The days were getting crisper and shorter, the light through the trees projected starker shadows on the sidewalk. October came, the month of enterprises and plans. Everyone around Lara had one, even her mother—she had enrolled in the Elders University, resolved to get a degree in anthropology. Anita was looking into a rare breed of Balinese dogs—even smaller than the hairless Chinese cresteds—which were all the rage in California (you can stuff them inside your coat pocket and fly with them everywhere, she’d exclaimed) and she predicted they would soon hit Europe. Leo was finally getting an office of his own—he had enough clients now to have a company with his name. Her ex-husband and Nicole were probably unpacking boxes in their new Parisian flat. Her belly must be pretty big by now.
Lara sat in her apartment in Rome, thinking about all this. After three weeks of gentle physical therapy, her knee was fine again, she had printed flyers and made a few phone calls advertising her yoga class, but only two people had called so far. She sat around the house unable to think of an alternative. What had happened to her? Nine years of safe marriage with a steady flow of cash assured by her husband’s salary had turned her into an incapable, paralyzed human being. It had been a steady flow of unlearning all that she’d known before. But it was late now. Too late even for being mad at herself.
The tourists had gone and with them their ugly plastic paraphernalia of inflatable mattresses, flippers and flip-flops that all summer long had crammed the exterior of the tabacchi shop and the grocery store. The village had regained its sober style and had gone back to looking like what it used to look like: an undisclosed secret, just a village nobody had ever heard of, with a small but perfectly proportioned square, a pretty clock tower, a baroque church and a grand palazzo once owned by a family of barons.
Lara had taken an early flight and arrived at the house just as her neighbors were sweeping the street outside their doors, as they did every day. When they saw her get out of the taxi they called out her name. They seemed happy to see her back, off season, just like a regular neighbor, like someone who lived there.
“I came for this evening’s procession. Per la Vergine della Tempesta,” Lara announced proudly, wanting to confirm that she had, in some way, become one of them; that this particular day—when the Virgin had appeared to a group of fishermen in the midst of a storm and had saved them from drowning—mattered to her as well.
“Brava! Brava!” The women in slippers with brooms in hand nodded and laughed.
Mina’s house had gone through a radical transformation. Everything was in its place, no more wisps of thread flying around, no bolts of fabric or clothes hanging off nails. Surfaces were clean and clear, there was no trace of work, no electricity or stuffy smells of sweat and fatigue in the air. Even the orange cat looked different, stretched on the windowsill next to the Gertrude Jekyll rose. Lara peered in the next room. The big TV screen was gone. But the change was owing to something deeper than just a cleanup. Something was gone from Mina as well: her mad exhilaration, her electric excitement. Now she looked older, more austere.
“It looks so neat in here.”
“I’m on holiday,” Mina said drily.
“That’s good. You deserve a bit of rest. You did so much work this summer.”
Mina didn’t answer. She was sitting on a chair and fiddling inside her tiny handbag. She pulled out a handkerchief.
“Too much work.” She gave Lara a crooked look and blew her nose.
“You mean … the work you did for Ben?”
Mina scowled. “Do you have any idea how much material I had to use for that big a man?”
“Of course. More fabric, more sewing. More everything.”
“Not more money, though!” Mina cried with unexpected force, which allowed Lara to dig deeper.
“You don’t feel Ben paid you fairly?”
“Ha!” Mina turned her face to the side with spite. “Those people, they have big mansions in England with swimming pools and servants but when it comes to—”
“Actually he lives in America, he doesn’t have a—”
“—squeezing money where they can, then … you should see them! Do they know the difference between something expensive and something truly beautiful? No, they don’t!”
Lara replayed the last sentence in her mind and double-checked its meaning. That was a sharp observation.
“Did he not pay you what you asked?”
Mina shrugged again, and turned her face away, as if the question didn’t even deserve an answer. Lara pressed her.
“Didn’t you tell him upfront what you were going to charge him?”
But, clutching her handbag and rising from the chair, Mina ignored this. For the occasion she had chosen to wear her pleated skirt and a funny blue jacket with golden buttons. She eyed her tiny wristwatch.
“We’d better go,” she said. “The procession starts at six and we need to find a good parking spot, one by the harbor.”
In the car—the small Subaru she had bought secondhand from a local dealer when she had first moved down south—Lara hoped Mina would release more information about what had happened with Ben, but she was wrapped in silence. Lara had to poke at her again.
“Have you heard from him lately?”
Mina shook her head.
“I thought he used to call you on the phone like every other day.”
Mina looked out the window, pretending to be absorbed by the landscape.
“Oh yes, he called, what, three weeks ago? ‘Mina, I’m flying down to see you for two days,’ he says, ‘I need you to do some more work for me.’ I say, ‘Of course, come, you are always welcome, and we must speak about the deal on the house.’ You know, the house of my cousin. So he arrives in a black car with black windows and a driver in a black suit. It looks like a funeral car, everyone got so frightened. People thought I was dead.”
Lara laughed, but Mina didn’t.
“With this blond woman. The one in the photograph.”
Lara stopped at a red light and turned toward Mina.
“The one by the swimming pool?”
“That one. He walks into the house, hugs me, kisses me like I am his mother,” Mina said with disdain. “Then he introduces this woman who doesn’t speak a word of Italian. She’s almost naked, in a little camisole that shows everything underneath. He says, ‘Mina, this is my fiancée and she loves your work, look, she has brought some clothes for you to copy.’ And this woman opens a suitcase filled with her flimsy dresses, and then she throws them on my table.”
Like she was his mother, Lara thought. Could that be what had hurt her the most? But how could Mina have been that deluded? But—she reminded herself—it was also true that Mina now knew Ben’s body like a familiar map, its exact measurements; she’d cut and sewn the fabric that would envelop him and keep him warm. She’d touched him on the shoulders, around the waist, along his legs. She had memorized every inch of him. Wasn’t that some other, extraordinary kind of intimacy?
Mina didn’t say anything more. She sat stiffly on the edge of her seat as the small harbor came into view. She indicated a slot between parked cars.
“There. You can fit right in there.”
There was another long pause during the parking maneuver.
“And then?” Lara kept checking her rearview mirror, pretending to be only half interested.
“I told him I was on holiday,” Mina said bitterly. “I gave him the address of Jolanda, in Ortelle. She’s not as good as me, no. But she can make their clothes.”