30.
I’VE DELETED ADAM’S TEXTS AND blocked his number. He’s become a phantom lurking in every shadow in recent weeks, but I came home from my morning with Felipe and knew exactly what I needed to do. Block. Ignore. Decide he’s dead to me and really believe it this time, because I didn’t claw myself away from him just to let him become my own personal Voldemort. I’m a New Yorker now. What happened to me in London does not define me here.
I’ve spent the weekend working, either downstairs in the noodle house or up here sprucing the place up for Christmas. I’ve draped my mother’s string of golden fir cones over the mirror and tacked warm white fairy lights around the window frame. It was a cold, crystal-clear London morning when we foraged for those fir cones, gilding our fingers with the gold paint afterward. They’ve faded significantly over the years, but they still lend Christmas cheer to this icy Monday morning. The breakfast radio weather guy seemed certain about imminent snow, but he’s had me fooled before so I’ll believe it when I see it.
Something spatters my window—a spray of small stones, I think—and I dash across the room to check the sidewalk, my heart in my mouth.
“Saw this outside the bodega and thought of you,” Gio shouts, shielding his eyes with his hand as he looks up. He’s standing beside a Christmas tree that comes up to his shoulder, his hand out supporting the top of the trunk. I shake my head, laughing as I throw my hands up in the air at him.
I run out on to the landing as he hauls it up the communal staircase, standing it up outside my front door with a flourish and a grin that makes him look about eighteen years old.
“I wasn’t planning on getting a tree,” I say.
“Yeah, you said,” he says. “But where will you hang your whisk if you don’t have a tree?”
I gesture toward the corner as he shuffles it into my apartment, and we both stand back to look at it once it’s in place.
“It looked smaller outside,” he concedes.
“You don’t say.”
“Maybe if we turn it around?” He has a quick go, but it’s so bushy that whichever way round it is the bottom branches flop over the arm of the sofa.
I slide behind it and sit down, parting the branches to look at Gio.
“I feel like I’m staking someone out,” I say.
He pushes the sofa along with me still sitting on it until it’s clear of the tree’s reach. It’s wedged up against the breakfast bar at the other end, but at least I won’t feel like I’m part of a nature documentary every time I sit down.
“Perfect fit,” he says.
I get up and stand beside him. “You know what? It is.”
This is the first real tree I’ve had in years. Adam had a small, sparse pre-lit plastic one from before we met, which he wouldn’t hear of replacing, a woebegone object that somehow managed to make the room even more dispiriting than usual. No baubles, and certainly no gifts piled beneath it.
“Lights?” Gio looks at me and I shake my head. The only string of lights I have is pinned around the window.
“Ornaments?”
I fetch the whisk and hang it on the tree, then step back. It spins slowly, catching the daylight, a solitary splash of color on the mountain of greenery.
“You know what this means,” I say.
He groans. “Please don’t say we have to go back to the Christmas store.”
“We have to go back to the Christmas store.” I rub my hands together like an excited child. “I’ll get my coat.”
* * *
—
MY LIFE FEELS LIKE a Coney Island roller coaster at the moment, a series of euphoric highs and stomach-plummeting lows. Today I’m flying high, sweet as you like, because Gio and I have spent the afternoon dressing the tree and eating panettone from a little bakery he knows over on Mulberry. I had a moment as we walked back home weighed down with Christmas bags. Gio was a few steps ahead of me on the sidewalk, hunkered inside his navy reefer jacket, panettone wrapped with brown paper and string dangling from one hand, Christmas decorations from the other, and the weatherman finally made good on his promise of snow. Gio turned back to look at me, fat white flakes settling on his shoulders as he cast his eyes toward the skies, and I clicked the shutter on my internal camera to save the scene forever.
“It looks like you bought everything in the shop and threw it at the tree,” he says, when I finally declare it to be perfect.
“I love it,” I say. “It’s the best tree in the history of Christmas trees ever.”
It looks insanely festive, a blaze of vintage-colored lights—pinpricks of rose pink, apple green, candy apple reds. I completely lost my head in the Christmas store earlier, bought far too many tree ornaments, and I’m not one bit sorry, because my tree looks like something from a child’s drawing. From my own wistful childhood drawings.
I cook pasta for dinner, and afterward we lie on the sofa and bask in the fairy-light glow, the TV on low and snow falling steadily outside.
“Heavy snow at the Monday Night Motel,” he says.
I adjust my head on his chest. “Maybe we’ll get snowed in.”
“Maybe,” he says, even though we both know it’s coming up to the time for him to leave. Bella’s at the cinema, and he’s walking over to meet her at ten to make sure she gets home safe in this weather.
“It feels like Christmas already,” I say.
“You do have the best tree in the neighborhood,” he says.
“Thanks to you.”
I’m deeply comfortable in Gio’s arms, even though I’m always subconsciously aware of a quiet ticking clock in my head. It was there long before my New Year’s cut-off date. It’s there when I’m awake and features in my dreams when I sleep, eerie dreams where I stand and stare at the clock face and realize that the quarter-hour markers have been replaced with words. LIAR in black capitals at quarter past, SECRET printed at the half-hour point. Adam’s name marks quarter to, and a tiny faceted ball sits ready to drop at midnight. The hands spin in both directions, fast and out of control. It wouldn’t take a psychiatrist to analyze the meaning behind my dreams, the portent of danger that runs like the San Andreas Fault beneath my precarious life.
Before Gio leaves, we make love—and it is love even if we haven’t said the words aloud—on the sofa by the haze of the tree. I used to grumble about this sofa, but if Bobby ever asks me if I need it replaced, I’ll say no, because it’s the keeper of my secrets and the custodian of some of my best memories now. This one in particular.
* * *
—
SNOW CHANGES EVERYTHING, DOESN’T it? The Narnian view from the windows, the muffled sound of the world, the conversation on the streets. New York has become an even more magical place for me this week. I went to the park across the street this morning to make fresh footprints in the overnight snowfall. I stopped to listen to the busker for a while; she’s in fine voice these days and reached out to touch hands when I dropped some money in her plastic tub. It’s too wet out there for upturned hats this weather.
I spent a couple of hours at the gelateria yesterday morning, helping Sophia out behind the counter. I go every now and then, not for the recipe anymore, as there’s little call for gelato while the city dithers under this deep freeze and the family waits for Santo. I go because I love being there, because Sophia has become one of my favorite people, because the Belottis make me feel as if I belong. I have a coffee mug with my name on it. Maria sometimes sends recipes she thinks I’ll appreciate. Bella played the piano yesterday, Christmas carols that rendered the atmosphere almost unbearably sweet as Sophia, Gio, and I slid homemade cannoli and tender sugar-glazed Italian cookies into green-and-white-striped paper bags. An illicit tray of small shots of Pascal’s limoncello sat on the counter for the customers as they waited in line, designed to keep tempers calm and the till ringing.