Vox(22)

I wriggle out from the heavy appendage encircling me. It’s too much like ownership, that gesture; too possessive. Also, the smoothness of Patrick’s skin, his soft doctor’s hand and fine hair, they’re all getting in the way of my memories, blotting them out.

Lorenzo may have returned to Italy by now. I’m not sure. It’s been two months since I followed my heart and libido and went with him. Two months since I risked everything for an afternoon tumble.

Not tumble, Jean—love, I remind myself.

It was his plan, all along, to go back to what we called the Boot, once the visiting professorship had run its course. He missed the cooking and the sea, oranges and peaches fattened on rich volcanic soil until they grew as big as the sun. And his language. Our language.

Patrick stirs beside me, and I slip out of bed. In the kitchen, I get out the old macchinetta from a cupboard, press espresso grounds into its tiny perforated cup, and fill the bottom container with water before putting it on a low flame. It’s nearly five o’clock, and I won’t be sleeping anymore.

Was it the coffee that started things on their trajectory? Or was it the Italian? All of a sudden, I feel cold and warm at the same time.

He kept a hot plate in his office, one of those single-burner electric jobs you find in efficiency apartments and cheap motels. Tucked between it and his semantics texts was a tin of coffee, real coffee, not the ground-up dust they stocked the faculty kitchen with. We’d met to review the progress on lexical recall in my patients with anomia. For some reason, the anomics had me stumped; their inability to conjure up the names of the most common objects while knowing exactly how to describe them had set my research back to ground zero. If I couldn’t produce a positive report by the end of the month, I’d be saying goodbye to funding and sayonara to tenure.

Lorenzo set the coffee to percolate, and we walked through the latest brain scans. There, among MRIs and EEGs and Italian coffee, it began.

The first thing I noticed was his hand as it poured thick black espresso into a demitasse. His skin was dark, had none of the scrubbed pinkness of Patrick’s hand. One of his nails was chipped, and there were calluses on the tips of his fingers, which were long and thin.

“You play the guitar?” I asked.

“Mandolin,” he said. “And some guitar.”

“My father played the mandolin. My mother would sing along; we all would. Nothing great, just the usual folk songs. ‘Torna a Surriento,’ ‘Core ’ngrato,’ things like that.”

He laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“An American family singing ‘Core ’ngrato.’”

Now it was my turn to laugh. “What makes you think I’m American?” Only I didn’t say it that way. I said it in Italian.

We met like that, in his office, where the hot plate and the little coffee maker were. Once I’d put the anomia project to bed, thus securing my somewhat unstable future for another semester, we still met.

“I brought you a bit of Italy,” he said one day, not long after he’d returned from visiting family over spring break. Our speech had migrated from half English, half Italian to full-throttle Neapolitan, and Lorenzo’s office became an oasis of continentalisms: caffè, music, the crunchy baked taralli cookies he brought in on Mondays after slaving all weekend over his grandmother’s recipe.

He pushed a newspaper-wrapped object across the desk.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Some music for you, Gianna. Open it.”

I did. Inside the paper was a wooden box, inlaid and polished, a five-petaled rose motif around the border. It didn’t look much like music until Lorenzo reached over and pushed up the cover with a finger.

I still remember that, how he lifted the hinged top with such care, like a bridegroom sliding a lace skirt above his new wife’s knee, preparing to hook his finger into her garter. A lascivious action made tender by the gentleness.

That was the first time I imagined Lorenzo’s hand on my bare skin, an ordinary Monday in his book-cluttered office with the music box tinkling out “Torna a Surriento” and the espresso maker bubbling its thick, sweet coffee.

Lorenzo isn’t a believer or a hater or a coward. He’s in his own category, tucked inside a dark and pleasant corner of my mind.





SEVENTEEN




Steven is the first to wake up and is out of the house before either Patrick or I start our morning routines. The twins, in a rare feat of self-sufficiency—if not color coordination—have dressed themselves and now pour the last of the milk into bowls laden with multicolored, teeth-rotting puffs of sugar. Leo has his sweater on inside out, and Sam fixes it. Neither of them says much over his cereal.

“What happened last night was only an argument,” I say.

“It’s strange when you talk, Mom,” Leo says.

I suppose it would be, after a year.

By the time Patrick comes in, looking as if he’s had less sleep than he has, the twins are on their way to the bus stop, and I’m dressing Sonia, sliding one thin arm at a time into her Windbreaker. My hand lingers on her red bracelet, and she tugs her wrist away, her small hand slipping from my grasp.

“I’m sorry you had to see that yesterday. With Steven.”

She nods, as if she’s sorry she had to see it too.