A Slender Thread

“Lei e una bella regazza,” Alex said, “or maybe it’s belle regazzae?” He glanced up at the blue Italian sky as if searching for an answer. “I think that’s the plural, at least in Latin.” He and his family were finally taking the long-planned-for trip.

Alex flipped through the small dictionary and phrase book. Lacey sipped San Pellegrino water and leaned back in her chair, closing her eyes, allowing the sun to warm her face. They were gathered around a table at an outdoor café in Orvieto across the square from the cathedral. After they’d wound through the narrow, cobbled streets, seemingly a ghost town at midafternoon with closed shutters and no signs of life, it had been like a mirage to emerge in this open piazza dominated by the immense black-and-white marble church. The city was still closed for the siesta, with only a few cafés and shops remaining open for the tourists.

Alex shrugged and smiled, knowing they tolerated his occasional silliness. He was glad they had stopped to rest. He sipped his beer, yeasty and cool, the right choice for a hot afternoon. They had driven to Orvieto from Todi, an Umbrian hill town where they had spent the night. He was still getting used to driving the rented Fiat on the curvy Italian roads. In spite of his careful planning and numerous maps, they had already gotten lost several times, once having to return to the auto route and exit in the opposite direction.

He stretched his arms back and yawned. The warmth of Italy felt great. After the hot spell during the girls’ graduation, the weather in New Hampshire had remained cold and drizzly all month. The Italian sun felt amazing. He imagined the bodies of his entire family filling up with this Italian light like a magic cure, one of those alternative healing therapies that people sought when regular medicine failed. And why not? They were breathing different air, eating Italian food, drinking wine—all infusing them with the possibility for change.

Toni gave Wink a sarcastic grin. Besides a Diet Coke, which had come with a piece of lime but no ice, she had ordered an ice cream, a block of chocolate and strawberry, and was passing the dish around the table so they could all take bites.

“Dad, can we go back to that shoe store we saw on the way?” Toni asked. The girls and Lacey had paused in front of several shops as they meandered up the street. “Everything should open again soon. It’s nearly four.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Mom and I will come find you after I pay the bill.” He looked around for the only waiter, who when not sizing up his daughters had been busily shuttling drinks back and forth to the other tourists gathered on the terrace.

“I want to go . . .” Lacey paused, then added emphatically, “too.” She sipped the last of her water and reached for her handbag. Alex noticed that jet lag had not made Lacey’s speech worse. He had worried that the fatigue that usually affected her fluency would be a problem after the long flight and time change, but in the three days they’d been there she was showing no ill effects.

He agreed, recalling the benches across the street from where they had left the Fiat. The location was high above the valley. He might have time to take some pictures of the views he had only glimpsed while maneuvering the car up the steep hill to Orvieto. The dreamy landscape punctuated with dark green cypress trees looked like the backgrounds he had seen in the Renaissance paintings in the Borghese Gallery and Museum in Rome. Everything in Italy connected to the past. Rome itself had looked like a theater set from the sixteenth century.

Wink told him that would be fine and he watched as his family gathered their bags, sunglasses, assorted maps and guide books, leaving him to wait for the bill. Lacey smiled down at him. She wore a straw sun hat with a wide, floppy brim that shaded her face. Just before turning out of sight, she glanced back at him once more. Yes, maybe the sun was doing its work.

Now by himself, Alex studied the people around him. Two large groups of Japanese tourists and several handfuls of Germans sat clustered in pockets. Closer to Alex were some hikers sharing tall pitchers of beer—Swedish or Norwegian, he guessed from their coloring and stature, and from the few words he overheard. They had piled their backpacks in a dusty mound behind their table. They looked flushed and weary from the steep climb up to the town.

Those gathered on the terrace in Orvieto had no idea that Lacey was suffering in any way. No one even gave her a second glance when she left the restaurant with her daughters. She seemed like any mother, happy to be out on a beautiful afternoon, looking in store windows, shopping for shoes. Being in Italy was like starting over, he thought again.

The three women at the table on Alex’s other side were Italian. He picked up snippets of their discussions, mostly the easily identifiable words he’d been studying—words for “please,” “thank you,” “you’re welcome.” Now that he was alone, he concentrated on their conversation. The stream of Italian that poured out amid laughter and emphatic hand gestures was all but unintelligible to him. It had been easy to copy and repeat the few phrases from the CDs he’d been playing in his car back home, but it was a totally different experience to try to decode the entire sentences that poured out of their mouths with such alarming rapidity. No sooner would he puzzle out a word and try to look it up in his dictionary than the ladies would be paragraphs ahead, and seemingly on to another topic.

The waiter appeared and Alex handed him his credit card. The older woman at the next table said something to Alex. She had gray hair and fine wrinkles set into her well-tanned face. She pointed to the chairs recently vacated by his daughters and seemed to be asking him something. Suddenly Alex guessed that she was asking if his daughters were twins. He responded with “Si, si,” and tried to say “My daughters, my wife.” He pointed to his shoes, and then said “tre” for “three,” and lifted his right hand, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together to indicate the expense of three women shopping for shoes. The Italian ladies seemed to acknowledge his message with more lyrical utterances before breaking into laughter.

Alex kept smiling and moved his head up and down, as if he could follow every word they said. When the waiter brought him his check and credit card, he told the ladies good-bye in Italian, and felt pleased for making himself understood.

He decided to visit the cathedral before taking the street down through the town to the park where they had left the car. He crossed the square as more people spilled into the streets, and walked through the swinging leather door at the side of the church. The central doors were probably opened only for important occasions. The air inside the old building felt cool and calming; it smelled of age-old stone. After the heat and chatter of the café, he appreciated the silence in the dim interior. He tried to imagine the peasants, farmers who worked the fields in the surrounding countryside, making the pilgrimage to this place when it was first built, hearing prayers in a language they did not understand. Staring up into the Gothic vaults, he thought how trivial language really was. In the café he had been able to read faces and gestures, a simple form of communication. Even without the right words, he had understood what was going on. Would Lacey still be the same person when she lost her ability to speak? The very thought of her words locked inside, no longer accessible to him, was frightening.

Prayers, another form of communication, were more than words, he thought. Prayers were about seeking answers, trusting in faith. Did he have that in him? He continued to walk around this sacred space. His footsteps echoed. This church had no seats, no pews. Aged frescoes covered the walls, and a triptych was displayed in the nave. It was more of a museum now than a church. He shivered and, once again hungry for the sun, decided to go outside and walk to the car.

Alex and his family settled into the country inn outside Monte-pulciano, where they would spend the week exploring the hill towns in Tuscany. The innkeeper served a multicourse dinner on the terrace that evening: a platter of cured meats, olives, and roasted peppers, followed by pasta with vegetables in a lemon cream sauce, then roasted pork. They all turned down dessert, but indulged in glasses of Vin Santo, a dessert wine, in which they dipped hazelnut biscotti. After this sumptuous meal they stumbled up to bed.

The girls were sharing a room off the terrace close to the pool and Alex and Lacey had an upstairs room with a balcony. Before collapsing into bed, Alex threw the French doors wide open. The tile floor under his bare feet was still warm from the day, but the air was growing cooler. Lacey was already asleep. He slipped under the linen sheets and brought the blanket to his chin.

During the night Alex dreamed of Bow Lake many years before. The call of the loon cut through the air and water lapped at the shore. Leaves rustled high in the trees. Unseen nocturnal creatures scurried through the pine-scented woods. Even though the surroundings were familiar, in this dream he was lost in an overpowering darkness. Was he floating? No. His back was pressed into the earth. The ground was hard. He felt the prick of pine needles. The dark was intense, and no matter how hard he tried, his eyes wouldn’t open. Then he felt a flutter of kisses on his chest, the sweep of hair across his face. He lifted his arms to reach out. An inner voice told him to stop. A command. He must not. He was unable to speak, to call out. Helpless. Suddenly, he knew. Margot. Margot was with him. Margot’s mouth was about to touch his own. He gasped and began to choke.

He opened his eyes to a swath of moonlight across the bed. There was no scent of pine. The Italian night had grown warm. Had he called out? Lacey’s hair spilled out across his chest and her hands touched him, stroking his arm, his neck, his face. Her breath warmed his ear and she kissed his cheek, his forehead, the hollows of his eyes. Her lips were light, barely there, until she met his mouth. In the middle of a moonlit night in Italy she had come back to him.

They made love. After he felt the initial surprise of holding her close once again, his uncertainty disappeared. She loved him fully, and he loved her. After so many months complicated by doubts and fears, he was finally able to forget for a short while the burden they both carried. It was as if Lacey’s diagnosis, the sense of doom they wore like a second skin, had slipped away into the night air.

Moonlight flooded the room. He could see clearly. He pushed himself onto his elbow and touched Lacey’s face. Her cheeks were wet with tears. He started to speak, then silently took the hem of the sheet and patted her face dry. Her fingers briefly touched his hand and then she drifted into sleep. There was so much he didn’t want to think about, so much he wished he could forget. The unpleasant taste of his dream lingered in his mind. He watched for the dawn and eventually dozed.

When he woke the next morning Lacey was not in bed. He wondered briefly if their lovemaking had even happened. He pulled on the hotel robe and walked to the balcony doors. Lacey and the twins sat at a table eating breakfast on the terrace near the pool, their faces shaded by a large green umbrella. He remembered dreaming about Margot, and swallowed, feeling suddenly unwell. He tried to convince himself it was the wine from the night before, the rich food, his exhaustion from the long drive. Italy would cure him, he thought, and headed to the shower.

“Careful,” Margot said. He didn’t seem to mind her maternal cautioning. Technically, she was old enough to be his mother. Now and again, he had even come to Margot for advice about girlfriends. For the last year he had been seeing Julie, four inches taller than he, with a wide smile, and an intelligent face, who worked in the education department of the Museum of Natural History. Margot, who liked to think of Mario as a younger brother, had encouraged the relationship.

The summer show, titled Waterworks, was the work of a group of five watercolor artists who painted scenes from the Adirondacks. She gazed at the quiet views, horizontal compositions of woodland streams, leafy valleys, undulating hills. The opening reception was the next evening. Carl liked having less controversial art up for the summer, pieces that he called easy on the eye. Margot thought of the studies she was doing of Bow Lake. She wanted her pictures to be beautiful like these on view, but she hoped to convey something more—the peace, the ephemeral quality of an unspoiled place, nostalgia for what might no longer exist. That was the difficult part.

“Nothing much,” she said, forcing a smile. She sat behind her desk and quickly checked her home e-mail account. Seeing nothing from Oliver, she clicked the computer switch off. She worried again that they were growing dangerously apart. “I may go to the chamber music concert in the park on Saturday. Our downstairs neighbor has put a group together. They’re organizing a potluck picnic supper. How about you?”

He smiled with almost childlike delight. “Yep. Moving in together makes it real. Now that we’ll be sharing the rent, I’m hoping I can afford some more studio space.” He cocked his head. “Carl said you’ve been painting a lot.”

Margot nodded. “I’m using my old apartment as a studio. With Oliver away I have plenty of time.” Too much time, she thought. The hours she spent painting helped, but she was often lonely. Oliver called intermittently. He insisted he was having an excellent summer. If he missed her, he wouldn’t admit it. Margot could still become angry thinking about the way he had tried to set the agenda for their lives. She had only wanted one summer. Oliver had grudgingly agreed in the end.

“You’re probably right.” She lifted her shoulders and released them with a sigh. She thought of the painting she had started just a few days before, a picture of the moon path on Bow Lake. She was trying to capture the cool water, the gentle lapping sound along the shore, the delicious feel of lowering your body into the lake on a summer night. It was proving to be the most challenging piece she had ever attempted. She remembered the way Oliver had rendered the night sky in Riverside Park with just the right shades.

After he left, Margot cleared her desk and took one final walk around the gallery. The show looked lovely, the pictures restful, dense in the blues and greens of mountains and lakes. These paintings would certainly appeal to New Yorkers stuck in the hot city for the summer. She’d done a good job of hanging the show, but oddly, she wasn’t feeling her usual sense of satisfaction now that she’d finished.

She turned off the last lights, armed the security system, and locked the door behind her. As she walked home, she pictured Mario heading in the opposite direction, on his way to meet Julie. She imagined his happy anticipation, that effervescent, floaty feeling of being in love, and knowing that someone else felt the same way about you. And now they were moving in together, possibly taking the first step toward beginning a lifetime as a couple.

Margot would never forget what had happened when she had gone to Boston at the end of her sophomore year in college to visit Lacey. The last of the winter grittiness had washed away in heavy rains early in the month, and the city seemed to be on the cusp of summer weather. She hadn’t seen Lacey since Christmas and this was the first time she had gone to Lacey’s apartment.

She got out of the cab in front of the gray clapboard building on a quiet residential street. Most of the houses seemed to be broken up into apartments, judging from the multiple mailboxes in front of the doorways. The neighborhood had an old-timey feel about it, as if one might expect mild-looking men in felt hats and belted overcoats to amble home along the sidewalks, clutching the evening paper.

Lacey’s apartment was on the second floor. The staircase was steep and narrow, but the stairs were carpeted in a tough-looking material in an appealing shade of green. Margot’s heavy bag bumped periodically against the wall. She caught her breath and rang the bell.

Lacey hugged Margot at the door and pulled her into the living room. The white room sparkled with color. Two bright green butterfly chairs were separated by a low table painted a vivid yellow. The sofa was upholstered in a nubby beige fabric, but Lacey had covered it with boldly printed pillows in fresh Scandinavian colors: blue, hot pink, and the same shade of yellow as the table. The kitchen beyond was the same brilliant blue found in the cushions. Nothing appeared fancy or expensive, but the effect was dazzling.

“Look at this.” Lacey pulled out a huge poster board covered in a collage of children’s artwork. “I asked the kids in my class to make spring flowers that I could hang on my wall. Some are painted, others just crayons.”

“Hey, Margot.” Alex stepped out from the bedroom, rolling up the sleeve of his shirt. Instantly, she understood everything. Momentarily speechless, she stepped quickly into his arms for a hug—the rote, expected gesture of an old friend. “Good to see you,” he said, clearing his throat and stepping away from her. “The paint fumes are pretty bad. Lacey insisted we get it done in time for you.” He looked down and fumbled with his other sleeve. He had obviously just stepped out of the shower and put on fresh clothes.

“Here’s my big surprise,” Lacey said. She came to Alex’s side and put her arm around his waist. He drew his arm around Lacey in an uncertain manner, as if he was unsure where to actually place his hand: whether to rest it on her upper arm or lower it to her hip, a more proprietary, intimate gesture. Instead, his hand dangled oddly in midair, as if the hand itself had been caught doing something wrong.

In the space of a moment a door had slammed shut for Margot and the deafening noise continued to reverberate inside her head. She hadn’t seen Alex since their time together at Bow Lake nine months earlier. The few awkward phone calls they’d had afterward had left her feeling empty and strange. Did he ever miss her the way she sometimes missed him? She had known Alex since childhood, he’d always been her friend, but now that he had been her first lover, nothing seemed the same.

Fortunately Lacey began to speak, turning and looking up at him: Alex, her childhood friend; Alex, her helper; Alex, her lover. “I told you I’d seen Alex a bit this fall.” She leaned into him, pulling him slightly closer. “He was such a drone then. Always making excuses about work.” Lacey squeezed him in a playful gesture. “This winter,” she laughed lightly, “things just started to happen.”

Alex stood very still during this explanation, his pale hand still hanging loosely in the air. He offered a tentative smile, almost a question as his lips parted, then quickly bent down to take Margot’s duffel bag. “I’ll put this in your room.” He clutched her bag and disappeared beyond the kitchen.

“Alex moved in a few weeks ago. I kept putting off telling you. I know you really care about him. I remember how disappointed you were when he didn’t come back to the house after Mom’s funeral. And we had all those years at the lake.” Lacey spoke quickly now as if she sensed some awkwardness.

“It’s okay, really.” But it wasn’t okay. Margot wasn’t going to let Lacey see how she felt. She would have thought Lacey might have told her something, anything. She remembered Lacey saying that she had seen Alex, but dating, getting serious—how could she have kept this from her?

Alex came back into the room and went to Lacey’s side. Margot looked away. Her mouth felt dry. Her brain was muddled. She didn’t know where to begin. “You sure you have room for me? I can go home to Concord.” Margot suddenly began to speak in a torrent, her words rushing out all at once. “Dad wants me at home before I go to the lake. He seems kind of down. I don’t like the sound of his cough.” Margot directed this to Lacey, not daring to look at Alex. She told them she’d be happy to take a bus to Concord that evening if they could get her to the station, or she’d even get there on her own.

A look passed between them. Had Alex spent nights on that sun porch before he moved into Lacey’s bedroom? When had it started? Had Alex already started dating Lacey that summer before he entered business school? The summer when he had slept with Margot?

Margot heard a door close, and a moment later, the sound of water running. She followed Alex to her room, the enclosed porch in the rear of the apartment. It also was painted white. She sat down on the bed and leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees.

“Margot,” he said, “I should have explained. I’m sorry.” He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Like Lacey said, it just sort of happened. I mean . . .” He turned and looked out the window into the trees below. He thrust his hands deep into his pockets. “We started seeing each other.”

“Not immediately,” he said hesitantly. “School was impossible at first. I was swamped, in over my head with the quantitative stuff. Lacey was always there, backing me up. Later, we saw more of each other. It was fast, I guess, but . . .”

Margot continued to walk toward home, astonished at how painful her memories still were. She paused in front of an art gallery she had never noticed before. She stared into the vast plate-glass window. The walls were covered with paintings of vividly colored still lifes with backgrounds that appeared to float off into the distance like landscapes. Rich purple eggplants, ripe tomatoes, red and green peppers, plates of sardines, crusty loaves of bread, and bottles of wine filled the canvases. The food looked Italian, as did the countryside beyond. She thought of Lacey and Alex in Italy at this very moment with their daughters. She imagined the artist with his own family and friends painting these pleasurable scenes. By now, Mario and Julie would be enjoying glasses of wine, talking about finding a new apartment, a place to share. And here she was, going home alone.

Her last argument with Oliver loomed once again. She wasn’t completely at fault. Oliver had been so insistent. He had wanted her to rearrange her work schedule, maybe even putting her job in jeopardy, so that she could fit in with his plans. He couldn’t seem to understand that she truly needed this time with Lacey at the lake. But was it so important? Needled with doubt, she told herself that a summer wasn’t really that long. She and Oliver would be together in the fall. She had planned to stay busy painting and she had, though recently the summer was seeming endless.