What Colin tries to gloss over but can’t is how much he’d prefer working only from home. In London twice a month, five days each, he lives at the office. He keeps meaning to look for a studio but puts it off. He’s not sleeping on the reception-room sofa, it’s not that bad, but in a corner of the former warehouse in the revived East End. When his firm, Arkas/Wright, developed a hotel for a Saudi sheik, the client demanded that he see a completed sample room before he signed the contract. The architect on the project, Colin’s friend Patrick, designed a luxury room at the end of their office building, complete with a swirly brown and white marble bath the sheik liked. So Colin has a handsome hotel room, a bit spooky, I think, and spa bath to use, with the most comfortable bed I’ve ever touched. There’s a love seat at the end of the bed and a corner window looking out at the Thames. The drag is no kitchen, though he’s tucked a microwave into the minibar alcove. When he’s in residence, he stays crouched over his drawing table and computers in his office at the other end of the building. He steps out for dinner, usually with colleagues, then works late, a light hanging over him in the cavernous gloom. We text several times a day, talk after dinner until he falls asleep in the artificial room.
On the Fridays he returns, we celebrate. When two people work at home all day every day, the other person begins to seem like a version of you, or you of him. With the London interruptions, we stay separate (I must) and charged. But I’m not the one doing the flight delays and the trip into the city and the haggard nights in the closed offices. A bit of solitude I revel in, but I feel terrible for him.
Last night he was due home by nine but arrived at two a.m. The Florence airport runway is short. In strong winds, planes can’t maneuver between the hills. He had to land in Bologna, take a train to Florence and then a taxi out to the airport where he’d left his car. Then home.
I was asleep when he got in. He fell into bed, not even showering. He smelled like jet fuel, as if he’d flown home clutching an engine. “What happened?” I’d already read his text about rerouting to Bologna. Even though I’d been roused from deep sleep, the smell turned my stomach. Metal. Fumes.
“You don’t even want to know.” Then he was sacked out. I was awake, curled around him, until the sky began to lighten and I fell asleep. The next moment, Colin was poking my foot, leaning over the bed with a cappuccino.
“I’m the one who should sleep in. Damn, this was bad, Kit, because the pilot almost landed in Florence. Then abruptly, and I mean abruptly, he pulled up again. Jerked up, lumbering like a giant turtle trying to fly. Several people screamed. The guy next to me roared. Like a sound in a nightmare. I was holding up the arm rests to raise the plane. We could feel the Gs dragging us down. Then the ass pilot said, Sorry, folks, in English though half the people on the plane didn’t speak it. Wind shear, he said, these things happen, folks. I hate being called folks. I was terrified. Wobbly for two hours.”
“You must have been absolutely petrified.” When planes fall, the people on them have longer to experience what’s happening than we’re led to think. Anyone with a shred of imagination has to have flashes of fear when floating along at thirty-five thousand feet. I really hate coffee in bed. But the gesture is so sweet that I plump the pillows, scooch up, trying to look awake. Colin seems dazed, imagining (I would be) the plane soaring up over and over. He takes my hand and covers his eyes with it. Damp boy. Colin-face. You. Whiskery.
“Maybe I should open a local office and restore farmhouses for foreigners. Forget this pie-in-the-sky London firm. What do you think?”
“I think no. No way.” Restoring houses for foreigners may be Colin’s worst nightmare. Occasionally the houses become jewels, but usually the owners either ruin noble buildings with bad contemporary ideas or drive the architect to drink because they’ve studied and want historic restorations, down to the bent handmade nails. Worst may be the client who sends a hundred images of kitchens. Can we discuss these?
The cappuccino has the same metallic taste that I noticed last night. And a couple of other times recently. I swirl around the foam and don’t drink. I didn’t drink much at all last night. No hangover—I’m coming down with something. Or was something off? No, not at Annetta’s table. Bronchitis season cometh. Colin is saying that Rick, his boss, wants him in London all of November and after that we’ll reevaluate assignments. “Do we have any zinc? And is that ominous, what Rick said?”
“Could be. He may need me back full time. Christ.” Colin flops backward on the bed and tells me about his week: the work for the firm pouring in from Ireland, Dubai, Majorca; the friends he met for drinks; the dream he had that he was lifted in the claws of an eagle and flown over Tuscany. He has wonderful success at his firm, but we both know what eludes him. He agonizes over all the shared projects—the hospital, the university theater, the private residences of the super-rich. I’ve seen his notebooks teeming with solo designs—severe classical but super-modern museums, stadiums based on ancient amphitheaters, fantasy racetracks, bookstores, even an ideal library that I would give anything to see built. I can put my fantasies on paper. My poems, though few read them, are full realizations of my vision. His is the real world of bricks and cranes and compromise and quirky clients, an unholy marriage of art and commerce. He must get his chance.
I run my fingers through his matted hair. He imitates a tech client who wants an upper-class British club atmosphere in his flat. “Can you tell me,” the client said, “what is considered good taste?” Colin, to his credit, liked the client and they spent two mornings looking at books and shelter magazines, with Colin putting tabs on good-taste pages and X-marked ones on the worst-taste pages.
He dozes for a few minutes and I ease the cup onto my bedside table. Wind cutting around the edges of the house screeches like lost souls at large. In the distance, Leo’s two horses neigh, long whinnyings that blend into the wind and carry it onward. When he sleeps, something in Colin that’s wound up relaxes and he looks like he must have at fourteen when the openness of childhood still graces the face with innocence but the coming changes into manhood already are forming. His beautiful lips slightly parted, fringe of eyelashes fluttering once, balled fist unfurling those long fingers drawn by da Vinci.
In the shower, I wash my hair and slather myself with body wash. I sing “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” My breasts feel tender. I stand under the hot water uncomprehending, then comprehending.
I’m not myself. I’m not right.
I’m not pregnant. I couldn’t be.
Working across the morning while Colin heads out to the olive grove, I run through my Margaret papers. Her book World Mafia World gathers dust on my desk. I take it down to the living room, where Fitzy has commandeered my favorite chair. He accommodates me and insinuates himself across the pages. This is risky Margaret, getting to know the young wives of Mafia dons, functionaries, sons, and those affected by them. She set herself up as an English teacher in Catania, stronghold of crime fiefdoms. Through the children, she’s invited to celebrations, ceremonies, Sunday dinners. A whole year teaching six-to-twelve-year-olds. I’m sure a good teacher. She’s popular. The dons, store owners, even one priest have to be fought off politely. She overhears, she subtly questions, she teaches Winnie the Pooh to the youngest, Charlotte’s Web to the middle group, and Romeo and Juliet, other victims of warring clans, to the oldest. She is said to have lost her husband in the Vietnam War. She’s chaste, living under the name of Mary Merritt. Dark skirt and white blouse. Only the pearls to show her class. Writing furiously at night, hiding her notebook in a locked suitcase under the bed. Brava, Margaret. Here’s where I envy her. The crusader giving over a chunk of life for a cause. (Not the only one either. The Taste of Terror, an analysis of the tense Red Brigades years, serves as a preview for the terrorism we’re now having to accept as the new normal.)
The Mafia book, scathing and incriminating, placed “Mary Merritt” on a watch list so dangerous that she had to return to the U.S. for two years. A lucky return, as that’s when she wrote her classic Sun Raining on Blue Flowers. The crusading books give me insight into her trap-mind, her toughness; the novels reveal lyric tenderness, love of the natural world, her sadness and rapier humor.
Hands to my breasts, yes, definitely tender.
After lunch at Stefano’s (I pushed around my pasta), I tell Colin I need to pick up a couple of things in the pharmacy. He joins Leo for a coffee in the piazza. Two other guys sit down and out come the cards.
I am stunned. Hit with a Taser. The swab is a live firecracker in my hand. Pink. Pretty in pink. Stripes. Pink bubble gum. As my mind shuts down, I rub my hand over my flat middle. A someone in there, kick-starting. Impossible. Twenty-four years of sex and now, now…So, when? I know. After Sunday lunch that mellow September afternoon, we took our green blanket to our hidden lair under the ilex tree, that sweet grassy dip that hides us from the world. Colin had recovered from one of his London weeks and was joyous and loving and wild. A brown leaf stuck to his back.
Pregnant! Never an option. When I was twenty and went in for birth control advice, my doctor told me that I could not get pregnant with such a tipped uterus. “At such an angle,” he said, “no determined sperm could cascade over that ledge.” I pictured an openmouthed salmon trying to leap upstream and forever falling back. Not having to deal with pills and implants and foams and goo was fine with me.
I will keep this to myself until I can think. Never say never. This changes everything. The X plus Y, or X now in flux. A small boy with a toy sailboat. And Colin…He likes our friends’ children and even has offered for us to keep them so the parents can have a getaway weekend. But he has always maintained that he doesn’t want his own. He adored his younger sister when they were small, but she became a social-climbing, shallow, manipulative jerk. (Kittens become cats.) Our work would be sliced to bits. We’d be tied down.
A slender girl in plaid skipping rope, a willful girl she is. She flashes my mother’s smile. My childless friends have much easier lives and more fun. How late am I? I didn’t even notice but it must be ten days. No period. (Now a comma.) No “falling off the roof,” as my mother used to say. Where did that come from?
A quiet abortion in Rome? That would be hideous. Like the moles Fitzy mutilates, tangled bloody rags. Emerging from some desperate room into winter light. Scraped clean. No one to know. D & C, dusting and cleaning, my mother called the procedure. Colin is forty, a mighty age; I am forty-four. Last gasp, aging eggs. (How unappetizing the sulfur smell when the dipped pastel Easter eggs were found weeks later in the bushes.) Remember Margaret saying Italian babies are born old? And children don’t always turn out well, no matter what you do. The jeweler’s son—porky little kid. He looks like a sausage about to burst out of its casing. I’ve seen him trip his sister, blame her, and get away with it. What if you had Grazia? Always stuffing tissues in her pockets, and her obnoxious laugh. That’s not nice. Grazia is…Oh, why the hell am I thinking negatively? Our child. A slice of me, a slice of Colin. Oh, babycakes. The needle on the gauge keeps falling to empty. I’m stalled. Lose a tooth with every child, my mother said. Annunciation? No way. This late miracle—as though this being always floated out there, holding a sparkler in the sky, waiting for her moment. Her?