I never dreamed I’d find one here.
Winning several categories—the fastest guitar restringing and the best classics’ neck fixing—brought me a lot of attention. But Jerry was the only one willing to invest in me rather than leaving me a card and saying, “If you get a working visa, come find us.”
The luckiest day of my life was when I had entered Luigi’s guitar shop in Milano thirteen years ago. I had nothing else to do, nowhere else to be, and nothing else to lose at the age of seventeen.
My second luckiest day was meeting Jerry. He hadn’t given up on me, even when it had become clear that my records in Italy prevented me from getting a working visa or residency here. I had sold him the rights for the pre-amps I’d designed so he could open a boutique line in his chain of guitar shops. It wasn’t something I could have done in Italy alone. I was also set-upping and fixing guitars for customers in his shops and working in parallel on designing a guitar line that Jerry promised to manufacture on a bespoke scale. I was almost at the prototype stage.
We had people interested in investing in it. I was on the brink of making my dream come true, but keeping me here was beneficial for Jerry, too, which was why he had come up with the marriage plan.
Only, it wasn’t supposed to be some random woman. It was supposed to be Amber.
After she’d left me, I didn’t care who it would be instead. I hardly looked at the woman whom I’d spent a whole ten minutes with and who was now my wife. She was the type I wouldn’t waste a second look on. Though she could be considered beautiful by those who liked the too-slim, zero-fat, rigid type.
To me, she looked like a tightly wound guitar. Her every movement was measured, controlled, as if she would snap if she tried to move freely, like the wrongly tuned strings I had the displeasure of fixing after they had been treated by the hands of an amateur.
I’d seen plenty of those. Amateurs, women, and guitars.
Even her dark brown hair was perfectly still. Only her oversized, soft, beige clothes flowed around her like a misfitting case. If Jerry hadn’t told me she was forty, I would have guessed her to be maybe five years older than me, not a decade.
It didn’t matter what she looked like, anyway. The next time I’d see her, we’d be divorcing each other.
“Jerry, we’re here.” My voice shook him out of the nap he had managed to fall into during the short ride.
It was his building, one of several he owned in the city. I lived in one of the apartments on the third floor, and the rent was deducted from my salary each month. It was an easy walking distance to Jerry’s guitar shop, one of five in his local chain in California. I had opened a workshop at the back of it, fixing guitars for the entire chain, designing prototypes, and building specialty preamps.
I did most of the design work alone in the apartment. The silence and solitude insulated me from the foreign streets outside, which no longer excited me as they had at first.
When I had been with Amber.
My third luckiest day, which was now my shittiest, had been meeting her. I had fallen in love instantly, on the spot, at first sight. She was fun, like the pop side of rock’n’roll. Not much of a talent playing the guitar in her girl band, Background Noises, as she wanted people to think, but she made up for it in beauty, sexiness, and sass—her three most prominent traits. Four fun months after we had met, I’d proposed with a ring I could afford, in a restaurant, over dessert. Unlike today, that wedding wasn’t supposed to be only for a green-card’s sake. I had been dumped in response with a, “Marriage? I’m twenty-four. I want to live, make it big with the band, havefun. Isn’t that what you and I were all about?”
She was right. That was all we had been.
They say disappointment is good for art, but so far, it hadn’t worked out exactly—everything I had designed with her in mind had failed. A preamp pedal prototype I’d completed sounded off when played, and nothing I tried could fix it. For a few weeks, I had found myself playing the guitars I had lying around and staring at the walls rather than designing.
“See you tomorrow,” Jerry and I both said as he passed me by on his way to the driver’s side.
Jerry was lovely to everyone, though sometimes I felt that his sprinkle of smiles was a means to an end. But he had given me a new life here, and artistic freedom, though it was mainly because he didn’t understand much about the artistic process.
I made more money here and was able to send most of it to my mother in Italy. With five sons, spanning the ages of thirty-two to eighteen, and with the eldest and middle ones in jail, the second youngest getting fired from every job, and the youngest just out of high school, she needed the money that I, the second eldest, made here. I pressed her to save so she could move out of the blocks to the suburbs. I wanted my younger brothers, whom I had taken for walks, pushing their strollers in the streets of Milano when they were toddlers and I was a teen, away from the bad influence of the neighborhood that I had barely escaped.
I just had to find my pace and place here. I felt that destiny had brought me here because my fate and future were here. So far, I was still more of a potential than a success, a foreigner, and mostly alone. I got to meet a lot of people, but at the end of the workday, and after the bars and clubs, jam sessions, and coffee shops, even if I went home with anyone, I was still alone.
On my way upstairs, carrying a guitar I had to work on, I passed by the pretty blonde from apartment 2C who was on her way downstairs.
“Coffee,” she said with a cheeky smile, poking a finger into my chest and reminding me of previous invitations for me to drop by her apartment.
Pretty or not, I wasn’t interested in anyone who lived so close by and wouldn’t go home at least a kilometer away after “coffee” was had.
I lifted my free arm and waved a casual hello with a side dish of wink that I hoped she read asnot going to happen.
Only when her shocked expression registered in my brain did I realize what had caused it.
I was a married man, wearing a wedding ring.
And the woman I had just married had striking dark blue eyes that reminded me of the oceans I’d crossed on my way to this country.
3
