Finding Juliet

by Frank Sennett

  At least he knew the basic story. And it was a perfect pairing with the Juliet festival, Nick realized, ending, as it did, with dying lovers sealed into a tomb they will share for eternity. The soprano who played the Ethiopian princess—imprisoned in Memphis only to fall in love with an Egyptian prince—had a sublime gift for phrasing to go with a voice that was as clear and pleasing as Lia’s soft breath in his ear.

  “I always find the consecration of Radames so powerful,” Lia said as they relaxed over drinks at his hotel bar. “I like to imagine seeing the premiere in Cairo, Christmas Eve of 1871—not that they marked the holiday, but it would have been a magical evening.”

  “Those were priests of strong voice,” Nick agreed. “I can’t believe you have the opportunity to take in such amazing performances all summer long.”

  “To me, it is Verona’s true charm,” she replied dreamily. “Even the tourists enter the arena after spending the day with their Juliet fairy tale and finally understand what lies at the city’s soul.”

  “I feel as if I’ve been given a window into your soul tonight as well,” Nick said.

  “I suppose that is true. What brings you that much joy in life?”

  He smiled.

  “Don’t say, ‘You.’ That is too much.”

  “But what if it’s true!” he protested.

  “Everyone’s heart soars after a night at the Verona opera,” she said with a wave of a hand. “I am charmed, of course. But you still barely know me.”

  “That’s why I’m here. I’m on a crash course to get to know Lia.”

  “Do not expect a quiz at the end. I don’t like talking about myself that much.”

  “Why not?”

  “I am boring,” she said with a sigh. “I live at home and work in a restaurant. That’s about it.”

  “What don’t you have?” Nick asked suddenly.

  She looked up from her drink. “I’m sorry?”

  “In your life—what’s missing?”

  Lia shook her head. “If I tell you that, you will just tailor yourself to me like a suit. But love only works if it fits off the rack.”

  “I’ll just watch and learn then.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes,” he said, breaking into a broad smile. “What are you doing tomorrow?”

  “Mondays are usually slow, but not during the festival. I have to cook all evening, I’m afraid.”

  “But during the day?”

  “No plans,” she said.

  “Good. Then I’ll pick you up at noon.”

  Lia lightly played her fingers back and forth across his knuckles. “What will we do?”

  “I’m going to study you the best way I know how. I’m going to take your picture.”

  “Mi piace,” she said. “I like that.” She gave him a warm kiss on the cheek as she rose to leave. “But now I will really need to get my beauty rest, no? Ciao.”

  “A presto, tesoro” he said.

  “Keep reading that guidebook,” she called over her shoulder. “We might just make an Italian out of you yet.”

  “Sono innamorato,” he whispered to himself.

  Chapter Fifty-five

  Nick couldn’t stand the idea of waiting for noon to see Lia again. When he’d called her at nine on Monday morning, he could tell she felt the same way. She wore a smile he could hear through the phone. After meeting for a late breakfast at a small café on a colorful square, they walked along the Adige toward Ponte Scaligero.

  “Do you know where your father writes his Juliet letters?” Nick asked.

  Lia pointed ahead. “It’s the bench right past the next bend.”

  “Then that’s where we’ll start the photo shoot. If it’s true your mother’s sprit visits him there, I want to try for a family portrait.”

  “Very funny. He says she guides his hand, but I think it is just a pretty place for him to remember her. I doubt very much that she will make herself available to pose.”

  But Lia liked the idea enough to start the session sitting demurely on the bench. He caught her in profile, gazing down the river, lips curled into a hint of a smile. It was the expression of someone self-conscious about being studied but willing to give it a try. After several changes of pose and angle, she seemed to relax into the experience, giving in to her inner goddess as Nick placed her upon a pedestal with his digital camera lens.

  In a last close-up, he stood facing her straight on from three steps back. She gazed directly at him with an unguarded expression of warmth and vulnerability, her long, dark curls moving almost imperceptibly in the warm breeze, brown eyes glistening, full lips slightly parted as if she was about to extend him the invitation of a lifetime.

  He snapped the shot and moved in even closer as she stood and playfully pushed the camera aside. He grabbed her extended wrist with his free hand and pulled her to him. With a surprised laugh, she found his lips and they kissed for a long time, exploring, parting, and then breathing each other in again.

  They only stopped when they heard another couple approaching. The young American tourists smiled at them, and Nick asked them to take their picture. It was a moment he was glad to have captured in both the camera and his heart. He returned the favor for the Americans, and then showed Lia the screen capture of the picture the woman had taken of them.

  “We look so happy,” she said, snuggling against him for a better view of the small LCD screen. “What silly imbecilles.”

  “I’ve always been a fool for love,” he said, kissing her neck.

  “I believe that is well established, signore. Do you seduce all of your models like this?”

  “Yes, I admit it.”

  She slugged him playfully on the shoulder. “You do?”

  “Yes, it’s true,” he said. “Of course, you are my very first model.”

  “Well, I hope there will not be a long line of them waiting.”

  He shrugged. “Come on, let’s take some more shots before the next girl shows up. I’m on a tight schedule.”

  “Che impertinente!” she said with a laugh. “I know one brutta strega who modeled for you last week and would jump at the chance to do it again. So perhaps I have another photographer waiting for me as well.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it,” he said as they walked up the steps to the castle-like bridge. “But maybe we should stick together. Where else are we going to find this type of artistic chemistry?”

  “Ok, deal,” she said, taking his hand and giving it a happy squeeze.

  They stayed away from Casa di Giulietta, lest they run into the “dumb bitch,” as Lia had called Fortunata. Instead, they finished their shoot under the turrets of Castelvecchio and the nearby Gavi arch, a white limestone relic dating back to the first century A.D. The camera was almost as infatuated with her as Nick was, and her beauty seemed to grow even more radiant as the day progressed.

  They grabbed some cheese, bread, olives and pears at a nearby market. Nick found it oddly unromantic to be paying for the impromptu feast with pan-European euros.

  “Do you miss the lire?” he asked as they made their way back to the river.

  “At first it was a national trauma to give it up,” Lia said. “It’s been a few years now, but people—young and old—still complain about the changeover sometimes.”

  “They were certainly colorful bills, from what I understand,” Nick said.

  “Garish,” Lia agreed. “Pinks, oranges, greens, blues—and the people on them! It was our cultural and scientific history all wrapped up in a billfold. Verdi, Caravaggio, Volta, Marconi, Montessori…”

  “Wow, your country used to be big news,” Nick joked.

  She shook her head in mock seriousness. “You should not talk. Your dollars are an ugly bunch of long-dead presidents.”

  “We’ve got Ben Franklin, too,” he said. “Also ugly, but never president.”

  “The poor man! But really, you are more right than you know about Italy. We are an antique country, bypassed. Ah, but what living history to en
joy.” They were back at the riverside now, and Lia spread her arms wide to capture the sweep of palazzos and ancient spires.

  It was breathtaking.

  After their late picnic, he walked Lia to her restaurant and headed back to the hotel to download the photos onto his laptop so he could enjoy the full-size versions. Transferring the files gave him an idea. After a brief, halting conversation with the evening desk clerk, Nick hopped into the rental car and drove to the small, American-style mall he’d passed last week on the industrial outskirts of the city.

  There, he found exactly what he was looking for: a sleek, black mp3 player no bigger than a business-card case. It was perfect. It was made by an American company, but its name sounded suitably Italian.

  If the personalized CD was Mix Tape 2.0, then this would be a quantum leap in romantic music giving: a mix music player for his sweetheart. He drove quickly back to the hotel and walked to an Internet café he’d spotted near the arena. After signing in at the desk, he connected the tiny player to a PC and logged on to the music store.

  Nick stuck mostly with the Italians—Rigoletto, Aida, La Traviata, Il Trovatore, Madama Butterfly, La Bohème, La Tosca, Il Barbere di Siviglia, Lucia di Lammermo, Bel Canto, Norma, La Sonnambula, and, of course, I Capuleti e i Montecchi. He skipped Wagner entirely, but couldn’t resist Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and two French operas: Bizet’s Carmen and Charles Francois Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. He chose the latter work for obvious reasons, even though most critics outside France deemed it the composer’s second-best work, after Faust.

  If only Verdi, Puccini and Bellini could see their complete masterworks downloaded into a device so small, he thought. The process took only minutes, but he also spent a few hours online researching and sampling what the critics considered the seminal recordings so he could put together an eclectic mix of conductors, eras and singers ranging well beyond Callas and Pavarotti. To this operatic assemblage he had to add Elvis Costello’s The Juliet Letters and the haunting Dire Straits number “Romeo and Juliet.” That still left plenty of room for Lia to add her own music.

  As he studied the tourist-snapped picture of them he’d loaded onto the player’s small color screen, Nick identified so keenly with Mark Knopfler’s “lovestruck Romeo” that he found himself whispering, “You and me, babe—how ’bout it?” He positioned the computer’s microphone and recorded one final file just for Lia.

  He unplugged the cable from the grimy PC and gave a wave to the café’s heavily pierced proprietor. Walking into Verona’s lively nighttime streets, Nick hoped he’d be getting the answer to that question soon.

  Chapter Fifty-six

  Lia botched so many orders that evening it probably would have been better to invite the tourists into the kitchen to prepare their own meals. But the head chef, back from a relaxing vacation, had given her only a few looks of mild concern. She felt sorry for the young waitress, Fiamata, who had to bear the brunt of her mistakes, but at least no one stormed out in anger.

  “You’re somewhere else,” the waitress whispered as she passed back yet another wrong order for culinary triage.

  “It’s true,” Lia replied. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t ever apologize for being in love,” the young woman said with a grin. She stepped into the kitchen and poured a glass of water.

  “You’re pretty smart for a kid,” Lia said.

  “Drink this before you melt,” Fiamata said. She handed over the glass and Lia gulped it down.

  “Thanks,” she gasped, wiping her mouth on the sleeve of her blouse.

  “You’d never show such bad manners in front of a man,” the waitress joked.

  Lia laughed. “You’re right. Why do we do that? We’re always on stage, like we’ve got to perform for a man, just so.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Fiamata said. “I always make a point of passing gas on the first date. If he doesn’t find it charming, forget it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Well, sometimes I wait for the second date.”

  “I’ll have to try that,” Lia said, shaking her head.

  “You should. It’s liberating. And the good guys appreciate your willingness to… let your hair down. They want you to feel comfortable with them.”

  “I guess we put a lot of that pressure on ourselves.”

  “Exactly,” Fiamata said. “But don’t worry: I never break wind in front of the customers.”

  “Good to know,” Lia said.

  “Speaking of which, I’d better get back out there. But tell me one thing: Who is it that’s making you into such a wreck?”

  “Remember the handsome tourist you fixed me up with?”

  The waitress put a hand to her mouth. “No! The one who said you stink?”

  Lia laughed. “That’s the one. I guess he got over it.”

  “Well, I expect an invitation to the wedding,” she said, pleased at being let into Lia’s confidence.

  “Don’t get too far ahead of the game,” Lia said, rolling her eyes. “We’ve been spending time together, but we’ve only got a week and I still barely know anything about him.”

  “You can always text him or chat online after he leaves.”

  Lia shook her head. “That’s so impersonal. Besides, I can’t type.”

  “Then you’ll just have to talk to him as much as possible over the next several days. Or you could do like we did in school and start passing him notes.”

  “That’s what got me in this mess in the first place,” Lia said. “But maybe something more substantial than a note…”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  Lia looked at the overwhelming string of orders awaiting her. “Back to work for both of us,” she said. “I’ll try to focus.”

  The waitress gave her shoulder a squeeze “Hey, if you can’t deliver the right orders, at least give me some juicy romantic thoughts to hang onto tonight.”

  As Fiamata returned to do battle in the dining room, Lia took one last breather at the sink. The talk of marriage reminded her that she hadn’t yet signed those papers and delivered them to her father’s attorney. Legally, she was still Antonio’s wife. Yet she physically ached for Nick. It was all she could do not to throw off the apron and run to his hotel. But after her disastrous last choice, she knew it was best to take things slowly this time around.

  Besides, although Nick’s notes had persuaded her to give him a pass for his avventura with Fortunata—which, in all fairness, did occur before their first official date—it still felt too close to infidelity for comfort. Lia downed a slug of Chianti and yanked another order slip from the wheel. It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter Fifty-seven

  When Lia met Nick in front of his hotel Tuesday morning to spend a few hours together before she had to work the lunch shift, he asked her a question he’d pondered while drifting off to sleep the night before: “Did you ever wonder what might have happened to Verona if Shakespeare had set his play somewhere else?”

  “Maria proteggici!” Lia said, making two fists with the pinky and index fingers pointing outward.

  “What are you doing” he asked, laughing.

  “These?” she said, waggling the fingers at him like a bull getting ready to charge. “These are le corna, the horns. We make them to protect us from bad luck. And what you just said would be very bad luck indeed.”

  “But I thought you weren’t the hopeless romantic type.”

  Lia paused, nodded. “That is true. But while I may not long to be part of a tourist pageant, I do hold the play itself close to my heart, especially Verona’s part in it. Besides, where else would he have set it?”

  “Milan’s just down the road. Venice is the largest city in the Veneto.”

  Here came the horns again. “And then what?” she insisted, having fun with it now. “And then Verona is known primarily as the place where Dante Alighieri wrote the Purgatorio? The place where you can write a letter to the Devil himself, maybe visit a circle of Hell erected
within enticing view of the Autostrada? I do not think so, sir. No, Shakespeare got the story here, and Verona is the only place he could bring his Giulietta to life.”

  Now Nick made the fist-horns and waggled them at her. “Then you must prove it: Show me the Verona you love so much.”

  They started on the west side of Piazza Brà, across from the Arena, and followed the curve of a wide promenade known as the Listone, its dark cobblestones arched like eyebrows, past uncrowded shops and outdoor cafes where a few backpackers lounged with their laptops under the still-warming sun.

  Nick reached out a hand and Lia took it easily, using the other to point out prominent places in history, both hers and Verona’s, mixing insights about Vivaldi and Salieri with stories of first dates and school outings. He chuckled at the sight of a medieval building housing a Lacoste store, paused to study the understated statuary of the old city’s fountains and took in an ornamental street lamp with a large globe up high and two smaller ones hanging from arched side arms like matched pearl earrings. The painted white bars of the crosswalks were among the few familiar touches he found on these streets.

  They followed the ever-swooping seagulls toward the Adige, which revealed itself as a fast-flowing ribbon of water with faster-moving cars running alongside or across it on arched and turreted bridges. The river curved around the city, almost cradling it. Magnificent brick mansions towered above the banks, flanked by ornamental trees reaching far above the red-tiled rooftops. In places, the riverside was so heavily forested that only the topmost apartments of nearby homes had a clear view of the water. Clock towers and other graceful spires dotted the pleasantly low-rise skyline surrounded by hills of moderate height.

  Back in the central city now, they passed densely packed housing stock and headed toward a church with a dome peeking out from behind a tall building that boasted an elegant white façade. Above the great wooden door, the statue of a saint smiled down upon them. Turning, they saw the imposing bell tower, long, narrow, windowless. Peddlers in the open-air market in front of the old church brightened the scene considerably, but they smiled more at each other than the paintings and curios on display.