Abroad (7 page)

Anna let out a drunken giggle, her face covered by her lavender-tipped fingers.

I rolled down the window. “
The B4 is spectacular!
” I shouted, and we all laughed. We laughed all the way down the mountain, past the already waking lights of the farms, and across the dusty valley. At some point we must have stopped, because by the time the car was once again climbing the streets of old Grifonia, we were sleeping, our heads resting on one another’s shoulders and pressed against the taxi’s windows. Yet now, hard as I ponder it, I cannot remember at which point, exactly, our delirium ended and the slumber began.

5

The nights of early September steamed ahead with force and gaiety. Though we never found ourselves at another happening as strangely delightful as the cathedral affair, Jenny led us to all sorts of parties hidden throughout Grifonia, held in gilded pockets behind walls of stone where richly tapestried apartments and courtyards paved in glittering mosaics revealed themselves. We went to a private chamber music concert, a small fashion show, an art gallery opening, a particularly odd masked dance. Once she led us halfway down a narrow stairwell, turned in front of a wall, then pressed her hand against the stone relief of a rose. To my awe the wall opened to reveal a tunnel leading to an underground club. Sounds implausible, I know, but this was the sort of thing that happened to me all the time under Jenny’s wing. The blurred faces, the candles flickering, the trays passed loaded heavy with glasses of Umbrian wine. Even when it was cold out, those enchanted chambers were always warm, almost murky, so that after a few hours the gossamer Italian dresses would wilt on their wearers’ shoulders, the stays would loosen and buttons would come undone, to free up just a bit more skin.

We made no real friends at these gatherings, though Jenny always knew someone from her friend’s house at Lake Trasimeno.
Going to the lake?
they’d ask, smiling.
When?
Jenny had most of her conversations through me. She kept them short and to the point, inevitably turning away when she was done. Mainly, we talked and danced among ourselves.

Back at home, Babs and I had waded meekly through uni parties. Yet Jenny, Anna, Luka, and I
were
the happening, and everything around us, the men, the chatter, the fashion, was just noise. People would stare as we arrived, as if someone had just switched on a light. Men often came to speak to us, but, following Jenny’s lead, we’d brush them off until the end of the night. Then, once it was time to leave, if we didn’t have another party to go to, we relented, letting them run to get us drinks or cigarettes.

I didn’t go home with these men. They tended to be older, peering at us through half-closed eyes in a way that often made me want to run back to the cottage and pull on my lumpiest, thickest wool jumper. As for the more age-appropriate boys—the sorts at the dive bars where we’d make appearances late in the night—they were tourists or students, eager for quickie sex and nothing more. It’s not that I wasn’t mildly interested; it was just that, always pragmatic, I never saw the point.

Jenny, though, almost always said yes. Luka would sometimes sleep with women. Anna would more often than not walk home with me. But for Jenny, it was a new man every night. She would wave, smiling coolly as she walked out the door with Paolo from Florence or Barry from Atlanta or someone whose name no one really caught but who was tall and had decent teeth. It didn’t seem to matter who these men were or how long she’d spoken to them. The range was wide: old, young, thin, fat, black, white, well-dressed, unshaven. By the end of the night, she always had someone.

I won’t lie. I was shocked at first. But after a week or so, I came to accept that I was different from the others. Jenny, Luka, and Anna came from a world so distinct from my own … They were the kind of girls who would disappear for a day in another country with no reason for leaving but a party, or a shop. Luka, especially, was always jetting off on impulsive international jaunts. “Where’s Luka?” I’d ask when it was only three of us, and the others would shrug.
Morocco, art bazaar. Portugal, polo match.
Luka just
went
to these places, the same way I might sometimes go to the sad little track at the bottom of the hill to get in a run.

I tried not to seem too impressed, but that was, frankly, the wrong word for my state. The truth was, I was deeply in love with each one of them, and when they took me aside to whisper their mesmerizing confidences—perhaps a night with a stranger in Trastevere, or a cocktail made of a strange liqueur one could get only in Belgium—I drank their words in greedily, savoring each syllable, each sweet breath of that new life.

*   *   *

Most mornings, I woke with a thick head. Our cottage was not a hundred feet from the bustle of the city center, but because of the position of the house, my room was hushed in the early part of the day and flooded with morning radiance. I could hear the birds in the sloped orchard, as well as the occasional rooster. I had always been a late sleeper, so generally, by the time I was awake, Gia and Alessandra were out of the house, at class or work or wherever their Grifonian lives led them in the course of a day. Sometimes, though, I’d hear them puttering about and lie in with a good mystery until they were gone, only then coming out to make my morning tea and read twenty more pages in the delicious peace, the sun streaming in the windows, the air heavy with the smell of the baked grass below.

One Wednesday, after a night out with the B4, I woke up paralyzed in bed, sick with sugar and rum. Determined to remain horizontal for as long as possible, I picked up Patricia Highsmith, then after a page or two tossed it aside for Ovid.

Anna had convinced me to join a monthlong seminar on Etruscan mythology. It took me a while to come around, but eventually I agreed. Due to the intensive nature of the course—six hours a week for the better part of a month—the class would count for as much credit as a semester-long one; also, the seminar happened to be taught by someone Anna knew, a family friend of some sort, and she promised he’d favor us with decent marks.

The syllabus, which Anna forwarded to me, was hard to make out. There were no specific readings, only “expected working knowledge” of
The Homeric Hymns
, the
Iliad
, and the
Odyssey
, as well as all of Virgil and Ovid. I was hacking away at it the best I could, but it was crippling stuff:

The poet’s limbs were strewn in different places: the head and the lyre you, Hebrus, received, and (a miracle!) floating in midstream, the lyre lamented mournfully; mournfully the lifeless tongue murmured; mournfully the banks echoed in reply.

“Ugh,” I cried through my hangover. “What does it
mean
?”

Just then, the door clattered open out front and someone stumbled in, dragging something huge over the rough tiles.

Even as I rose to see who was there, I faced a whole other wall of pain.
Rum.
I put on my robe and opened my bedroom door. A girl in a loose T-shirt, cargo pants, and Converse tennis shoes was dragging a huge, overstuffed duffel down the hall.

“Oh, hi.” I took a moment. She was nice-looking but sloppy, this American. Unplucked eyebrows, ears pierced all the way up the sides, hair a curious, manufactured silver color, tied with the kind of elastic band you’d put around the newspaper.

But then she smiled, and everything changed. It was as if the delight of ten children shone from her face.

“I’m Claire.”

Claire. Her loveliness grew fourfold by the end. Yet upon our first meeting, she was clumsy as a puppy, knocking into a lamp here, the counter there. She leapt over the bag and stuck out her hand, the loose flowered T-shirt she wore falling aside to reveal a soiled bra strap.

“Tabitha, right? They told me. But, you know what? I recognize you. I’ve seen you everywhere.”

“Right,” I said. It all came back to me now. She was the girl kissing the Italian on the steps my first day. “You do look—”

“Oh, shit, I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“Please. You saved me from Ovid.”

“Nice. Amor makes an ass of Apollo. I remember. So you got the good room, huh?”

“Oh, well. I hope you don’t mind.”

“You kidding? If I’d gotten my stuff here first, I’d have done the same thing.” She walked into my room rather brashly and stood at my window. “Wow.”

“I know.” Did the room smell stale, of sleep? And my underwear. It was lying on the floor next to the contents of my purse, which had spilled out onto the tile.

Claire seemed not to notice. She stood for a moment looking out at the Umbrian countryside, then trotted out into the hallway again. “And this fucking terrace,” she said. “Can you believe it?”

“I just woke up…”

“I mean, mostly it’s a view of the street, but if you turn
this
way…” She turned a plastic chair toward the hills and collapsed into it, propping her feet up, then took a pack of cigarettes out of her cargo pants. “You smoke?”

“No.”

“Oh. I thought everyone in the house did.” She tapped one out, lit it. “So you went out last night?”

“I did.”

“Fun,” Claire said with curiosity. When I didn’t elaborate, she threw her barely lit cigarette into an earthen pot. “I’ll make some coffee.”

“Oh, yes.”

The new girl shot up and began rifling through the cabinets. Gia’s and Alessandra’s doors were open, meaning they were out. Beds unmade, belongings everywhere. The Italian girls never shut their doors, nor did they seem to mind who happened to see their messes.

“This must be the coffeemaker,” Claire went on. “I haven’t quite gotten it yet but it looks pretty easy—wait, what about this one, though? See, I’m from Butte—totally weird, don’t ask—and we need good coffee all the fucking time just to—wait, is this espresso or coffee? Too coarse to be … oh, fuck, a gas stove. Where’s the lighter? Oh, never mind—it’s broken—no—oh fuck, the gas—shit! [
small explosion
] Okay! We’re a go.”

It was as if the filter between her brain and mouth was passable as air.

“I know, I can be a spaz. Anyway. You’re pretty. Do people tell you?”

“Sometimes.” The truth was, that statement was rarely made, and if so, it was by a boyfriend during sex or by my mother. I was not pretty; I was interesting-looking. My skin was smooth, my limbs thin, but my face was slightly off-kilter: eyes out of proportion with the nose, chin that ended too abruptly.

We were silent for a bit, waiting for the water to boil.

“Boyfriend?” I asked.

“Broke up. For the trip. We keep in touch, but really, it’s better this way. You?”

“I recently got over something.”

She took the coffee off the stove. “
That
’ll last, like, five seconds. You being single, I mean.”

“Maybe.” I watched her pour the coffee, spilling half on the counter.

“Have you met anyone here yet?”

“I have,” I said. “It wasn’t so hard.”

“I hope not. Though I’m really hoping to meet Italians.”

“Sure.”

“Do you hang with Gia and Alessandra at all?”

“Not really. Not yet anyway.”

“Well. We’re going to have an awesome time.”

“Absolutely.”

She sipped her coffee, narrowing her eyes. “You remind me of someone.”

“Yes. You, too.”

“Really? Who?”

I blinked. I was just being polite. “I’ll have to think of it.”

“Well,
you
could be Winona Ryder. Before she got all fucked up.”

I had to laugh. “Hardly.”

“I probably remind you of the fucking Lorax. I dyed my hair this awesome purple color before I left, for shits and giggles, and also to piss off my mom. But now it’s going back to blond, and it just looks weird.”

“I like it.”

She grinned and got up from the table.

“Rule number one, roommate,” she said. “No more lying.”

Claire threw her dishes into the sink and slid into her room to unpack. In her absence, the tiny living room stilled perceptively, almost sighing with the loss of life.

6

That month of September, my happiness was reaching a point of delirium. Young women of the sort I was are most content when they feel secure. Now that I had the B4—ridiculous and childish as the label sounded—I was bolstered. I wasn’t naive enough to think that Jenny, Anna, and Luka were my good friends. They were sophisticated—vastly more than anyone I’d hung out with at Nottingham or at home, and I had every reason to suppose that, as soon as I got back, I’d be relegated to regular-girl status alongside Babs again. Yet just knowing that for now I had someone to call for lunches, night walks, and late-night pizzas … it was comforting. I had this group.

Perhaps because of my newfound social independence, Gia and Alessandra were getting nicer as well. The girls seemed to appreciate my studious attitude toward their language, and would bend over my shoulder, helping me translate the newspaper. Sometimes, if we all happened to be around together, they’d cook for me. Though tiny, our kitchen was properly outfitted with all the things any self-respecting Italian would bring to a house: a pan for sautéing, a deep pasta pot, a cheese grater, a baking dish, two separate knives, kept sharp, one for bread and fruit, one for meat. Alessandra had one pasta sauce she made every other day of tomatoes, something sweet I couldn’t place, pitted olives, and hand-brined capers. She would cook fresh spaghetti, made that day at the grocery down the street, and top the strained and rinsed mound with curled shavings of aged cheese. Then, crowded next to it on our tiny, scrubbed counter: a bowl of insalata mista, sparkling with deep-purple balsamic; a plate of cold burrata, its wrinkled outer membrane straining to contain its succulent white insides; freshly sliced tomatoes, scarlet and bleeding; and thinly shaved prosciutto, transparent and rosy against the white china plate. I found myself getting up again and again, helping myself to seconds, thirds. I’d mop my plate shamelessly with bread and then, if there was none left, use my fingers.