“How about a rock of a cookie instead?” Wade passes the plate of almond biscotti. They are tooth-cracking hard.
Lizzie continues. “At night, we had the usual sessions. I’ve always looked down on those as dumb-ass and reductive. Drama queens starring in their pitiful plays. My name is so-and-so and I’m a royal screw-up and you’re a royal screw-up but in a different screwy way. Selma Hodges, though, had a touch. Maybe she was hokey but she probed, she listened, and she has a sense of humor, something I hadn’t experienced with any of the many fuckers who tried to save me from myself by telling me to make lists of my goals. She also has a shit detector and sometimes just cut people off with a Rethink that remark. I can’t explain everything. Against all odds, I started to feel comfortable. The old saw, One day at a time. But months have passed. This is condensed. Upshot—I have been off drugs for eleven months and I have every intention of remaining clean, clean, clean.”
Julia, guarded, feels that guard start dissolving. Almost a year. A long time. Lizzie—articulate, if foul-mouthed. Looking normal. Dear and remembered. The sweet curve of her jaw, sweet oval face, sweet smile. The girl who used to decorate her sand castle with shells and wanted to find fairies under mushrooms. She’s clear and present, the ironic smirk gone.
Wade reaches over and puts his hand over Julia’s. “I know you’re hit with a stun gun; I was dumbfounded. I went to the house where your friend Chris went and Lizzie’s friend maintained that Lizzie was ‘lost in space.’ A damaged guy with a tattooed face knew where she was because a girlfriend of his checked into the same place and dropped out after a month. Said it was too artsy-craftsy for her. Too politically correct. Too-too.”
“That’s Sandy. He doesn’t look like a Sandy anymore but he must have been one a long time ago.” Lizzie pushes up her sunglasses, now that the shadow has reached their table, and Julia gets to see her eyes, the same pond green as Wade’s.
“Anyway, let’s move on to lunch and we can finish the saga. There’s too much to say. I just didn’t want to call and drop this on you. Wasn’t sure you’d believe me. Where can we go?” Wade tosses money on the table, more than enough, a habit Julia used to admire.
Julia stepped to the edge of the piazza and left Susan a message. “You will not believe this. I’ll tell you everything later. Sit down if you’re standing. I’m with Wade and Lizzie. In the piazza. Shock. Lizzie is totally okay. It’s like someone stood up out of the grave. We’re going to lunch. Lunch! Just letting you know. Lunch. Like ordinary people.” She texted Chris: Call you later. Her throat felt parched. She drained the bottle of water in her bag. Lunch. Crazy.
She chose Angelo’s trattoria, where she’s only been a few times. If she went to her usual Stefano’s, she’d have to introduce everyone and she’s not ready to do that yet, though she knows all of San Rocco soon will be talking about the appearance of the ex-husband and the daughter no one has heard of before.
Angelo, the owner, confusing her with Camille, congratulates her on the art show. They’re seated in the courtyard under a white umbrella. The pallid light beneath makes them all look spectral. Lizzie looks directly at Julia. “I haven’t given you a moment to tell me what you are doing here. I don’t even know quite how you got to Tuscany or who your friends are.” Lizzie takes the menu and regards it with interest. Julia hasn’t seen her eat a bite in years, and this is the first time in memory that Lizzie has expressed a particle of interest in her. An ugly aspect of addiction: me, me, me. Angelo plops down a carafe of wine, not ordered but welcome. Lizzie asks for water.
“Your dad probably has told you that I left Savannah. When I was house-sitting for my professor in Chapel Hill, I met two women. We had such rapport—fun, really—and we had some common issues. We’d all lost our husbands. Not that mine was dead! Sorry, Wade. We cooked together, spent a lot of time walking on the beach. It was exhilarating to make great friends. We brought out the visionary in each other. Over the summer, we got a wild idea and here we are.” How much does Lizzie know about Wade’s escapades and his forthcoming daddy status? Skip for now. Well, no. Not at this stage. “Things at home were complicated by your father’s romance with another woman.” He fucked up everything, she didn’t say, but bit the inside of her jaw and tasted blood.
Glad the waiter speaks no English.
Wade looks up, seemingly unperturbed. “She knows about Rose. We don’t need to get that far right now.”
Julia feels a sweep of anger—who is he to decide?—but she takes a sip of wine. “Okay. Va bene. Onward,” she says, just a slight edge to her voice. “You all come out to the house for dinner, see the villa. Susan has made the garden a showplace. Camille has her art studio. We have the most beautiful kitchen with marble tables and a huge sink and copper pots everywhere. I’m taking my Mulberry experience to another level. I’m trying, no, I am actually writing a book called Learning Italian. I’m combining my study of the language with Italian cooking, real Italian cooking. I took a course where we each had a pig to dress and cook.” Openmouthed, Wade looks at her.
“That’s fabulous, Mom. You’re loving it, I can tell. In a funny way, it sounds like Hopesprings House. That’s where I am.”
They share a laugh. The first one in a dozen years. “Cool name. I hope it does! I am happy every day here. We’re traveling a lot. The other thing is, I also have a job. Helping plan wine and culture tours for a California vineyard owner, Chris Burns. He’s just finishing our second tour of the year. I do research and handle details and help plan. Love it! And Chris and I have become close over the past few months.” Let it all out.
Lizzie nods, scarfing up the pasta and reaching for bread. Whether she knows how destructive her addiction has been for her parents, Julia has no idea. What a wake of flotsam and jetsam she left behind.
“Back to you, Lizzie. What I’m doing is not as monumental as your big changes.”
They’re eating. As a family. Watching this good Lizzie-twin, Julia is barely able to swallow. Had she totally given up? She thinks she had. The story of the yellow robe undoes her; cry later.
Angelo brings over platters of grilled meats and potatoes. “What do they do to make such simple food so good?” Wade asks, stabbing a second sausage. His dazzling smile, as though nothing ever went wrong. She’s not immune to his beauty, even as he bites into a hunk of sausage. Pretty herself, she’s always privately acknowledged his prerogative. He wears it lightly, almost unaware, but the first time she saw him she thought of a line from a poem she just studied in school. He walks in beauty like the night. The poet said she, but the line applied. How many everyday mornings has he walked into the kitchen, tousled from sleep, and in the middle of frying pancakes, she’s caught her breath. He didn’t fight for me, she thinks. He took the course of least resistance, like lightning. But here she is, Lizzie, my girl.
“It’s the water and the sun.” She smiles. “Be right back.” In the bathroom, she turns on the water full blast and cries. Not for the last time.
If they notice her flush and red nose, they don’t say. “You can check in now. Why don’t I come back in a couple of hours and pick you up. Walk down that street”—she points—“and I’ll meet you at the gate at four. We can take a walk and talk more, then I’ll make dinner.” She gathers up her packages and rushes out the door; she practically runs home. The confusion she’s escaped during these months of walking on air crowds her body. Lizzie: possible again. Wade: former body and soul love, now impossible. She feels as if she’s about to go under anesthesia.
At home, she lies down in the grass under the pear tree and falls deeply asleep.
Sixth sense? When I saw the extraordinarily handsome man—though handsome doesn’t seem quite accurate—and the pink-rose young woman in the piazza, something about them caught me. They stood out from the general flow of tourists. Maybe an electrical energy emanated. The next day, Susan stopped by and filled me in on the identity of the prodigals Julia
greeted in the piazza. I connected the dots quickly. He was the Narcissus, she a nymph surfacing from a deep pool. I didn’t get to meet them. Julia invited us for dessert last night but we came home from my visit to Dr. Caprini (everything fine) too late.
As a writer, I wonder about his decision, deus ex machina, to surprise Julia. Easier for her? Or for him? Did he want to present himself as the glorious rescuer? Look at the wounded bird I have brought to your doorstep? It’s more understandable from Lizzie’s point of view. Just Here I am, take me back instead of a phone call or letter.
Now they’ve gone. Julia must feel like something washed up on shore. Liz, as she now prefers, goes back to the Hopesprings House for an indefinite time, Wade back to his new life. Liz mentioned eventually moving home to Savannah and trying to enroll in ceramics at the art school there. As Julia took them to the train, Wade pulled her aside at the station door and apologized, mouth against her ear, saying what a serious fool he had been, but that he’d put himself into a situation he now had to honor. You know you carry my love always. That, to me, is a knee-weakening line, but Julia told him the important thing was Lizzie, and that she, too, was way down the line from any reconciliation. They hugged, and Julia hugged Lizzie long and hard. Lizzie wept.
Susan, Camille, and I were shedding a few tears for all of them. And for Chris, who had to be headed off from the drama. He decided to dine at Hotel Santa Caterina with Camille, Susan, and Rowan, all exiled from the villa.
At the station, Lizzie unzipped her bag and pulled out a tissue-wrapped gift for Julia. A bowl, sky blue with concentric ridges and a few flecks of malachite to catch the light. Something to hold. On the marble kitchen table at the villa, as it glows under the light, they all regard it with awe.
* * *
—
According to Dr. Caprini, dilation will begin soon. The baby’s room is ready. I am ready. Colin is set to take off two weeks. Meanwhile, he works in his new barn space on designs for the sunset-viewing pavilion for Key West. May it inspire poets, moon-viewing poets as well as those worshipping the sunset. Sometimes a single building can transform a place; I think this will be one, and in a good way. Colin and I disagree; I think the Louvre glass pyramid desecrates the severe and historical aspect of the Louvre, especially now that it has the atmosphere of a nice subway station. And what they’ve done with the British Museum—I won’t go there again. The Key West district where the pavilion will be situated is funky. It is what it is. What Colin builds has to win over hearts and minds. I’ve never seen him as enchanted with a project.
I’m thinking of Julia and send her that message. She replies: The reprieve feels as though broken bones all over my body have mended but I can’t yet walk because they don’t know how. See you soon. I mull over that and read Akhmatova all afternoon, some poems aloud in case Leaf/Della might hear.
* * *
—
Colin and I go out for pizza. He works way too late out in his new studio. With Fitzy on my feet, I finish rereading Margaret’s last, luminous novel. I read and aspire.
* * *
—
After the lassitude of my bed rest, I’m charged. I feel like a bolt of lightning trapped in a jar. I’m riding waves of energy, followed by dips when I want to sleep. But the surges inspire me to invite the three women, Chris, and Rowan for a simple supper, and Matilde, too, since she told me in the piazza that she has news for Camille and would love to surprise her. It’s Susan’s birthday, the big sixty-five. Colin will throw some steaks and vegetables on the grill, and I’ll make a salad. I have pecorino Leo brought me from the mountains. Rowan offered to pick up gelato in town. Julia dropped off a pan of gingerbread, saying she was feeling nostalgic and wanted to bake something from her mother’s recipe box. She looks wild. Her hair’s gone frizzy; she’s blank-eyed and startled. At least she’s coming. I’m setting the table outside now, in case I lapse later in the day. I walk the land, gathering an armful of wildflowers to poke into a copper water pitcher.
Everyone knows to bring sweaters or shawls; these early summer evenings turn chilly around nine. I’m planning to serve dessert in the kitchen.
Matilde arrives dressed simply in teal tight pants and a retro-patterned fitted T-shirt. Her red-bronze hair seems ornament enough, flying out in tiny waves around her face like some Annunciation angel’s. Matilde is someone Margaret would have loved. They share the taste for lush fabrics and romantic embroidered blouses and vests and platinum velvet skirts and fringy scarves and earrings that jangle. (Margaret also had a severe black-suit, clenched-jaw style as well. Matilde works in a lab coat.) Matilde, too, is decidedly single, claiming to have no time for anyone who must be accommodated. Matilde, ugly name in English, but here it resonates from the Tuscan queen of that name.
“Oh, but you are huge!” she greets me. “You’re looking quite ready for the big event.”
“Past ready. I’ve even got the crib made up.”
“This is for the nursery wall.”
She hands me a gift, a framed manuscript page with painted bees and tiny wildflowers in the margin. I’m overwhelmed. “It’s astonishing. What a lucky baby. But how can you part with this?”
“I think we should expose new ones right away to art, don’t you? I’ve looked at it for years, now new eyes can try to focus on it. See, the monks got bored with the lettering—those figures are really doodles in the margins.”
The others arrive: Susan bringing a stuffed elephant (looks like me?); Camille in her red shoes again, even though this dinner couldn’t be more casual; Rowan, holding a shoebox. “I didn’t want to be upstaged by the baby. I’ve been busy over the winter.” He takes out a copy of Somewhere, Someone, the poems I gave him over Christmas, now bound into a chapbook. The title comes from a line in a John Ashbery poem, “Somewhere, someone is traveling furiously toward you.” I wrote the clutch of short poems in the first shock of pregnancy. The binding made of swirly blue marbleized paper must have taken him weeks to make. The hand-pasted-on label runs sideways, with the two large title Ss looking scored like music. Classic and careful.
“Colin,” I call, “you will not believe this.” I feel a hard jab of elbow or foot scrape across my stomach. “Feel that, Rowan. He/she approves. What a joy. I love the typeface, everything. Those sinuous Ss are dramatic. I hope the poems are decent.”
“Oh, yes.”
Camille comes over to see. “Oh, Rowan. It’s as beautiful as my guest book. Let’s toast.” She passes the book around as Colin fills glasses. This is what it means to be happy. I can do this. (Twinge of pain.) The downside of a vivid imagination is that you always have the capacity to visualize the worst. For weeks I dwelled on the worst things that could happen. We would both die. The baby would be one of those fetus in fetu, the small fetus contained inside the body of another baby. Or some undeveloped baby attached to the body of a normal-sized baby. I’d wake up hollering like a haint and scaring Colin out of his wits. My doctor wondered, when I told her, if I needed counseling. I confessed to her that I always imagine the plane going down, the elevator falling, the tumor when I have a headache. I’m just wired that way. At last I feel perfectly normal; this is a normal state, not that I am an alien host, or a cocoon for a butterfly who will rip out and fly.
“Cin-cin, here’s to a new book in the world!” Camille clinks with everyone.
“And here’s to the someone who’s coming furiously,” Rowan says.
“To summer,” Susan adds.
“To Lizzie,” Julia says.
“Yes, to Lizzie.”
“But not to Wade,” Susan whispers to me.
Chris, frowning, smiling, keeps close to Julia, talking quietly to her. Colin takes away her prosecco and puts a full glass of sauvignon blanc from Friuli, her favorite, in her hand. Perhaps she is feeling a layer away from things, something like the image I dreamed: a shutter bangs in the room you never added on.
“How is Julia?” I ask Camille quietly.
“Getting over shock. The double whammy of Lizzie back from the dead, the two of them appearing out of nowhere in the piazza, and the finality of Wade—it’s way too much. We’ve just been quiet at the house, playing good music. Susan planting ever more flats of double pink impatiens and white begonias. Julia has been baking, studying Italian. Chris has been around, calm and sweet. Since he’s tired from the two tours, all’s been low key. Rowan and I are going to the Marche for three days—Fabriano, where there’s a long history of papermaking—and Susan will be on the coast with Nicolà and Brian for part of the week. She’ll have a chance to absorb and regroup. I hope you don’t have the baby this week!”
“Who knows?” Actually, I’m feeling strong lower-back pressure right now. “Let’s sit. I think we’re ready to eat. You all, sit anywhere. There’s no way to go wrong with this group.”
Everything’s on the table at once, which is non-Tuscan, though the big Florentine steaks could be from nowhere else, and the vegetables are smoky browned. We bring out gifts for Susan—a palm tree that thrives in this climate, a hand-forged trowel, and a straw hat with style. She models it and admires the woodwork on the trowel.
Matilde, seated by Camille, takes a letter from her bag and hands it to Camille.
“What’s this?”
“You’ll see.”
“Matilde! Who’s it from?” Camille opens the envelope and reads. Conversation around the table stops. “What! This is some mistake.” She reads again, looks around the table, then leans into Matilde laughing and saying over and over, “This is impossible.”
Women in Sunlight Page 34