Chapter Three #2
My heart drops. “Wha—? You know?” I feel the sweat start to slick on my palms. No wonder Benito immediately hated me. He knows.
“I recognized you when I met you yesterday.” Benito says it so casually, it’s like I quit my job at H&R Block after a storied 20-year tenure.
“So you know about. . .” I trail off. Benito raises his eyebrows. “Oh god.” He knows about the texts. He knows about the media frenzy that followed, my shaming in the public square, the scarlet A on my chest. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
The waiter comes back, and Benito waits to respond until she’s poured each of us a glass of wine and left. “I figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”
He’s right about that. “Then why bring it up now?”
“I’m dying to know if the thing about the treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence is real,” Benito deadpans.
I roll my eyes, avenging the many times he’s done the same to me. “I wouldn’t know, they don’t let you touch it.”
Benito looks down at the menu again. “I didn’t plan on saying anything, but I felt weird knowing and not telling you.”
I try to wrap my head around the fact that my safe hamlet where nobody knows me or my past is not so safe anymore. “Does everyone here know who I am?”
“I’m the mayor, not a telepath.”
I sigh.
Benito lowers his voice. “I doubt it. I only know because I worked as an advisor to a lord in the House of Commons and it was my job to keep tabs on the U.S. and our ‘special relationship.’”
“Our what?”
“Special relationship,” he says again.
“You love to say things again instead of explaining, don’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure if it was my accent, I know Americans struggle to understand dialects outside their own.” He tries again, putting on an American accent. “The special relationship between the U.S. and the U.K.”
I laugh, because he sounds like a Southern belle, and while it’s a spot-on impression, it doesn’t suit him. “Oh! That special relationship!” I respond, mockingly. “That was a pretty good accent.”
“I went to boarding schools my whole life and they were stuffed with Americans. My best mate in year 10 was an oil billionaire’s son from Dallas. He spoke exactly like Owen Wilson.”
Despite his standoffish demeanor, I can’t quite picture Benito getting along with trust fund kids.
I knew them well from a lifetime in Los Angeles, but it’s hard to picture Benito skiing the Swiss Alps or schmoozing on a beach in St. Barts.
“I thought I heard a little bit of You, Me and Dupree in there.”
Benito cocks his head. “Really? Of all his roles?”
The waiter returns and asks for our order. I haven’t looked at the menu at all. I plan to eat my way through every restaurant in La Musa, but it’s overwhelming.
Benito motions for me to put my menu down. “Io gradirei i ravioli, invece la signora prenderà le linguini al tartufo.” The waiter nods and walks away. He turns to me. “I ordered you the truffle pasta. Truffles are an Umbrian specialty. Don’t worry, no meat.”
“Thank you,” I say, momentarily touched that he remembered my dietary restrictions.
“I wouldn’t want you to ask to speak to the manager when you find meat in your carbonara.”
I exhale. “My Italian might not be fluent, but I do know there’s meat in carbonara.” I refill the wine glass to numb the pain of knowing we have a long lunch ahead of us. “How long did you live in London?” I ask, hoping to steer the conversation into a neutral zone.
Benito takes a sip of his wine. “A while. I went to university in Cambridge and then I stayed.”
“You went to Cambridge?”
He nods.
“Wow. So, you’re smart.”
“No, I’m a legacy.” He says it quickly, like it’s a reflex. “My father and his father and his father’s father. . .”
The father who is gone but not dead. “Oh. I mean, I’m sure you got in on your own too.” I smirk. “Old institutions never play into nepotism.”
He looks at me pointedly. “I think it’s much more impressive to get into one such institution on your own merit rather than familial connections.”
Are we talking about my congressional past again? If so, he’s teetering on the edge of a compliment, and that’s not really our dynamic. “So, boarding school, Cambridge, London. . . you’d only be in La Musa for holidays and summers growing up, then?”
“I didn’t realize this was a hearing, Congresswoman,” he says, raising his hands in surrender. “I yield my time.”
“That’s not how that works.” I roll my eyes again. “I’m asking questions, trying to get to know you, that’s typically how a conversation goes. Do they not teach you that at Cambridge?”
Benito shakes his head. “No, the core curriculum is focused on maintaining the monarchy and how to charm oligarchs.”
A sort of half laugh comes out of me, but I remind myself the most monstrous narcissists I worked with previously were also good at using charm and wit to disarm their opponent.
Just because Benito’s kind of funny, and kind of pretty, doesn’t mean I have to like him.
“With such stunning manners, it’s no wonder they chased you out of the country and you ended up in your hometown, where you spent.
. .?” I trail off, waiting for him to answer my original question.
“Holidays, yes, sometimes. Sometimes we’d travel. Summers the same or at my father’s family home in Lake Como.”
It seems like a charmed life to me, but the way Benito speaks about it makes it sound like the summer my parents sent me to that horrible, bedbug-infested camp in Big Bear. “How long have you been back?”
“Six months.”
My eyebrows shoot up in surprise. It changes the image I’ve had of him thus far. I thought he was the golden child of La Musa. The quarterback who stuck around after high school graduation to run his father’s mechanic shop, or whatever the Italian equivalent of that is. “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Why’d you come back?”
He looks up at me and we lock eyes. There’s an intensity behind his that I haven’t noticed before. It’s like he’s scanning my soul, trying to figure out if I’m worth a real conversation. “I came back because I had to,” he says, perhaps deciding I don’t deserve the real explanation.
The waiter returns with our food, and the intoxicating aroma wafting off the plate in front of me distracts from whatever judgment lurks behind Benito’s gaze.
I dive into the pasta. The earthy, hearty flavor of the truffle is complemented with the freshness of lemon and olive oil.
It’s creamy, it’s rich but not too rich, decadent but not overwhelming.
After a moment of quiet reveling in the flavors, Benito dots his mouth with his napkin. “Izzy, how long are you actually going to keep this up?”
“This conversation? At least until the wine is finished,” I say.
Benito stares blankly at me. “That’s not what I meant.” He twirls a noodle with his fork. “I meant how long are you going to pretend you’re actually moving to La Musa.”
I take a sip of wine calmly, measured. “I did move to La Musa,” I say.
He stares at me like he’s waiting for me to retract. “Come on.”
“Where to?” I say, taking another slow, luxurious sip of wine.
“The future of her party, Congresswoman—” I flinch. Benito raises his hand in surrender. “It’s not like Italy is some progressive haven. If anything, moving here is the antithesis of your life’s work.” He calculates something in his brain. “Unless—is that why you’re here?”
I weigh how to best respond. It’s not lost on me that Italy has its own set of issues politically, its own battles people like me, the old me, are fighting, but it makes me sound like a fraud if I admit that right now, in this moment, I don’t really care.
“I’m not trying to fight the thread of resurging fascism in Europe, no,” I say.
“Then what is it?” he asks again.
“Nothing.”
Benito huffs. “You don’t actually expect me to believe you’re doing a whole Eat, Pray, Love thing.”
“Believe what you want.”
“An Under the Tuscan Sun,” he says.
“Great film.” Another sip of wine. Unbothered, unfazed.
“Roman Holiday,” he says. “Letters to Juliet, Room with a View, need I go on?”
I shrug. “You’re naming films. I don’t know what this has to do with me.”
Benito leans in, suddenly energized. “You aren’t actually playing the white woman who leaves everything behind, hoping the answer to all her problems is simply Italy.”
My breath stutters. He more or less nailed it, but I uphold a stoic exterior. “I studied abroad in this town. Did you know about that? I needed somewhere to go, and this is a place I could. . . go. Somewhere familiar but also the complete opposite of the life I was living.”
Benito’s eyes narrow, studying me. He leans back in his chair and crosses his arms. “You won’t last more than a month.”
“I will,” I say. “I booked three months in the room in your house.”
“You won’t make it,” he says. “Maybe you won’t go home, but you’ll never stay in La Musa.”
I hear it for the first time. An edge to his voice when he says La Musa. He hates it here. He’s the freaking mayor and he hates it here. “La Musa is beautiful,” I say.
“It’s decrepit,” he replies. He lowers his voice, “Maybe when you were here 20 years ago—”
I almost spit out my wine. “It was closer to ten.”
“La Musa used to be the shining gem of Umbria, but it’s fallen. Look around. No one comes here anymore. The population is aging. La Musa is on life support. In another 10 years, it’ll be nothing.”
“Then why are you here?” I ask again.
“Because I—” he starts.
“Because you had to be. Right,” I say.
He relaxes a bit, takes a deep breath, and sits up straight. “I don’t mean to be so harsh. It has its charm, but I’m realistic. Trust me. By the end of your three months, you’ll be hightailing it out of here, if not sooner.”
I shake my head. “You see a lack of commerce, I see community. You see nothing for miles, I see natural beauty all around us. You see ruins where I see a preservation of everything and everyone that’s come before us.”
“I didn’t say any of those things.” Benito shakes his head.
“Am I wrong?” I ask.
He runs his hand through his hair. “I refuse to believe my prison is your paradise.”
I laugh because it’s all just so, so dramatic. “I guess we’ll see who’s right in three months.”
The edge of Benito’s mouth twitches upward. “I guess we will.”