Passing the Arena and making her way toward the river on this fine morning, Lia felt almost hopeful that her life would soon get back on track. If she could keep moving forward even half as long as her little scooter had, she was bound to end up someplace good.
Chapter Seven
Nick settled into his usual Friday night corner booth at the Woodsman, while his friend Ben Cameron poured two pints of microbrew from a pitcher sweating circles onto the giant lacquered stump that served as a table.
Next would come the latest string of entertaining complaints and hopeless schemes from Ben, Nick thought as he drained a third of his amber bock in one satisfying gulp. A general-assignment reporter for the Daily Tidings, Ashland’s afternoon paper, Ben busted his hump for $23,000 a year covering everything from garden shows to city council meetings. But he always seemed to have an angle on an oddball story that would get picked up by the national press—and help punch Ben’s ticket to a larger paper.
In recent years, Ben had hung his hopes on stories about the death of goggle-eyed Western film star-turned-local celebrity Jack Elam, an attempt by SOU students to start the world’s largest pillow fight, and a local preacher’s “curc”—a church without either “h” to eliminate any possible connection to Hell. In each case, a state Associated Press reporter had rewritten the accounts for general distribution, leaving Ben to labor in obscurity.
“I’ve really got it this time,” Ben insisted, his unruly brown hair bobbing like a box of uncoiled springs. Nick watched the damp circle under Ben’s glass spread across the stump’s age rings. When he was excited, his friend often forgot to breathe, let alone drink his beer. Nick was drawn to his enthusiasm. They’d met when Ben had audited a graduate literature class. Nick soon found himself wishing for a dose of the driving intensity Ben still displayed at 25, and they’d fallen into an easy friendship.
They’d kept this standing Friday happy-hour rendezvous for nearly a year. Ben thought the classy environs suitable for an up-and-coming journalist, while Nick got an ironic chuckle out of seeing the locals put on airs for a dining experience that wouldn’t pass muster in most Seattle diners.
“Don’t fall too far behind,” Nick said, clinking Ben’s full glass with his nearly empty pint. “Remember, it’s your week to buy.”
Ben took a quick sip, which he clearly didn’t even taste. “Man, listen up. I finally found the story, and it was right under my nose. I’m not writing it up for the Scaly Hidings and watching the Ass Press hijack it, either. I pitched the Seattle Times, and they want it. If they like the piece, they might sign me on as a stringer.”
Now it was Nick’s turn to set his glass down. “Seriously?” he asked.
“Deadly serious.” Ben grinned across the stump at him, waiting for the inevitable question.
“Well, congrats,” Nick said instead.
“Don’t you even want to know what it is?”
“I figured you’d get around to telling me before I finish off this pitcher.” Nick smiled back at his friend and poured himself another pint.
“It’s you, man,” Ben said.
Nick set the pitcher down. “Me?”
“Well, not you exactly. Your collection.”
“What?”
“You know, all those tickets from games and concerts that never got played.”
“I know what my collection is. But what gives you the idea I want it turned into some big story?”
Ben’s smile blinked off like a neon bar sign at closing time. “You’re not pissed, are you?”
After a moment’s consideration, Nick realized he wasn’t. “Just surprised,” he said. “Why would I be pissed about having the opportunity to help a friend realize his dream?”
Visibly relieved, Ben finally took a real drink. “Only one pitcher tonight, then,” he said. “After that, I’ve got to interview you and go through those tickets. The story’s due day after tomorrow.”
It had been a long time since he’d taken anyone home from a bar, Nick thought. This wasn’t exactly what he’d had in mind, but at least he’d have some company this evening.
Chapter Eight
Serafina and Salvatore usually teamed up to answer any letter even hinting at suicide. She would formulate a clinical response encouraging the writer to seek help, while Salvatore gave it the literary polish for which Club di Giulietta was known. Given the tragic ending of Shakespeare’s play, he was at first surprised they didn’t receive more misty odes to ending it all, but then he’d realized that most people set on killing themselves lacked the romantic spark to ask for Giulietta’s thoughts on the issue.
He glanced again at the first line of the latest note: “Rather than kill myself, I have decided to pour my grief into a letter this night.” That’s what had prompted Serafina to entrust the response to Salvatore alone.
“I don’t think he’s really suicidal—just dramatic,” she’d said. “Why don’t you take this one on your own and let me know if you have any problems with it.”
And now here he was, perched on the nondescript stone bench overlooking the Adige where he always ended up when he had a tough response to draft and needed the help of his beloved Viola.
In the first weeks after her passing, Salvatore had thought her spirit might stay near her gravesite. But when he’d tried talking with her there, he sensed no response. It was only after six months, during a melancholy retracing of the walk they’d taken on their first date, that he’d felt her presence on the bench, brushing at his coat sleeve as he trudged by.
She never talked to him, not exactly. But she lived on as his muse. Words that evaded Salvatore’s grasp elsewhere flowed through his long fingers onto the pages of his leather-bound notebook when he sat on what he now thought of as their bench. As crowded as the river walk grew during the warmer months, he never found his seat occupied. It was as if it existed in an intersecting dimension accessible only to him and sweet Viola.
As a team of rowers glided by in the water below, Salvatore picked up his heavy ballpoint and watched another of his late wife’s wise responses appear before him, a kind of magic he never tired of seeing. As Giulietta, Viola wrote:
Dearest heartsick friend,
I am glad to see you have worked out for yourself the futility of following my ill-chosen path to a cold and dreamless sleep. But for one both so smart and sensitive, I am surprised you have not yet seen the one glaring truth that would have kept you from even considering such a tragic end.
You write that although your lover lives, her love for you has died. But it cannot be! If her feelings for you have truly vanished, then she never actually possessed the love you seek. The true love of which you speak can never end. Keep your heart open to it, and it will find you. That, I promise.
Forever yours,
Giulietta
The pen felt hot in Salvatore’s fingers. He capped the nib and closed the notebook with a snap. He did not wish to stain Viola’s words with his tears.
Chapter Nine
In the two weeks since Lia had resolved to get out more, she had enrolled in a traditional northern Italian cooking class and applied for a job as an apprentice prep cook at a laid-back ristorante a few blocks from her father’s apartment, at the edge of the old city.
Antonio, ever critical, had ridiculed the meals she lovingly prepared for him. He called it slop not fit for American tourists. Even though her father and trusted friends assured Lia she had a natural flair for cooking, Antonio’s constant insults had wounded her almost as much as the cheating. As a child, watching her mother whip up simple, delightful meals, she’d often thought she might grow up to be a famous chef armed with secret family recipes. But that notion died along with her mother, and when Lia was forced to help run the household she began to see cooking as more of a chore.
With Antonio, she had tried to start afresh, buying cookbooks and exotic ingredients to impress him. She set out to express her love through food as her mother had done every day. So when her husband rejected tha
t overture just as he had sourly dismissed her other attempts to fill their home with affection, Lia gave up, rotating among the same four or five basic dishes.
When that only provided more ammunition for his ridicule, Lia fantasized about expressing her growing hatred for Antonio through food. Perhaps she would poison his pizza, or at least scald his sharp tongue with boiling cheese. But before he drove her to that extreme, he’d flagrantly cheated on her again, and Lia had left him instead.
Now she was reconnecting with the joy she used to feel in the kitchen and honoring her mother’s memory in the process. Lia hadn’t yet applied for a spot in cooking school; signing up for the one class, taught by a well-regarded retired chef, felt like a big enough leap for now. And if she landed the prep job, really a glorified internship with lots of chopping and some fill-in work on the grill, she surely would learn as much about cooking as she could in any first-year course of study. And then, who knew? Maybe having that restaurant with her name above the door wasn’t out of reach.
Lia began working out the particulars as she kneaded the linguine dough. She was the youngest student in the class, and the other women often gave her tips and supportive smiles as she relearned the basics of pasta-making. The retired chef, who clearly wished he was still running one of the city’s top kitchens, wasn’t quite as warm with her. In fact, he could be downright gruff as he chided her for using too much flour or over-salting a sauce. But he also was quick to praise her when she presented a perfect platter of bruschetta or gathered a particularly fresh selection of produce during one of their field trips to the evening farmer’s market. Despite his ego and quick temper, Vittorio Valente had turned out to be a good teacher.
“You’re working it too hard, Cattaneo,” he said from behind her. “That’s going to be some tough linguine when you’re through. Try not to treat it like the ex-boyfriend you’d like to strangle.”
Lia felt herself blush, but she didn’t really feel embarrassed. As she tossed aside her failed effort and started making a new batch of dough, she felt liberated. As the chef passed by on his way to the next table, he smiled at the red now fading from her cheeks.
“I must be a mind-reader,” he said, twisting one end of his long moustache with a flourish.
Lia smiled back at him. “Actually, I was hoping to make a batch strong enough to strangle you.”
As the laughter of the other students welled up around him, Valente said, “Cattaneo, I think we’ll make a chef of you yet.”
Chapter Ten
When Nick awoke Saturday morning, Ben was still tapping away at the keyboard. After showing him the ticket collection and discussing his reasons for starting it, Nick had been too tired to kick Ben out when he suggested it would be easier to write the story with the box full of alternate reality close at hand.
“Mr. Cameron, I will need to check my e-mail at some point,” Nick said on the way to a breakfast of bran flakes and recently expired milk. No response. He scratched a thigh through his blue sweats as he grabbed the box from an otherwise-empty shelf and shook it. “There’s enough here for two bowls,” he called out. “Not sure about the milk, though.”
Still not getting an answer, Nick poked his head around the corner. Ben hadn’t heard a word.
Nick ate his cereal over the sink, rinsed the bowl, and then headed back to the fridge hoping to find some palatable orange juice amidst the crusty bottles of ketchup, ancient jars of strawberry jam and neon-green margarita mix. He let his hand fall from the door when the printer coughed to life in the living room.
“Finished,” Ben said as he rounded the corner into the kitchen and nearly sideswiped Nick, who was on his way out. “Got anything to eat?”
Nick handed Ben the nearly empty carton of milk and pointed to the cereal box next to the sink. “Help yourself.”
“Thanks.” While Ben grabbed a bowl, Nick peeked around the corner and watched a page slide out of the printer onto the floor, where it joined three other pages ostensibly containing the story of his collection. After the remaining pages touched shag, Nick scooped them up and put them in order.
“Mind if I read this?” he asked as Ben joined him.
“Your milk was bad,” his friend said, snatching the story from Nick’s hand. “And no, I can’t let you read this until it comes out.”
“Why?” Nick felt his gut tighten with irritation. “Is this some kind of hit piece?”
“Nothing like that.” Ben grabbed his jacket off the creaky desk chair. “It’s just not kosher in journalism to let a source read a story before publication.”
“Is it kosher to interview a friend and then write the story in his house, on his computer?”
Gazing at the floor, Ben shook his head. “No. No it isn’t,” he said, meeting Nick’s eyes. “You’re right. I owe you a look. But I can’t promise I’ll change anything except any factual errors you might find.”
“That’s fair,” Nick said. When Ben offered him the pages, he added, “I’ll just read it on the computer.”
“You’d better look at this. I already e-mailed myself the story file and deleted it.”
Now it was Nick’s turn to shake his head. “You are a sneaky bastard, aren’t you?”
“I’ve never denied it.” Ben handed over the copy and put on his jacket. “If you have any corrections or concerns, call me in four hours or so. I want to catch a nap before I re-read it and send it along to the features editor.”
As soon as Ben shambled onto the sidewalk, Nick took to his ratty easy chair and began reading. He knew his uneasy feeling about the story was warranted when he saw the proposed headline and opening paragraph:
Tickets to paradise
by Ben Cameron
Ashland, Ore.—Whenever Seattle native Nick Moore finds himself overwhelmed by life, he steps into a rich alternate reality of his own creation. It’s a world of Mariners playoff victories where Kurt Cobain’s still churning out albums and Sept. 11 is just another date on the calendar. Moore, 30, has fashioned this personal nirvana out of pre-printed tickets for rock ’n’ roll tours and professional sports series that came to early, sometimes tragic, ends. By collecting these mementoes of events that never transpired, the Southern Oregon University graduate student has found a unique and fascinating way to escape the real world at will.
It went on like that for page after page, making Nick sound like a creative kook too overwhelmed with reality to spend much time dealing with it. Though well-written, the story made him feel at turns despondent and angry. How could he have trusted this career-obsessed kid with the intimate details of his life? How could he have expected Ben to understand that a harmless hobby shouldn’t be trumped up into a case of mental agoraphobia?
He started dialing Ben’s number, but then let the phone fall back into its cradle with a thunk. Let the bastard sleep, he thought. Maybe he’ll listen to reason after some rest.
But then he saw the extra piece of paper that had floated partway under the desk. It contained only a story tagline: Next in the Unreal Collectors series—Visit a virtual porn-star love shack.
Nick grabbed the phone again. It took six rings to wake Ben up.
“Couldn’t wait to give me the good news, eh?” Ben asked with a nervous laugh.
“Yeah. The good news is, I might not wring your neck the next time I see you.” Nick watched his knuckles whiten as he squeezed the cordless phone. For several seconds, he heard only Ben’s breathing. Maybe if he tightened his grip…
“I just tried to make an honest assessment, man.”
Now it was Nick’s turn to clam up.
“Maybe I sold the escapism angle a little too hard,” Ben said finally.
“You think?”
“I said maybe. Yeah. But, you know, ever since the shit with Allison you haven’t seemed all that engaged to me. And you have been spending more time on the collection. I know it’s just a phase, a way to heal, but I called it like I saw it.”
Nick relaxed his grip. He hadn’t considered the
possibility that Ben actually believed the crap he’d spun out onto those pages. But he was a friend, so it made sense that he wouldn’t just cynically sell him down the river. The question was, did Nick believe he was hiding from reality, too?
“Okay,” he said. “The story was a slap in the face. But you’ve given me something to think about. I feel kind of like the guy whose friend finally tells him he’s got chronic bad breath. I appreciate the honesty, but the verdict isn’t pleasant.”
“I should have talked with you before letting you read the piece,” Ben said. “I was too cashed to think straight, but I owed you that. Sorry to be so insensitive. If it’ll make you feel better, I’ll call my editor this afternoon and push back the delivery date until everything’s cool between us.”
This time, Nick didn’t leave his friend hanging. “It’s already cool. You wrote it like you saw it. It’s a good piece, and it means a lot to you. Send it in.” He hung up before Ben could gush out his thanks.
At least no one in Ashland read the Seattle Times. His father might see it, though. Nick couldn’t remember if he subscribed. If he did read the story, he’d take the opportunity to express gentle disapproval of his son’s useless hobby, but then tell him he was proud of him anyway. The guy fairly radiated conditional love.
Finding Juliet Page 3