Advice for Italian Boys (5 page)

“Do you think I should take that cooking class that Sue recommended?” Monica asked Nicolo at the end of one session. “Or there’s this new diet. Have you heard about it? All steak and cream and butter, but no carbohydrates. It doesn’t make any sense at all, but I’ve heard that people swear the weight melts away like magic. Carbs are just like poison, that’s the theory. If you stop eating bread and pasta and white flour, your body will start to eat into your own fat reserves. The cave people didn’t eat carbs and we shouldn’t be eating them either. Or something like that. Maybe it was the Neanderthals. Were they the ones that lived in caves? In the south of France? And made those paintings? Anyway, you’re supposed to get really bad breath as your body starts to feed on itself, but apparently that only lasts for a while, and then your body adjusts.”

“Try the cooking class,” Nicolo replied. This was not difficult advice for him to give. Sue’s class couldn’t hurt, and it might give Monica something to think about, a distraction from her weight and her ex-husband. He thought sometimes of what he understood medical students were taught about their chosen profession: Above all, do no harm.

Nicolo thought that Enzo, who had already completed four years at the university and half of his first year of law school, might have some advice on how to deal with
Monica. Beginning at age nine or ten, around the time that the boys had first begun to differentiate themselves from one another and to take on more distinctive personalities, Enzo had become a reliable source of information and then adviser to his older brothers. He absorbed facts effortlessly, quickly discerned patterns and trends, was swift to acquire new terminology and was shrewd at deducing motives. Enzo was modest about his abilities around his brothers, however; Nicolo had the keenest moral sense, he said, and older Enzo was the most tenacious. Nicolo described Monica to Enzo one weekend afternoon when they were turning the compost pile in the backyard.

“Ah,” said Enzo. He grunted and pushed his heavy fork through a frozen surface layer of earth. They were in the deepest corner of the yard, using a pair of ancient, rusting, wood-handled pitchforks that, although they seemed venerable enough to have been brought from the old country, in fact had been bought with the house, abandoned by the previous owner and found leaning together like a long-married couple, along with their near relatives, a shovel, a hoe and an edger, all of similar vintage, in a dim, cobwebbed corner of the garage. A steamy emanation rose up from the softly stewing underlayers of leaves, grass and kitchen peelings as they were turned, and a rich, mushroomy odour filled the air.

“Neurotic,” Enzo said as he lifted his pitchfork with its load of peels and eggshells and coffee grounds, and he explained the meaning of the term to Nicolo, who had heard it before but had not understood how to match it to a set of human behaviour.

“There are greater and lesser degrees of neurotics,” said Enzo, stopping and shaking his head so that a hank of his hair fell forward across his brow and into his eyes. He pushed it away with the back of his hand and then rested for a moment and leaned into the handle of his fork. “This sounds like a milder case. But still to be taken seriously. Neurotics are interesting people, and can be great friends when life is going well, but when things go badly you will find that they tend to try to assign blame. Generally they are loyal to the people they trust. Better overall to stay on their good sides.”

Up a notch from Monica in concern were the brother and sister, Phil and Bella Fell, although so far it was difficult for Nicolo to explain to Enzo why he felt this way. They were almost entirely passive, trailing Nicolo from machines to weights to bikes to mats without questioning his intentions or his plan. Neither of them ever made suggestions or demands. They stood together, side by side, slowly blinking, heads tipped, fingers clenched into loose fists, during Nicolo’s explanations, and they followed his instructions precisely, if mechanically. Their form was good for beginners, but Nicolo found that they lost heart quickly. They tended to turn to him after only ten or fifteen reps, in a single motion, as if with one thought, and their compressed expressions indicated, clearly,
What next?
They had no small talk, even between themselves, and so Nicolo laboured alone under the effort of providing conversation, which he had come to learn moved the hour sessions with his clients along more efficiently—an encouraging word or two to smooth out the transitions between stations, a few distracting comments during any task that was strenuous or repetitious, a joke or
bit of gym news toward the end. The Fells almost never responded to his comments about sports, the weather or front-page news. Nicolo had once had his hearing tested in a thickly soundproofed booth, a small dark room in which the walls and roof were covered with what looked like hundreds of black Styrofoam egg trays. Inside, with the door tightly closed, his words fell heavily from his mouth without any reverberation or echo from the surrounding walls. Speaking to the Fells was like that. His sentences were flattened by their blank impenetrability. His words didn’t seem to reach any farther than the outer edge of his own lips.

In addition, the Fells seemed incapable of feeling encouraged or discouraged.

“Is everything okay?” he would ask. Or: “Do you think you can do that?” Or: “Shall we move over to the free weights?”

“Yes-s,” they would reply almost in unison, words almost overlapping, at different inharmonious pitches, their heads tilted. There was seldom any request for more information; they followed his directions exactly as he set them out, without question, deviation or improvisation. They were always impeccably neat—they didn’t even seem to sweat—but Nicolo had learned to turn his head to the side when they spoke. They both had breath that reminded him of the compost heap in the backyard, a warm, acrid and repellent smell like eggs that had turned.

And then there was Patrick Alexander, who was becoming a steadily increasing challenge. Nicolo had not yet fixed on any system to manage Patrick or to predict what he would do next. Patrick’s faults varied wildly from day to day. If it were just that he was late, or had forgotten his gear, Nicolo
could have planned around these shortcomings. But Patrick sometimes didn’t arrive at all, or he came on the wrong day, or he came an hour early, or on time and on the right date but without his gear, or at the right time and with the right equipment but completely distracted and unable to follow Nicolo’s instructions. Patrick seldom demonstrated any memory or understanding of what had been thoroughly shown and reviewed and reinforced during the prior sessions. Patrick was always charming and apologetic throughout. He motioned toward the heavens. He struck his forehead with the flat of his hand. He smacked himself a glancing whack at the back of his beautiful haircut. He wrung his hands as if they were damp towels. He made deeply chiselled expressions of dismay. He bowed. He cringed dramatically. He explained, exclaimed, declaimed and apologized. He all but wept. He was eminently forgivable, every time, and Nicolo did forgive him, even grew fond of him. He made room for him in his schedule if possible when he appeared, and filled in his absences with other work. No harm of any duration was ever done, and Patrick paid for all of his sessions even if he missed them. He wafted his golden credit card in front of whoever was on cash at the front desk, crying “Pay poor Nicolo! Double! Triple! Whatever it takes!” But Nicolo was beginning to dread the sessions with Patrick. He wasn’t running out of patience—he seemed to have been born with an infinite store—but his time with Patrick left him feeling exhausted and with a mounting sense that he was failing to provide whatever it was that Patrick really wanted from him.

At dinner one evening Nicolo described his problems with Patrick to his parents and Nonna. Enzo had eaten early and
had already gone to work. His father got up from the table to return to his basement workroom.

“What can you do?” he shrugged as he departed.

“Cosa pensi, Nonna?”
Nicolo said. His mother stood up and began to clear the table. What do you think?

“Chine è natu quatru ’un po’ morire tunnu,”
she said.

“Yeah,” Nicolo said. He nodded once, slowly, and then again. “Yeah, I know that, Nonna. What is born a circle won’t die a square.”

O
n Saturday morning, Nicolo drove to Vaughan Bakery with his new psychology textbook beside him on the passenger seat of his car. He carried the book into the wide, bright store, which sold Italian groceries and small household goods as well as coffee and bread and pastries, and he propped it on the table up against the blue fluted bowl filled with paper-wrapped sugar cubes behind his cup of cappuccino with its monk’s hood of chocolate-flecked foam. He read through a page while cracking three packages of sugar lumps against the side of his cup so that the sugar cubes spilled like dice into his coffee, and he continued to read while stirring the froth and coffee and hot milk and sugary grit together.

Nicolo came to the bakery every Saturday morning a half hour before the ten o’clock time that he and the others had agreed on. He liked to watch the customers as they flowed through the doors and carried out an efficient series of straightforward and gratifying transactions. Each Saturday morning, Nicolo bought a dozen ricotta-filled cannoli, and he and Frank, Mario and Paul would eat three each directly from the pastry box, balancing them over their coffee cups. If someone didn’t show up, as happened occasionally, Nicolo took the extras home for Enzo and his father. The bakery had served for years as a meeting place for Italians in the area. As well as breads and sweets, it sold brands of tomato sauce, pasta, meats and cheeses that were difficult to find in the regular stores and it was a useful source for news and rumours—who was marrying or having another child, who to vote for or against in the upcoming municipal elections, the degree to which the region’s plans to close the landfill were advancing or stalled.

Marietta, the owners’ granddaughter, who had played around the counters and tables as a child, and who now served pastries and sometimes prepared the coffee in the enormous red sighing Gaggia with its banks of stainless steel valves and indicators and black dials and intermittent blasts of steam, had grown up observing Nicolo and the other three every Saturday, among the stream of customers and visitors. Nicolo has become aware of her gaze. What he cannot know, however, is how Marietta sees them: Mario foremost, the handsomest of the group, with his thick head of hair that cascaded across his forehead in shiny black rings like carved, coiled snakes, his dark skin, with, on Saturday mornings, a
beard in threatened eruption around his long jaw, his wide, brown, swimming eyes, his dark lashes, thick and curled at the outer edges like a woman’s, his strong, straight nose, his cleft chin, his thick neck. Mario wears clothes that are neither new nor old, but the exact right place in between—black jeans, a close-fitting white T-shirt, a jacket cut from soft, cinnamon-coloured calfskin. He smells—she has occasionally manoeuvred herself close enough to him to take in his scent—like starch and musk, with a slightly acrid edge of tangy male-ness. Even the memory of his scent makes her mouth water. He moves through her yearning vision as if under water, like a great fish, slowly and with a surfeit of grace and without any evident consciousness of the way he refracts the light. He is as without flaw and as remote as a cloud or mountain or god. It makes Marietta weak to gaze at Mario for longer than a moment, and she tests herself every Saturday. Standing behind a wire shelf with its display of pasta and canned Roma tomatoes, she stares at Mario until she feels the tips of her fingers begin to tingle. Then she rests her eyes on the dark blue boxes of Barilla penne rigate, which she pretends to straighten on the shelf although they are almost always already in perfect order. She has, in this manner, memorized every word on the Barilla box, and the phrases printed on the box have taken on a deep, Mario-tinted significance:
COTTURA
11
MINUTI. N°
1
IN ITALIA.
There are for Marietta no words more charged with romance in any language of the world than these.
COTTURA
11
MINUTI. N° 1 IN ITALIA
.

Once Marietta has soaked up as much of Mario as she feels she can bear, and if she is not too busy serving other customers, she might watch Paul for a while, since he is infal
libly splendid, although not nearly as good looking as Mario. Paul’s jeans and colourfully striped button-down shirts are always crisply ironed, his boots polished, his black leather jacket stiffly assertive, his belt buckle almost aggressively large and glistening. He sometimes wears a black cashmere scarf loosely knotted around his neck. Marietta has sometimes thought that if Mario were to dress as Paul does, he would be too much to endure, and she is grateful that Mario sticks, on Saturday mornings, to jeans and T-shirts.

Marietta pays no attention to Frank, who is shaped like her father—short, with a mild face, rounded torso, and a humble walk with no bravado or swagger. Frank works on Saturdays, and comes in for coffee during his break, dressed for work in blue canvas overalls with the name
CORELLI’S AUTO BODY
stamped on the breast pocket. She hasn’t ever seen Italian paintings or sculpture, and so doesn’t know that Frank has a classic, slanting Roman profile, the profile of a nobleman, a silhouette surely intended for coins and for marble busts rather than the muddy, greasy undersides of cars.

Marietta knows Nicolo best, in fact Nicolo is the only one of the four she has ever spoken to, since she often takes his orders, but he has always treated her like a child—she is sixteen—and so she assigned him many years ago to the category of adult. As a result, she now perceives him to be middle-aged and therefore entirely beyond any possible romantic significance.

That Saturday morning, Frank was the next to arrive at the bakery. He slid into the chair across from Nicolo, the seat closest to the high glass counter with a good view of the parking lot, his usual place because it allowed him to keep an eye on his car, a sherbet-yellow 1988 Corvette, to make sure no one placed a foot on its bumper or leaned on its hood or came too close to its recently waxed surface in manoeuvring through the constricted parking lot.

“Hey,” he said to Nicolo. “Whatcha doing?”

“Reading,” Nicolo replied. He folded the covers of the heavy book closed. “It’s for a class I’m starting.”

“Look at our good wittle Nicolo, weading his book.” Paul had arrived. Except for Mario, who had recently completed a real estate course, none of them had studied after high school; they had all fallen into work that they liked well enough and that provided the advantage of reliable pay without requiring diplomas or degrees.

“Yeah,” Frank said, mugging, widening his eyes and mouth into an expression of foolishness. “You know, now that I think about it, I remember I read a book once too. It was red, about this size. Some kinda title. Fulla big words. Didja ever read it?”

“Yeah, yeah,” said Paul. He sat down and shot his cuffs. “Yeah, sure, I remember that one. Red cover, real thick. You gotta like a book that’s got lotsa pages, ’cause then you really get your money’s worth. That’s the most important thing with books; you gotta make sure you get your value.”

“A short book,” Frank said. “A short book is hardly worth your while. You might as well not even bother with a short book. You’re done before you’ve even started. Two covers,
a couple of pages, a few words in the middle. Nothing to it. Sneeze and you’ve missed the whole plot. Where’s the challenge? A book for girls. Now this, this here is a book.” Frank seized Nicolo’s psychology text and held it up. “You could kill someone with this thing. You know? It’s more of a heavy, blunt object than a book. And the beauty of it is, is you can carry it around right out in the open without even you gotta get a licence. Could come in useful, if you get me, eh? In a certain kind of situation.”

“Idiots.” Nicolo removed his book from Frank’s hands and placed in on the floor beside his chair.

The glass door of the bakery opened and Mario came in on the heels of an older couple. Nicolo watched the little Gerussi girl slip away from the counter and take up her usual spying post on the far side of the pasta aisle. Two boxes of penne rigate were moved a finger’s width apart and he saw a slow-blinking brown and glistening eye appear between them.

The four of them ran through their usual topics of conversation: soccer or baseball or hockey, depending on the season, work, cars, family, neighbours, anyone who had done something unusual or of interest, bought a house, moved, married, separated, divorced, gone bankrupt, met with unexpected fortune or success. Nothing unusual that Saturday at all, except that, after they had drained the last of their coffees, set the cups with their grainy residue of sugar askew in their saucers, as they were rising to leave, Mario held up his right hand in a signal for the others to wait for a minute before heading off into the rest of their Saturdays; he had something to say.

“We decided. Well, Angie decided. No, we both did. The other night after, um, dinner. We both decided that we should ask you guys to help us out. At the wedding. I need to have six whatdyacallem, best men or attendants or something, because Angie wants six bridesmaids, her two sisters and a bunch of her friends. So can you do it? The first Saturday in June. We’re going to ask Angie’s brother Joe and her cousins from Vancouver, Nick and Guido, as well, and with her brother and with you guys that makes six. Okay?”

This was the first Nicolo or any of the others had heard of a wedding.

“Yeah, sure,” they all told him, clapping him on the shoulder, leaving overlapping powdered cannoli sugar outlines of their hands on his jacket.

“We’ll be there, man. We’re there for you,” said Paul.

Nicolo slipped a glance to the little Gerussi girl behind the pasta, but the brown eye had been withdrawn. Poor Marietta was on her bottom on the floor.
COTTURA
11
MINUTI. N°
1
IN ITALIA
floated in the sparkling blackness that swirled in front of her blinking eyes.
COTTURA
11
MINUTI. N°
1
IN ITALIA.
She twisted and tugged the silver ring that she wore on the fourth finger of her left hand as a place-holder, but it resisted her efforts; it twisted and dug into her plumply upholstered knuckle and, unlike her tender pink heart, refused to be moved.

Mario had parked his cosseted Mustang beside Nicolo’s black Civic, and Nicolo felt that the few moments when they were walking together across the lot toward their cars should include some acknowledgment of Mario’s announcement.

“So,” he said. “Angie, eh? She seems like a good kid.” Nicolo had met Angie once or twice. He thought he remembered
that her family lived in one of the suburbs to the west of the city, Brampton, or maybe Rexdale, not as far out as Oakville. She was thin, large busted, with thick blonde hair teased and sprayed into a curling mass. She wore several jangling bracelets on each arm, and large gold hoops swung from her ears. Not a calm woman. Quick moving. Quick talking. Take charge. Smart.

“Yeah,” said Mario. His breath puffed thin and blue into the cold morning air. “She’s got a good job at the bank, management track even, it looks like, and now that I have my licence, we thought, you know, get a house and some proper furniture of our own, maybe think about beginning a family even, start to live like grown-ups. You know?”

“Yeah,” Nicolo replied. “Big wedding too. That’s good. I’m really happy for you. For the both of you.”

“She’s okay, Angie,” Mario said. He stopped and turned toward Nicolo.

Nicolo could hear more than a trace of self-persuasion in Mario’s voice. Which was only natural, he thought. Getting married. What could be bigger than that? He wondered too what would make someone take that leap, commit to someone else for the rest of his life. It would be like deciding to go on an uncertain trip with a stranger instead of staying safely at home.

Nicolo and Mario stood for another half-minute, facing each other but not talking. Nicolo kept his gaze near Mario’s shoulder, which he thought about punching lightly, but that seemed not quite right. Nicolo stubbed a booted toe against a ridge of ice on the pavement. A companionable silence, easy as breathing, was broken finally when Mario said, “I guess I
should be…” and Nicolo said at the same time, “So, I’ll be seeing you around…” Nicolo threw his book into the front seat of his car and they each slammed their car doors and drove away in separate directions, their quick minds already moving on to the next thing that the day held and the next thing after that.