If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (26 page)

“Are you comfortable?”

The girl says that she is. She nods her head.

It’s hard for Kate to know how to begin. “Maybe this isn’t my business,” she says. “But I heard today… I want to ask you, Anna. I heard a man at the café. I was passing by the kitchen, and there was an argument. His voice…”

The girl nods. “Carlos. The owner.”

“He sounded very angry.” Kate moves her hand to Anna’s cheek. Her fingers barely remember softness of this kind. “No man should ever talk to you that way.”

“Carlos is mean. He’s a terrible man. He owns the café, but thinks he owns me. Like I belong to him. When he touches me…”

“You shouldn’t let him touch you.”

“His hands…”

“What?” Kate has been touched by only one man in her life. Stephen, gentle, cool, loving at one time. “Is he rough with you?”

“His hands have no feeling. From the stove, from being burned. They are dead. He touches me, but cannot feel. I hate this. This not being felt. When he touches me, I feel myself disappear. Like I am not real.” Her face seems to have grown paler, as though the white of the gown has soaked into her skin.

“Don’t let him,” Kate says. “Why should he touch you?”

Anna reaches for Kate’s hand, and guides it to her own shoulder. Kate almost pulls it back, as though she might be burned. As though she is still herself. But she doesn’t.

“Tell me,” Anna says. “Tell me what my skin feels like.”

Kate’s hand lies motionless for a moment; then she begins very lightly to trace circles down Anna’s arm.

“You feel me?” Anna asks. “You feel my skin?”

“Yes.” Smooth as moonlight. “Yes, I do. You feel…”

“Tell me.”

“You feel soft.” It isn’t right. It isn’t enough. “You feel…” Kate watches her fingers, wrinkled at every joint, against the silken olive of Anna’s skin. It is like touching a memory, reaching into the past and caressing what is gone. “You feel beautiful,” she says.

Anna opens her eyes. She touches Kate’s arm, barely grazing the bruises there. Her fingers on Kate’s skin feel so strange. Being touched by anyone feels strange.

“Your husband…” Anna begins.

Kate looks up. “Yes?”

“I want to say this. I hope it doesn’t make you angry. But maybe you are better now, better without him.” She lifts her hand to Kate’s head, pushes a silver lock off Kate’s face. “I saw how he treated you that day, with so little respect. How he flirted with me, with you sitting there. And I see the bruises on your arm. A man who does that, maybe it’s better for him to be gone. You need better… better…”

“Better treatment?” Kate supplies.

“No.” Anna shakes her head, pulls her hand back from Kate’s hair. “Not that word. My brother needs treatment. Because he isn’t right. That’s the word I see, the word I read for him. Treatment. You need… you need…”

The pause stretches out, but Kate has no further guess.

“Love,” Anna says. “You need better love.”

The old word surprises Kate. Love. Immediately, she thinks of Stephen, of the day he left; and all those cold, cold apologies of his, all that efficiency of emotion he displayed. What was it she had wanted of him? Something like loyalty. Something like honor. She had wanted him to stay. That was it. When had it last occurred to her to think of love? The girl’s eyes, large and beautiful, are so serious. Her face is so sincere. Her advice is so sincere.

“You should sleep,” Kate says. “Here.” She moves closer to the bed’s edge, so Anna can stretch out her legs, lie flat. The girl turns on her side, away from Kate. “Here,” she says again, her hand on Anna’s back. “Here. Go to sleep. Go to sleep.”

“No more talking tonight,” Anna says.

“No. It’s time for quiet.” In the darkness, she sees it like an ocean, the quiet around them, like all the waters of the earth, the silences of her life, larger, more powerful than what has ever been spoken, mapped, planned.

When she’s sure the girl is deep asleep, she shifts away, then stands. Her body remembers the particular tread away from a sleeping child, the careful slowness, and then the hurry to be gone.

T
he heat and light have both fallen from the night air, leaving the scent of the rosemary bushes that hover along the stone patio, like motionless shadows. Kate cannot remember when she was last outside so late. The moon is a slim crescent that seems as though it might easily flicker out.

Only feet from the farmhouse it is so dark the surrounding hills and valleys could themselves be an ocean now; or could be nothing at all. But there are vipers in the grass, Arthur told her, black, poisonous snakes, so she stays on the patio, in the light, where she can see what is close to her.

In her hands she holds the box of ashes. She won’t look for somewhere special, not try to do this well, not worry about the questions to come. She will just sprinkle them, a handful, another, a third, out into the darkness where they belong.

IV.

The entrance to Città della Pieve is through an enormous stone gate, built, no doubt, to keep some medieval army from devouring the town. Anna, at the wheel, is talkative, impatient to be done with the drive, impatient to show Kate the flower festival, but the central streets are closed to cars, flimsy barricades at all possible turns.

“I’ll park anywhere,” Anna says. “Here is fine.” She pulls onto a grassy crescent where other cars have been left. “It’s perfect,” she says, handing Kate the keys. “We’ll go look for my cousin now.”

“Don’t forget your jar.”

Kate gave it to her, early that morning, in the kitchen. “Sell it,” she said. “Or bring it back to the store. You can probably return it. Use the money, for your brother. It was very expensive. It might be of some help.”

Her head is still throbbing from last night’s wine.

“There’s a meal today, outside, for the entire town,” Anna says, beginning to walk away. “A town party. Come.”

The music in the air is familiar, maybe a song that Kate learned as a child. She follows Anna into an open square and finds a small crowd gathered around a brass band of young people, in black shorts and white shirts. A nun, also in black and white, conducts.

“From the school,” Anna calls back, walking fast. “This is their big day.”

“Very nice,” Kate says, but too quietly to be heard.

It is already a big day for her too. Captain Marconi called early to ask if she was sure of what she had told him. It was very difficult for them, he said. There was no way to know how much she had been drinking, how quickly she had driven. There was no proof. She might be misremembering. Such mistakes can occur. While he spoke, Kate walked outside, to the patio. The darkness and whatever it held had vanished, the landscape appeared again, the patches of olive trees, wheat, jostling one another on the hills.
Coltura promiscua
.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. On the grass around her, dew had beaded, sparkling now, as though everything she had scattered the night before had been washed away by dawn. “Yesterday morning, I’m afraid I misspoke. I have been upset, and quick to blame myself. But I do not believe it was my fault.”

A moment’s silence passed. In that case, Marconi said, the office would like again to offer her their most sincere condolences. She is free to go home.

Anna is still in sight, but far ahead. In this tandem, they pass rows of closed shops, through a stream of people in festive clothes, until finally, at the mouth of a street, Anna stops. “Here,” she says, gesturing into the road’s opening. “Here you will see. The festival of the flowers. This is why we have come.”

Kate makes her way to where Anna stands, but at first she sees nothing. Nothing at all. And then what she does see makes no sense. The road that falls before them has been painted, with many colors. It has been drenched with color, as far as Kate can see, as though an endless supply of paint has been spilled from this, the highest point.

“Is it always… ?” she asks Anna. “Is the street always painted?”

“Look closer,” Anna says. “Go and look.”

Kate takes a step, and then another, and she sees it isn’t paint, not flat, but textured rough. It’s a tapestry, she thinks. A massive, unfurled tapestry. She takes one more step as a tiny wind blows, just a breath, and the colors before her seem to exhale, in a sigh.

“But they’re flower petals,” she says. “All of them.”

Anna’s hands are clasped together, her face wide with a smile. “Don’t look,” she says. “Not yet. Don’t start here. Come with me to the bottom of the hill.” She guides Kate away from the petals lying there. “It’s the history of Italy,” she explains. “The history of the world. Going up the hill. Beginning with Adam and Eve, of course.” It is an annual town project, she tells Kate, done for as long as anyone can remember. “Families, neighbors, they are in teams. By tradition. Something like Siena, like the Palio. Each group has a square, and a time in history to show. They draw the scene, before sunrise, on the street. They have all the petals. They dry them for months. The parents draw the picture, just the… the…”

“Outline?”

“Yes, the outline. The children are the painters. They paint with flowers. They fill in all the color on the street.”

By now, they have reached the lowest point. Looking up, Kate can see the long banner, dozens of squares draped up the hill. Just before her, at her feet, is the first. A black
vipera
twines himself around a gray-barked tree, hung heavily with fruit. His split tongue slithers, long and pointed, blood-red from his mouth, as a naked Eve bends toward him, hand outstretched, while Adam’s back is turned.

Kate stoops, leaning in, her eyes on the broken flowers, none of them much bigger than an inch. When she stands upright, they disappear, the whole picture emerging clear once again. It all seems impossible to Kate, impossible that these weightless wisps have conspired into this scene. Into Eve, so complete in her struggle, leaning eternally forward, reaching so fatefully for the fruit, aware and unaware of what she does. How can it be this moment is only sprinkled here? Scattered onto the ground, held by the slimmest gravity?

Looking uphill, she watches the children at the ready along the way, their hands brimming with endless petals, placing them down, filling in colors where the edges have loosened into ragged floral shards. Anna has moved ahead again, just several feet, studying a different scene, her hands on her hips. Suddenly Kate is afraid of a wind that might blow, afraid the colors will vanish as it all floats away.

“But what happens?” she calls. “At the end of the day? What happens to it then?”

“At the end? It only takes a broom,” Anna answers with a smile and a shrug. “At dusk, you will see. One old woman with a broom sweeps it all down the hill.” She wipes her hands together in a brisk gesture. “And that’s that,” she says. “It is done.”

For a moment, Kate watches her climb to the next square. “Come with me, Kate,” she hears Anna’s voice say. “Come with me, now. Come see.”

“I will. I’ll catch up. I’ll be right there.”

But she has difficulty leaving this opening scene.

Kate turns back to see Eve surrender once again, knowing now how little time is left. Only hours before all of history is swept down on her.

A light breeze blows and from this distance Eve’s flesh seems to quiver, as if alive.

Acknowledgments

I
have been so fortunate throughout the long process of writing this book. I have been helped by so many people. My extraordinary agent, Henry Dunow, has steered me and my work far beyond any hopes I ever allowed myself to have and has been a friend and wise adviser all the while. I’m immeasurably grateful to him and equally grateful to have him as my companion through this. My editor, the brilliant Kate Medina, has shown an understanding of my fiction that amazes me always and buoys me often. She, Laura Ford, and Lindsey Schwoeri, have made a mighty, mighty team. I’m so fortunate to have benefited from their insights, enthusiasm, and care, as well as from the extraordinary support that everyone at Random House has given to this book.

The earliest of these stories were written in the Rittenhouse Writers Group in Philadelphia, and I only wish that every anxious, hopeful writer who expects at any minute to be declared a fraud had such a place to be and to grow into her own words. Other stories emerged while I was in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers, where I learned incalculable amounts from my work with C. J. Hribal and Kevin (Mc) McIlvoy, and also from the insights of Peter Turchi, director of the program at the time. I’m still trying to figure out how I got lucky enough to work with Steven Schwartz my first semester in the program. He was an extraordinary teacher then and has been a generous mentor and friend ever since.

Before these stories were ever in a book, they were in literary journals, where they benefited from the talents and the inadequately celebrated commitment of editors who work with devotion and artistry to ensure, quite simply, that good writing has a good home. Every one of those people has my gratitude and my admiration.

Since beginning this project, I have been honored to receive recognition from the Leeway Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner-Wisdom Writing Competition, and I thank them all. A very special thank-you goes to Antonio and Carla Sirsale of the hotel Le Sirenuse for my Sirenland Conference Fellowship, and for their most generous hospitality to both me and my husband. Special thanks too to Jeffrey Levine and Grace Dane (Gretchen) Mazur of Tupelo Press for their invaluable role in the creation of this book. My deep gratitude as well to Kate Harvey at Picador, UK, for her acute insights, her good humor, and her friendship.

Shannon Cain, Erin Stalcup, and Jim Zervanos have been loyal and cherished readers. The fact that each happens to be a brilliant writer in his or her own right makes the gift of their attention to my work that much more precious—but still the gift of their friendship far outshines even that. More support, more entirely essential care, more extraordinary friendship has come from David Black, Gavin Black, Eleanor Bloch, Jane Cutler, Donald Goldberg, Amy Grimm, Stephanie G’Schwind, Allan Gurganus (my very first writing teacher), Laurie Schafer, Dani Shapiro, Alice Schell, Daniel Torday, Bettyruth Walter, Richard Wertime, Bonnie West, the extraordinary alumni of the Warren Wilson MFA Program, and the amazing students I have had along the way who have allowed me to learn by their side.

I have been blessed with a mother, Barbara Aronstein Black, who understands that unless she tells me when my writing is problematic, I’ll never believe her when she says it’s great. She is one of the most astute readers I have and one of the best friends I will ever have. I think it’s a toss-up which of us cared more about getting my work out into the world—and for it mattering so deeply to her, I am more grateful than she can know. Also, importantly, in ways too complex to describe, too precious to me to qualify, my father, the late Charles L. Black Jr., has been a constant partner in this project from the start.

As a writer, I have a lot of faith in the capacity of language to express anything really, but am unable to find words that fully express my gratitude to my children, Elizabeth Simins, David Simins, and Annie Goldberg. All I can say, E, D, & A, is that nothing you’ve done has been lost on me. I know what you have given and I know what you have given up. And I hope you know that you, my true first collection, are my heroines and my hero.

As for my husband, Richard Goldberg, no writer has ever had the obstacles cleared for her as surely as he has cleared those in my way, nor had her path illuminated as brightly as he has lit mine. I have been given a lot of amazing gifts by many, many people, but finally, truly, it is Richard who has given me this book.

It took me eight years to write the ten stories here, and there is simply no way to acknowledge every person who helped in some way, whether with writing advice or kindness or child care or faith or by authoring a story that amazed and inspired me. I hope I’ll have the chance to thank you all in person. I surely mean to try.