The Italian Lover

  “A crane. But we’d need a crane.”

  “You’re the director, Michael. Tell Signora Klein you need a crane. We have cranes in Italy.”

  “But five minutes with no sound?”

  They had ordered the antipastone and the waiter was arranging crostini on their plates.

  “You should always imagine you’re making a silent film,” Zanni was saying. “Then you have to use the camera to think visually. Think about it. The first meeting. Instead of Sandro emerging from the sewer, which is ridiculous, we see a young woman who’s been excluded by her American colleagues from a Thanksgiving dinner at I Tatti. She wanders out into the piazza, on the edge of tears. She sees a girl chasing her dog. She shouts at the dog to stop. There you might allow the audience to hear her voice. She calls the dog; the dog stops. And who is watching her beside the audience? You. You’re looking down from on high. You see her. You see the man who is going to become her lover approaching from behind. He’s been watching her too. They speak. We don’t hear what they have to say because we don’t need to. It’s classic. She’s angry. She pulls her whole body away from him. She jerks away. They speak some more. And then they walk across the piazza to a bar. Not a word; do you see what I mean? One long shot that takes in the piazza, the fake David, the Uffizi in the background. Simplicity itself. What do you think?”

  Michael, who’d been looking at his dog-eared copy of the script, shook his head. “We’d have to get a crane, a big crane.”

  “We have big cranes too.”

  “But it’s not in the budget.”

  “Tell Signora Klein to put it in the budget.”

  “I’m afraid of heights.”

  Beryl’s heart sank. She knew why her husband had never won an Oscar.

  “If I didn’t have to be on the ground, I’d shoot the scene for you,” Zanni said, “but you can watch it from below on a video tap. That’s what most directors would do. Send the director of photography up in the basket.”

  Beryl didn’t think that Zanni was speaking sarcastically, but if he was, he’d taken the edge off it. “Seriously, though,” he went on, “you ought to try it. It gives you a new perspective on things.”

  The waiter brought more antipasti: squid, fish, little octopuses. Beryl knew that Zanni was stealing the movie, which they’d decided to call The Italian Lover. Everyone knew it, and everyone was happy, except Miranda.

  Beryl stopped listening to Michael and Zanni when she suddenly realized that she could understand what the couple at the next table was saying. Her intensive Italian class at Linguaviva was paying off. She wasn’t even stopping to translate. They were arguing about a sofa (divano) that the woman had ordered without consulting her husband. She didn’t realize that she needed to consult him about every little thing (ogne cosa piccola). A sofa, he said, was not a little thing. It was huge (enorme).

  The waiter brought more food. “Get the crane,” she said to Michael. “I’ll talk to Esther if you don’t want to. It’s a great idea.” Antipastone. Beryl finally realized what it meant: big antipasto. They weren’t going to eat a regular meal. They were going to eat one antipasto after another. Including lardo Colonnata. Paper-thin slices of lard that had been cured in special marble tubs in Colonnata. She didn’t think she could do it. Eat straight lard. But she did, and it was delicious.

  When they’d finished their lardo and the waiter had brought fresh plates, Michael, who hadn’t touched his lard, asked Beryl for a piece of paper, which she produced from her purse, and began jotting down some notes. The waiter brought a platter of deep-fried anchovy pastries, but Michael, who’d hardly eaten anything, wasn’t interested. He wanted to get home to call Esther about the crane and then rethink the shooting schedule. “We could shoot the library scene tomorrow,” he explained, as if he were justifying himself to Esther. He stood up to leave. “Then we can shoot the new piazza scene when we’ve got the crane.”

  “But we haven’t finished eating,” Zanni said.

  “You stay,” Michael said. “I’m going to call Esther.”

  “I don’t think I can eat anymore,” Beryl said in Italian, as one waiter cleared their plates and another brought a tray of prosciutto and salame toscano with big chunks of white fat in each slice. “I can’t believe that I ate straight lard.”

  Zanni answered her in Italian: “They’ll keep bringing more dishes till we tell them to stop.”

  Beryl tried to explain to Zanni, in Italian, that she was a different person in Italian—not her usual confident self, but timid, attentive. She had to stay alert all the time in Italian. She told him about the woman at the Protestant Cemetery, where she sometimes stopped for tea after her Italian lessons. About her teachers at Linguaviva. It was like starting her life over or starting another life. She wasn’t sure who she was or who she would turn out to be if she kept it up.

  They finished their wine. Zanni told the waiter not to bring any more food, just a little fruit and some Vin Santo and maybe a plate of biscotti. Beryl knew she was in danger. She wasn’t going to make anything happen, but she wasn’t going to stop it from happening either. They continued to talk in Italian. They dipped their biscotti di Prato in little glasses of Vin Santo; they ate their fruit and drank two coffees, corrected with grappa. Beryl paid the bill with her Visa card.

  Walking with Zanni down the Via de’ Macci, Beryl said, “Let’s get this over with.” At least that’s what she meant to say, though she wasn’t sure about the subjunctive in Italian, and so they turned south instead of north, south toward Santa Croce instead of north toward San Pier Maggiore, down winding streets on the other side of the piazza—Via Torta, Via della Burella—into Piazza San Firenze, past the Bargello and the Badia, where Michael was planning to film some exterior shots. They crossed the right-angled streets of the old Roman forum, under the arch to Via Tornabuoni. This route was imprinted on Beryl’s mind at this time, and she didn’t think she’d ever forget it. This city was no longer Renaissance Florence. It had become something more personal. But she was afraid that one word of English would send her back to her old self, a self that could never do what she was doing. She couldn’t always understand what Zanni was saying, but she understood that they were going to his hotel. She could sense another self—her English-speaking self—walking beside them. When she checked their reflections in the window at Versace, pretending she was just looking at a pair of shoes, she saw just two people, but when they were walking along, not looking in the windows, she seemed to glimpse this other self out of the corner of her eye. She had to struggle to keep the conversation going in Italian. She was afraid that Zanni would become impatient and start speaking in English, and she knew that if he did, she would turn around and go straight home. To Via Pietrapiana. But Zanni must have understood this too, because he did not become impatient.

  Zanni whispered his room number in her ear. Trenta-sei. He would go in first, he said, and she should wait five minutes and then take the elevator. No point in bumping into Esther in the lobby. Maybe, she thought, he was giving her a chance to back out—a second chance—time to think things over. But there was nothing more to think over.

  She walked down the street to Via Tornabuoni and then back to the hotel, which had very fancy glass doors—large glass windows set in beautiful dark wood. A sign indicated that the hotel accepted various credit cards. The lobby was empty. Arches sprang from Corinthian columns. There were two desks. A man at one, a woman at the other. Both looked up. Let them look, Beryl thought. What were they going to do?

  In the mirrors in the elevator Beryl thought she looked especially handsome in a velvet halter that showed off her shoul-ders without being overtly sexy. She was a little shaky, but she knocked firmly on the door. Numero 36. Trenta-sei. She thought she had it right, but for a minute she imagined a perfect stranger opening the door. Or Esther or Miranda.

  “Avanti.” Zanni opened the door. The first thing she noticed was that there were two single beds in the room.

  Beryl knew how San
dro proceeds in The Sixteen Pleasures. He undresses Margot in front of a cheval glass. Michael had talked about this scene. She knew that Miranda was nervous about it. But what did a beautiful young body like that have to worry about? What Beryl wondered was, how would Zanni proceed? They never really show this part in films—a man trying to get out of his pants, a woman trying to unhook her bra. Nude scenes in movies all had the same shape, acted out the same cultural fantasy.

  “Vieni.”

  “Sicuro?”

  “Si, si.” Zanni patted the bed and she sat down beside him. You’d think she’d know what to do by now, but Michael was the only man she’d been to bed with since Smith. She wasn’t thinking that way now, though. In Italian she’d done this lots of times. In her imagination—Darren, the point guard at Troy High; Mr. Alexander, the friend of the family; Paul, the server for her father and her date for the senior prom; Barry, her coworker at Bergdorf Goodman’s before she met Michael. And after that: Duncan, an editor at Advertising Age; the priest at St. Hildegard’s back in L.A.; her husband’s colleagues; men she’d passed on the street or seen in a restaurant or on an airplane. She’d had a dozen lovers since she’d come to Florence. She’d slept with the barista at the bar where she stopped for a cappuccino every morning, with the man at the pizzicheria and the ortolano on Via degli Albizzi, with Franco Bevilacqua and the good-looking dolly grip. She couldn’t begin to count them, the lovers she’d held in her arms at night, in Italy. And now they all came crowding together in this hotel room, sitting next to her on a single bed in the person of Giovanni Cipriani.

  “Vuoi mettere i letti insieme?” she asked. Do you want to put the beds together?

  “C’e sempre un diviso sconfortabile nel mezzo,” he said. “Domani chiedero una camera con un matrimoniale.”

  “Va bene. E stasera?”

  He laughed. “Faremo il meglio possiamo.” We’ll do the best we can. He touched her. “Permettimi.” He started to remove her dress, but there were too many buttons.

  “They’re fake,” she said. “It unhooks. Like this. My wedding dress,” she said, “had hundreds of buttons, and my mother kept getting them misaligned. I was half an hour late for the ceremony.”

  He entered her with all the force of her imaginary lovers—priest and plowman, young and old, short and tall, stout and thin. They whispered to her in Italian. She didn’t know what to say in Italian, so she didn’t say anything. She’d exhausted her supply of Italian and just wanted to be quiet, to experience all these lovers at once, after so many years of behaving herself.

  Zanni insisted on walking her home or calling a cab. Not because Firenze is dangerous at eleven o’clock at night, but because it was the thing to do, but Beryl refused, because she wanted to be alone, to savor this moment as she retraced her steps back to the restaurant, Osteria de’ Pazzi, and then got a little lost and wound up in Piazza Sant’Ambrogio, where Saint Ambrose had spent a year, living with a local family, in 403. Ambrose, the church’s chief opponent of Arianism in the West. When someone asked her the time—Che ore sono?—she couldn’t understand a word. The man had to point at his watch.

  Back at the apartment, Michael was hard at work on the new crane scene and hardly noticed that she was late. “Hello,” he said, and when she put her hands on his shoulders, she was her old self again. He’d already talked to Esther about the crane, he said. She waited for the sadness to kick in, the melancholy, the postcoitum triste, the guilt, the shame. She tried to pretend, but she couldn’t. She was too full of life and joy and love, and her earlier feelings about her husband—her knowledge that he was middling—turned into tenderness. He was so excited, and she thought that just maybe this film would turn out to be something great for him. He seemed to think so. He wanted to talk about the new plan for the crane. At first Esther had objected, he said, but he’d insisted, and she seemed happy enough. She was going to talk to the production manager in the morning, start adding time to the schedule. If Michael wanted a crane, he’d get a crane.

  So they both went to bed happy, their arms around each other, at first, and then just touching. Beryl thought about last Sunday’s lesson—Paul warning the Ephesians against fornication and uncleanness, against filthiness and foolish talking, against whoremongers and idolaters and vain words; she kept waiting for something bad to happen, but it didn’t.

  Hump Day

  Sunday afternoon. Esther was in the production office with Guido Graziano, the dolly grip. Guido was talking on the phone in Italian, talking to his father, who owned the movie-supply house in Rome that had provided the camera, the lighting package, the dollies and that was going to supply the crane they would use for Michael’s piazza shot. There was to be some kind of demonstration in the piazza on Wednesday, and Esther wanted to reschedule the crane for Thursday. She had the impression that Guido and his father were talking about something else, but whenever she coughed or tapped the desk, Guido would smile and move his hand up and down as if he were patting a dog on the head. He was a beautiful man, Esther thought, and a good worker.

  They were four weeks into the shoot. Almost halfway. Wednesday would be hump day. The weather had been cooperating, not good for tourists, but a string of gray days that could pass for midwinter, which is just what they needed. The sun had come out on Friday for a while and she’d thought they’d have to scramble to find an interior shot they could do, but then it clouded over again.

  Esther liked the Italian crew, and the Italian crew liked her, especially after she’d hired an old Italian couple, Gina and Rosario, who cooked special dinners at the American Church, to fix a proper Italian lunch every day in the big convent kitchen. Everything they needed—pots, pans, glasses, tableware—was in the kitchen. All Esther had to do was hire a plumber, an idraulico, to hook up the eight-burner restaurant stove.

  They’d been making their days, getting through the exterior shots on schedule—a difficult car shot in Fiesole, the walk to Settignano. The dailies looked good, and if Zanni was stealing the show, that was all right. The man was too full of life experience to need the attention of the camera, and for that reason the camera was drawn to him.

  Her own life experience in Florence, she thought, was totally different from shooting with Harry. Maybe all the craziness, all the shouting and yelling, wasn’t really necessary. Maybe it was better to plan ahead, the way Michael did; keep the whole movie in your head, instead of just plunking down the camera and trying to figure out coverage on the set.

  Even so, when she thought of the days ahead, she experienced a nameless dread. Margot—the real Margot—was demanding a copy of the script, and Esther wasn’t going to be able to put her off much longer. Leviathan was objecting to the crane, even though the last cost report showed that the crane would not put them over budget. Esther had ignored the faxes from Los Angeles and ordered the crane anyway. It was going to be a difficult shot, a huge scene to mount, and she still didn’t have written permission to use the piazza, though the mayor, whom she’d taken to lunch at Cibreo, with Franco Bevilacqua and Michael, had promised her that there would be no difficulties.

  And they still had the sex scenes to do, and they’d have to be careful because they couldn’t release the film with an NC-17 rating.

  But Esther’s biggest worry was the affair between Zanni and Beryl, which everyone seemed to know about except Michael and Miranda. An affair between Zanni and Miranda would have been fine. A man like Zanni. A young woman like Miranda. It would have been good publicity. Stars are the gods and goddesses who embody the romantic dreams of people not in the business. When they come together on the screen, sparks are supposed to fly. It has to be real, and the audience has to know it’s real.

  But an affair between the male lead and the director’s wife was another matter. It could disrupt everything. Esther’d seen it happen. And Beryl of all people. Beryl was the last person Esther would have expected to have an affair. Beryl was a nice person, a good woman, an Episcopalian, a good friend to her, and to Harry too, du
ring the divorce. Sitting up late all those nights, holding her hand, taking her shopping on Rodeo Drive, taking her for sauerbraten at Mussos. How could she do this to a man like Michael? The man was dying. He was bound to find out. And then what would happen? How would he keep going? What if he lost heart? How could she, Esther, protect him? She could almost imagine him turning to her, leaning on her the way she’d leaned on him and Beryl when Harry had dumped her. What would she say to him as a friend, an old friend? What advice would she give him? Beryl was a bit older than Esther, more sophisticated, and she was still beautiful. Beryl knew how to dress. She had class. But who would have thought that a man like Zanni would prefer her to a young woman like Miranda?

  And Miranda. She’d been in love with Zanni from the start. What if she went to pieces? lost it? balked? clutched? panicked? How would they get through the love scenes, the sixteen pleasures?

  Esther was depressed. She was sorry for everybody, and most of all she was sorry for herself, because she knew that no one would ever again feel about her the way Zanni felt about Beryl.

  Guido was still sitting in Esther’s office chair, behind her desk. She didn’t know how long he’d been off the phone. “Sorry,” she said. “I was daydreaming.”

  “They’ll bring the crane on Wednesday,” he said. “We’ll get it set up in the piazza that night, but you have to have the permission papers for the right day.”

  Esther nodded. “The mayor promised,” she said. “He said he’d see to it that things arranged themselves.”

  “That’s good,” Guido said, “but I have to have the papers in my hand by Wednesday night.”

  “Wednesday’s hump day,” Esther said.

  “Hump day.” Guido repeated the words after her.

  “It means halfway. You’re over the hump.”

  He laughed. “It sounds like something else.”