Woody was admiring a glass-topped display box full of pens. “Why do you have so many fountain pens?”
“Different nibs, different color inks, different heft. Besides, they’re so beautiful.”
“I never thought of a person having more than one fountain pen.”
“It happens all the time.” She laughed. “Here, try this Aurora. You like an italic nib. They’re hard to find.” She opened the case and took out a pen.
“I thought you weren’t supposed to let another person use your fountain pen.”
“I’m going to make an exception for you, Woody. Actually, it would take a few years of regular use before it made any difference.”
Woody looked at the pen. Forest green. Large. Comfortable. On a piece of paper he wrote, “My soul is an enchanted boat.”
“Nice.”
“Shelley.”
Margot refilled the Duofold and wiped off the nib. She made a row of dots on a piece of paper. It worked perfectly. No skips. She handed it to Woody. “Good as new. I have so many of them I figured I ought to learn how to fix them. It’s not that hard. Most of them. I wouldn’t knock out my old Parker Snake Pen, but that’s a special case.”
She was pleased that Woody was impressed. Back in the living room, she started the movie again. “What are we looking for now? Plot Point Two?”
“I think it’s Act Two,” Woody said. “To tell you the truth, I’m not very clear about these plot points. The book says there can be as many as fifteen. I think there’s got to be an important plot point at the end of each of the first two acts, but there’re other plot points too.”
“Like when Anna disappears. That’s a plot point.”
“Right, but the big ones are at the end of Act One and then at the end of Act Two. We must have missed the one at the end of Act Two. It’s supposed to come about page eighty-five or ninety. Two pages a minute. That’s forty-five minutes. We’re way past that.”
“Maybe Italian films are different.” Margot thought the film would never end. There were more false leads about Anna’s disappearance. Then some smugglers showed up. But the smugglers were a false lead too. Margot could tell that Woody was losing patience.
“Are the smugglers a plot point?”
“I suppose, but they don’t change anything. They’re a red herring.”
Margot was more concerned about Woody’s response than she was about the movie. Over an hour and a half had passed. Sandro was running for a train. Sandro and Claudia were on the train. There were a couple of peasants from the provinces with strong accents.
“That’s us,” Woody said, and laughed. “A couple of midwesterners.”
What she was thinking was that the movie was totally and absolutely remote from her experience. She wasn’t bored with life. She was nervous and excited, and when the woman—some woman—sashayed through a crowd of workers, she thought, Finally, someone I can connect with. She was sure she’d wind up in bed with Woody, but she felt innocent too. They were like a couple of kids.
They didn’t pay much attention till Claudia started making faces at herself in a mirror. Margot thought it was the best scene in the movie.
“Do you make faces at yourself in the mirror?” Woody asked her.
“Sometimes.” She made a face.
“That’s nice,” he said.
The movie dragged to an end. Nothing was resolved.
“When did Act Three begin?” Woody asked. “Did we miss more plot points? Actually, I think the plot-point thing would work better for The Sixteen Pleasures. Act One: You get to Florence and start working in the convent, where you discover a book of dirty pictures.”
“Erotic drawings,” she said.
“Why don’t you write this down,” he said. She unscrewed the cap of her Montblanc. Woody handed her his notebook. She wrote “Act One: Florence. Convent.”
“Then Act Two. You have an affair with Sandro. This ends when you discover that he’s trying to swindle you and steal the book.” She wrote this down too.
“Then in Act Three you take things into your own hands. All these men are trying to get the book away from you— the bishop, your lover, and finally your father—but you outsmart them all. You auction off the book at Sotheby’s for a quarter of a million dollars and give the money to the convent. End of story.”
Margot knew that he was waiting for her to say something, but she didn’t know what to say. “I kept some of the money for myself,” she said.
“A commission,” Woody said. “You earned it. Let’s get some words on paper. Let me have the notebook.” He uncapped his pen and took his notebook from Margot’s lap. “Take a look at On Screenwriting,” he said, handing her the book. “Chapter Thirteen is on screenplay form. It says you don’t need to put down anything about camera angles or acting directions.”
“That’s good.”
“Do you want to begin at the beginning?” he said. “Actually, I think we should forget about the train trip from Luxembourg. Just start in Florence. Maybe some stock footage of the flood. There’s plenty of it around. You arriving in the rain.”
Woody sat next to her. She watched him write:
EXT. STAZIONE SANTA MARIA NOVELLA—NIGHT
“Does that look right?” he asked.
“So far,” she said
It’s raining hard. A young woman (MARGOT) gets into a taxi.
EXT. TAXI—NIGHT
Taxi drives through the rain.
INT. TAXI—NIGHT—FAVORING MARGOT
Taxi driver drives recklessly. Margot in backseat.
MARGOT
Can you take me to an inexpensive pensione? In the center.
TAXI DRIVER
There ain’t no such thing. Not now. You can see for yourself. You got to go to Fiesole. And you won’t find anything cheap.
MARGOT
I guess I don’t have a choice then.
A muffled noise and the taxi starts to shake.
MARGOT
I think you’ve got a flat tire.
The driver pulls over, leans his head on the steering wheel, and starts to cry.
CUT TO: EXT.—NIGHT
The driver tries to change the tire in the rain. A man holding an enormous umbrella approaches and holds the umbrella over the taxi driver. The window of the taxi goes down revealing Margot’s face.
INT. TAXI—NIGHT
A man’s face appears at the open window.
Woody took a deep breath and put the pen down. “This is hard work,” he said, laughing.
“You’ve already thought this through, haven’t you? It’s a good beginning. You’ve already got me hooked. The man’s face at the taxi window in the storm.”
“Is that what really happened?” Woody asked.
Margot nodded.
“That’s how you met Sandro Postiglione?”
“That’s it. But I didn’t know who it was at the time. Not till later, in Piazza Signoria.”
“And your Montblanc pen. That’s the pen you bought in Rome after he went back to his wife.”
“That’s the gospel according to Margot.”
“And Sandro was your boyfriend’s name. I hope he wasn’t as boring as the guy in L’avventura.”
She laughed. “He was a bad man, but he was never boring.”
“I suppose that’s better than the other way around. You’ve got a good story. This’ll make a great movie.”
“You’ve got the form down, but are you sure you’re supposed to put in ‘cut to’?”
“Can’t hurt. They can always take it out.”
“How about some popcorn?”
“Right, I need a break. I didn’t know you could get popcorn in Italy. What kind of wine do you drink with popcorn?”
She laughed. “I get it at the Old England Store,” she said. “Where I get my peanut butter.”
“I’ll take the dog out,” he said. “You make the popcorn.”
She made the popcorn in a saucepan and melted some butter. She put the popcorn in a la
rge wooden bowl and poured the butter over it, and salted it, and then got out a handful of napkins, and then she washed an apple and quartered it.
Woody still hadn’t come back with the dog, and she thought, He’s not coming back. But then she saw his Parker Duofold on the notebook. He hadn’t put the cap back on. She capped the pen and went to the window.
Biscotti was off leash, running in circles. She lifted a leg and marked the statue of Dante, and then she circled some more, each circle getting smaller, and squatted to poop. And then Margot saw something she’d never seen in twenty-four years in Italy. She saw a man take a plastic bag out of his pocket and bend over and clean up the mess his dog had made on the sidewalk. She watched him spin the bag around and tie it in a knot and walk across the piazza to drop it in a garbage can in front of the monte di pietà, where she’d pawned the jewelry that Sandro Postiglione had given her. Twenty-four years ago. And she knew that this was a plot point, knew that she was in love. Once again. But not hopelessly, because there was something beyond love too, something that wasn’t hopeless at all. At the moment that she’d realized what he was doing, she had stopped worrying about whether or not he’d spend the night, stopped worrying about being too forward and frightening him or being too reticent and discouraging him. She put aside her hopes and fears about the future. She would let things happen instead of forcing them. It was enough to watch him, to watch his lips move as he talked to the dog, to watch his strong hands ruffle the dog’s fur.
Piazza Tasso
Woody’s life had taken a surprising turn: he had a girlfriend, a woman from the Midwest who fixed fountain pens, a woman whose life story was going to be made into a movie. But was this good luck or bad luck? He thought it might be bad luck. The last time he’d gotten involved with a woman, in Bologna . . . Well, actually, that had been good luck.
And he had a dog.
Biscotti had been a problem at first. She pulled away when he tried to pet her. She kept her distance from other dogs in Piazza Tasso, and there were plenty of them. She was afraid of noises, so when Woody played his guitar, he had to play and sing very softly. When she growled at him, he refused to react. After she’d eaten, he would lower himself down to her level and approach her slowly, avoiding eye contact. But it was another dog who taught Biscotti to be less fearful, more aggressive.
On school days Woody planned to leave Biscotti at the home of his student, Marisa Lodovici, on Borgo Pinti. Marisa had a medium-size husky named Bianca, and they thought the two dogs could play together in the courtyard. But at their first meeting Bianca jumped at Biscotti’s throat and threw her to the ground and held her down. Woody started to intervene, but Marisa held him back. After a minute Bianca released her hold and lay down on her back, exposing her own throat and waving her paws in the air. By the end of the week, they were taking turns lunging at each other and throwing each other to the ground. Biscotti no longer squatted and peed when Woody approached her. She began to play with other dogs in the piazza in the evening, and Woody started to spend more time chatting with his neighbors, with other dog owners that is, and with the young punks who hung around outside the bar next to Il Tranvai, the little restaurant where he ate once or twice a week, and who called him Professore. He was starting to feel that he belonged here.
It took Woody and Biscotti forty minutes to walk from Piazza Tasso to the American School in Piazza Savonarola. At first they crossed the river on the Ponte alle Grazie and took Via Verdi north to Piazza Salvemini. Woody would drop Biscotti off on Borgo Pinti and walk the rest of the way with Marisa. But after a while he and Biscotti started to vary their route to avoid Signor Stronzo and his friends, who’d begun to follow him. Signor Stronzo—Mr. Turd—would call the dog: Cicciolina, Cicciolina. Woody recognized the name of the porn star who’d been elected to the Italian parliament and who recently had offered to make love to Saddam Hussein as a way of promoting peace in the Middle East. Biscotti was frightened. Sometimes they waited for Woody in Piazza Salvemini, sometimes on the Ponte Vecchio, sometimes in Piazza San Firenze or on Via del Proconsolo, and on Saturday nights they sometimes showed up at the Bebop Club and heckled him. What he felt when he saw them, or when he heard Rinaldo’s smooth voice, was the kind of tightening of the stomach you feel at an approaching playground confrontation. Hektor and Achilles. Those were Woody’s terms. But was he Hektor or Achilles? He’d always thought of himself as a Hektor person—defending family, city, home—but his anger at Signor Romero made him think that he might be an Achilles person, and it raised Aristotle’s disturbing notion that some of the most important virtues flourish only in battle, that some things can be settled only by violence.
Woody was tempted to stop in and see the commissario—to seek his advice—but he didn’t want to raise any questions, didn’t want to get the commissario in trouble by suggesting that they were in cahoots.
Woody was putting up a shelf in the bathroom when they rang the bell. He had a hammer in his hand when he pushed the button to see who it was.
“We’ve come for the dog,” someone said over the intercom. Signor Stronzo himself, Woody thought, Mr. Turd. The voice told Woody to let the dog out. “You give the dog back now, maybe we won’t break your fingers. Kind of hard to play the guitar with broken fingers. Just open the door and let her out.”
Woody opened the window and looked down. He could see the tips of their cigarettes. They were smoking in unison! Three of them. Mr. Turd and two turd friends.
“Get the fuck out of here,” he shouted.
“You give the dog back, maybe we’ll break just one finger. How’s that sound?”
Woody surprised them by coming down. With Biscotti on her leash. He still had his hammer in his hand. They backed away when they saw the hammer. He could see that they hadn’t expected him to come down and that now they weren’t sure what to do.
Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. He wanted to get it over with. He walked the dog around the piazza and they followed him. A kind of fury was building inside him. He was a big man, not afraid of a fight. Biscotti was plastered against his leg so tightly that he had trouble walking.
“Call her, Rinaldo,” one of the turd friends said.
Rinaldo started to call: “Cicciolina, Cicci, Cicci, come here bitch. Hey, Cicci, hey girl. That’s my dog, you know,” he said to Woody. “My father’s lawyer says you’ll rot in jail. And big time too. Dog thief. Time for you to go back to the States.”
Woody didn’t say anything.
“Fucking Americans. Think you can run the world.” This was their second time around the piazza. “That’s my dog, you know.”
Woody finally stopped in front of Il Tranvai. It was chilly, but there were still tables outside. He had an audience.
“Rinaldo,” he said. “So that’s your name. I thought it was Signor Stronzo. Go ahead, Mr. Turd. Call your dog.”
“Hey, Cicciolina. Hey, girl. Come here. Come to Papa.”
A crowd was starting to gather. Waiters from the restaurant, some of the punks who hung out at the bar next door.
Woody unhooked Biscotti’s leash. She stayed by his side. Rinaldo kept calling. Biscotti pressed her shoulder harder against Woody’s leg.
“Any of you speak English? Too bad. I took the bus to Vallombrosa last fall. It was quite a ride. Up and down, around those hairpin curves. Made me a little queasy. Like looking at you fellows. It turned my stomach. But the leaves were really something. ‘Leaves that bloom in the flowery spring.’ That’s Homer. Young ‘squirts,’ that’s what Homer calls guys like you. But ‘turds’ is more like it. Stronzi.”
“That’s my dog,” Rinaldo said, appealing to the crowd. “This man stole my dog, you hear that?”
Woody patted the dog. “Excuse me?”
“I said that’s my dog. He knows it is. He stole her. She’s tattooed. That means the police can identify her.”
“The dog doesn’t seem to know it, does she?” Woody said.
“You’ve brainwashed her.??
?
“It didn’t take much.” Now Woody appealed to the crowd. “You want to know the story? He burned her. He cut her. He dragged her behind his car in Piazza Santissima Annunziata. You read about it in the papers.” He turned back to Rinaldo. “You’re surprised she doesn’t want to go back to you?”
“It’s just a dog. My dog.”
Woody sat down on one of the restaurant chairs and put the hammer down on the table in front of him. He was suddenly depressed. Where do people like this come from?
“Don’t fuck with us, okay? We’ve come for the dog.”
“The dog’s busy right now.”
“Fuck off.”
Woody stood up and walked up to Rinaldo and slapped him as hard as he could, a real bone-jarring slap that snapped his head to one side. “Get lost,” he said to Rinaldo’s two friends, “or I’ll do the same for you.” He put his arm around Rinaldo’s neck. “You’re a slow learner,” he said.
“Fuck you.”
“Do you want me to slap you again?”
“You’re going to regret this.”
“I already regret it. I regret discovering that there are people like you living in our midst, looking just like normal human beings.”
He jammed the heel of his hand into Rinaldo’s face. “Do you know who I am?”
“You’re a fucking American.”
“I’m the former vice president of the Association of the Families of the Victims of the Bombing of 15 August 1980. Do you know why I was the vice president? No, probably not, but —”
“How the fuck would I know?”
“Don’t piss me off, Rinaldo.”
“You got no right to keep me here.”
“Because my daughter was killed in Bologna, in the bombing, 1980. You must have been four or five years old. She was killed by someone like you. Someone who didn’t give a shit about the harm they do. Now this dog’s name is Biscotti. That was my daughter’s name. ‘Cookie’ in English. And I’m going to look after her as if she were my own daughter. Do you see what I mean?”
Rinaldo didn’t answer.