We'll Always Have Paris (10 page)

That day, Mario Schifano made our list of top ten favorite artists. The bright color and crackling energy of his post-modern pop art charged us with excitement we hadn’t experienced since London when Katie discovered her love of Dalí. Schifano’s large canvases looked as though they should hang beside Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein’s but possessed their own distinct style. Katie and I stared at a large mural, examining a series of colorful wigs floating onto different heads. At least I thought they were wigs. Katie insisted they were babies. We simultaneously burst into laughter at each other’s assessment. “How could you think those are wigs?!” Katie shrieked.

“Because babies don’t sit on top of human heads,” I returned. “Stop laughing, we’re supposed to be British.”

“English people laugh, Mommy.”

“Not this loud,
shhh
.”

Years earlier, we had begun playing the museum game we called Pretentious Art Critic. We never needed to ask the other to play. One would just begin using the Thurston Howell III voice, and the other knew it was time to add to the drivel. “The artist is saying that we all costume our authentic selves as a survival mechanism,” I began through a clenched jaw. “And colorful wigs—”

“Babies,” Katie interrupted. “Colorful babies on our heads represent the innocence of our young minds.”

“Which are so quickly destroyed in the commercial meat grinder of our consumer culture,” I said.

“That makes no sense whatsoever, but so often the most profound insights are nonsense.”

“How very right you are,” I said.

Returning to her normal voice, Katie whispered, “I love this Schifano guy.”

“I’m with you. There isn’t a piece in here that I am not one hundred percent in love with. This man is absolutely brilliant.”

“Aren’t you glad we changed the days?” Katie asked.

“We didn’t change the days; we let the days change us.”

“That’s some deep stuff, Mommy,” she teased.

***

“I’m going to bring my new girlfriend Stella on Sunday,” my father said on the phone. “She’s a brilliant artist, better than Picasso.”

By the time the weekend rolled around, my father’s announcement had escaped my nine-year-old brain until I walked out of my apartment building door and saw a rail-thin woman leaning against my father’s car. She had a mop of curly brown hair and wore a purple ribbed tank top and embroidered jeans.

As my father opened the lobby door, he pointed toward the girl in front of his beige jalopy. “That’s Stella,” he informed me. “She moved in Wednesday.” The three of us slid into the front bench seat of my father’s car and headed toward Brooklyn Heights where my father had recently rented an apartment after he returned from what was supposed to be a six-month stay in London. Rumor had it that he was evicted from the home of a music producer where he was staying. Apparently he slept with the producer’s wife.

“It was an honest misunderstanding,” I overheard my father explaining to his sisters, Rita and Bernice. “The guy said, ‘Help yourself to anything,’ and winked at me. He said, ‘What’s mine is yours,’ and his wife was standing right there, so I figured he was giving me a signal.”

“A signal?!” Rita balked. “He meant you should have a snack, not his wife.”

“She was a very aggressive woman,” my father defended. “I thought they had an arrangement.”

“An
arrangement
,” Rita spat. “Does anyone actually know a single person with one of these so-called arrangements?”

Always the peacemaker, Bernice chimed in. “There were those men from the diner.”

“They were involved in a prostitution ring, Bern!” Rita said.

Bernice shrugged. “Anyway, Shelly’s home and that’s all that matters.”

Now, three weeks later, my father had moved Stella into his ninth-floor Brooklyn Heights apartment. The home had high ceilings with an oversized arched window overlooking the downtown Manhattan skyline. His view was a straight shot across to the Twin Towers. When I stood close to the window and looked far to the left, I could see the Statue of Liberty on her private island.

After the short drive over the bridge, I discovered that my father’s apartment had been transformed into the Museum of Stella. Canvases with brilliant cubist paintings hung clustered on one wall. On the adjacent wall was a mural of a crowd of people standing behind a velvet rope looking at the canvases. The third wall was solid mirror, so it became difficult to tell what was real and what was simply a reflection of the absurdity that had become my father’s home.

As my father moved further off the beaten path, my mother continued her upward climb toward middle-class life. Earlier that year, she moved us from our studio apartment in Greenwich Village to a two-bedroom spread in Stuyvesant Town. We sang the theme song to
The
Jeffersons
as Mother Truckers moved us on up to the East Side. Unlike George and Weezy, my mother and I weren’t relocating to a luxury apartment, but a working class development, one pay grade up from
Good
Times
. It didn’t have the character of Greenwich Village, but we each got our own bedroom and that was a thrill for us. My mother’s first purchase was plush wall-to-wall carpet more suited for Sutton Place than Stuyvesant Town.

“You finally got your wall-to-wall carpeting, Carol,” my father said during his first visit. “Happy now?”

“I will be when you take off those filthy clogs,” she said as she accepted my father’s offering of whole wheat bagels and vegetable cream cheese. She smiled and invited him in for the full tour.

***

On our last day in Rome, Katie and I discovered that our tickets for the hour-long Tiber River cruise offered unlimited rides during a twenty-four-hour period. The timing could not have been better. After eight days of walking non-stop, my feet had their own heartbeat. My abnormally large pinky toes were colorless. I wondered if they’d need to be amputated when we arrived in Salerno the following day.

“Good morning,” I said in my bright English accent to the man at the ticket booth. Like everyone else in Rome, he offered me a European discount and waved Katie on for free without question. “You like a music?” he asked, offering us headphones. On the riverboat, reminiscent of the
Adventures
of
Tom
Sawyer
, Katie and I placed the headphones on our ears and listened to classics like “Santa Lucia” on guitar. The plucking of Italian songs matched the mood of the scrolling scenery so perfectly that I wondered if someone had orchestrated the playlist so the melancholy songs would play as we passed older buildings while flitty numbers began during stretches where children played by the riverbank. By our fourth river ride, I gave Katie a gentle nudge. “This is so cliché, I love it,” I said. “Why do you have your nose buried in a book?”

“I watched the first two times,” she said. “And I love this book.”

“Are you bored?”

Katie looked up. “I’m content.”

“Show-off.”

The boat captain approached us. We were the only passengers and it was his job to chat us up, to be a good ambassador for Rome. He was a sweet older gentleman, and maintaining the English accent was making me feel guilty. “
Signora
, we stop the boat for a two hour to take a lunch,” the captain said, gesturing to his crewman. “You come back in a two hour and ride again?”

“If that’s all right,” I said.

“
Belle
, to have you on our boat all day is a wonderful thing. You come back and ride the boat all day and all night.”

My heart sank. “I need to confess something.”

The captain sat beside us and leaned in. Katie looked up from her Kindle. “We’re not British,” I said sheepishly. “I used this accent to get the discount on the fare. I’m sorry.”

He knit his brow. “You sound a like you from England.”

“She’s good at accents,” Katie said.

The captain paused again, looking down. “Where you from a for real?”

“America,” I said. “California.”

“You can do the voices of America?” he asked. “Like John Wayne?”

“Ask her to do New York,” Katie piped in.

The captain smiled and did his own impression of a New Yorker. “I break a you face,” he said, smiling brightly. “Now you say like John Wayne.”

Tapping into my spaghetti western, I looked him square in the eye, adjusted my cap, and told him, “I’m afraid I’m gonna have to break your face, Pilgrim.”

“You stay for pizza!” the captain yelped.

I straightened up. “I reckon I’d like y’all to stay for pizza.”

Katie snorted. “I think he’s inviting us to stay onboard for lunch.”

“
Si
,” he confirmed. “You stay and eat pizza with us. I tell you things to say and you say them like America states. Can you say like the Dakota? Oh, I love the
Fargo
movie.” Imitating a character, the captain continued, “Look a like the cold front is a coming.” Then breaking character, he laughed. “It’s a so cold already and they say the cold is a
coming
? The movie, she is so funny.”

“You’re not angry?”

“Angry?!” he scoffed. “All day I go up river, down river, up river again. Can you do voice like
Italiano
?”

Katie shut off her Kindle and slipped it in her backpack. She smiled mischievously. “Yup, she does all kinds of accents. Ask her to do yours.”

My head whipped to face her.
Are
you
freaking
kidding
me?!
I said by way of facial expression.

“Ah yes, do my accent!” the captain said. “Marco, come listen to
Americana
. She going to make a her voice like me.”

Katie smiled again and gave me the Euro-shrug.

Back home, while planning our trip, several friends asked if I’d met Claudia, an Italian urban planning professor visiting San Diego State University for the year. They said she was very Italian: warm, generous, and loved to throw parties. When I called her, she was in the midst of planning her birthday party and immediately invited my family to join.

“You come a Saturday,” she insisted. “I have many Italian friends to tell you about a your trip.” As it turned out, in her six months in San Diego, Claudia had collected a veritable United Nations of friends, more than I had accumulated in two decades in the city. There were German, French, Japanese, Spanish, African, and Italian grad students and professors. They spread out on the porch and lawn chairs in front of the house, a pitcher of mojitos in front of them. Others sipped wine and played ping-pong on her garage roof. Another group ventured up a steep hill in Claudia’s backyard where she had designed patio furniture from truck tires. She fashioned a canopy by spreading a bed sheet across four metal poles planted in the ground. There was a smoker’s corner with liquor bottles resting in an ice-filled garbage pail. French rock blasted from a boom box tethered to the house by thirty feet of orange industrial extension cord. It was like
Sanford
and
Son
, Euro-style.

When Claudia saw me, she smiled broadly. “You are a Jennifer,” she told me in her musical accent. She kissed both cheeks and introduced herself to William and Katie and offered them both a glass of wine. William quickly discovered the Mexican beer stash and Katie settled for lemonade.

By the evening, William and Katie were the reigning ping-pong champions and I discovered that, after several mojitos, lifting oneself out of the center of a tire was not as easy as it looked.

Weeks later, we invited Claudia to our home for dinner. She brought two guests: her aunt, Micheline, who was visiting from New York, and her friend, Andrea, who was visiting from Salerno. When I picked up the trio at Extraordinary Desserts downtown, Claudia explained that Andrea had just arrived from Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus and she could not fit him in her Fiat convertible. “I go with Jennifer,” Andrea offered, striding toward my minivan in his black skinny jeans and dark fitted T-shirt. “Why you have such a big car?” he asked.

“My daughter plays soccer,” I explained.

“One child?” I nodded to confirm.

“
Mama mia
,” he said scanning the length of the van. “You know how Italian children go to soccer game?” I raised my eyebrows to encourage an answer. “On Papa’s motorcycle.”

Looking out the window at the changing scenery, Andrea had an idea. “You know what we do, Jennifer? We go somewhere else for dinner, just you and me.”

I laughed. The offer was a harmless one, clearly tossed out with no more thought than a fisherman throwing his baited line into the sea. “I don’t think my husband would appreciate that,” I told him.

“Ah yes, the husband,” he sighed. “We stop for cigarettes, no problem?”

“Not a problem,” I said, smiling inside. “But you know that smoking is bad for you, right?”

“No, it’s good. Everybody smoke.”

“Yeah, Andrea, the jury is back on smoking. It’ll kill you.”

“No, no, very old people smoke and they are good,” he said.

We pulled into the gas station where Andrea could chose from several brands of cigarettes. I made one last attempt. “You’re only seeing the smokers who live,” I pressed.

“What?”

“It’s not really fair to say that you know plenty of old people who smoke because you’re not accounting for the ones who never live to see old age.” He stared at me. “Because they’re dead.”

Andrea flashed a bright smile and patted my knee. “You worry too much,” he said before bolting from the passenger seat. I wanted to tell him that at thirty years old, he didn’t feel the effects of daily smoking, but the habit was indeed taking its toll on his health. I wanted to tell him that one day he might have a daughter he would leave to navigate adulthood fatherless because he insisted that smoking was harmless. I wanted to tell him that after he was gone, people would ask his family how he died; when they learned it was lung cancer, they would immediately ask if he was a smoker. When it was confirmed that he was, there would be an awkward silence in which people would inevitably wonder,
What
did
he
expect?

There is little pity for smoking-related lung cancer. There is no Race for the Cure to raise money for smokers who suffer from lung cancer. There are no cute ribbons fashioned after a filtered cigarette. When nonsmokers are diagnosed with lung cancer, the first thing people say is that the person didn’t even smoke. Everyone shakes their heads at the injustice.

Moments later, as we approached my house, I saw Claudia’s car parked half in the driveway and half on the sidewalk. I imagined the neighborhood dog walkers knitting their brows as they sidestepped to avoid the Fiat.

After an hour of laughter and wine, Claudia made a declaration. “You come and a stay with me in Salerno this a summer.” She broke a piece of bread from the loaf and dipped it into sauce William had made for the salmon. I thanked Claudia for the kind offer, but explained Katie and I weren’t going south of Rome except for a day trip to the ruins of Pompeii. We had already made our hotel reservations and our plans were set.

“No, no,” she said. “Everybody come to Italy, they go a Rome, Florence, Venice. Southern Italy is a beautiful. You visit Salerno for a few days, and I take you to a Pompeii. You give to me a phone number for your hotel in Rome and I change your reservation. You stay a with me.”

This was not a request.

She sat at the dinner table and waited for me to bring her the phone number so she could call Casa Banzo, right there and then. As Claudia dialed her cell phone, I shot William a look from across the dinner table. “What am I going to do?” I whispered.

“I think you’re going to Salerno,” he said and poured another glass of wine.

In bed that night, I laughed incredulously, slightly tipsy. “Why am I going to
Salerno
?”

William told me that if my travels were supposed to teach me to enjoy life, I needed to embrace unexpected changes to my plans. “The whole point of these trips is to let go and live a little, so just go with it. You’ve got a whole month in Italy. Why
not
go to Salerno?”

“You never cease to amaze me, how you totally and completely know me better than I understand myself,” I told him. “Where would I be without you?”

“Probably in jail,” he replied.

***

Six months later, Katie and I sat on a train that had left Rome three hours earlier and pulled into Salerno station in the early evening. Claudia emailed me days earlier to let me know her husband Gianluigi would pick us up at the station. Katie and I spotted him immediately. He looked like fun, with a Hollywood smile, cropped brown hair, and—of course—red pants. He was the perfect complement to Claudia’s more buttoned-up look and cemented his status as the whimsical half of the pair when he introduced himself as Gigi and tossed our bags in the back seat.

Gigi’s car seemed as if it had been plucked from my father’s collection. It sat unevenly in the parking lot, resting on the metal rim of a front wheel. I am not a car person. In fact, my first date with William came about after he noticed me struggling to start my car in the parking lot after leaving an improv comedy class we were both taking. His sister had enrolled him to help William overcome shyness. I needed the creative outlet after spending the day at a desk job. In the parking lot, William opened my hood, sniffed, and asked me when my last oil change had been. I stared blankly. He looked at my odometer and asked when I’d last changed my oil. When I told him I didn’t remember, he rattled a checklist of questions about my auto maintenance history. Nothing had been done since driving the car off the lot two years earlier. So if someone as clueless as me looked at Gigi’s car and noticed a tire was flat, the situation was dire. “Do you want to get some air for your tire? Or, um, patch up the hole?” I asked, my eyes darting around for a service station.

“It’s a good,” he said, patting my back. “We are very close to home.”

We arrived at the apartment a little after ten that night, where Claudia laid out a feast of pasta, squid, and marinated artichoke. By now I knew better than to feel guilty that they had delayed their evening meal for our arrival. This was the normal dinnertime for Italians. Gigi broke out a bottle of clear liquor, slammed his hand on the table, and growled, “
Grappa!
” A party had begun.

“What does
grappa
mean?” Katie asked.

As Gigi poured from the bottle, Claudia explained that
grappa
is grape liquor. Gigi finished for her, “It is insult not to a drink
grappa
when you are in
Italia
.”

“So, if I politely decline…?”

“It is like you have come into my home and slapped a my face!” Gigi said, his eyes sparkling, hands pouring.

I was facing my first real parenting dilemma of our travels. I have always told Katie that, within reason, we should follow the customs of the places we visited. I have also warned her about succumbing to peer pressure, especially around alcohol, so I wanted to make it very clear that accepting Gigi’s offer of
grappa
was my choice, not my forfeiture. I tried not to sound as self-conscious as I felt when I announced, “I’ve decided I
would
like to try
grappa
. Yes, that is what I have decided…for myself.”

I watched Gigi and Claudia toss back their heads to drink the
grappa
and decided a quick shot would be the best approach, a wise decision since the drink tasted like liquefied fire. I was painfully aware of every internal organ as it heated to a different temperature in my body. Throat: 200 degrees; stomach 400; liver boiling. Gigi threw back another and Claudia declared it was time to dance. Gigi held out the bottle by way of offering another. “I’m kind of a lightweight, so one’s my limit,” I told him as Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel’s music began to blast from the stereo speakers. Gigi nodded his head, accepting.

By now, Katie and Claudia were dancing to “Mrs. Robinson,” alternating between a box step and something that looked like a modern jazz interpretation of trees blowing in the wind during a storm. They were both utterly beautiful and ridiculous, and I thought this is what happiness must look like.

After we made it through the entire three-CD collection, Claudia said that she needed to get to sleep since tomorrow was a workday for her. “Same here,” said Gigi. “I have to make it an early night.” It was two in the morning.

***

The next day, Claudia dropped us at the ferry to Positano so we could spend the day enjoying the Amalfi Coast.

Katie and I stood at the front of the boat, letting the breeze wash over us as we approached the seaside towns. White and pastel-colored villas were chiseled into steep mountainsides. On the beach were dense rows of orange umbrellas beckoning. The captain overheard Katie and me speaking in English and asked if he could practice on us. “I teach myself in the book but I like try with real American,” he said. Katie and I nodded willingly.

“Tell us something about Positano,” Katie said slowly. “What will we like?”

“Ah, Positano,” the captain said. His uniformed chest filled with pride. “This bitch is a eunuch.”

“Whoa!” I said, laughing, Katie doubled over. “We definitely need to work on your pronunciation.”

Despite his fifty years, the captain looked like a little boy, sheepish. “What I say?”

“Okay, let’s start with what you
want
to say,” I told my student. “This
beeeeach
, not
bitch
, is
unique
.
Unique. You-neek
.”

“
Bitch
,” he tried again.

“No,
beeeeach
. Do it with me,
beeeeach
.
You-neek
. Watch my mouth,
beeeeach
.
You-neek
.” Together we repeated the words, the phonetics lesson going on for a few minutes.

“Good! Good work, Captain,
molto
buono
.”

“What is bitch and eunuch means?” he asked.

“Well, a bitch is, um, a woman who doesn’t treat people very nicely.”

He furrowed his brow. “What is to
treat
the people?”

“Here,” I offered. Putting on a high-pitched Italian voice, I stomped my foot, folded my arms, and turned up my nose. “I love you, I hate you. Come here, go away. Buy me flowers,” I said, motioning accepting the imaginary flowers then throwing them overboard. “I hate your flowers! I hate you.” I batted my lashes and smiled coquettishly. “You give me necklace?”

Recognition flashed across his face. “I know the bitch!” the captain shouted victoriously.

“Lucky you. Now a eunuch is…hmmm.” Katie raised her brows and smiled. Turning to my eleven-year-old daughter, I asked, “Do you know what a eunuch is?”