If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (23 page)

“Bread?” the girl supplies. “Yes, yes. Of course.”

“Bread. Yes, bread. That would be wonderful. Thank you for that.”

“And would you and your wife like water, with the bubbles or do you want it… do you want it…”

“Still?” Arthur asks.

“Just the wine is fine,” Kate says. “For us both. And two menus, please.”

“Yes. Of course. I’m right back.”

“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Arthur asks as she disappears into the café. It is a comment Kate has been expecting. Because she
is
very pretty, with dark, great brown eyes, and that expression of easy good humor on her face, and because Arthur considers himself a connoisseur. Over the years, he’s regaled her, and Stephen too, with stories—some hilarious—of his exploits in that regard, and she’s laughed at his conquests and misadventures, and Stephen laughed too; but then in private they had raised the possibility of feeling a little sorry for Arthur. Despite all the fun of it. It had to grow lonely sometimes, they had agreed, skipping from woman to woman like a skillfully tossed pebble over the surface of a stream.

“Yes,” Kate says. “She’s very pretty. Are there women in Italy who are not?”

“Not many.”

The girl reappears with wine and menus, smiling still. “Just call me over when you know. I’m Anna.” She leans over the table, more so than is necessary, Kate thinks, revealing dusky, rounding skin.

“Thank you. Anna?” Arthur says. “You’re very…”

“Kind,” Kate supplies. “You’re very kind.”

“Yes, you are. That’s just what I was going to say.”

The corners of his eyes, his lips too, have relaxed—as though he is lost in thought, planning his next move. Twice the girl’s age, more than that, and he is contemplating an approach—and it isn’t even absurd. That’s the unfairness of it all. A man at sixty-five can still do these things. Sixty-five is nothing for the male.

As the girl disappears into the ancient, crumbling café building, his face seems to wake up, as though a hypnotist has snapped his fingers. “Too bad she thinks I’m… married,” he says. “To my sister.”

“That’s easy enough to correct, if you’re serious. I’m happy to clear the way. I have shopping I can do.”

“One thing I’m
not
is serious. Even if I do decide to… to… to…”

“Make an ass of yourself over a girl a third your age?”

“Hah!” He tips his glass to her. “Very clever, Kate.”

“It’s a bit of a sore point these days.”

She looks at him now, one eyebrow raised, and he says nothing—though he knows this is an opening, an opportunity to talk, to talk in the way Kate means when she says
I’d like to talk. We’ll have a chance to talk. I think we should talk
. But he doesn’t know what he can say. And it isn’t the words he can’t find—for once. It’s the sentiment. What he really wants to tell his sister is to get over it, already. Pull herself together. Stop dragging her sorry self around, around such beautiful sights as this, too teary and bleary and just too bloody self-absorbed to see what’s before her eyes. Life is short. Too short for this kind of extended misery.
Stop wasting your life
, he wants to say. But this isn’t what she wants to hear, he knows, and he doesn’t want to be cruel. This is Kate after all, his twin, his other self, the girl who threw rocks at the children who made fun of him, sending his torturers scattering.

He raises his glass in a toast. “To your future,” he says.

She takes a sip, then stares out toward the cathedral.

“You know, Kate, if you mean it about shopping, I’m happy to wait here. I read in the guidebook that there’s a ceramic store on one of the back streets that’s supposed to be a cut above the rest. Better even than the stores in… in…”

A pause begins.

Deruta
, Kate thinks. She looks back at him and takes another sip of wine.

“… in…” Arthur is staring at her now, brows lowered, eyes squinting. She can feel him bearing down. He wants what she knows. He wants something that she has.

Deruta
, she thinks.

“Oh, come on, Kate. What’s the name of that town all the ceramics come from? I know that you know it.”

Deruta
, she thinks. But she just shakes her head and shrugs.

S
tephen was the only person to whom Kate ever confided her in utero crime—the strangulation of her twin. She was a sophomore at Wellesley when they met and fell in love. He was simply the most certain person she had ever known; and it turned out that certainty—of all things—was what she then craved. Maybe what she had always craved, growing up in the concentric rings of Arthur’s endless hesitations; though in the end it turned around and bit her, hard. Stephen’s certainty. But as a young woman, she thought him positive in every sense of the word, like a great strong building himself, a shelter she willingly sought. After a semester of serious dating, they spent a night at an inn in Vermont where her virginity was more given to him than it was lost, and after that she confessed, as though all her secrets, all she had been holding close for nineteen years could now safely be revealed. Stephen, then in medical school, assured her it couldn’t possibly be true—with certainty. A twin
could not
become tangled in the other baby’s cord. Not three times around the neck. It couldn’t possibly ever happen, he said, and in his arms she had believed herself absolved.

O
n the way back down the A1, Kate drives. “You’ve had too much wine,” she tells Arthur. “And anyway, you speed.”

He resists arguing, but as he gets in on the passenger side he makes a big production out of trying to move back the seat, and as they wind down the hill of Orvieto, they are back in the silence that seems to shadow them. But then, within minutes, Arthur remarks on the selection of meats at the
salumeria
they’d both explored, then says that Orvieto was much more interesting than he had expected. She agrees that it was and says that before the week is out she’d like to go back, and he agrees that they should, and only a few minutes later they are both calling the rented farmhouse “home”—just a single day into the trip. He tells her it’s good that they’ll be home in well under an hour, and she says that she’s happy to be spending the evening at home, cooking up some of the pasta that she bought.

How seductive domesticity is, she thinks as she drives. How seductively benign it all seems. How easy to fall into a routine with someone you know. So familiar. Even the bickering. And then the quiet, unacknowledged glide into making up. A well-traveled road. Arthur is reading bits and pieces from the guidebook out loud so they can piece together the coming days, and she wonders, as she has from time to time, why Arthur never settled down with anyone. There was only one serious contender, at least whom she ever knew. Her name was Sylvia, an heiress of the old New England variety—complete with farmhouse in Vermont, town house in Boston, place on the Vineyard, skin that had worn a little tough even in her twenties, and a long rope of inherited pearls Kate had coveted at the time. Much better than any Stephen could ever afford.

The speedometer begins to rise and Arthur ostentatiously cranes his head to see it. “Hmm,” he says. “Who’s speeding now?”

“I want to get home before this storm comes on. And I’m not close to as fast as you were. But you’re right. I’ll slow down.”

“Don’t do it for me. I like the speed. It’s the Italian roads, Kate. It’s Europe. See? Even you. You can’t help but speed. It’s part of the culture here. You shouldn’t be such a… a…”

“Such a what, Arthur? Such a worrywart?”

“No.” Though she has hit the nail on the head. Why, when he never means to be unkind, does he feel himself continually on the verge?

“Stick-in-the-mud? Is that it?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Pessimist, Kate. That’s all. You shouldn’t be such a pessimist. It makes me worry about you. You only see what’s wrong.”

“That’s not fair, Arthur. I’ve had a lot to deal with recently.”

“I don’t mean to be unfair.” He doesn’t. “I’m only trying to help you… move on.”

And for a moment there’s a pause, another pause, and Kate wants him to fill this one. She has wanted to fill this very silence since suggesting that they travel together to mark their sixty-fifth birthday, wanted him to express rage at what has happened to her life, outrage that her husband, certain as ever, has left her to be alone—when she can think of nothing she has done to earn that punishment. She wants her brother, her twin brother, to insist that she recount in detail how awful these last ten months have been. She wants him to call Stephen names, wants him to offer to call Stephen out. Wants him for once to find the right words, the ones powerful enough to carry her rage.

Rain starts to fall, hard.

“It’s probably better,” Arthur says, “if you do slow down a bit.”

But the warning comes too late. The speeding Fiat skids on a slick patch of road, hits a truck whose own brakes have been slammed, and the passenger side of the car is crushed.

II.

When the children were little, Kate would sometimes wonder what strange hypotheses they were concocting within themselves. What guilts did they carry? Of what imaginary crimes might they hope future lovers could absolve them? Martha, Ellen, and Dave. Spaced at two-year intervals, their bonds to one another had always seemed oddly loose to Kate. Loose and unburdened. They were playmates at times, sworn enemies at others, and it all seemed to wash out by the end of any day.

On the day following the crash, all three call her several times in the hospital where she has been kept for observation overnight. Nuns shuffle in and out of her room, crossing themselves, taking her pulse. The sisters speak in whispers, but the children’s voices on the phone are loud and insistent. They declare themselves frantic. They declare themselves disbelieving. Committed to their jobs, to their families, they declare themselves unable to come get her, and she catches a whiff of the neglect she felt from them in the aftermath of their father’s betrayal. They won’t be rushing to her aid. Nonetheless, she must come home. They declare themselves agreed.

That evening, her right arm bandaged, walking with a cane, she returns to the empty farmhouse—because she doesn’t know where else to go—and the children call her there. They insist again that she leave Italy. They have had a day now to take all this in. They have spoken to one another, many times. They have compiled a list of available flights. She should not be alone. She thanks them all for their concern—it all feels so strange—but she doesn’t tell any of them the truth, which is that she cannot go home. An investigation is under way and the police have asked her not to leave. Speaking to her own children, she thinks her voice sounds oddly resolute, when what she really feels is
caught
.

On the third day, her sixty-fifth birthday, they each call again, but not one of them mentions the occasion, and she is grateful to them for that. She drinks herself through the day, Chianti, and when that’s gone some unearthed vermouth that tastes like lacquer but gets the job done. Dispensing with the cane, she moves haltingly from room to room, touching Arthur’s belongings with her good hand. His battered leather suitcase. His smooth, steely laptop. His shirts. The large bed in which he slept, and which he left so carefully made, the pillows plumped up in a row.

The owner of the farmhouse, a stick-thin Italian woman, comes by with a stew and some bread, enough food for two days at least. She asks Kate what else she needs. But Kate can’t think of a single thing.

Late that night, Martha, the eldest, the lawyer, the practical one from
their
nursery years, calls back to tell her mother that a decision must be made—about Arthur. The body can be flown home, preferably with Kate, or he can be cremated there. Either way, it can’t be put off endlessly. Does she realize this? He’s left no instructions. No will that anyone can find. Since Kate is his sister, it’s all her decision. So Kate says she will decide. Soon. She’s decidedly drunk as she answers—only sober enough to hope that she doesn’t sound drunk.

“I think you must still be in shock,” Martha says. “It doesn’t sound like this has hit. I can’t imagine why you’re still over there, Mom.”

“No, it may not have hit. You may be right. But I do feel tired. I should go get some sleep.”

On the fourth day, Stephen calls. The rental car company has notified him—she is still on his insurance. Or the children have. Or the police may have found his name still on the emergency card in her wallet. She has the sense that he may have called her right away that first night when she was still woozy, but she can’t remember clearly. It feels oddly like trying to remember the pleasures of their early years together, distant and doubtful, called into question now. His concern for her is offered in unmistakable tones of detachment, a man phoning his own past to offer condolences. The iron cage of shock begins to fail. Tears flow freely now. Arthur is dead. She is at fault. And Stephen is unable to make it right. Little squeaking sounds escape her.

“It could happen to anyone, Kate,” he says. “Accidents are accidents. The children tell me that there was a storm. It’s terrible, but these things do happen. Don’t beat up on yourself.”

She doesn’t tell him she had been drinking that day, that she was speeding, that she felt petty and annoyed with her brother for having reached their sixty-fifth birthday in so much better shape than she felt herself to be. That Arthur seemed to be purposely withholding from her the sympathy she craved. That she had been knocked down, winded, by visiting the cathedral Stephen had long before taken for his own. Wishing
him
dead. Not Arthur, but him. She only says that she thinks she’s still in shock and none of it seems real. It’s true enough. She forces the tears away and thanks him for calling. She says it will probably hit her soon. But it hasn’t. Not yet.

When they hang up, she lays her head down on the sofa, and sobs and sobs.

On the fifth day, she makes arrangements for Arthur to be cremated.