Summer in Tuscany (12 page)

So here we were in Florence. But did we see the Duomo? A brief glimpse. Did we stop to look at the Uffizi? A passing glance. The Piazzale Michelangelo with its statue of David and a view of all Florence? Not even close. No. We shopped. My least favorite occupation and, I had thought until now, Nonna’s. Until she had come back to Italy, that is, and since then I hadn’t been able to stop her.

We hit the Via de’ Tornabuoni at the speed of light, flashing in and out of boutiques so fast I wilted like a flower fading for lack of water. I missed the stillness, the peace, the silence I had become so used to in Bella Piacere, as I sat on little gilt chairs in fancy shops while Livvie and Nonna popped in and out of dressing rooms to get my not very expert opinion on their latest choices.

I was thinking about the villa: about the octagonal room with the ancient parrot; about the faded elegance and the way the apple-green silk walls looked with the sunlight streaming in. The memories sent a shiver of recognition down my spine, a feeling that I had lived there before, though in fact the nearest any ancestor of mine might have gotten to the villa was as a serving maid. Still, the villa was there, at the back of my mind, sleeping and waking, and I realized I didn’t only want to get it back for Nonna. I selfishly wanted it for myself.

I thought about how I would corner Ben Raphael tomorrow night at Maggie’s party, how I would get him alone out on the terrace, away from the crowd, and then I would…I would
what
? Tell him what I thought of him? That I thought he was a liar and that Donati was a thief, or they were in cahoots and were
both
liars and thieves?

Even I knew that approach was going to get me nowhere. I would have to soften things up a little, maybe bat my eyelashes, get close enough so he caught a drift of my perfume…What perfume? I didn’t possess perfume. Still, that was something I could rectify as soon as we were out of this darned dress shop. Maybe I should gaze into Ben’s eyes and appeal to his better nature? If he had one, that is.

Then I remembered him at the Hassler with his little daughter, how tender he had been to her, how caring. Hey, maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all. Maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt.

Thoroughly confused, I turned my attention to Livvie, who was twirling in front of me. The aqua-blue dress clung to her like a mermaid’s scales, revealing every nubile curve and, even more provocative, every shadow. I had never seen Livvie look like this before, and I suddenly realized she was becoming a woman.
But not yet,
my heart cried,
not yet, please. Stay a little girl just a bit longer
…

Nonna came out to take a look. She pursed her lips, clicked her tongue disapprovingly, and shook her head. “Take it off,” she commanded.

Livvie groaned. “But, Nonna—!”

“Off, I said.”

Livvie twirled imperiously in front of the mirror. “It’s time you realized I’m a woman,” she said. “I have breasts.” She ran her hands proudly over the insignificant twin buds. “I have periods.”

“And in that dress you will
not
have your virginity. Take it off,” Nonna said.

“Oh, N-o-n-n-a!” Livvie’s childish blush almost turned her hair red. She was dying with embarrassment, and I thanked God. She was still a little girl after all.

They browsed the racks some more, with a sweet salesgirl hovering behind making suggestions and finding sizes. I watched Nonna go back into the dressing room with half a dozen more dresses and knew we were here for the long haul. So what was
I
going to wear? Reluctantly I got up and scanned the racks myself. I wished I could wear my doctor’s white coat.

“The
signora
will be a size
trentaquattro, trentasei,
” the patient salesgirl said, pulling a couple of dresses out to show me. I shook my head. I didn’t want to be shown what to wear; if I had to do it, then I would choose something myself, and I would be quick about it. I pulled a beige silk off the rack and held it up against me. It had a V neck, a tight waist, and a puffy skirt. It would do; they said beige was good with everything.

“M-o-m, you can’t wear
that
.” Livvie grabbed it from me.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s, like,
beige,
that’s why. And just look at that skirt—you’ll look like a bowling ball. Mom, you’re in Italy! Why not choose something more colorful? Like, how many women in beige will there be at this party? Not many, you can bet.”

Oh God, I thought, now my grown-up daughter is giving me instructions on what to wear. I wished I had never brought her here.

“I don’t feel very colorful.” I grabbed a soft white chiffon off the rack. It had a high round neck and fell in a straight line just to the knee. “This will do,” I said firmly and, ignoring Livvie’s protests that I should try it on, and also ignoring the lofty price tag, I told the salesgirl to wrap it up.

“Madame will need sandals,” she said to me, and before I knew it I was tottering around in strappy little gold mules with the kind of heels I hadn’t worn since I fell in love with Cash. I doubted I could walk more than ten paces in them, but I figured all I really had to do was get from the car into the house and I would be okay.

I approved Livvie’s final choice of body-clinging red Lycra—I thought it looked a bit tarty, but I was too worn out to protest anymore—and also Nonna’s banana-yellow silk suit with a nipped waist and portrait neckline dotted with crystals, though I did ask her where she thought she was going to wear it back in Long Island. She gave me a withering glance and didn’t even bother to reply.

I caught the gleam in her eye, though, and I wondered who it was, besides Maggie Marcessi, she wanted to impress. I remembered the name Rocco Cesani and I wondered,
Could she?
But no, of course not. I pushed the thought that my mother might be falling for an old school friend to the back of my mind. I didn’t want to know. Life was complicated enough already.

I thought of Ben Raphael and remembered I needed perfume. I checked my guidebook to find the whereabouts of the famous herbalist and perfume shop that I knew would have exactly what I wanted. It was a scent I had discovered years ago. It had been worn by a patient, an Italian visitor who had come to the ER with a sprained ankle after slipping on an icy winter sidewalk. I’d caught a whiff of it as she bent close to me, and I thought she smelled like the essence of spring. She had told me it was Violetta di Parma and that it was sold mostly in the town of Parma or in special pharmacies, like the one in Florence. I had never owned it, but I remembered the soft, almost powdery violet smell, and also its name.

The Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella was in part of an old monastery of the same name, tucked away on a street called the Via della Scala. From the glitz of the Via de’ Tornabuoni, we stepped back in time into an old-world
farmacia
. Colored potions glistened in bulbous glass bottles on mirrored shelves, and antique wood cabinets were filled with pottery jars. There were ancient frescoes and painted tiles and the scent of herbs and perfumes. Here you could buy remedies to calm your nerves or restore your vitality; you could buy lotions and hand-milled soaps to smooth your skin and creams to soften your face and scents to lend you a certain allure; and all made from ancient recipes written by hand by the Dominican friars of old and preserved until today.

I found the Violetta di Parma and sprayed a little into the air from the tester. It smelled the way I imagined violets picked on a misty spring morning would, and I was in love with it all over again.

We bought a birthday gift for Maggie: a huge basket of soaps and balms and lotions and elixirs wrapped in white tulle and tied on top with a gigantic satin bow. Somehow I thought it looked like Maggie.

Then, laden with our packages, we staggered out of the store, which by now was closing around us for lunch, the way every place did in Italy. We grabbed a taxi and were driven to a small, bustling trattoria, Garga, on the Via del Moro, a narrow little side street jammed with Vespas and minicars, all squashed into impossibly small parking spaces.

Inside it was even more jammed. Customers crowded the rustic entry, stood three deep at the bar, and filled the tables. Cigarette smoke hung in blue curls under the low-beamed yellow ceiling, the scent of wine hung heavy, and conversation echoed from the art-filled walls. There was an aroma of bean soup and the crackle of rosemary-roasted pork and a heady wave of cheerful busyness as we were shunted through the crowd to a tiny table in a side room, jammed so close to the tables next to it I felt like we were joined at the hip.

A bottle of red was plonked on the paper cloth, specials were recounted, our order taken. Bread was brought in a little basket, glasses slammed in front of us, the wine poured, with San Pellegrino
“per la signorina.”

I slumped back in my little wooden chair, glad just to be off my feet, glad to have the shopping behind us, and still totally pissed off that Donati had not shown. But I thrust my worries temporarily away and enjoyed my lunch.

I started with a vast plate of prosciutto with figs so ripe they were at bursting point and so sweet they were almost dessert. Then we all had the rosemary-roasted pork with crispy crackling that melted in the mouth, and after, hot strong espresso to wash it all down.

We collected our packages and pushed our way back through the still-strong crowd into the street, where Nonna had only to raise an imperious arm for a taxi to squeal to a halt in front of us. Then it was back to the parking lot and back to the torture of threading my way through the Florentine traffic, squeezed into narrow streets that had surely been meant for sedan chairs, out of the city and onto the
autostrada
.

Back to Bella Piacere, after having spent an entire day in one of God’s most beautiful cities without seeing a single one of its magnificent sights.

Ben

Ben climbed the round hill in back of the villa carrying a sketchbook and a small box of watercolors. Muffie darted along in front of him, leaping over tufts of grass and hollering when she saw a rabbit. With her shiny, silvery blond hair in a ponytail, long-legged in pink-and-white check shorts, a suntan, and sneakers, she looked like an all-American kid. She was an elf, a sprite, bursting with joy and the freedom of the moment. Ben didn’t even have to think about how much he loved her; it was just a part of him. Without Muffie, life would be meaningless.

“Dad,” she yelled from atop the hill, “you can see the
whole entire world
from up here.” She jumped up and down, waving both arms over her head, a bundle of uncontained energy, making him laugh.

He ran the rest of the way and stood, breathing harder, next to her. “So you can,” he said. “You can see
the whole entire world
.”

Muffie giggled as she gave him a nudge. “Oh, Daddy. You know what I mean.”

“Okay, so I know. Now what I want you to do is paint it.”

“Paint it?
Me?
”

“You,” he said firmly. “Here’s the sketch pad, the watercolors, the brush. Just paint what you see.”

She looked doubtfully at him and then at the expansive view. “But I don’t know how.”

“You don’t know how? Does that mean you can’t see?”

“Of course I can see. I just can’t paint.”

“Muffie, you
can
paint. It doesn’t have to be perfect, you just have to enjoy what you’re doing.”

They lay side by side on their stomachs, and Ben asked her to tell him what she saw. “A cypress tree,” she said, pointing. “There, right in the middle.”

“So the cypress tree will go in the middle of your painting. Go on, tell me more.”

“A church, a village, a farm, olive groves, vineyards on the sides of the hills…”

“There you go,” he said, turning over onto his back. “Now, get started.”

He lay with his arms behind his head, staring idly at the infinite blueness of the sky. It was a blue you never saw in urban areas, he decided. It was as though someone had swept it clean with a broom, making the light brighter, clearer, more intense. The colors held more color, the shadows were deeper, the glare of the sun brighter. And in winter, when the skies grayed and the
tramontana
blew from the Alps and snow fluttered down, there was still a quality of light that intensified things, objects, feelings.

It seemed to him that, like the quality of the light, the quality of life was also different here in Tuscany. It was lived more intensely, more day to day, more of the moment even. Just buying a loaf of bread in the market or choosing a wine or admiring a pretty woman was done with so much more gusto. Every aspect was to be carefully considered, to be tasted, to be admired; every compliment to be chosen with care and thought.

There was no doubt about it, he lived in the moment in Tuscany in a way he never could back in New York. Here he could lie on his back on a grassy hill, staring at the sky and just thinking about his life instead of plunging head-on into it every waking minute of every day and, too often, even in his sleep. Or lack of it.

When he had bought his four-thousand-square-foot apartment in SoHo, he’d thought, This is it; this is the symbol of my success; what more do I need? But it wasn’t long before he had discovered that he needed more. A lot more. He filled his days doing what every businessman did: meetings, lunches, negotiations, deals. And he filled his evenings, and sometimes his nights, with a series of pretty women, some of whom made him laugh, some of whom he desired, some of whom he couldn’t stand after the first five minutes.

There has to be a different life, he’d told himself. There has to be something more than just this. And that’s when he had taken off for Europe, and eventually had ended up in Bella Piacere. It had seemed to him, when he finally closed the deal on the villa, that it was the best deal he had ever made in his life. And now Gemma Jericho was jeopardizing that deal.

Of course, he had gone immediately to the old priest, Don Vincenzo, who had instigated the whole affair by searching out the Jerichos. Don Vincenzo claimed to have seen the will leaving the property to the Jerichos. Then he’d backtracked and said it would be best if Ben sorted out the whole matter with
signor
Donati, from whom he had “bought” the villa.

Bought and paid for,
Ben had reminded him, and Don Vincenzo had spread his arms and lifted his shoulders in that expressive little shrug that Ben knew only too well meant that he had been duped.

His thoughts returned to Gemma, that crusty, quirky, offbeat, insecure woman who was devoted to her young daughter just the way he was to his, and who he could tell was also in a love/combat relationship with her Italian mother, who no doubt wanted to see her married. Gemma seemed dedicated to her profession, though he had a hard time imagining her as a trauma surgeon in New York’s foremost emergency medical center. She was just too…ditsy. Too clumsy. Too…restrained. He thought she might have been better off as a librarian. In fact, she looked like a small-town version of a librarian, as seen in the movies.

It was her mouth that got to him, though. He liked how it turned up at the corners in that smiley way, he liked her cushiony underlip and the way she caught it in her small white teeth when she was angry, or thinking bad thoughts. Or maybe it was her eyes that got to him, the way she narrowed them when she looked at him, assessing him with that deep blue glare. Or maybe…

“Daddy.”

He sat up and looked at his daughter and the painting she was showing him. He shook his head to clear away the thoughts of Gemma.

“Terrific, baby,” he said. “That cypress is dead center, and the color of the olive trees is exactly right. Now you understand, it’s not always what you see that makes the difference. It’s how you see it.”

And wasn’t that the way of the world, he added to himself.