Italian for Beginners (14 page)

Her whole face lit up. “Ah, Michael! I adore him!” She leaned forward and patted my arm. “Any friend of Michael’s is a friend
of mine!”

“Good thing we’re friends then,” I muttered.

She nodded pleasantly, my sarcasm having flown over her head. “So you are upset, no? Allow me to guess. You have had an encounter
with one of our famous Italian men? And you are disappointed?”

I sighed. “It’s not exactly like that,” I said.

Karina nodded. “Okay. So tell me.”

I stared at her for a moment. I didn’t know if I wanted to tell this stranger anything. But what did I have to lose? “I should
have known better,” I began. “It’s a guy I dated thirteen years ago. I came back to see him, and it turned out he’d made a
mistake. He thought he was e-mailing with a college kid, not me.”

She looked at me in disbelief. “But you, you are beautiful!” she said. She truly looked astonished. “And surely you know more
about the ways of womanhood than a college girl, no?”

I couldn’t help but laugh. “Probably not,” I said. “I’m not exactly the most feminine person in the world.” I looked pointedly
down at my mess of an outfit.

Karina smiled, but she shook her head. “Nonsense,” she said. “You are more feminine than you realize. And this Italian man,
he is an idiot if he doesn’t see it.”

I looked down at my coffee. “Thank you,” I said softly.

Karina nodded. “So tell me.”

“What?”

“Tell me about him. About this man. About why you are here.”

I hesitated. I looked at her and was mildly surprised to see her leaning forward and looking at me with intense interest.
“Are you sure you want to hear this?”

“Sì, assolutamente.”

I nodded. “Okay.” And so I told her briefly about my history with Francesco, my desire to break out of the dullness of my
life in the States, my snap decision to follow my heart to Rome again, and what had happened in the past twenty-four hours.
I wasn’t sure why I was being so honest with her, but her mouth fell open in horror when I told her what had happened with
him last night and that this morning, he’d told me it had all been a mistake.

She cursed under her breath in Italian, which made me feel a little better. She seemed to find his behavior as appalling as
I did.

When I was finished, Karina stared at me long and hard. “So you are to stay in Rome, then?”

I shrugged and shook my head. “I don’t know. I feel like I’ll look like such a failure if I go home. But honestly, I had to
loan my sister some money before I left. And now I can’t afford a hotel. It’s why I came here. Michael said you rented rooms.”

“How much money do you have to spend?”

I hesitated. “I guess about four hundred euros,” I said. “And that would get me, what, maybe a week in some one-star hotel?”
I sighed in discouragement. “If I want to go home sooner than my ticket is booked for, I know I’ll have to pay a big change
fee.”

Karina studied me for a moment. Then a slow smile spread across her face. “Okay. You will stay with me,” she said, as if it
was the most obvious thing in the world. “My apartment has a small maid’s chamber above it; it is a studio apartment with
a separate entrance. I need someone to rent the room. It might as well be you. You look clean—even if you seem to have a little
problem matching your clothes.” She paused and smiled. “And you say you can pay. Four hundred euros is fine for one month.
So why not?”

I couldn’t believe I was even considering it. But the offer
did
sound enticing. And the price was right. “I don’t know,” I said finally. Could I spend the next four weeks living under the
roof of this raven-haired lunatic? Although I had to admit that she didn’t seem nearly as crazy now as she had a half hour
ago.

“Okay,” I heard myself say. Karina’s face lit up, and I swallowed hard. “I’ll do it,” I added as confidently as possible.
After all, what did I have to lose?

A
n hour later, the restaurant had officially opened for lunch, and I had filled out a four-page, handwritten rental application
that Karina had whipped up quickly in the back. Along with asking me for my home address and three references, it also asked
me for my favorite food, my worst childhood memory, and my zodiac sign.

What had I gotten myself into?

After bringing me a huge cornetto, a little glass bottle of apricot juice, and another cappuccino, Karina came back out on
the restaurant’s patio at eleven thirty to see if I’d completed the application.

“Meraviglioso!”
she exclaimed enthusiastically when I handed it to her. She stood there for a moment, reading carefully. Then a shadow passed
over her face.

“Your mother left your family?” she asked, looking at me in surprise.

I swallowed hard. Why had I even answered the childhood memory question so honestly?

“I shouldn’t have written that,” I backtracked. “It’s in the past.”

“No, no,” Karina said. “That is horrible. What kind of a mother leaves her children? I can’t imagine!”

I swallowed hard.

Karina continued. “You do not feel this makes you unreliable?”

“What? No.”

Karina’s face softened. “I just do not want you to run out on the rent.”

“I’m not my mother,” I shot back.

She looked hard at me. “No,” she said after a moment. She nodded. “You are most likely not.” She went back to studying the
rental application. “I see you are a Cancer. Good, good. I’m a Pisces. We’re a good match.”

I raised an eyebrow, expecting her to laugh and say she was just kidding. But she seemed completely serious.

“Okay,” she said after a moment. “It is decided. You give me half the rent now, the other half in two weeks. Okay?”

I nodded warily. “Okay.”

“Good,” Karina said. She seemed to be waiting for something.

“Wait,
now
now?”

She looked bewildered. “Of course. You have the money?”

I hesitated. This was foolish, wasn’t it? For all I knew, I’d never see this woman again. But there was something about her
that struck me as honest. Sure, I was being foolish and making a decision I
never
would have made at home. But in my gut, I felt like it was the right thing to do.

“Yes,” I said. I pulled out my wallet and counted ten twenty-euro bills into Karina’s outstretched hand.

She smiled once the counting was done. “Good. Shall we go? I will help you with your bags. I told my boss I needed just a
half hour, and he said fine. We are not busy.”

I nodded and stood up, prepared to take the handle of my suitcase. But Karina grabbed it instead and began dragging.

“Wait, I can do it,” I said.

She shook her head. “You are a wimp,” she said over her shoulder. She was already pulling it down the street. She was freakishly
strong.

I hurried along after her with my duffel and purse slung over my shoulder. Karina chattered along the way about things we
were passing: the meat market where she liked to buy sausages, the greengrocer who stared at her chest whenever she picked
out fruit, the wine shop that gave her a discount if she tried a new kind of wine. After we’d walked a couple blocks, zigzagging
in and out of alleyways, she stopped in front of a tall, old-looking building that was painted a faded copper color.

“We have arrived,” she said. She dug in her pocket for a moment for her keys and turned one in the front lock. The massive
wooden door cracked open, and Karina threw her weight up against it and tumbled, along with my suitcase, into the foyer. “Sometimes
the door sticks,” she said. “You have to push.”

I shook my head and followed her inside. She glanced back. “Can you help me with the suitcase?” she asked, pointing to the
stairs.

“Of course.” Together, we lugged my bag up three flights of stairs. I was sweating again by the time we reached the third-floor
landing, but Karina looked as cool and unfazed as ever.

“Wait here,” she said crisply. She turned another key in the lock of a door just to the right of the landing, and I craned
my neck a little to catch a glimpse inside her apartment. All that I managed to see before she slammed the door were her burnt-orange
walls, her cream-tiled floors, and several pieces of dark wood furniture that seemed to match beams on the ceilings. It looked
nicer than I would have expected for such a wacky waitress.

She emerged a moment later and held up a single key. “Yours,” she said simply. She nodded back to the stairway and added.
“Up one floor.”

Lugging the suitcase once more, we walked up one more flight of stairs. Karina turned the key in the lock of a door just at
the top of the stairway and pushed it open. “Welcome home,” she said cheerfully.

I stopped in the doorway and stared. The room was tiny; it looked more like a converted walk-in closet than an actual apartment.
There was a twin bed pushed up against the far wall, and there appeared to be a complicated set of drawers underneath the
mattress. Gauzy white curtains fluttered at the edges of a big picture window above the bed. Against the right wall was a
small door that I guessed led to the bathroom. Against the left wall was a small archway.

“There’s a little kitchen in there,” Karina said, following my eyes. “You’ll find a little closet in the kitchen where you
can hang your clothes.”

“In the kitchen?” I asked tentatively.

“I didn’t say I was renting you a palace.”

“This is definitely not a palace,” I said under my breath. I swallowed hard and gazed around. It was even smaller than my
college dorm room.

“I know it is small,” Karina cut in, her voice softer around the edges now. “But please. Before you judge, look out the window.”

I took a deep breath, crossed the room, and knelt on the bed to push the curtain aside. The sight made me gasp.

The noon sun was beating down on the streets of Rome, and from my fourth-floor vista I could see the ancient roads stretching
out before me, with angular, brick-red rooftops, short chimneys, and arched windows the only signs of modernity. Straight
ahead, down a dusty brick road, behind a series of stout apartment buildings, the Pantheon loomed, immense, hulking, its sturdy
walls scuffed from nineteen hundred years of wear. From where I sat, I could see three of its great columns holding up the
entrance, the base of the dome, and its curved side disappearing behind a neighboring building.

“It’s beautiful,” I said softly.

Karina was smiling when I turned around. She shrugged and held her hands wide. “
Naturalmente
,” she said simply. “It is Rome.”

Karina had to return to work, and she invited me to come back with her, but I shook my head and told her I wanted to unpack
and settle in. The truth was, I just wanted to be alone. The enormity of my decision to stay in the tiny maid’s quarters belonging
to the crazy friend of a cheating jerk from New York was weighing on my mind.

Karina told me she’d come back after her shift. After she left, I spent thirty minutes unpacking my suitcase, hanging dresses,
skirts, and shirts in the little kitchen closet, folding pants and underwear into the drawers beneath the tiny bed.

When I was done, I gazed out the open window for a while, watching the people below pass by. I felt like I was some sort of
secret voyeur, high above the action and undetectable, as raven-haired young mothers in long skirts and floaty blouses strode
quickly down the street, clutching the hands of toddlers who were trying to dawdle and gaze into shopwindows. A pair of old
women dressed in black, their heads bent together conspiratorially, hobbled along the road, one of them using a cane, the
other one drawing her head back every few moments to emit a guttural laugh that sounded far away. Two elderly men, one in
a tweed golf cap, one with a huge pair of dark-framed glasses, set up a chessboard outside a small coffee shop just down the
way and began moving their pieces slowly around without saying a word to each other.

The apartment was situated on a side street, so although we were near a touristy area, the view from my window seemed purely
residential, purely Italian. For a moment, as I gazed out, I felt almost Italian, too, as if by virtue of overlooking these
private, everyday scenes, I belonged here.

I thought for a moment of my camera, which hadn’t seen the light of day since Becky’s wedding. The street scenes below almost
begged to be captured. But there would be time for that. For now, I needed to sleep.

I pulled the blinds and tugged the gauzy curtains closed over them. I changed quickly into a T-shirt and sweatpants, pulled
my hair into a ponytail, and crawled under the covers of my new twin bed.

But despite the fact that I was exhausted, I couldn’t seem to drift off, no matter how much I willed myself to. I tossed and
turned for hours. As the daylight disappeared from behind the blinds, I snapped my light on and tried to read a book for a
while, hoping that it would make me sleepy. No luck.

Finally, in desperation, I resorted to taking one of the prescription sleeping pills Kris had pressed into my hand before
I left. “In case you need them on the plane,” she’d said. I had protested that I’d never taken anything that strong before,
but she had insisted they would change my life.