Chapter 7
I am notsure if it’s being on stage in front of the entire student body or if there’s something else going on, but the skin on the back of my neck prickles like someone is staring at me. I tune out the speaker for a few minutes, casting my gaze through the students in the seats, but no one really meets my eye. They’re too busy paying attention, as they should be.
I direct my gaze back to Director Greco, but the feeling intensifies. When I glance back out at the audience, a flash of movement catches my eye.
Someone is slouching, sitting perfectly behind another student, so I can’t see them, but I can see their bag on the seat next to them.
I shift to the left, and I glimpse long, loose hair before it shifts out of my sight.
Gray hair.
My heart unnecessarily speeds up, as if there aren’t millions of people in Italy with gray hair, people who aren’t Americans who are probably back home and back to their regular jobs.
People who are avoiding me.
I quickly lean over to my far right and bump into Vincente.
“What are you doing?” he hisses at me with an elbow nudge.
“Nothing, sorry,” I mutter.
I saw a face. Her face.
That can’t be right.
Several excruciating minutes later and multiple admonishments from Vincente, I still haven’t seen her face again. We’ve been playing a game of hide-and-seek, and I’m pretty sure the person she’s hiding behind is getting concerned by the way I’m staring at them. They have slunk down in their seat. At first, she slunk down, too, but now she’s holding a spiral notebook up in front of her face as if she’s reading.
I grind my teeth together.
I thought—no, assumed—that she was visiting on holiday. When I picked her up at the bar, I was thinking I’d be a one-night-stand, some fond memory she’d have of her trip to Rome, a story she could brag about to her girlfriends later. “Remember that Italian man I slept with in Rome?” she’d say.
Of course, after she ran out, the story changed.
“Remember that Italian man who took me to his place and did something so unspeakable I had to run out in panic?”
And after today it’s, “Remember that Italian man who tried to make me come, and now I’m going to see him around campus all the time?”
Oh god. It’s my turn to sink down in my chair. What have I done?
“…have a fantastic first week getting to know the university and your fellow students. Thank you for your attention, and I’ll be seeing you this afternoon,” Director Greco finishes.
I dart to my feet, but I’m too slow. Emma—if that is Emma—is ducking down and hiding behind her colleagues as they shuffle out the door toward the break-out rooms where they will meet to begin their tours.
I’m not leading a tour, but Vincente is. Assigned to an activity room, I meet with students, shake hands, explain the facilities, and welcome them to the university.
All morning, I keep an eye out for Emma, but I don’t see her. You would think that as tall as she is, as remarkable as her gray hair is, I’d easily find her, but in a crowd of a hundred students filtering in and out, it’s hard to spot her.
Especially if she’s avoiding me.
Vincente and I grab a quick lunch, then have a faculty meeting, followed by a few one-on-one meetings with students I’ll be advising.
When I catch a break, there’s a knock on the cracked open door, and Director Greco steps in.
I stand. It’s been a few weeks since he joined, just in time for the start of the full-time program, and we’ve seen a lot of each other, but not one-on-one yet.
We shake hands and I offer him the seat across the desk and settle back into my own once he sits.
The new director doesn’t waste time. “I was impressed to see your name on the list of faculty here,” he says, folding his hands in his lap. “I was a big admirer of your father’s.”
“Thank you,” I say because people don’t like it when I say anything else. They don’t want to know that, in addition to being one of the richest men in Italy, my father was a tough man. Even beyond his aspersions for my career: my father was an adulterer.
“His acquisition of MDK Shipping in the seventies really gave Italy a foothold in the US, and his early adoption of sports team sponsorships was brilliant foresight.”
“Yes, it was.” Sure, that’s when my father was brilliant. Not when I suggested investing in cars in the eighties or mobile technologies in the nineties.
Do I sound bitter? I shouldn’t be. I made those investments myself and they did very well.
“It makes sense that his son would be a leadership expert. You learned it at home.” He smiles and I hold in a sigh. “Do you still do any work for Offredi?”
“I never did any work there,” I correct. “And as you know, it’s owned by a private equity firm now, and I have never had anything to do with them.”
“I see.” He nods, more serious now. “And how was your first day of the FTMBA program?”
Fine, fine. The woman I tasted last weekend and spent the entire week fantasizing about is in the program. How does that sound, director?
I come up with some bland response, and after a few more minutes of small talk, Director Greco leaves me alone to get back to my work, but the conversation about my father lingers. I’ve been a professor here for long enough that most people don’t bring it up, despite the business being a household name—as much as an importation company can be, anyway. The only people who really know about my father’s more sordid behavior are my ex-wives and Vincente.
And my father’s mistress and her daughter.
When I was five, I came home to my mother drunk and crying in my father’s home office. My father had had an affair with his very young secretary, who approached my mother when she got pregnant.
Years later, I was able to piece together more and more of that time in my life. My father gave his mistress money to disappear. He never spoke one word about my half-sister or the affair, and my mother’s mental health deteriorated. By the time I found out about my sister, my father and I were fighting more and more, and I didn’t have the resources to do anything about it.
It was only after my father died and inexplicably left me all his money—but not the business—that I had the means to find her. I hired a private investigator. We stayed in touch long enough for me to give her half the inheritance, and then she said she wanted nothing to do with me. She was happily married with several children and wasn’t thrilled to have a reminder of her absent father.
She wasn’t thrilled to inherit either, but all that money doesn’t make up for a family and a stable childhood.
These thoughts linger until, finally, it’s the end of the day, and I can lock up my office and head home. First days of the program are hard. In a work environment, like in the last startup that hired me as CFO, everyone else knows everyone else, and it’s you who’s new. There’s a relative sense of order, of everyday activities that, if you are lucky, you don’t disrupt too much.
Not so here. There’s a different excitement. Students who don’t know each other creating energy in a new way.
It’s exhausting.
I exit the building and turn toward home. It’s mid-afternoon, as most days end around four o’clock for us, and while the students finished about half an hour ago some of them still linger in a nearby caffè, chattering in a mix of English and Asian languages.
An espresso is tempting, but before I can stop for one, I catch a flash of gray and soft blue across the street.
There, on the opposite sidewalk, is Emma.
Or at least, someone who I’m pretty confident is Emma.
Before I even know what I’m doing, I shout her name. “Emma!”
She turns, but a bus passes, one of the bright red city buses that slams on its brakes and honks at another car, completely blocking my view of her. I walk left, trying to see around it, but by the time I make it, she’s made a turn and is walking away from me.
I impatiently wait at the intersection, throwing up my hand and an expletive when I almost get run over by a Fiat. She’s too far to shout again, and I don’t even know what I’m going to say when I catch up to her, but it feels imperative that I do. She’s walking toward my apartment anyway, I reason.
When I get close enough to shout again, I do, but this time, she doesn’t turn around. We’re two blocks from my apartment now, and I’m out of breath. Sure, I get plenty of exercise playing football, but usually, I’m not laden down with a bag and a sports coat.
God, I hope I don’t have a heart attack chasing after a woman. How ironic.
“Professor!” someone else calls.
It’s Eva walking her dog, the brown, chubby French bulldog, toward me. Her smile is wide, and she catches my arm. “How is the new term? Did you have a good start?”
Emma turns the corner up ahead. Assuming she’s going home, she’ll walk right past my apartment to get to and from university every day.
“Excuse me,” I say to Eva, and dart around her.
I ignore the call of my name behind me, and as I turn the corner, I see Emma darting into my apartment building. What?
I run and catch the first vestibule door right before it closes and scramble with my card to catch the second one. “Emma!”
She spins around with a flash of bright red and terror on her face. In the time it takes to process the can of spray—bright red with a black silhouette of a large angry dog barking on it—Emma’s no longer scared but surprised.
“Santo? I mean—Professor.”
I hold my hands up, palms facing her.
“Oh, my god. I thought you were someone else.”
“Who did you think it would be?” She was scared…of who?
“There was this guy this morning. I thought…” She blinks and shakes her head, her hand trembling.
I lean in, anger coursing through me. My voice comes out rough. “Is someone bo?—”
The door behind me slams open, and a dog barks aggressively. Reflexively, Emma’s eyes widen and her hands tighten. Almost in slow motion, while I’m staring right at it, the mist of pepper spray hits my face.