dining room overlooking an urban garden. A blackened steel staircase with maple treads rose to the second-floor living room and library; a second stair climbed to the master bedroom, bath, and guest room on the top floor. Skylights opened the master bedroom to the stars. To warm up what would otherwise have been a visually cold interior, he had collected a number of primitive pine antiques, most from the Pennsylvania Dutch country west of the city: a stripped pine dining table; a large, hand-painted cabinet originally made for storing bread dough; a wormwood side table to stand by his favorite reading chair; a thick and worn cobbler's workbench, cut down to serve as a coffee table.
An hour after Katerina left—an hour spent staring blankly out at the garden and replaying the scene on a continuous loop in his head—Andrew got up from the dining table at which he'd been sitting since her departure. He left the house and walked across Rittenhouse Square, picked up a couple of bottles of Australian Shiraz at the state liquor store, then went on to the Italian delicatessen on South Nineteenth Street, where he'd shopped for years. He felt scorched. Blistered. Charred. Part of him wondered why no one on the street noticed and called an ambulance.
“Buongiorno, Professore!” Mario, the deli owner, roared above the heads of the shoppers crowding the store. “The usual?”
Andrew nodded. The usual was a selection of cured meats—dry salami, prosciutto, thinly sliced bresaola—and a plastic container each of oil-cured black olives with thyme and green picholine olives in brine. These latter were from the south of France, and Mario always gave him a hard time about his preference for them over the fat Sicilian green olives. Andrew's response was always “If you don't want me to buy them, why do you sell them?” Mario's response was always a shrug and a smile. In fact, he carried them especially for “il Professore.”
Andrew had always been fond of Mario; they'd known each other now for almost a decade, ever since Andrew started coming into the store. It had taken a couple of years before he realized the source of the fondness: He wanted to be Mario. He longed to come from a big Italian family. A noisy family with a multitude of brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. A family that yelled a lot. And laughed a lot. And talked and fought and loved. A family whose members were inseparable, no matter who wasn't talking to whom that week. A family, in short, awash in emotion.
Instead, he'd grown up as the third member of a pathologically peaceful triad: a father who embraced his English heritage by wearing tweed and being a man of few words (and those mostly platitudes), and a mother who knew her husband could have married someone more beautiful, more vivacious, more sophisticated, but didn't. The war threw people together and made them think they'd better grab whomever they could, as soon as they could. She'd become pregnant within a month of meeting Andrew's father and, times being what they were, Graham Stratton and Sheila O'Leary married immediately. The child, a daughter, died hours after being born. It was quite a few years before Andrew came along, and, looking back, it seemed to him his parents had run out of child-rearing energy by then. He'd been left pretty much to his own devices as he'd grown up.
As he was ringing up Andrew's order, Mario said, “So, some nice antipasti, olives, wine … a party tonight, eh, my friend?”
Andrew looked blankly at his old friend and suddenly Mario knew something was wrong.
“Ah, no; trouble with a woman, I think.” He tapped a pudgy forefinger on the side of his nose and nodded, the universal Italian gesture of confidentiality and understanding.
Andrew gave him a thin smile.
On the walk back across the square, he paused at the play area. The day was warm and fragrant from the flowers in the formal plantings at the park's four corners. All around him, children of privilege dashed about in absurdly expensive spring outfits. Their sleek young mothers, in equally stylish clothes, lounged on the dark-green benches lining the walkway, skirts hiked up a few inches so their long, lithe legs could catch the sun.
At the corner, while he waited for the light, a hand touched his elbow and a silky voice purred, “Hey, handsome.”
The voice belonged to a rather Rubenesque beauty called Phyllis Lieberman, a colleague in the art and architecture school who lived