The Italian Lover

  “Those posture pictures,” Miranda said. “They turned out to be a hoax. Somebody at Harvard claimed to be doing anthropological research.”

  “What did they do with the photos? When I was there everyone was afraid that the boys from Amherst would break into the gym and get their hands on them.”

  “No idea.”

  Beryl had finished her coffee. Miranda looked into her cup. She still had a sip left.

  “I’m going to give a talk next week,” Beryl said, “to the Smith students on the Junior Year Abroad Program. The office is right around the corner, in Piazza Repubblica. Maybe you’d like to come along. I’m surprised they didn’t ask you, in fact. I’m just somebody’s wife, but you’re an actress.”

  Miranda couldn’t tell if Beryl was serious or if she was making fun of her. “To Virtue, Knowledge,” Miranda said, the Smith motto. “What the hell does that mean? I hated Smith,” she went on. “Every minute of it. I hated Lawrence House; I hated House Meetings and House Inspections and Quiet Hours and the Honor System, and all the talk about gracious living, and the Harvard book bags, and the Ivy League scarves, and Mountain Day. I didn’t graduate, but you must know that if you read my bio.”

  “Well,” Beryl said, smiling, “I take it that’s a no.”

  Miranda didn’t say anything.

  “Miranda,” Beryl said, “how old are you?”

  “Twenty-nine. I mean, I just turned thirty.”

  “There are still some things you don’t understand about life.”

  Miranda started to disagree, started to say that she understood, all right; but before she opened her mouth, she decided that Beryl was right.

  That night Miranda wanted to eat by herself. She sat at a table in a back corner in Trattoria la Maremmana, behind the table of antipasti, and the waiter, who recognized her but who treated her as if she were a civilian, rather than a movie star—which she appreciated—brought a basket of the kind of Florentine bread that needed salt and a large bottle of red wine and told her, in English, to enjoy. She wasn’t in a mood to enjoy, but she poured a large glass of wine. They would charge her by how much she drank. She wasn’t hungry either, just restless, wanting to blot out the day, the humiliation, everyone except her and Michael knowing about Zanni’s affair with Beryl, her humiliating encounter with Beryl. This wasn’t the script she’d been visualizing.

  And the smile. She couldn’t forgive herself for the stupid smile she’d let loose at the camera at the end of the shot. She was like Oblonsky, smiling a stupid smile at his wife after he’s been caught having an affair with the French governess. Well, maybe she wasn’t like Oblonsky, but she’d caught the eye of the dolly grip as he was cranking the camera in tight for a close-up of her face, and he’d smiled, and then she couldn’t stop herself.

  She poured herself some more wine and ate a piece of the Florentine salt-free bread. She drank more wine and ate more bread and tried to order a tris—three different kinds of pasta— but the waiter said you had to have three people to order a tris, so she ordered the lasagna al forno and drank more wine and at some point she was joined by Esther and the studio exec from Leviathan, the one who’d said “nice heinie,” the one who’d been kicked off the set. Gordon.

  Esther and Gordon were both really excited about the dailies, and Miranda started to feel better. They all had dessert, and afterward Esther tried to talk her into going back to the hotel, but she wasn’t ready to go back because Gordon, who kept pouring more grappa from the bottle the waiter had brought to the table, kept talking about how her career was about to take off and how he was definitely going to make some things happen for her.

  By the time they left the restaurant, she was too drunk to walk. Gordon asked the waiter to call a taxi. She fell asleep in the back of the taxi, and when she woke up she was in the lobby of the Excelsior. There was a party. People were all dressed up. Someone was playing a piano, and Gordon was saying, “You’re the star. I can’t understand why Esther didn’t put you up here.” And then he was steering her toward the elevator, but she was pulling away from him. She broke loose and plopped herself down in an oversize chair. The lobby started to spin as she curled up in the chair. She couldn’t get it to stop, and she couldn’t figure out how she’d almost let Gordon Talbot into her life.

  Settignano

  A dreary Saturday morning. Margot, whose bid on the Galileo codex had not been accepted, sat on a wooden stool at her workbench in her studio paging through a copy of the shooting script of The Sixteen Pleasures that Miranda had brought her.

  “What I have to do now,” Miranda was saying, “is detach myself from the outcome.” Margot nodded. “But I shouldn’t have to detach myself from the outcome because the outcome should have been different. What’s the point of visualizing an outcome in the first place if you’re going to have to detach yourself from it at the end?”

  “How about a cup of tea?” Margot asked.

  “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “It’s called puppy love,” Margot said. “That’s what my mother used to say when I fell in love with one of my teachers.”

  “I’m too old for puppy love,” Miranda said. “Besides, the man’s a total jerk. I don’t know what I saw in him anyway.”

  “He’s a lovely man, Miranda.”

  “How could he be having an affair with Beryl Gardiner? She must be in her fifties!”

  “I’m in my fifties,” Margot said.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “And she’s the director’s wife.”

  “That makes it awkward.”

  “It’s unprofessional.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Margot said.

  “And I still have to do the cunnilingus scene.”

  “Just lie back and think of England,” Margot said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Margot didn’t explain. Miranda was preparing for the conservation scenes in the movie, which were going to be shot in Margot’s studio. Margot was helping her assemble the dummy book that was going to serve as the Aretino volume.

  “How much of the Aretino restoration will they actually film?” Margot asked.

  “They’ll probably do mostly medium shots,” Miranda said, “with a few cutaways to show the results. I’ll do some of the sewing, but I’ll just pretend to do the gold tooling, like Helena Bonham Carter pretending to play the piano in A Room with a View. But it isn’t just pretending. It’s important for me to really understand what I’m doing.”

  Margot didn’t comment. The kettle on the stove in the staff kitchen had started to whistle, and she poured boiling water into two cups. She was anxious to finish reading the script, but she wanted to conceal her anxiety from Miranda.

  The plan was to sew the dummy book on two half-inch linen tapes that Miranda had already attached to a sewing frame. When they were finished, they’d glue the tapes to the covering boards to attach the text block securely. They’d already marked up and pierced the signatures, and Margot was demonstrating to Miranda how to weave the needle up and back through two sections at a time.

  “I know how to do the kettle stitch,” Miranda said. “That’s the stitch you taught the nuns in The Sixteen Pleasures. There’s a whole chapter on sewing up in my book on hand bookbinding.”

  “Just don’t pull the thread too tight,” Margot said.

  “My mother taught me to sew,” Miranda said.

  Margot had been trying to get a copy of the script from Esther for several weeks, but Esther kept making excuses, and now Margot knew why. The shooting script didn’t look anything like the screenplay she and Woody had written. She’d known that Esther had tweaked it, and she’d braced herself for changes and thought she would be ready, but she wasn’t prepared for the extent of the damage, just as she hadn’t been prepared for the extent of the damage caused by the flood when she’d come to Florence in November 1966.

  Two pages into the script and it was clear that there was no f
lood, and it soon became clear that someone had moved the Newberry Library from Chicago to New York, and that her father was an alcoholic blues musician and her mother a coldhearted bitch who cheated on her husband and drove him to drink.

  It took Margot two hours to read the script. Miranda had sewn about two-thirds of the signatures of the dummy book. Margot sat at her workbench with her head in her hands. Instead of making her own way in the world and finding herself, at the end, in the place where she wanted to be, in Piazza Santa Croce, Movie Margot was going to marry Sandro, who’d rescued her from the Vatican Police.

  Margot was thinking about love, about how she’d waited for the real Sandro Postiglione to propose, and about how he hadn’t, and about how difficult it is to see clearly when you’re in love. Especially with an Italian man. Like Sandro, or Zanni, or Bruno Bruni. What had her mother seen, she wondered, when she’d fallen in love with Bruni? Her father had gone to see Bruni, alone, when he’d stopped to visit Margot on his way to India, but he’d never told Margot what they’d talked about. Whatever it was, he’d been happy to have Helen back home again, and Margot didn’t think that he ever held the affair with Bruni against her, didn’t think they’d ever been so solid as they were at the end, when her mother was dying. He hadn’t fallen apart. He’d been strong. He’d held the family together.

  Margot thought that this was the kind of love she wanted and that this was the kind of love Woody offered. Woody had asked if she’d marry him, and she’d said, “In two shakes.” But he wanted her to go back to the States with him. The dog too. Not to Chicago, but to St. Clair, a small town in the middle of nowhere, and she didn’t think she could do it, didn’t think she could leave this city where she still met her mother on every street corner, at every angolo, in every museum, every theater, every piazza, even though she’d resisted her mother’s lectures and the enforced trips to the museums; even though she’d refused to speak Italian at home, in the beautiful apartment that Signor Bruni had found for them. Now every memory seemed precious: how her mother had ordered bollito misto at a fancy restaurant in Siena and was served a plain chunk of boiled turkey breast with no sauce; how one night they were going to take the bus up to Piazzale Michelangelo, but when a number-23 bus pulled up to the stop on Via Verdi just as they were walking by they took it. It was dark and the bus went a long way. They were going to ride to the end of the line and then ride back, but when they got to the end of the line, the driver told them to get off. The bus wasn’t going back into the city. This was it. They had to get off the bus. It was an industrial area. There were no people around. Mama finally flagged down a car and asked Margot to talk to the driver. She explained what had happened. The driver laughed, and his girlfriend laughed too, and they gave Margot and her mother a ride back into town. And afterward her mother was very proud of her. They never figured out where they’d been because the capolinea of the number-23 bus is off the edge of all the maps.

  In the afternoon it was still raining—the skies were gray; the river was gray. But Margot had one of the big green umbrellas from San Gimignagno, and she and Miranda walked to the bus stop on Via Panzani and took the number-10 bus up to Settignano, so that Miranda could see the Casa del Popolo and the little cemetery. Margot was still upset about the screenplay. “My father played the blues,” she said, “but he was an avocado broker, not a broken-down alcoholic bluesman. And my mother had an affair with Bruno Bruni, but she wasn’t trash. It doesn’t make any sense. And in the end, I turn my life over to Sandro. We’re going to get married and be poor but happy! It’s unforgivable. If Esther liked the book so much, why didn’t she stick to the story? I mean . . .”

  “I know what you mean. That’s the way I felt.”

  “Then why did you take the part?”

  “I blew up at them. Believe me. At Michael and Esther. At the audition. I really gave them hell. I thought I’d blown everything, but they liked it. They called my agent the next morning. They thought I had spunk.”

  Margot could have pointed out that Miranda hadn’t answered her question, but she didn’t.

  “They always change things,” Miranda said. “It’s part of the culture. You should talk to Esther. They can only imagine one kind of ending.”

  “I don’t think I’ll be able to speak to that woman again.”

  It had stopped raining by the time they got to Settignano. “You can’t see the city from here,” Miranda complained as they drank a glass of wine in the Casa del Popolo.

  “So I fudged a little,” Margot said.

  “Like you did with the statue of Dante, putting it in the middle of the piazza?”

  “That was just a simple mistake.”

  “But looking down on the city from this place?”

  “Well, I liked the idea of looking down on the city.”

  “That’s what moviemakers do. They go with what they like. What else did you fudge?”

  “Oh, heavens, I have no idea.”

  “Sandro undressing you in front of the cheval glass?”

  “No, that was the real thing.”

  At the little cemetery on the edge of the town, they located Bruno Bruni’s grave, and Miranda studied the photo on the tombstone. Margot remembered him from when she was fifteen, when he’d been her mother’s lover, though she hadn’t known it at the time. He’d helped her with her schoolwork, and later in life she’d known him socially—if he saw her in a restaurant he’d stop at her table to have a word. But she’d never talked to her mother about him or to him about her mother. And then one morning she’d read in La Repubblica that he was dead, and she’d gone to the funeral, at the little church in Settignano. The priest, she learned, was Bruno’s brother, and she wondered what he could possibly say about this man.

  What he said was this: “My brother was a man who loved life. He was always happy. Everyone loved him. When you were with him, you were happy too. It was a gift from God, this happiness, a sign that God wants us to be happy. When he came into a room, everyone was glad. The party was a success. All awkwardness, all reserve, would disappear. People would begin to open their hearts to each other in his presence. When we were boys . . . ,” and he went on to reminisce about their childhood in Settignano, how they had climbed the cave walls in Maiano and found an underground passage.

  This was as close as Margot ever came to the mystery of Bruno Bruni.

  He’d died on August fifth, four days after her birthday. Nineteen eighty-one or eighty-two. She couldn’t remember. It had been hot, and the church had been full of flowers and full of people, but of course Bruni had known everyone. But who were all the women, she’d wondered, some of them clearly American? And who was the woman glowering at her from the pew on the opposite side of the church?

  After the funeral, the glowering woman came up to her and said, “You’re very beautiful—I can see why Sandro was so fond of you. Now how about getting out of my apartment so I can sell it?”

  Beautiful. It was the first time a woman had ever called her beautiful, and she was pleased. But she was conscious of being in the wrong too. Sandro had said she could stay in the apartment after he went back to Rome, to his wife, but it was not really his apartment to dispose of. It was hers. She came from a rich banking family and could have afforded to let Margot stay in the apartment, but instead she sent lots of letters and even telegrams. She had the phone cut off. But Italian laws make it very difficult to evict a squatter, even a foreign squatter.

  “You’re Sandro’s wife?” Margot said.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you going to the cemetery?” Margot asked.

  “Did you sleep with Bruni too?” she asked back.

  “No,” Margot said, “but my mother did. Years ago. We spent a year in Florence when I was fifteen.”

  “He was an unusual man. Did you notice all the women at the funeral? It was almost all women.”

  “And you?”

  “Bruno and I were old friends.”

  “I thought you’d given up on the apa
rtment,” Margot said.

  “To tell you the truth, I’d sort of forgotten about it, but when I saw you sitting there, I had to say something.”

  “How did you know who I was?”

  “Sandro kept a picture.”

  “Really? I mean, I can see how it would rub you the wrong way.”

  “Do you want to walk to the cemetery?”

  “Treviso?”

  “No, no. He’s being buried right here, in Settignano.”

  “That cemetery? I thought it was full.”

  “A man like Bruni,” she said, “there’s always a table for him at a restaurant that’s booked solid, always a room at a hotel, an extra seat on the plane. Why not an extra plot in the cemetery?”

  “I’m sorry about Sandro,” Margot said. “I never sent a card. I didn’t know what to do.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “He was a good lover but a bad man.”

  “No, no,” Margot protested.

  They walked to the cemetery, at the end of the procession that followed the coffin, which was trundled along on a kind of gurney. Margot was thinking about her mother. How they’d always been surprised when the little cemetery came into view at the end of their walk. They’d stand at the wall and look down. The cemetery was always full of flowers. Signora Postiglione, Margot thought, was very beautiful. Younger than Sandro but older than Margot. Her name was Francesca.

  Margot and Francesca stood at the wall and looked down as Bruni was lowered into the ground. They stood where Margot and her mother used to stand, where Margot and Miranda were standing now.