Chapter 61
“You picked some week to get out of here,” I said to Tom when Paul and I greeted him.
“Ending on a high note,” Tom said with a laugh.
Paul asked what I wanted to drink, and when I told him I’d take a gin and tonic, he disappeared into the crowd to fetch it.
“You getting excited for New London?” I asked Tom. He had been selected for Submarine Officer Advanced Course, the same assignment that Paul wanted next.
“Yeah, I’m worried I’ve forgotten how to study. But I guess it’s like riding a bike, right?”
“Sure.”
He took a sip of his beer. “Honestly,” he said, “I’m so excited to be in the same time zone as Shari, let alone the same house, I haven’t thought much about anything else.
” Tom’s wife, I’d learned, was a pediatrician, and he’d come to Italy on a one-year unaccompanied tour so that she could keep working.
“That’s sweet,” I said, then remembered his car. “What’d you wind up doing with the Fiat?”
“Oh, I sold it to Hollingsworth. That kid who works the gate.”
“He didn’t care about the key?”
“He’s nineteen. He’s just glad to have a set of wheels.”
Paul returned with my drink, and I listened to the two men talk about some steam turbine that either was or wasn’t imbalanced. After a minute or two, I allowed a few of the wives to lure me away.
With the exception of Laura, I didn’t know many of these women.
Most of them were married to enlisted guys who worked in RADCON, Nuclear Planning, or Nuclear Repair, and while I’d met a few at CAWS meetings, the reality was that most enlisted wives viewed the Community of American Women in Sardinia as an Officers’ Wives Club, no matter how fervently Mary Lou argued otherwise.
In general, I found that the enlisted wives were more fun, which explains why, at a quarter to nine, I was already three drinks in and following Marty Ricard’s wife out to the sidewalk for a smoke.
Her name was Colleen, and like me, she’d never been out of the country before.
“Do you ever miss McDonald’s?” she asked, then launched into a story about a guy in Planning and Estimating who had to fly home on emergency leave when his father died.
On his way to the airport after the funeral, he’d stopped at McDonald’s and bought a Big Mac for his wife.
“He packed that thing in a cooler and carried it from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to La Maddalena, Italy. If that’s not the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, I don’t know what is. ”
“I wouldn’t have touched that burger with a ten-foot pole,” I said firmly.
“Really?”
“It had to have been in that cooler for two full days.”
“Well, she ate it,” Colleen said. “And she said it was the best thing she ever put in her mouth.”
This made us giggle uncontrollably, and it was as I was catching my breath that I noticed Teo sitting at an outdoor table with a few friends. “Hey,” I said as I took a few trepidatious steps in his direction. “I know you.”
He gave me a big smile, then stood to greet me with a kiss on each cheek. He smelled like tobacco and red wine, and for a second, I lost my balance. “Whoa,” he said as he took my elbow to steady me.
“I’ve got it,” I said, gesturing at the cigarette and my empty glass. “Just too many things in my hands.”
“Eileen, right?”
I nodded, then introduced Colleen. “Teo, Colleen. Colleen, Teo.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
“This is funny,” I said to him, “but I realized I take Italian lessons with your aunt.”
“No,” he said disbelievingly.
I nodded. “I saw a picture of you in her living room, and we put it together.”
He laughed. “It’s a small island.”
“I guess so.”
“How long have you been taking lessons?” he asked.
“Not long,” I said. “Maybe a month?”
Already, Colleen seemed bored. “I need a refill,” she said, then disappeared inside, which was fine. Maybe even preferable. Teo pulled up an extra chair, next to his, and gestured for me to sit.
“Questa è Eileen,” he said to the group. “è americana e il suo italiano è pessimo, quindi vacci piano con lei.”
I had followed the first part of the introduction but not the second. “Did you just say my Italian is very bad?”
He grinned. “Yes, and that they should go easy on you.”
Teo rattled off the names of the people around the table. Ernesto and Afonso and Aldo and a girl named Gianna. With the exception of Ernesto, none of them spoke English.
“Piacere,” I said, then returned my attention to Teo. “They all live here?” I asked him.
“Everyone except Aldo. He’s in Santa Teresa.”
“And you?”
“Me?”
“Francesca said you live in Sassari?”
He lit a hand-rolled cigarette that he’d been storing in his breast pocket, then exhaled at the sky. “What else did she tell you about me?”
“That you work for a newspaper there.”
He nodded.
“That your family lives in Rome.”
This elicited another nod.
“And that you’re very charming.”
He looked at me then. Like, really looked at me.
What I’d said had come off as flirtatious, and I think he was trying to figure out if I’d meant it that way.
Had I meant it that way? It’s honestly still hard for me to say, all these years later.
I’m inclined to tell you that my comment didn’t mean anything.
That I was drunk and said the first thing that came to mind.
Francesca had told me he was charming. And, like a lot of people, I lose my filter when I’ve been drinking.
“I think it is you who are very charming,” he said. “And if I had realized my aunt knew you, I would have been sure to tell her.”
This lit me up, and I asked him what he was doing on the island.
“It’s this man’s birthday,” he said, nodding in the direction of Ernesto.
Ernesto gave me a small wave.
“Happy birthday.”
Teo explained how he knew everyone. They were all people he’d grown up with during the summers he’d spent on the island. Except for Gianna, whom he’d met through Aldo. Ernesto and he had randomly wound up in the same residence hall at university.
“Where did you go to school?” I asked Teo.
“University of Bologna.”
“Your English is very good. Did you study it in college?”
“I did. But I also had a fellowship later.”
My cigarette had burned to nothing, and I stubbed it out in the ashtray.
“Here,” he said, and handed me a cigarette that he’d rolled himself. It was beautiful—not too loose, not too tight, and it smelled earthy, like the woods near my parents’ house after a big rain.
I took it and was about to tell him I didn’t have a light when he struck a match on the side of the table and leaned toward me, sheltering the small flame with his hands.
I brought the cigarette to my lips and my face close to his hands, and we were both so quiet that when the paper touched the light, we could hear it sizzle.