by Sue Margolis
“No, not really,” Stephanie said.
“Look, you won’t tell her I know, will you? She’ll be on the phone telling me I’m interfering before I’ve even said a word.”
“No, Mum, I won’t say anything. Promise.”
Stephanie laughed quietly to herself and at last put the lasagna in the microwave. As she sat looking through the TV listings in the paper, her thoughts returned to Albert, Jake’s father, with whom she’d had a brief fling in Italy over three years ago. It sounded appalling, she always thought, to describe Jake, whom she loved more than anybody in the world and without whom life would be totally meaningless, as the result of a brief fling, but it was true.
Albert lived in L.A. He’d always helped support Jake financially and he came over as often as he could. But his visits were erratic. Stephanie knew there was nothing to be done. They lived on different continents. Albert had a living to earn. But Jake wasn’t a baby anymore: he was a little boy and he needed a daddy in his life to do boy stuff with. He needed somebody constant—somebody who would play kick-around in the garden with him before bed, who would be there when he woke up in the morning. The only person he had at the moment was her dad. Harry did his best, but he was pushing seventy and he just didn’t have the energy to keep up with a toddler. Unlike her mother, who as a result of hormone replacement therapy, not to mention her congenital neurosis, was positively brimming over with energy. Naturally, she worshiped her only grandchild and had taken it as a personal slight that Stephanie had employed Mrs. McCreedy instead of asking her to look after Jake. The reason was simple: like Grandma Lilly said, Estelle interfered too much.
“Of-course-you-know-best-darling-but …” had become her mantra since the day Jake was born. This was followed by one or a combination of the following: “don’t you think he might be too hot/cold/uncomfortable in that? Or perhaps he’s hungry/tired/wet, has an infection/a virus, needs more Infants’ Tylenol/less Infants’ Tylenol/the doctor, just to be on the safe side. I mean, God forbid. You’d never forgive yourself. Stay where you are, I’m phoning an ambulance… .”
OK, the ambulance bit was an exaggeration, but not much of one. Had Estelle come to look after Jake it would have taken all of Stephanie’s strength to hold on to her sanity. Love Estelle as she did, her interference and general neurosis drove Stephanie round the bend. Over the years she’d tried talking to her, and discovered Estelle wasn’t without personal insight.
“I know I’m annoying. I know I interfere too much, but I can’t help it. You and Jakey are so precious and I worry about you all the time. Sometimes I lie awake at night worrying.”
It was clear that Estelle would never change. But Stephanie had begun to. These days she was getting much better at letting her mother’s behavior wash over her. Her friend Lizzie, who watched a lot of Oprah, said visualization was the key. Whenever her mother started to annoy her, Stephanie had to imagine her irritation was a balloon. Then, in her mind’s eye, she had to visualize it floating higher and higher into the sky until it finally disappeared. Of course Stephanie scoffed at first, but she agreed to give it a go. A year later, Estelle still drove her mad with her constant interfering, but now when she put down the phone from her mother, Stephanie was just that bit less inclined to want to eat her own head.
Of course, when she was a teenager, Stephanie and Estelle had had the most spectacular set-tos. The ear-piercing one was the worst. At fourteen, Stephanie was desperate to wear gold hoops in her ears. Her mother refused to allow this, on the grounds that a) it was common, and b) there wasn’t an establishment on the planet that performed ear piercing to the Estelle Glassman Gold Standard of Hygiene. Stephanie would get a gangrenous infection in both earlobes. This would spread to her brain, cause meningitis, and she would end up a vegetable—or worse. Since they would have nothing left to live for, her parents’ lives would be over too. In other words, Stephanie’s getting her ears pierced was certain to bring about the complete destruction of the Glassman family.
But Stephanie refused to let the matter drop. After months of verbal battles, she finally wore her mother down and she gave in. Stephanie could have her ears pierced, as long as it was done at Harrods. Afterward, when gangrene and meningitis failed to set in, Estelle took the credit. What Estelle didn’t know to this day was that Stephanie never went to Harrods. Instead she got her friend Natalie Finkel to come round when Estelle was out, and she performed the ear piercing with a needle that they sterilized on Estelle’s gas stove. The two girls then went to Top Shop and blew the Harrods money on tube tops.
Stephanie had met Albert in Verona. It was September and still baking hot. Back in London, she’d just finished recording a ridiculous jingle for men’s briefs: “Ground control to Major Thong.” Since her bank account was now in the black for the first time in ages, she decided to take a break and spend some time with her friend Lucy. They had known each other since school, and Lucy, who was studying postgrad art history in Verona, had been nagging her for ages to come and stay. Stephanie decided she would stay in Verona as long as her money held out.
It turned out that Paramount, which was doing a remake of Spartacus with Chris Eagle in the lead, was filming at the city’s Roman amphitheater. Lucy, who practically swooned at the mention of the star’s name, happened to have a contact at the Paramount press office. He managed to wangle them onto the set one afternoon to watch the filming.
They spent the morning visiting the Romeo and Juliet balcony and wandering from one street café to the next, getting high on the glorious espresso. After lunch they decided to hit the posh shops for an hour. Not that either of them could afford anything. In the end Lucy made her buy a black Versace Gstring with a scarlet sequinned pubic heart, just for a laugh and to say she’d gotten something.
Stephanie had imagined that the amphitheater would be in the middle of a field somewhere out of town, but it wasn’t. It sat there, a vast, squat, wondrously preserved stone ruin in a piazza right in the middle of the city. Encircling it, fifty or so yards from the walls, were low metal police barricades. This created an off-limits area, which was crowded with Winnebagos, trucks full of equipment and catering vans. Then there were the film people: darting women with headsets and clipboards, sweating, jelly-bellied blokes lugging gear or standing around drinking from liter bottles of water.
Stephanie and Lucy showed their press passes to one of the darting women who appeared to have momentarily stopped darting in order to be chatted up by a severely cute Italian policeman. She barely glanced at their passes.
Lucy asked around and soon located Chris Eagle’s Winnebago. According to a couple of Italian tabloid photographers, he was inside giving an interview and was due out at any moment. Lucy decided to hang around and wait. Since Chris Eagle had never done a lot for her, sex god–wise, Stephanie decided to go into the amphitheater and take a look around.
She walked through one of the arches and climbed the steps. Inside—apart from the lake of equipment and film people—it was exactly like the picture in her first-year Latin textbook: a central stadium the size of a football field. Then, fanning up and out perhaps two hundred feet, a circular auditorium was made up of row upon row of gnarled gray stone. Of course, these days the theater put on operas, but this afternoon the stage and stadium seats had all disappeared. From what Stephanie could tell, any minute now there was about to be a chariot race.
She strolled over to a trestle table, opened an icebox and helped herself to a bottle of water. A large open truck stood at one end of the stadium. The director and cameraman sat on it, on specially mounted seats. They were surrounded, on the ground, by more camera people and sound and lighting engineers. Near one of the exits stood a posse of paramedics in blue jumpsuits.
Stephanie took a swig of water and watched two utterly authentic-looking charioteers in helmets and metal breastplates climb into their equally authentic wooden chariots. “Stuntmen,” said a woman carrying a black plastic sack full of paper plates, cups and bottles. “Ap
parently Chris was meant to do the dangerous bits himself, but he chickened out. Not that he’d ever admit it.”
“Really?” Stephanie said, wondering what the hacks outside would give for this piece of information.
The director picked up his megaphone. “OK, let’s go for another take. Quiet, please.” A darting woman appeared with a clapboard. The truck moved off and began to pick up speed. Then the two charioteers cracked their whips in the air and the horses were off, thundering around the stadium, throwing up an enormous, dense dust cloud. The truck maintained its position, just a few feet in front. Stephanie watched with her face screwed up as the sides of the chariots came closer, until they were touching and sparks flew between the wheels. Then one charioteer leaped from his vehicle onto the other one. Having grappled with his enemy for the reins, he then managed to keep control of the chariot while at the same time engaging in a wondrously choreographed fight, which ended in his thoroughly convincing mortal wounding. Stephanie let out a gasp as he fell from the chariot and hit the ground with a series of somersaults.
“And cut,” the director shouted through his megaphone. The horse pulling the empty chariot slowed to a trot and allowed one of the technicians to take his reins.
The dead guy, who was wearing remarkably little padding, Stephanie thought, got up and removed his helmet. She watched him as he ran his fingers through his wavy collar-length hair. The next moment, somebody came running up and handed him a can of Coke. He walked toward a couple of chairs. The other charioteer—shorter, stockier, nothing like the handsome dead guy—was already sitting on one of them. She watched the pair of them as they started laughing, backslapping and generally joking around. She got a bit nearer. As Dead Guy took off the padding on his arms and legs, she could see his tight muscular body. Then he sat down and put on a pair of wraparound sunglasses. It shouldn’t have worked, this bloke in a breastplate and tunic, drinking Coke and wearing sunglasses, but somehow it did.
“Hey, Steph.” Stephanie jumped and turned round. It was Lucy. She’d come running in from the piazza and was panting. “Chris Eagle’s due out of his Winnebago any minute. You coming?”
“No, you go. I think I’d rather hang around here.” Lucy shot her a puzzled look, but was in too much of a hurry to argue.
A few minutes later the director decided to go for a second take. In the end it took five or six until he was satisfied. Each time, Dead Guy got up without a scratch on him. “OK, that’s a wrap. Good job, everybody.”
Stephanie couldn’t help herself. She just had to tell him how wonderful she thought he was. She ran to catch up with him. She was a few feet away, when she tripped over a cable. The next thing she knew she was lying on the ground, flat on her face. There was a sharp stabbing pain in her knee. Dead Guy put down his Coke and came running toward her.
“It’s my knee,” she said, wincing. “I’ve pulled it or something.”
“Let’s take a look,” he said. Soft, sexy voice. American accent. He bent the knee gently, making her wince. “So, what’s a nice joint like you doing in a girl like this?” And that was pretty much it. Maybe it was the romance of Verona, that carefree holiday feeling, or even too many espressos before lunch, but she couldn’t fight it. In a moment she fell for the body, the cheesy charm.
“Oh, for God’s sake, stop beating yourself up,” her friend Cass would say a few weeks later, when Stephanie was trying to make sense of it all. “Look, you’d been working hard, you were in the market for some fun. So when you discovered this great-looking bloke, you just knew you had to have him. I’ve done it loads of times.”
The paramedics said she ought to get the knee checked out at the hospital.
“Let me take you,” Albert said. “It’s no problem. We’re finished here for the day.” Since Lucy’s car was parked miles away and Stephanie couldn’t bear to ruin her friend’s chance of meeting Chris Eagle, she agreed. While one of the paramedics went off to find Lucy and tell her what was happening and that she shouldn’t worry, Albert scooped her up and carried her to the parking lot. He put her down gently in front of a silver Audi convertible. She leaned against the door while he produced his keys from under the leather tunic he was still wearing.
“OK, let’s go,” he said. The next moment she was being hoisted onto the back of a shining BMW motorcycle. She looked back at the car. “Oh, sorry,” he said, clearly seeing the horrified expression on her face. “You thought …”
“I’ve never ridden on the back of one of these,” she said.
“Look, I’ll take it real easy, I promise.”
“But what about helmets?”
“Hey, this is Italy. Who would buy Armani and then spoil it with a helmet?”
“Er, me?” Stephanie said.
“Don’t worry, you’ll be fine. The best hospital is only a few minutes out of town.”
The force of the air rushing past quite literally took her breath away. For the first few minutes she buried her head in his back. Then, bit by bit, she lifted her face to the sun and the wind. At one point they stopped at a traffic light. He turned round and smiled. Then he started singing. “Take it easy, take it easy / Don’t let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.”
His voice wasn’t half bad. “You OK?” he said.
“Fine.”
“Not going too fast?” She shook her head. He smiled again and turned away. He carried on singing. His voice wasn’t half bad, she thought again.
After a few minutes they hit the autostrada and he really picked up speed. Suddenly they were overtaking everything in sight. She could see drivers staring at Albert in his short charioteer’s tunic and breastplate. Heart pounding, she held on to him for dear life. She realized she’d never felt so much fear or exhilaration. Until they reached the hospital, she completely forgot the pain from her knee.
Leaning heavily on him, she hobbled up to the reception desk. “It’s OK,” he said to Stephanie. “Leave this to me.” By now the woman at the desk had noticed his centurion costume and was giggling. He ignored her.
“La mia amica si è fatta male a ginocchio,” he said, his accent faultless. “Le fa molto male. Dovrebbe visitare un dottore immediatamente.”
The woman at the desk, still looking at him warily, as if she thought she was about to spot a hidden camera from some terrible Italian reality TV show, took Stephanie’s name and told the two of them to take a seat. Albert turned to Stephanie.
“I told her you’ve hurt your knee and that you’re in pain and need to see a doctor quickly.”
“Wow, where did you learn to speak Italian like that?”
By pure coincidence, Albert was half Italian. He’d been christened Alberto, surname Rossi. His father had died a few years earlier and his mother ran a tiny Italian restaurant in Venice Beach, California.
The doctor said it was only a sprain and gave her an elastic knee support. A week later she was walking normally again. Albert sent her flowers, and three days after they met he took her to dinner. The day before, she’d gone hobbling back to one of the posh shops in town and blown a fortune on the sexiest dress she had ever owned.
It was a beautifully cut silk shift with spaghetti straps. The pale blue matched her eyes perfectly. When he saw her he whistled. “Wow, principessa.”
That first evening they drove a few miles down the autostrada—this time with helmets on—to eat at a fish restaurant in Sirmione, an exquisite medieval town on Lake Garda. They sat at a table a few feet from the water’s edge and drank delicious thick red wine as the sun went down. Afterward they strolled along the narrow cobbled streets. As they reached the bike he stopped, pulled her gently toward him and kissed her.
They went out practically every night for the next two weeks. Lucy didn’t mind, since she’d only been expecting Stephanie to stay for a few days anyway and had already made plans to go to Milan for a couple of weeks to see her boyfriend.
Stephanie accepted Albert because they were never going to be serious and because he made her
laugh until she wept. He also made her come with more skill than any man she had ever slept with.
The memory of the first time they slept together—she held out until the fourth date—would stay with her until the day she died. She was at his flat, leaning against the balcony rail in another obscenely expensive silky shift thing she couldn’t really afford. This time it was backless and in the palest of pinks, which looked glorious with her tan. As she stood there watching a sun as big and red as a medicine ball sink behind the cypress trees, he came up behind her and ran a cold champagne glass very lightly down her spine. She gave a shiver and turned to face him. He put the champagne glasses down on the small garden table. As he cupped her face and kissed her, she felt her insides melt into soft warm molasses. As he started kissing her neck, she threw back her head, holding on to him to steady herself. She felt him begin to unzip her dress and pull down the shoulder straps. Now he was kissing her shoulders, the tops of her breasts. She could feel his erection hard against her. By now she was letting out little sighs, kissing and nipping his face. She felt his hand go up under her skirt. In a moment he had slipped his fingers inside her panties and was feeling the moisture seeping from her.
“Oh, boy,” he whispered, parting her and caressing her gently, back and forth, back and forth.
He led her to the bedroom, where he finished undressing her as if he were unwrapping the most precious, delicate object in the entire world. He stood gazing at her for what seemed like an eternity. When he laid her on the bed, gently spread her legs and opened her with his tongue, she truly thought she would die from the pleasure.
At the end of two weeks, she had to get back to London. Eileen, her agent, had rung to say she’d found her a job singing the jingle for a building society ad.
Stephanie knew it would always be just a physical thing between her and Albert. He could never be right for her. For a start he talked too much and too loudly, mainly about himself—the job, how his much-adored late father had been a stunt artist and taught him everything he knew, how he got into bikes, the stars he’d worked with, the bikes he owned, the Hollywood parties, the bike he’d like to own. On the other hand, his job was fascinating and she couldn’t help finding his stories and all the gossip hugely entertaining.