“Saul?”
“I’m sorry, I can’t this evening,” says Saul. “My family.”
“Your family,” Eli repeats. “And how are they, your family?”
Saul doesn’t like talking about his family with Eli. He compartmentalizes. “They’re well,” he says.
Eli can sense his reticence. “Call anytime,” he says. Eli’s warmth is a weapon. The kinder his voice, the more severe the consequences.
Saul hangs up, sweating.
Everyone has plans for expansion, says Eli, over and over again in Saul’s head as Saul walks home. It’s human nature.
Is it? Saul wonders. All he wants is to shrink into the places in his life where he feels at home. All he wants is for those places to coexist.
* * *
—
When Robbie starts school, Antonia decides if she is ever going to go back to school herself she is going to have to take it into her own hands. So she hatches a plan: Monday and Wednesday mornings, after she has dropped Robbie off and Paolo has left for work, Antonia packs herself a snack and a notebook and a sweater, for it is always freezing in the library, and sneaks furtively out of her apartment and down the street, as if someone might stop her.
She still has no money for extracurriculars but the memory of reading Antigone in high school has come back to her like a long-lost friend and she has begun reading the classics section systematically. She sits curled into a chair like a snail into its shell in one of the vast, echoing stone reading rooms on the third floor and from nine in the morning to twelve noon, Antonia loses herself in the drama and heartache of another time entirely. Aeschylus and Euripides. Aristotle and Ovid.
Soon, Antonia finds Metamorphoses, a greasy, dog-eared copy that she becomes in thrall to almost immediately. Where teenage Antonia held on to stories of principle, of the great unfairnesses perpetrated by those in power, mamma Antonia prays to stories of evolution, stories that promise that no one is born into their final shape. She mouths words to herself, tasting them as they bounce along the tongue. She wonders if she herself has the capacity for change.
When she walks home in the early afternoon, Antonia is buoyant, the combined joy of exercising her brain and the adrenaline of keeping a new secret propelling her along. Of course, she knows in some way that this is a stopgap, something she made up to pass the time, to distract herself. She can see the concrete ways that the people around her have changed: Sofia, with her job; Lina, who has now built such a loyal clientele that she often sits with visiting women from dawn to dusk. Even Frankie, once small enough to balance with Antonia on one chair like a teddy bear, has begun saving money to move out of her parents’ home. She cuts neighborhood ladies’ hair and they forget she is only sixteen; her self-assurance is so contagious. Her face so poised.
It’s just us, thinks Antonia. She and Paolo and Robbie. It’s just us who are standing still.
* * *
—
The phone rings as Saul is finishing breakfast. Sofia is already gone, having kissed Julia’s forehead and whispered to Saul, my mamma can take her to school, and then rather than kissing Saul, too, brandishing the bottoms of her shoes in a wave before disappearing in a cloud of Soir de Paris. Saul picks up the phone.
It is Joey. He is brief, but he asks Saul for a meeting.
* * *
—
The room where Saul has been told to wait for Joey is small and dark and smells like salted meat. There are two chairs, both soft brown leather that have seen better days, and there is an aged folding card table with an espresso machine and cups balanced precariously on one side. From the one dirty window a saturated afternoon light streams in, illuminating generations’ worth of dust dancing in the air. On the ground floor, just below, is a sandwich shop, the din of which rustles up through the floor.
Saul sits in the room, accompanied only by his own curiosity about why he is here. He has gotten very good at waiting. At trusting; at holding himself still. He does this at work, when he has been given a job but not a reason for it; he does it at home, when Sofia is taken by a nameless rage or curiosity or joy but has not explained it to him. He does it every other Thursday night, now, when he waits for Eli to pick up the phone. He did it, once, on a boat, rocking creakily from Europe to America, where the only thing he knew was that nothing was known.
Joey is late. When he pushes open the door Saul stands to shake his hand, to kiss the air next to his cheek.
“Ciao, buddy,” says Joey, “I couldn’t get here any sooner, did you get a coffee? That machine is dusty but it makes a perfect espresso.” As he talks, Joey fills the espresso maker; tamps down the mound of fragrant ground coffee; gestures to see if Saul would like one.