Dolci di Love

Pienza was one of the villages Alberto had recommended: an insanely compact and pretty town perched like another medieval crown on a hilltop half an hour away.

Looking at it was one thing but trying to get into it another; Lily circumnavigated the whole place what felt like a dozen times trying to find a parking lot and almost came to blows with Dermott over a certain nonexistent roundabout before eventually parking down a residential back street beneath the leafy canopy of an enormous tree.

The town was famous for having been the home of a fifteenth-century pope who basically invented the makeover, she gathered from the guidebook. This pope had not only spruced up the Pienza town square but built a stunning cathedral plus, while he was at it, his own lavish papal palace, which Lily paid ten euro to tour.

He knew what he was doing. The palace had a view over the surrounding countryside that was hard to beat, and he’d even thought to install a hanging garden through which to marvel at it.

Anything else Lily wanted to know about the pope and his leanings she gleaned from a pimpled teenager who was also on the tour, which would have been even more enlightening had it not been in German. She had missed the English tour, Rolf the spotty boy explained to her, but he could help her: to his mother’s obvious consternation.

Each time Rolf translated anything for Lily’s benefit, Rolf’s mother shot her the filthiest of looks, and when he explained with enthusiasm about the little cupboard where the pope kept his lovers, Lily thought the woman might just explode.

She was interested in Rolf, but not in the way his mother assumed. Lily had imagined her own teenage boys looming over her ever since she’d first dreamed of having a family—initially with John Travolta, her poster boy in junior high. She thought she would have those sons by now. She thought one would be about Rolf’s age. And she’d be a better mother to Rolf than this dour creature with her sour looks and disapproving guttural noises. Who called a kid Rolf, anyway? Hadn’t the woman seen The Sound of Music?

But then Rolf’s mother bade her good-bye with a sympathetic pat on the shoulder and such a compassionate smile that Lily crumpled afterward on the steps of the cathedral in the town’s made-over piazza. Could she tell that Lily ached to have a pimpled son of her own? Was her desperation so obvious?

It was desperation of a different sort that eventually drove her from the sun-soaked steps of the duomo. The guidebook said that Pienza was known for pecorino—a local cheese made from sheep’s milk—so Lily headed for one of the recommended restaurants tucked in a little square behind the piazza and ordered grilled pecorino with walnuts and honey.

She didn’t, as a rule, eat cheese, so she proceeded to push the pecorino around the plate while she finished a half bottle of wine. But the pain that the prosecco bubbles had danced away so happily earlier on in the day showed no signs of subsiding quite as easily with the riesling.

As the moments ticked by in the little trattoria, thoughts of Francesca and Rolf and Baby Grace bounced in her mind like fat raindrops off the cobbled Corso. She kept trying to flush them away but no sooner had she gotten rid of one than another splashed in its place.

She shouldn’t have taken the photo out of the shoe. She shouldn’t have drunk-dialed Rose. She shouldn’t have fallen foul of Tipsy Tourism. She shouldn’t sit there and plough through another half bottle. If she’d not ploughed through the ones at home, she might still be meeting with Finance trying to decide who they could afford to let go and who they could afford to keep, where they could cut costs in the red-lit states of Maryland and Delaware, instead of sitting there wrangling walnuts and trying not to order more wine.

In the end, she decided to go somewhere else to do that, meandering across the other side of the main piazza until she found another trattoria that had an outdoor terrace showcasing yet another sumptuous slice of the Tuscan countryside. Through the soldier-straight trees that grew at the edge of the terrace, she could see sloping grassy pastures tumbling down to a patchwork of perfectly mown hayfields, their giant rolls of hay sitting evenly spaced and proud between the green of the neighboring grapes and olives.

Across the valley she could spot at least three other hilltop towns, their church spires and palazzos casually interrupting the horizon as though medieval fortresses and bell towers were perfectly normal, which, she supposed, they were. Did Tuscany ever get sick of being so ridiculously gorgeous?

She ordered more pecorino with walnuts and honey and more riesling. It would help her make her plan, which she now needed more than ever and which she promised herself she would have all done and dusted by the time the bottle was empty.

Obviously, when she found Daniel, she wasn’t really going to shoot him. So what was she going to do? Without much experience in histrionics, it was hard to picture the scene. It would be unpleasant, that was hard to avoid, but it would not be loud. She would quietly demand a divorce, she supposed. Divorce. She hadn’t honestly considered that up until now. Not honestly. But sitting here now, having met Francesca and not been a mother to Rolf, it seemed inevitable.

Or was it? She poured herself another glass. She didn’t want to move out of the Seventy-second Street apartment. She loved the closets. Hers was perfect. She could find anything she wanted at just a glance. It was cost effective too, not that she needed to worry about that, lucky her, but being able to see all her beautiful clothes constantly reminded her of things she had forgotten she had, which meant she bought fewer new ones, or at least rarely doubled up.

Could she hold her marriage together for closet space? Stranger things had happened, she was sure. It was just that she didn’t have a boring shoe collection like Daniel; she had a magnificent shoe collection. Hers were all color-blocked and shelved in individual cubbyholes. Never mind wearing them, it gave her a thrill just to see them. The question was, could she overlook the whole lamination issue just to keep them that way?

Anyway, if they divorced, Daniel would have to move out. She could still afford to keep the apartment. She would be in it by herself, but she was in it by herself a lot of the time anyway. She had never minded that. She had never minded Daniel being there and she had never minded him being away.

Being divorced might not change anything apart from giving her the opportunity to double her shoe collection, move into his side of the wardrobe.

She wasn’t sure. And there was something wrong with that, there was something wrong with her not minding Daniel being there or being somewhere else. She had loved him with all her heart and soul, and although she wasn’t sure if she still did, she knew she had never actually decided not to. So what the heck had happened? How had such an enormous change come about without her authority? No, worse than that, without her even noticing?

She had a lot to figure out and none of it was becoming any clearer, so she ordered another half bottle of wine, a dessert wine, and because it would seem inappropriate to not have dessert, she ordered one of those too.

“Tiramisu?” the waiter prompted her as she perused the menu a trifle blearily. She supposed that’s what most Americans ordered.

When the tiramisu arrived soon after, she pushed it away without even dipping her spoon in it and concentrated instead on the wine and her plan.

She could divorce Daniel or not, whatever she decided, and it appeared to not matter. This seemed hopelessly inconclusive. But as the afternoon light faded to evening across the hills, what finally became clear was that whatever she was going to do, she did not actually need to find Daniel to do it.

She could just go back to her room at Violetta’s, pack her bag, and fly straight home to New York. End of story.

Should she decide to keep the status quo, Daniel need never know she had been to Italy. Should she decide she wanted his closet space, she could see a lawyer before he got back and start the proceedings.

Lily left that possibility to fully sink in, but it seemed merely to skip across the glassy surface of her heart, only just breaking the surface, never plunging into its shadowy depths.

She tried to picture Daniel the way he used to be, the way he was when she couldn’t imagine a minute without him, let alone a lifetime. He used to look at her as though she were the most beautiful woman in the world and he the luckiest guy. She knew this to be true, she’d seen that look a thousand times, but now, sitting in the back blocks of Pienza draining her glass, she couldn’t imagine him that way, try as she might. All she could see was his Prada belt with a wide hip in front of it and a fat baby’s striped leg attached to that.

“Grappa, signora?” the waiter asked, smoothly whisking away her empty wine bottle but leaving the tiramisu.

Lily looked at him in surprise. She could not believe she had finished the wine. It felt like she’d only just taken the first sip. She was as sober as a judge but still unbelievably thirsty. Insatiably thirsty. And she hadn’t finalized the plan yet. She needed to finalize the plan. Grappa was a liqueur, she knew that, and while she generally steered clear of those, she thought it would round off her completely uneaten meal perfectly.

The grappa tasted like paint stripper. It was so strong her eyes watered when she lifted it near her lips and it was all she could do to sip it, although in the end she managed, and the second glass slipped down far more easily.

The good thing was that there would be no stigma attached to divorcing Daniel because nearly everyone got divorced these days. And there would be no stigma attached to staying with him because no one would know what he had done.

No one would feel pity for her, mumbling over the candles at dinner parties that there she was, the poor barren wife, working all hours of the day and night to keep him in style, while he was playing up in Italy, getting everything for himself that he had once promised her.

If they didn’t know what he had done, life would go on as it had been. Daniel would have his pals and his golf and his trips to Italy, and Lily would have her wardrobe, her workouts, her sixteen-hour days at the office. This was the world she had built for herself. This was the world that still stood, that could stay standing, untouched by Daniel’s betrayal, if that’s what she decided was best.

She could keep living like that, she knew she could. But an image of a green-eyed, olive-skinned, leggy little girl popped into her mind. “What’s wrong with you?” Francesca had asked.

Lily batted the image away and looked at the tiramisu. “Don’t stay this cold, lonely person,” it said to her, giving her such a fright she screamed.

Lily stared at the tiramisu again, mouth agape, as the cream across the top shimmered. “It’s not the real you,” it said to her.

She sprang out of her chair and reeled back from the table as if the tiramisu was about to follow up its conversation with a physical attack.

“Did you see that? Did you hear it?” she asked him. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that!” she said to the tiramisu.

The waiter was no longer on her side, she could tell that. He stood back, irritated. Two couples sitting at another table dragged their eyes off her and started whispering among themselves. The tiramisu glistened in a smug fashion and stayed resolutely silent.

“Yes, you’re right, it’s time I left,” Lily said, flinging far too much money on the table. “The cheese was too rich, I think . . . I’m so sorry. Thank you. Good-bye.”

She stumbled out into the small square, down a curving alley, and emerged into the cool air of the emptying main piazza, where shock gave way to dizziness, confusion, embarrassment. She had to lean on the warm stone of the pope’s palace to steady herself. That grappa!

Eventually she lurched over to a drinking fountain in a corner of the square and took a long slug of water. She should have been drinking water all day—what was the matter with her? Everyone knew that after a long flight you were dehydrated and needed to look after yourself. All that pastry for breakfast and plates of pecorino—never mind she hadn’t eaten any of it. That wasn’t the point. The point was . . . oh, hang the point. The point was beside the point. There was no point.

The tiramisu had spoken to her. That was bad. That was very bad. She’d drunk three half-bottles of wine (or was it four?) and some grappa and the tiramisu had spoken to her.

“I’m sorry?” An elderly English gentleman who happened to be passing by with his wife thought she had spoken to them. “What was that?”

“It’s nothing,” Lily mumbled, horrified to hear that her voice sounded slurred. “Perfectly fine. Really.”

It was the grappa. She’d have been fine if she’d stuck to just wine. The grappa had been too strong and had unsettled her equilibrium. She just needed to find her car and get back to Violetta’s to lie down on those crackling apricot sheets. She’d got carried away coming up with her plan and it had been foolish to accept a liqueur on an empty stomach. She just needed to sleep, then everything would be all right.

When she felt steady enough on her feet she retraced her steps and miraculously found her car, failing on the first few attempts to get the key in the lock, but finally opening the door and sliding into the driver’s seat.

She got the key into the ignition but couldn’t find the lights and as she hunched over the dashboard, stabbing at different levers and buttons, Dermott lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Please, please, I beg you, don’t sweep this one under the carpet,” he urged her in his Irish lilt. “Please, please, I beg you.”

“You have got to be kidding me!” Lily cried, collapsing on the steering wheel, her arms flung around it, her head dropping on to them. It was too much. It was all just too much. Everyone was against her: Rose, Daniel, Carlotta, the tiramisu, and now even Dermott, whom she’d trusted with her life. Her life!