Chapter 8

Daniel sat outside a pleasantly crowded café just off the piazza around the corner from his hotel, emptying a carafe of wine as he smoked his fourth cigarette in a row.

In Italy, Daniel smoked.

In Italy, Daniel was a different person.

In Italy he didn’t go jogging in the mornings or play golf at the weekends. He didn’t wave away the sommelier at lunch, he didn’t scrimp on the olive oil, he didn’t pass on dessert. In Italy he didn’t do any of the things he usually did. It was like being on vacation but not from his job because it was his job that brought him here. It was like being on vacation from his usual self.

He exhaled slowly and watched through the smoke as a tall blonde woman slid her way between two tables nearby. She sat down, pushed her sunglasses up on her head, and flicked him a smile as she met his gaze.

She looked like Lily. Not as slim or as beautiful but she had that same sort of casual chic that Lily had. It was one of the first things he’d noticed about her, the woman who would become his wife: the way she moved with an almost accidental grace, like satin sliding off a marble tabletop.

He’d known from the first glimpse of her that he wanted to marry her, yet he hadn’t even believed that things like that really happened until then. He’d thought it was just something foolish that lovestruck couples said after the fact to make each other feel like it was meant to be.

But the truth was, the second he saw Lily across the restaurant Jordie dragged him to after some sweaty squash game all those years ago, he knew. He just knew. Well, he didn’t know that he was going to marry her. But he knew that he wanted to. Just like that. Kapow.

Turned out Lily was a friend of Jordie’s date—they never did find out if it was a set up or not, but if either of them suspected it at the time, they hadn’t shown it. Afterward, they never cared how they met, only that they did.

Daniel just watched her, mostly, that first night; the way she ate so delicately, spoke freely, laughed easily, and had no idea how many eyes in the room lingered on her delectable neck, her tiny ear lobes, her perfect mouth.

He’d been smitten. So smitten, in fact, that he realized all the other love or lust affairs he’d had before then had been ridiculous, hardly more than schoolboy flirtations in comparison.

Loving Lily had been an ache from the very beginning, an ache so deep he couldn’t tell where it started and where it finished, what shape it was, an ache that consumed him till he won her heart and consumed him still.

He’d never feel like that about anyone else, ever, even if he lived to be a hundred, which he hoped he wouldn’t because living to be forty-five he’d made so many mistakes he didn’t know how to even begin fixing them.

Sometimes, when he was shaving, Daniel met his own eyes in the mirror and was astonished to see the same person he once was looking back at him. How could that be? He still appeared so clean cut on the outside. So dependable, so ordinary, so the same as ever. But those tidy good looks, that impassive exterior belied the secrets and private shames that scurried around inside him, searching for places to hide.

It got so that he started shaving in the shower, no mirror, never mind the odd nick.

The blonde woman sitting alone at the table was chatting on her cell phone now. Actually, she had big earlobes, a shorter neck. She wasn’t so much like Lily after all, Daniel thought, lighting another cigarette. She had her own style and she looked happy, this blonde woman. Uncomplicated. And happy.

If it had been Lily sitting at that table and someone else’s husband smoking cigarettes and looking at her, he doubted happy would have been the word that sprang to mind. He’d admire the beauty, this other husband, he may even find himself briefly enamored. But he’d quickly sense the darkness lurking behind that exquisite face and would find his eyes roving to a less thorny rose, someone not as good to look at, perhaps, but with a twinkle in her eye.

Lily’s sadness had stolen her twinkle. The blonde sitting two tables away from him still had hers.

Daniel poured himself another glass of wine. The thought of Lily’s sadness was something he did not want to further contemplate. He’d contemplated it enough already, knew that there was little if anything he could do to alleviate it. In New York he was the useless husband of an unhappy wife, but here he didn’t have to be, or at least he didn’t have to see the unhappiness. This too was a sort of vacation. Not that he begrudged his wife her grief, her sorrow. It was his too, after all. To begin with, they shared it, the same way they shared all the good things in life, the greatness, the laughter.

But Lily’s sadness had gradually overtaken everything else about her. He wondered, often, when the tipping point had been. He knew when it had started, and when it had gotten worse, but he couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment when it consumed her completely.

He was disappointed about the first miscarriage, of course, but not overwhelmingly so, fatherhood being an island he knew he wanted to visit, but wasn’t sure he wanted to stay on.

Every failed attempt after that hurt him more and more, but that was nothing compared to what it did to Lily. Each tragedy seemed to chip away at her until she was like a statue remodeled over the centuries: the same piece of stone that had always stood there but an entirely different image. Smaller. Sharper. It wasn’t as though she cried all the time, or became suicidal, or resorted to hysterics, although he thought he might have preferred that, ill-equipped as he was to deal with that sort of behavior. Instead, she just retreated, the lights went off, and it took him too long to realize he was sitting in the dark. Alone.

By then, he had screwed up too badly to do anything much about it.

His own cell phone rang then and when he looked at who was calling, his heart sank. Still, he picked it up and waited for the voice on the other end to start where she had left off half an hour ago.

“I told you, it’s just a few days,” he said, tiredly, when he finally got a word in. “I know, and I’m sorry, but I’ll figure something out. I promise. I just need a bit of time.”

He listened for a while longer, then gently took the phone from his ear, laid it on his thigh, and turned it off.

A waiter approached, a man who looked old enough to be Daniel’s father and who wore a similar look of something bordering on contempt but not quite.

He ordered another liter of wine and slid his old self into his back pocket along with his phone. Then the blonde woman asked if she could join him.

She wasn’t Lily, but she was close.