Elisa turns the knob, but to no avail. “The receiver won’t move. I think the connection’s fried.”
“Turn it off, then.”
“It won’t even turn off,” she whimpers, on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say, unhooking her bra. “We can go to confession tomorrow.”
“Good point.”
We pick up where we left off, with even more enthusiasm, when the roar of an eighteen-thousand-decibel tri-tonal trumpet makes us both jump.
The beam of two powerful headlights illuminates the cockpit like daylight, Elisa covers herself, and I glimpse the nose of a tractor in the rearview mirror.
“You guys need a tow?” the driver shouts. “I have a hook.”
And that’s that. Another evening scuppered.
46
Elisa
“There’s something romantic going on between you and Michael, isn’t there?” Mamma asks me the following morning over coffee in the annex kitchen.
Romanticis the last word I’d use to describe it at the moment, but who am I to parse words? “Let’s say it’s a friendship with room to evolve,” I reply vaguely. If I confirmed her suspicions with a clear and direct yes, she’d start sending out wedding invitations today.
Something else I won’t tell her: Michael and I have a high-voltage rendezvous planned tonight, since Giada is taking Linda to Florence to see some pop star I’ve never heard of, and Mamma and Donatella will be busy at their burraco tournament.
“How wonderful! Between Giada and Charles and now you and Michael, I’ll be the envy of the entire village! You’re about to become two very wealthy ladies! You even more so than Giada!”
“Your imagination is getting ahead of you.” I stop her immediately. I get up and take the folder with all the estate’s accounts. “Being a wife is the last thing on my mind. If all goes well, I’ll be getting a loan soon.”
I was counting on Carletto coming back so I could talk to him in person, but now I’ll have to do it by phone, in which case I need to get my facts straight. I may not be a Russian tycoon swimming in gold,but I will offer him what Le Giuggiole is worth, and if our friendship means anything to him, maybe he’ll consider the idea.
Mamma mumbles something incomprehensible but which reveals her disapproval of my decision, and I—completely immune to her judgment as I have been since the day I was born—head out.
I have an appointment with the bank director in twenty minutes, but I’m early, so I sit down and observe the people crowding the branch—the only one in the town, obviously.
On the opposite side of the room, sitting on one of the chairs, I’m surprised to notice Donatella, dressed in her tailored suit, fanning herself with a fan.
“If I’d known you were coming, I’d have given you a lift,” I say, going to sit next to her.
“Every now and then, I like to take a taxi just to pretend I’m going somewhere interesting,” she replies, always in that affected tone of hers. “Tell me, treasure, is today the big loan day?” she asks.
“How did you know?”
“I didn’t. I can read,” she replies, gesturing to the folder resting on my knees, with the wordloanwritten across it in big letters. “Ah, the thrill of debt. I still remember when I was twenty-one and broke and hitchhiking across the United States. I never knew where I’d end up the next day, who I might talk to, what I was going to eat ... if I even had enough money in my pocket to eat. In the seventies, you could be whoever you wanted and the next day be someone completely different.”
“Honestly, I can’t picture you hitchhiking coast to coast,” I say, trying to summon the image.
“Oh, I’ve done a lot of things in my life that you couldn’t imagine. But there’s a time for everything. Certainly the girl who hung out at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol and Truman Capote couldn’t have imagined that she would start studying stock market investments dressed in Chanel.”
“Do you play the stock market?”
“Oh no. When my last husband died, he left me some shares. I just manage them. I have to speak with an adviser today about where to move a million that’s barely yielded anything for a year.”
“H-how much?” I must have misheard.
“A million.”
