This is who he is. This is the actual person.
I have not been wrong about him.
"You're a good teacher, Matt."
He waves a hand like he's batting the words away. "She did the work. All of them do the work. I just sit there and butcher Italian badly enough that they feel better about their English."
"Noble strategy."
"Worked on my sophomores for twelve years. Signora Capelli, per favore, dove il bagno... and yes, I know I just said that with the accent of a man who learned Italian from a pizza box. That's the point."
Something loosens behind my sternum, as we chat, a knot I didn't know was there, or maybe I did and just stopped counting it among the inventory of things that hurt.
"What are you going to do?" I ask. "After. When all of this is whatever all of this eventually becomes."
He doesn't volley the question back at me the way most people would. The conversational reflex of deflection dressed up as politeness. He just considers it. Tips his head back. Looks at the sky through the tree branches like the answer might be written in the gaps between the leaves.
"I'll move into a smaller apartment," he says finally. “My current one has three bedrooms. Don't ask me why. I think I convinced myself I needed a guest room and an office, like I was going to become the kind of person who has guests and does work in a separate office. Three years of heating a space I used maybe forty percent of." A small shake of his head. "Turns out I hate it. Turns out all that empty space just reminds you that it's empty."
He picks a blade of grass and turns it between his fingers.
"So. Small apartment. One bedroom. Big windows, though. That's non-negotiable. And a dog."
"What kind of dog?"
"Big. The kind that leans its whole body weight against your legs while you're standing at the kitchen counter, so you're always a little off-balance but you always know it's there." He demonstrates the lean, tilting sideways into invisible furniture, and the image is so specific and so ridiculous and so exactly Matt that my chest aches.
"And a garden," he continues. "I've never had one. In Connecticut I had a fire escape and a planter box with Gerald in it."
"Why did you call your basil plant Gerald?"
He looks at me like I've asked why the sky is blue. Like the answer is so self-evident that the question borders on offensive.
"He looked like a Gerald."
Then he asks about my future and the answer should be ready, should be right there on a shelf I can reach, and it isn't. Which surprises me. I have always known what I was going to do next. Architecture. Restoration. The patient, painstaking work of returning broken things to what they were before time and neglect and gravity conspired against them.
I was in the middle of restoring a cathedral when all of this started. But Santa Maria della Luce feels like a lifetime ago. Like someone else's life.
"I'll sketch again," I say, because this part I do know. "Design things. Restore things. I'm too good to stop and the world is full of things that need fixing," I say with more conviction than I feel. But the conviction has to start somewhere, even if it starts as a bluff.
He doesn't push. Doesn't ask about the cathedral, or my family in Boston. Doesn't poke at the space between I'll sketch again and the woman who stood on scaffolding with plaster dust in her hair and knew exactly who she was.
Instead he reaches into his pocket. Pulls out a folded napkin. Hands it to me. On it, in what I can only describe as a genuine artistic emergency. A daisy. Rendered in what appears to be ballpoint pen by a hand that has clearly never once in its life attempted to draw a flower. Too many petals. I count nine, then eleven, then nine again, depending on which marks are intentional and which are just the pen slipping. A stem at an optimistic forty-five-degree angle. The center a lumpy oval that bears no relationship to any daisy that has ever existed in nature or in art or in the loosest possible interpretation of either.
"From the world's worst artist," he says, "to the world's best."
I look at the daisy for a long time.
I fold it back up. Put it in my pocket.
"It'll be your life again, Vi," he says. His voice is quiet now. Warm but quiet. "The scaffolding and the columns and all of it. It'll come back."
"You all right?"I ask him that evening, when I find him pacing the kitchen. The question comes out casual enough.
Too long. He takes too long to answer.
"Yeah." He smiles after a while, but it doesn't reach the right muscles. "Yeah, I'm good."
