But Michele walks around barefooted, checking his email on wifi, leaving a juice glass or an espresso cup wherever he forgets it, as if the domestic staff were still about to show up. He seems to not have realized yet that there is no man coming to cut down the branches and rake the driveway. There is no Swiss au pair coming to take care of the kids. The aristocracy is over.
But Donna Alda wants to sit on the terrace and admire the sea from her chair. Besides the fact that I happen to totally agree with her, I also have felt an urgent need to make sure she has what she wants. I am possibly overconscious that this may be her last summer. She mentions it herself, with humor and matter-of-fact-ness, but I am really taking it to heart. I also can’t shake this feeling that it may also be my last summer here—it seems likely that we will start to speak of divorce when we return to New York—and I want at least some of what I want. If I will never be close to, if I will never be truly known by this man, if we will never have the parties, the five kids, the fire that burns outside all night long, then the self-bankrolled martyr wants at least a negroni on the terrace while looking out at the sea, even if she has to make it herself. With only four days left of our vacation in the south, before we will have to pack up and head back to Rome, and then back to our lives lived separately in New York, I take the car and drive alone to Tricase, about twenty minutes away, and find the store that has clippers and saws and shovels and rakes. I buy a brand-new pair of sharp pruning scissors and a long-handled branch cutter, and while I am there I pick up packets of seeds for arugula and parsley and lettuce, knowing that I will never see them grow in our last four days, but reasoning that it will be good to show Marco and Leone how to plant and care for something daily. So I get them anyway.
For the next four afternoons in a row, when I am finished cooking and while Alda is taking her nap, I climb the trees, sometimes barefoot, with the scissors and the clippers. I trim at least six trees, bracing myself in their crotches in the hot summer sun, cursing and grimacing, trying to hold on with one hand and work the clippers with the other. I am twenty-five feet in the air, and can see the sea and all of the life on the promenade. I try to notice where each branch forms so as not to cut the very one I am standing on and plummet to the ground below, but sometimes it’s so thick and tangled that I cut with a little niggling doubt hovering over me, between my head and the hot sun. When two hands are required I try to use another branch or my own body as leverage, but much of the time I am forced to simply wedge my foot into the tangle of branches below and then just reach all the way out with both hands on the clippers, hoping for the best.
Giovanni, in disbelief and I think maybe irritation, looks up from where he is reading on the terrace to discover what all the rustling is in the trees. Regarding my labor, he pauses, sitting still in his chair a moment, letting it sink in that this fucking girl has just climbed the tree and is now pruning it back. Ma Donna, I bet he mutters. He drops his book in his lap and sits there one more moment, relishing, I feel certain, his last few seconds of idleness. And then he patiently lifts himself from the chair and descends the stairs into the garden until I hear him below me, under the trees, dragging away the branches and sawing them into smaller manageable bundles. I can’t see him but I hear him. It is exhilarating to be so high up, at the very tops of the trees, and to be able to look out at the sea and back at the house completely unobstructed. To have my bare feet wedged into the crotches of tree branches—like they haven’t been for thirty years—makes me feel instantly, kinesthetically, very young again, as if the