Pasta Imperfect

by Maddy Hunter

  “Replenishing all your supplies, I see.” I scrambled to collect their articles.

  “There’s a very nice drugstore by the train station,” Britha informed us. “It has everything, except sturdy sacks.”

  I stuffed all the items into a gallon-size Ziploc bag I’d tucked away in my shoulder bag for emergencies, then handed the bag to Barbro. “That should hold until you get back to the hotel.”

  “You’ve thought of everything,” Britha complimented me. “You take good care of us, Emily, dear. Thank you again. We’re going to take a few more pictures from up here, then we’re going shopping. We’re anxious to see how the prices in the open-air market compare with those at Wal-Mart.”

  “Do you need any help back down the stairs?” I inquired.

  Barbro smiled sweetly. “You’re nice to ask, but the advice I’d lend, is leave us here and help your friend.”

  Jackie’s mouth twitched with annoyance as we circled back to the stairs. “What is it with that woman? Why does she talk like that?”

  “Occupational hazard.” I stopped to shoot a few more pictures. “She writes sentiments for greeting cards. I think she’s been doing it for so many years that her brain is permanently geared that way.”

  “Well, she should get it un geared because it’s really irritating.” She peeked back toward where we left them. “They’re kind of cute though, aren’t they? Are they really as identical as they look?”

  “Yup.” I swung around and captured Jackie in the lens of my camera. “All except for one…elusive…characteristic.”

  “And what’s that?” she asked, striking a pose for me.

  “They won’t tell anyone. Family secret. Smile.” CLICK.

  Chapter 6

  I still think you should have sprung for the leather coat,” Jackie admonished four hours later, as we seated ourselves at the last open table in a crowded outdoor ristorante. “Five million lire was a steal.”

  We were in a triangle of space between ancient buildings that hunched claustrophobically together, all crooked angles and shuttered windows. Around us, leafy bushes in terra-cotta planters fenced us off from the intrusion of foot traffic. Above us, an umbrella the size of a parachute shielded us from the sun. In nearby alleys, speeding Vespas disturbed the Florentine siesta with their constant chain-saw buzz.

  “Blow twenty-five hundred dollars on a coat?” I cried. “Are you nuts?” Much as I adored leather, I liked food on the table and a roof over my head better.

  “Yeah, but it was full-length.”

  We stashed bags labeled Intimissimi, Eredi Chiarini, Ferragamo, and Versace near our feet for safety and grabbed the plastic-encased menu from the middle of the table. None of the bags were mine. I was just a pack mule.

  “Pizza looks good,” Jackie said, studying the menu. That was nice to know, especially since pizza was the only item on the menu. The choices were written in Italian; but I’d been in Italy for two days, so my translation skills were improving by the minute.

  “Just for your information, Emily, salsiccia is sausage, vongole is clams, cipolla is onion, and olive is olive. So, do you know what kind of pizza you want?”

  “Yup.” I pointed a proud finger at my selection. “Hawaiian.” When I looked up again, I found Philip Blackmore navigating his way through a maze of tables toward us, Sylvia Root, Gabriel Fox, and the two divas traipsing close behind.

  “Excuse me, Emily,” he interrupted politely, his right shoulder drooping from the weight of the huge bottle of water he was toting in a sturdy L.L. Bean harness. Guzzling designer water might be considered trendy these days, but not if you ended up looking like Quasimodo. I wondered if Philip Blackmore was familiar with the term “water fountain.”

  “I realize we haven’t been formally introduced,” he continued, “but would you mind if we joined you? Duncan recommended this cafe to us, and as you can see, all the tables are filled…except yours.”

  Our table was big as a wagon wheel and could easily accommodate eight. “Um, sure,” I said. “Happy to have you join us.” Did I have a choice? I scooted my chair closer to Jackie’s. Marla stood back, drilling me with a wary look.

  “Should you be out in public? Philip warned us that you’re highly contagious.”

  “Well, I don’t know about the rest of you,” Sylvia griped, pulling out a chair and plopping herself into it, “but I’m starving.” Then to me, “If you’re contagious, do me a favor and don’t breathe on me. Is this the menu?” Her jacket and pants puddled around her like hundred-year-old-wrinkles. Her hair was thin and manishly cut, her face bland and colorless. She lacked style, sex appeal, and soft edges, but she oozed the kind of self-confidence and control that made you think the only time Sylvia Root wouldn’t have the upper hand would be if she were eating a plate of spaghetti in that jacket of hers.

  Gillian Jones looked slightly unsettled as she hovered beside Marla. “Is your skin condition very painful?” she asked me delicately.

  “Why don’t you ask her if it throbs?” Marla said under her breath.

  “I heard that,” Philip Blackmore said. “And as I cautioned the two of you back at the hotel, we are not having this conversation.”

  “Are you people going to stand there jabbering, or are you going to sit down and order?” Sylvia demanded.

  While making introductions all around, Philip directed Marla and Gillian to adjacent chairs, which I thought was pretty risky considering they might be given access to silverware later. Gabriel Fox slid into the chair beside me. “So what’s the story with your skin condition, Emily? No need to be embarrassed. We’re all friends here.” His light brown hair was razor cut to within an inch of its life, his beard a precise quarter inch of growth, his fingernails buffed and polished. His mouth gleamed with what I would guess was ten thousand dollars’ worth of veneers, but his smile couldn’t do the teeth justice. He looked about as comfortable smiling as Dumbo had looked flying.

  “No story,” I answered, raising my hands in the air. “I have everything under control.”

  He gave me a slow look up and down. “Somehow, I would have guessed that. So you can guarantee we won’t be sorry we dined with you?”

  “Not unless you choke on your food,” said Sylvia. “And if that happens, you’re on your own. I never learned the Heimlich maneuver.”

  “I know it!” Jackie volunteered. “I could save him.”

  “Don’t waste your energy, honey.” Sylvia dipped her head to eye Jackie over the top of her reading glasses. “It’d be a shame to break one of your pretty nails over him.”

  Gabriel grinned his amusement. “Sylvia’s charm is her trademark. You should catch her on a bad day.” He hugged his arms to himself and shivered. “Brrrrr!” Lowering his voice, he said in a more conspiratorial tone, “The problem is, she’s been lusting after me for years and has no outlet for all her pent-up sexual frustration.”

  Philip Blackmore cracked his invisible whip. “That will be quite enough, Gabe.”

  “Is there anything on this menu besides pizza?” Sylvia griped. “I didn’t come all the way to Italy to eat pizza.”

  “Why did you come to Italy?” Gabriel grazed his knuckles over his fine facial hairs, seeming to enjoy the abrasive rasp against his skin. “For the seafood? You should be in luck, Sylvia. I hear they run daily specials on barracuda.”

  Sylvia smiled at the comment before removing her reading glasses and skewering him with a cool, patronizing look. “I’m here for the same reason as everyone else. To gather whatever pearls of wisdom the good ‘book doctor’ will be kind enough to share with us. Because, as we all know, whenever Gabriel Fox speaks, the publishing industry listens, no matter what he says, or whom he destroys.”

  Was it my imagination, or was I detecting some major undercurrents here?

  “Granted, he wields some power,” Philip said, favoring Gabriel with an oddly guarded look. “But lest you forget, Sylvia, so do you.”

  “You’re all kidding yourselves,” Marla said,
laughing. “The person with the real power is Oprah.”

  “She’s right,” Gillian agreed. “You become one of her book club selections and pow! You get it all. Mega print runs. Endless publicity. More money than you can spend in six lifetimes. Literary stardom.” She straightened her spine and set her clasped hands firmly on the table. “I want to be an Oprah selection.”

  Gabriel Fox pounded the table with his fist in a howl of laughter. “Why don’t you aim for something more realistic? Like…like discovering a vaccine to prevent whooping cough?”

  Jackie nudged my arm. “Didn’t somebody already do that?”

  “You have no chance of ever becoming an Oprah selection,” he went on. “Oprah’s books are deeply intelligent, complex, multilayered. They refract truth through layers of falsehood. They render prose with subtlety and grace. They’re masterpieces of modern-day literature.”

  Marla looked confused. “I thought they were books about torment, depression, lost children, suicidal characters, and dysfunctional families, in which case, Gillian has a point. Her books would fit in just fine.”

  “So there!” said Gillian, her glee diminishing suddenly as she paused to reflect on Marla’s words.

  “Oprah is a cash cow,” Sylvia announced flatly, “and if you were smart, Blackie, you’d be waving Gillian’s and Marla’s upcoming books in front of her nose so you’d have a chance of getting in on the action. So what if her taste doesn’t run toward cowboys and barbarians. Her reading habits could change. Think of the quarterly profits. The cash bonuses at Christmas. It’s all about the money, and you’re blind if you say otherwise.”

  Philip Blackmore looked decidedly uncomfortable. Uncapping his bottle, he took a long swig of water. “I’ve always admired your bluntness, Sylvia, but this is neither the time nor the place for a financial analysis of the effect Oprah has had on publishing.”

  She cackled with laughter. “Woo the lady, Blackie. And if you won’t do it for Gillian and Marla, do it for Gabe, who would sell his left nut to be known as the man who edited one of Oprah’s anointed literary masters.” She sidled a wry look at Gabriel before casting an impatient glance around her. “What do you have to do to get a waiter in this place?”

  Considering the escalating tension at the table, I hoped everyone’s utensils turned out to be plastic. “Wasn’t that sad about the woman who fell last night?” I ventured, hoping to tap into some of their more sympathetic emotions.

  “Speaking of that —” Gabriel leaned forward to address Philip. “I’m not judging her entry if she’s dead.”

  “Are you sure you didn’t give her a little shove yourself to ensure you wouldn’t have to judge her entry?” Sylvia accused.

  Gabriel’s eyes became hostile slits. “Okay, babe, this time you’ve gone too far.”

  “Well, I think this whole tour was a bad idea,” Gillian complained. “First, you expect me to give up all my secrets to the wannabes, telling them how to write a romance, then you concoct this idiotic contest, guaranteeing that one of them will be given a free ride. I’m glad the fire destroyed all my lecture materials. Do you know what I had to go through to get my first book published? How many years of rejection I went through? I tell you, Philip, not only is this contest grossly unfair, it’s positively insulting.”

  “Ditto,” said Marla in an unexpected show of unity.

  It was nice to see them finally agree on something, but it caused me to wonder where they’d been last night while Cassandra was falling down the stairs.

  “Is that the waiter?” Sylvia asked. “Hey, you!” she shouted. “Over here!”

  Philip appeared suddenly tired beneath his killer tan. He leaned forward and steepled his fingers, looking as if he were gearing up to deliver a history lesson. “I don’t need to tell you that publishing has changed dramatically in the last three decades. Back in the old days of the business, the whole industry was kinder and gentler. The slush pile was a potential gold mine. I started out as a reader in a small publishing house and moved on to a position as an assistant editor, but even then, I read every manuscript that came across my desk and wrote letters to everyone I rejected. I always tried to blunt the blow with a few personal words of encouragement.”

  Aw, that was so sweet.

  “These days, editors have no time to give personal critiques, and the slush pile is, regrettably, a relic of the past. Literary agencies have become clearinghouses, and literary agents are performing the tasks that were once the sole responsibility of in-house editors. It seems everything has become a little cockeyed, and a great deal more impersonal. Ask Gabe. He’ll tell you.”

  Gabriel looked as if he wished he were somewhere else. “Whatever.”

  I caught his eye. “Did you start out your career as a reader, too?”

  He sighed restlessly. “I started out as a reviewer. A miserable choice of employment for a kid straight out of college who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Bennington. I assigned stars to the schlock that came across my desk so readers could decide if they wanted to buy the latest action hero novel, sci-fi thriller, or pulp romance. The quality of the fiction was so pathetic, it gave me ulcers, so I moved on to a position where I could influence the quality of the books being published. I made Hightower’s name synonymous with superior literary fiction.”

  “Oh, yes,” Sylvia said, laughing, “you’ve improved the quality of literary fiction so much that it’s completely incomprehensible to most humans — even the pseudointellectuals who claim to understand what these bozo writers are talking about. Wake up and smell the coffee, bud. Commercial fiction is where it’s at these days, and Hightower is finally realizing what I’ve known for a long time: people want to read stories that have plots!”

  Gabriel seemed deaf to her words. “My authors don’t need to be fettered by plots. Their vocabulary alone elevates them to a class by themselves. Their sentence structure is superb. Their verb usage is a thing of beauty. They learn from me, Sylvia. They don’t use just simple present or past tenses. They intermingle the imperfect and the pluperfect with equal skill. Once, one of my prodigies even used the rare but ever dynamic…superpluperfect.”

  Gillian stared at him, agog. “What the hell is he talking about? Imperfect? Superpluperfect? If he tries pulling that kind of crap on me, I’m telling you right now, Sylvia, I’ll want another editor.”

  “Me too!” Marla chimed in. “Barbarians don’t use verb tenses. They grunt.”

  “Ladies, ladies,” Sylvia soothed. “You’re making way too much of this. It’s all quite easy to understand.”

  A smile snaked across Gabriel’s lips. His eyes snapped arrogantly. “Why don’t you explain it to them then, Sylvia? Save me the trouble.”

  “Gladly. I’ll even give examples. Shall we start with the present tense? That would be: The editor is an asshole. The perfect would be: The editor had become an asshole a long time ago. The imperfect would be: In fact, as a child, the editor would act like an asshole all the time. The superpluperfect would be: If only we would have known the editor was such an asshole, we would have asked to be assigned to someone else. Get it?”

  Wow! I’d been using the rare but dynamic superpluperfect a whole lot and didn’t even know it! But Gabriel wasn’t looking any too happy about Sylvia’s grammatical expertise. In fact, he was looking decidedly miffed.

  Jackie’s mouth dropped open. “That is so impressive. Were you an English teacher or something before you became an agent?”

  I could swear I saw a flicker of unease cross Sylvia’s face before she plastered a stiff smile on her mouth. “I attended Catholic schools for sixteen years. Does that explain anything?”

  “But Jackie raises a good point,” Philip interjected. “All the years I’ve known you, Sylvia, and we’ve never discussed our postcollege years. You didn’t start out agenting right away, did you? What was your first job after you graduated college?”

  “Look, look.” Gillian waved her hand madly to catch our attention. “There’s that woman with t
he funny eyebrows. Over there with that group of people standing in front of the tobacco store.”

  Funny eyebrows? I looked for Helen Teig among the half dozen or so people milling around the doorway, but failed to see her. Heck, those people weren’t even tourists. They were natives. Look at them! Their tasteful, form-fitting slacks and tops. Their sumptuous colors. Their intricately tied scarves. Their hot sunglasses. They could all afford to shed a few pounds, but leave it to the Italians to accent their least flattering features with style and flare, not to hide them.

  I nodded in their direction and commented to Gillian, “Those people aren’t on our tour.”

  “Yes, they are. I can tell from their campaign buttons. They were all wearing them when they went out this morning. It looks like they’re backing some old bald guy who smokes a cigar. I wonder what office he’s running for. The woman with the Magic Marker eyebrows has hers pinned to her scarf. See?”

  Campaign buttons? I darted another look at the group. Oh, my God! She was right. They weren’t Italians. They were my Iowans dressed up like Italians! Eh! The two Dicks, Helen, Grace, and Lucille had traded in their farm caps and polyester wind suits for Ferragamo and Prada. They looked nothing like themselves anymore! Uff da! How would I ever find them in a crowd if they didn’t stick out like sore thumbs? A ripple of panic fluttered along my breastbone. This was terrible!

  “Sorry for interrupting,” Gillian apologized, “but I had to point that woman out to you. Don’t you think someone like that would make a great character in a book?”

  “I couldn’t agree more,” Marla said agreeably.

  Wow. These two had really turned a corner.

  She touched Gillian’s hand with genuine affection. “Those are the kind of brows that could definitely ‘wing upward in heart-stopping shock’ at the sight of ten inches of flaming virility.”