Italian for Beginners (10 page)

Of course he was older than me, I had to remind myself. A good seven years older. So he was already into his forties. It was
a strange thought; the last time I’d seen him, he’d been twenty-eight. It seemed as though nearly a lifetime had passed.

Could he have married and divorced since I’d last seen him? Could he have had a child? I wondered if he frequented the same
bars, rode the same moped, still liked to twirl his spaghetti twice and then suck the strands messily in through his front
teeth. I wondered if he still smoked when he drank or whether he’d outgrown that. Had he started shaving every day instead
of letting his sexy stubble accumulate? Did he get haircuts more regularly instead of letting his curls grow a little wild?
Did he wear business suits now, or was he still wearing collared shirts and jeans to work? Would he still laugh at my jokes
and smile at me as though we shared a special secret?

It was just past 2 p.m. Italian time when I finally cleared customs and began walking toward the international arrivals exit
of Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, a sprawling, old-fashioned place that hadn’t changed since I’d seen it last. My heart was pounding
as I dragged my suitcase behind me, moving as fast as I could. I knew that Francesco was just yards away. The dark-tinted
automatic doors loomed up ahead like the entrance to another world. Taking a deep breath, I quickened my pace and strode through,
my eyes scanning the waiting crowd.

And then, there he was. It was like something out of a dream.

I recognized him right away. Thirteen years had done little to dull his sharp-edged good looks. In fact, as he moved toward
middle age, he looked even better. His hair was still thick and jet-black; his smile lines were few but looked deliciously
sexy; his darkly tanned skin was still taut across his strong-featured face. He was wearing dark jeans and a gray designer
T-shirt that clung to him in all the right places, showing me that he’d lost none of the muscular structure to his arms and
shoulders that I’d found so attractive long ago.

He was scanning the crowd, too, and I lifted a hand to wave as he glanced in my direction, but he seemed to look right at
me and look away, as if he hadn’t seen me. My heart sank a little, but that was silly. He continued scanning, slowly, leisurely,
while I hurried toward him, my heart hammering.

“Francesco!” I said loudly, once I was in shouting distance. “Over here!” I raised my right arm above my head and waved it
madly, trying to get his attention.

Finally, his eyes focused on me, and I saw the spark of recognition in his face. He blinked a few times, seeming to take me
in, then he smiled as I rushed forward.

“Bella!” he exclaimed.
“Che sorpresa!”

I let go of my suitcase just a few feet from him and rushed into his arms. It felt a bit like being enveloped in the past
as he kissed me on both cheeks and pulled me into a hug. It felt amazing. It was the way Francesco had always held me, every
time we embraced, and it felt so familiar now that I almost wanted to cry.

“What are you doing here?” Francesco exclaimed, pulling away from me finally and studying me.

“I know!” I said. I couldn’t wipe the grin from my face. “It’s the most spontaneous thing I’ve ever done, just e-mailing you
like that and hopping on a plane.”

His brow creased and he stared at me. “But why?” he asked after a moment. “Why did you come all this way?”

“I never… I never forgave myself for leaving the way I did. For not following up on what could have happened between us. I’m
sorry.”

“Ah,” Francesco said, his lovely green eyes boring into mine and making me tingle.
“È bel niente.
It’s nothing.
Non ti preoccupi.”

Francesco spoke proficient English, but he had an endearing habit of peppering his words with Italian phrases. It had always
seemed to me to be very charming, very cosmopolitan. The fact that he was releasing me from blame as he stood there gazing
down at me made my insides do backflips.

“I’ve missed you,” I said softly.

He paused and then smiled.
“E tu.”
He glanced down at my suitcase. “So. Shall we go?”

I nodded, and as Francesco grasped my hand tightly with his right hand and began effortlessly dragging my suitcase with his
left, my heart swelled. I felt like part of a couple, part of a pair again. But as we exited into the bright afternoon sunshine
outside the terminal and made our way toward Francesco’s little Fiat, it occurred to me that I had no idea where we were going
or what his life was like now.

We made small talk as we sped toward the city. Francesco drove the way I remembered, quickly and aggressively, cutting off
other drivers, cursing under his breath when someone got in his way. I supposed I’d expected that he would have grown out
of this form of Italian-specific road rage. But strangely, it wasn’t a turnoff to me that he was still like this. It made
me feel closer to him, as though less time had passed and fewer changes had transpired. Maybe I
did
still know this man. Maybe he still knew me, too.

“So, you were able to just leave your job, like that?” Francesco asked as he cut off an old woman in a coupe and wove deftly
between two helmetless moped riders.

“I haven’t taken much vacation time,” I said, trying not to feel paralyzed with the fear of dying in a fiery car crash on
the A91.

Francesco glanced at me and smiled slyly. “You must have a good job, no? Very good?”

I laughed. “It’s all right,” I said. “Same thing I’ve always done. I work in accounting.”

It felt strange, having a getting-to-know-you talk with someone whose birthmarks I could locate with my eyes closed (one directly
over his left hip bone, one on his right elbow), whose whole life story I already knew, whose hopes and dreams I’d once found
impossible to separate from my own.

“But you make a lot of money, no?” he pressed on playfully. He turned his attention back to the road and darted in front of
an old pickup truck, whose driver leaned out the window and unleashed a string of expletives and hand gestures, which only
made Francesco laugh. He glanced back at me. “You are rich?”

I rolled my eyes. “Hardly. I’ve just been good with saving my money. How about you?”

“Am I rich?” Francesco asked in obvious amusement. “Is that what you ask me?”

“No! I meant, what’s your job? What are you doing these days?”

“Ah, my job,” Francesco said. He stroked his chin with his right hand thoughtfully, as if this was a question that needed
to be mulled over. “This is an interesting thing, bella. I do a lot of things. I paint a little. I do, how you say, handiwork?
Yes, handiwork.”

“Handiwork?” I stared at him in confusion.

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Like that character on your TV show.
Desperate Housewives.
Eh… Mike Delfino?”

He pronounced the character’s name slowly and respectfully, as if talking about a real, revered individual. I had to laugh;
like many Romans, Francesco had always been enamored with American pop culture.

“Yes,” I said. “You’re a handyman?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. He was distracted again as he shot through a spot between two cars and zigzagged into the right lane.
“I fix things. You know. Wires. Pipes.”

“But what happened to your job as a computer engineer?”

He glanced at me, and I thought for a moment that I saw something like annoyance flash over his face. “That job, it was not
for me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Obviously, the pain from losing his job was still fresh.

He blinked a few times and changed the subject. “And you? Where do you live?”

“New York,” I said.

“Oh, New York! I visited New York six years ago. I love it. The Big Apple!”

I stared at him. My mouth felt dry. “You were in New York?” I said slowly. “Why didn’t you call?”

He glanced at me sharply. “I did not know that is where you live.”

Now I felt confused. “You didn’t? But I always lived there. Remember? I told you it was the only place I ever wanted to be,
because my family was there.” Surely he’d remember that from all of the times we’d lain in bed talking about our future and
our past.

“Ah, yes,” Francesco said vaguely. “I remember now.” He paused and cut the wheel sharply, sending us shooting off the road
on a side street to the right. I grasped the door handle for dear life. Seeing this, Francesco laughed. “Relax, bella. It
is the way we drive here.”

I was being reminded of that quickly enough as Francesco wove in and out of side streets, cutting other people off, being
cut off, slamming on his brakes, and cursing in rapid Italian approximately every forty-five seconds. How had this not bothered
me more when I lived here?

But then, as we shot off a side street, lurching onto a main drag, I recalled immediately why the erratic driving of Romans
hadn’t bothered me as much as it should have. It was because the town they drove through like maniacs was so ridiculously,
achingly beautiful that one could hardly blame them for wanting to race from one beautiful spot to the next.

I sucked in a deep breath as the Tiber and its beautiful, arching bridges stretched out ahead of us. The afternoon light gave
a soft, milky glow to the ancient buildings across the Ponte Garibaldi, and the sun seeped through their arches and crevices,
caressing them with its rays.

I felt suddenly like I was home.

“I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here,” I murmured.

Francesco glanced at me. “Ah, yes? Yes, it is beautiful. A little bit of
colpo di fulmine
for you, no?”

“Colpo di fulmine?”
I repeated.

“Love at first sight,” Francesco said, pulling up to a stop sign and turning to stare at me meaningfully before lurching the
car forward again.

He cut another hard right and we whizzed past a rectangular piazza, presided over by a hulking statue of a stern-looking,
hooded man who looked like a monk.

“Campo dei Fiori,” Francesco announced like a tour guide as he saw me straining to look. “Remember?”

I nodded, wishing we hadn’t just shot by it at the speed of light. But, I reminded myself, I’d be here for a whole month.
I’d have plenty of time to visit my old haunts.

Francesco turned down a side street, then down a narrow alley, and screeched to a halt in front of a building painted a faded
rust-orange color. “Here we are,” he said after parallel parking. “Home.”

Home.
The word lodged itself in my mind.

Francesco hopped out of the car and, ever the gentleman, came around to open my door. He grinned and held my arm gently as
I stepped onto the sidewalk.

“
Grazie
,” I said with a smile.

“
Prego
,” he replied with a wink. “So you speak Italian now?”

I laughed. It had been a joke between us that summer that even though I had taken two semesters of Italian and was studying
in Rome, I was horrible at speaking the language. Two semesters of college Italian were barely enough to get down the basics,
never mind verb conjugations and sentence construction. So I could say all kinds of useless words—
mucca
for cow,
mela
for apple,
finestra
for window—but as much as I loved the way the words rolled off my tongue in that smooth Italian staccato that made you want
to gesture with your hands, they didn’t do me much good.

Understanding Italian was a different story. My mother had, of course, been born in Italy, so like Francesco, she peppered
her English with Italian words and phrases. I remembered sitting at the kitchen table many times as a child, coloring pictures
or eating apple slices with peanut butter while I listened to her rapid-fire telephone conversations with her parents and
sister. I worshipped her then and used to ask her to teach me words in Italian. So she did, patiently some days, with impatient
agitation on others. By the time she left, I could understand a good 50 percent of what she said, although I wasn’t capable
of repeating most of it.

It was during one of those phone conversations that I’d heard her say she was leaving. I was so sure I’d misunderstood that
I never said anything to my dad, or to her. And then, a week later, she was gone. I’d always felt guilty for having advance
notice and failing to stop her—even if I hadn’t been sure. To this day, I’d never told anyone.

Francesco grabbed my suitcase out of the trunk and pointed toward the door of the burnt-orange building. “This way,” he said.
“Up those stairs.”

I nodded and set off up the stairs with Francesco following close behind me. I wondered if he was checking me out from behind.
Granted, I didn’t have the same body I’d had at twenty-one. But I wasn’t bad for a thirty-four-year-old woman, all things
considered. I hoped Francesco agreed.

Four flights up, we stopped at a door just off the landing, and Francesco set my bag down while he fiddled with his keys and
inserted one in the lock. He pushed the door open and gestured for me to step inside.

Even though it was a different apartment than the one he’d lived in thirteen years ago, a wave of familiarity washed over
me as I walked through the door. It was a studio loft, much like Francesco’s old place had been, and I was moderately surprised
to see the same worn leather sofa, the same cream-colored throw rug, the same wrought-iron coffee table, and the same dented
wooden kitchen table that I remembered from his old place. It even smelled like him; the faint smell of cigarette smoke mixed
with a touch of Trussardi cologne. I breathed in deeply, loving the way the scent transported me back in time.

The floor of his new apartment was mostly a glossy, brick-colored tile with a small rug separating the living room from the
rest of the small apartment. A small TV sat on a wooden stand opposite the old leather couch, and a sturdy wooden ladder was
propped against the loft, where I could just glimpse the end of a bed covered in a navy comforter. The kitchen was tiny and
clean, but I guessed Francesco didn’t use it much; I remembered him eating out most nights and complaining that he wasn’t
even capable of cooking spaghetti correctly. The counter was lined with a dozen bottles of chianti, two tall bottles of Campari,
and several bottles of Piper-Heidsieck champagne. Francesco had been cheap in many areas, but never with his alcohol; he drank
only the best. Sunlight poured in through a narrow pair of French doors just off the living room.