had anyone to give flowers to.”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve been given any.” She smiled.
He reached up to a high cupboard, brought down a glass vase clouded with dust, and rinsed it.
“Tell me.” Henry handed her the clean vase. “Tell me everything you did since we parted this morning.”
As she unwrapped and arranged the flowers, she gave him an abbreviated version: the phone calls, the packing up; the food shopping downtown; then cooking, meeting Justin.
“And did you get a sense of him?”
“He was just here for a few minutes,” she said diplomatically.
“I hope he wasn’t in one of his surly moods.”
Her silence prompted Henry to explain, “That’s all just cover. It’s his way when he’s uncomfortable.”
“Well, we all have a way when we’re uncomfortable.”
“It’ll take time, but you’ll see what a great kid he is.”
* * *
Justin liked green after all. And he could be charming. After a small assessing bite he dug into his bowl of linguine al pesto with appetite. He praised Costanza’s cooking and announced to the table in general, “What a really nice dinner this is.”
He had returned from the train station in a more buoyant mood, moving through the apartment with a proprietary air, opening and pouring wine as though he were the host. He was helpful, charming, a different Justin—Henry’s Justin? Closer, for sure.
“Ah, yes,” Henry said when Justin introduced his friend David.
David, six or seven years older than Justin, had been his TA at Bard. A wiry, ethereal young man in the obligatory battered jeans, David had prominent cheekbones, hard gemlike blue-green eyes, and a mouth that might have been appealing if it hadn’t been so busy delivering opinions and pronouncements.
David liked the pesto too. David knew all about pesto. “It’s the classic dish of Liguria,” he told the table. “It comes out of a tradition of cucina povera, humble local ingredients resourcefully combined. Food that was once devised out of necessity is now considered a regional delicacy.” Henry raised his eyebrows at Costanza at the idea of David, in front of Costanza, holding forth on the gastronomy of Liguria, but at least he had his facts straight. He had been to Genoa, and down all along the coast. He had even visited Recco. He knew the focaccia al formaggio, and he had swum in the pool where the famous water-polo team practiced. He had hiked into the hills too, as Costanza had many times, over many years. “That little church, a thousand years old and halfway down the hill toward Punta Chiappa—remind me of its name?”
“San Nicolò,” she said.
“Correct.” (Correct—as though she were a student of his.) “There’s a little square, you can’t even call it that, a little pad out front, paved with a design of gray and white pebbles, the kind you find on the beaches nearby. It’s like the pesto, everything very much of the place.”
And what place was he of? It was not easy to determine.
“We should go there sometime, Justin,” David added, holding out his wineglass, which Justin promptly replenished. “The swimming is terrific. You see all kinds of fish…”
Henry, who had been holding back and observing more than participating, now said, “Justin’s never been that much of a swimmer. Andrew is the swimmer in the family.”
“I’ve been swimming,” Justin said. “David and I have, a lot this summer. We found a lake outside of town. A hidden lake, clear as glass. We’ve been sneaking in.” Justin turned to Andrew. “I guess I’ve sneaked in on your turf, Baby B.”
“I don’t own swimming,” Andrew said.
“You are brown,” Henry said. “It’s not how I’m used to seeing you.”
“What my father means,” Justin explained to David, “is that I spent most of my high school years doing math and playing music. I rarely left the house. I was like a ghost.”
“A studious ghost,” said Henry. “A gifted ghost.”
“But still a ghost, Dad. And a gho
st is not enough. Not anymore, not for me.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop abruptly.
“Are you saying you regret the math workshops?” Henry said. “The music lessons? The fact that we encouraged you to practice?”
“I don’t regret the work. I regret not having had a life to go with it.” Justin drank some wine. “Now that you have one again”—he glanced at Costanza—“maybe you understand better.”
Barbed though this remark was, Justin delivered it airily. But Henry didn’t bite, at least not in the way Justin seemed to expect. Instead Henry sat back in his chair and said, “Tell me more about the lake. Clear as glass, you said. Sneaking in.”
Justin looked off into the distance. “They were just about the best afternoons ever. This place, you have to drive about twenty minutes from campus, along a back road. You park in a little clearing and walk through the woods another ten minutes or so.”
“Closer to fifteen, I’d say,” said David.
Justin smiled at David. “Fifteen, right. There’s a dirt path, so your steps are very quiet, muffled. And you feel completely on your own. That’s the best part. Away from people, traffic. It smells of summer. You know that smell? All the plants and trees are lush and green, full of juice. And the air has a sound, it almost, I don’t know, hums. From the bees and the crickets and—and it’s like you can hear the plants growing. That’s their music. They stretch, they reach for the sunlight. They become stronger. That’s what I felt I did with my summer. I stretched, I—I felt things.” Justin glanced at David nervously. “All kinds of new things.”
“For David,” Henry half said and half asked. It was a leap, but if he was right—and he was nearly sure he was—he wanted to get ahead of this situation. He didn’t want to give Justin any more reason to withdraw from him, from them. And his love for his son was deep enough, unconditional enough, to withstand anything—anyone—Justin might turn out to be.
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