by Julie Sarff
At this point of my story, I put my hands on my hips and say in my most mocking voice, trying to mimic my Aunt Alice to a T, “Yes, well, maybe you have learned enough for one morning, Lee-lee Bee-Brrr-Eee. I tell you what, Lee-lee, why don’t you follow me back downstairs. I’ll show you the laundry and you can iron a few sheets before you take your lunch break. Va bene?”
“Oh brother.” Rupa grimaces.
“Yeah,” I say in my own voice, “so I am thinking to myself at this point, well, that’s more like it. So I follow Alice to the laundry. It’s a pretty room too, Ruup, my friend. It looks exactly like a slightly larger version of the cloakroom I told you about—the cloakroom with the staff entrance; remember, I did tell you about the fuss Alice made because I used the front door on my first day of work?”
I wait for Rupa to nod before I continue, “Anyway, this room too has high, deep set windows. And it smells so nice. Like linen water.” I stop and pretend to be sniffing the Villa Buschi laundry room.
“So here I am in the laundry room and I think to myself, ‘this isn’t going to be so bad.’ I grab the floral sheets fresh off the drying rack and I attempt to iron every living crease out of the sheet… EVERY LIVING CREASE. After all, this is my new fabulous job! My ticket to independence! Except Rupa, my dear, the creases didn’t want to come out. That is the way God made them. Who am I to try to change nature? But I tried. I made yet another pass with the iron, concentrating so hard my tongue was sticking out like this.” (I mime this part for her.) “Both Alice and the laundress, Carla, stood over me watching with quite serious looks on their faces. They offered encouragement and took turns showing me how to hold the iron ‘proper-like’.”
“Freaks.” Rupa takes a big sip and polishes off her third martini.
“Exactly, freaks. Cleaning freaks! I flashed them both a murderous look and Alice said, ‘Yes, well, how about some lunch, Carla? We’ll just leave her to it then,’ and they both shuffled out.”
“Thank heavens for small favors,” Rupa points out.
“Yes, but get this Ruup. No sooner did the door close behind them, than I wadded those nasty sheets up in a bunch and threw them on the floor. Then I sat down and leaned against the washing machine… I was faint with hunger. And I began to think that maybe my job is not going to be so fabulous after all. I mean, who am I kidding? I’m not going to meet anybody important and be instantly promoted to a more interesting position; I am just going to clean toilets and iron sheets and wither away an old… well, an old maid actually.” I let out a small sniffle. The tears begin to form, and I do my best to hold back the tide.
“Oh dear,” Rupa says. “That’s the martini talking. In fact all this is the martini talking. I know you, Lily Bilbury. You are a good mother, and you are the eternal optimist. Come on now, it will get better. You’ve only been there two weeks. And think, pretty soon you are going to meet Mr. Logan, how incredible will that be?”
I am not so sure it will be ‘incredible.’ Right now I can’t even begin to think about meeting a famous Hollywood star. In fact, I can’t even sit up any longer. I feel bone weary. I lie back down on the floor and curl up. “It’s still hideous, even now,” I snuffle. “Alice orders me around all day. You know?”
Being the wise person she is, Rupa says nothing. “And do you know what Rupa? The house is clean! So all we do is clean the clean. Oh… now… maybe it needs a little dusting every week or so, but otherwise there is nobody there to get it messy. I don’t know when Mr. Logan is going to be home, they say he is very busy on set.”
“Wow… just think, Brandon Logan. He is so handsome, isn’t he?” Rupa gasps, clearly trying to stir the conversation in the direction of the villa’s new owner. By the excited look on her face I realize she has been waiting to talk about him all night. “What a dream he is. How excited you must be to meet him.”
At these words, I don’t move. I lie completely still as I contemplate meeting Brandon Logan.
“Well, he’s really not all that, do you think?”
“Oh come on.” Rupa throws me a look.
“I dunno. He’s not really my type.”
“But he’s so debonair and good-natured at the same time. And he’s always off saving children in the Congo and stuff—pretty darn sexy.”
“Yeah, I guess. Not like Johnny Depp sexy. But I guess he’s like 75 percent hot,” I say snobbishly.
“Ah well, there is only one Johnny Depp.” Rupa glances off into space. For a moment she is far, far away. I should respect her silence, her reverie, her alone moment with Mr. Depp. But I don’t. Instead I use every ounce of my strength to pull myself into a seated position and start talking about the villa again. “And you know, Rupa, I still don’t get the gardens. I mean I must have asked Alice one hundred times why they are such a mess, but all she does is ignore me. And she says there is a gardener, but I have yet to see him. It’s all a bit creepy if you ask me.”
Rupa pours herself her fourth martini as she mulls everything through. (Her fourth! Goodness me, she better take it easy. I hope she doesn’t end up standing up and face-planting right into my coffee table.)
“Heaven knows, I do the best I can to drive around that mess of a garden,” I ramble on. “I’ve learned to drive that poor excuse of a driveway like it’s the autostrada. I swerve out of the way of everything.”
“Like that anaconda vine you told me about briefly on the phone?” Rupa teases.
“Yes! Yes, like the anaconda thing. My goodness, that’s right, I never got around to telling you what happened to it…”
“Something happened to it?” Rupa raises an eyebrow.
“Alice went out there in the rain and hacked it up.”
“What?”
“Yes, yes it’s true! I kept complaining, saying my Panda could barely make it over that vine and could she please call in the gardener to get rid of it. The fifth time I asked her she got this wild look in her eyes.”
“What?” Rupa’s voice gets higher and higher each time with each repetition of the word “what.”
“Yes, she got this wild look in her eyes, and then I watched her from the window. She went out to the converted stable, you know where Brandon Logan keeps all his expensive cars, and she came out with this huge axe, and she traipsed off towards the driveway. She came back about a half an hour later soaking wet, with that ugly plastic headscarf she always wears plastered to her head from all the rain.”
“That’s crazy. Why didn’t she ask the gardener to do it?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. That’s the same question I have asked myself.”
Rupa takes another sip of her martini. I think at this point she must be totally blotto.
Come to think of it, I think I may be totally blotto.
“Ruup?”
“Yes.” She glances over at me.
“I don’t think I can feel my legs.”
“Oh?”
“Or any of my body parts, really.”
“Want me to help you get to bed?”
She doesn’t wait for an answer. In a jiffy she comes round—stretching out a hand and pulling me to my feet. Gently, she helps me locate first my bedroom and then my bed, upon which I throw myself face first.
“Ruup?” I murmur into the pillow. It comes out muffled sounding like “woop.”
“Yes, sweetie?” she says.
“You won’t drive, will you?”
“Of course not, I never do after a drink. I’ll call Dario to come and get me. I’ll wait in your living room till he gets here.”
“Suss a goo man…” I murmur into the pillow. “Home savin da animals…”
“Yes, well there is not a lot for him to do. I fed and watered all the dogs and cats before I came over, you know.”
“Such a good man, your Dario, to help you run your rescue.” I turn my face from the pillow and look at her. Rupa smiles and turns out my light.
“Not like my Enrico,” I say, flipping over onto my back.
Rupa hesit
ates in the doorway. “Try not to think about that tonight? Okay?”
“Okay, but Ruup, I’m so sorry about you losing your job and all.” I glance over at her. Silhouetted by the light from the single 60-watt bulb in the hallway, she looks like an angel.
“Sweetie, I’m going to close the door now, and I want you to go to sleep, but I want you to get something straight. I lost my job because of that inexcusable wreck of a man known as your ex, not because of you, okay?”
“Okay,” I murmur sleepily. “Okay, but Rupa, one last thing. I mean losing the job was bad. But, I’m so sorry about the restraining order they slapped on you. I still feel horrible about all of that.”
“Heh. Yeah. The restraining order…” Rupa chortles softly as if she is recalling a most fond memory. “Oh well, Lily, what are friends for?” And with that she shuts my bedroom door and pads off silently down the hall.
chapter 7
REGRETTABLY THE NEXT morning, I am really feeling the effect of our little get together. I get up, look around in a bit of a haze, realize it is another terribly drizzly day and note that I am still wearing Rupa’s sari. I shut my curtains, trade my sari in for a proper nightie and go back to bed. After all, why should I get out of bed today? I can count two good reasons not to. No, three. First of all, my head hurts from my hangover and second, it is raining. And third, I am alone.
Alone. Like every Sunday. The boys are off with their father and, of course, I have no date. But in order to get a date, I need to get a proper divorce. I’ve asked Enrico a million times for one, and the prospect of asking yet again is all so depressing that I simply lie still, snug under my comforter.
Mid-morning, however, I have an epiphany. I decide that lying around in bed all day would be giving up. What I should do is rouse myself, go to the kitchen, and microwave an entrée for one. It is a sign of changing times here in Italy, but they do have entrees for the single person in the frozen section at the supermarket. I have to admit some of them taste quite decent.
Despite my little pep talk, I don’t get up. I’m not ready to get out of bed or to eat anything. Instead, I yawn and stretch and contemplate the question –how did I get here, in northern Italy, alone with two boys? Well, I calculate miserably, it all happened because of Three Huge Life Mistakes. The first life mistake came about long ago, when I was in the full flush of youth. That sounds a bit dramatic, but it’s true. You see, long ago when I was fifteen, I went on a vacation with my father to Rome. He was a high school art teacher and we went to the Sistine Chapel where he gave me a fine lecture about the restoration of the ceiling. Looking at the before and after photos of Michelangelo’s masterpiece, I decided, on a lark, that I wanted to learn to restore art when I grew up.
That set me on a mission to attend the best art restoration school in the world which is obviously in Italy, and the language of instruction is, of course, Italian. So the very moment I returned from vacation, I decided to sign up for a high school exchange program and go abroad in my junior year so I could learn Italian. That year abroad was Huge Life Mistake Number One.
I am just going to gloss over what happened during my time as a high school student in Piacenza, Suffice it to say, it mostly involved spending every minute possible with a beautiful boy with hair the color of midnight. Like I said, Enrico was not my first choice in Italian men; there was once another. But that is a story for another time. Actually, no, that isn’t even a story for another time. I returned home and that was the end of my first love, he soon met another person and completely forgot me. But the reason I refer to this period as Huge Life Mistake Number One is not so much because of that boy but because it put me on an irreversible path.
Fast forward three years. After finishing up my senior year back and doing two prerequisite years of junior college concentrating in art and chemistry, I finally became eligible to transfer to an Italian university. With so much enthusiasm that my hands were trembling, I filled out the application for my student visa to study in Italy, this time to attend what I will simply call the World’s Most Fantastic Art Restoration School in Perugia (or WMFARS for short).
After some intense negotiations with an unmotivated employee at the Italian consulate in Denver, I finally got the “permesso di soggiorno,” and I showed up in Perugia on one very hot day in late September with my MWFARS acceptance letter in hand. I had learned Italian, I had taken the two years of prerequisite courses, I had navigated the unfriendly and confusing Italian bureaucracy and here I was in Perugia—ready to look at paintings through a microscope. And guess what happened? WMFARS was shut down, that’s what. In typical Italian bureaucratic style, they never bothered to inform the students until we showed up. And what did we, the students, see when we arrived? The entire WMFARS building was shuttered up, with a sign on it in violent pink, nailed to the front door. It said that the closure was only temporary. Inscriptions would be honored as soon as the school received more funds from the Italian government.
Wonderful, I thought. Marvelous. So I’ll hang out some five thousand miles from home and wait for my university to reopen. This event NEVER happened because the Italian government never forked over any money. That was Huge Life Mistake Number Two –the whole sequence of events: the moving to Italy and waiting for a school to reopen.
The rest is cliché really. You can probably guess. I met a man. I married a man. The man cheated on me. And now I am stuck, which makes huge life mistake number three.
There it is. One long string of mistakes. I seem to be a master at them. I actually got chewed out by a woman at a shop the other day who told me that as mother I should make things work out with my ex no matter what the cost. I should be, as she put it, more grown up. I suppose she is right, to a certain extent. Suddenly, I feel a lump in my throat. I am miserable. I roll over and pull the sheet back over my head, vowing to stay in bed for the rest of the day. I lie there for exactly one minute before I throw off my covers and leap out of bed as if bitten by a snake. To hell with the microwaveable entrée for one, I am getting DRESSED UP. Then I am going to downtown Arona to eat lunch at the best restaurant in town.
chapter 8
I ate a fine lunch at Il Pranzo Vivo. I enjoyed my own company. I even tipped my wineglass in toast to all the other diners who glanced at me in apprehension, feeling sorry for a woman who was dining alone. But honestly, I was okay. More than okay.
The very next day, feeling confident and happy, I come flying through the gates of Villa Buschi and maneuver my way expertly across the grounds. After only a few weeks of working here, I have learned where every overhung branch, every pothole, and every aggressive hedge resides. Since Alice hacked up the anaconda vine, there is nothing to stop me from driving top speed up the oxcart path. In addition, Alice has given me a gate opener with super long range ”oomph” so that I can push the button long before I get to the villa; no more sitting and waiting for that creaky old piece of iron to move out of the way. All of this means, I make it from the entrance gate to the villa in five minutes on this particularly hazy Monday morning.
With a bit of concentration, I do an expert job at parking in the narrow-slotted parcheggio. Then I emerge from my car to breathe in the cool, crisp autumn air. Even though there are rain clouds rolling in to obliterate the sun, I still smile wide—because Alice won’t be at work today. She has gone off to Milan to buy new towels for all the guest bathrooms or something. To tell the truth, I can’t remember what it is that she is buying.
After hanging up my coat, I get right down to work. I grab my supplies and my daily task sheet before making my way up the stairs to return guest bedroom number six to its former glory. As it turns out, guest bedroom number six is really not all that messy. In fact, the whole house is not that messy. I decide to move on. I change the sheets on a couple of beds for good measure, and do a bit of light dusting. I also straighten up the guest bathrooms as best I can. I pour the deep blue stuff in the toilet that makes the water such a lovely color, like the Mediterranean Sea off the
coast of Portofino. After that, I lug the vacuum up the stairs and go after the shaggy rugs.
Have I mentioned the little shaggy rugs? They are inexplicable. They look like something spewed sheep; ugly, black and white-striped lumpy sheep. From a design point of view, I think they should all be torched. The worst thing about those shaggy rugs is that they pucker up and get stuck in the nozzle of the vacuum, making a loud honking sound. Worse yet, the process of vacuuming them takes forever. Today, the nine of them on the second floor take me over an hour. As soon as I’m done. I check the rugs off on my list and head back downstairs for a break. There’s a Toblerone in my purse calling my name.
I am just opening the door to the cloakroom to retrieve my Toblerone, when I see Carla, the laundress, and her sister Elenora, the chef, coming in the staff entrance. “Ah, Buon giorno Signora Bilbury!” they say in unison. “Che freddo che fa per Ottobre, vero?” What a cold October it is, isn’t it?
I answer that yes, it is a most cold, blustery October, and watch as they hang up large woolen coats, scarves and mittens.
“Un café, Signora Bilbury?” Elenora invites temptingly. She swings the door to the kitchen open wide and ushers me through.
I have to say, I never miss a chance to take in the grandeur of the Villa Buschi kitchen. It’s a cook’s paradise. It’s all marble floors and European maple cabinets and copper pots hanging from an enormous iron rack in the middle of the kitchen. There is a long galley-style island that runs the entire length of the room. But the piece de résistance is the stone oven that Alice informs me was built during the original construction of the villa… which was around 1695.