“Mama always said it was a nun. Two or three hundred years ago. She left the convent in some disgrace and survived by painting scenes in villas. Someone should study this. A few other villas have what looks like the same hand. I prefer bare walls but would never paint over this because my mama would rise out of the grave. Oh, the black and white bird, Mama said, symbolizes the nun’s habit.”
Upstairs, we examine the beds and I have plenty to advise. “Get rid of these chicken-feather pillows. They stab you in the night. Some new sheets. These are pretty vintage ones but hard to dry.” (I’ve been almost rope-burned on heavy linen sheets before.) “Your mother—grandmother?—crocheted the coverlet?” Starched snowflakes, a thousand of them.
“Grandmother. One of the treasures of the house but I will leave it on the bed.”
“You know, Grazia, Americans like to read in bed. I’d get some lights with more wattage.” More wattage than one candle, I think. Italians always say they don’t read in bed, they make love. Even luxury hotels often have bedside lamps no brighter than night lights.
“I don’t know about that. They seem fine to me.”
In the downstairs bathroom, mildew rings the shower. It reeks like stagnant frog water. “All these towels—I’d replace them. Americans are used to soft towels. I know the Italians aren’t, mainly because they dry theirs outside.” I don’t add that these thin antiques feel like emery boards.
Grazia is surprised, having never met a soft towel. “That’s expensive. For the whole house?”
“Believe me.”
A rank drain smell rises from the kitchen sink. The vintage vacuum cleaner with its deflated balloon bag must be from the ’50s. “I’d say a new one is a priority. And also mops.” Disgusting, the ragged gray mop and a broom with the straw half worn away.
We go through the drawers and shelves and make a list: a couple of nonstick frying pans, a sturdy pasta pot (Luisa’s is dented aluminum), a good colander, wooden spoons—rancid—that didn’t usher in the last century. New dish towels, mixing bowls, a large steamer. Grazia balks at the idea of a coffee maker or espresso machine, and vetoes any kind of food processor or mixer. Her mother made everything by hand. And a Moka pot is just fine.
“Should I tune the piano? Remove all the books. They’re in Italian?”
“Leave them. These people are coming to Italy, after all. Who knows if anyone will play. You could wait on that if you want.”
One room crammed with trunks and boxes and furniture will remain as is. Seven bedrooms is enough. Grazia still has to empty each armadio upstairs. Luisa left some prize evening dresses and tailored suits. A vintage shop in Florence would scoop them up, but Grazia will give them to her aunt who will someday leave them again for Grazia to dispose of.
* * *
—
Whoever lands here is lucky. There’s some funk but the villa has noble bones and gracious spaces. My own place is more intimate and suits us, but I think to wake up here would expand your mind every day. I visualize making love with Colin in every one of the bedrooms and on the divano in front of the living room fireplace.
Climbing up to the Roman road that leads to the monastery, I shift to remembering what’s real. We have our spot beneath a stone wall high up on the land, a dip in the thick grasses where we take our green blanket on Sunday afternoons after our pranzo of salads and roast guinea hen. And on warm nights, for the stars. So far, no wild boar has nosed our bare bodies. Then I reposition my earbuds and turn on the voice of Nicole Kidman reading To the Lighthouse.
Bliss to wake up to the sound of waves rolling in. Julia is the first one up. When Camille and Susan wander into the kitchen in their robes around nine, she has waffle batter ready, juice poured, and a pan of bacon already made. “You accomplish everything effortlessly,” Camille says. “I consider it a major event when Charlie brings his family over for quiche and salad for Sunday brunch. And how orderly the kitchen is.”
“My secret weapon: clean up as you go.”
After breakfast and a beach walk, they drive into Wilmington, where the gracious neighborhoods invite them to stroll and make up stories about the inhabitants of the white houses all surrounded by pink and white azaleas. They buy carnations and lavender soaps for Susan’s house, and stop for ice cream cones in the old town. After lunch at a waterfront café, Susan finds new walking shoes, and Julia shows them some of Mulberry Press’s publications in the bookstore. In the art section of the bookstore, Camille selects tubes of watercolor paint, six brushes, and paper. “I might as well paint a big clichéd sunset,” she jokes. But she’s excited to think of taking the paints down to the dunes. This is the first time she’s bought paints in how many years? She cannot remember.
By three, they’re back at Sand Castle and out on the beach with Archie. “Julia, tell us the rest, if you will,” Susan says. “You know how the crime novels always have ‘the hook’ propelling you from chapter to chapter? I’m dying to know about Wade.”
“That is, if you want to,” Camille adds. She wonders if Susan is not being a bit pushy. That daughter, Lizzie. What a disaster.
“Yes, I’ll try. I’m sure you’ve guessed what happened next. I hardly could blame him. We were both morose. I sort of wished I’d met some cute guy. But”—she laughs—“there’s not an abundance of cute sixty-year-olds out there. Wade went way down the age scale. I think she was around thirty, thirty-three maybe.”
“Is he still seeing her?” Susan asks.
“No idea. If we hadn’t endured the long Lizzie ordeal, I think I would have been strong enough to weather a betrayal—though I doubt that would have happened—but after all the rocky years, it seemed non-negotiable to me. We’d always had each other. It was like the keystone fell out of the arch. Here’s how it all came down.
“Wade always had a huge temper. I was silly enough to be thrilled with it at first. It showed he was passionate, and he was. He was jealous of anyone I looked at, or he imagined I looked at. He was one of those southern boys who go to Woodberry Forest and UGA then return home more southern than ever to work in the family business. His daddy owned a boating supply, marine paint company. Wade loves the water, loves sailing. Fitting in at Georgia Marine was easy. He’s six-two, green eyes, deep, the color of malachite—I used to melt when he looked my way. Even though his father was black-haired and his mother, too—she was Jewish and warm-skinned—Wade’s hair is blond as an angel’s. Who knows how the gene pool twirls? When I met him I was so physically attracted to him that I never considered anything beyond his heavenly shoulders, racehorse legs, skin the color of honey with the sun in it, and his great smile that promised and delivered the moon and stars. My parents were won over, too, even though he wasn’t quite our social class. Things like that really mattered in Savannah. Not as much now.
“We were wildly happy. When Lizzie was born, she was our darling. Those were the days, my friend…Any chinks? Oh, Wade lost his temper at a slow waiter and turned over his chair getting out of the restaurant before we were served. And he might have invented road rage! He told off one of Lizzie’s teachers when she said Lizzie needed to be more organized. And there was the incident in CVS when a prescription wasn’t ready. Security escorted him out. Lizzie and I were exempt from his anger attacks. I told myself he was under stress, et cetera, and after Lizzie’s problems started, he was.
“Okay, moving on to after Lizzie left the last time, when we started pulling away from each other. I couldn’t bear the devastation. I threw myself into work. I learned later, he threw himself onto Rose Welton, his new marketing consultant and web designer. I only met her once at the company holiday party. She has puffy lips that must be pumped full of something. They look like two boiled shrimp. Oh, meow. She’s pretty enough.
“He was coming home late—dinner meetings, an Atlanta trip, and he flew to Jacksonville for a boat show. I hardly noticed. I watched escape movies on Netflix and the endless s
eries about the wimpy Scottish laird. Even if I barely could look at him, I assumed this stage would pass and that we’d eventually get back to a normal, or new-normal life.
“When he left one night, I caught a scent of the cologne I gave him for his birthday, verbena, woodsy and musky, eighty bucks! Very provocative. Ding, ding! Sherlock Holmes! ‘Where are you going for dinner?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, we’ll just go to the club. These reps will like that.’
“You already know I’m a snooper—I looked in Lizzie’s bag and found drugs—but only when I’m desperate. He left. He’d been online and his computer hadn’t shut down yet. I looked at his credit card bills, all paid automatically and I don’t see them. There was plenty to make my blood boil, including some Jacksonville expenses at boutiques and the hotel spa, four restaurant charges in Atlanta, and more at places out from Savannah. Also really extravagant florist bills. I remembered that he’d brought me a small nosegay of daisies not long ago. I felt as if I had a grease fire in the brain pan. Those silly daisies must have assuaged his guilt over the French tulips or roses he splurged on, roses, now that I think back, because of her name.
“An hour after he left, I drove through the club parking lot. No black Range Rover. Obviously he was dining elsewhere. Where would he take someone after dinner, I wondered. Surely not to a local hotel. Maybe her place. Is she married?
“Then, I realized—the boat, of course. So, this little detective drives to the marina where my dad keeps Suncatcher, his sailboat. It’s really our boat now. I parked at the shadowy far end of the lot. We keep the cabin key in a hatch under the cushions. I let myself in, then pocketed the key. I latched the door from inside without turning on any lights. As I sat there, I had to ask myself what I would do with the information I was about to acquire. I had no idea. I kept thinking, So this is how it feels. I thought, This is not going to happen.
“In about an hour, I saw lights swing into the lot. And, lo and behold, through the curtain I saw Wade, always the gentleman, opening the door for Sweet Thing. Arm in arm they walked to the boat and he helped her in. She sat down and—I couldn’t see much out of the crack in the curtain—adjusted a scarf around her neck. He opened the hatch and then let it slam. He tried the door and I heard him sputter something, then stop short. There are no windows on the front of the cabin and I’d pulled the curtains along the side. ‘I must have left the key at work,’ he said. ‘Damn, this is embarrassing.’ She said something; they left. I waited, cold and revolted.
“On impulse, I looked in the galley fridge. Champagne. Good Champagne. I popped the cork and poured myself a glass. The bed in the bow was spread with the contour sheets my mother had someone make for the boat, and that enraged me again. I poured another glass, turned on the ship-to-shore, and listened to static communications out on the water. I sent Wade a message: Spending the night at my dad’s. I wasn’t ready to face the truth just yet. Instead of their having a sex fest in that bow bed, I slept there rather soundly.”
* * *
—
They sit down on a log. Camille wants to take out her paints from her bag. As she listens to Julia’s story, she looks at clouds, the horizon, the wavy waterline, wondering what instant of these images she might capture, and if she could blend white with a speck of blue to capture the silvery edge of the foam as the wave retreated.
Julia continues. “I sat on the news. I avoid confrontation if possible, but it was not going to be possible. I arranged a leave of absence at work, with the proviso that I could freelance edit for them. That’s when I saw the notice in the paper that Hugh was speaking. That’s when he offered his house. I told my dad and Alison, my neighbor.
“I shredded papers, gave away a pile of my clothes and books I’d never reread. Some fanatical instinct took over. I completely cleaned and ordered the house except for Lizzie’s room, which I left just as it was, down to a pile of sweatpants and T-shirts on her closet floor. I guess he found the flat Champagne on the boat. He never mentioned it. I remained cordial to Wade—small talk and dinner on the table—but he picked up on my smoldering anger and one morning called me ‘cold as a cod.’ That afternoon, can you imagine, I cleaned our bathroom’s grout with a toothbrush and Q-tips! Then I loaded my car. He came home to change for sailing ‘with clients’ and I finally confronted him as I shoved my cookbooks into a box. He tried to get my keys and almost broke my finger. He was shouting and denying and blaming. And that’s how I’m through with other people’s lies and dramas.”
“You must be PTSD. Or at least in deep shock. That’s quite a pileup of bad,” Susan responds, and Camille agrees. “Would it help to talk to someone? I have a friend who’s very good.”
“I’m talking to you! That’s better. After all the shrinks and clinics with Lizzie, I’m done with that. I don’t want to backslide into them anymore. When someone is hell-bent, all that talk, talk, talk is useless. I need space to figure out how to live, how to silence the voices that keep clamoring for my life. No, not those kinds of voices! Not hallucinations. Memories. Now I want forward motion. My feet out of quicksand.”
Camille opens her bag and takes out her new sketch pad. “Yes, you need exactly that,” she says. “Let’s start with a watercolor of this spot right here. You can hang it as a reminder of a turning point. Every time the quicksand beckons, you look at this and listen to the waves and think about good friends.” She stands up and hugs Julia.
“Let’s go up, Julia. I’m famished.” Susan whistles for Archie. “I’m going to run you a bath with mimosa salts. Candles around the tub. You need to chill, big-time.” She rests her hand on Julia’s shoulder and they head for the house. Camille opens the tube of blue. Other lives, she thinks, exhausting.
* * *
—
The spring days beginning to lengthen bring back sweet lingering twilights. Darkness, no longer plopping over the land like a velvet stage curtain, gives in to the light more every day, allowing a vast space to play at sunset with flamingo, mauve tending to gray, and azure with a glittering edge. As the friends prepare their feast of shrimp and crab, Susan opens the doors onto the back deck and calls them out. The western sky over the marsh behind the house is filled with cotton-boll clouds, the bottoms fluffy and rufous. Through layers of tints, the orb of sun wobbles gently down. “Fertilized egg yolk,” Julia says. Camille says, “Fireball.” Susan says, “Sun.”
* * *
—
When they gather around the fire after dinner, Susan brings out her laptop. “Just look.” She indicates the screen. “You don’t have to say anything.” Before them appears a square stone house on a slope of olive trees. On one side a pergola droops with white wisteria. Behind the house lie distant hills and two conical peaks. “Extinct volcanos,” Susan said. “We could lease this house. It’s right outside San Rocco, Tuscany. It’s an hour from the sea. And not far from Florence. Firenze, I should say.”
Camille and Julia look at her quizzically and frown, then laugh. “A lease with an option to buy,” Susan adds. “Isn’t it beautiful? The wisteria is white, not purple. Most people plant purple. This is a sign. I’ve looked all over the Internet and at all my sources, even looked in France and Spain. This is the most appealing place I found. I think we would love it. And it does not simplify—it complicates.” Susan, years ago, had fallen hard for Tuscany when she and Aaron celebrated their twentieth anniversary there. She always meant to get back but never has.
“Are you suggesting that we lease, you mean move there?” Julia marvels. “What an idea! Susan, you are one bold sister!”
Camille rotates the screen to see better. “Click on the inside shots!” Beamed rooms with high ceilings flash by: peach, cream, pale yellow, white, each with large stone-framed windows. The kitchen has a real butcher’s chopping block on sturdy legs, a long shallow marble sink that reminds her of cloistered nuns chanting, worktables instead of counters, and all shapes of pots and pans around the biggest fi
replace she’s ever seen. “Julia, look at those pots. Little Morning Glory’s copper fades into oblivion, right?”
“Yes! Is that a wood-burning stove? Is there a regular stove, too? Look at that marble-topped table. It must be for making pasta.”
“Would you possibly consider this?” Susan asks.
Silence. Then Julia says, “I cannot imagine anything more phenomenal. But, really, this is fantasy.”
Camille adds, “Well, worth looking into. I could so completely love this! Think of all the art!” She didn’t remotely consider this possible.
Julia does. Some of life’s best decisions are made irrationally. A fireplace. A window. A saffron-colored wall. A view of volcanos. The thought of a mythic sea just over the hills.
The out-of-nowhere idea stirs them. A house in Tuscany, where they know no one. Everything open to reinterpretation.
* * *
—
Other weekends follow at Sand Castle. They talk into the wee hours. They reminisce about sororities and apartments with roommates after college. Camille had loved the communal closet at the Chi O house. She’s never, before or since, had such wardrobe options. They talk about friends, mistakes they made, biopsies, trips, what it’s like being alone. Why, they wonder, after family life ended, didn’t more people banish loneliness and live together? Things, they conclude. People can’t part with their stuff, their mother’s stuff, attics and basements full of stuff. We must be afraid of sharing a kitchen or bath, they realize. “Are we like that?” Susan wonders. Camille thinks she is, but she becomes so infatuated with the idea of Italy that she back-burners the thought. Rising through her—the realization that she must break through. So much talk of women and glass ceilings. Hers presses right on her head. She begins to appreciate Susan’s drive that she’d been wary of at first. She could learn from Susan. Julia is coiled to spring. She finds the whole concept enchanting. They talk about residency options, the Tuscan coastal towns, and Italy’s system of fast trains. She pictures them stepping onto a sleek Italo and speeding through the countryside, eating sandwiches, the green hills flashing by the window. Alone in her room, however, she’s sometimes engulfed by waves of fear that Lizzie would need her, waves of hope that Wade would repent, and random waves that wash over, lifting her feet from the sand and tumbling her roughly to shore.
Women in Sunlight Page 8