Maybe it was all the good news or maybe it was just the wine, but I was feeling bold, so I slid my foot out of my sandal and allowed my toes to graze Teo’s ankle. He gave me an almost indiscernible wink but otherwise remained engaged in the conversation, which soon turned to the subject of Luca’s budding romance with Matilde.
“When do I get to see her again?” I asked.
“Soon,” he said. “But aren’t you leaving any day?”
“It’s looking like late August now,” I said, careful not to make eye contact with Teo.
Bruno asked about New London and some of the logistics pertaining to the move, and while I answered all of his questions, I didn’t expand upon them.
“I assume it’s bittersweet, moving on,” Bruno said, and the way he glanced between Teo and me made me wonder if he knew more than he was letting on.
After dinner, Teo and I walked back to his apartment. I shouldn’t have risked it, but I had just spent the last three hours pretending I didn’t care about him, and I couldn’t bear to split up and take two separate routes to the same place. We turned down a small road, too narrow for cars, near the Istituto San Vincenzo, and as we walked up the hill in the dark, I reached for his hand.
“Someone could see,” he warned me, but he didn’t let go and neither did I.
I was looking for the right place, and when I saw a small garden with a couple of overgrown strawberry trees, I pulled him into a secluded corner.
“What are we doing?” Teo asked, but I was already unbuckling his belt. It was a dumb thing to do, but I was infatuated with him, and I was so scared of what came next that I think part of me almost wanted to get caught.
“Shhh,” I whispered, but I didn’t need to explain how this worked. He kissed me hard on the mouth and, in one fluid motion, hoisted me onto a little ledge and pushed up my skirt. Neither of us could see what we were doing, but the bumbling was a turn-on, and once he was inside me, all I could focus on was my own blind need.
I came quickly, and Teo was about to finish when we heard someone with a cane making their way very slowly past the garden wall. The cane made a clicking noise on the cobblestones, and we froze for a moment, terrified that whoever it was would enter the garden and discover us.
It was a near miss, thank God, and as we heard the clicking noise recede, I whispered into Teo’s ear, “Keep going.”
A few seconds later, he collapsed against me, and that’s when we heard an old man say, “Buonasera, signora.”
I must have jumped a mile, but Teo put a finger to my lips. “He’s talking to someone else.”
It was a woman whom the old man must have passed on the street, although we hadn’t heard her coming. We listened as she returned the man’s greeting, then moved along, the click of her heels echoing behind her.
“That was close,” I said, and we both laughed, intoxicated with each other and our own good fortune.
142.
ON JUNE 20, ITALIANS EVERYWHEREwent to the voting booth, and while something like thirty-four percent of them voted for the Italian Communist Party, it was not enough to wrestle control of either the Chamber of Deputies or the Senate away from the Christian Democrats.
Francesca was disappointed, but Americans in La Maddalena were thrilled, and two weeks later, when the command celebrated the Fourth of July—and the United States’ bicentennial—it was hard not to feel as if all of the festivities were really just a giant victory dance.
Paul had come home with a mimeographed schedule of events. On Saturday night, there would be a huge fireworks display, visible from both the Palau and La Maddalena waterfronts, and on Sunday—which was the actual Fourth—we’d go to special church services in the morning, the dedication of the softball field in Moneta in the afternoon, and a semiformal dance at Vista Mare Elementary School in the evening. Monday was the federal holiday, so provided any of us were still standing, we could catch a bus from the Palau ferry landing to Costa Serena, where the command was hosting a beach picnic.
I hadn’t seen Teo since Tuesday afternoon, when he’d come to La Maddalena to—ostensibly—interview Bertini for a piece he was writing on the new administration. We’d had only a couple of hours together back at Teo’s apartment after the interview, but we’d made tentative plans to see each other sometime over the July Fourth weekend if I could slip away.
It was a dicey plan, because the weekend was jam-packed. “Are you sure you want to wait around for me?” I’d asked, but Teo insisted that he was coming to La Maddalena anyway and had plenty to keep him busy in the event I didn’t show.
By Sunday, when Paul and I arrived at the softball field for the ribbon-cutting ceremony, I was in a terrible mood. I hadn’t seen Teo once all weekend, and since he did not have Monday off, I knew he’d be leaving for Sassari on the six o’clock ferry.
I had held on to the hope that, if I could survive the speeches and handshakes and photo ops, I might get home from the ribbon-cutting with enough time to make up some errand and slip away for an hour. But then I saw that all of the guys, including Paul, had changed into jerseys that readLA MADD SQUAD.
“Wait, what are they doing?” I asked Annie as we watched our husbands clamor into the dugouts.
“It’s an exhibition game.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said.
We were sitting on the hot bleachers, surrounded by a gaggle of other wives. “Do you think they make those shirts in my size?” said Debbie, who was a diminutive woman.
“They should,” said Annie. “They’re cute.”
