Chapter Sixteen

Better break down now, I thought, than live another day juggling all of my implausible resolutions to try again later.

No, better he should never know. I could live with that. I could always, always live with that. It didn't even surprise me to see how easy it was to accept.

And yet, out of the blue, a tender moment would erupt so suddenly between us that the words I longed to tell him would almost slip out of my mouth. Green bathing suit moments, I called them—even after my color theory was entirely disproved and gave me no confidence to expect kindness on "blue" days or to watch out for "red" days.

Music was an easy subject for us to discuss, especially when I was at the piano. Or when he'd want me to play something in the manner of so-and-so. He liked my combinations of two, three, even four composers chiming in on the same piece, and then transcribed by me. One day Chiara started to hum a hit- parade tune and suddenly, because it was a windy day and no one was heading for the beach or even staying outdoors, our friends gathered around the piano in the living room as I improvised a Brahms variation on a Mozart rendition of that very same song. "How do you do this?" he asked me one morning while he lay in heaven.

"Sometimes the only way to understand an artist is to wear his shoes, to get inside him. Then everything else flows naturally."

We talked about books again. I had seldom spoken to anyone about books except my father.

Or we talked about music, about the pre-Socratic philosophers, about college in the U.S.

Or there was Vimini.

The first time she intruded on our mornings was precisely when I'd been playing a variation on Brahms's last variations on Handel.

Her voice broke up the intense midmorning heat. "What are you doing?"

"Working," I replied.

Andy, who was lying flat on his stomach on the edge of the pool, looked up with the sweat pouring down between his shoulder blades.

"Me too," he said when she turned and asked him the same question. "You were talking, not working."

"Same thing."

"I wish I could work. But no one gives me any work."

Andy, who had never seen Vimini before, looked up to me, totally helpless, as though he didn't know the rules of this conversation.

"Andy, meet Vimini, literally our next-door neighbor." She offered him her hand and he shook it.

"Vimini and I have the same birthday, but she is ten years old. Vimini is also a genius. Isn't it true you're a genius, Vimini?"

"So they say. But it seems to me that I may not be."

"Why is that?" Andy inquired, trying not to sound too patronizing. "It would be in rather bad taste for nature to have made me a genius." Andy looked more startled than ever: "Come again?"

"He doesn't know, does he?" she was asking me in front of him. I shook my head.

"They say I may not live long."

"Why do you say that?" He looked totally stunned. "How do you know?" "Everyone knows. Because I have leukemia."

"But you're so beautiful, so healthy-looking, and so smart," he protested. "As I said, a bad joke."

Andy, who was now kneeling on the grass, had literally dropped his book on the ground.

"Maybe you can come over one day and read to me," she said. "I'm really very nice—and you look very nice too. Well, goodbye."

She climbed over the wall. "And sorry if I spooked you—well—"

You could almost watch her trying to withdraw the ill-chosen metaphor.

If the music hadn't already brought us closer together at least for a few hours that day, Vimini's apparition did.

We spoke about her all afternoon. I didn't have to look for anything to say. He did most of the talking and the asking. Andy was mesmerized. For once, I wasn't speaking about myself.

Soon they became friends. She was always up in the morning after he returned from his morning jog or swim, and together they would walk over to our gate, and clamber down the stairs ever so cautiously, and head to one of the huge rocks, where they sat and talked until it was time for breakfast. Never had I seen a friendship so beautiful or more intense. I was never jealous of it, and no one, certainly not I, dared come between them or eavesdrop on them. I shall never forget how she would give him her hand once they'd opened the gate to the stairway leading to the rocks. She seldom ever ventured that far unless accompanied by someone older.

When I think back to that summer, I can never sort the sequence of events. There are a few key scenes. Otherwise, all I remember are the "repeat" moments. The morning ritual before and after breakfast: Andy lying on the grass, or by the pool, I sitting at my table. Then the swim or the jog. Then his grabbing a bicycle and riding to see the translator in town. Lunch at the large, shaded dining table in the other garden, or lunch indoors, always a guest or two for lunch drudgery. The afternoon hours, splendid and lush with abundant sun and silence.

Then there are the leftover scenes: my father always wondering what I did with my time, why I was always alone; my mother urging me to make new friends if the old ones didn't interest me, but above all to stop hanging around the house all the time—books, books, books, always books, and all these scorebooks, both of them begging me to play more tennis, go dancing more often, get to know people, find out for myself why others are so necessary in life and not just foreign bodies to be sidled up to. Do crazy things if you must, they told me all the while, forever prying to unearth the mysterious, telltale signs of heartbreak which, in their clumsy, intrusive, devoted way, both would instantly wish to heal, as if I were a soldier who had strayed into their garden and needed his wound immediately stanched or else he'd die. You can always talk to me. I was your age once, my father used to say. The things you feel and think only you have felt, believe me, I've lived and suffered through all of them, and more than once—some I've never gotten over and others I'm as ignorant about as you are today, yet I know almost every bend, every toll-booth, every chamber in the human heart.

There are other scenes: the postprandial silence—some of us napping, some working, others reading, the whole world basking away in hushed semitones. Heavenly hours when voices from the world beyond our house would filter in so softly that I was sure I had drifted off. Then afternoon tennis. Shower and cocktails. Waiting for dinner. Guests again. Dinner. His second trip to the translator. Strolling into town and back late at night, sometimes alone, sometimes with friends.

Then there are the exceptions: the stormy afternoon when we sat in the living room, listening to the music and to the hail pelting every window in the house. The lights would go out, the music would die, and all we had was each other's faces. An aunt twittering away about her dreadful years in St. Louis, Missouri, which she pronounced San Lui, Mother trailing the scent of Earl Grey tea, and in the background, all the way from the kitchen downstairs, the voices of Manfredi and Mafalda—spare whispers of a couple bickering in loud hisses. In the rain, the lean, cloaked, hooded figure of the gardener doing battle with the elements, always pulling up weeds even in the rain, my father signaling with his arms from the living room window, Go back, Anchise, go back.

"That man gives me the creeps," my aunt would say. "That creep has a heart of gold," my father would say.