The Other Language(87)
The letters started coming about a year after Drew left, completely out of the blue. Elsa was twenty years old; she’d left home by then and was sharing a flat with two friends from university. The first letter, mailed to her parents’ address—an event, since nobody bothered to write with a pen on paper, buy stamps and find a mailbox anymore—didn’t sound like Drew at all, it had absolutely no trace of his dark humor. Its tone was formal, old-fashioned, just like his neat handwriting: it was very specific and seemed concerned only as to whether she could forgive him for what he had done to her. Apparently Drew had gone back to Wisconsin after all; the letter claimed he’d now realized how “confused and unhappy” he’d been in Rome at the time of their breakup. What he’d inflicted on her was “unforgivable” and only now could he see what he had lost by breaking off their relationship so abruptly as if, he wrote, “you had been my enemy rather than a person I loved.”
Elsa was puzzled by the saintly tone, and showed the letter to one of her roommates, a girl whose skills at deciphering emotional nuances she trusted. The girl declared he must be in one of those American 12-step programs either for booze or drugs or both. This letter, she said, was simply what step 8 required: making amends to all the people you’ve harmed under the influence; Elsa surely happened to be just one in a long list of people to whom he owed apologies.
“I bet quite a few of these aerograms must be flying across the globe as we speak,” the girl said with a smirk.
This obvious truth came as a mild disappointment and Elsa regretted showing her the letter.
But then, a couple of days later, she decided to jump at the opportunity and secretly constructed a short but effervescent reply, chiseling her words, cutting and shaping it more and more so that her letter would sound casual, affectionate and humorous enough in case he might be interested in continuing their correspondence. Drew wrote back a week later with the same humorless tone of the first message, confessing he’d just recovered from a very dark period and was now helping out his father in the hardware shop back in Kenosha. He was thinking of taking up playing music again with a bunch of guys from the neighborhood. He thanked her for putting the letter in the post rather than e-mailing him back. He said that seeing her familiar handwriting again made their contact “so much more valuable.” It struck Elsa as odd, unlikely, the way these details seemed to be precious to him. As if he’d shed a protective layer and what was left underneath was too tender, too vulnerable to be attractive.
Sandro Donati ordered two cappuccinos and forced Elsa to try an almond croissant despite her protests. Nonsense, he said, you are not fat at all. Elsa couldn’t make herself look into his piercing blue eyes, he was so much more attractive than she remembered when they were discussing ideas for his website. He then complimented her for the work she’d done and on the vintage leather jacket she was wearing. He asked her whether she also lived in the neighborhood.
“I see you often coming and going on your bicycle. I live right around the corner, in Via Monserrato,” he said.
The fact that he was a neighbor as well as a client seemed to allow a significant shift in their relationship. Elsa found him easy to talk to—they compared notes about the new restaurant that had just opened in Via dei Giubbonari, discussed which one was their favorite vegetable seller at the market in Campo de’ Fiori. Elsa was flattered when he asked her for her phone number.
“If you like, one of these days we could go to a movie or get a bite at that new place,” he said, and rose to kiss her lightly on the cheek when she left.
Elsa rode her bike to the studio in a state of euphoria. Lately there had been little excitement in Elsa’s love life. An affair with a married man had gone awry a couple of years earlier and she’d been sleeping on and off with an old boyfriend she was no longer attracted to just to keep her body engaged in some sort of sexual activity. Even that had come to an end for lack of purpose.
In the following days she caught herself checking messages and missed calls. When she finally saw Sandro’s name on the display and he told her he’d been given two tickets for Barker’s concert, she couldn’t say no.
It wasn’t long before Elsa had lost interest in Drew’s correspondence. He’d told her that he’d started to play music again but his life in Kenosha, apart from a couple of gigs in small venues with his band and idle talk of a contract with an obscure music producer, seemed to have shrunk into a dull repetition—early morning jog, nine to six in the hardware shop, evening practice with the band in the garage. He did mention attending weekly Narcotics Anonymous meetings—so Elsa’s friend was spot-on there—and she suspected that getting off his addictions had probably made him a better person. But it had dulled the edge, killed the magic. All his romantic notions about art and literature, about living his life to its fullest, all that drug-induced passion that had possessed him and sometimes embarrassed her when she knew him in Rome, seemed to have faded and dispersed like fog, revealing his true substance. Reformed Drew was actually no longer worth yearning for, she told herself. And that’s how Elsa was healed of her broken heart and eventually stopped thinking about him altogether.
The posters were everywhere now. A black-and-white one was covering the scaffolding on the fa?ade of the Andrea della Valle church, which was undergoing yet another restoration. As Elsa kneeled down to lock her bicycle to a lamppost across the street, she felt Barker’s now universally recognized shape hovering above her. The shot caught him jumping midair in skinny jeans and cowboy boots, his sculpted biceps protruding from his T-shirt like some kind of superhero in flight. For a moment she wondered whether it was a good idea, to see him in the flesh again after so many years, even if only at a distance, while in the company of a man she barely knew and had a bit of a crush on.