15

No, he’s the noble sort, I thought. Not like me, insidious, sinister, and

base. Which pushed my agony and shame up a few notches. Now, over and

above the shame of desiring him as Chiara did, I respected and feared him

and hated him for making me hate myself.

The morning after seeing them dance I made no motions to go jogging

with him. Neither did he. When I eventually brought up jogging, because

the silence on the matter had become unbearable, he said he’d already gone.

“You’re a late riser these days.”

Clever, I thought.

Indeed, for the past few mornings, I had become so used to finding him

waiting for me that I’d grown bold and didn’t worry too much about when I

got up. That would teach me.

The next morning, though I wanted to swim with him, coming

downstairs would have looked like a chastened response to a casual

chiding. So I stayed in my room. Just to prove a point. I heard him step

lightly across the balcony, on tiptoes almost. He was avoiding me.

I came downstairs much later. By then he had already left to deliver his

corrections and retrieve the latest pages from Signora Milani.

We stopped talking.

Even when we shared the same spot in the morning, talk was at best idle

and stopgap. You couldn’t even call it chitchat.

It didn’t upset him. He probably hadn’t given it another thought.

bHow is it that some people go through hell trying to get close to you,

while you haven’t the haziest notion and don’t even give them a thought

when two weeks go by and you haven’t so much as exchanged a single

word between you? Did he have any idea? Should I let him know?

The romance with Chiara started on the beach. Then he neglected tennis

and took up bike rides with her and her friends in the late afternoons in the

hill towns farther west along the coast. One day, when there was one too

many of them to go biking, Oliver turned to me and asked if I minded

letting Mario borrow my bike since I wasn’t using it.

It threw me back to age six.

I shrugged my shoulders, meaning, Go ahead, I couldn’t care less. But

no sooner had they left than I scrambled upstairs and began sobbing into my

pillow.

At night sometimes we’d meet at Le Danzing. There was never any

telling when Oliver would show up. He just bounded onto the scene, and

just as suddenly disappeared, sometimes alone, sometimes with others.

When Chiara came to our home as she’d been in the habit of doing ever

since childhood, she would sit in the garden and stare out, basically waiting

for him to show up. Then, when the minutes wore on and there was nothing

much to say between us, she’d finally ask, “C’è Oliver?” He went to see the

translator. Or: He’s in the library with my dad. Or: He’s down somewhere at

the beach. “Well, I’m leaving, then. Tell him I came by.”

It’s over, I thought.

Mafalda shook her head with a look of compassionate rebuke. “She’s a

baby, he’s a university professor. Couldn’t she have found someone her own

age?”

“Nobody asked you anything,” snapped Chiara, who had overheard and

was not about to be criticized by a cook.

“Don’t you talk to me that way or I’ll split your face in two,” said our

Neapolitan cook, raising the palm of her hand in the air. “She’s not

seventeen yet and she goes about having bare-breasted crushes. Thinks I

haven’t seen anything?”

I could just see Mafalda inspecting Oliver’s sheets every morning. Or

comparing notes with Chiara’s housemaid. No secret could escape this

network of informed perpetue, housekeepers.

I looked at Chiara. I knew she was in pain.

Everyone suspected something was going on between them. In the

afternoon he’d sometimes say he was going to the shed by the garage to

pick up one of the bikes and head to town. An hour and a half later he

would be back. The translator, he’d explain.

“The translator,” my father’s voice would resound as he nursed an after￾dinner cognac.

“Traduttrice, my eye,” Mafalda would intone.

Sometimes we’d run into each other in town.

Sitting at the caffè where several of us would gather at night after the

movies or before heading to the disco, I saw Chiara and Oliver walking out

of a side alley together, talking. He was eating an ice cream, while she was

hanging on his free arm with both of hers. When had they found the time to

become so intimate? Their conversation seemed serious.

“What are you doing here?” he said when he spotted me. Banter was

both how he took cover and tried to conceal we’d altogether stopped

talking. A cheap ploy, I thought.

“Hanging out.”

“Isn’t it past your bedtime?”

“My father doesn’t believe in bedtimes,” I parried.

Chiara was still deep in thought. She was avoiding my eyes.

Had he told her the nice things I’d been saying about her? She seemed

upset. Did she mind my sudden intrusion into their little world? I

remembered her tone of voice on the morning when she’d lost it with Mafalda. A smirk hovered on her face; she was about to say something

cruel.

“Never a bedtime in their house, no rules, no supervision, nothing.

That’s why he’s such a well-behaved boy. Don’t you see? Nothing to rebel

against.”

“Is that true?”

“I suppose,” I answered, trying to make light of it before they went any

further. “We all have our ways of rebelling.”

“We do?” he asked.

“Name one,” chimed in Chiara.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

to be continued

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