The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

  “You’re not a film person, are you?” Esther said.

  “I used to love to go to the movies.”

  “What was the last movie you saw?”

  Margot stopped to think. “I saw Coming Home with my sister, in California.”

  “My God, that was over ten years ago.”

  “And I saw Gone with the Wind a few years ago. With my friend Francesca Postiglione.”

  “Francesca Postiglione. Wasn’t that the name of your lover’s wife? Sandro’s wife? How did that happen?”

  “It just happened. She owned the apartment in Santa Croce and kept trying to kick me out after Sandro died. Finally she gave up and we became friends.”

  “I’m sorry. You sound just like my daughter. I mean, I don’t have a daughter. Just what I imagine my daughter would sound like. If she were you. You know, I’ve always imagined Margot—in the book—as my daughter. How I wanted her to be happy—that’s how real she was to me. And now here you are about my age. It’s hard to believe.”

  The waiter brought Esther’s lasagna and Margot’s risotto and took their orders for the second course.

  “I could have been a mogul, you know,” Esther went on. “I should have been. Like Dawn Steel or Sherry Lansing. I should be running a studio instead of running around begging for money. If it hadn’t been for Harry . . . I was a D-girl at MGM. Harry was making a film about a friendship between a wise old man and a slum kid from the Lower East Side, and he was so out of control—Harry, not the kid—that they wanted to fire him, but they were afraid to tell him, so they sent me out to the back lot where he was shooting. I told him he was fired, and he asked me to have dinner with him. Just like that. We made the film two years later on our own, and we never worked for a studio again. Atlantic Avenue was the name. I don’t suppose you saw it? Forget it, that’s all right.”

  “Shouldn’t I have an agent?”

  “Agent smaygent. Why do you want to give your money to an agent?”

  “What money? Isn’t that the question?”

  “Ten percent. That’s what money.”

  “What do authors usually get?”

  “It all depends. Look, this property’s been knocking around for fifteen years . . . You’re lucky to get an offer at all. But I’ve got to have the rights. You understand that? I can’t do anything till I have the rights. I can’t pay you up front, but I’ll make it up to you on the back end.”

  “You paid for the rights the first time you optioned it,” Margot said. “Everybody else paid.”

  Esther interrupted her. “I know the whole story, doll—MGM, New Line, TriStar, the Jersey Tomato Company. It’s old news. But let me ask you this: do you have a movie?”

  “No.”

  “Do you have any prospects for a movie?”

  “No.”

  “You got anything coming up on the horizon?”

  “No.”

  Esther spread her hands out, palms up. “I’ll tell you what you got. You got me. You got Esther Klein, and Esther won’t let you down. The big boys are all waiting to see what happens. This is my first film since Harry left me. Can she do it? they want to know. Can she pull it off without Harry? They should be asking, can Harry pull it off without me, without Esther? Harry’s got a huge budget for a piece of schlock, but Harry doesn’t believe in budgets. Ah, the hell with it. Do we have a deal? I’ll give you ten dollars to make it legal.”

  “Okay, but I’ll write the screenplay. I read the screenplay that MGM had. It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. No wonder they couldn’t get anyone to play the part. I could come up with something better than that in a weekend.”

  Esther started to say that she already had a screenplay but decided against it. She leaned forward. “Look, doll, do me a big favor. Leave the screenplay to a pro.”

  “How hard can it be? I wrote the book, didn’t I? If I wrote the book, I ought to be able to write the screenplay.” Now Margot leaned forward. Esther leaned back. She didn’t want to get into a staring match.

  The waiter brought their secondi.

  “Give it a shot, why not? You do it on spec and we’ve got a deal.”

  “On spec. You mean for nothing?”

  Esther sighed. “Not for nothing. When I get the funding, you’ll get Writers Guild minimum for a high-budget screenplay, okay? You’ll get paid on the first day of principal photography.”

  “Who’s going to pay?”

  “The production entity.”

  “How much?”

  “Eighty-nine thousand dollars. Plus something for the book. Let me shop it around and see what I can do for you. Plus ten percent of the net. Don’t say Esther Klein doesn’t have a big heart.”

  “Ten percent of the net is zero, right? I read the papers.”

  Esther’s shoulders sagged a little. “That’s how we do it,” she said, “because that’s how it’s done. But there are bonuses too, depending. It’s complicated. Maybe a deferred fee after breakdown. For an Academy Award nomination. For a win. For Golden Globes. Leave it up to me. The main thing is, I can’t make a movie until I get the rights.”

  “All right,” Margot said. “It’s a deal.”

  Esther signaled the waiter and ordered another bottle of expensive Chianti.

  Margot walked Esther back to her hotel near the station and then, instead of going home, went to her studio. What she did when she was experiencing a nameless dread, as she was that night, was get her hand on a book or a manuscript. Like the Galileo codex she was planning to bid on. It had been rescued from the flood, at the very last moment, by Sterling Pears, one of the foremost authorities on the Galileo collection in the Biblioteca Nazionale. Pears had called her to say that the Biblioteca Nazionale was finally getting around to soliciting bids for the restoration work.

  The manuscript on her desk right now, unfortunately, wasn’t doing much for her nameless dread. It had been brought over by the chief of the music division at the Biblioteca Nazionale to see if she could do anything about it. Many of the pages had been stained a dark pink. It looked to Margot as if the whole book had been treated with calcium hydroxide and calcium bicarbonate, which had dissolved some editorial markings in the margins. There was nothing to be done. Some problems have no solution, and this was clearly one of them. She could accept that as a conservator but not in her own life.

  Actually her nameless dread did have a name. It was homesickness, nostalgia, the place she’d come back to on Saturday night. It was a kind of longing, a kind of ache, a kind of sadness, the kind of fear she’d felt when she’d heard Woody singing “Sweet Home, Chicago,” the fear that her true home was elsewhere, that her real life—her true spiritual life—was not here in Italy, here at her workbench in her very own studio on Lungarno Guicciardini or in her very own apartment in Piazza Santa Croce, but waiting for her back home, back in Chicago, back in the big house on Chambers Street, waiting for her to take up where she’d left off.

  On two occasions she’d come close to going home. Both times she’d changed her mind at the last minute. Not for the sake of an Italian lover, but because two powerful women had befriended her. The abbess at the convent where she’d stayed when she came to Florence after the flood, and where she’d discovered the Aretino, had helped her set up her own studio right in the convent; and Francesca Postiglione had given her a life interest in the big apartment in Santa Croce. The abbess had been her mother, and Francesca her sister. Both were dead. And now there was Esther Klein, who was going to make a movie about her.

  She didn’t know what to make of it. What she was hoping was that a movie would validate her life, would validate her decision to stay in Italy. Because she thought that maybe she had come back to this place—this longing, this ache, this fear—for the last time. She was fifty-three years old. It was time to settle things once and for all.

  She put the book with the pink stains back in its solander box and put a note on the cover for one of her three assistants to return it to Signor Malfatti at the Biblioteca
Nazionale, with a note inside to say that nothing could be done. She locked the door of the studio behind her, crossed the Ponte alle Grazie, and walked home along the river. The lights of Piazzale Michelangelo were reflected in the water. She thought about going to the Bebop Club, but it was too far away, and it was too late, and she was too tired.

  Questura

  The bidet in Woody’s tiny bathroom reminded him, as it did every morning, that he didn’t belong here. In Italy. His people were not bidet people. A couple of generations back they’d been outhouse people. Now they had indoor plumbing, of course. But no bidets. He didn’t know anyone who had a bidet in St. Clair, Illinois, where he’d taught Latin and Greek for twenty-five years, before his daughter’s death had torn his family apart, before Hannah’s nervous breakdown, before she’d divorced him and entered a convent, before the scandal that had set the dean against him, before he’d come to Italy for the trial of the terrorists who’d bombed the station in Bologna. He knew what the bidet was for, and he had his own method of using it. But questions remained about bidet etiquette. Was it proper to use a bidet in someone else’s house, for example? And if you did, was it proper to use the little towel, hanging on a metal ring, to wipe your ass? There was a bidet in the faculty men’s room at the American Academy, where he taught classical literature in translation, but he didn’t think anyone used it. Maybe the women used the one in the faculty women’s bathroom. He’d never asked.

  The bidet, for Woody, was a symbol of Italy. He spoke the language fluently; he had Italian friends in Rome, Bologna, and Florence; he’d served as vice president of an important political organization, the Association of the Families of the Victims of the Bombing of 15 August 1980; and yet he couldn’t seem to get things—things like the bidet—quite right. Every time he turned around he was doing something wrong: drinking a cappuccino in the afternoon, putting Parmesan cheese on spaghetti alla puttanesca, or putting too many ingredients on pizza. “The problem with you, Woody,” Gabriella used to say—Gabriella was the woman he’d lived with in Bologna—“is that you like too many hybrids. Italian taste is simple, not a weird combination of exotic flavors.”

  “In Sicily,” he’d say, “they put everything you can think of on pizza. Not just one or two sparse ingredients.” And she’d shake her head in disgust. “Sicilia . . .”

  Saturday morning. Woody was going to pick up the dog, which had been in the hospital for over a week. He’d been to see her every day, after school—the ambulatorio veterinario was on Via Masaccio, only five minutes from the American Academy in Piazza Savonarola—and he’d bought a leash and a dog dish and a supply of dog food and a Frisbee and a heavy rubber ball with a handle. Dottoressa Soldi, the vet who was looking after her, was very nice, really, once it had become clear that Woody was going to assume financial responsibility for the dog. She’d shown him the evidence of previous injuries: burn marks, knife wounds, X-rays that showed that the dog had undergone several expensive operations to reset broken bones, operations that could only have been performed at a very sophisticated animal hospital. The fur on her left shoulder had been scraped away when she was dragged behind the car, and the skin was raw and red, and her throat was still swollen where the collar had choked her, but no more bones had been broken. Dottoressa Soldi had reported the incident to the Ente Nazionale Protezione Animali and to the police, and Woody had received an invitation to appear at the police station—the Questura—on the following Monday, in the morning. He’d have to take time off from school. He considered declining the invitation, but he didn’t think it was that sort of invitation, though it had been written in flowery, almost poetic language.

  Woody expected the dog to be glad to see him, but when Dottoressa Soldi led her out, all bandaged up, she seemed a strange combination of fear and self-possession. At least she was trying to act self-possessed, Woody thought, looking him over as if she were deciding whether or not to accept him as her new padrone. She didn’t seem particularly interested. She kept her distance, walking stiffly, deliberately not looking at Woody.

  When Woody approached her head on, she squatted down and peed on the floor. “She’s afraid of men,” the dottoressa explained.

  “She probably has good reason to be.”

  The dottoressa got some paper towels from behind the counter to mop up the pee.

  Woody squatted down on his heels and held out a hand, fingers curved down.

  The dog bowed her head and kept it down, reminding him of Laska, his old husky, when she was waiting for something.

  He was expecting gratitude. After all, he was doing something great and noble, or at least quite decent, and certainly expensive. (He suddenly became aware of these feelings, but there was nothing he could do about them.) He put his hand on her head and she started to tremble, and then she gave herself to him completely. She didn’t even sniff him. She put her head on his knees. Woody wasn’t sure she liked him, but she was helpless and she needed him, and he started to tremble too and had to hide his hands from Dottoressa Soldi.

  “Who could harm a dog like this?” he asked, anger surfacing. “It takes your breath away.”

  “You haven’t found out who it was?”

  “No, just that he had a fancy car. A Mercedes or a BMW. I haven’t tried, really. I have to go to the Questura on Monday. They may know something.”

  “Take the dog with you,” she said. “Let them see what the owner did to her.”

  “Good idea.”

  “I think you’ll be good friends,” she said. “But don’t try to rush things.”

  “Do you think she can make it to Piazza Tasso, or should I take her in a cab?”

  “She could use a little exercise. Just take it slow and easy.”

  On the way home they stopped for a cappuccino and a dolce at a bar in Piazza Santa Croce. Woody looked around, wondering where the American woman’s apartment was located. It occurred to him that the dog saved him from getting involved with the American woman. He’d known she was going to invite him up to her apartment, and he’d known he was going to accept her invitation. Two lonely ex-pats. Why not? But he was hoping to go home, and he couldn’t afford to get involved with a woman. That was why not. Not now. But what about the dog? What would keep him from getting involved with the dog?

  The dog was hungry, and Woody gave her one of the biscotti that he was dipping in his cappuccino. She liked it and he gave her another one.

  “What’s her name?” the barista asked.

  Woody thought for a minute. “Biscotti,” he said. “That was my daughter’s name. Cookie.”

  “Biscotti’s plural,” the barista said. “But I guess that’s all right. Biscotto would sound funny. And it’s masculine. How about Dolce?”

  Woody shook his head. “Biscotti.”

  Woody used one of his own bowls for her water and Biscotti’s new dog dish for her food—two cups in the morning, two cups in the evening.

  As he was going to sleep that night—Biscotti’s first night in Piazza Tasso—Woody tried to remember everything he knew about dogs. King Arthur had a dog, but he couldn’t remember the dog’s name. Freud had a German shepherd named Wolfe and then a whole series of chows. He kept one of them in the room when he psychoanalyzed patients. The patients were calmer and more forthcoming with a dog in the room. Lincoln had a dog. Odysseus had a dog. One of Woody’s dogs had been named Argos. And before Odysseus? The Etruscans. There was a beautiful dog in one of the tombs at Cerveteri. And dog bones in excavations in Iraq suggested that dogs and humans had pooled their resources more than fourteen thousand years ago. He tried to imagine the primordial scene: humans offering food and fire; dogs cleaning up the garbage and keeping watch while the humans slept, barking at the slightest hint of danger.

  Woody had put down a blanket for Biscotti by the side of his bed, so he could reach over and touch her and let her lick his hand.

  On his way to the Questura in Via Zara, Woody was greeted by a man in uniform whom he didn’t recognize at first, on
e of the guards from the Archeological Museum, which had been closed during August. He was pleased that the guard recognized him. The guard clasped Woody’s hands. “We haven’t seen you for a while, Professore. You haven’t forgotten your stone altar?”

  “No, not at all,” Woody said, “but I’ve been getting ready for classes.”

  “I see you have a friend with you. Looks like she had a nasty scrape.”

  Woody nodded. “Some stronzo tied her behind his car,” he said.

  The guard frowned.

  Woody gave him an answering frown.

  “She’s been having bad dreams,” Woody said. “Running in her sleep. Not eating well. I started giving her a little pasta with butter on it with her dog food. I don’t like to leave her alone. She’s making progress, though.”

  At the Questura they were shown into an inner room where Woody was surprised to see Margot Harrington, sitting at a desk, chatting with an impossibly handsome man, a southerner, a commissario in a smart uniform. It was a Monday morning. Ten o’clock. Woody, who had his “invitation” in his hand, was right on time. He was pleased to see her, in spite of himself, and relieved, because she didn’t look at all distressed, but then he was disappointed when she barely acknowledged him.

  The commissario greeted Woody warmly and invited him to sit down and stooped down suddenly to greet the dog. Woody didn’t have time to warn him. Biscotti squatted and peed on the floor. The commissario didn’t seem to mind. He waited, offered his hand. Biscotti started to tremble. Woody put his hand on her head to steady her. She raised a paw. The commissario took it in his big hand and shook it. A good sign.

  “She’s a little afraid of men,” Woody said.

  The commissario called someone to wipe up the pee. “It’s nothing,” he said, tossing his handsome head. “You remember Signora ’arrington, of course,” the commissario said to Woody, “from the night of the incident.”

  “Yes, of course,” Woody said, shaking Margot’s hand.

  A young man at a second desk was typing something rapidly with two fingers. They waited for him to finish. He pulled the form out of the typewriter—several carbons—and handed it to the commissario, who looked it over. “Very good.”