Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

brodo, and a paralyzed stillness hangs over the whole peninsula of Italy. It’s a dangerous hour of daylight ghosts, an hour when I can’t write or sleep. Instead I try always to be doing something definite, like making love or drinking strong coffee, nursing the baby, having my hair washed, or reading a scandal magazine. Otherwise, if the sun is shining, one could be vaporized in that deadly silent brightness, or if it is overcast or foggy, one might feel one’s soul leached away, particle by particle, into damp gray nothing. You could have taken the train from Milan at any time, but it was I who suggested this hateful time of day.

There you are under the sycamores, a slender woman of my own height and weight, looking dismayingly elegant in a black ski jacket and narrow black pants. Oddly flattened, a theatrical silhouette. A female stage Mephistopheles, or a sexy transvestite Hamlet. And your entourage of sycamores—a mottled platoon of them leading up to the Crimean war memorial—makes me think of college writing seminars, when I stuck lyrical sycamores into all of my prose. “Parti-colored branches searching the heavens…” One of my best stories from those days describes a professor whose trousers fall down as he strolls beneath the sycamores of the Cambridge Common. It dates from the time when I was about to marry R, the young man who years later would marry you. R is no longer husband to either of us, but his quondam presence in our lives has formed the frail bond that connects us. Not sisters or lovers or yet friends, we are certainly not strangers.

I stop the car and get out and kiss you on both cheeks. We are used to the greeting; we both know Italy well enough to have picked up the customs of the country. But already I feel my disadvantage planted and growing, established in the exaggerated strength with which I grabbed your shoulders and pressed my lips against your face. I wanted to show you that I was relaxed enough to be very happy to see you. All I did, however, was leave myself open to one of those ironical glances of yours, the mute comment of a West Coast earth child, disdainful of all pretentiousness. In the shadow play that lies behind all of our encounters, I am the false, frothy artist type; you, somehow, the genuine human article.

I grab your bag, which is slightly larger than an overnight bag, and wonder how long you are going to stay. On the phone, I urged, no, insisted, in my frivolous way, that you stay for two nights, but we both know that that’s probably too much. You have the excuse, anyway, that you have little time. You don’t live in Italy anymore; you’re on vacation here from the Oregon town where you moved after you divorced R. Where you are a consultant to fiber optics companies run by callow billionaires. Where you live with a dog that used to be my daughter’s puppy. Why do I feel secretly possessive about your life?

What are you writing nowadays, you ask me as you get into the car. I’ve been following the magazine and wondering…

It occurs to me that you might feel possessive about my life.

We drive away from the city center up into the hills, or the Hill, as they call it, winding past walled villas, green stretches of park with rust-colored beeches, the turn-of-the-century Ospedale San Vito, with its peeling stucco towers streaked with water stains. As we go higher, we drive through patches of November fog. Your presence is making me rattle along like a tour guide about the history of this area where I’ve come to live with my second husband, who’s an Italian businessman. About the court of the Savoy kings, and the Juvarran villas the courtiers built for summer rustication, out of the heat and malaria of the Po Valley. About Fiat, and the postwar invasion of automobile workers who constructed their socialist dream in the smoggy industrial flatlands below.

And every so often, you’ll prick the bubble of my rhetoric by saying something droll. Yes, you’re droll. You have a sexy, slightly adenoidal voice. So, you say, do you hang out with Gianni Agnelli? What’s the Italian word for Motown—Mottocittà?

From the corner of my eye, I see you sitting as always like a wary child, with your cropped head thrust forward and your hands in your lap. You are wearing the most beautiful scarf I ever saw, black with a design of peacock blue. Its changing colors and heavy fringe match your eyes. When I compliment you on it, you say that it’s from a movie wardrobe, that a well-known actress wore it in a recent role. Someone in your family, I recall, is in the film business. Once, when R was still married to you, he stopped by my house on a casual errand, wearing a pair of oversized jeans that he told me proudly had been worn by Gérard Depardieu. They hung alarmingly low on him, like a rapper’s jeans, and caused me to muse for a second on exactly why it was that a wife—a recently married second wife—would present her husband with Depardieu’s trousers. Why he wore them to visit his first wife was, I thought, fairly obvious.

We get to my house at three-thirty, a few minutes before my daughter gets off the bus from the American School. Piles of raked leaves dot the garden, and someone as usual has left the side door wide open.

It’s very big, I say of the house, in my tour guide’s voice. But we don’t have the time or money to keep it as it ought to be kept up. It’s old, over six hundred years, and there used to be a pair of round towers, though it was never a real castle, just a fortified farmhouse. You are silent, so I babble on. Down the hill are the outbuildings, but they belong