“Come on, Valentine. I’m the worst. I really blew it the past two weeks. Teodora is gone, and I planned to come over every night and spend a lot of time with you.”
“It’s okay,” I stammer. It’s as if that seagull delivered to Roman a message from my epiphany on the roof this morning. He really can read my mind.
“No it isn’t. I wanted to be with you, but then things went wild at the restaurant and I blew it. That’s all there is to it. But I’m sorry about it. I wanted to make this time special for you.”
“I hate that we spend a lot of time apologizing to each other for working hard. It’s the way it is. We’re both trying to build something.” I love how I was ready to kill him this morning and now, I’m making excuses for him. This surely falls under the category Be Adorable, doesn’t it?
“I don’t know how else to do it. I don’t know how to run a restaurant and not be there twenty-four hours a day. I don’t think it’s possible. Now, down the line, when it’s established and I’ve paid back my investors, and I find the right chef to replace me in the kitchen, then this becomes a different discussion.”
It’s funny that Roman uses the word discussion, when we haven’t had one. I attempt to be understanding when I say, “I guess I don’t know where I fit in your life right now. And I don’t want to ask you to put me first, because that’s not fair either.”
Roman folds his arms on the counter and leans forward. “What do you need to hear from me?”
“Where do you see this going?” There it is. I put it out there. The second it’s out of my mouth, I wish I could take it back. But it’s too late. The last thing I wanted to do was turn our last night together into one of those talks.
“I’m serious about you,” he says. “I don’t have a high opinion of myself when it comes to being a husband, because I tried and failed at it. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try again.”
“How do you feel about my career?”
“I’m in awe of you. You’re an artist.”
“And you are, too.” I sip my wine. “You are also the Emergency Glass Box guy.”
“What’s that?”
“At the first sign that we’re going down in flames, you break the glass and pull the lever and save the day. Like coming over here tonight. Cooking for me. Taking me to Capri without leaving the dinner table. Kissing me with great wine on your lips. Telling me you’re in love with me. That was the crème fraîche on the caviar.”
“I want this.”
“Roman, you have fallen in love with me.”
“I wouldn’t waste caviar from the Black Sea on a fling.”
“What does the fling get?”
“Potato chips.”
I laugh. “So that’s how I tell?” I smooth the napkin on my lap. “The caviar test?”
“There are other ways.” Roman comes around the counter to my side. To be honest, I don’t want to stop eating this dinner, but sometimes a woman has to choose between food and sex, and it’s the idiot who chooses food. I can reheat the steak later, but letting Roman know that I’m in love with him, too, is a moment that won’t come around again. Well, it might. But it would be different. So, I push the plate away as he lifts me off the stool and into the moment. Desire definitely has a shelf life. Delay love or the expressing of it, and it dies. Take it for granted, and it goes away, like the morning snow on the roof during the ides of March.
Roman carries me up the stairs, marking each step with a kiss. My feet drag along the hallway wall like handles on an old suitcase as he carries me to my room. As we make love, every doubt I have, every question that enters my mind about us, who we are, where we’re going, and what we will become, disappears like the quarter moon behind the low clouds of spring.
I have fallen more deeply in love with this man on the very day I was planning to say good-bye to him. I may need my solitude, but I also want to be with him. I may not always see this clearly when he is away from me, but it’s what I’m most sure of when we’re together.
“I love you, Valentine,” he says.
“You know, I get that a lot.”
“You do?” he asks as he kisses my neck.
“‘I love you, Valentine’ is actually a popular phrase used in greeting cards.”
“If you were sending me one, what would it say?” he asks.
“I love you, too, Roman.”
And there it is, words that I dread to say and do mean, because with them comes the responsibility of owning it, moving forward together and deciding for real who we are to each other. Now we’re not just lovers discovering what we like and sharing what we know. In this mutual declaration, we’re accountable to each other. We’re in love, and now, our relationship has to build slowly and beautifully in order to hold all the joy and misery that lies ahead.
He places the tip end of his nose on the tip end of mine. I almost feel he’s looking so deeply into my eyes, he’s seeing the rest of my life play out in slides clicking through on a carousel. I wonder what he’s looking for, what he sees. Then he says, “Our children would be blessed, you know.”
“They would never go without good food or pretty shoes.”
“They’d have brown eyes.”
“And they’d be tall,” I say.
“And they’d be funny. A house of laughs we’d have.” He kisses me.
“That’s my dream,” I tell him.
We get tangled up in the down comforter and the pillows that fly around the bed like doors opening and closing, and as we settle in to make love, we begin to make plans. I no longer wonder where this is going. Now, I know.
10. Arezzo
I PULL OVER ON THE SIDE of the road on the hilltop above Arezzo and park the rental car. After the hullabaloo at the Rome airport, with customs, the bags, and figuring out the directions on the Italian map, I am happy to actually set foot on Tuscan ground.
We have arrived, and now, our work begins. We must buy supplies to meet our orders, and find distinctive and fresh elements to make the shoes from my sketch for the Bergdorf windows. It’s not going to be easy to win over Rhedd Lewis, but I have a greater goal in mind: to distinguish the Angelini Shoe Company as the face of the future in the custom-shoe business. That may sound lofty, but we have to succeed in new ways if we’re going to save the old company and reinvent our business.
Gram and I spent most of the flight working on the fine details of the sketch for the competition. There’s a problem with the heel I designed. Gram says that I need to refine it, while I feel it needs to be bold and architectural. Her idea of modern and mine are about a half century apart. But that’s okay-Gram is encouraging me to use my imagination, and while she likes what I’ve drawn, she also knows her experience counts when it comes to actually building the dream shoe.
Gram gets out of the car and joins me. The cool April breeze washes over us as the sun, the color of an egg yolk, begins to sink behind the hills of Tuscany. It drenches the sky in gold as it goes, throwing its last bit of light on Arezzo. The houses of the village are built so closely together, the effect is of one enormous stone castle surrounded by fields of emerald green silk. The winding cobbled streets of the town look like thin pink ribbons and I wonder for a moment how we will get the car through them.
All around us, the hills of Tuscany are parceled into contour farms. Sloping dales of dry earth are planted with rows of spindly olive trees next to square beds of bright sunflowers. It creates the effect of a patchwork quilt, bursts of color separated by straight seams. Soft spring colors, chalk blue and cornmeal yellow, spike the fresh green leaves while stalks of wild lavender grow on the side of the road, filling the air with the powdery scent of the new buds.
“This is it.” Gram smiles, exhaling a breath that she seems to have held since we landed in Rome. “My favorite place on earth.”