A Slender Thread (35 page)

“Go ahead,” he said. “Mom and I will come find you after I pay the bill.” He looked around for the only waiter, who when not sizing up his daughters had been busily shuttling drinks back and forth to the other tourists gathered on the terrace.

“I want to go . . .” Lacey paused, then added emphatically, “too.” She sipped the last of her water and reached for her handbag. Alex noticed that jet lag had not made Lacey's speech worse. He had worried that the fatigue that usually affected her fluency would be a problem after the long flight and time change, but in the three days they'd been there she was showing no ill effects.

“Where will I meet you?” Alex asked.

“How about by the car?” Toni said. “There's that park there, remember?”

He agreed, recalling the benches across the street from where they had left the Fiat. The location was high above the valley. He might have time to take some pictures of the views he had only glimpsed while maneuvering the car up the steep hill to Orvieto. The dreamy landscape punctuated with dark green cypress trees looked like the backgrounds he had seen in the Renaissance paintings in the Borghese Gallery and Museum in Rome. Everything in Italy connected to the past. Rome itself had looked like a theater set from the sixteenth century.

“An hour or so?” he asked.

Wink told him that would be fine and he watched as his family gathered their bags, sunglasses, assorted maps and guide books, leaving him to wait for the bill. Lacey smiled down at him. She wore a straw sun hat with a wide, floppy brim that shaded her face. Just before turning out of sight, she glanced back at him once more. Yes, maybe the sun was doing its work.

Now by himself, Alex studied the people around him. Two large groups of Japanese tourists and several handfuls of Germans sat clustered in pockets. Closer to Alex were some hikers sharing tall pitchers of beer—Swedish or Norwegian, he guessed from their coloring and stature, and from the few words he overheard. They had piled their backpacks in a dusty mound behind their table. They looked flushed and weary from the steep climb up to the town.

Those gathered on the terrace in Orvieto had no idea that Lacey was suffering in any way. No one even gave her a second glance when she left the restaurant with her daughters. She seemed like any mother, happy to be out on a beautiful afternoon, looking in store windows, shopping for shoes. Being in Italy was like starting over, he thought again.

The three women at the table on Alex's other side were Italian. He picked up snippets of their discussions, mostly the easily identifiable words he'd been studying—words for “please,” “thank you,” “you're welcome.” Now that he was alone, he concentrated on their conversation. The stream of Italian that poured out amid laughter and emphatic hand gestures was all but unintelligible to him. It had been easy to copy and repeat the few phrases from the CDs he'd been playing in his car back home, but it was a totally different experience to try to decode the entire sentences that poured out of their mouths with such alarming rapidity. No sooner would he puzzle out a word and try to look it up in his dictionary than the ladies would be paragraphs ahead, and seemingly on to another topic.

The waiter appeared and Alex handed him his credit card. The older woman at the next table said something to Alex. She had gray hair and fine wrinkles set into her well-tanned face. She pointed to the chairs recently vacated by his daughters and seemed to be asking him something. Suddenly Alex guessed that she was asking if his daughters were twins. He responded with
“Si, si,”
and tried to say “My daughters, my wife.” He pointed to his shoes, and then said
“tre”
for “three,” and lifted his right hand, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together to indicate the expense of three women shopping for shoes. The Italian ladies seemed to acknowledge his message with more lyrical utterances before breaking into laughter.

Alex kept smiling and moved his head up and down, as if he could follow every word they said. When the waiter brought him his check and credit card, he told the ladies good-bye in Italian, and felt pleased for making himself understood.

He decided to visit the cathedral before taking the street down through the town to the park where they had left the car. He crossed the square as more people spilled into the streets, and walked through the swinging leather door at the side of the church. The central doors were probably opened only for important occasions. The air inside the old building felt cool and calming; it smelled of age-old stone. After the heat and chatter of the café, he appreciated the silence in the dim interior. He tried to imagine the peasants, farmers who worked the fields in the surrounding countryside, making the pilgrimage to this place when it was first built, hearing prayers in a language they did not understand. Staring up into the Gothic vaults, he thought how trivial language really was. In the café he had been able to read faces and gestures, a simple form of communication. Even without the right words, he had understood what was going on. Would Lacey still be the same person when she lost her ability to speak? The very thought of her words locked inside, no longer accessible to him, was frightening.

Prayers, another form of communication, were more than words, he thought. Prayers were about seeking answers, trusting in faith. Did he have that in him? He continued to walk around this sacred space. His footsteps echoed. This church had no seats, no pews. Aged frescoes covered the walls, and a triptych was displayed in the nave. It was more of a museum now than a church. He shivered and, once again hungry for the sun, decided to go outside and walk to the car.

 

Alex and his family settled into the country inn outside Monte-pulciano, where they would spend the week exploring the hill towns in Tuscany. The innkeeper served a multicourse dinner on the terrace that evening: a platter of cured meats, olives, and roasted peppers, followed by pasta with vegetables in a lemon cream sauce, then roasted pork. They all turned down dessert, but indulged in glasses of Vin Santo, a dessert wine, in which they dipped hazelnut biscotti. After this sumptuous meal they stumbled up to bed.

The girls were sharing a room off the terrace close to the pool and Alex and Lacey had an upstairs room with a balcony. Before collapsing into bed, Alex threw the French doors wide open. The tile floor under his bare feet was still warm from the day, but the air was growing cooler. Lacey was already asleep. He slipped under the linen sheets and brought the blanket to his chin.

The wine had made him sleepy. He heard the lonely bark of a dog on the hillside in the distance. The air smelled of mown hay—dry and sweet.
Like summer should be
, he thought as he drifted into unconsciousness.

During the night Alex dreamed of Bow Lake many years before. The call of the loon cut through the air and water lapped at the shore. Leaves rustled high in the trees. Unseen nocturnal creatures scurried through the pine-scented woods. Even though the surroundings were familiar, in this dream he was lost in an overpowering darkness. Was he floating? No. His back was pressed into the earth. The ground was hard. He felt the prick of pine needles. The dark was intense, and no matter how hard he tried, his eyes wouldn't open. Then he felt a flutter of kisses on his chest, the sweep of hair across his face. He lifted his arms to reach out. An inner voice told him to stop. A command. He must not. He was unable to speak, to call out. Helpless. Suddenly, he knew. Margot. Margot was with him. Margot's mouth was about to touch his own. He gasped and began to choke.

He opened his eyes to a swath of moonlight across the bed. There was no scent of pine. The Italian night had grown warm. Had he called out? Lacey's hair spilled out across his chest and her hands touched him, stroking his arm, his neck, his face. Her breath warmed his ear and she kissed his cheek, his forehead, the hollows of his eyes. Her lips were light, barely there, until she met his mouth. In the middle of a moonlit night in Italy she had come back to him.

“Lace,” he whispered.

“Shhh.” She brought her fingers to his lips.

They made love. After he felt the initial surprise of holding her close once again, his uncertainty disappeared. She loved him fully, and he loved her. After so many months complicated by doubts and fears, he was finally able to forget for a short while the burden they both carried. It was as if Lacey's diagnosis, the sense of doom they wore like a second skin, had slipped away into the night air.

Moonlight flooded the room. He could see clearly. He pushed himself onto his elbow and touched Lacey's face. Her cheeks were wet with tears. He started to speak, then silently took the hem of the sheet and patted her face dry. Her fingers briefly touched his hand and then she drifted into sleep. There was so much he didn't want to think about, so much he wished he could forget. The unpleasant taste of his dream lingered in his mind. He watched for the dawn and eventually dozed.

When he woke the next morning Lacey was not in bed. He wondered briefly if their lovemaking had even happened. He pulled on the hotel robe and walked to the balcony doors. Lacey and the twins sat at a table eating breakfast on the terrace near the pool, their faces shaded by a large green umbrella. He remembered dreaming about Margot, and swallowed, feeling suddenly unwell. He tried to convince himself it was the wine from the night before, the rich food, his exhaustion from the long drive. Italy would cure him, he thought, and headed to the shower.

 

“A hair to the left,” Margot said.

Mario stood at the top of a stepladder, adjusting the spotlights for the summer exhibition at the Van Engen Gallery. “Can you angle it down just a bit? That spot needs to flood the whole picture.”

“Let me move this one over.” He reached out for the next light, teetering precariously as he leaned to the left.

“Careful,” Margot said. He didn't seem to mind her maternal cautioning. Technically, she was old enough to be his mother. Now and again, he had even come to Margot for advice about girlfriends. For the last year he had been seeing Julie, four inches taller than he, with a wide smile, and an intelligent face, who worked in the education department of the Museum of Natural History. Margot, who liked to think of Mario as a younger brother, had encouraged the relationship.

“Yes. That's it. Just right.” She stepped away and walked back and forth, checking the lighting on the entire wall.

“So we're done?” he asked, descending the stepladder.

“It looks great. Carl will be pleased. I'll finish the price list in the morning. You won't need to come in until late afternoon.”

The summer show, titled Waterworks, was the work of a group of five watercolor artists who painted scenes from the Adirondacks. She gazed at the quiet views, horizontal compositions of woodland streams, leafy valleys, undulating hills. The opening reception was the next evening. Carl liked having less controversial art up for the summer, pieces that he called easy on the eye. Margot thought of the studies she was doing of Bow Lake. She wanted her pictures to be beautiful like these on view, but she hoped to convey something more—the peace, the ephemeral quality of an unspoiled place, nostalgia for what might no longer exist. That was the difficult part.

“Do you have plans for the weekend?” Mario asked, kicking the two sides of the stepladder into place and carrying it toward the storage area behind the office. He knew that Oliver was away for the summer.

“Nothing much,” she said, forcing a smile. She sat behind her desk and quickly checked her home e-mail account. Seeing nothing from Oliver, she clicked the computer switch off. She worried again that they were growing dangerously apart. “I may go to the chamber music concert in the park on Saturday. Our downstairs neighbor has put a group together. They're organizing a potluck picnic supper. How about you?”

“Apartment hunting with Julie. We've decided to get a place together.”

Margot looked up at Mario, who had perched at the edge of the desk. “It must be getting serious.”

He smiled with almost childlike delight. “Yep. Moving in together makes it real. Now that we'll be sharing the rent, I'm hoping I can afford some more studio space.” He cocked his head. “Carl said you've been painting a lot.”

Margot nodded. “I'm using my old apartment as a studio. With Oliver away I have plenty of time.”
Too much time
, she thought. The hours she spent painting helped, but she was often lonely. Oliver called intermittently. He insisted he was having an excellent summer. If he missed her, he wouldn't admit it. Margot could still become angry thinking about the way he had tried to set the agenda for their lives. She had only wanted one summer. Oliver had grudgingly agreed in the end.

“Have you checked out the real estate market lately?”

“What?” she asked, not sure what he was talking about.

“Man, Margot, you could sell your little place for a ton. You wouldn't have to work here if you had that kind of dough.”

“You're probably right.” She lifted her shoulders and released them with a sigh. She thought of the painting she had started just a few days before, a picture of the moon path on Bow Lake. She was trying to capture the cool water, the gentle lapping sound along the shore, the delicious feel of lowering your body into the lake on a summer night. It was proving to be the most challenging piece she had ever attempted. She remembered the way Oliver had rendered the night sky in Riverside Park with just the right shades.

“Say,” Mario continued, interrupting her thoughts, “do you want to join me and Julie for a drink? I'm meeting her downtown. I'm not sure what we're planning for dinner.”

“Thanks, but I have a few errands to run on the way home.” Margot smiled, touched that he would think of including her. She hoped she hadn't been looking too down these last weeks. “Another time, maybe?”