“I was,” I agreed as I stared up at him.
“So,” he said, kissing me once and then twice, “it’s only fair that I do something nice for you.”
“Oh yeah?” I said, intrigued.
But he had already rolled away and was swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Right after we go get some food.”
25.
PAUL DIDN’T HAVE TO OFFICIALLYreport for duty until Monday, which gave us the weekend to get our feet under us.
In bed on Saturday morning, we debated what to do. I wanted to go to the beach, but Paul insisted on taking me to Santo Stefano so I’d know where the commissary was and how to get there.
I was not excited. “I don’t want to do more grocery shopping.”
“This will be fun,” he said. “I swear.”
I agreed to go on the condition that he bought me breakfast first, and he acquiesced right away—probably terrified that if he didn’t, I’d try to cook him an egg or a piece of toast on that hot plate of mine.
We bought aHerald Tribune—the only English-language newspaper we could get on the island—at a nearby newsstand, then made our way toward the Piazza Rossa, where at Café Gargiulo we had our choice of outdoor tables.
Paul and I had been warned that we wouldn’t find drip coffee anywhere in Italy, so I ordered a cappuccino, which I’d only ever seen in the movies, and Paul said he’d take an espresso. When the waiter returned with our coffees, I watched Paul down the espresso like a shot of vodka. “Don’t you want to taste it?” I asked.
We asked for a breakfast menu, but the waiter seemed confused by this request, so I asked if he had any croissants, and he brought us two cornetti on tiny plates with these cute paper doilies. While we ate, Paul read headlines aloud. “The VC keep pushing south.”
I had tried to follow what was happening in Vietnam when Lenny was over there, but I’d stopped after he died. At Condon’s, it was easy to avoid the subject. Someone would get going about how Operation Lam Son was worse than anyone was saying or how twenty thousand North Vietnamese troops had crossed the DMZ, and I’d act real interested in a stack of sweaters that needed to be refolded out on the floor. But at home it hadbeen harder to look the other way. My parents read theNews and Couriereach morning, and at night, Walter Cronkite was right there in our living room, with his horn-rimmed spectacles and his mid-Atlantic English. The night he announced that we’d begun withdrawing combat troops from Vietnam, I had looked at my parents, who just sat there staring at the television like they didn’t quite believe it. Cronkite gave his familiar sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” and I felt an overwhelming urge to throw my dinner plate at the television.
It wasn’t that I was for the war, it was more that I felt I couldn’t come out against it. I’d lost a brother over there, so had I gone to marches and protested the United States’ involvement in the conflict, I would have felt like I was—in some way—turning my back on Lenny, and also my parents, who were proud of his service and desperate for his sacrifice to contribute to some greater good.
Now that I was in Italy, I didn’t want to hear much more about the peace talks or ceasefires, the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops or whether the ARVN was or was not managing to hold back the Viet Cong. It was one of many reasons Paul’s marriage proposal had seemed so appealing. I could get away from the headlines and the broadcasts and my parents’ obsession with trying to comprehend the incomprehensible.
Had I ever told Paul this? No, I had not. And he certainly wasn’t going to intuit it.
“Schlesinger says it’s only a matter of time before they take Saigon,” he said as he took a big bite of his pastry.
I stood up, fast, and said I needed to use the bathroom.
I didn’t have to pee, but I tried to go anyway, then took as long as I possibly could to wash my hands and pat down my hair. I was standing there, staring at myself in the mirror, when I noticed it. The same flyer I’d seen two nights earlier in the market. This one was taped to the back of the bathroom door, and when I moved closer to examine it, I saw the familiar missile or bomb or whatever it was withUSAstamped across it. Then there was the outline of the island, and all the same unfamiliar words:L’isola della Maddalena transformata in una fonte di inquinamento, in un pericolo atomico, in un bersaglio di guerra.
I pulled my phrase book out of my purse and flipped toI. Isolawas there, and it meant island. Of course it did. Next I looked updellaand feltstupid because I should have known it meantof. The islandofLa Maddalena. Easy enough. I kept going, but my phrase book didn’t havetransformataorfonteorinquinamento.
There was a knock on the door, and I jumped. “One minute,” I said, before realizing that the person on the other side of the door was Paul.
“You all right in there?”
“Oh, fine. Yes. Hang on,” I said, stalling for time, because I had already decided the flyer was coming with me. I ripped it off the door, folded it up, and slid it inside the phrase book, then flung the door open and gave Paul a bright smile that I didn’t quite mean. When I look back now, I see that this was the beginning of something—the first time I deliberately hid what I was doing from Paul.
26.
WHEN WE ARRIVED AT THEPier after breakfast, there were already maybe a dozen people, mostly women, waiting for the next liberty boat. A few of them had scarves tied around their heads, and several of them carried those little folding carts that old ladies in European cities are always dragging around behind them. For a second, I worried we might need one, too, but then I remembered we were buying only as much as our Styrofoam cooler could hold.
When the liberty boat approached the pier, I was startled to see that it was actually one of those old mechanized landing crafts that the U.S. had used to storm the beaches of Normandy. You know the ones with the bow ramps that all those poor boys had to charge down under enemy fire? Apparently, the American government had a surplus of them after World War II, because what we were looking at was not a reproduction but the genuine article. Thirty or so years old, rusted through in some places, and covered in enough epoxy to hide any number of flaws.
A crew member in a pale blue shirt and dungarees hopped off the boat and tied it up, and a few sailors disembarked. Meanwhile, the people around us fished for their wallets and withdrew their military IDs.
Paul and I were among the last to board the boat, but it didn’t matter. There was plenty of room, and after we’d taken our seats, I got that feeling I used to get when I’d go out on the boat with my dad and my brother. Part nerves and part anticipation. The nerves because the water was so vast and unknowable, and the anticipation because—no matter what happened—I knew I was about to have a good time.
We pulled away from the pier, and after the coxswain had gotten the boat turned around, he increased the engine’s throttle and we made for the open sea. “Woohoo!” I yelled, but Paul gave me a look that saidPropriety, please.
