The Italian I Was Never Supposed to Understand novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Table
At the dinner before her City Hall wedding, Livia hears her fiancé and best friend flirt in Italian, catches him lying, refuses to sign tomorrow and walks out, and her grandmother shows her he works for a company the family owns, with nine days left on his visa.
Chiara leaned across my fiancé's shoulder and whispered to him in Italian.
"Come over tonight. I bought the lingerie you like. The red one."
Raffaele smirked into his wine glass and answered her in Italian too.
"We went through four condoms last night. That's still not enough for you?"
The night before our City Hall wedding, ten of us sat at a long table in the back room of a West Village trattoria.
Candles in wine bottles. Bread nobody was eating.
My best friend's cheeks went pink.
She glanced at me, then back at him.
"Maybe we shouldn't. What if Livia finds out?"
"So what if she finds out? She can't live without me anyway."
Chiara giggled.
Then the whole table laughed.
His coworkers from the wine company. Chiara's sommelier friends. All of them born in Turin or Alba or Milan.
All of them laughing at a joke they were sure I couldn't follow.
They'd never heard me speak a word of Italian.
They didn't know my mother was a Marchesi.
They didn't know I grew up at my grandmother's table on East 73rd Street, where you got no dessert if you asked for it in English.
I understood every single word.
I put my fork down.
It didn't make a sound.
Raffaele turned to me and switched back to English.
His voice went soft and warm, the voice he used on waiters and my landlord.
"Babe, you okay? You look tired."
I looked at him.
Two years. Eight months engaged.
I had drawn his face so many times I could do it with my eyes shut.
I decided to give him one more chance.
"What did Chiara just say?"
He laughed and cupped my cheek.
His thumb smelled like her perfume.
"She said she's so happy for us. Tomorrow we sign the papers, and she wants to plan a surprise."
Something in my chest went very quiet.
Across the table, Chiara gave me her best sad-puppy smile.
Nine years ago she was my freshman roommate at NYU.
The first week, she made fun of "fake Italians from New Jersey" who couldn't pronounce bruschetta.
I was a Dorrington from Connecticut on paper, so I'd laughed along.
It turned into a joke I never corrected.
Then it turned into the one place I could be loved for me and not my grandmother's money.
Fine.
I picked up my napkin, folded it in half and laid it beside my plate.
"I'm not signing tomorrow," I said.
I said it in English, loud enough for the whole table.
Raffaele's hand slid off my face.
"What?"
"I want my grandmother there. I want a real wedding. Let's do it later, when she can come."
Nobody laughed now.
One of his coworkers set his glass down too fast and wine slopped onto the tablecloth.
"Amore," Raffaele said, still smiling, "you're tired. We talked about this. City Hall is just paperwork."
"Then it can wait."
Down the table, a woman in a green dress murmured in Italian, "Nine days. He has nine days."
Chiara kicked her under the table.
I heard the thump.
Nine days until what?
I kept my face blank.
Raffaele leaned in close.
"Livia. Sweetheart. Everything's booked. My mother is flying in. You're embarrassing me."
Then, without moving his smile, he muttered in Italian, "Stupid cow, not now."
I stood up.
My chair scraped the tile.
"I'm going home," I said. "Enjoy your dinner."
Chiara half rose. "Liv, wait, I'll come with you."
"No," I said. "You've got plans tonight."
For one second her face went blank.
Then she laughed, high and careful.
I took my denim jacket off the back of the chair.
I took the ring off my finger, too.
I set it on Raffaele's bread plate, right on top of the butter.
"Hold this for me," I said. "I don't want to lose it."
He stared at it.
Ten people watched me walk out of that room.
Nobody followed.
On Bleecker Street I didn't call an Uber to Brooklyn.
I hailed a yellow cab and gave the driver an address I hadn't said out loud in months.
East 73rd, between Park and Lexington.
The townhouse lights were still on at ten-forty.
They were always on.
My grandmother opened the kitchen door herself, in her silk robe, leaning on the cane she pretended she didn't need.
She looked at my bare finger.
Then at my face.
"Finalmente," she said. Finally.
"Nonna, I need to know everything about Raffaele Bellandi."
"Sit. Eat something first."
"I'm not hungry."
"Nobody in this family has ever been too upset to eat. Sit."
I sat at the long kitchen table where I'd learned to count, to curse and to roll gnocchi off the back of a fork.
She put a plate of cold lasagna in front of me.
Then she put a manila folder beside it.
She had a folder ready.
Of course she did.
"I had him looked into the day you got engaged," she said. "You wouldn't let me tell you."
I opened it.
There was his photo, his Alba address, his salary.
And a line in thick black letters across the top of the second page.
EMPLOYER: PONTE IMPORTS, LONG ISLAND CITY. WORK VISA SPONSORED BY EMPLOYER. EXPIRES MAY 16.
Nine days.
"Ponte," I said. "That's the wine company he works for."
Nonna tapped the page with one red fingernail.
"We bought Ponte fourteen months ago, cara. Your fiancé works for you."
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