When the music stops, silence comes into the great room, moving through the sea of humming souls. A vibration floats in and around, below and above. Lavinia hears the DJ say, “You are alive. Feel the hum in your connection. Take this with you into the night.”
Carmine and Kinky sway toward them. They are humming their own vibration. The four of them huddle in a close circle, congratulating each other silently, heart to heart, beat to beat, arms around each other, before walking out into the night air toward the bus stop.
Carmine walks with them toward the 30 Stockton, where he says good-bye. Arm in arm, Lavinia, Mario, and Kinky wait for their own bus. When it doesn’t come, they walk to Grant Avenue through Chinatown, flickering red lanterns lighting their way. Lavinia and Kinky smile at each other. After midnight, they reach the Mission and stop in front of Kinky’s house, where Kinky leans into Lavinia for a hug and whispers, “I like him.” The friends hold each other in a long hug before saying bye.
With Mario’s warm hand in hers, Lavinia weaves seamlessly through small pockets of tourists and shopkeepers who are closing down on 16th Street. Their silence feels big and round, like the forest.
At her place, she unlocks the door. Mario follows her into the long, cave-like room and to the far end, where she leads him to her bed and darkened room. As natural as following the beat of the music, they undress each other, allowing their tongues to roam the wet spaces of their mouths and then move down each other’s body. He kisses every part of her, finding hidden places that throb and seem to be laughing loudly.
“I like the way you move, Lavinia,” Mario says. “You are on fire.”
He slowly kisses her. She flows into him and melts. They dance as one great beat, yet also rooted, like trees. They fall into each other as his love releases and enters deeply inside her.
He whispers a love song as sweet as their embrace: “You are a perfect completion of a never-ending circle of my small life, Lavinia Lavinia. Lavinia, Lavinia,” he repeats her name over and over while holding her in his arms.
As dear Sleep takes them in her embrace, Lavinia whispers, “Mario Mario, do you see we are falling into a galaxy of connection?”
Chapter 20:
THE DISCOVERY
Morning peeks through the slit in the curtain and watches Lavinia as she sits on her small sofa, feeling the sunbeams warm her memories of last night with Mario. She can still taste the sweetness of his tongue on her lips. She misses him and looks across the length of her blue-gray studio. He rose early this morning to open the café. Looking toward the back door, she sees the fig tree, its small green sacks absorbing the early sun, carrying seeds, reminding her of Mario’s love pouch, the one she touched last night, smooth and soft. His poetry buzzes in her ears, whispering, You are the completion of a never-ending circle, like the tree.
Before leaving the studio, she rereads Giovanni’s email and begins the long walk to Nina’s house on Russian Hill, determined to face her and to quit. She’s decided she must come clean with her about Don’s behavior.
She pictures Mario’s face—his voice, his encouragement. She smiles and walks up the steep hill. She looks at her watch; there’s no time to go to the café before facing Nina. She takes the last hill slowly, her resolve waning.
How will I say it? In the timid way or the lioness way? Will I be the one who stands? The one who growls? The one who is in harmony with my own beat? Will I roar or smother my head in fear?
Before she even knocks, Nina yanks open the door, seemingly unsurprised to see Lavinia standing there. “What a morning! Don didn’t come home last night.” Nina’s still in her slippers and her hair is in disarray; she’s buttoning a silk shirt with her long nails, which slip around the button. The seam of her skirt is off-center. Lavinia hides her relief that Don’s not in the house but feels disturbed to see Nina’s body tremble as she steps aside to let Lavinia pass.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. This has never happened before. I’m worried that something terrible has happened to him.”
“He’s never stayed out before?” Lavinia can’t believe this is the first time.
“The other times he’s called.” She finishes with her blouse and walks to the bedroom, gesturing for Lavinia to follow.
Upon entering the room, Lavinia notices that one side of the bed is still made and that Don’s side table is clean. The charger to his cell phone is missing. His Kindle is gone, too.
“He took his stuff,” Lavinia says, then walks into the closet. The hook where he keeps his running clothes is bare. The bureau top is clean, too. “A ton of stuff is gone!” she says.
“What?” Nina looks dumbfounded. She, too, notices his empty chair where his fleece normally would be, and the bureau. “Oh my God,” she says, “he’s taken all his belongings. His running clothes.” She goes over to his closet and looks more closely. Lavinia watches as she runs her fingers along the empty hooks.
“Gone! He took everything.” The drawer pulls Nina toward it, and she yanks it open. “It’s clean.” She picks up a flashlight and an empty eyeglass case, a few pennies, and a photo of her. When she picks up the photo, she cries. Then she looks at Lavinia. “He left the picture of me. He used to look at it every day.”
Lavinia remembers the morning Andy left—the morning he told her he didn’t love her anymore. How shattered feelings cut into her own heart, fragmenting her. She feels the sharp edge of pain as fear creeps in—fear for herself and for Nina’s well-being. Nina is crying now, and Lavinia considers how Nina has never shown weakness in front of her before. They both stand completely still, close in what seems like mutual sorrow. Except that Lavinia is not sad, not for Don and not even for Nina. She’s pissed at her and her asshole husband, who groped her with his eyes, who harassed her and held his fist to her face. She backs away from Nina, her arms folded across her chest.
When Nina regains her composure, she looks at Lavinia. “Thank you for listening. I’m a mess.”
“Yes, life is messy sometimes.”
“Have you been through something like this?” Nina asks.
“I have.” Although she relates to Nina, she feels almost no empathy for her. Anger has overridden any desire to connect with her former employer.
“Can I ask you a question, Lavinia?” It’s the first time Nina has ever looked into her eyes or said her name.
“Sure.”
“Is there anything you’ve seen—in Don’s things, for instance—that would give us clues as to why he might have left me like this?”
Lavinia holds her breath, thinking about how much she dislikes Don, his hostile behavior toward her, how she decided to quit because of it, and how Nina still doesn’t know that’s the reason she’s here. She believes that Don’s leaving is more about Don than about Nina, but what should she say?
She sits in stillness for a few moments.
Then she tells Nina about what she experienced: the strange and confusing notes; his frantic return to the house after Nina left to harass her; the car that dropped him off, waited, and picked him up; the meeting at the Spanish restaurant.
“All of these things happened?” Nina looks shocked, but Lavinia knows she believes her. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“I don’t know,” Lavinia confesses.
“He came back here after I left for work?” Nina yells now. “How many times? What did he say to you?”
“He mostly just stared at me.” Lavinia fingers her birthmark.
“And that made you uncomfortable?”
“Yes. And the last time I saw him, he was aggressive and mad. I thought he might hit me.”
Nina’s shoulders drop. She seems to want to say something, but Lavinia imagines she doesn’t have the words.
“And the notes, what did they say?”
“They were bizarre,” Lavinia says. “The first said, ‘Meet me at Velo Rouge.’ I didn’t know if it was for me, or what. Of course, I didn’t go. I started to think they were an excuse for
him to come back here and to harass me.”
Nina looks away, deep in thought. Then she says in her formal voice, “Thank you, Lavinia. I’ll call you about scheduling future days with you, after I find out what’s happening.”
“I’m sorry, Nina, I can’t come back here under these circumstances,” Lavina says. “In fact, the only reason I came here this morning, after what happened yesterday, was to tell you that I have to quit.”
“Please come back one more time to help me clear out of here,” Nina pleads. “He won’t come back. He’s gone.”
“No, I won’t be coming back here,” Lavinia says firmly. “I quit.” Lavinia leaves the house, pops a piece of Bubblicious in her mouth, and runs down the hill toward North Beach. She enters Mario’s café with her fingers knotted. Knowing this is his business, she runs to the head of the line, not even noticing the scowls of the other customers.
“Look at you, cutting in front of everyone,” Mario teases. “Maybe it was the dancing we did together last night.” But he stops joking as soon as he sees her face. He immediately abandons his post behind the espresso machine, much to the customers’ chagrin.
He emerges from behind the counter, and she reaches out and puts her arms around him and squeezes him. He holds her tightly. He calls Steve to take his place. Arm in arm, they walk to the dark corner table in the inner part of the café and take a small table. She tells him what’s just happened—that Don is gone, that she’s sure he’s done something bad.
“Nina asked me to return to the house one more time to help her clear out. I said no.” She nestles into his shoulder. “Mario, I did it the way I wanted to.” She feels his beautiful face, so close to hers, and her anxiety lessens.
Mario listens, holding her in his arms, until she calms down. Then he says, “This must be the day for surprises. When I left your place at five thirty this morning, there was a man lurking by your mail slot. When he saw me, he scurried out of the way.”
Lavinia sits up tall. “The stalker!” she cries out.
“I grabbed his coat sleeve and he turned toward me. A guy about my height. Thin. Wavy hair, shoes that had mud stains on them—some fancy kind of leather shoes. I asked him what he was doing there. You’re not going to believe what he said, Lavinia.” Mario takes her face in his hands. “He said, ‘My name is George Lavinia,’ and then he pulled his sleeve out of my hold.” He pauses. “Then we looked at each other, and I said, ‘I know you. You’re Lavinia’s father.’”
Without any warning, Lavinia screams out, “The stalker is my father,” and then covers her mouth, encased in stone, like one of George’s statues.
Mario waits, his hands resting on the table, then he reaches for her hands, pulls her up, and leads her out onto the sidewalk.
“Oh my God!” she says. “You met my father. That coward never told me he was my father. Never even said his last name was Lavinia. He introduced himself as George Levine, and all this time he’s been dropping off notes in the night like some kind of weirdo. He kept me from knowing who he was all these months—a year! He’s been watching me, stealing from me, never saying who he was. I can’t believe it! You met him before I ever met him. What did he say?”
“He just stared at me and turned and left. I think he was shocked.”
“Oh my God,” she says, “he was coming to my door hand delivering his notes for me to come back all these weeks and you found him.”
“You know where he lives, right? I’ll go with you so you can give him a piece of your mind.”
“I don’t know if I want to, Mario. What would I say to him?”
“Some of the things you just said to me,” Mario says.
“But I’m furious.” She feels so betrayed by George, mad he was secretly sculpting her face and body. She remembers Giovanni saying that when George lived in Naples, he sculpted her mother’s face and torso. Oh my God, she thinks, what if the statues were of my mother? She jumped to conclusions about the sculptures in George’s show room. Those heads, those torsos, maybe they weren’t me after all.
“When shall we go to see him, Lavinia Lavinia?” Mario asks. “Do you want my company?”
“I don’t know yet.” All she can think about is checking out those sculptures again. She crushes Mario close to her in a long hug, so close she can feel his heartbeat and long breaths. They walk down the block, holding hands, as she gathers herself. She feels like she’s spinning, like she might crash to the ground at any moment if Mario weren’t here to hold her up.
Lavinia thinks of her father, George, who’s always seemed to her so alone in the great studio, throwing clay. He’s spent his whole life losing his loved ones. Dizzy and shaking, she cries a long, low moan—more like an animal cry, or is it a wound? Maybe she’s crying for herself.
Mario holds her in his loving arms.
Chapter 21:
TELL IT STRAIGHT
At home, Lavinia racks her brain trying to picture her father’s life. How did he spend his first days in San Francisco this year, and what of the days of the years before? Day after day spent molding clay in her image—her mother’s image?—in some sort of trance she attempts to envision and yet can’t imagine this life of a sculptor, hands deep in the black mud, squeezing and pulling and thrashing wet slabs of the earth for eternity. It seems like a relentless task, like the one given to Sisyphus. She can’t presume to know the reward or the motivation. Is it to keep Angela alive? To keep himself alive? To keep Lavinia alive?
“Be open to whatever comes,” says a voice too loud to ignore. She swirls around as if she’s in a whirlpool. When she stops, she’s facing the fig tree. Squinting, she imagines that she sees her father’s round face, smiling joyfully. She feels her feet planted on the wooden floor, her toes grasping as if searching for a lifeline, a tight rope.
The face stares at her, a solemn mask. His wavy hair with the few silver threads is parted to the side; his eyes—brown, warm, mostly sad, deep, and inviting—tell of something old and sacred. How can he have such sad eyes while he smiles with full red lips, as if he is sucking a cherry lollipop?
Her body starts to grieve for him, and some deep ravine of pain cuts through her heart and seems to break her open. She can’t stand these feelings. She wants to run away, but she is stuck to the tight rope. One misstep and she will fall into the ravine and disappear. The spell is broken when she hears the Beatles music in her head, “A Hard Day’s Night,” and remembers when she was with him in the studio, watching him work the clay, waltzing with him, whirling around the great studio, stopping at his clay table. It seemed so natural to dance with him and then to learn what was on the potter’s wheel.
It occurs to her she wants to tell him something—but what? What is it she wants to say? She waits; she listens. Nothing! She opens the door to her patio and goes outside and kneels by the fig tree, her sacred place. She begins to dig with her fingers into the soil, moistened by the early fog. The earth stuff loosens and becomes the clay she yearns for, the sculptor’s diet. She squeezes it into a small clump and brings her hands to her face, smelling its rich mineral source before placing a speck on her tongue. The stuff melts away, leaving a pleasant, fruity taste in her mouth.
She looks up at the tree. What is it that he wants me to know? All is still, except for a small drop of milk that leaks from a ripening fig. Lavinia covers her face with her dirty hands and begins to cry. He wants me to know the truth—yes, that’s it. And I want to hear him tell me the story of my life and to tell me what happened. To tell it straight.
Back inside the house she imagines how he’ll say she looks just like her mother. That he’ll ask for forgiveness that she will not be ready to impart. It’s strange for her to think of such an intimate and honest meeting with him, having only ever seen him as a quirky New York artist who works incessantly, his hair flying as he works his clay. His East Coast accent, how inarticulate he is at times; his expressive movements compensating for his quietness.
She doesn’t recall if she met Georg
e before Sal left for Italy. Didn’t Sal tell her in the first letter that he talked to her father once before they left Italy? Was George here in San Francisco back then?
She’s pissed at Sal all over again. How dare he? How did he face me night after night with that cocky, lying face? He knew I was working for a sculptor. Why didn’t he introduce himself to George before he left? The coward!
She allows a scream to escape; its vibrations bounce around her head and then off the walls of her room. It occurs to her that one of her neighbors might call the police. But she is on fire, igniting feelings buried in embers. The heat rises in her belly like a volcano’s fire show, ready to blow the top off the secrets and find the story of her life. No more rumbling around in a dark eternity for her. Lavinia expects an explanation. She stands on her tiptoes, making herself tall.
How dare they all deceive her? Why couldn’t anyone in her family tell her the truth? Why was everything shrouded in some deep secret, leaving everyone tongue-tied? Even Giovanni waited until Sal returned to Naples to step up and talk about his nephew. And Sal, a million miles away, can barely say that his father killed his sister—and that’s what happened, isn’t it? It’s like they’re stuck in some kind of spell or curse that has put them all to sleep. Is she living in a fairy tale? Is she the sleeping beauty? Is a town waking up a generation later? And who is the charming prince?
Something is bothering her, something else she can’t verbalize yet. It’s so close to her awareness, yet it’s unreachable. She has to see the sculptures. She knows they’re Angela and not her, but she still has to see them. That feels key to forgiving George and for forgetting her belief that he was a pervert who was stalking her. She fingers her birthmark on her upper lip.
Sitting on the floor, rubbing her feet, she remembers how George laughed when she accused him of sculpting her without permission. How absurd it must have struck the man who expresses love in clay, if the only subject he’s ever had is a woman who has been gone from him for years. Giovanni told her the boy of seventeen sculpted busts and torsos even back then, and he is still doing it now. She suddenly sees George for what he is—a lost lover who’s pined his life away.
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