Mary Lou shrugged. “Moneta’s popular with Europeans on holiday, and Americans like us. It’s because of the views. And the beach. But the Italians prefer to live closer to town.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“All of the schoolchildren walk home for lunch. There’s not time to get all the way out here and back before the bell rings.” She abruptly changed the subject. “So, this luncheon—it’s for Frank Jordan’s wife, Susan.”
“Who’s Frank Jordan?”
“He runs the Navy Support Office.”
I tried to remember what, if anything, Paul had told me about the Jordans, but I was drawing a blank.
“Susan and Frank aren’t leaving for a few more weeks, but Janine and I wanted to get this in ahead of the change of command ceremony. Just us girls, you know?”
I assumed Janine was the commodore’s wife, but I wasn’t going to ask. Instead, I said, “Is she going to care that I’m crashing her party?”
“Janine? God, no,” said Mary Lou. “Women are always coming and going on this island. If we waited until we got to know everyone before we started issuing invitations, none of us would ever get out of the house.”
33.
AT THE END OF THEdirt road, we came to an ornate metal gate, which had been left open. Mary Lou eased the Caprice past it and parked behind a long line of American cars with Armed Forces license plates. These cars already stuck out to me like sore thumbs. It wasn’t just the license plates. It was that they looked like tanks compared to the little Fiats and Autobianchis I had grown accustomed to seeing around town.
The Greers were the only Americans on the island who had been provided a house by the navy, and it sat at the highest point on the property, in the middle of a small grove of cork trees. From the front, it looked modest, a typical Italian farmhouse with stucco exterior, granite stonework, and terra-cotta roof tiles, but Mary Lou told me I hadn’t seen anything yet.
She parked the car. In front of us, a woman who had just emerged from a Volkswagen Golf was struggling with a big black garbage bag. Mary Lou took one last draw from her cigarette, then stubbed it out in the car’s ashtray and hurried to help.
“We’ve got to hold it from the bottom,” the woman said as she and Mary Lou trundled off toward the Greers’ front door with the bag between them.
“Will you get the hatch?” Mary Lou called over her shoulder to me, and I did as I was told.
Inside the house, it was as if we were delivering an antelope carcass to a pack of hungry lions. Someone shouted, “Carla’s here!” and a dozen women rushed us. There wereooohs andaaahs andPut it heres until finally, Mary Lou put a finger and thumb between her lips and let out a shrill whistle.
“Ladies!” she said. “Some decorum, please.”
She and Carla had put the bag down in the vestibule, but Carla was stillclutching the top of it, so the contents—whatever they were—wouldn’t spill out onto the floor. “You all know the rules,” said Carla. “I’ll spread everything out, and then we’ll draw numbers to see who picks first.”
A middle-aged woman with a striking gray bob guided Carla and her big black bag toward a room off the kitchen, and a woman with a cleft chin and big hoop earrings offered Mary Lou and me a glass of prosecco, which I had never heard of.
I waited for Mary Lou to wander off before I asked this woman what was in the bag.
“Oh,” she said, like she couldn’t believe I didn’t already know, “books.”
“Books?” I repeated in disbelief. I liked to read as much as, if not more than, the next person, but never in my whole life had I seen a group of women so excited about the written word.
“It’s impossible to buy an English-language book anywhere on the island,” said this woman.
“Not even at the Navy Exchange?” I asked.
She shook her head. “All they’ve got is Lladrós and shaving cream. There’s a tiny lending library on the tender, and we’ve been begging the command to set up something similar at the compound. It’d be much easier for dependents to use.”
“Do you think they’ll do it?”
“They say they’re going to get to it, but for now, we’ve got Carla, who’s a one-woman bookmobile.”
“I’m dying to readZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” I said.
“Is it a romance?”
“I don’t think so?”
