Chapter 46 1965
To figure out how to live, you have to live. I’ve never driven a car, never swum in the ocean, never really been on a date besides walking to a hot dog stand. I think part of what Calliope was telling me the night we fought was to make sure I truly understood what love is.
I do understand. I could lie down right now like Arturo’s father and die of a broken heart. I honestly could.
But Theo is a liar. He doesn’t deserve my dead heart.
And I’m in Venice giving Aria Jones a life.
So, “Yes,” I tell Arturo in the morning. “I’ll go out with you.”
Arturo arrives at the restaurant at five o’clock—Monday is my only half day and I’m usually finished by now.
Through the curtain separating the kitchen from the dining room, I observe him.
He’s classically good-looking, a man who shines at midday when the sun is bright and you can see how clear blue his eyes are.
A man who’d be asleep at midnight, who’d miss the full moons and the stars.
But he’s a kind man too—he saved this damsel in distress.
I put down the dishrag, ready to say, Buongiorno, Arturo, when the radio changes to a new song and my hands wrap around the edge of the countertop.
It’s the symphony of lost youth and regrets that I once heard played in a Chateau Marmont penthouse.
One of the waiters sings along. A waitress hums. I try very hard to breathe.
At the end, the announcer says that Theo Winchester’s new number one hit in America is taking Italy, taking the world, by storm. He’s touring Europe next month.
He’s coming to Rome.
The waiter looks at the waitress. “Want to go with me?” he asks and she beams. “Sì.”
I look up at the ceiling. Theo’s song is number one. I’m so happy for him.
But I don’t think I can listen to that song again without dying from grief.
And waiting out front for me is another man. One I’m going on a date with because life is always about the next step forward, the one you have to take even when you have sorrow ensnared inside you like a bird, beating its wings against your chest.
I tug off my apron, smooth a hand over my striped knit dress from a new Italian fashion brand called Missoni—so new that they need customers and charge prices I can afford. I pull my trench coat on, tie a scarf over my hair.
When I step outside, Arturo says, “You look more Italian than the Italian women do.”
“I’m going to take that as a compliment.”
“You should,” he replies, and I’m not sure that I want him to look at me that way.
“I’m not…” I start.
“Not in search of amore,” he finishes. “Sometimes the things you aren’t looking for find you anyway.”
Like Theo found me.
I follow him into Castello, to the Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo. Beside the square stands the basilica, an aged but colossal beauty that reminds me of Miss Devine Rey.
My heart squeezes. I’ve hardly thought of my aunt since I fled. Is she better now? I should write to her, let her know that I’m okay. Maybe she might care about that, the same way I care about her.
The basilica adjoins a building with a white marble facade and shimmering trompe l’oeil decorations.
How people stare. One woman makes the sign of the cross, another wipes a tear from her eye.
Yet another goes right up close to the pictures and studies the skill, the artistry, the miracle of how many centuries those pictures have lasted for.
It isn’t always a bad thing to be looked at.
Now I wish it was Calliope standing next to me in the square so I could say, I’m sorry. I thought that because I’d read my way through a library, I knew everything. But there’s still so much to learn.
Which is why I’m sitting down on the terrace of an osteria with a view of the Rio dei Mendicanti, opposite Arturo.
The waiter passes me a blanket, which I tuck around my legs to keep out the chill. Arturo orders a bottle of Montepulciano. I’ve never had that before. When I sip, I discover it’s like drinking a soft leather jacket.
Like drinking Theo.
The waiter’s voice pushes through that aching thought. When Arturo finishes, I open my mouth to ask for the sarde in saor, the vinegary sardines I’ve developed a taste for, but the waiter is walking away and I realize Arturo has ordered for the two of us. Which is what the men in movies always do.
I remember Theo whispering Do you like that?—his heart asking my body how else it could love me.
A man who cares what a woman wants is no small thing, I want to tell Calliope. Perhaps she’s never known a man like that. Perhaps she hadn’t even known a man could be like that.
God, I want to hug her.
God, I want to kiss Theo.
“Are you all right?” Arturo asks as the polenta e schie and risotto are placed on the table.
“Yes,” I tell him. The lie falls off my tongue as easily as Theo’s lies about builders and renovations and weddings had fallen off his.
I push the risotto around the edges of my plate. Because I lied too. I never told Theo that my dream was of escaping, never told him what my heart really wanted.
Even with Theo I was hiding.
“You don’t like risotto,” Arturo asks once his plate is clean and mine still full.
“I ate too many leftovers at work,” I lie again.
“You like the food there?”
He wants me to say no, wants me to like Montepulciano and risotto, Italian cinema and Amari.
“I like hot dogs especially,” I tell him.
He laughs, disbelieving.
We stand up and Arturo offers me his arm. We walk along in silence, let Venice be the fluent conversation we cannot make flow between us.
Then he says, “Thank you for helping my sisters,” and he’s genuine in his gratitude.
He loves his sisters, is happy to let them stay in Venice and run a business rather than making them move with him to Rome where he can orchestrate their lives, even as he thinks it’s his role to order food for me.
Humans are so full of contradictions. It’s something you don’t see on the screen. The gangster is always a gangster. The gun moll always his slave. And the orphan is always ready to subsume herself for others because she’s perennially afraid of the moment when someone doesn’t want her anymore.
“Will you tell me about Hollywood, Aria?” he asks.
Instead I point to a building and ask, even though I already know it’s the Chiesa Maria di Santa Maria dei Miracoli, “Which church is that?”
He pauses for a second before he tells me, then we talk about church and religion, unfamiliar things to me, as we walk.
When we arrive back at the house, Marzia is singing along to the radio, to a song written in heartbreak, a language we each learn by accident.
Theo’s song.
I thank Arturo for dinner, go up to my room, sit down at the typewriter.
The story that pours out of me is about a woman who everyone believes has everything she wants, but who has nothing at all when the spotlight is off and the theaters are empty.
Because, as the buildings outside will attest, you cannot enjoy immortality.
You’re either six feet under or ash. Your legend is for others to weep over, or to smile at. Not you.
But everyone needs something for themselves. And this story is for Calliope.
As the weather warms, the tourists return. A guest takes up residence in the second room—an American woman about my age who’s on her way to Rome to rendezvous with a man. Her limbs are thin, her torso curved, and she’s tall enough to look Theo in the eye.
When will I stop comparing everyone to Theo?
“Is your friend American too?” I ask her over breakfast.
“No, he’s a real Parisian.” She crunches biscotti without dunking it first, leaving crumbs all over the table.
“He told me to come to Rome when I’d finished my obligations in Paris—I was a fit model at the house of Christian Dior for a season.
I don’t know why he went to Rome,” she finishes with a puzzled frown.
“A vacation? He said he’d be there through the spring. ”
“What part of America are you from?” Arturo asks.
“San Francisco.”
“San Francisco!” he cries and then he asks her about the Golden Gate Bridge and fog and diners and all the things he knows about from movies. She answers all his questions, doesn’t deflect with a question of her own about a church whose name she already knows.
I have more work to do before I can declare that I’m truly living.
As I’m leaving, Arturo slips into the foyer. It’s a week since our date. I’ve worked every night following and have only seen him at breakfast. He says with a wry smile, “Do you think anyone will be waiting for her in Rome?”
“Yes,” I tell him, because I don’t want him to be another man who thinks that a woman traipsing across Europe is following an already-broken dream. I want to believe there’s a story where girls who do wild and improbable things really do find what they’re looking for.
His face lights up. “There might be a movie in that! We follow the girl across Europe, bracing ourselves for her disappointment on the Spanish Steps. We track her as she walks up each stair, tensed for heartbreak at the top. And instead—”
“She finds hope,” I finish.
“Not necessarily in the form of a Parisian though,” Arturo says, studying my face.
“Not necessarily.”
Then he asks, “Aria, don’t you want to be found?”
“Only by me.” I slip out the door.
Arturo is gone when I return. So is the girl. “They went to Rome together,” Marzia says, incredulous. “My brother and that girl.”
I can’t help laughing. Yes, the world is incurably romantic.