All right. All right. Now what are you going to do?
She was on her honeymoon. She had avoided a wedding night encounter by virtue of their travel arrangements, but every hour was borrowed time. It was going to happen, there didn’t seem to be a reasonable possibility that she could avoid it anymore. She would endure the violation of her most private places, the bestial reduction of labor and childbirth, the tearing and stretching, maybe even death. The thought sprouted unhelpfully in her mind, like clover in a stone wall, that she had misjudged Joey, that she finally understood why he had shot himself rather than offer his body up to circumstances beyond his control.
Wasshejust going to let it happen? Let her whole life be the choices other people made for her? But she had never made a choice for herself—that had been her mistake. She’d never known what it was she wanted out of life, only what she didn’t want. People can’t understand negative convictions. A man who is willing to die for something is a hero, but a man who is passionately not willing to die for something is a coward. Maybe that was why no one had listened to her, thought she’d been doing anything but playing hard to get.
She hunched on the toilet in her wrinkled blue travel suit. A heaviness had settled low in her chest, a weight hanging from the bottom of her heart. She wondered if this was despair. What was she going to do? She had spent most of their courtship sitting on the toilet hiding from Carmelo. She doubted the same strategy would get her through an entire marriage.
STELLA ANDCARMELO SPENT THE AFTERNOONwalking through the cobblestone streets near the hotel. They stepped into shops andstopped for pastries. Stella let Carmelo carry the conversation, and she accepted his arm when he offered it. It was not a bad feeling, strolling through a pretty city with her hand resting on a good-looking man’s elbow. But even as she enjoyed herself, Stella suffered a swelling nausea of fear. Those complacent thoughts were the dangerous ones. If Stella let herself like a piece of her marriage, she might succumb to the whole thing.
For dinner Carmela and Paolo brought them to a restaurant Tina would have considered “fine dining.” There were pink cloths covering the tables and short candles in glass tumblers. Carmela took Stella’s hand in her cold one for a long moment—Stella was wearing her gloves, but the cold passed right through them.
“My brother told us you were very beautiful,” Carmela said.
Carmelo touched Stella’s elbow, where her sleeve had creased into a pinch. “Now you see for yourself,” he told his sister.
Paolo summoned the waiter and ordered for the table in French. They shared several dishes so Stella and Carmelo could sample them: sea mussels cooked in white wine, the giant bones of a cow split and served shimmering with their own marrow, long soft French-fried potatoes. Stella had never eaten such fancy food. She noticed only after she had gnawed all the meat off a duck bone that Carmela had left hers on the plate, separating the meat from the bone with her knife and fork.
Carmela and Paolo seemed to be kind, solicitous people. Paolo had a job at the docks, and Carmela was a cleaning woman at a university. Paolo was a soft-spoken man. He said little throughout the whole meal. Carmela, who looked so much like her brother, listened intently as Stella answered her questions about her family, about Ievoli, about presents she had received at her shower. She asked Stella if she needed anything for her kitchen, and Stella smiled sweetly and said, “Oh, I don’t cook, so you had better ask your brother what he needs for the kitchen, instead,” which shocked Carmela into silence. Carmelo laughed it off ruefully and his sister’s expression lit up in a grin. “You’relucky he spent years cooking for all those railroad men,” Carmela told her. “They made him a great cook. At least twice as good as me.”
For dessert, Carmela ordered a small, soft chocolate cake that was hot on the inside. The cake, a surprise to Stella, arrived as Paolo was insisting on picking up the check for dinner. Carmelo fanned colorful Canadian bills on the tablecloth and made good-natured threats about never coming to visit again if Paolo was always going to pay for things. Meanwhile, the cake sat primly under its orange peel garnish, giving off a cakey aroma. Stella had eaten so much she had begun to feel turmoil in her gut, but Carmela insisted Stella try it. “Just one bite. Just oneforchetta.”
“Notforchetta,” Carmelo interrupted. “That’s Italian. We have to learn Calabrese now, Carmela.” He winked at Stella. “You have to say, ‘Na bròcc.’”
The light from the table candles rippled in his smile lines, and Stella couldn’t help but think that this man had done more than his twenty-seven years’ worth of smiling. That was something someone else would have loved about him, but it made her feel sad. She did not love him, and she never would. Some other woman would have wanted badly to make him happy. But he had to be so damn stubborn. The thick chocolate coating her throat made her want to cough. How stupid Carmelo was, forcing them into this arrangement that would make them both unhappy.
The good news about that heavy chocolate cake was that it settled so poorly in Stella’s stomach that when she and Carmelo got back to the hotel room she was able to make herself vomit. On this occasion she left the bathroom door open, so Carmelo might see the veracity of her indisposition. It was a shame flushing away that duck and those beautiful potatoes. But she’d saved her virginity for one more night. She slept in her blue suit again, not even taking off her stockings or jacket.
MONTREAL WAS LOVELYthe first week of October, the leaves at the peak of their autumnal change. Chilly breezes cut through the stonefaçades so that Stella never felt overwarm in her thick new coat. As the hours ticked by, Stella’s anxiety accumulated, gradually but inexorably, like sand in the bottom of an hourglass. Eventually she would run out of time.
They went to mass at the Basilique Notre-Dame—a cathedral, the meaning of which word Stella finally understood. The building was bigger than the emigrant shipCountess of Savoy,its distant ceiling supported by muscular piles of swooping stone. Stella would have happily sat through a second mass so she could continue staring at the sparkling stained glass.
After the mass, as they ate lunch on the Rue Notre-Dame, Carmelo told Stella about the great cathedrals of Italy, the inspiration of all church architecture. “This cathedral is beautiful,” he told her. “But Stella, ours are ten times more beautiful.”
She could not imagine even the Vatican more opulent. “You’ve seen them?”
“Only the cathedral in Genoa. When I was fourteen, the afternoon before I got on the ship to come here.” He was squinting in the sun. “It is very old, Stella, eight hundred years old. Like nothing they have in the Americas.” He paused. “I hope it is still there. After the bombs.”
A sentimental man. Stella looked down at the crumbs of her sandwich.
“But Rome,” he said after a moment, his voice clear again. “The Vatican, St. Peter’s—they are the most magnificent in the world,certo. We’ll go there someday. We’ll walk through St. Peter’s together.”
Carmelo was wrong. They never would.
THAT SECOND EVENING OF THEIR HONEYMOON,Stella and Carmelo went to see a movie with Carmela and Paolo at a cinema that looked like a palace. There was only one movie in English, a love story about two pianists. Stella didn’t understand the fast-talking actors, but the movie was full of wonderful music.
On the walk back to their hotel, Carmelo took Stella’s hand inhis, and the anxiety she had set aside for the entire beautiful day came rushing back to her. She had let her guard down, she had been kind to him—how would she say no to him now? She was almost hyperventilating as Carmelo fumbled with the hotel key.
Still wearing her winter coat, she rushed to the drawer into which she had unpacked her clothing, scooped it all up and locked herself in the bathroom, as was her custom. Sucking calming breaths through her mouth, she assembled a night outfit for herself: her long-sleeved honeymoon nightgown over a pair of long underwear bottoms. She had the latter because Za Filomena had given her a married lady tip a few weeks before the wedding: when Filomena wanted to signal to Zu Aldo that it wasn’t a good day for her, she wore long underwear to bed to indicate there would be no access down there for him. “It’s not a problem anymore, now that we’re old and I went through my change,” Za Filomena had confided, “but when I was younger I sometimes put them on even when I wasn’t bleeding, if I just didn’t want to be bothered that day.” Stella had made sure to include three pairs of long underwear with her final trousseau.
There wasn’t much else with which she could armor herself, although Stella had the notion to pull a girdle over the long underwear, which made her pelvis feel protected. It would be quite a lot of work for anyone to get through—impossible without her cooperation, she thought. All right. That was the best she could do.
“I am very, very tired,” Stella announced as she stepped out of the bathroom. She was alarmed to see Carmelo wore only his trousers and a sleeveless white undershirt. The contours of his torso, revealed for her now, reminded her of her father’s; he had large, smoothly muscled arms, the arms of a strong man who would become stocky, not stringy, with age.
Stella’s mouth was dry and her girdle throbbing. “I—I am very tired,” she said again. Her voice sounded weak. She hated herself. “I am going to sleep.”
“Stella—” Carmelo began.
“Good night,” she said, and turned off the light.
