—Do you mind, Lenny, I have to get my groceries from the car. I’ll be right back.
—Let me get them. Let me be a gentleman so I don’t feel like an embarrassment.
—No. Stay.
It was almost four and I decided to cook him dinner. I had many fresh vegetables and they wouldn’t all fit in the fridge.
In the beginning I cooked for Vic all the time in my apartment. You shouldn’t do that. If you cook for a man, and you cook very well, as I did, they will think you belong to them. The truth was I was always practicing for a man I might actually love. Big Sky, for example. With every crisp quail I roasted for Vic I was perfecting my technique for Big Sky. There would be long oak tables set for Thanksgiving in his deluxe lodge in the mountains. There would be twigs and pinecones strewn about, no tablecloths, and fresh sparkling water with twists of lime.
Lenny sat on one of my modern barstools, which were out of place in that rustic hovel. He watched me mince garlic. My mother minced garlic very quickly, so fast I would always check that all her fingers were still there when she was done. I took my time. Unlike her, I didn’t have a child at my knee and a husband on his way home.
But this time I minced sloppily. I nearly sliced my finger. My mind was on that phone call. I hadn’t thought about the people Vic left behind, not enough, anyway, until I heard her voice. When you’ve suffered as much as I have, you begin to see everything in perspective. You know exactly the ways in which people will move on and you know that they will laugh again. It makes their present suffering seem prosaic.
—What are you making?
—I’m sautéing broccoli with garlic, red pepper flakes, and bread crumbs.
—Sounds spicy.
—Are you one of these old men who can’t tolerate spice?
—You have some cruelty in you.
Let me tell you: men love cruelty. It reminds them of every time their fathers or mothers didn’t think they were good enough. Cruelty looks better on a woman than the perfect dress.
—How about gluten? Salt? How’s your heart?
He knocked his chest.
—Strong, he said. A few things I have are still strong.
I knew he meant between his legs. I wanted him to know that there was nobody left in the world who would fuck him.
We opened a bottle of wine. Garlic skipped in the pan. When I tossed the thick stalks of the leek, Lenny said, You can tell the worth of a woman by how much food she wastes. There were moments like that when I wanted to strangle him. And then he would compliment me, tell me my hair was like onyx, or reach with an old arm to fill my glass.
I asked about Lenore because it soothed me to hear people talk about love like it was real. I want you to know about Lenore, about the women who men make you feel are better than you. I want you to know about everything I may not be able to teach you.
Lenny was happy to oblige. They’d known each other only a month before he asked her to marry him, and the wedding was two weeks later. He went on about their honeymoon in Anguilla. Snorkeling and creamy pineapple drinks. A friend of his got them upgraded to a suite in one of the finest hotels. Two bedrooms, two giant marble bathrooms. Lenore said she would be able to maintain her girlish mystery with the second bathroom for at least ten more days. They made love on both beds; the poor maid, he said with a grin, like it turned him on that the housekeeper had to make two dirty beds. There was a Jacuzzi on the balcony, stone and round. Just beneath their room, palm trees and white muslin umbrellas ringed a giant blue pool. There were buckets full of sparkling wine and bikinis in bright colors and more women than men, in sunglasses and straw hats, reading tall glossy magazines, and nobody as far as the eye could see in distress, nobody who had just come from a hospital or knew they might have to go back. He said he looked at all the women in their bathing suits, some in thong bottoms with their nice rears exposed, and not one of them, he said, held a candle to Lenore. And just beyond all of that luxury they were blessed with the Caribbean ocean, teal and endless, rolling gently against the bone shore.
—Did you ever have second thoughts? I asked. Since you hadn’t known her very long?
—Let me tell you something, he said, looking into my eyes like an asshole. If a man takes longer than two, three months to ask you to marry him, he doesn’t love you. He won’t ever love you. Do you have a man in your life?
—Until recently I did.
—Did he provide for you, financially speaking?
I thought about that for a moment. Vic had indeed provided for me. He promoted me several times. He bought me plane tickets and couches and computers, fine wines and a substantial wine cooler in which to store them.
—In a way I didn’t need.
—So he provided for you?
I nodded.
—Did you leave him in New York? Did he leave you?
—I suppose, in a way, we left each other.
—There’s no such thing.
Old men are so sure of everything. He was forking broccoli into his mouth. I tried to determine whether he had dentures. Or he could have had caps. He came from a wealthy family. Now he was worried about air conditioners but that is how all old people end. More surely than we fly toward death, we go to parsimony.
—He killed himself, I said.
8
WHEN I WAS TEN I drank grappa in Grosseto. Down the hill from my parents and the cousins, in a field that had nothing to do with farms or horses but was full of haystacks. It was late September. The horizon was a stand of cypress, some scattered clouds, and a dry field. The remnants of an old olive grove.
I met a boy named Massi, short for Massimiliano. Max, I would tell my friends back home. He was much older, fourteen. His red hair was too thick but everything else was consciously set there by God for a small American girl to love. He was the last boy to make me feel worthy, to put me on a pedestal the way Lenny had for Lenore. Of course, that sense of worth coincided with the fact that I had not yet been to hell.
We were at a villa party given by posh distant relatives of my mother’s. The day lasted forever. A string quartet played “Hallelujah” on the tall, crunchy grass. There were figs in that grass, heavy as hearts.
I’d seen the boy playing soccer, noticed his strong, tan legs and skillful footwork. What does a girl love at ten? What will you love? I loved the air around this boy. It was mixed with the strong cigarettes of the men and the flowery perfume of the ladies and the lemons in the trees.
I stared at the boy as I sat beside my father. I felt babied by my father’s hand on my shoulder as he spoke to a circle of men, smoking and drinking, most of them paunchy. I’d eaten so much of the shrimp cocktail being passed around that one of the men appraised me in what I’m fairly sure was a sexual manner. He said to my father, The girl likes expensive things. She will have to marry a man with money. My father smiled. No, he said in his decent Italian, she will make it on her own. I’d thought of that often since then, my father’s belief in me. My mother thought I would need to marry someone with money, maybe she thought that because of her own life. Either way, the boy, Massi, was from a wealthy family. I was thinking of pleasing my mother. On top of that or because of that, I wanted to kiss him more than I’d wanted anything outside of my mother’s love.
Massi looked at me several times. Italian boys are good at eye contact. I looked older than ten in an off-the-shoulder dress, with my long dark hair and the coral lipstick from my mother’s purse. I’d wanted to fall in love since kindergarten. I’d always had crushes, had liked boys since Jeremy Bronn with the calloused thumbs. Four years earlier, in the lingerie section of a department store, I’d picked a sapphire teddy off the rack, with trickling garters and a net bodice. I begged my mother for it, and my mother, because she was either innocent to the request or uniquely understanding of it, let me have the silky bedroom thing. In the privacy of the house I wore it, baggy and bright, over my colt legs and flat chest.