The Vanishing Year(41)

It’s too easy to get caught up in Henry’s buoyancy. His hair is tousled from the drive, like he’s had the car window open. His face shines from the misty air, his cheeks puffed and pink.

“Go get dressed.” He pats my bottom and gives me a wink. I skip-step into the bedroom and pull open my suitcase.

“Oh, I brought something for you.” He’s holding out a hanger and a bag. I unwrap a simple straight sheath dress, black with tiny silver faux-buttons up the back.

“Where did you get this?” I ask him, eyebrows raised.

He shrugs and gives me a lopsided smile. “I bought it a while ago, but I’ve just been looking for the right occasion to give it to you. We’ll be hopelessly overdressed.”

“Better over than under,” I say, another Evelyn-ism. Evelyn, who would wear her Sunday best to the grocery store, just for fun, complete with hat. You only live once, you know. And who knows, maybe someone will think we’re really somebodies.

I slip on the dress and it fits like a glove. Henry always knows my exact size, even if it fluctuates due to brand. When I turn around to face him, he hands me a pair of simple black sling-backs, an impeccable complement to the dress. I cock my head to the side.

“What, are you surprised?” He shakes his head, a curved smile playing on his lips.

“Always.” I snatch the shoes and slide them on, wiggling my toes. I bounce back and forth on the balls of my feet: The day has energized me, filled me with nervous anticipation. I’ve sworn not to think of her, but I find myself wondering what she’d make of me. Of this whole scene, this rich, powerful husband of mine who buys me clothes in the perfect size, in a style he likes, even though I hadn’t stopped to ask myself if I liked it.

I give a twirl in the mirror and decide that I do. I wouldn’t have picked it, but then again, some of my favorite pieces come from Henry’s mind. The man knows how to dress a woman.

Feeling daring, and unlike myself, I whistle at him. He turns and, with a quick movement, I shimmy out of my panties and toss them on the bed. He lifts a brow, his mouth bowed down in surprise.

“Well, now. Dinner should be interesting.”

? ? ?

The restaurant is small: one waitress and ten tables, only four are filled. The room is dark, lit by flickering candles and twinkling white lights that are absorbed by the maroon tablecloths draped over two-top round tables. Everyone knows one another, on a familial level, the Sartinis, the Petruccis, the Tomasis, they descend on us newcomers like a flock of seagulls. Fishing Lake used to be a textile town, Henry explains. Two mills flanked the small community, attracting hundreds of Italian immigrants in the early 1900s. When they both closed, in the early seventies, the population divided: one half bedroom community commuters with long drives into the city, and the other half descendants keeping up the remaining tourist industry. A small restaurant, a bakery, a corner store, a rental management company.

“My father was the former,” he tells me. “A lawyer, commuting into New York.” I hold my breath. He hardly mentions his parents. I know they are dead. Henry has mentioned a car accident. I tried to relate, my own father died in a car accident, I said at the time, but he’d brushed me off.

“Mr. Whittaker was a wonderful man,” stage-whispers a man from the table next to us. He is small, his shoulders hunched into the table. His hands are large and his knuckles misshapen. He claws a fork that shakes over his plate of ziti. “My boy got in trouble, that boy was always in trouble. Mr. Whittaker saved his hide plenty of times.” His eyes twinkle and he nods at Henry. “But he knew how it was to have a troublemaker son.” He shakes his index finger at Henry. Henry smiles at the man.

“Were you a troublemaker?” I tease, coyly. Henry smiles and rolls his eyes in the man’s direction.

“That’s Mr. Zappetti. His mind,” Henry says and taps his temple with his middle finger. The man shakes his hand in Henry’s direction and laughs.

“You kids.” The man turns to me. “My son, he’s a good citizen now, just like your Henry. The wild boys. They run wild.”

Henry is pulled into another conversation. The men, they want his advice on their investments, the women compliment my dress and ooh and ahh when I tell them Henry bought it as a surprise. They cluck and raise their eyebrows when I order white wine (What’s wrong with the red?) and when I remind them which house is Henry’s, Mrs. Zullo, a tiny gray tuft of a woman, nods knowingly and clicks her tongue.

“That’s the old Vizzini place.” She raps the table with her knuckles and all the tables around us say ohhhhhh in unison. “That old strega. She died in that place, you know.”

Her husband elbows her. “Vita mia, hush now, that was forty years ago.”

I look over at Henry, who is forty years old, and wonder when they moved there. Where did he live before? So much to learn about my husband, so much I don’t know. It’s odd, I realize, to have this much blank space in a marriage, this broad of a canvas to fill in. Maybe. I don’t know, this is my first one. His foot touches mine under the table.

Mrs. Sartini, as round and wobbly as Mrs. Zullo is small, shakes her finger at us. “Mrs. Vizzini, she died of a broken heart. Left by a man at fifty. Zitella!”

The crowd breaks up laughing. I don’t know what zitella means, but even Henry tips his head back in belly laughter.