Chapter 4 #2
If anyone had asked Andrea when he graduated from high school if he wanted to become mayor of his hometown, he immediately would have said that he’d rather be forced to spend the rest of his life cleaning up after one of the wild boars that occasionally got hit on the highway—the big ones.
With the fangs. It’s not that he didn’t like the idea of working hard—he eventually became an asset fund manager, dealing with some of the wealthiest, most demanding clients in the world.
It’s that it seemed like there couldn’t be anything on earth more boring than being the mayor of Baia Santa.
The town was old, not because the main church was built in 1090, but because even back then, the average age of its inhabitants must have been seventy-two.
Jobs were scarce, so other young people were even more scarce, and most of them moved to Genoa, Milan, or Rome to explore more opportunities.
His older sister, Carla, went straight to University College London, got a job at a tech company, and sent plane tickets to their parents when she missed them.
His older brother, Massimo, made it to Boston College on early decision, then Boston University dental school, and only visited every other year when he could get away from his practice in Newton, Massachusetts.
When Andrea was accepted to NYU with a scholarship, Paola and Antonio gifted him a new suitcase, hugged him tight, and drove him to the airport.
To them, he was doing the best thing possible. And he was. For a while.
It was hard to know if he’d begun feeling hollow in the city or if the city had begun feeling hollow to him.
The result, however, was the same. Ten years after starting his very own American dream, he had his first panic attack.
It was about a month after he’d ended things with Danni.
Breaking up with a model unfortunately meant that he’d had to continue to see photos of her on billboards across the city.
As the face of Cartier’s holiday-themed blast of advertisements, she had been everywhere he looked, her face frozen in crimson-lipped surprise as a satin jewel box sat open in her hand on every available surface clear up to Queens.
It was also about a month into working with a new client who had the biggest portfolio he’d ever managed before, and after a week of holiday parties that had pickled him in vodka.
He had been at the Whole Foods in Union Square on a Saturday afternoon between Christmas and New Year’s, and the place was absolutely packed.
Taking the escalator down to the grocery store entrance felt like descending into a melee, but he was hungry and craving curry chicken salad.
Everything was fine, or as fine as could be in Union Square during the holidays, until he got to the checkout line.
It was a convoluted affair, with a snaking line and large screens set up with blinking, colorful numbers and a voice telling the next customer in line which cash register was available.
Holiday songs blared from the overhead speakers, and the temperature hovered around a balmy seventy-five degrees while he was dressed in a down parka and wool hat.
Ten minutes into the wait, he looked down at the container of chicken salad and noticed that the price was incorrect.
Instead of $8.47, it said $8,470. He started to think about whether the person at the cash register would simply make the adjustment or send him back to get another.
Then he realized that he had forgotten to grab a drink out of the cooler near the checkout line and wondered if he should ask the person behind him to hold his place while he got one, or, since he was already out of the line, try to run back to the prepared-foods case and exchange the chicken salad for a different container.
He couldn’t decide what to do. His chest started to feel tight as Mariah Carey launched into “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” and the beeping, flashing light above his head kept pushing the customers forward.
He was sweating in his coat, feeling full rivulets run down from his lower back, and then he thought maybe he was going to have to get to a bathroom immediately because something was definitely happening in his lower abdomen that didn’t feel like tidings of comfort and joy.
There were only two people ahead of him, and he would have had to make a decision quickly.
His eyes darted to the chicken salad, the cold drinks, the numbers, Mariah—beep, number seven please—his chest was really hurting, he wondered was he going to poop right here?
and the whole time it was hot, hot, hot.
He didn’t remember dropping the chicken salad at the cash register, running the wrong way up the escalator stairs until he got outside, or ripping off his parka and sweater.
The only thing he remembered was staring up at the Union Square Metronome, a gigantic digital clock mounted on a building that used to tick down fifteen digits every day to midnight, wearing only a T-shirt in thirty degrees Fahrenheit.
“Blood sugar,” said his doctor when he went to get checked out after the incident. Andrea lay on the examining table with electrode tabs stuck to his chest, prepared to hear the worst about whatever ventricle had closed for business permanently. “Did you eat breakfast that morning?”
“Yes, I had my usual,” he’d said, watching the doctor pull off his latex gloves and drop them into the trash.
“And what was that?”
“Coffee and two or three plain cookies.” It was more or less the same version of what he’d been eating since he was a kid, minus the smear of Nutella. He’d figured that was an improvement.
“There you go. That’s caffeine and sugar.
It’s got to be an Italian thing, right? I remember when my wife and I went there on our honeymoon, at least one of us would turn into a wildebeest about ninety minutes after breakfast. I swear we would have ended up divorced already if we kept trying to live on sweets and coffee every morning.
Your heart is fine. You just need protein and more calories, kid.
Try a good old egg sandwich. It’ll balance that blood sugar right out. ”