by Teri Emory
The phone rings. I mute the sound on the TV, but my eyes don’t stray from Stone Phillips’s chiseled face on the screen. He’s doing the lead-in to the piece about the fake masterpieces. It’s Jim calling. Dinner is running late, he’ll stay in the city tonight. No, I don’t mind, I tell him. He asks about my lecture in New Haven, but I can tell he’s not really listening to my response; he’s covering the mouthpiece of his cell phone and talking to a waiter. Laughter in the background. I’m watching the camera shots of the Vatican Museum as I remind Jim that I’ll need his help to get ready for the party. “I’ll be home early tomorrow,” he says. “Sleep well.”
By the time I hang up, the Dateline story about Italy is over. I decline Jane Pauley’s invitation to stay tuned for a warning about unnecessary cosmetic surgery, and I wend my way upstairs to the bedroom.
__________
In my junior year at Buffalo, shortly after I applied to the study abroad program, I received a threatening letter from the dean, informing me that I had to declare an actual major before I left for spring semester in Rome. I had already taken some art history classes, so I figured I could major in art history and still graduate on time. I didn’t exactly know what I would do with my degree, though I had a vague notion that I could be happy working in a museum, looking all day at beautiful things.
The Rome Academy of the Arts—L’Accademia delle Arti—draws students from all over the United States and Europe, serious young musicians, artists, and scholars. The art history program, led by renowned Renaissance experts, was meant for students far more serious and accomplished than I. And yet, over the semester I developed a deep appreciation for masterpieces of the quattrocento, participated in lively discussions about the Church’s patronage of the arts, took countless curators’ tours of obscure galleries and churches, and made weekend expeditions to the Uffizi in Florence. But I was distracted from a true commitment to scholarship by one of my own life’s big main ideas, or rather, by one of the main characters in the drama of my life. In Rome, I fell in love for the first time.
He was a grad student from Vermont, in Italy to study music composition at the Academy. We met at a reception for new students. According to the notes about him in the orientation booklet, he had been awarded a scholarship to the Academy based on a sixteen-minute chamber piece he had composed, “Trio for Piano, Cello, and Violin in G Major: La Chamade.” I noticed him at the bar, wearing a brown suede jacket rubbed shiny at the elbows. He was chatting comfortably in Italian with the bartender.
“Hi, I’m Beth Jacobs, art history,” I said.
“Molto piacere, Beth. Io sono Andrew Carino. Music composition.”
“Not the famous composer of La Chamade?”
“That’s me.”
“What does la chamade mean, anyway?”
“It’s French, for a wild beating of the heart.”
Two hours later we were making love in his dorm room, across the piazza from the Academy’s women’s residence where I lived. Afterwards, Andrew and I lay in each other’s arms, drinking cheap wine—the kind that the vino-olio stores poured from spigots into empty mineral water bottles and sold for a few hundred lire, less than a dollar.
“When did you know that you were musical?” I asked him.
“Always, I think. My kindergarten teacher said that I didn’t pay attention in class. When my parents asked me why I wasn’t listening to my teacher, I told them, ‘I want to listen to her, but instead, I hear the music that’s always in my head, and I can’t stop hearing it.’”
“Are you hearing me, or is there music in your head?”
“Both,” he said. “Your music is inside me now.”
There must have been rainy days, cold temperatures, difficult moments in Rome, but I remember only warmth and sunshine and joy. People who saw us together knew at once how happy we were. Giovanna, the owner of our favorite coffee bar on Viale Trastevere, greeted me excitedly every morning as I took my seat under an umbrella at an outdoor table: Un cappuccino per la bella signorina americana? I can still see Andrew sitting across from me, his head buried in a copy of the Rome Daily American. His blond hair, several shades lighter than mine, drew attention from every Italian we met. Giovanna would tease him, Buon giorno, Robert Red-a-ford! Un caffè macchiato? I pronounced Andrew’s name the way the Italians did: An-DRAY-a. Beth has no equivalent in Italian; Andrew called me Bella. Beautiful.
Over the semester, I dragged Andrew through art galleries and Renaissance churches all over Rome and nearby towns. He escorted me to weekly concerts given by students at the Academy, and to Milan for a performance of La Bohème (my first opera) at La Scala. We said, “I love you” to each other a hundred times a day.
By all rights, we should have returned to the States when classes at the Academy ended in June. Both of us needed to get summer jobs. Our families were expecting us. But fate intervened, in the person of Tito Fabrizzi, Andrew’s friend and mentor at the Academy. Like most upper-class Romans, Dr. Fabrizzi and his wife Marilena escaped to their country house to avoid the heat of Rome in July and August. Would we accept a small compensation, he asked, to mind the Fabrizzi palazzo in the Flaminio area of Rome until the family returned from their summer in Gallipoli? He apologized that he couldn’t pay us more than a half-million lire a month—a little over two hundred dollars—but the house was molto bella and he’d leave us his ancient Fiat 500 for outings alla campagna—to the countryside. It would be a comfort to him and his wife to know that reliable people were keeping an eye on their home. Would we mind watering the plants and feeding the family cats, Mimi and Rodolfo, as well? “My sister in Gallipoli is allergic,” he said. “Alas, we must take our vacanze without the cats.”
Andrew and I moved into Dr. Fabrizzi’s home right after classes ended. The palazzo, three stories high, was built in the 1850s and sat on a bluff overlooking the Tevere. Like so much else in Italy, the house was dazzling, and full of maddening impracticalities. The exquisite marble floors throughout the place were cold and slippery, except where they were covered by Persian rugs so beautiful that Andrew and I hesitated to step on them. In each of the three bathrooms was a claw-footed bathtub with ornate brass fittings, but no shower. The kitchen countertops were inlaid with magnificent cerulean tiles, yet the refrigerator held little more than one day’s provisions for the two of us. The freezer was barely large enough for one ice-cube tray and a can or two of the frozen blood-orange juice concentrate we liked to buy at the Standa, the only supermarket for miles.
Shopkeepers welcomed us to the neighborhood, proud to introduce us to specialties from their own regions of Italy: Try this ricotta, made the same way my grandmother did in Sicilia. This is how we cook steak in Firenze. Let me give you a recipe for the best osso buco, the Milanese way. Have you heard the legend about this Frascati wine?
Nowhere else existed for us. We didn’t talk about the future; there was only our borrowed palazzo—on borrowed time—and exhilarating adventure every time we walked out the door. We used our student IDs to get free concert tickets and cheap train fares. We hardly drove Dr. Fabrizzi’s Fiat—gasoline was more expensive than train tickets—though one afternoon Andrew did insist on taking the car out to quiet roads near Castel Gandolfo so he could teach me to drive a stick shift. Every car I’ve owned since then has had a manual transmission. As often as we could, we splurged on excursions out of town. We slept on lumpy mattresses and shared bathrooms with other travelers in cheap pensiones from Venice to Positano. We traipsed through palaces and ancient ruins, museums and vineyards. We toured artisans’ studios where sparkling Murano glass and delicate cameos and exquisite leather boots were still crafted by hand. Inside the Grotto Azzurro, Andrew nearly capsized our tiny rowboat when he leaned over the side to retrieve a bracelet that had slid off my wrist into the phosphorescent water. On a narrow street in Naples, a small boy belted out O Sole Mio from the second-floor window above his father’s bakery and bowed
to our applause with a sweep of his arm. “Bravissimo!” Andrew called to him. “Che bella voce!”
Che piacere . . . How happy we were. And how I yearn for that life, my old life, when I believed the world was full of possibilities. What I wouldn’t give to feel joyful and hopeful again! To feel for one hour the way I felt every day I spent with Andrew.
Andrew, fluent in Italian and French, who sang arias to me in bed. Andrew, who three times hitchhiked from Burlington to Buffalo to visit me at school and meet my friends after we returned from Italy. Andrew, who in the end said he loved me but just didn’t ever want to be married. Andrew, who married someone else, just as I did, not long after we parted. Andrew, who still owns a piece of my heart.
The last time I heard news about him was ten years ago. Sarah ran into him at O’Hare while traveling home from a business trip. He was a music professor at a small college in California, passing through Chicago on his way to judge a young composers competition. He showed Sarah a photo of his two sons, though not his wife. Andrew looked the same, Sarah said, handsome and boyish. Sarah gave him an update on me. “Two kids? A Ph.D.?” he said with admiration. “Well, tell Dr. Jacobs—no, I guess she’s Dr. Gillian now—that I said ciao.”
__________
My senior year was coming to a close when things ended with Andrew. Friends were busily pursuing graduate schools and auspicious job offers, but I was too dispirited to plan my next move. In a half-hearted attempt to find work, I mailed my résumé to a handful of museums in the northeast. I can’t even recall what I wrote I was qualified to do. Two museums sent back form-letter rejections. The rest didn’t bother to respond. Among the entities that ignored me: the Laurel Falls Museum of Fine Arts, where I now sit on the board.
My advisor suggested I look into a summer school program that might keep me occupied until I could summon the energy to begin job-hunting again. I wound up at Ithaca College in a graduate seminar on nineteenth-century European painting. Influential curators from major museums were lined up as guest lecturers. I arranged for a student loan to pay for tuition and the dorm room. I figured I could get a waitressing job to cover my living expenses for the summer.
The day after graduation, I drove from Buffalo to Ithaca College in the used, bright yellow Volkswagen Beetle that my parents had given me as a graduation present. The sign at the entrance to the Ithaca campus said, “Welcome to IC. Last day for summer registration. Follow signs to gymnasium.”
At the gym I was told that there was no record of my loan.
“I’m sure it’s a mistake,” I said to the dour woman who was handling “Last Names, A-J” from behind a folding table. “The loan was approved.”
“Go to the bursar and work it out with them. Job Hall, second floor,” she said impatiently. “Next in line, please.”
Walking across campus to the bursar’s office, I considered my alternatives if things didn’t work out at IC. Go back to Mom and Dad’s house in Riverdale, take up residence in my old bedroom with the flowered drapes and the canopy bed. Get my old summer job back, waiting tables at the Blue Windmill Steak House in Yonkers. Maybe register with a temp agency, look forward to a few months of typing, filing, answering phones. I imagined the voice of my brother Bruce, who was spending his summer studying for the New York Bar exam: A degree in art history! What do you expect?
“You look like you’re having a bad day,” said the good-looking guy working behind the counter at the bursar’s office. He was dressed like a student, though something about him made him appear a little older. His hair, I realized. His sideburns were sandy brown, but the rest was almost all gray. “Maybe I can help.”
“Sorry, do I look upset?”
“You look just fine to me,” he said with a grin. “I’m Jim Gillian. What can I do for you?”
I told him about my experience in the gym.
“Let me check on something,” he said. “Do you know your student number? Write it down for me—your name, too. Where do you go to school during the year?”
“I just graduated from Buffalo.”
“What’s your degree in?”
“Art history.”
“Oh, I’ll bet you’re here for the European Painting seminar.”
I nodded. “If I can manage to register.”
“Wait right here,” he said.
He disappeared into a back office and resurfaced a few minutes later, carrying a blue folder with my name on it.
“Well, Beth Jacobs, I have some good news for you. They’ve put you in Eastman Hall, much better than the Towers, where most summer school students have to live. And you’re right, the loan was approved, but the money is not being sent directly to IC. This is the kind of loan that’s paid directly to students. You should have your check in about a week.”
“I have to pay tuition today or I can’t register,” I sighed.
Jim motioned for me to lean in towards him.
“Here’s the strategy,” he whispered. “Just write a check for the tuition. Your check will have to get processed in the world-class bureaucracy here at the bursar’s office. That’s sure to take a week at least, and your loan check will probably arrive in time to cover it. Worse comes to worse, trust me, it will take weeks before anyone at this place will be able to figure out what to do about a check that’s been returned from your bank. They’ll eventually redeposit it, by which time your loan check will definitely be in your account. Meanwhile, you’ll be well into Delacroix—maybe even an Impressionist or two—before anything happens.”
“Are you in the art history seminar, too?”
“Nope. I just graduated from IC, starting an MBA at Cornell in September. I’m working here for the summer.”
“But you seem to know something about art.”
“Oh, yes. My dear mother wouldn’t let me get a bachelor’s degree in business. She had this idea that I’d regret it for the rest of my life if I didn’t pursue liberal arts in college. So I majored in humanities, minored in business administration.”
“A wise woman,” I said.
“Yes, she was. Um, she died two years ago. My parents were in a car accident. Both of them . . .”
“So sorry. What will you do when you finish school?”
“Go to Manhattan, figure out how economics works outside of textbooks, and make a great deal of money. The usual business student’s agenda.”
The people in line behind me were getting restless. “I guess I’d better be going. Meanwhile, it’s nice of you to try to help, but I’m not sure your plan will work.”
“Believe me, lots of people survive this way. Myself included. You went to a big school, you should know that beating the bureaucracy is a major college sport. Besides, what other options do you have?”
I shrugged.
“You know where to find me if you run into anymore trouble,” he said. “But this should work.”
He was right. It did.
My classes ended at noon every day. I took to spending afternoons at a diner in town where the owners didn’t mind that I sat and read at one of their booths for hours every day, enjoying free refills of coffee. Finding a waitressing job turned out to be near impossible. Business is down in a college town during the summers. No one was hiring. I was at my usual table at the diner one day, scanning the local want ads, when a pile of textbooks landed without warning in front of me.
“You never came back to tell me what happened,” said a familiar voice. “I was afraid the banking police had locked you up for check kiting.”
“Hi, um, Jim, is it?”
“Yes, it is,” he said, sitting down. “I’m disappointed, Beth Jacobs, that you barely remember my name. How’s it going?”
I filled him in on my latest crisis.
“Some professors, especially in the social sciences, do research during the summer and need assistants. Why don’t you check out the bulleti
n boards at that other school in town, you know, Cornell? It’s just up the hill,” he said, pointing with his thumb.
“Thanks, wiseguy. How are things at the bursar’s office?”
“Stupefyingly boring. I can’t wait until classes start in the fall. I’m getting a head start on some reading,” he said, pointing to his books. “Tell me, what do you do for fun these days, Beth?”
“Fun? Oh, yes, I remember fun. I once had fun in my life. Now all I do is go to class, get rejected for jobs, and obsess about money.”
“That’s no good. Tell you what, why don’t you come over and let me cook dinner for you tonight? I make the best spaghetti sauce in the Finger Lakes.”
“Is this a pity date?”
“It’s not pity, and it’s hardly a date. You can meet my roommate, Harold Rosenblatt. We’ve known each other since kindergarten. Harold’s finishing his architecture degree at Cornell this summer. You can also meet his girlfriend Sharon Greta, just back from the Eternal Peace commune in Berkeley. She’s thinking of changing her name to Sunshine or Moonbeam, I forget which, and trying to talk Harold into adopting a less establishment name for himself. He can’t decide if Solar or Harmony goes better with Rosenblatt. If you come, maybe they’ll let you vote.”
“I’ll be there,” I said. He stood up to leave, and I noticed for the first time what a nice body he had.
I wandered down the hall of the psych department at Cornell until I found an occupied office. “Sonya Needham, Associate Professor” said the handwritten sign pasted to the open door. A young woman with straight auburn hair almost to the hem of her mini-skirt was standing over the desk, examining papers. She jumped when I rapped on the door.
“Sorry,” I said. “Is there anyone I could speak to about a summer job?”
“Are you a psych major?”
I shook my head. “I just graduated from Buffalo. I took a few psych courses there. Intro, child psych. And a class on ‘The Psychology of Twentieth Century Art,’ if that counts.”