Sacred Time (17 page)

When the man nods, his hairpiece slides a tiny bit forward. Shiny and black, it looks as if cast in one piece. His eyes are knowing and sad, as though he spent all his hours doing away with unfaithful husbands, and Leonora has a feeling that, the instant you enter his shop, he can tell if you've come from the end of a marriage. What gives you away? The slant of your lips? Your bitten fingernails? That rage in your eyes?

For his services, he asks a high price, but Leonora reminds herself what Victor is spending on engagement parties, on new suits and shoes. While she's been saving money on little things, feeling cheap. Saving money forever. Storing a box of ice-cream cones in the car, so that, when they drive to the Carvel's on Webster Avenue, Victor can buy just two vanilla swirls and take some off each top to put into a cone for Anthony. Three for the price of two.
Pennies saved.
And nail polish—how she uses bottles right down to the dregs and then adds polish remover to make them last longer, even though the polish won't coat her nails evenly and always flakes off.
Pennies.

As she pays to have Victor eliminated from her wedding, she promises herself to buy the most extravagant bottle of nail polish on her walk home.

That evening Victor calls, asking to talk.

Every evening he calls.

Every evening she tells him to talk to Elaine instead.

Every evening he says he has broken it off with Elaine.

Every evening he says he wants to come home to her and Anthony.

At the end of the week Leonora returns to the used-furniture shop. In the filigreed frame, she's the only one left, still graceful and still substantial in her white gown; but where before Victor's arm was linked through hers, stands now a waist-high pedestal, the kind you see in museums, and her left elbow—forever angled in that initial position—rests on the marble top. In back of the pedestal hang the airbrushed folds of a long curtain.

“Is this how you wanted it?”

For an instant she thinks he's asking if this is how she wanted her marriage all along. “It's how I want it now,” she tells him.

As she walks out, the wrapped photo under one arm, a woman in a flared coat comes out of the coffee shop at the end of the block, raising her face into the mild wind, smiling to herself. Leonora sniffs the air—buds and new green. The woman's stride is graceful, fluent, and Leonora can tell this is a woman who enjoys being alone. It makes Leonora want to be alone like that, too. Already she sees herself stepping from some coffee shop or theater, wearing a flared coat, her face radiant with the pleasure of being alone. She feels her stride getting lighter, and as the woman approaches, her smile deepens, as if she knew Leonora's thoughts, and her arms rise in preparation for a hug. A bit too effusive for Leonora. Still, she slows down, bracing herself. Just then a thin man with sunglasses—he must have been a few paces behind her all along—rushes past her and into the arms of the woman, whose light was all along for him.
Because of him?

It takes the breath from Leonora, and she has to lean against a brick wall as the two embrace and kiss. Traffic moves past her, women with strollers, people with pull carts to do their shopping, while Leonora is trying to preserve that first glimpse of a woman rejoicing in being alone. But where before she'd only been aware of the woman, she now is overwhelmed by all else around her: the stutter of a jackhammer, a shrill argument in a courtyard, two little dogs yapping. The scent of spring carries soot and exhaust fumes. Against the left side of her body, she feels the silver frame, and as she tightens her arm to keep it from falling, she feels as though she's the one who has stepped from one frame into another and has ended up behind an airbrushed curtain. Where she'll find Victor.

And that's when she knows she'll call him.

The first evening they're back together, he arrives with a Bernice Peaches carton full of groceries as if he'd never been away. That part of being together feels familiar; but in bed his body feels unfamiliar, and she won't let him near her. Despite the sex in the hallway the day of his engagement. Because of the sex in the hallway.

After she switches off her bedside lamp, she adjusts her pillow, punches it as she usually does to get it right, waits for him to ask.

And he does. “Are you quite settled?”

It comforts her, the ritual of that question—
Are you quite settled?
—makes her realize how she missed the history of the ritual, starting with that same question years ago. When Victor repeated it that following night and the night after—
Are you quite settled?
—or even in the car if she was fidgety, she got annoyed, as she does whenever he repeats himself, but out of that annoyance a certain tenderness arose, until she finally came to expect that habit.
Are you quite settled?

It's like that between them with other things that have changed from the incidental to the frustrating, from the frustrating to the endearing. And that's why she has let him come back. Because of the habits. Because of Anthony. Because of the inevitable tenderness between them. Because time will not be theirs forever. Because of the woman in the flared coat. Despite the woman in the flared coat.

She knows she will be hard on Victor. Will make him sweat his way back to her. It's for herself she'll do that—not for him. Quite likely, she won't trust him when he is away from her, at least not for many months. Until, gradually, she won't have to remind herself to be hard on him. And maybe there'll be a day when she won't question where he's been without her, a day when she won't need to hold back with her love.

When she wakes before dawn, he's lying on his side watching her as though he hadn't slept at all. Moon paints his slick face,
face of the moon, slick and bleached, face of a man whose skin is slick and bleached as moon
—

He lays one fingertip against the base of her throat. “You turned to me while you were sleeping,
mia cara.”

She swallows. Feels her throat against his skin.

“Your body turned toward me. I didn't move. Your throat—” He stops. His eyes are on the wedding photo above the dresser.

She waits for him to question why it no longer includes him.

“Your throat,” he says, “came to lie against my wrist. I felt your pulse in my wrist. It was…beautiful.”

Her pulse flickers against his fingertip the way he must have felt it in his wrist—beautiful, airy—and she's suddenly glad he's here. His touch makes it possible for her to imagine what it'll be like to have his entire body against hers, soon, a hundredfold the sensation of her skin against his fingertip now. Not yet, she decides. And feels herself opening up. Opening—

But he says, “I thought this is what it must feel like to carry a baby.”

“Don't,” she warns him. He has been so careful with her. Grateful to be back home with her and Anthony. And he still doesn't understand how these words are slicing through her.

“That kind of nearness”—
face of a man whose skin is slick and bleached as moon
—“like the baby is already living beneath your own skin…”

She sees herself alone, in this very bed, after Victor's death, reminding herself how his face looked the first night he was back after cheating on her—
face of the moon, slick and bleached, face of a man whose skin is slick and bleached as death
—

“I was thinking,” Victor murmurs, “how that's something only women experience, but when your throat was against my wrist, I understood what it must be like, being pregnant.”

“You can't,” she says. “You can't understand.” Is this what their marriage has been like all along? Even during those moments when she believed they knew each other? Is it all that simple to him? What about the nuances? The grooves and the folds?

“Not the same, of course,” he says. “Just almost like it.”

“It is nothing like being pregnant,” she tells him firmly.

What she does not tell him is that pregnant means afraid.
After losing the first one, you no longer know how to carry a child without fear. The child and the fear start living inside you at the same instant, and both grow within you until the child will bleed from you. While the fear recedes to your womb, ready to swaddle the next child. The shame of having yet another child fall from you. The whispers: “Leonora lost another one….” Each child falling from you sooner. Four lost. Only one born: Anthony. Who was your first pregnancy. An eight-months baby. Living. A pregnancy still untainted by fear. Anthony, who started inside your womb one month after you married Victor. Since then, all others have fallen from you: after five months; after three months; after two months; and the last one barely taking root in your womb before your body cast it out. Amazing to think you could be raising five children so far. God forbid. Given the choice—

Don't think it.

Still, given the choice—would you want to raise one or five? But what if you had other choices? Two children? Three? You could handle two or three children. But the question you must push yourself toward is this: five or one? And the answer is savage. One. Given the choice. Given the four babies that fell from you. No. You would have chosen the one.

“Feeling your pulse in my body,” Victor tells her, “was sacred.”

T
he Italian words of her childhood that come back to Floria have to do with music and food. Her father listening to his opera records: sacred time. Her mother cooking: sacred time.
Un bel di vedremo. Fragole. Scarola. La forza del destino. Costoletta. Una furtiva lagrima. Insalate. Tarantella. Dolce.

It's her first trip to Liguria, and she has come alone to Santa Margherita, to this hotel that was a convent for centuries. Perhaps the nuns scattered during the war years and forgot to reconvene. Some may have married. A different altar. No longer a bridegroom in spirit only.

There is an odd allure to being inside this convent as a woman who has conceived and borne children. Cats approach her window as she rolls down her black stockings, as she empties her suitcase. She has packed lightly: her black nylon slip doubles as a nightgown, her black raincoat as a bathrobe, and her black sandals as slippers.

Two cats lean against her window as if expecting the glass to yield to the pressure of their bodies: a ginger cat with white paws; and a brown cat whose fur, beneath the brown, reveals the blurred markings of a much wilder and larger cat. Far below the cats lies a courtyard, and across the courtyard rise the clay roofs of red-and-ocher buildings. Beyond them curves the harbor, where veins of land fuse the hills to the sea.

Sundown blurs into dusk, and an old woman appears in the alcove of a nearby roof: first her head, then her arms, her waist, as she climbs laboriously from a stairwell. Her shawl—the same implausible shade of turquoise as the scalloped bay behind her—shrouds her hair and the shoulders of her red bathrobe. As she flings food scraps into the dusk, pigeons plummet from all directions of sky like falling children, flicker around her till they become extensions of her: one body with countless heads and wings, easily startled into separate birds if anyone were to move abruptly.

In the hills beyond the old woman, Floria can make out the village where her father was born. Nozarego. The name reminds her of Nazareth, conjuring olive groves, money changers in the temple, donkeys on dust-brown paths. In Nozarego, the largest structure is the church where her father celebrated his first communion. The following year his family moved to Mestre, a city as sprawling and ugly—so he has told Floria—as Nozarego is contained and beautiful. When his family took a freighter from Genoa to New York, he believed he'd eventually return to Nozarego; but he hasn't been back, though he likes villages better than cities and sees the Bronx as temporary. Too noisy, he likes to say, too confusing, too drab. And yet, he came to love the Bronx for giving him employment in a salvage yard, for letting him afford an attached house on Castle Hill Avenue, where he renovated the deep space beneath the stairway into a music room with an angled ceiling.

Two years ago, when Floria turned fifty, her parents gave her this trip to Liguria, but it's taken her this long to get here because her father asked her to visit the grave of his grandparents, because she has already enough dead people in her life.

“In many of these villages,” her father told her, “the cemeteries are situated where the earth rises to its highest point. To make it easier for the dead to start their way to heaven. By carrying them up as far as earth will allow it, we can be part of their journey for as long as possible, and we ease that part of the journey they will have to take alone. But first we have to leave the dead.”

Floria knows that from burying her daughter. At Bianca's grave, her father took her hands, his face parched, his eyes glistening as though they hoarded every drop of moisture from his body. “When I was a boy—” His voice clogged. “All that separates Bianca from heaven is that layer of earth. The dead can only ascend when no mortals watch. And we must let them….”

Floria takes out the photo of her father she's brought to Italy: the day of his first communion, and he stands in front of the stone church, the ground one large mosaic of widening circles. His eyes are turned toward the cemetery high above, and his hands hold his communion candle as if it were the string to his kite. Floria props the photo against the television on the desk next to her bed, picks up the vase with mimosas, their tiny yellow globes wilting.

“Not yet,” she tells the boy in the photo.

In the bathroom, she throws the mimosas into the wastebasket, and as she rinses the vase, her body heats in a sudden blush that leaves her damp from thighs to hairline. Ever since she stopped bleeding, these flushes have come to feel like a trade-off she prefers over the days of blood. She knows how to let it pass, by yielding, by reminding herself that the abrupt heat will be over for her in fifty seconds at most and that the dampness—especially beneath her breasts, where the soft weight of flesh against flesh hides her sweat as if it were forbidden—will dry.

She imagines Malcolm next to her, curved sideways, not spooning, but toward her, knees against her knees, palms against her palms. And she envisions herself taking her husband's hand and guiding it to the damp skin beneath her breasts, whispering, “Feel this. Just feel this, Malcolm,” letting him warm himself on her mysterious fire.

The husband of her youth would be fascinated by her scent, her taste.

The husband of her youth would touch her without hesitation.

But the husband Malcolm has become in the sum of their years together would pull away from her, no longer curious, no longer inventive.

The husband Malcolm has become would be repulsed by her sudden heat.

Floria wonders if the nuns, too, were they too seized by this sudden heat? Did they speak of it to each other? Would they, in a community of women? Floria can feel the nuns,
praying and sleeping within the walls of this convent, walking across the terra-cotta tiles of the courtyard, leaning against the white columns, sitting on the edge of the marble fountain, where water dribbles from the hands of naked baby angels. Some of the nuns are still young girls. Not a loss to their mothers, but a blessing. At least some mothers pretend. A daughter in the convent. A son in the clergy. Blessed art thou among women. Blessed for losing your child. Young girls falling or drowning or walking from villages where they grew up, away from stone houses the colors of dunes and of earth, stacked against the hills amidst deep-green vineyards. Echoes of pigeons—their purring, their claws on tile roofs—crawl along stone walls, stalk the girls through narrow streets that smell of mangoes and recently gutted fish.

When Floria was a girl, the nuns at her school feared the passion of flesh and converted the girls' passion to a chaste ecstasy that was as pristine as the white gowns of the young postulants, who floated toward their eternal bridegroom on the cross above the altar. Like many of her classmates, Floria dreamed of becoming a postulant, but she found two reasons against that. One: she was afraid of turning into a nun like Sister Gabriella, who believed she'd been carrying the baby of the Archangel Gabriel inside her for eighteen years because the other sisters were jealous and wouldn't let her give birth to the Archangel's baby. And two: she couldn't imagine what she would be like after she'd shed the white robe of the postulants. Not that it had anything to do with wearing black forever. Black made her feel elegant. Most of her clothes were black, as much a part of her as the scent of her skin. Or her name.

“You're named after Floria in
Tosca,”
her father told her when she was old enough to understand, and Floria imagined Puccini and her father deliberating names, while sitting knee to knee in her father's music room, where he had just enough space for two chairs. Singing swelled the curves of his Victrola, streamed through golden threads, and slid down the angled ceiling toward the window that faced the alley.

When her father was at work, he kept the door locked; but in the evening he'd let Floria in—not her brother, though she was two years younger than Victor. “Because you know how to be quiet around music,” he told her. What she loved even more than the music was to look at his face go wide as he listened to his operas, so wide that light poured from his skin.

No one touched dinner, not even guests, till he emerged from his music room, and even if Floria's saliva pooled around her tongue, she knew not to eat until he'd sat down, nodded toward her mother, and raised his soup spoon.

This early in February, the hotel is empty except for Floria and the signora behind the reception desk, who is Floria's age and has a strong face with broad lips that are closed in a mysterious and evocative pout. The signora wears suits like the ones Jackie Kennedy had when she still lived in the White House, but, unlike Jackie Kennedy, who owned many short jackets with matching fitted skirts, the signora has two: a stone-colored tweed with silver buttons, and a red wool the shade of strawberries before they're entirely ripe. For three days the signora wears the same suit, then the other suit for three days. That's how Floria is reminded of time passing.

And she will remind herself:
Now it's six days since I arrived here.

Now it's nine days.

In the breakfast room that used to be the chapel, a holy-water basin still hangs by the door. On the marble altar, the signora has set out enough food for a dozen people who will never arrive—cheeses and wafer-thin slices of ham; flaky pastry spun around air; juice squeezed from blood oranges—as though she were waiting for the nuns to return.

As Floria eats, she wonders if the signora owns the hotel. If so, how can she afford to operate it for just one guest, providing all this food and the fresh flowers? The floors between the lobby and her room below the roof seem to be empty. Perhaps the hotel is only open for repairs, and any guest is incidental. Yesterday, an old man replaced some tiles in the lobby, and this morning, two men are erecting scaffolding in the courtyard. They shove and hammer scuffed rods into brassy couplings, lay boards across each width of two rods. The shorter of the two, heavyset and deliberate, scales the layers of boards like a gymnast, with much grace and little effort, while the other man moves with a self-consciousness that reminds Floria of Anthony. He, too, has that habit of touching his face or neck as if to make sure he's still there.

She used to love Anthony as if he were her own, and through him, learned to love his mother, too. When she met Leonora, she didn't like her at all—too thin; too irreverent—but once they both became mothers, a friendship grew between them, impulsive and confident. And this is another loss for Floria: no longer loving Anthony as if he were her own. Instead: feeling uneasy around him. Not knowing for sure what he had to do with Bianca's fall. And yet knowing. Feeling ashamed of that knowing. And keeping that knowing her secret. So many things to keep secret in this family.
Things-we-don't-talk-about.
Not talking about the first time she felt uneasy around Anthony.