The Other Language(84)
He nods, waiting for her to continue.
“We had to sell our apartment back home because it’s going to be horribly expensive to have surgery done here without insurance.”
Sonia leans sideways. She lets her own weight pull her down and slides slowly, till she’s reclining on the bench, under the table.
It’s the fatigue, the weight of all the events and circumstances that she can no longer control, all the questions that have no answer, this venturing onward, through a darkness getting darker. It’s the near future at the rice paper door.
At times it is so tiring, she needs to close her eyes.
He too slides and reclines on his side, coming into her view. Now they face each other under the table, supine on the benches, just like they did in those hospital beds six years earlier.
“We decided we’d do whatever it takes. So here we are.”
He nods and then holds out his arm toward her.
“Tell me more,” he says.
“We have a child, she’s only three,” Sonia says, her voice nearly breaking. “She needs her father. They adore each other.”
Sonia needs him too. It’s just that her mind refuses to register the likelihood that she may lose him.
She extends her arm till their hands find each other. It’s the first real physical contact they have had since the night of the crash. She feels his fingers closing on hers, brushing them lightly. They remain like that, without saying anything for a while. And it feels okay to be able to be silent together, lying under the table, taking a break from all that is happening above it.
It’s a relief. This resting place.
“What about your children?” Sonia asks.
“They’re growing up fast. We have three now.”
“You and Alexandra are still good?”
He nods.
“I’m happy for you.”
“She’s wonderful. I couldn’t live without her.”
This is a grace, Sonia thinks, to have this, to be able to look at it and say this is what we have, rather than this is what we can’t have.
Love has many faces.
The rice paper door slides open and the waiter enters holding a tray with the food. For a moment he looks around—it seems as if his two customers have vanished. Then he sees they are lying on the benches under the table, facing each other. Holding hands.
He places the food on the table and steps out as lightly as possible, so as not to wake them.
Roman Romance
Elsa still had his letters in a shoebox somewhere. They’d been written in longhand on a yellow legal pad and on the backs of the envelopes was “drew barker 21 taft road kenosha wisconsin usa,” all in lowercase.
Her mother kept suggesting she sell them on eBay if she needed cash.
“You know how much money you’d make? Enough to do your whole apartment, even the kitchen and the bathroom.”
“Will you stop it? You’re annoying me,” Elsa said to shut her up.
She found the box one day while rummaging on top of an armoire. It was buried under some old sweaters she’d meant to give away. She sat cross-legged on the rug and read all the letters, one after the other, without stopping. They were sweet and melancholic; rereading his words after so long saddened her. They made her aware of all the things she had lost and left behind.
Elsa didn’t own a car on principle. She rode her bike, a red Atala, everywhere across the city. Every morning on her way to work, she pedaled along the Lungotevere, under its thick canopy of plane trees, and then turned right into Via Giulia along the ivy-covered wall of Palazzo Farnese. The street was pretty much in the shade all day, and like similar streets in old Rome, it smelled of moss and mushrooms. The walls of the palazzo exuded damp; a whiff of cool air came from its vents even at the height of summer. It was a chilling sensation, this smell of death and cold stone mixed together. She had never had a good feeling about Via Giulia: too many cruel cardinals and scheming courtesans had lived in the palazzi that lined the street, too many murders and Machiavellian plots had taken place around its dark corners. As soon as she entered the wide-open space of Piazza Farnese, with its twin fountains and the gently concave cobblestoned pavement, a sudden warmth always lifted her heart. At that time of day the tables of the corner café were usually crowded with good-looking people facing the sun in expensive sunglasses, either busy texting, getting a tan or reading the paper. Past the square Elsa crossed the confusion of Campo de’ Fiori, slowed down through the open market, skirted the stands of flower sellers, the mounds of vegetables piled artistically on the stalls for the benefit of the tourists, and parked her bicycle in Via del Pellegrino, another dark and murky street right off the piazza. The studio was on the first floor of a poorly maintained building. She had recently joined a group of graphic designers who built websites mainly related to art. They made catalogs for contemporary art galleries and museums. It was a good job, and she’d just been asked to become a partner.
She was parking the bike on the rack at the corner when she noticed the poster on the opposite side of the street. She’d heard he was coming; she just hadn’t realized it was going to be that soon.
When Drew and Elsa had first met, about twenty years earlier, they’d made fun of their respective names. Elsa was convinced that whenever she introduced herself to strangers, the image of Elsa the lioness—from a sixties film about an orphaned lion cub raised as a pet in Kenya—would pop up in their minds, obscuring her face. She told Drew she’d always felt as though she’d been walking through life with the head of a famous animal stuck to her body. He rebutted that she was the luckier of the two: if she was stuck with a lioness’s head, he had been named after a past tense.