“English, or at least that was the idea.”
“You didn’t finish?” he asked.
I shook my head, then started to tell him about Lenny. How he had died in Vietnam and what his death had done to my mother and father and me. “After he was gone, nothing made sense,” I said. “I’m still not sure it does.”
It surprised me, how easy it was to talk to Teo about Lenny. Particularly because I didn’t always find it easy to talk to Paul about him. Paul had a tendency to look at Lenny’s life through the lens of his military service, and this made me uncomfortable, because Lenny hadn’t chosen to join the army and it was the army that had gotten him killed.
I much preferred to talk about what it had been like to grow up with Lenny, and I found myself telling Teo about the time my mother found a wand of mascara in the washing machine. I was twelve or thirteen and had shoplifted it from the drugstore because I wasn’t allowed to wear makeup yet, and like an idiot, I’d left it in the pocket of my jeans. My mother was no dummy, and she figured the whole thing out, but when Lenny heard her starting to get worked up, he swooped in and claimed the mascara was his. Something about how he was holding it for a friend. The story made no sense, but the insinuation was that maybe he had a girlfriend, so my mother dropped it.
We had arrived back where we started, at the entrance to the villa.
“My parents lost a baby before I was born,” Teo said as we made our way toward the house’s stables. “A little girl. Isabella. She lived for three or four months, then died suddenly, in the night.”
“That’s so sad,” I said.
He acknowledged it was. “But the loss of your brother is very different. You knew him. Grew up with him. I tell you about Isabella only to say that I always felt my sister’s absence, even though my brothers and I came along after she was already gone. My parents didn’t talk about her much, and the house was always busy and loud, but somehow, my brothers and I, we knew there was this hole we couldn’t fill, no matter how hard we tried.”
Was this the moment I fell in love with Teo? It’s hard to pinpoint, exactly, but I do recall standing in the courtyard of the Villa Webber, after he’d said all those heartfelt things, and thinking that I had just managed to make my life infinitely more complicated.
85.
THE BINGO NIGHT THAT LAURAand I had been planning went off without a hitch, which would have left me feeling pretty good about myself had Mary Lou not flagged me down in the parking lot, as I was getting into my car, and asked if I could give her a ride home.
“How are you holding up?” she asked when I had eased the car past the guardhouse and onto the Via Principe Amedeo.
“Holding up?” I said, a little confused.
“With Paul gone.”
“Oh, right,” I said. The tender had been gone for over a week, but I’d been so busy that I’d hardly noticed. “It’s been hard.”
She gave me a sly smile. “I don’t believe you.”
I was so surprised, I laughed out loud. “What do you want me to say? That I’ve been totally fine?”
“That’s certainly better. If it’s accurate.”
I got serious. “Do you know that I’ve never lived on my own?”
Mary Lou rolled down the window and lit a cigarette. “That’s probably half the American women on this island.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, how’s it going?” she asked.
“I have to say, I don’t hate it.”
She blew a long stream of smoke out the window. “Jim doesn’t like it when I read in bed at night. I have to keep the lamp on, and he says he can’t sleep.”
“That’s the type of thing I’m talking about,” I said.
“When he goes to sea, I read until one or two o’clock in the morning.”
I liked picturing this version of Mary Lou, engaged in her own private rebellion.
My own acts of rebellion had been piling up around me. Without Paul at home, I was sleeping in a little later, leaving the bed unmade, and goingto the bathroom with the door open. Twice I’d gone out to eat by myself, but otherwise I’d managed to survive on yogurt and bread and sausage and cheese and these apricot jam cookies, which I ate by the handful. Of course, my big act of defiance was spending time with Teo.
“It’s nice to let loose a little,” said Mary Lou. “But we must be careful not to get carried away.”
