Antonia wakes shivering, though the heavy midsummer air sits thickly in her bedroom. She wraps a sheet around herself and tiptoes into the living room and folds herself into the space softened by Lina’s body on the couch. She is overcome by gratitude that she will not live in this apartment forever.
Antonia has done a good job of convincing herself that marriage—that the life she is carefully constructing with Paolo—is what she wants. Paolo wants something different than the world he was brought up in, too. For him, that change is the Family—which Antonia had always thought she needed to escape in order to move forward. But Paolo is sure of himself. He’s a dreamer, like she is, but he’s careful, measured, constructive. Paolo has a plan. He’s saving his wages for an apartment, for furniture, for bedding. They will be married next spring. Paolo’s future is full of clean rooms, of well-behaved children, of warmth and security. Antonia has adopted it as her own.
When she brings up classes at university with Paolo, he looks distracted, confused. He cannot fit the idea of Antonia working toward a degree into his future fantasy, but he loves her. He loves me. He wants her to be happy. He will try, he says, to figure it out. We’ll figure it out.
* * *
—
Like Paolo, Saul cannot sleep at all during the summer of 1941. He walks and walks and thinks of women. He spends the dark hours winding his way up and down the length of Manhattan, moving until his legs buzz with fatigue and then retreating into the steamy subway, the air of which is thick and helps him to keep his head attached to his body. Some nights he is ecstatic with thoughts of Sofia. When Saul is with Sofia, the terror that bitters his tongue and twists his stomach is reduced to nothing. Sofia makes him feel like he is standing on his own feet. He has become infatuated by her smell and her strength; by the ways she is tangible and surprising; by the honey of her laugh and the earth he can smell in her hair.
Other nights, his longing for his mother feels like a beast walking beside him down the gaslit avenues.
* * *
—
After high school ends, Sofia spends a week sitting aimlessly in her room, caught in a breathless sort of freedom that feels empty and insubstantial and overwhelming. The rest of her life—which until June had been no more than a surreal abstraction—asks her to think in lengths of time she had never conceived of. It paints every little decision she thinks of making in lurid shades of permanence. “You could consider university, you know,” said Frankie, peering in around the door to Sofia’s bedroom to find Sofia flipping through the same magazine for the third time, or staring aimlessly out the window. “You’ll meet someone soon,” said her mother. Sofia doesn’t want to go to university, where she would spend years more being told what was right and wrong. And she doesn’t want to meet someone. Someone other than Saul, that is, and he will never satisfy her family’s requirements for “meeting someone.” They will never get married. They will never have children. Saul’s name will never come first on cards addressed to both of them; they will not be bound together by church or culture or anything but their own web of secrets and lies and love. This makes their time together irresistible. It makes it possible for Sofia, who has always felt a vague dread at the thought of marriage and children, to fall madly into obsession with Saul, who is safe, who doesn’t threaten Sofia’s independence. Sofia is beginning to understand contradiction: how it is possible to want something more than anything and not want it at the same time, how sometimes the impossibility of a dream is what makes it attractive.
Sofia is borne along by her new secret. She and Saul cross paths in the hallway; there is something magnetic about them, something molten. They clasp hands in doorways; they walk together around the block, quickly; they speak directly into one another’s mouths, pouring sentences out like liquid, cresting a wave that is all animal addiction, all exhale.
Sofia and Saul pass notes when he comes to her house. They arrange meetings in other neighborhoods. They duck into small restaurants and try foods from places they have only ever seen on maps: Morocco, Greece, Malaya. Saul doesn’t know which are the bad neighborhoods and he doesn’t treat Sofia like she’s fragile. They walk as far west as they can without stepping into the Hudson, and as the sun sets they watch the lights come on in New Jersey and Times Square and they find themselves on an island, an impenetrably dark patch of industrial wasteland at the edge of the world.
With Saul, Sofia feels there is room for her. Saul asks Sofia who she is, who she wants to be, and there is never the threat of disappointment, of Sofia not fitting into a preordained space. I think I want to be powerful, like my father, she says to Saul, but I will never do it the way he does it. She does not know what she will do but she understands that it will be something. As the summer passes, Saul is on her mind more and more often, despite her resolve that they are only having fun, only breaking rules.