This Crumbling Pageant Read online

Page 11


  “Excellent,” Holly stated. “And so were the pan-fried dumplings.”

  “Mm, that sounds lovely.”

  “We were saying we want to come here more often,” Holly went on. “It was nice to get a break from Italian food. In America, Italian food is just one option out of many.” She lowered her voice and said to the man in mock-astonishment, “But here they eat it every day.”

  He smiled hesitantly. “Yes.” Then he became mirthful. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Janet intervened. “Alright, Richard. Take it easy over there. Look at him, drooling all over her. She’s practically a baby, Richard! Sheesh!”

  The man looked off across the room, a crooked smile lingering on his face.

  “On the other hand,” he said in an airy voice, “perhaps I’ll have the blowfish and see if it kills me.”

  It was such a wonderfully wry remark that Scott started laughing. Then he stopped abruptly and looked down at his chest as Janet rested a hand on it.

  “Well, Scott here doesn’t seem to mind Italian food,” she said. She added, pointedly, “He can eat it at my house almost every day.” Again, she had said it pointedly, but to whom it was pointed was not immediately clear.

  &

  She phoned later that evening.

  “I need you to come over here and fix that chair you broke. You didn’t fix it properly. I tried sitting on it today and landed flat on my ass. I hope you can fix it for real this time. It’s an antique. I don’t have anything ready for you, but I went to the pastry shop this afternoon and bought some babas. Do you know what those are? It’s like rum cake.”

  On the drive over, Scott thought about his life. Then he caught himself staring at the windshield as it filled with raindrops and he put on the wipers.

  Before leaving, he had had another little squabble with Holly. This time it was about sex. It was one of those occasions where he had wanted to, but she didn’t, then she had warmed up to the idea, but he was being a spoilsport. And then Janet called.

  “I’m supposed to go over there tonight and fix a chair,” he said after hanging up.

  “Go ahead,” Holly said, scooting toward the foot of the bed. “That’s all you want to do with your life anymore anyway—work on your cockamamie scheme with that miserable bitch. Either that or just mope around the apartment.” She reached for her laptop on the dresser.

  He disapproved of this characterization. “Cockamamie? If anything, it’s not cockamamie enough. And please, tell me: what else should I be doing? Should I be competing with the Romanians here for carpentry work? As depressing as it may seem, Holly, this painting is my one shining beacon. And I still don’t know what I’m going to do when we get back home.” That morning, Scott had made an exploratory call to one of his uncles on the Cape. Nothing going on here, Scotty, the uncle confirmed. New home construction is kaput. And by the way, you woke me up. It’s three o’ clock in the morning.

  “You haven’t even tried looking for work here,” Holly said. “If you had started when I asked you to, you might have found something by now.”

  Scott was too worn out to sit down with her and lay bare the many fallacies in this argument. With a great force of will, he rolled out of bed and began putting on his shoes. He said, “I set the return date for our plane tickets. January 3rd. The latest date we can legally stay. That means if our flight is canceled for some reason, we might have trouble. Anyway, that’s our deadline. Exactly three weeks from now.”

  The sky was already black by the time he turned onto Janet’s street. Her neighborhood was always a sleepy one, but at night it seemed as vacant as a business district. The massive old houses rose up into the darkness with nary a light burning. At some point, Scott thought, all the old people living around here are going to die off, and these homes will be filled with their slightly less old children.

  Inside the apartment, he collected Janet’s tools, upended the shaky lyre-back chair and parked himself on the floor.

  “Here, don’t forget this,” she said, handing him a piece of the chair.

  She padded back to the den to continue her nightly online shopping. Out of habit, Scott’s eyes went up to the painting above the fireplace, to that frame of tranquility and light.

  Several minutes later, Janet returned. “So how’s it going?”

  He put down a glue gun and dusted himself off. “It’s done. Just be careful sitting on it from now on, okay?”

  “How the heck am I supposed to be careful?”

  She went to the kitchen, and he trudged over to his place at the table. They had dessert. The coffee was burnt, but the baba was delicious.

  “It’s delicious,” he said sadly, toying with the soggy pastry.

  “Jesus!” Janet said. “You’re such a fricking Gloomy Gus tonight.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yeah.” She spoke with force. “You are.”

  He peeled back the rum-saturated baba from his plate and let it drop with a wet smack. “Oh well.”

  She watched him, her brow darkening. In her typically aggressive manner, she suggested, “You should come over tomorrow night. I’m gonna have some manigot.”

  But Scott looked singularly unmoved by this tempting delicacy.

  Janet picked at her lip. She remained silent for over a minute. Then her chin went up. “Oh,” she said, “by the way, I was thinking about taking your advice.”

  Scott sighed. “What advice was that?”

  “I was thinking about getting rid of some of this stuff.” She indicated her busy surroundings. “I wanna start making some more room in here.”

  He lifted his eyes. “You do?”

  “Yeah,” she said, stirring in her chair. “I wanna go for a whole new look. Kind of a sleek, modern style. What do you think?”

  He calibrated his tone carefully. “That sounds like a really interesting idea, Janet.”

  “I know.” She was proud of herself. “Of course, I don’t know what I’m gonna do with all these belongings, but I’m sure I can figure something out.”

  “—sure we can figure something out,” Scott was saying at the same time.

  “I can have Gemma make some ads and post them around town. See what kind of offers I get. Or I can try going on eBay. How hard can it be? And anyway my stuff’s a lot better than the junk you see on there. I could probably make a killing.”

  “I don’t doubt it.” He hesitated. “Before you do, though, let me have a chance to look around the apartment. I think I might like to buy some things myself. You know, my place is still so bare.”

  She urged him to do just that. “Oh, definitely. You should definitely come to me before you go anywhere else. These people will rob you blind if you don’t know what you’re doing.” She smirked. “I’ll give you a good deal.”

  “I would appreciate that.”

  “So you like my idea?”

  “I love it!” Scott shouted. He had been trying to play it cool—but what the hell. He was one obstacle away from an outstanding future.

  Janet’s right shoulder rose as her chin drew back to meet it, doubling-up coquettishly. “You’re a funny one, you know that? For a man, you take such an interest in decorating. You’re very sensitive to your environment. You always have lots of opinions about what looks nice, and where things should go.” Her dainty hands formed a heart-shape on her bosom. “I like that. It’s unique.”

  “Mm,” Scott said, with his mouth full. “Can you pass me a napkin?”

  “Sure. So then I wanna fix up the bathroom, redo all the moldings in the apartment, and put in all new fixtures. Everything here is so ancient. I’m sick to death of it. What do you think of that idea?”

  “It’s beautiful!” He swallowed. “Damn this rum cake is strong! I feel like I’m getting drunk.”

  “Yeah, they do it good there,” she said absently. “Oh! Let me tell you about what happened to me there! You’re not going to believe this.”

  And so
she went on to tell him about her experience at the pastry shop that day, about the comedy of errors it had turned into. And she told him all about the personal war between her and the girl behind the counter. Scott listened avidly. He laughed and asked questions. He ate the intoxicating pastry in two bites.

  He came over for manicotti the next day.

  &

  And for sausages the next, and for a solid clump of gnocchi the day after that. And so on. It could be dinner, it could be lunch, but either way Scott would show up with his car to take her to one specialty shop or beauty appointment after another—to the tailor’s, the cobbler’s, the nail salon, to the lady who did her eyebrows in the outskirts of the city, or to the secluded sanitarium in the countryside where Europeans still liked to go for their health and where Janet liked to get her sinuses cleared and her pores unclogged. And they went to one office whose services were an utter mystery to Scott, except that Janet came away from her visit with some obvious aftereffects. Her face had puffed up, losing the reptilian scrawniness that he associated it with. Thankfully, this swelling didn’t last, and she was back to her old self in no time. Scott quickly found himself spending so much time in waiting rooms and reception areas, he began to bring a book.

  He didn’t pressure her about selling any of her belongings. He brought it up only once, over a plate of rigatoni with meat sauce:

  “Oh, so do you mind if after supper I take a look around the apartment? I want to see if there’s anything I’d like to buy off you.”

  “Are you retarded? Not tonight! I told you already I wanna show you my pictures from Greece last summer.”

  So he immediately retreated. After all, he didn’t want to strong-arm her into it. Not just yet.

  Meanwhile, it seemed like Holly, his lovely wife, was always saying something like “Luca.”

  “Luca,” she would say, in response to the question, “Who did you go to the monastery with?”

  “Luca,” she would say, when asked, “Who was that on the phone?”

  “Luca,” she would say, when asked, “So what are your plans for today?”

  Scott felt she was testing his patience whenever she said this, because it forced him to then ask, “Which goddamn Luca?” And even though the Luca she was talking about was never the same Luca twice in a row, she kept saying only “Luca.” Because she wants to keep me guessing, Scott thought. She’s deliberately keeping me off balance, so I won’t figure out the truth.

  Scott felt guilty for thinking this way. And he tried to prevail upon himself to control his jealousy before it actually drove Holly away, thus bringing about the very thing he was afraid of, and causing a betrayal when she had intended none. But then:

  “Luca,” she would say, when asked, “Who gave you this book of lyric poetry?”

  To no one’s surprise but her own, Holly was offered the job at the Pinacoteca Nazionale. Before accepting, she called Scott with the news.

  “No way,” he told her, under his breath. He was at the Armani store with Janet. She was modeling a futuristic-looking new blazer and wondering what he thought. He held up a finger and excused himself to go to a corner of the room. “I’m sorry, Holly. Really I am. But no way. Not unless Luca can find something for me, too.”

  “Luca says he can’t,” Holly said as soon as he entered the apartment later that night.

  Scott didn’t budge. “Then that’s it then.”

  She petitioned San Michele once more and persuaded him to keep looking. Then she sat down at the computer and banged out a résumé for Scott—a pretty impressive one, he thought—and took him to the two employment agencies in town. But unless Scott could mutate overnight into an experienced Italian-speaking machinist, they had nothing for him. Again Holly called their landlord and again he told her, with a sorrowful laugh, that he had not had much luck, not much luck at all.

  In one of her blackest hours, she proposed to Scott that he overstay his visa—an uncharacteristically reckless suggestion.

  “Are you crazy?” he said. “Have you read what happens to people here when they overstay their visas, even by one day? Go look it up online. There are some harrowing tales.”

  He had exhumed his suitcase from the spidery utility closet and was on the floor going through it to make sure his passport was there. Unzipping one pocket, he uncovered some dollars and quarters. His hand ran over them, spreading out the green bills and silver coins. Never in his life had he gone so long without seeing American money, and so he was able to look at it with new eyes. It was beautiful.

  Suddenly Holly pointed the finger of doom at him. “I told you to apply for citizenship months ago! Before we even got here! Why didn’t you? We both might’ve had it by now.”

  “We can always do that later when we get back home. But if we overstay our visas, we’ll lose any hope of that. We won’t even be able to set foot on this continent again for ten years.”

  Finally, Holly resigned herself to defeat. Out of courtesy for all he’d done, she called San Michele first to inform him of their decision.

  “Thank you so much for your help, Luca, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to tell them I can’t take the job. I’m sorry I put you through all this trouble for nothing. Hm?” She listened, then said, “No, no. We discussed it and decided we don’t like the idea of being apart for that long. Right… Okay, I’ll ask him.” She cupped the phone. “Luca says why don’t you return to the United States, temporarily, and continue looking for work in Italy while you’re over there. He can keep looking, too, and that way you will probably find something fairly soon, and we won’t have to spend too much time apart.” Then she said into the phone, “That’s not an option for us, Luca. Mm-hm… That’s true… Well, okay, hold on again. Let me suggest it to him.” She cupped the phone once more. “Luca says you can also try applying for dual citizenship while you’re there, and that might be faster than finding a job.” She said into the phone, “That’s not going to work for us either, Luca. What’s that? Okay, hold on a second.” She held out the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”

  He took the phone from her.

  “Hello?”

  “Scott,” Luca said.

  “Luca,” said Scott.

  “How are you?”

  “Not so good, actually.”

  “I know. Listen, I may have a solution to our little problem.”

  He told him about a woman he knows, the director of an English-language school located in the old Jewish Ghetto. The other day, over coffee, he was discussing Scott and Holly’s situation with this woman, and she was saying she might consider taking him on as a teacher there.

  “But I don’t know how to teach English,” Scott said.

  “It’s an advanced conversation course. The students are adults who simply want to chat with a native speaker for a few pleasant hours each week.”

  “Really?” he said slowly. He brightened. “Well… Okay! That sounds fantastic, actually. You think she’ll hire me?”

  “I can call her first thing in the morning and arrange a meeting for you two.”

  “This is incredible!” Scott exclaimed. “My God, I don’t know how to thank you. Holly! Luca may have found me a job!” Holly let out a jubilant screech, and he said into the phone, “She’s really excited, Luca.”

  Scott paused to reflect on their amazing luck, and his smile faded.

  “Huh… That really was incredible, Luca, the way this job just sort of magically appeared at the last second.”

  13

  Scott’s objective was to railroad a work visa through before exceeding the ninety-day maximum stay allowed under his US passport, because to apply for one after the ninety-day period would give him the uncanny resemblance of an illegal alien trying to pull a fast one on the Italian state.

  Luckily, he had his new boss, Elvira De Pretto, to assist him.

  She was a tall, bosomy, statuesque neurotic who entered rooms spraying perfume into the air. First thing she did
, when they met for lunch, was complain of a funny odor and take out her bottle of scent and spritz some over Scott’s prosciutto sandwich and $6 glass of Coca Cola. Since he was unaware that this was merely her habit, Scott spent the whole interview paranoid that he smelled bad.

  “Thank you so much for meeting with me,” he told her, with bated breath and armpits pinned down.

  “Oh,” she said, looking somewhat taken aback to hear English. She smiled. “My pleasure.” She settled into the chair opposite. “Right, let’s get started. Let me tell you the most important thing about me. A former employee of mine used to call me the Enlightened Despot, and that is how I like to see myself. I am very ambitious. I have big plans for my little school, Scott. And,” she added formidably, “I have big plans for you, too. I told all my teachers we have a native speaker coming to work with us, and everyone is extremely excited to meet our new star. Our students will certainly see it as a bonus that you are American. Italians love an American accent. They simply love it. It is by far the most popular accent people want to learn. The only problem is that Americans, I’ve noticed, have a slight tendency to chew their words when they talk.” She pretended to chew. “So please be aware of it, and try to pronounce your words distinctly. Okay?”

  “Okay coach,” Scott said nervously.

  “Do you speak Italian?”

  “My listening skills are improving, but I still have trouble speaking it.”

  “Good. We don’t want you to. Now, because you have no teaching experience, we will start you off slowly, with only one class. Then, after a little while, we can gradually increase your workload.” She paused to bicker with the waiter, then leaned forward, fidgeting with her rings. “I wanted to tell you about this inspiration I had the other night. Not now,” she was quick to reassure him, “but in a week or two when you are more comfortable, I would like for you to begin visiting each of our classes as a sort of guest lecturer. I have already discussed this with my teachers and they are very pleased not only for their students but for themselves as well—to learn what you can teach them.”