“That’s Donatella Versace,” Kelly says in awe. “Your mum was really a proper model, being in a Versace show.”
I nod absently, unable to take my eyes off my mum. She looks so beautiful, the makeup and the hair turning her into a goddess. She never wears much makeup nowadays; she says she had enough in her modeling days to last her the rest of her life. Her cheekbones are so high with the contoured blusher that her face looks almost alien.
“So you know what this means,” Kelly’s saying, and I realize that I’ve been focusing hard on my mum’s gorgeous face to avoid coming to the real conclusion. Reluctantly, I nod again.
“This is September 1994,” she says, “in Milan. I mean, it doesn’t prove anything at all. But it shows that they were together, they could have met. Before you were— Anyway, they could have met.”
She’s right: it doesn’t prove anything. But it’s another nail in the coffin of my hopes that Luca and I aren’t related. And for a moment, horribly, I resent Kelly with such intensity that my fists clench, my nails digging into my palms. She’s too good at researching, too clever. She’s only seen a couple of photos of my mum on my phone, and she still managed to locate these albums, work through the ones with the correct time period, and spot Mum in the background of a photograph that didn’t even feature her.
I should thank her. But instead, I want to kill her.
“Violet?” she starts, and I swallow hard, because my anger has suddenly transformed itself into a desperate wish to burst out crying. And I absolutely can’t burst into tears, not here, not at this party.…
Then we hear footsteps outside, on the terrace, a swift pattering of heels on stone, coming closer. We stare at each other in panic. Under the circumstances, the last thing I want is to be caught here, looking at family photograph albums. Kelly moves like lightning. She shuts the album, grabs my arm, and pulls me to a small sofa, ducking down to hide behind it. One of my sandals twists under me and I wince, but I can’t move to adjust it now, not a muscle, because the footsteps are clattering onto the parquet floor, and Paige is saying breathlessly:
“Are you really upset about tonight?”
“Yes!” Kendra sighs in a rush. “Oh God, I feel like I’m going mad!”
“Is he—”
“Yes! He’s waiting, to see if I can sneak off, but he can’t hold on for much longer—he’s got to go and help out a friend later with something—”
“Oh no!” Paige gushes.
“I feel like I’ll die if I have to wait till tomorrow to see him!” Kendra bursts out passionately. “And it was going to be so lovely tonight—he was going to take me out to dinner somewhere far away, where no one would recognize either of us, a little restaurant in a sort of secret garden—it was going to be so romantic. He’s so disappointed! He’s been texting and texting me—”
“Oh!” Paige is clearly completely caught up in the romance of all this sneaking around. “But hey, we can do it anytime, though—we’ll just say we’re doing the double-date thing again. I can always find someone to go out with, and then you can take off with Luigi—”
“Shh!” Kendra hisses. “Don’t ever say his name!”
“Sorry!” Paige is contrite.
“He says Catia would go mad if she knew,” Kendra whispers.
Squashed beside me, I feel Kelly’s head nodding in vigorous agreement at this.
“Oh, she totally would,” Paige agrees. “And we have to be really careful around Evan, too. He’d go crazy.”
“It’s so unfair!” Kendra laments. “Just because he’s a bit older! Why can’t people understand? I don’t want to date boys my own age!”
“I’ll totally help,” Paige assures her enthusiastically.
“Hey!” cuts in a deeper voice, and I can hear the two girls start, their feet shuffling, their dresses rustling, at the interruption.
“Ev!” Paige says quickly. “What’s up?”
“I’m hiding out,” her brother says. “There’s this, um—lady, who—”
“Omigod, I know!” Paige says in a happy rush. She’s having a fantastic evening; so much drama she doesn’t have time to keep up with it all. “She was, like, all over you!”
“She said she feels much more at home with all us young people,” Evan recounts, sounding very uncomfortable. “She said her husband was really boring and everyone inside was really old—”
“She’s really old!” Paige exclaims.
“It was pretty embarrassing,” he says. “I mean, she made me waltz with her and she was kind of rubbing my arm and talking about my muscles.”
“Cougar bait!” Paige trills. She giggles. “I bet you’d rather’ve been dancing with Violet, right? Did you head in this direction ’cause Violet came this way?”
Evan mumbles something unintelligible.
“You’re mean to tease him like that,” Kendra says after a few moments; I presume Evan’s left.
“What? He likes Violet!” Paige says. “And she’s not after Luca anymore—or she messed up with him, ’cause he’s with Elisa now. I’m almost positive. I thought he was into Violet, but something went wrong there.”
“She played that badly,” Kendra agreed.
Eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves. I jerk furiously, fighting the impulse to stand up and yell at them that they don’t know what they’re talking about: that Luca still really likes me, that Elisa’s only second-best to him, that he looked beyond jealous just now when I was dancing with Evan.…
“We should get back,” Paige is saying.
“I don’t want to.” Kendra sighs miserably.
“You’ll see Lu—er, him tomorrow!” Paige says. “You can sneak out into the garden again! Just wait till ten, like last night. I’ll get us all watching a movie like the last time—no one had any idea you weren’t reading in bed. Come on, we should get back.”
“I wish I could be like you,” Kendra says as they go out onto the terrace. “You just don’t feel things like I do.”
“That’s me. Easy, breezy, beautiful CoverGirl. Deep as a puddle of water,” Paige says lightly as their voices fade away.
“ ‘You don’t feel things like I do’?” Kelly hisses, hauling herself to her feet. “That Kendra’s beyond arrogant. Ow, I’ve got a cramp in my foot.…”
“She’s lucky it’s practically impossible to offend Paige,” I say ironically. “Paige was kind of messing with her there.”
I stand up, wincing, swiveling the ankle that was caught underneath me and now has the worst pins and needles. We both limp across the room, shaking out our feet, and head back down the long terrace. The harpsichord music has been replaced by jazz, and Sunny has got hold of poor Evan again, backing him against the balustrade and swaying in front of him. “I used to be an air hostess,” she’s saying. “Only in first class, though. They put the prettiest girls in first class, did you know that?”
Elisa, meanwhile, has maneuvered Luca onto the dance floor. She has her arms around his neck and is wriggling her narrow hips in time with the music, doing the dancing for both of them.
I take a deep breath, march over to Evan, and say over Sunny’s shoulder: “Hey, I thought we were going to dance again.”
“Oh yeah!” he says with flattering enthusiasm. “Excuse me, ma’am,” he mumbles to Sunny, sliding past her and out toward me. I grin at him as he mouths “Thank you!” and we take each other’s hands, starting to move to the music.
I have no idea how to dance to jazz, and clearly neither does Evan; but what we have in common is that we want to have fun. I honestly don’t know whether the impulse to save Evan is stronger than my jealousy of Luca and Elisa, but right now it doesn’t even matter. I can’t have Luca, that’s clear enough. So I need to move on.
I’m not one of those girls who rush from one boy to another, scared of being alone. I’m not going to suddenly throw myself at Evan, snog him one night and declare that he’s my boyfriend the next day, as I’ve seen girls do. But dancing has always been one of the main w
ays I’ve distracted myself, and this kind of dancing needs a partner, and Evan needed rescuing, and I can’t chatter away to Kelly while watching Luca and Elisa out of the corner of my eye.…
My head is spinning. Really, all I can think of is the photo that proves Mum and the principe could have met before I was born. It’s almost as if that image is projected on Evan’s wide chest, as if on the pale-blue fabric I can see the principe, smiling with his arm around that model, Mum in the background. I put a smile on my face and I keep it plastered there as we dance around the terrace. And I’m doing fine, I really am.
Until I get back to Villa Barbiano that evening and find the text from Mum waiting for me.
You Did the Right Thing
Darling, I got your email. Hold on. Hold on. I love you so much. Please just wait to hear from me. Please!!! I love you!
I must have read Mum’s text a hundred times. I have no idea what it means. But I know what it doesn’t say: Of course Dad and I are your parents! Why on earth would you think anything different? I’m on the first plane over to give you a big hug and tell you I love you!
I’ve actually gone weirdly calm, as if my brain’s suffused with a drug that’s flowing gently through me. I woke up feeling outside of myself: I’m floating above my body, looking down at the Violet who’s going about her day, observing her with detachment as she eats breakfast, goes to her Italian lesson, eats lunch, goes to the pool. Fights the desire to ring her mother and beg her to explain what’s going on.
Luigi comes in to teach an art class; that doesn’t faze this strangely detached Violet. She sits there and sketches Evan and doesn’t even blush when Luigi convinces him to take his shirt off. She concentrates on trying to render, as accurately as possible, the cap of muscle on Evan’s shoulder, the one that’s turned toward her. Luigi is making her draw Evan in three-quarter profile, and it’s surprisingly hard to get the proportions right.
Violet has the feeling that if she let herself tune in to the vibrations between Kendra and Luigi, she’d pick up all sorts of things. Nothing even that overt. The briefest of touches, maybe, as Luigi leans over Kendra to make an alteration on her drawing, or as Kendra turns to him to ask him a question. It’s more the way they communicate, the haze in the air around them, a sense that they’re scarcely aware, when they look at each other, that anyone else even exists.
But this Violet, to be honest, couldn’t care less anymore about what’s going on with Luigi and Kendra. It’s not her business if Kendra’s being a stupid idiot, or Luigi an old creep. Violet has more than enough of her own to cope with. Violet feels as if she’s carrying a brimful vase of water, and she has to move very carefully to keep it level. Because if that vase tilts even a little bit, and even a drop spills on her, she’ll start crying and she’ll never stop.
Evan can tell something’s up with Violet, but he’s too nice and tactful to push at her. He asked her this morning if she was okay, and she said yes, but she knows she sounded so aloof and disconnected that it was a total snub. And after that, he’s been polite but respectful, keeping his distance.
Which would make it strange, seeing him with his shirt off, if Violet were really in her body. Since she isn’t, however, she can just take him for granted as the life-drawing model, whose squarish features are particularly hard to draw in three-quarter profile, and focus entirely on the work of conveying what she sees in front of her to the sketchpad. She is constantly aware of the phone in her skirt pocket, resting on her thigh, starting if she hears even the slightest sound that might be an incoming call, feels something that might be the vibrating buzz of a message. And a text does come in, but it’s from Milly back in London, and Violet doesn’t answer it because she feels so disconnected from almost her entire life that she wouldn’t know what to say.
After art class, Violet showers and then goes to dinner: spaghetti with mild green peppers called frigitelli, sautéed in olive oil, and then cold sliced veal dressed with tuna mayonnaise and capers, which sounds bizarre but is actually tasty. She has a glass of red wine with the food, and coffee afterward. And then Paige suggests that they all watch a movie or two in the rec room, and Violet says that she’ll probably go back to the art studio and keep working on her sketches, and Paige exchanges a glance with Kendra that clearly tells Kendra to keep an eye out for Violet in the studio when she sneaks out to see Luigi, and Violet really wants to say that as far as she’s concerned, Kendra and Luigi could be lying on the main lawn snogging each other’s faces off and she, Violet, would just step over them and keep going, because she couldn’t care less about the mess that anyone else is making of their lives right now.
As the rest of them debate what film they want to watch, Violet goes back to the studio, which is the only place where she’s sure of keeping the vase of water steady and balanced. She looks at her sketches of Evan and decides that she can’t cope with the demands of another human being. So she puts them aside and starts instead to draw a still life of a jar of brushes and some tubes of paint. She’s so absorbed in that task that she almost completely forgets about anything else until, a couple of hours later, outside the studio, she hears someone screeching their head off, and she drops the pastel she’s using and sprints for the door, because frankly, it sounds as if someone’s being murdered—
And what she sees outside jerks her back into her body instantly. Me. Jerks me instantly back into my body with a fizzing electric shock.
All the outside lamps are on. The front of the villa is lit up as brightly as a stage, the green of the lawn shining iridescently in the artificial light. From the lower level of the formal garden I might be a spectator looking up at a stage on which a melodrama’s raging away. Catia, standing in the middle of the lawn and screaming in a mix of English and Italian, is definitely the leading actress; she’s dominating the scene. She’s yelling at Kendra, who’s emerging from the gap in the hedge. Kendra has changed from the simple dress she wore at dinner and is in a sexy slip that might actually be a nightie, which is pretty gross, considering the circumstances.
“E tu! E tu, Luigi! Fatto vedere! Tanto so che ci sei!” Catia is yelling. She’s telling Luigi to come out and show himself.
If they were meeting in that stone alcove again, I think, there really isn’t any way out from there apart from the steps to the lawn. Could he jump down? Is it too far? I picture the area, and think there’s quite a big drop—but Luigi looks strong, he might be able to climb down the wall, or jump for it.…
He hasn’t. He’s here. Coming out behind Kendra. I can’t read his expression, but his body language looks distinctly hangdog. Busted, as Paige would say.
On the terrace above, Paige, Leonardo, Evan, and Kelly are spilling out from the rec room, looking down at the scene below. Paige squeals as Catia strides across to Luigi and slaps him so hard across the face that we all wince at the sound.
“Ma sei scemo!” she yells. “Cretino, idiota, scemo! Cosa cazzo avevi in mente?”
Swinging around, she confronts Kendra.
“And you!” she shrieks. “Stupid little girl! What the hell were you thinking, sneaking out at night to see a married man?”
I gasp. So does almost everyone else: I hear Paige squeal again in surprise. I nip up the steps and onto the terrace to join the rest of the group; you want company in these moments, someone to turn to when you need to share the shock.
“Married!” Kendra exclaims, such misery and disappointment in her voice that we all wince again in sadness for her. Luigi cringes as she turns to him.
“Tell me it’s not true!” she says, and I can hear tears in her voice.
“Not just married—he has a little daughter and another baby on the way!” Catia announces.
“È vero,” Leonardo says to us. “It’s true,” he translates. “His wife is—uh, in dolce attesa,” he adds, clearly not knowing how to say “pregnant” in English.
Kelly’s ears prick up at learning something new.
“ ‘In sweet waiting’?” she asks,
translating it literally. “That’s actually a nice way to say pregnant—”
“It’s not true!” Kendra screams, not having heard Leonardo’s confirmation. She throws herself at Luigi, grabbing hold of the collar of his shirt with both hands, trying to shake him, but Luigi is stocky and muscular, and he doesn’t move under her assault. This failure makes Kendra collapse onto his chest, still holding his shirt.
“Tell me she’s lying,” she wails against his neck.
“You seemed like the clever girl!” Catia says furiously to her. “The one who wouldn’t be stupid enough to be caught out by some man!”
“Uh, thanks,” Kelly mutters. Paige snorts.
“And you, Luigi!” Catia continues, even more viciously. “You swore up and down to me two years ago that you’d learned your lesson! I was an idiot to give you a second chance! I should never have allowed you to come back to teach in my summer school! I should have been on the lookout as soon as I heard that Annalisa was pregnant again!”
“Oh my God,” Paige says as the full horror of the situation sinks in.
We exchange stares of pity for poor Kendra. It’s not only that Luigi’s done this before, that she isn’t unique in having a fling, or whatever she’s doing, with him: this isn’t some big love affair, some grand passion. Kendra was just a distraction for him while his wife was pregnant. As, presumably, the first girl was too.
“È vero,” Luigi says to Kendra, so quietly that we can hardly hear him. “È tutto vero. Mi dispiace, Kendra.”
It’s true. It’s all true. I’m sorry, Kendra.
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