Dolci di Love

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

  Or was it? She poured herself another glass. She didn’t want to move out of the Seventy-second Street apartment. She loved the closets. Hers was perfect. She could find anything she wanted at just a glance. It was cost effective too, not that she needed to worry about that, lucky her, but being able to see all her beautiful clothes constantly reminded her of things she had forgotten she had, which meant she bought fewer new ones, or at least rarely doubled up.

  Could she hold her marriage together for closet space? Stranger things had happened, she was sure. It was just that she didn’t have a boring shoe collection like Daniel; she had a magnificent shoe collection. Hers were all colour-blocked and shelved in individual cubbyholes. Never mind wearing them, it gave her a thrill just to see them. The question was, could she overlook the whole lamination issue just to keep them that way?

  Anyway, if they divorced, Daniel would have to move out. She could still afford to keep the apartment. She would be in it by herself, but she was in it by herself a lot of the time anyway. She had never minded that. She had never minded Daniel being there and she had never minded him being away.

  Being divorced might not change anything apart from giving her the opportunity to double her shoe collection, move into his side of the wardrobe.

  Forget holding her marriage together over closet space, could she end it for the same reason?

  She wasn’t sure. And there was something wrong with that, there was something wrong with her not minding Daniel being there or being somewhere else. She had loved him with all her heart and soul, and although she wasn’t sure if she still did, she knew she had never actually decided not to. So what the heck had happened? How had such an enormous change come about without her authority? No, worse than that, without her even noticing?

  She had a lot to figure out and none of it was becoming any clearer, so she ordered another half bottle of wine, a dessert wine, and because it would seem inappropriate to not have dessert, she ordered one of those too.

  ‘Tiramisu?’ the waiter prompted her as she perused the menu a little blearily. She supposed that’s what most Americans ordered.

  ‘Sí, grazie,’ Lily answered with a curt little nod.

  When the tiramisu arrived soon after, she pushed it away without even dipping her spoon in it and concentrated instead on the wine and her plan.

  She could divorce Daniel or not, whatever she decided, and it appeared to not matter. This seemed hopelessly inconclusive. But as the afternoon light faded to evening across the hills, what finally became clear was that whatever she was going to do, she did not actually need to find Daniel to do it.

  He was not a requirement in her immediate future.

  She could just go back to her room at Violetta’s, pack her bag, and fly straight home to New York. End of story.

  Should she decide to keep the status quo, Daniel need never know she had been to Italy. Should she decide she wanted his closet space, she could see a lawyer before he got back and start the proceedings.

  She need never see her husband again.

  Lily left that possibility to fully sink in, but it seemed merely to skip across the glassy surface of her heart, only just breaking the surface, never plunging into its shadowy depths.

  She tried to picture Daniel the way he used to be, the way he was when she couldn’t imagine a minute without him, let alone a lifetime. He used to look at her as though she were the most beautiful woman in the world and he the luckiest guy. She knew this to be true, she’d seen that look a thousand times, but now, sitting in the back blocks of Pienza draining her glass, she couldn’t imagine him that way, try as she might. All she could see was his Prada belt with a wide hip in front of it and a fat baby’s striped leg attached to that.

  A fat baby. Don’t go there, she urged herself. Not now. Just don’t.

  ‘Grappa, signora?’ the waiter asked, smoothly whisking away her empty wine bottle but leaving the tiramisu.

  Lily looked at him in surprise. She could not believe she had finished the wine. It felt like she’d only just taken the first sip. She was as sober as a judge but still unbelievably thirsty. Insatiably thirsty. And she hadn’t finalised the plan yet. She needed to finalise the plan. Grappa was a liqueur, she knew that, and while she generally steered clear of those, she thought it would round off her completely uneaten meal perfectly.

  She smiled serenely. ‘Sí, grazie,’ she murmured.

  The grappa tasted like paint stripper. It was so strong her eyes watered when she lifted it near her lips and it was all she could do to sip it, although in the end she managed, and the second glass slipped down far more easily.

  The good thing was that there would be no stigma attached to divorcing Daniel because nearly everyone got divorced these days. And there would be no stigma attached to staying with him because no one would know what he had done.

  No one would feel pity for her, mumbling over the candles at dinner parties that there she was, the poor barren wife, working all hours of the day and night to keep him in style, while he was playing up in Italy, getting everything for himself that he had once promised her.

  If they didn’t know what he had done, life would go on as it had been. Daniel would have his pals and his golf and his trips to Italy, and Lily would have her wardrobe, her workouts, her sixteen-hour days at the office. This was the world she had built for herself. This was the world that still stood, that could stay standing, untouched by Daniel’s betrayal, if that’s what she decided was best.

  She could keep living like that, she knew she could. But an image of a green-eyed, olive-skinned, leggy little girl popped into her mind. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ Francesca had asked.

  Lily batted the image away and looked at the tiramisu. ‘Don’t stay this cold, lonely person,’ it said to her, giving her such a fright she screamed.

  The waiter dropped a tray of drinks on the nearest table and came running.

  ‘Signora, is everything OK?’ he asked, looking around, bewildered.

  Lily stared at the tiramisu again, mouth agape, as the cream across the top shimmered. ‘It’s not the real you,’ it said to her.

  She sprang out of her chair and reeled back from the table as if the tiramisu was about to follow up its conversation with a physical attack.

  ‘Is there something wrong with your dessert?’ the waiter asked.

  Was there something wrong with it? It had spoken to her.

  ‘Did you see that? Did you hear it?’ she asked him. ‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that!’ she said to the tiramisu.

  ‘I’m sorry, signora? I just ask if there is something wrong with the dessert.’

  ‘No, not you,’ Lily said. ‘That.’ She pointed at the table. ‘That.’

  ‘Can I get you a glass of water, signora? Or perhaps a taxi?’

  The waiter was no longer on her side, she could tell that. He stood back, irritated. Two couples sitting at another table dragged their eyes off her and started whispering among themselves. The tiramisu glistened in a smug fashion and stayed resolutely silent.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, it’s time I left,’ Lily said, flinging far too much money on the table. ‘The cheese was too rich, I think…I’m so sorry. Thank you. Goodbye.’

  She stumbled out into the small square, down a curving alley, and emerged into the cool air of the emptying main piazza, where shock gave way to dizziness, confusion, embarrassment. She had to lean on the warm stone of the pope’s palace to steady herself. That grappa!

  Eventually she lurched over to a drinking fountain in a corner of the square and took a long slug of water. She should have been drinking water all day—what was the matter with her? Everyone knew that after a long flight you were dehydrated and needed to look after yourself. All that pastry for breakfast and plates of pecorino—never mind she hadn’t eaten any of it. That wasn’t the point. The point was…oh, hang the point. The point was beside the point. There was no point.

  The tiramisu had spoken to her. That was bad. That was very ba
d. She’d drunk three half-bottles of wine (or was it four?) and some grappa and the tiramisu had spoken to her.

  ‘I should have eaten the damn thing,’ Lily said to herself. ‘That would have shut it up.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ An elderly English gentleman who happened to be passing by with his wife thought she had spoken to them. ‘What was that?’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Lily mumbled, horrified to hear that her voice sounded slurred. ‘Perfectly fine. Really.’

  The man protectively hustled his wife away, looking at Lily over his shoulder as he did so.

  ‘I think she’s had too much to drink, dear,’ Lily heard the woman say, to her complete mortification.

  It was the grappa. She’d have been fine if she’d stuck to just wine. The grappa had been too strong and had unsettled her equilibrium. She just needed to find her car and get back to Violetta’s to lie down on those crackling apricot sheets. She’d got carried away coming up with her plan and it had been foolish to accept a liqueur on an empty stomach. She just needed to sleep, then everything would be all right.

  When she felt steady enough on her feet she retraced her steps and miraculously found her car, failing on the first few attempts to get the key in the lock, but finally opening the door and sliding into the driver’s seat.

  She got the key into the ignition but couldn’t find the lights and as she hunched over the dashboard, stabbing at different levers and buttons, Dermott lit up like a Christmas tree.

  ‘Please, please, I beg you, don’t sweep this one under the carpet,’ he urged her in his Irish lilt. ‘Please, please, I beg you.’

  ‘You have got to be kidding me!’ Lily cried, collapsing on the steering wheel, her arms flung around it, her head dropping on to them. It was too much. It was all just too much. Everyone was against her: Rose, Daniel, Carlotta, the tiramisu, and now even Dermott, whom she’d trusted with her life. Her life!

  ‘I thought you were my friend,’ she told him tiredly. ‘You’re supposed to be my friend.’

  He didn’t reply but he didn’t have to. Lily knew when she was beat. She closed her eyes and slept.

  Chapter 22

  Violetta sat back in her chair and wondered if she would ever be in a good mood again. Everything hurt.

  ‘Tell us once more what happened,’ she said tiredly to the widow Del Grasso.

  ‘I told you, Lily went to Poliziano and had two glasses of prosecco, then got caught up in Signora Borsolini firing someone again, but she ended up at Alberto’s, just as we planned.’

  ‘Well, if she ended up at Alberto’s just as we planned, why don’t we know where she is now?’

  ‘I waited outside for as long as I could,’ the widow Del Grasso said, ‘but nature called and I was only gone for a moment. I used the restroom at the souvenir shop, and then I suppose I, well, I got confused and then, I, then she…a person can only hold on for so long, you know.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Violetta said impatiently, who among them could not attest to how long, or otherwise, a person could hold on for these days. ‘It’s all right, widow Del Grasso, of course it is, but widow Mazzetti, I wonder if we need a new rule to cover this business of going to the bathroom. It’s not going to get any better.’

  ‘You and your rules!’ chortled Fiorella. ‘How about a rule to stop having more rules? You can only eat cantucci, you have to wear black, you’re not allowed to use the bathroom while you’re snooping, and what else?’

  ‘You must have known the true love of a decent man,’ piped up the widow Mazzetti, who took the question seriously. ‘That’s actually the first one.’

  ‘Yup, I got that,’ said Fiorella.

  ‘To benefit from the work of the League, to qualify as a calzino rotto, you must have a good heart and a clear conscience,’ continued the widow Mazzetti.

  ‘A clear conscience? Hmm. Tricky. Yes, but understandable.’

  ‘And our assistance is a special one-time-only offer,’ the widow Pacini added. ‘That one’s quite new.’

  ‘What’s that about?’

  ‘That’s about a lovely seamstress we found for a pig farmer out near Aquaviva,’ the widow Mazzetti explained, ‘back in late November 1982, if memory serves me correctly, and it was an extremely good match. They would have been very happy, but he left the poor woman when she became ill and was advised to give up eating meat.’

  ‘Doctor’s orders,’ cried two other widows simultaneously. They lived in fear of the same thing happening to them.

  ‘The pig farmer said there were some things on which he could not compromise,’ the widow Mazzetti went on, ‘and refusal to eat pork was one of them.’

  ‘He went straight back to being sad and lonely,’ Luciana added, ‘but started dropping hints left, right and centre to everyone he came upon about being on the lookout for another wife, but one with better bowels. It caused quite a stir.’

  Quite a stir, indeed. Two of the widows (the two most keen on swine goods, it had to be said) wanted to give him another chance, four more wanted to shoot those two, four others wanted to shoot the pig farmer, and the whole question of who deserved love and who didn’t was debated hotly for weeks.

  ‘The end result,’ explained the widow Mazzetti, ‘was that we voted on a regulation declaring that we would help the downhearted once, but if they blew it, they were on their own.’

  ‘A separate clause,’ added Violetta, ‘mooted by Luciana, seconded by me, widely supported, and added as a note, was that love is all about compromise.’

  She looked at her sister, who looked straight back. They had barely spoken a civil word since their quarrel about the cantucci. Just what Violetta needed: another lump in her throat.

  ‘What if she’d just chosen to not eat meat?’ Fiorella asked. ‘The Aquaviva pig farmer’s wife. Would we have had more sympathy for the pig farmer then?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said half the women in the room.

  ‘No, not at all,’ said the other half.

  Another spirited debate was about to break out, and not in a good way, so Violetta called the group to attention with a single bellow.

  ‘It would behoove us all to remember,’ she went on, quite menacingly, glowering at Fiorella in particular, ‘that when a single sock goes missing, it is sometimes never found. This is a catastrophe for the sock that remains. We have just let such a sock slip through our net, so now is not the time to stand around causing trouble and nitpicking. Now is the time to remedy this disaster.’

  The widow Del Grasso took this opportunity to sneak off to the bathroom and have a good cry. It was her eyes, her pesky, cloudy, failing eyes. She’d sat on her glasses the month before and couldn’t afford new ones. The truth was that after she’d been to the restroom, she had thought she was following Lily out of Alberto’s wine shop but was practically inside one of the washing machines up at the Laundromat on the other side of town before she realised the person she was following was actually much younger, much shorter, and had much more gingery hair than Lily.

  It was the white pants. She had simply followed the white pants and it had been her undoing.

  Back in the main room, the door from behind the baptismal font burst open and the widow Ciacci bustled in, red-faced and wheezing. She’d spent the past few hours looking for Alberto, her grandson, and had finally tracked him down to a poker den behind the piazza grande. Of course he knew where the bella blonde was headed, he proudly told his grandmother.

  ‘She’s in Castelmuzio,’ she reported breathlessly to her friends. ‘Or Montefollonico. Or Pienza.’

  ‘My sister lives in Castelmuzio,’ spoke up one widow. ‘I could make a few discreet inquiries with her.’

  ‘I know the baker in Montefollonico,’ said another. ‘I could try him.’

  ‘My cousin’s a waiter in Pienza,’ the widow Del Grasso said, entering the room again, red-eyed but hopeful she could undo some of the damage she had caused. ‘His wife’s a bit of a battle-axe and won’t like it if I call this late, but I can try an
yway.’

  Chapter 23

  Ingrid and Daniel sat across the table from each other at an outdoor table in the Piazza della Signoria. They had both ordered grilled tuna with asparagus sauce, but only Ingrid was eating.

  ‘You know, I think Florence might just be my favourite spot in all the world,’ she said, taking a sip of her wine. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Daniel answered, pushing his food around the plate. He had no appetite for anything.

  Ingrid eyed him, weighing whether she should stick another oar into his murky waters or leave him to it. His earlier emotional outburst had ended without explanation. He’d simply stopped weeping, excused himself, and emerged a half hour later looking perfectly normal.

  Still, in her opinion, Daniel Turner was a study in a broken man doing an almost OK job of holding himself together. He had a good heart, she could tell that as easily as she could tell an avocado was ripe just by squeezing it. But he was in trouble.

  Part of her, the vacationing part, just wanted to enjoy having lunch with a handsome man and then wander across the Ponte Vecchio to the Boboli Gardens like a normal tourist. But another part of her, the mothering part, wanted to know what had happened to him and to see if there was anything she could do to help.

  She remembered a day from a darker part of her past when she had abandoned her little boys at home untended and ran to a nearby park where she hid on a bench, sobbing, until her elderly neighbour happened upon her. She’d have left them forever, she thought, if not for Mrs. McArthur’s sage advice that sometimes getting to the end of the day without killing anyone was as good as it got—but that was still pretty good.

  They’d held hands, she and her ancient widowed neighbour, until Ingrid felt the return of a little fault line of love for her noisy children and her distracted husband. Then the two of them had gone home, and Mrs. McArthur had helped her feed and bathe the little boys and put them to bed.