Advice for Italian Boys

Home > Other > Advice for Italian Boys > Page 4
Advice for Italian Boys Page 4

by Anne Giardini


  “I need to get in shape quickly,” she told him at the end of an hour-long kick-boxing class early on a cold November morning.

  Both Monica and Nicolo were breathing heavily, and triangles of sweat showed under their arms and at their breastbones.

  “The thing is, my ex-husband Gordon is getting remarried in May and I’m supposed to be going to the wedding with the children—I’ve got two children—to act the role of the gracious ex-wife, and so I’m going to need to look terrific. I want to look as if I’m in perfect shape, or at least as perfect as possible, considering, you know, considering everything. Considering what we have to work with, I mean, and the kids and all of this, this transition phase. I know whatever we can achieve will be superficial. Fundamentally not much is going to change, and not for very long, but sometimes superficial is all you can really manage, if you know what I mean. If you take me on, I promise I’ll come to the gym as often as you think I need to, and I’m willing to work very hard.” Monica paused and pressed her locked hands against her damp chest at the level of her diaphragm. “I need you to help keep me focused. I am famous for losing focus; anyone you ask can tell you that. Famous. I’ve been working really hard already though, and there is no way I can risk slipping backwards. I really need you to help. Please say you’ll do it.”

  Nicolo checked with Sarah and James, the yin and yang administrators who worked in the small office and staffed the front desk—Sarah, tall and angular, lank-haired, square-jawed, blue-skinned and diffident, and bullet-headed James, a fat five-foot-five of roseate, crew-cut, pugnacious taciturnity. They told him he was free to provide personal training sessions to the gym’s clients if he wanted to. A portion of his fee would be kept by the gym to pay for the use of the facility and equipment and overhead, and in return Sarah and James would help him with scheduling and with collecting and processing the payments. Nicolo updated his resumé, and his older brother Enzo arranged for the photographer two doors down from the store where he worked to take a series of black-and-white photographs of Nicolo. One of these, in which a trick of framing and lighting and the angles of the room in which the picture was taken made Nicolo appear taller than he was, but that otherwise captured him reasonably well—strong and patient in a white T-shirt with the gym’s emblem on his chest, arms crossed over his chest, his biceps sculpted in light and shadows—ended up in an informal blue binder of photos and bios through which members of the gym could browse when they were considering a personal trainer.

  At Monica’s request, they met first with a nutritionist who worked part time at the gym. The nutritionist, a yellow-haired woman named Sue Hopewell, went over a form that Monica had completed, on which she had been asked to write down everything that she had consumed over the past three days. Sue leaned forward and gave Monica a computer printout that showed, in comparative numbers and columns and pie graphs printed in primary colours, whether she was eating too much, too little, or the right amount of various vitamins, minerals, calories, and other “food values,” as she referred to them.

  “You are deriving a third too many of your calories from fat,” she advised Monica. The corners of her mouth turned down as she pointed to a graph that compared kinds of oils and fats.

  “See here. You’re getting too much of the wrong kind—saturated. Polyunsaturated is the kind you need, not that you need much of that kind either. And you’re not getting enough from fresh fruits and vegetables and whole grains. You need five full servings of fruit and vegetables a day. Those giant bakery muffins you’ve been eating every morning are going to kill you. They have far too many calories and they’re full of corn syrup and refined flour as well as loads of saturated fats. All that kind of thing does is throw your whole system out of whack and set you up for an entire day of cravings for salt and sugar and oil. Okay? Understood? Are we agreed?”

  Sue slid a stack of colourful brochures and several photocopied pages across the table—food and nutrition guides, a shopping handbook, a calorie counter, menus and recipes. She pressed them into perfect alignment and then leaned forward, opening and explaining each one in turn, pressing the pages flat and then closed, pointing to highlight the information that she most wanted Monica to remember.

  “Overall, I have to say that there’s not too much you really need to change, if you’re careful and if you pay attention,” Sue summed up. “It is more a matter of some tweaking here and there. I teach a cooking class on Tuesday nights at seven, if you’re interested. We cover how to cook the same kinds of foods that you’re probably making already, but how to make them with more fibre, and with a lot less fat. You can replace the oils for example in many cakes and other desserts with unsweetened applesauce, which you can make yourself and purée in the blender. Not many people know that. There are dozens of little tricks that are easy to put into everyday use once you know about them. If you use fresh ingredients and take a little care, most people can’t even tell the difference. They just feel better, and they have more energy. It’s a win-win all around.”

  After Sue had packed up her printouts and charts and folders, Nicolo and Monica went over another form that Monica had completed, one that described Monica’s current fitness activities and her goals.

  “I don’t want to kid you, Nicolo,” Monica said, attaching her gaze to his. She hitched up her sweatpants, which in the absence of a waist tended to drift lower on her hips. “My only aim is to look as great as possible by June nineteenth. That’s the day when my ex is getting married again. But the day after the wedding I’m going back to how things are now. Not perfect, but good enough. Low maintenance. Comfortable. Relaxed. I know myself really well, and when you get right down to it, this is how I want to be.”

  “You’re already in good shape,” Nicolo said.

  “Yeah, I know that,” Monica said. “This new person Gordon has hooked up with is supposed to be a bit of a pampered brat. The kind of woman—well, she’s a girl, really, she’s twenty-four, a baby when you think of it—who manages to get looked after all her life. I want to look good of course, that goes without saying, that I can take care of. But I also want to look confident and competent, the opposite of someone who needs to be taken care of, independent, self-reliant. I’ve thought about it very carefully and I’ve decided that is what’s important to me. This is what it’s going to take to get me through this. Can we do that, Nicolo? In less than six months?”

  “I think we can do that,” said Nicolo. That Monica was so clear about what she wanted to achieve would make progress easier to measure and should help him to keep her on task.

  “We can work on your arms today and get started on the ab muscles next time. It’s going to hurt, you know that.”

  “Pain I can do,” said Monica. “As long as it gets me to where I want to be and as long as I know it’s not going to last forever. I was in labour with Sarah for seventy-two hours and everyone was amazed that I wasn’t begging for an epidural. What’s a few months of a little extra effort compared to that? This’ll be over before I know it and then it’ll be mission accomplished.”

  Nicolo was selected next by a couple, Alden and Clarissa O’Brien—a judge and a local television anchorwoman—to work with them both three times a week. After them came Patrick Alexander, a lean, hyperkinetic, tightly sprung man in his mid-thirties with a mobile, rubbery face, a broad-hinged, dark-shadowed jaw and an active Adam’s apple. Then Phil and Bella Fell, dark, slim, tall twins, new members at the gym on the six-month Bring a Friend trial plan, asked if they could see Nicolo early mornings on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays.

  Alden and Clarissa O’Brien came in together after work on Wednesday. Alden was a tall man in his mid-fifties. His upper back was beginning to curve forward into a studious stoop. He had a round stomach, thick arms and legs, a ropy neck, a substantial head of greying hair and a face deeply etched after years of close reasoning into a permanently shrewd and competent expression. He plunged his large, smooth hand forward to enfold Nicolo’s in a solid grip when he int
roduced himself, adding quickly “Call me Alden,” to put an end to any question that Nicolo may have had about the correct form of address for a judge. Judge O’Brien? Your Honour? Your Worship? M’lord? There was no way of knowing. Even Enzo hadn’t been certain when Nicolo had consulted him on this point of protocol. Alden’s handshake was a double up and down, strong and authoritative.

  The clasp of Clarissa’s long, freckled hand was considerably gentler. She was twelve years younger than her husband, and very slender. Her face—pale skin, wide-set eyes, strong nose and chin, elaborately furled lips, and a high brow winged by thick dark waves of hair—seemed familiar to Nicolo, likely from some TV show or other, Clarissa suggested, and she named six or seven programs she had hosted that he might have seen. Nicolo had heard of none of them. “A billboard maybe,” she concluded, and she raised her shoulders, making it clear that both she and Nicolo knew that TV programs and billboards were ridiculous. Her smile hung in the air for a long moment, a curved and complicated bracket.

  Partway through their orientation tour of the gym, Clarissa hung back while her husband walked ahead. She rested one of her hands on Nicolo’s forearm.

  “I bought these sessions with you as a birthday present for Alden,” she said to him. She spoke in a low voice and inclined toward him, her manner direct and complicit. “The trouble is he works too hard and spends far too many hours at his desk. His oldest friend died a year ago and since then he doesn’t even get out to play tennis any more. He needs to get some exercise, move around a bit, or he’ll end up like Bruce with his heart attack. I have to confess to you that I only signed on to keep him company. I hope you don’t mind that I’m telling you this. It’s easier for him to have me do this with him.”

  Alden caught up with Nicolo at the end of the tour, after Clarissa had returned to the women’s locker room to change out of her workout clothes. “It is important for you to know that my wife is not strong,” he said. “She will want to push herself, but she can’t do as much as she would like. I made up my mind to go along with this scheme of hers only so that I could make sure that she paces herself. There’s nothing serious, don’t get me wrong, but she had a close bout with an eating disorder, anorexia nervosa, a few years ago, a year before we were married, and I want to make sure she doesn’t head down that path again. It still holds temptations for her. So we can’t let her overdo it or get too fixated on any of this. Do you understand me? We’ll watch her together, both of us?”

  The judge thrust his hand into Nicolo’s and pumped it up and down, once, twice, making the bargain physical, manifest, and Nicolo felt that an enforceable pact had been made between them.

  Early on Thursday afternoon, Patrick Alexander gusted into the small room where Nicolo met his clients. He was almost half an hour late, and he emitted explanations and apologies like nonna’s watering can, which leaked and streamed and sprayed where it would. A long and utterly boring meeting had run hopelessly, fruitlessly late. Dreadful people—he was sure Nicolo knew the kind: demanding, grudging with money, quick to judge, but slow to make any kind of decision. Certain Nicolo understood but terribly sorry nonetheless. Simply not possible to break away. Dying to be here. And then the direst traffic possible. Every intersection clogged with pedestrians. Who walks these days? With this weather? Sheer idiots all of them, in those stupid puffy jackets and tuques. Drove like a maniac. Miracle hadn’t crashed or killed someone or gotten yet another ticket. Hoped he hadn’t thrown an absolute wrench into the schedule. Ready as soon as he changed.

  Patrick was a whirl of chatter and confessions. He emerged from the men’s change room after another five minutes wearing very short white shorts with a dark green stripe down the sides, a lime-green tank top of a synthetic woven material that clung to his skinny chest, black socks with a subtle pattern of chevrons running along the outside of his ankles, and black lace-up leather shoes.

  Nicolo looked down at Patrick’s feet and cleared his throat. Patrick was bouncing at the knees and swinging his arms forward and backward to loosen his shoulders. He gazed expectantly at Nicolo. Nicolo hesitated. He could let the shoes go, but they were likely to mark up the floor and, more seriously, they didn’t provide the kind of cushioning and support he advised his clients to have when they exercised. Patrick’s feet looked to be about the same size as his own, nine and a half, although not quite as broad.

  “Would you like me to lend you a pair of training shoes?” Nicolo offered.

  Patrick looked down at his socks and shoes and smacked his forehead with his right palm. Nicolo must think him an absolute idiot. Always in too much of a rush. Hadn’t been thinking. Mind somewhere else completely. Too many things going on to try to keep track of them all. Sure he understood. New project keeping him up all day and half the night. Sheer madness of people to try to get an entire product launch done in under two months. So sleepy during the day, completely drained. Too tired to think straight. What an utter nuisance he must be. Would not be a minute. Three shakes of a lamb’s tail.

  Patrick reappeared minutes later wearing fine-spun lime-green socks that slouched around his ankle bones, and thinsoled lemon-yellow tennis shoes. Nicolo decided to make allowances in light of the unavoidable crisis in Patrick’s professional life, and, although they were a good twenty minutes late getting started, gave Patrick the full allotted hour, which was devoted almost entirely to Patrick’s single stated goal: abs. Abs as solid and ridged as wet sand on the beach, abs to die for, was how Patrick described what he wanted. Deadly, killer, suicide-inducing, mouth-watering, knuckle-gnawing abs.

  The brother and sister pair, Phil and Bella Fell, arrived more than promptly at ten minutes before seven on Friday morning, the start of a dark day in which snow hung heavy in the cold, pregnant clouds. They were not identical but close to it, slope-shouldered, narrow-chested, twenty-nine and a half years old, both of them sales associates at Vit@lity, a rapidly growing computer parts and software manufacturer in an industrial park east of the city. Both were tall, thin, grey-eyed and slightly stooped. Their inturned shoulders bracketed their chests. Phil wore his hair long, and Bella wore hers short, and their hair, which was fine and formless, fell in a similar way around both narrow skulls, in limp ferny fronds over their pointed ears and sloping brows. Their skin had a yellow cast over a darker underlayer, like a cheaply made metal alloy. They had similar quick, tightly sprung mannerisms: a flat-line, flickering manner of smiling, a rapid series of irregular, darting eye movements when they were thinking and after they had spoken, and a tic that involved raising their shoulders in half-circles around their necks, lifting first the left, front to back, and then the right. The air around them smelled damp and electrically charged.

  And their goals were…? Nicolo enquired.

  “They ssay we need some exercise to help us deal with stress,” Bella hissed.

  “Ssomething physical to relieve the pressure.” Phil’s words followed quickly behind hers as if he were finishing a sentence that she had started. He had the same curious lisp.

  Each of them blinked and raised first one shoulder and then the other, while their thin lips stretched into identical brief, humourless grimaces.

  “What do we have to do to sstart?”

  Nicolo looked from one to the other, uncertain which of them had spoken, unsure how to respond. He was beginning to understand that working with people alone or in pairs would be considerably more difficult than he had anticipated.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  After dinner one December evening, Nicolo sat down in a chair at the kitchen table to work his way through the course outlines that had arrived in a large brown envelope from the university. He hooked his feet behind the chair’s metal legs and leaned forward into the task. He had been thinking along the lines of accounting or investment management, something to do with finance that would help him make good decisions about the money that was building up in his bank account. His mother had more than once suggested that he buy a house and start planning for the day when
he would have a wife and family. His father, he knew, would like him to quit the gym and go back to school for a degree. Nicolo didn’t know whose advice he should follow. He felt that his work, his savings, all the many different things he was learning, the advice and views of his parents and brothers, even Nonna’s proverbi, all of these were or could be important, and that he was reaching the point in his life, close to a quarter-century, when he should be putting them together somehow toward an end. But so far, no picture had emerged, no image or map or solution or key to his life or to its purpose. Occasionally he imagined that he had been granted the shortest possible flash of insight, but these revelations were clear for only an instant. They flickered into his mind and then out before he could take in more than a fleeting impression, like the striking of a distant match. There was so much to consider and the context was vast. The world was chaotic; that was clear. And it was unfair: some people were lazy and grew fat, while others worked hard and still starved. He could see that. Everywhere there were people who made mistakes, or acted wrongly, deliberately or in error. He wanted to become a purposeful adult. And although so far his purpose, the reason for his existence—the son of Massimo and Paola, the brother of Lorenzo and Vincenzo—remained without form, it had begun to occur to him that the answer might have something to do with providing clarity and order and with helping people get what they wanted most. He had also a concept of service. At least, that was the impression he had from time to time. Beyond that, he had no certainty. But he liked to believe that the rest, the details and timing, the who, where, when, why and what, would be revealed to him in time. If he was patient. If he was ready.

 

‹ Prev