Flirting in Italian

by Henderson, Lauren

  The clever girls know this; the pretty ones usually don’t, because they tend to rely too much on their looks. Of course, the ones who are both clever and pretty do especially well, but that’s true for everything in life.

  I look over at Kendra, who’s both clever and pretty. I’m surprised to see that she’s staring, wide-eyed, at Luigi, absolutely mesmerized by him.

  “We put the paint on thee brush, then thee brush on thee paper, and you see.…”

  Luigi demonstrates, dipping his brush into black tempera paint from a tube he’s mixed with water and put on his palette, then flicking the tip of the brush swiftly across the paper. “It dries almost immediately. As you pull the brush across, it is drying already. You see?”

  We nod in unison. Luigi has executed a perfect stroke on the paper, like a ribbed black branch stretching from one end to the other.

  “That is why watercolor is thee most deefeecult way to paint. You will cry, maybe. You weel be vairy frustrated.” He smiles. “Is good for life, to learn sometheeng vairy deefeecult. And one day, perhaps, if you are vairy good and try vairy hard, you will be able to do thees.”

  He dips the brush into the black paint again and, with a few more strokes, sketches in a few branches and twigs flowing from the main branch; then, with a deft, practiced twist of his wrist, he cleans the brush in a can of water, wipes its bristles off on the edge, loads it with red paint, and taps little flowers as plump and pretty as cherries onto the branches, seemingly at random.

  He steps back: we all gasp. The picture he’s just made is so simple; it looks as if it would be the easiest thing in the world to do.

  “I study in Japan,” Luigi says. “That is my style. I weel teach you a number of styles, but we start today weeth the most deefeecult. Today, you will all try to do thees, the tree branch with flowers. You must ’old the brush very steady. You weel make many meestakes and be vairy un’appy. Okay!” He claps his hands, making us all jump. “We begin!”

  I’m excited. Only two days ago, at the castello, I was looking at watercolors, and now we’re learning how to do them—even if it does include making many mistakes and being very unhappy. I was absolutely determined to make it to our first art class today, so much so that after spending the day in bed yesterday eating more yogurt and plain boiled rice, I hauled myself down to dinner to show Catia that I was okay to restart the normal daily program. Elisa, unfortunately, was there with Ilaria, oversympathizing with me in a way so exaggerated it was almost offensive. I can’t believe that Catia doesn’t realize what a bitch her daughter is. Every time I picked up my fork, Elisa would lean forward to make a comment:

  “It’s so good you have your appetite again, Violet!”

  and:

  “Oh, you finish all your pasta! You feel much better, yes! You eat everything!”

  While, of course, leaving most of her own pasta on the plate. Catia was smiling approvingly at Elisa, just as if she really believed the face value of all her daughter’s nasty snarks. She’s oblivious to Elisa’s deeply unpleasant personality. She’s probably always let Elisa get away with murder, I reflect, and this is why Elisa’s such a spoiled little horror.

  Around me, the other girls have all made tentative starts on their watercolors. We’re in a converted barn in the gardens of the villa, big skylights set into the roof, so light pours down, clear and white, onto the equally big trestle table in front of us. Catia runs art courses at Villa Barbiano when she isn’t hosting summer schools, and the barn is done up as a full art studio, with canvases propped against walls, easels stacked at the far end, even a plinth for a model to sit on. There’s a huge stainless-steel sink for washing up; a long built-in marble shelf running the whole length of one side holds a dizzying array of paint tubes, acrylics and oils, paintbrushes, and wooden palettes, all battered and paint-stained.

  I look down at my own palette. It’s metal, because, as Luigi explained, wood is absorbent, and the water-based tempera would just soak into it. I have black mixed into one of the dips in the palette, and pale pink in another. Inspired by Luigi’s Japanese-style painting, I have the idea of trying to do a cherry-blossom branch.

  I pick up my brush and dip it into the black; just as I’m drawing it across the top sheet of paper, Kelly, next to me, rips her first attempt off with a deep groan of disgust, and the sound makes me jerk. Just a little, but more than enough; to my dismay, the straight line I’m trying to paint wobbles and bends the way only the weirdest, most deformed branch would do in real life. Thinking fast, I don’t fight it. Instead, I follow the bend, tail it off as best I can, lift the brush, and then add another line, continuing the original branch. I don’t think it looks brilliant, but I’ve sort of saved it, and before I can lose my nerve, I take just a little black paint, the way Luigi did, on the very tip of the brush, and sketch in some twigs coming off the branches.

  He’s right; the paint dries almost before you’ve taken the brush off the paper. It’s a terrifying pressure to be working under. Around me, I hear tuts of exasperation, sighs of annoyance, more paper ripping off the sketch blocks, but I’m in a kind of zone now and I tune the noises out. At least the speed with which the tempera dries means that I don’t have to wait for the black to set before I start painting the blossoms. If I stop, I will lose my nerve. I know that instinctively. So, barely breathing, heart pounding, I clean my brush, clouding the water with an inky black swirl, dip it into the pale pink, and dot blossoms on the twigs. I can’t picture cherry blossoms in my mind, see exactly what they look like, but when I’ve done them, they look unfinished somehow. Bare.

  Quick. Think fast. What does it need?

  There’s some green in Kelly’s palette, next to me. Kelly isn’t painting at the moment; she’s at the sink, chucking out the water in her can, having already used several colors and made the water too murky. She took a different approach from mine and mixed up loads of colors before she started; along with the green, which is bright and grassy, there’s an equally bright yellow on her palette. I wash my brush one more time and dip a bare three millimeters of the tip into the green, dotting miniature centers onto each blossom. Then I wash it one more time and dot tiny yellow circles overlapping the green ones, and add a light wash of yellow to one of the weird black branches. I think I’ve added depth, but I’m not really sure.

  Stop now, the voice says firmly. Now. Don’t touch it any more.

  I step back, breathing normally again, and look at my sheet of paper.

  It really isn’t very good. Not when I compare it to Luigi’s, which he’s propped up at the end of the trestle table.

  But for a first attempt, I honestly don’t think it’s that bad, either.

  I look around at the other girls’ sketchbooks. Kendra’s got a decent-looking branch, but only after numerous tries, while Paige and Kelly have a lot of crumpled-up sheets at their feet and dejected expressions on their faces.

  “I suck at this,” Paige sighs.

  “Stick to flower arranging,” Kendra suggests, frowning hard as she dabs some bright red flowers onto her branches.

  “Oh, hey,” Paige says gloomily to Kelly, “you can’t be good at everything, right?”

  “I’m rubbish at everything,” Kelly says, grimacing.

  “Oh, shut up!” Paige waves dismissively at her. “You did an okay bouquet, you’re really good at wine tasting, and your Italian’s the best of all of us. I hate when girls put themselves down. Kendra’s mom’s always lecturing us on that—she says women should always be confident. She’s really smart. She’s a research scientist at a global pharma company, and Kendra’s dad is too. Major brainboxes.”

  “Paige.” Kendra’s voice has an edge. “Don’t.”

  Paige pulls a comic face. “Kendra doesn’t like it when people know what her folks do, ’cause they think that it’s, you know, Big Pharma making drugs too expensive for poor people. But your mom’s doing all this really cool stuff, Kendra!” She swivels to us. “Really complicated, like herbal remedies, but it
costs gazillions in research. It’s not all animal experiments.”

  “Paige!” Kendra snaps.

  “Sorry!” Paige mimes zipping her lips, and then promptly continues:

  “My mom doesn’t do anything. And my dad basically plays a lot of tennis at the club. Kendra’s parents are regular grown-ups, so when her mom tells me what to do and what not to do I kind of like it.”

  “You wouldn’t if you had it all day long,” Kendra says sourly. “My mom expects daily emails telling her what we’ve learned and what I’m going to put on my college applications. She never lets up. It’s all right for you, Paige. You just want to go to Miami and party. I’m destined for Ivy or death.”

  Paige nods. “Yep, I wanna go to college in Miami,” she explains to me and Kelly. “Big party school; great weather.”

  “I can’t even imagine what my mom would do if I went to college anywhere but New England,” Kendra says, shuddering. Just then, Luigi interrupts:

  “Okay, basta chiaccherare! You have tried to paint, and I let you talk because I know it ees deefeecult. But now, we look at what you have done.”

  We fall silent immediately, recalled to order. It doesn’t hurt that Luigi is very good-looking in a grown-up way. Unlike the tall, slim, almost lanky boys we’ve met so far, Luigi is short and stocky, with a hairy chest (you can’t fail to notice the tight dark curls of hair poking out from the neck of his denim shirt); equally hairy, muscly forearms; and a strong, bullish neck.

  And though he’s a bit too manly-looking for my tastes, he’s obviously exactly what Kendra likes. As soon as he spoke, her head whipped around and her huge slanted dark eyes went dewy; she’s staring at him with her head tilted to one side. I doubt she’s listening to a word he’s saying. She’s just watching his full lips move as he talks.

  “Who does not like to paint the watercolors?” he asks.

  Paige and Kelly’s hands shoot up.

  “Bene,” he says, shrugging in a way that would be really rude in Britain, but somehow in Italy isn’t dismissive. “You may try the oil paints. They are easier. But you, and you?” He looks at me and Kendra. “I begin looking at what you have done.”

  He walks around to stand behind Kendra.

  “Allora,” he says, looking at her branch and blossoms. “A good start.” He nods. “There is confidence here. Bene. We work on the technique.”

  Kendra preens as he walks around the table toward me.

  “Eccecente,” Luigi says, his bushy brows rising to mingle with his dark ringlets. “You have done thees before?”

  “No,” I say, my heart shooting up into my mouth, because that question can only be positive.

  “Molto, molto bene,” he says, nodding in short, sharp jerks of appreciation. “Complimenti.” He reaches out to touch the blossoms, pointing to the green and yellow centers. “Why did you do thees? Eet ees your memory of the flowers, how you have seen them?”

  I shake my head.

  “They just needed something,” I say. “It didn’t look finished without them.”

  “Benissimo,” he says, nodding sharply. “Complimenti. The green and the yellow, thees is vairy nice. I like. You have correct instincts.”

  I’m bright red with sheer happiness. I know I am, but I don’t care. Kendra’s scowling, and I don’t care about that either.

  You can have Luigi, I say to her. Honestly. He’s not my type and too old! All I want is to learn how to paint, okay?

  I’m loving everything about being in Italy, I think with a rush of sheer happiness. The countryside, the beauty, the yummy food, and most of all, learning to paint. Oh, but then—Luca. Luca Luca Luca …

  But I realize to my surprise that while I was painting, I didn’t think about Luca at all, not once. I was completely absorbed; I could do it all day long. I absolutely love it.

  I so don’t want to go home.

  After all, Kelly and I have no proof I was poisoned, I tell myself firmly. It could have been just a fluke. A reaction to something, a bout of nasty food poisoning. I’ll be careful what I eat and drink from now on.

  But Kelly’s probably right, I think, wincing. From now on, maybe I should stay away from the Castello di Vesperi. …

  Something Out of a Fairy Tale

  “Par-tee! Par-tee!”

  Paige clatters downstairs, whooping happily, all hair and tan and teeth, looking as if she’s come straight out of a Southern California reality show. Her cork-soled wedges make her legs seem endless, as do her white short shorts. I always thought you had to be really thin to wear shorts like that, but Paige isn’t, and she totally makes them work. Mind you, the glorious American tan helps too. I’ve been sunbathing, but it’ll take me some time to get as lovely and golden as Paige is.

  “Madonna santa,” Leonardo says devoutly, goggling at Paige.

  “Bellissima,” Andrea agrees. He looks around at the rest of us girls, all clustered in the hall waiting for Paige to take out her hot rollers and get herself downstairs, and smiles at us.

  “Bellissime tutte,” he continues. “You are all beautiful.”

  Even Kendra, who’s so cool and poised, can’t help looking smug at this flattery; Kelly and I positively coo with pleasure. I don’t think I’ve ever been called beautiful by a boy in my life. It’s definitely not an English-guy thing; in London, we pride ourselves on our irony and sarcasm. You’re lucky if you even get a backhanded compliment from a boy. “Your hair doesn’t look terrible today”—that kind of thing.

  If boys only realized how much girls love attention and compliments, I think, they’d do it more. I mean, we absolutely melt when one of them kisses our hand, or tells us we’re pretty—even beautiful. To be brutally honest, they don’t even have to mean it a hundred percent. They just have to say it.

  I glance at Paige and Kendra: yep, I’m willing to bet that American boys don’t throw around words like “beautiful” either. They’re both glowing like hundred-watt bulbs. Kendra has sort of poofed up her hair into a big smooth chignon at the top of her head, and in her white halter dress she looks sophisticated enough to challenge Elisa for Chicest Girl at the Party.

  “Andiamo!” Leonardo says, throwing back his dark hair from his face and holding out his hand to Paige like a medieval courtier; she giggles madly as she places hers in his and totters out of the house and down to the car, wobbling in her wedges.

  “If she has a drink,” Kelly mutters to me, “she’s going to fall on her face in those heels. Fashion victim or what!”

  “There’ll be plenty of boys ready to catch her,” I point out as we follow.

  Andrea is escorting Kendra, catching the pale pink cardigan that’s sliding off her shoulders—she’s wearing it in a very Michelle O way, like a cape—and handing it back to her with a gentlemanly flourish. The pairing-off is going on already, I notice. I really hope that at least some boys at the party are interested in talking to me and Kelly. I don’t know if Luca’s coming—I was much too proud to ask Leonardo and Andrea if he was—and actually, I don’t mind being a wallflower if, as Luca predicted, Italian boys don’t generally find my looks that appealing. If Luca isn’t there, I’m still going to dance and hang out and make friends.

  But Kelly won’t be happy to be a wallflower, I know. She’s dressed up within an inch of her life, eye makeup layered on, wearing a black top and skirt that make her look slimmer, her white skin gleaming against the black. It’s almost translucent, her skin; you can see a tracery of blue veins beneath its lightly freckled surface. She’s geared up for this party, having missed the last one. I’m really glad she’s coming along.

  We pile into the jeep, which Leonardo has special permission to drive, and bounce down the driveway and through a winding maze of asphalt and dirt roads, blue signs with white lettering flashing a series of little villages called Vagliagli, Tregole, Capriolo. The white dust of the roads, kicked up by the tires of passing cars, is thick in the hedgerows, making them seem ghostly in the headlights; there are no streetlights, none at all, an
d around us it’s completely dark, apart from the bright stars and a yellow moon that hangs low in the sky, behind the branches of the oak trees on the ridges of the hills. The radio’s playing loud dance music, and by the time we turn a curve and see a line of cars parked on each side of the road, angled up on the sloping tree roots, my heart’s surging with anticipation. I love parties.

  Leonardo drives the jeep right up onto the bank, at the end of the line of parked cars, going so high that the jeep tilts and we all scream, scared and thrilled by what feels like the imminent danger of tipping over. He cranks up the handbrake, turns off the engine, and we literally tumble out the road side of the jeep, because the higher side is blocked by a tangle of brush.

  “Wow,” I breathe as we walk along the road past the parked cars, and come to an arched gate set in a low wall, a drive slanting steeply downhill through the archway. A few Vespa scooters are leaning against the wall, by the gateposts, and at the bottom of the drive is a small house, all its windows blazing with light, music pouring out into the dark velvety night air. It’s like something out of a fairy tale. A modern fairy tale, where Hansel and Gretel don’t get put into a witch’s oven, but dance all night under the stars.

  And maybe there’ll be a prince to make the fairy tale complete, I can’t help thinking, before I firmly forbid myself from speculating about whether Luca will be here. I’m determined not to make my happiness dependent on whether Luca’s at a party or not; I’ve never done that before with the boys I’ve dated. I’ve managed to keep myself from being one of those pathetic girls who can’t get out an entire sentence without wedging the name of their latest crush into it. But I have the horrible feeling that Luca is going to test my ability to stay strong and independent like never before.

  Basta, as they say over here. Enough. I push him to the back of my mind as we pass through the gate and start picking our way down the steep gravel drive to the fairy-tale party house. Horses neigh, and we do a double take, realizing that the fences on the right of the drive enclose paddocks: one horse ambles up to the rail as we pass by, its silhouette looming huge and dark against the sky. Kelly squeaks in shock.