Chapter 66
THINGS WERE GOOD between Paul and me for the next few weeks, and before we knew it, we’d arrived at move-in day.
The plan was to meet Giovanni at the house at eight o’clock, but we were up much earlier, packing the last of our belongings in suitcases and tidying the hotel room.
At half past seven, Paul pulled the Chevelle around to the front of the hotel, and while he loaded the car, I went to the front desk to check out.
“I trust you have had a pleasant stay,” said Michele, and I, of course, said that we had.
I wasn’t even being insincere. I mean, yes, we’d grown sick of living out of suitcases, but that was no fault of the Excelsior’s.
Michele and the rest of the staff had gone out of their way to make us feel welcome.
Giovanni was waiting for us, as promised, when we pulled up in front of the house.
I did my best to introduce him to Paul, but since I was the only non-Italian speaker among us, I soon stepped back and let them do their thing.
Giovanni showed Paul where to turn the hot water on and off and how to unlock the garden shed.
Paul was getting most of it but not everything, because in the bathroom, they played a very elaborate game of charades—something about needing to open the window for ventilation when we bathed.
For my part, I said Grazie and Mi piace la casa so many times that I started to sound like a broken record, and finally, Giovanni handed us the keys and said, “Casa mia è casa tua.”
The woman at the Personal Property Office had told us not to expect the movers until at least ten o’clock, so we spent the first couple of hours unloading the car and rearranging the furniture Giovanni had left for us.
After I’d unpacked the cooler, Paul suggested a quickie, just to christen the place, but I told him I wasn’t even a little bit tempted, so he offered to go get food for the movers and returned a half hour later with some bottles of Evian and a big bag of tomato and feta focaccia.
The movers didn’t arrive until close to eleven, but it hardly mattered because it took them all of about eleven minutes to unload the truck. “This is really both shipments?” I asked Paul when we surveyed what few boxes had been deposited in each room.
“It’s everything.”
“I guess it just felt like it was more stuff when it was in my parents’ den.”
While Paul tipped the movers, plied them with food and drink, and helped them get the truck turned around, I ripped the packing tape off the first box—labeled Kitchen—and got to work putting away what I could.
We worked through the afternoon, taking occasional breaks to eat leftover focaccia and marvel at all the items we’d forgotten we owned.
I had brought a Wonder Body Exerciser, which Paul found hilarious because he’d never seen me exercise, and I discovered that Paul owned not one but two down ski parkas.
“These should do you a lot of good on a Mediterranean island,” I said as I put them aside.
“We need to buy a shelf or something for the bathroom,” I yelled to Paul at one point, but he didn’t answer. Then I heard the opening chords of “Carry On” and wandered down the hallway to find Paul standing in the middle of the living room, reading the Déjà Vu liner notes.
“You want to turn it down a little?”
He didn’t listen to me; instead, he took my hand and danced me around the room.
“It looks nice,” I yelled into his ear, and he knew I was talking about the turntable stand, which we’d bought at the NEX the week before.
Paul had spent the better part of an hour assembling it, then running the wires from his record player to two speakers big enough to do double duty as end tables.
The system was plugged into one of two transformers we’d found in the classifieds, at the back of the NSO Notes, and if I didn’t want to blow-dry my hair in the kitchen each morning, we’d need to buy at least a couple more.
Paul began to sing along, and there was nothing I could do to shut him up. “Will you bring me happiness? Will you bring me sorrow?”
“I might bring you sorrow,” I said, “if we don’t make a little more progress getting this house unpacked.”
“Fine,” he finally said, then gave me a wet kiss and got back to work.