Roman returns with a small tureen that he places on the table. He loosens the cork on a bottle of Tuscan Chianti and pours wine into my glass, then his own. He sits down at the table. He picks up his wineglass. “Good wine, good food, and a good woman…”
“Oh, yes. To Bruna!” I raise my glass.
As Roman ladles the risotto onto my plate, a buttery cloud floats up from the dish. Risotto is a tough dish to pull off. It’s labor intensive, you must stir the rice grains until they puff up or your arm falls off, whichever comes first. It’s all about timing, because if you stir too long, the rice will turn into a goop of wallpaper paste, and not long enough-you’ve got broth.
I take a taste. “You’re a genius,” I tell him. He almost blushes. “Where’d you learn how to cook?”
“My mother. We had a family restaurant in Chicago. Falconi’s, in Oak Lawn.”
“So why did you come to New York City?”
“I’m the youngest of six boys. We all worked in the family business, but my brothers never saw beyond the fact that I was the baby of the family. Even in my thirties, I couldn’t break that birth-order rap. You know what that’s like, don’t you?”
“Alfred is the boss, Tess is intelligent, Jaclyn is the beauty, and I’m the funny one.”
“So you get it. I’d been working for the family since I was a teenager. My mother taught me how to cook, and then I went to school and learned some more. Eventually, I wanted to take what I’d learned and make some changes in the restaurant. It soon became apparent that they liked the restaurant just the way it was. After a lot of wrangling, and nearly drowning in my mother’s tears, I left. I needed to make it on my own. And where better to make your name as an Italian chef than here in Little Italy.”
Roman refills our glasses. There’s a lot of common ground between us. Our backgrounds are similar, not just the Italian part, but the way we are treated in our families. Even though we’ve both made some bold choices and gotten real-life experience, our families haven’t changed their perceptions of us.
“So how did you decide to join the family business?” he asks. “Not too many shoemakers out there these days.”
“Well, I was teaching school, ninth grade English, in Queens. But on weekends, I’d go into the city and help Gram in the shop. Eventually, she began to teach me things about making shoes that went beyond packing and shipping. After a while, I was hooked.”
“There’s nothing like working with your hands, is there?”
“It takes everything I’ve got-mentally, physically. Sometimes I’m so bone tired at the end of the day I can hardly make it up the stairs. But the work itself is just part of it. I love to draw, to sketch the shoes and come up with new ideas, and then figure out how to build them. Someday, I want to design shoes.” This wine has put me in a cozy place. I just confided my dreams to a man I hardly know in a way I rarely ever admit, even to myself.
“How long have you worked with your grandmother?” he asks.
“Almost five years.”
Roman lifts another pumpkin blossom from the plate. “Five years. So that makes you about…?”
I don’t even blink. “Twenty-eight.”
Roman tilts his face and looks at mine from a different angle. “I would have guessed younger.”
“Really.” I’ve never lied about my age, but being almost thirty-four years old seems like a good time to start.
“I got married when I was twenty-eight,” he says. “Divorced at thirty-seven. I’m forty-one now.” He rattles off the numbers without the slightest hesitation.
“What was her name?”
“Aristea. She was Greek. To this day, I’ve never seen a woman more beautiful.”
When a man tells you that the most beautiful woman in the world is his ex-wife, and he’s been looking at your face for over an hour, it sets like a bad anchovy. “Greek girls are Italian girls with better tans.” I sip the wine. “What went wrong?”
“I worked too much.”
“Oh come on. A Greek would understand hard work.”
“And-I guess I didn’t work hard enough on the marriage.”
I look at Roman’s handiwork-the mural, the candles, the feast on the table-and then I look in his eyes, which I’m beginning to trust. I can talk to this man. It’s almost effortless. I feel badly that I lied about my age. This could be the first date of many; now what do I do?
“I’m glad you called me-,” he begins.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” I interrupt. “I’m thirty-three.” My face turns the color of the red pepper slices in the crudité dish. “I never lie, okay? I just did because, well, thirty-three seems almost thirty-four, and that seems like a number that’s getting up there. You should know the truth.”
“No worries. You don’t go out with Italians. Remember?” He smiles. Then he gets up from his chair and comes over to me. He takes my hands in his and pulls me up to stand. We look at each other in that way people do when they’re deciding whether or not to kiss. I feel guilty that I told Gabriel Roman’s nose was like the one with the Groucho Marx glasses. From this angle, his nose is lovely, straight and absolutely fine.
Roman takes my face in his hands. As our lips meet for the first time, his kiss is gentle and sensual, and very direct, like the man himself. I might as well be on the Piazza Medici on the isle of Venice, as his touch takes me far from where I stand and off to someplace wonderful, a place I haven’t been in a very long time. As Roman slides his arms around me, the silk of my dress makes a rustling sound, like the dip of an oar into the canal in the mural behind him.
The last man I kissed was Cal Rosenberg, the son of our button supplier from Manhasset. Let’s just say it didn’t leave me wanting more. But this kiss from Roman Falconi, right here in this sweet restaurant on Mott Street in Little Italy, with my feet in gunboat clogs, makes me feel the possibility of a real romance again. As he kisses me again, I slide my hands down his arms to his biceps. Chefs, evidently, do a lot of heavy lifting, whereas button suppliers and hedge fund managers don’t.
I bury my face in Roman’s neck, the scent of his clean skin, warmed by amber and cedar, is new, and yet familiar. “You smell amazing.” I look up at him.
“Your grandmother gave it to me.”
“Gave you what?”
“The cologne.”
I can’t believe my grandmother gave Roman the free men’s-cologne sample in the goody bag from Jaclyn’s wedding. I don’t know whether to be embarrassed that she gave it to him, or embarrassed for him that he decided to use it.
“She said either I had to take it, or she’d unload it on Vinnie the mailman. You don’t like it?”
“I love it.”
“That’s a strong word, love.”
“Well, that’s a strong cologne.”
The sound of laughter from the street breaks the quiet of the restaurant. Through the windows, I can see the feet of a group of Saturday-night party hounds on their way to the next stop. Their shoes, a mix of polished wingtips, suede ankle boots, and two pairs of high-heeled pumps, one ruby red leather and the other black mock croc, stop in front of Ca’ d’Oro. “Closed,” I hear a woman say in front of the entry door.
Not for me. Roman Falconi kisses me again. “Let’s eat,” he says.
For all the extensive construction going on here on the Manhattan side of the Hudson River, there is plenty happening across the water as well. Construction cranes, dangling with cords hoisting parcels of wood, pipes, and cement blocks play in the far distance like marionettes on a stage. The rhythmic chuff of the pile driver softens as it crosses the water, reminding me of the sound of a coffee percolator.
I lean over the railing on the pier outside our shop and wait for Bret to meet me on his lunch break. A painting class is in full swing under the permanent white tents on the pier. Twelve painters with their backs to me and their easels facing east are painting the landscape of the West Village riverfront on white canvases.