When in Rome (7 page)

I have no idea why she’s calling me this, and I tell her so.

Sandra puffs out her cheeks. “Looking the way you do, how dare you act like that!”

“Dirty bitch?” I say again, while a family walking by stares at me like I’m dealing drugs to children.

“Whore!” Sandra yells. She hops into a cab, and my mother, burning with a desire to learn more about her daughter’s sleazy side, jumps into the cab with her without a good-bye. I stand paralyzed on the sidewalk, a halo of icy breath framing my face.

Finally, I go back to the apartment, unable to make sense of this. Luca is still in the kitchen, putting a frozen chicken in the oven. He looks pensive as he scrubs a potato under running water.

“Hey,” I say, entering.

“Hey,” he says. “Do you want fries with the chicken? Here, peel this potato.”

I take a knife and start to peel it, hands shaking with confusion and anxiety. “I hope my mother didn’t freak you out,” I say. “I’m sure she told you quite a few tall tales.”

“She thought we were together?”

“Well, you’ve gotta admit—”

“Right.”

“I get the feeling that Sandra hates me,” I say, watching him out of the corner of my eye.

He turns, looking both amused and guilty. “You’re not wrong.”

“What did you say?” Sandra’s choice words rattle around in my mind like marbles.

“If there’s one thing I can’t deal with, it’s crying women. Especially when it’s a crying woman I don’t even know coming into my apartment and accusing me of—”

“But you do know Sandra,” I say. “You slept with her three nights ago.”

“—God knows what kind of treachery,” he continues as if I hadn’t interrupted him. “I can’t stand it when women come home with me once and then act like we’re engaged! My intentions are clear. So I just explained to her that—”

“What did you explain to her?” I demand, the potato in my left hand and the knife in the other.

“That I’m a slave to your deprivation, that we’re actually together but you forced me to bring Sandra back here because you get off listening to me having sex with other women,” he says. “That I’m in love with you, but you’re kinky and treat me like a doormat. That I’m seeing a psychiatrist to help me figure out how to leave you. And that if I do leave you, she’ll be the first person I call.”

I can’t even believe this.

“You’re a fucking . . . asshole!” The potato tumbles to the ground with a thud, and my face turns fuchsia. “There are other ways you could have resolved that! Do you know what she called me in front of my mother?” The knife falls to the ground, too. He just might be next. “Luca! Do you realize what she’s going to say to my mother? They left in a taxi together!”

“I wouldn’t worry about your mother. She might even be relieved to hear it. She asked me if you still kiss like you did when you were sixteen. Apparently your boyfriend at the time publicly complained about your lack of tongue.”

“Holy crap.” I collapse onto a chair, for fear of melting into the floor, and repeat that about eight times.

“I told her that your tongue has since risen to the challenge.”

If I still had the knife in my hand, I swear I’d use his back for target practice.

“By the way, no more messing around like that.” He pretends to zip up his lips. “No more kissing, I mean.”

“Am I that disgusting?”

“You’re not disgusting at all, butterfly. The truth is, we shouldn’t play around with things that might lead to misunderstandings. I know, I started it, and I’ll bang my head against the fridge as punishment. But I don’t want that to ever happen again. Sex or anything remotely resembling it should be off the table for us. We’re friends, damn it, and if we let something like that get in the way, even if it’s just a joke, it might mess things up.”

“You’re right,” I whisper. I feel like a raw fish that’s been chopped up by a hysterical sushi chef.

We change the subject and set the table while the chicken cooks and the potatoes turn golden. Luca turns on some music on the radio, and then holes up in his room for half an hour to call a friend. Then we eat, but my stomach is sealed shut. I don’t let myself show any emotion until I can hear him typing on his keyboard.

At least I don’t repulse him, but I read him loud and clear. There will be no sex between us, no love. Just me and him, one here and one there—never us. But this is the first time I’ve ever truly been in love with someone. In a way, I’m still a virgin! Virginity is in your heart, not your hymen. It’s an emotion. I love him, and that scares me.

While I load the dishwasher, Luca pops out wearing his reading glasses. He gestures to the answering machine.

“I forgot to tell you that while you were down there with your mom, Michelangelo called.”

“Who?”

“What’s-his-name. The tongue guy that you puked on last night. The message is on the machine.”

He disappears, closing the door behind him, but the typing doesn’t start back up again. I wipe my hands, stunned, and press the flashing button. Tony’s voice is cheerful, much to my dismay. He swears he’s not offended; Giovanna told him I rarely drink and that I threw up because of all the alcohol. He clearly does not understand that his saliva was the catalyst for my regurgitation. He’s still determined to paint my portrait and repeats that I have a very interesting face. He leaves me his number, asking me to call him back, and I scribble it down on a piece of scrap paper. I sit on the couch and giggle. I don’t know if I’ll call him back. If he tries to kiss me again when I haven’t had any alcohol and I puke, he may realize something’s up.

I lie down with my head on the armrest. Light snowfall shimmers beyond the window, and I drift off to sleep. At some point I feel a wave of air on my warm cheek and am barely conscious of Luca draping a plaid blanket over my curled-up body.

SIX

The Knights Theater isn’t much more than a closet, and it’s sat unused for thirty years. The dust pinches my nose and throat. The curtain looks as scraggly as a mop, and the forty seats in the auditorium are covered in cobwebs. One thing’s for sure: this ain’t Broadway. And yet, I like this cubbyhole. I imagine what it will look like after a vigorous cleaning: the pistachio-green granite floor, the red chairs, the mahogany fixtures ready to shine in the dark like flames. I can already hear the footsteps of the audience flooding in, their voices hushed like in church, the whoosh of the curtain sliding open, and a shower of applause.

I’ve always loved this world. During the show, I’ll be backstage preparing the props for upcoming scenes, and my heart never fails to skip a beat from the emotion.

I have no hope, however, for improving the director. On Monday, I signed my contract and learned that my salary will allow me to feast on dry bread and spring water. Luckily, Rocky wasn’t there. It was just Franz, who shook my hand with the usual vigor and smiled at me with that good-guy smile. He gave me the script, which I devoured in one night. I was shocked at how, despite the substantial changes to the setting, the story had been left unchanged. Laura’s loneliness, Amanda’s intrusiveness, and Tom’s intolerance are all the same. The Barbie doll collection is different, though. I guess the dolls are much more suited to modern times than glass animals. I’m enough of a Barbie expert to know that the ones Rocky has requested are like the Gronchi Rosa stamp for stamp collectors. I hope he’s aware that he’ll need a much bigger budget to obtain them.

As I walk down a side aisle, I see him sitting in the front row, dressed all in white. He’s wearing a Korean-style gown that comes down to his calves, a scarf wrapped around his neck, and a headband. I swear. His hair shouldn’t be pushed back like that; it brutally highlights his cheekbones, his shark-fin nose, and his eyes, which are devoid of kindness but well equipped with kohl eyeliner. He’s shouting instructions to both the technicians and the actors, waving his arms around like a conductor, but not bothering to get up from his chair. He frowns and rolls his eyes when he sees me.

“Here she is,” he murmurs. “Late. Zero professionalism.”

I hold back a retort. I had prepared a little speech about the impossibility of finding the entire Barbie collection with a budget of only five hundred euro, but I’m afraid that once I start, I won’t be able to hold back. Better to postpone it. This is only the second time we’ve met, and Franz isn’t around this time to protect me.

Rocky condemns me with a look, not even thinking to introduce me to the rest of the crew. He moves on to the man sitting next to him, who nods emphatically as Rocky waves his script.

I sit down, feeling uncomfortable. I don’t know anyone here apart from the bird man in the scarf. I’d feel weird getting up onstage and introducing myself, like a new student in an elementary school class. While I’m sitting there wondering what to do, a set builder in overalls emerges from one of the wings. He waves an arm and calls my name. It takes me a few seconds to realize that it’s Franz! In those clothes, with his hair all mussed up, he looks completely different—but definitely not in a bad way. Next to him is a young girl who’s shorter than I am but very full-bodied. Her red hair is plaited in two French braids, and her nose is sprinkled with freckles. She’s very pretty, but why is there a teenager in this theater?

“Carlotta, welcome!” says Franz, leaning down from the stage to shake my hand. His fingers are a little dirty, and there’s a splash of black paint on his nose. “Forgive me for my outfit, but with such a small production, you have to get down and dirty and do whatever needs to be done. This is Iriza, the set design architect. Iriza, this is Carlotta, who will be a big help.”

“I know what you’re gonna say,” says the girl with a smile. “Everyone reacts the same way. I’m a baby face! But I’m thirty-two.”

I stare at her in amazement. This girl with pigtail braids is thirty-two years old? But she looks sixteen! And where are her wrinkles, the ones that begin to creep up around your eyes just as you near thirty? She laughs, but her skin stays as smooth as porcelain. She doesn’t look like she gets Botox, either. Maybe I got her wrinkles instead.

One thing, however, is immediately clear. Iriza has a crush on Franz. She looks at him the way I looked at Luke Perry when I was thirteen years old. He doesn’t seem to notice, though. He’s friendly and basically indifferent. Since I have some experience in unrequited feelings, I immediately recognize the signal she’s broadcasting:
We’re just friends, but I’m not letting you touch him with a ten-foot pole.
I immediately like Iriza a whole lot more. We share a disease—we both want someone who won’t even give us a second glance.

Rocky interrupts our pleasantries. “This isn’t a holiday party,” he shouts. “You’re here to work.”

Franz gets back to work, and Iriza invites me to follow her onstage. She enthusiastically explains her stage design ideas to me. The few pieces of furniture will be made of plexiglass, and the details of the house will be a painted on the background. The actors will wear pale, almost phosphorescent, makeup to suggest an air of fragility. At the end of the show, when the curtain closes, the set will break from an earthquake special effect to express the rift that is created in the characters’ lives before and after the events in the play. After all, no matter how well maintained or protected it may be, a world of glass is destined to shatter.

While we’re talking—quietly, so that Rocky doesn’t come yell at us again—a new voice sneaks up behind me and makes me jump in fright.

“Hey there.” A mammoth stands an inch away from my left ear. “Our Franz has a nice ass, huh?” She says this so loud that audiences as far away as the La Scala in Milan probably heard her. But no one seems bothered: not the arrogant director, and not even Franz with the aforementioned nice ass.

Urged by her comment, my gaze shifts lightning fast over to Franz. Mind you, the woman’s not wrong. Iriza whispers to me that her name is Rose, but she’s nowhere near as graceful as her floral name might suggest.

“You know what they say about a guy with a big nose? He’s also big down south,” she declares openly, without a hint of embarrassment and (amazingly) without Rocky telling her to go to hell. “The sound engineer must be small—his nose is the size of a tiny potato.”

I want to sink into the ground, but instead I turn so I can see her better—and almost scream. All she’s missing is an eye on her forehead, and she’d be the spitting image of two-hundred-year-old Polyphemus (although I don’t believe Polyphemus ever made foul comments about the length of Ulysses’s nose). Rose, meanwhile, continues to giggle as she spouts more coarse jokes—with no response from Rocky.

Iriza seems to read my mind. “She’s the director’s grandmother,” she says. “She’s the only human being on this planet that Rocky shows even the slightest bit of affection to. She doesn’t bother any of us anymore. Be careful, though. She’s going to ask you your favorite sexual position, and you’d better have an answer—she won’t leave you alone until you do.”

I fear that Rose will be disappointed in me. Not only has it been centuries since I’ve engaged in the art of lovemaking, but in my few experiences, I never strayed from your basic choreography. The classic guy-on-top, girl-on-bottom, a few minutes of frenetic bustle, thank you, I’ll call you, you’ll call me, and life goes on.

Suddenly, Rocky seems to remember that we’re actually in the theater, and he calls the actors up on the stage. Iriza and I move aside toward Franz, who is caulking a damaged floorboard, and continue to whisper. The actors are perfectly cast according to Rocky’s vision. They all look like they’ve been fasting for a month, and they’re pale as eggshells, too. The woman who’s playing Amanda looks like a thinner Sigourney Weaver. Laura is a tall blond girl with Slavic cheekbones, who sort of looks like Cate Blanchett. The guy who plays Jim, the family’s guest whom Laura is secretly in love with, fits the part. But the guy who plays Tom seems out of place. According to the new script, Laura’s brother is an aspiring heavy metal musician forced to work in a bank and is oppressed by an omnipresent mother. But he’s got eyes as innocent as Bashful from
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
. I can’t see him dreaming about smashing guitars and humping microphone stands.

While the actors run their lines, pausing every so often to move left or right according to Rocky’s instructions, I wander backstage. The world back here is my secret garden—everything still has yet to be placed, everything is still possible, radiating with the charm of undiscovered treasures and unsolved mysteries. Walking around back here, I feel like I’m rummaging through an attic. For a moment, I imagine the Phantom of the Opera emerging from a tunnel and kidnapping me. I’m so focused on my fantasies of hidden passages behind the walls that I don’t notice the irregularity in the flooring. At one wrong step, a wooden board gives way underneath my weight. It cracks like a breaking walnut. I find myself facedown on the ground with my legs trapped in a hole, my rear in the air, and my skirt raised completely up over my waist.

For a moment, my mind goes blank. Then I start to process the situation, and panic strikes. There’s no one back here. No one saw me fall, and it’s no use trying to pull my skirt down because the back is completely torn and hooked on a ledge like a flag. I take a deep breath, and two dust balls fly up my nose. Ann Darrow must have felt more or less like this when King Kong captured her. So what now? Will everyone else come looking for me? What if they don’t? What if they think I left? Why do I keep finding myself in these ridiculous situations? Why doesn’t anything normal ever happen to me?

I hear actors’ voices in the distance and the occasional hammer. I just have to ask for help. Mortified, I begin to call out. At first, my voice is so quiet that I think only the cockroaches could hear me, so I call out louder. Sitting here waiting to be ridiculed by the public, I feel like I’m caught in a slapstick comedy show. A sharp pain pierces my legs; by some miracle my nose doesn’t seem to be broken. But the thought that haunts me most as I hear people respond to my cries is that today I decided to wear a pair of panties with bleach stains.

Everyone trickles in, both curious and alarmed. As soon as they realize what happened, the giggles intensify. Franz and Iriza rush to help me, not laughing at all. Rocky doesn’t laugh either, but not out of compassion. His stare is murderous. I’ve interrupted his rehearsal, and he wants to reduce me to sawdust for it. I get up with great effort, suppressing a string of curse words that would make a sailor blush. My tights are snagged, my skirt shredded, my knee skinned. Flushed with embarrassment and trembling like a leaf, I sneeze half a dozen times before I can breathe regularly again.

“How are you doing? You all right?” Franz asks with touching solidarity.

Grandmother Rose approaches. “Congratulations. You’ve got a nice ass, too.”

Hooray, now everyone will remember me as a great bumbling fool. It won’t even matter if I do my job well. I’m permanently marked. It’ll go like this:

Carlotta? Who is that? I don’t think I know her.

Oh, she’s done incredible work for some of the best directors in Europe. She graduated with honors from the Academy of Fine Arts and wrote her thesis on twentieth-century theater scenes. I think Woody Allen wanted her for his film that was set in Rome. You don’t remember her?

No, I swear I don’t.

She’s the one who fell into the hole and got stuck with her rear hanging out on her first day of work.

Oh, yeah, her! I know her!

While I limp away, Franz, who has since donned a coat, takes me by the arm. He insists on taking me to the emergency room, but I refuse.

“There’s no need, really. It’s only my dignity that’s hurt, and I don’t think there’s any medicine for that.”

“Let me at least take you home. Your skirt is completely torn, and you shouldn’t be walking around like that.”

“You have no idea. My mood is completely shot,” I say, accepting his offer of mercy.

In the car, I’m silent for a long time, wallowing. Not because I feel victimized, but because I’m criticizing myself. After a while, Franz turns to me and smiles indulgently.

“Nothing serious happened, come on. Don’t make that face.”

“Nothing serious, sure. I could have been seriously injured, and instead I’m well enough to be able to think about how stupid I am.”

“How is it your fault if that theater is littered with traps?”

“Has anyone else ever fallen through the floor?”

“Well, no, actually.”

“Because that trap was waiting for me. I shouldn’t have gone back there,” I say. “I knew I’d end up like this. My life could have been written by Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker. I’ve seen it all. Once I was even attacked by pigeons in Piazza San Marco—like in that Hitchcock movie! When I was younger, I was the one who always fell down the stairs at school, slipped love letters into the wrong guy’s pocket, or got stung by bees if I picked a flower and put it in my hair. And don’t even get me started on my adult life. Would you believe me if I told you that I even mixed up the recipients of two note cards? I sent one expressing condolences to a friend that was getting married and my warmest congratulations to another one who just became a widow! Of course something like this would happen to me. Perhaps in a past life I tortured angels, and now karma is retaliating. I should add these wonderful experiences to my resume. Maybe some director who’s even nicer than Rocky would appreciate them.”

“At least with you, we’ll never be bored,” Franz offers.

“A little monotony is good for your health and your reputation.”

“Is that what your boyfriend says?”

I shrug, my way of admitting that I don’t have a boyfriend.

“I thought I heard that you lived with a guy, but maybe I was wrong.”

I stare at him. He thought he heard
what
? Do people just go around spreading gossip about me all over Rome? I’m vaguely irritated. Franz, seeming to sense my bitterness, quickly explains.