“I’m ashamed to remember it,” he said. “How I hurt you.”
Cleo nodded. “You did,” she said. “But there was one upside to that night.” She gave him one of her mysterious, knowing looks. “You were so hungover the next day, I finally won Pinch Punch.”
Frank began to laugh. Cleo had once mentioned offhandedly that it was a tradition in England on the first day of the month to say “Pinch, punch, first of the month!” As long as the victor declared “And no returns!” afterward, they were free to enact these pinches and punches without retaliation. The loser then had to wait a whole month before having the chance to say it first again. Frank, who had a taste for the nonsensical, had sprung upon this game with a fanatical competitiveness, waking up early on the first of every month and hovering over Cleo’s sleeping figure until, at the slightest sign of awakening, he would launch his attack, screaming the singsong rhyme with the kind of zeal that, Cleo was sure, caused middle-aged men to have heart attacks.
“I forgot about that.” He chuckled. “You sucked at Pinch Punch.”
“Because I didn’t want to set my alarm for the crack of dawn on the first of every month like a maniac!”
Frank looked at her seriously. “That’s what it takes to be a Pinch Punch champion, Cleo.”
He tried to maintain a straight face, but they were both quickly reduced to laughter.
“Well, now you can play with Eleanor,” said Cleo, as their amusement subsided.
Frank shook his head, serious again. “I wouldn’t do that. It’s our game. Anyway, she’s not British.”
Cleo looked at him tenderly. “Okay,” she said. “It stays ours.”
“Is it weird for you?” he asked. “That I’m with someone else? You can be honest.”
“It is a little,” she said slowly. “But in some strange way, you and Eleanor give me hope. It makes me feel like I can find what you have one day too.”
“That won’t be a problem for you. You’ll have men lining up.”
Frank finished his lemonade with a satisfied slurp.
“I’d like to be married again,” she said. “For a little longer next time.”
“You will. Just don’t pick someone like me.”
Cleo raised an eyebrow. “You mean an active alcoholic almost twenty years my senior?”
“Pah!” Frank fell back against his chair as if shot. “But yes, that’s exactly what I mean,” he said, coming back to life.
“You didn’t pick someone like me.”
“No. Eleanor’s not like either of us.”
“How is she different?”
“You really don’t mind talking about her?”
“I’m curious.”
“Okay, well, Eleanor has this mother. She intimidated me at first actually because she just—she’s fierce. Fiercely loving. And Eleanor grew up in a house in the suburbs with a garden and something called a visitor’s couch and, you know, three different types of bird feeder.”
Cleo nodded. “The height of domesticity.”
“Exactly. And it wasn’t perfect—her parents divorced when she was young, and she had this weird relationship as a teenager with an older guy—but I could tell she felt safe in that house. She grew up feeling safe and fiercely loved.”
When he looked up, he was surprised to see that Cleo’s eyes had glazed with a thin film of tears. “That sounds nice,” she said quietly.
“And you and I didn’t get that, not because we didn’t deserve it, we just got dealt something else. But the people who did get that love, they grew up to be different from us. More secure. Maybe they’re not as shiny or successful as you and I feel we have to be. But it’s not because they’re not interesting. They just don’t feel they have to do the tap dance, you know? They don’t have to prove themselves all the time to be loved. Because they always were.”
Cleo smiled sadly. “But how do you stop tap dancing if you’re like us?”
“I just got too tired, Cley,” he said. “The shoes didn’t fit anymore. And when I stood still, Eleanor was there standing with me. And I think you deserve to be with someone like that, who can provide that safety and that stillness for you in a way I never could. Even though God knows I wanted to, Cleo. I really wanted it.”
Cleo took his hand across the table. Frank’s freckled hands. She remembered them always in motion, flitting across surfaces, adjusting his glasses, accentuating words in the air with an emphatic, flared-palm gesture that was, just, him. She squeezed his fingers between hers.
“I know you did,” she said. “I wanted to do that for you too.”
The young waiter brought the check to sign, and as Frank often did when feeling a little low, he attempted to lift his spirits with a burst of unnecessary generosity by tucking a fifty-euro tip inside the bill.
As the boy took it away, a minor commotion began to take place on the square. A young couple was running with loose-limbed abandon across the large flat stones and laughing loudly, shouting to each other for no reason, it seemed, than the joy of being youthful and beautiful somewhere ancient and beautiful. They’re not much younger than Cleo, Frank thought. They’re so much younger than me, Cleo thought. An old bearded man they passed was laughing too and waving his cane, calling after them in Italian. Cleo and Frank watched the couple’s faces, flushed and free, as they raced past.
“Do you understand what the man was saying?” Frank asked.
Cleo shook her head as the waiter appeared beside her.
“Signor, this is not right!” The bill was open between his hands like a prayer book. “It’s too much!”
“No, no, it’s all right,” said Frank. “It’s for you. Did you hear what that man was saying? To the kids running?”
“Yes, I think so,” said the boy. “But this—”
“Can you translate it?”
“But this tip,” said the boy. “It is … too American.”
Cleo laughed when she saw the bill. “I’m glad not all of you has changed,” she said.
“Can you tell me what he said?” Frank asked again.
“How strange you are,” said the boy looking from one to the other. “It’s an Italian saying. It is something like, ‘Wherever you are going, it is waiting for you.’”
“Wherever you’re going is waiting for you?” repeated Frank.
The boy turned to Cleo apologetically.
“It doesn’t sound so good when he say it,” he said.
Cleo and Frank left the café and walked arm in arm down the Spanish Steps toward his hotel, where the divorce papers were waiting. Outside the restaurants, clusters of people sat enjoying the clement weather, their glasses of wine glinting in the light. Above them a black flock of starlings filled the sky. People turned their faces upward to watch. The birds swirled and pulsed, contracting to a dense black swarm, then twisting wildly into a dipping, fluxing swirl, a loose constellation of Vs. Frank stood mesmerized as they transformed from a dancing cloud to a pulsing wave to a lung breathing in and out.
“It’s called a murmuration,” said Cleo, surprising him, again, with the breadth of things he did not know she knew. “It’s warmer here in the city, so they return every evening from the surrounding areas.”