How many times over the years has she gone back to that moment, or has it come back to her? Sometimes it acted like a drug, inoculating her with a dose of its toxicity as a way of resetting her perspective. She had a feeling that was what was going on now. Toughen up, girl, it was saying, or something in that vein. But tough was the last thing she was feeling.
Costanza was still sitting in Henry’s half-empty living room, sipping her wine and studying the dreary décor, when he returned an hour later. He switched on the light, and she turned to face him, squinting. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
She shrugged.
He sat down in the chair that paired with hers. “How did it go?”
“It went.”
“Sandra knows her stuff.”
Costanza nodded.
“Are you okay?”
“I will be.” It wasn’t clear whom she was trying to assure with those unconvincing words.
“You’re not having second thoughts?”
“Third, fourth, fifth—but not second.”
“I wish I knew what that meant.”
“It means … that I am going to go ahead. But I think you might have to help me learn how to do the shots. Knowledgeable though Sandra was, I’m not sure I followed so well.”
“No problem.”
“And, Henry?”
“Yes…?”
“What would you think if we had this room painted? And the library too?”
He looked as though he expected something more relevant; more momentous, even. “Of course not. Just choose the color, and I’ll get the super in here. He does that kind of job with his cousin.”
“It would be good for me to take on a project like this right now. And I believe it would make me feel more at home.”
“Nesting. Let’s get on it.”
* * *
The next morning Costanza made a beeline for the sample chips at the closest hardware store. It was like falling into a sea of color, gently graduated by tone. She went for the yellows first. Golden Honey. Good Vibrations. Candlelit Dinner. Who came up with these names, anyway? Shooting Star. Lightning Bolt. Little Angel. Sunny-Side Up. Could she live in a room whose paint color was called Cheerful, or Pure Joy? That was asking a lot. Perhaps she would be more comfortable with the grays or the greens. Vale Mist. Paris Rain. Nimbus. Inner Balance.
She took a dozen different samples back to Henry’s apartment. Please, nothing too dark was all he said. Other than that he trusted her to choose the color herself.
She taped up the sample chips in the living room and stood back to study them. She had always loved refurbishing projects. As a girl she liked to play house with her mother, which didn’t mean rearranging doll furniture but real tables and chairs and paintings. Once she was grown up, playing house—though it wasn’t exactly playing then—helped her to make a new place feel like her own. (One of the reasons she had never felt at home in Morton’s penthouse was that it was such a closed system—in many ways, just like him.) When Costanza wrote a story she always began by thinking about the setting, then the people, then what happened to the people in that setting. Before she could imagine, she had to visualize, everything from the carpet to the lighting to the view out the window. She approached her translations the same way. She always mapped out the locations in the book first. If it was nonfiction, or fiction set in a verifiable street or town, she would zoom in on Google maps, so that if the writer described a character going up or down a street, or turning right or left, she could follow along. While working on certain novels she had even been known to draw a sketch of the interiors of rooms or to block out the floorplan of houses that she put together from clues she extracted from the text and accumulated in a little notebook while she was reading. She was convinced that these exercises allowed her to inhabit these other worlds more fully and made her a closer reader and a more accurate, even a more imaginative, translator.
Now here she was, living—starting—a new story herself. Of course she had to put her mark on Henry’s apartment.
Since the living room windows faced north, and admitted a rather cool, almost gray-tinged light, Costanza decided on a yellow that was essentially an amped-up cream: Pale Straw. The color was pretty (but not too pretty), the name palatable. The super was coming at eight o’clock on Saturday morning, which gave her half a day to get the place ready.
She dived in. After rolling up the new rug that she and Henry had bought, she removed the few remaining pictures from the walls, emptied the bookshelves, and stacked up the books in the middle of the room. Under the bookshelves was a row of cabinets with raised-panel doors. They were packed. If she was going to do the job, she decided, she would do it properly. Evidently no one had organized these cupboards in a long time, probably not since Judith left. Costanza found notebooks, files, old cameras, chipped clay pots made by the boys. The typewriter ribbons alone were evidence that this was a highly outdated corner of Henry’s world. She spread everything questionable out on the drop-leaf table for him to review.
In the last cupboard she came across a box of photographs. So far, she had resisted the temptation to do any sleuthing. She believed that people’s stories came out over time, and what’s more, having decided to go forward with Henry and the treatment, she was curbing her impulse to find reasons not to. But photographs? How could she not, at least, peek?
Because the photographs had been tossed into the box as they accrued, she found herself surveying Henry’s life in reverse order. He became younger, thinner, with a beard that grew bushier, then more close-cropped, then bushy again; interestingly, there wasn’t a single picture of him barefaced in the lot. Costanza noted a hardness in his face that relaxed as she dug deeper. It was a most poignant reversal: the joyless Henry was replaced by a joyful one as a family divided turned back into a family intact. The sober single father became paired again with his wife, smiling again at dinners, parties, beaches, touching Judith, holding her, holding their boys.
Not just Henry but the whole family traveled through time like this, magically substituting their past selves for their future ones. Where else, except in memory, could Justin and Andrew shrink back down through adolescence to boyhood, then toddlerhood, and then infancy? Before that, they were captured in utero, as someone, Henry presumably, photographed Judith in a series of shots where she raised her shirt and stood in profile against a dark background as her large melon-shaped belly grew smaller and smaller still.
The bottom of the box was all smiles, parties, and play. A young couple, a new couple, on vacation. At dinners. At picnics. Dancing. Skiing. At a baseball game. At someone’s wedding. Touching—kissing—happy. Costanza could feel the sex, she could almost smell it. Even, maybe especially, when the pictures were of Judith alone: in a bikini by a beach or, once, lying in a rumpled bed, alongside a breakfast tray (had Henry recycled this knack of his for her?).
Costanza had dropped all the pictures into her lap, facedown, carefully preserving their order. She leaned forward and was just about to tip them back into the box when she heard someone in the hall. Startled, she turned around and sent them scattering.
It was Henry’s longtime housekeeper, Hilda. “I didn’t mean to scare you, Señora Costanza.” She looked around at the disassembled rooms.
Costanza explained about the painters, then Costanza gathered up Henry’s now-scrambled life and put it back in the box. “They were just so—beautiful,” she said with a sigh.
Hilda glanced at a photograph of Judith pregnant. “Yes. A beautiful family. A nice family. I was here, you know, before the boys.”
“That’s a long time.”
“Oh, I was here before Señora Judith too…” She paused. “Dr. Weissman, he has been good to me, to my family. Mire.” Hilda had found a picture of herself, holding one of the boys—baby Justin—in her arms.
At last all but a handful of pictures were back in the box. Costanza lingered over one in particular: a photograph of two couples, sitting at a dinner table. Henry
and Judith she recognized. The other two she did not.
Or did she? The couples sat at a table in what looked like an old-fashioned New York chophouse, all dark walls and red leather upholstery. They were drinking martinis. That didn’t seem at all like Henry, or the Henry she knew. But then this picture was taken decades ago. Before children, Costanza surmised from the haircuts and Henry’s and Judith’s youthful faces. The men were sitting on one side of the table, the women on the other. A waiter must have taken the picture. They were all looking straight at the camera, and grinning. Henry had his arm around the shoulder of this other man. That too didn’t seem like Henry. She couldn’t imagine him, today, sitting at a table with his arm around another man, conveying such open affection. And grinning. And the other fellow also, a handsome man whose oval face had a patrician air, as did his thick hair, his eyes that were like that stone. Which? Obsidian. Yes, that was it. That was how such eyes were described. In books anyway; it was a little bit cliché. Costanza felt she had seen these obsidian eyes before; she had seen him before, somewhere. But where?
“I feel like I know this man,” Costanza said, as if to herself.
“That is Dr. Isaac and Señora Eileen. He used to work with Dr. Henry.”
Dr. Isaac—Isaac Schoenfeld? She remembered the photograph she’d seen on Andrew’s desk, the one he’d taken in Florence, and she remembered Schoenfeld from the time she and Morton had consulted him in his office. He was a good deal younger in this photograph, naturally.
“They are old friends, he and Henry?”
“They were at school together. Afterward they worked together, for a while. Dr. Isaac used to stay here sometimes. They were like brothers.”
“Were?”
Hilda flushed. “These things I don’t know so well. Only after Andrew was born, they stopped working together. Dr. Isaac had his office and Dr. Henry had his.”
Costanza nodded. She wondered what it meant that when she’d told Henry that she and Morton had consulted Schoenfeld, Henry hadn’t mentioned their connection. Probably there was some bitterness about business. She started to put the photograph back into the box, but there was something about it. She slipped it into the pocket of the apron she’d put on to protect her clothes when she started prepping for the paint job, then continued with her work.
* * *
As she came closer to starting her IVF cycle, Costanza alternated between losing track of entire days and feeling others inch by. She knew she’d been busy because the pages of her translation were accruing during the long days she’d been putting in at a café around the corner while the super and his cousin extended the painting project beyond the living room and the library to the foyer, and Henry’s (now their) bedroom and bath.
During the evening and on the weekend Costanza assigned chores to Henry: trips to the hardware store or tasks such as weeding through and organizing his books. They were living together and sleeping alongside each other, yet for days on end they scarcely had a conversation of any substance. Nesting vincit omnia was all Henry could think, but not unhappily.
Henry disposed of a formidable quantity of things that he didn’t even know he had and shed books he hadn’t opened in decades. They ate their way through three weeks of alternating Chinese-Thai-Japanese-Turkish-pizza takeout. At the end of the second week he went to work on a Friday morning. At about five o’clock he received a message from Costanza asking him to pick up a bottle of prosecco on his way home. When he let himself into the apartment, he saw books on the shelves, rugs open across the floor. In the living room were flowers, candles, bright new pillows, several new lamps. Over the lingering smell of fresh paint and furniture polish he detected garlic; something was cooking.
Costanza met him with a platter of antipasti, beaming. “It’s still a little bare, but we can change that with time.”
We. Time. How Henry loved hearing those words come out of her mouth. He now understood what these weeks had been for her, for them. It was their first shared domestic project, the first time in years he didn’t have to look at those depressing shadows on the walls and be reminded of his ex-wife’s angry departure.
Henry put his arm around Costanza. “This is really fantastic. It’s like starting over in a new place, only without the headache of having to move. How often do you get to start over in life?”
“Not often, in my experience.”
“In mine, never—until now.”
* * *
There was an ardor to Henry and Costanza’s lovemaking that night that took Costanza back to their very first time at the Ricci. The experience had been so mysterious to her, unfamiliar and also, yes, wonderful. And frightening. It was less frightening now, to feel how much she wanted Henry, in her mouth, deep inside her, lying close to her when they were finished. And she didn’t need to send him off afterward, as she had in Florence. That time wasn’t so very long ago, but it felt like it belonged to a different part of her life entirely.
Only later, as she was falling asleep, did Costanza realize that she had not been tracking her ovulation. Between refurbishing the apartment and anticipating the in vitro (between—as though there were no connection), she had not been paying attention to the calendar. That was probably why she felt so free in bed. Trying to become pregnant was not going to be up to her, not up to her body alone. Because the in vitro would permit them to bypass long months of timed intercourse, she believed that her physical relationship with Henry wasn’t likely to deteriorate as irreparably as hers with Morton had. It might be tested, but she did not think it would be compromised.
She woke the next morning, Saturday, to one of Henry’s breakfast trays, which he left by the bed before he went into the shower. He had taken extra care, making fresh orange juice and scrambled eggs, a frothy mound of them. Costanza tried not to think of the photograph of Judith in bed with her tray. That was years ago, decades now. And besides, he had not scrambled eggs for her.
When Henry emerged from the bathroom, he asked her whether she had any ideas about the day, if, that is, they were free to do things that weren’t related to putting the apartment into shape. They were free, she said. Yes. They traded suggestions for which museum they might visit, or whether they might take a walk in the park instead. How delightful this kind of easygoing scheduling conversation could be.
Henry dropped his towel and opened his dresser drawer, took out a pair of clean shorts, and stepped into them. Costanza enjoyed watching the naked Henry disappear into his clothes. A T-shirt came next, then socks. Then he stopped. He stopped because he had glanced at the top of the bureau, where the night before, as Costanza was changing out of her work apron for dinner, she had emptied her pockets. Among the rags and picture hooks was the photograph of Henry and Judith with Schoenfeld and his wife.
She watched Henry pick up the photograph. One of its corners was bent, and both sides curled inward. Costanza was so focused on the change in its condition that she thought at first that was why Henry was saying to her in such an altered voice, “Where did this come from?”
“The library cupboards. I think I told you that I glanced through that box of your photographs…” Glanced. “I set that one aside because I was curious to ask you about it. I wanted to know why, when I told you that Morton and I had been to see Dr. Schoenfeld, you never mentioned you were friends.”
He looked at her in silence for a moment, then tossed the picture into the wastebasket. Afterward he went back to dressing. For the pants he had to step into the closet. When he returned, more than just his body seemed covered up.
“Are you going to tell me why you threw that picture away?”
“Costanza, we haven’t talked about anything other than domestic matters in weeks. I don’t want our first conversation after all this time to be about trivia. Now: MoMA or the Met?”
They sounded like pills. Punishments. “Trivia?”
She was out of bed now, belting her robe tight.
“I was once better friends with that man,” Henry said
neutrally.
That was it. He turned to the mirror and started combing his hair.
“That man?”
He returned the comb to his top dresser drawer.
What Is Missing Page 17