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

to our neighbor, a lawyer with a shady side business of selling used luxury cars. That bulldozer is him trying to dig out the old fishpond, which there is officially some city ordinance against doing. Imagine, all the land that we can see, with those modern suburban houses, used to be vineyards that were attached to this place. You are still silent, walking beside me as I carry your bag, your profile inexpressive as a face on a cameo; and I am running out of things to say. I tell you that there are supposed to be secret tunnels joining the cellars of our house with all the other old villas on the hill, that this hill is a warren of underground passages.

We pause alongside the back garden wall, where the stone urns are full of yellowing geraniums. From here, on those rare clear blue days that sometimes descend on Turin without warning, one can see green slopes sweeping down to the city; streets and buildings and factories as if in a diorama; and beyond the Po, rising into the sunlight, the snowcapped wall of the Alps. The mountains are extraordinary presences, angelic witnesses to our lives. But today they are hidden, and the line of the hillside fades off into the usual smoggy haze.

Even so, you look out over the wall and say: I think it’s beautiful. And you have such a winning way of saying it, as I have heard you say other things in the past: an earnest tone with a curious submissiveness to it, that gives one the feeling of having won a small but valuable prize. Suddenly I love you. I invite you into my house.

Your bag is full of presents for my daughter, formerly your stepdaughter, presents of a perfection that I am not sure I would ever be able to manage. We are upstairs in the attic playroom having a gift opening, one of those tiny misplaced Christmases that expatriates, always celebrating things minimally or out of season, get used to. You’ve brought a CD of UK garage music that the twelve-to-fifteen-year-old crowd desires ardently this year; another CD of Christmas carols miaowed by a computerized chorus of felines; a floppy stuffed cat and dog; a T-shirt from your local microbrewery; and, most marvelous of all, a fantastic array of kids’ magazines, the kind that Theodora can never find on the international newsstands here, with subjects ranging from Internet pet exchanges to feminist water polo.

Theodora sits with her long legs crossed Indian-style, so we can see the mud caking the soles of her size nine Doc Martens, bending her flat-chested eleven-year-old body over the gifts, pushing back a single skinny braid she has made at the front of her hair, a braid tipped with an orange bead and a tiny piece of tinfoil. She knew you were coming, and was excited about it, but when she gallumphed in from school, ready for her snack, and saw you and me together, she turned mute. I was embarrassed, but you wisely sat still and waited, and now she is giggling and chattering as she tears wrapping paper. She is the nominal reason for this visit, after all. I have a snapshot from six years ago, of Theo sitting on your lap, her head lolling back in an abandoned attitude of perfect confidence. It scared me at the time: I thought you might steal her. Some years later, I was scared at the idea that you might vanish forever from her life: that, instead of the stepmother she learned to love, you might become a woman who left her father’s house one spring night, and stepped into nonbeing. Theo already has too many memories that hover on the verge of being apocrypha.

The baby is awake from his nap, and crawling around shredding wrapping paper and making noises like an engine that needs a muffler. As usual, his fat toothless face wears an expression of expectant hilarity, as if he were awaiting the punch line to the joke of the century. His Sri Lankan nanny is crawling after him. We’ve put on the British CD, and the clamor of young black female voices makes it seem that there are a lot more of us in this attic with its posters and toys and cushions, that we’ve been transported to an intimate noisy paradise of women and children. I leaf through National Geographic World and find an article on the Hubble telescope. New galaxies, it appears, have been discovered, not just a few dozen, but billions, and those billions crammed into a visual space the size of my fingernail, like angels on the head of a pin. Theo is looking at some snapshots you brought of the Fourth of July celebrations in your hometown. Shaggy-haired, Gore-Tex-clad Oregonians are reveling in patriotic weirdness.

Mom, look at these two guys, says Theo. They’re dueling with foam swords on this board over a mud pit.

Just wanted to give you a little taste of home, you say, with a half smile.

Strangely enough, these pictures fill me with real contentment, as though I’d been missing something without knowing it.

The phone starts ringing, and it’s my editor from New York. I have to correct last-minute details of an article on Fellini that is closing the next day. Specifically, we’re thrashing out whether Fellini for decades nourished an illicit passion for a woman the Italian scandal sheets call Fatty. And whether in his famous sketches he drew “thousands of penises” (my words) or “hundreds of penises” (fact checker’s specification). I have to keep jumping up from dinner to discuss these matters, and I fear I’m neglecting you. Theodora devoured a plate of tortellini and dashed upstairs to do her homework. My husband, home from the office at eight-thirty and, knackered as usual, is eager to stretch out in front of the television and watch one of those big Italian variety shows in which platoons of scantily clad girls wag their butts and lip-synch Spice