Ten Exotic Pepper Plants

Three rooms hold five pieces of furniture including a cardboard box bedside table lamp and martini pitcher filled with dying roses. In the fourth room scattered on the floor a mattress, two dirt-caked bocce balls, and books. The fifth room kitchen and dining and where the living takes place: crates of records, a mustard-colored steel workbox, a large tongue-and-groove wooden table pencil-etched with a vine, then lacquered, then cluttered with: cilantro, pink ginger, a chef‘s knife, sashimi, a mason jar of sea salt, and ten exotic pepper plants in plastic pots. Outside, a yellow bowl rises, steaming wisps of clouds. Pond frogs add bassline to the night song. From other waters, different frogs respond, so that between the distinct growl of these is the whelping of others—echoes of shades from one to another over space and time. “Beautiful guest,” he says, calling her back to his table. “Would you like to go to bed?” His hands over hers—so much touching to do. Happiness surrounds them like a sigh. Morning dusts off the earth, the haze smelling like clay. He surveys his garden. Barefoot, he takes a thistle, any pricks of feeling deflected by callouses—as rough as her pads were cold beneath his covers. Now drowsy, frogs sleep; birds take up the morning melody. She, the guest, drinks coffee from a soup bowl. Far beyond the vineyards, flashing silver cars ride the highway like rosary beads on twine. She confuses squinty-eyed delight with belief: that happiness is as simple as peppers growing. But the soil is hard, dry—cracking and red like an abrasion. Wind whips across it. His ten exotic peppers plants, with fruit broad shouldered and narrow hipped, sit on the deck’s bottom step. They must be hardened to the seduction of night, the harshness of day.

The Naïve Americana

served in Menu Turistica, Episode II

1 ounce sweet vermouth
1 ounce dry vermouth
1 ounce Campari
1 ounce soda

Serve over ice in a highball glass. Garnish with a twist of lemon or orange.

Menu Turistica, Episode II

After a reasonable sleep in a neat and unassuming pensione and a breakfast of hard roll and jam plus tea, Elena stepped into the crisp Florentine morning. On her way out the door, she nearly ran head-long into an Australian. She immediately envied him for his boyishness and for his backpack. He was wearing socks with smiley-faces on them. "Hullo," he nodded to her, his blond hair shaking with his greetings. He bounced down the cobblestone street, his backpack seeming to weigh nothing upon his back. He looked perfectly filthy. Not a care in the world. Barely enough money to make it from town to town.

She fit better with these aimless souls than the world back home. It wasn't an enormous trust fund, but it was enough—enough to live a modest life and do absolutely nothing, an accepted quality in a place like this, among people like this.

Though it was early spring and the tourists had not yet begun to swarm the street, the novelty painters sat at easels outside the Uffizi. Elena went to each station and thumbed through the paintings. Some of the painters did terrible tourist portraits in charcoal or watercolor. Everyone had an assortment of views of the Arno. She pondered a painting of the Ponte Vecchio, to send back to her friends and family, a kind of expensive post card that didn't tell them she would be home soon or that she wished they were here.

“Gianni is the best of them,” someone said to her in unaccented English.

She barely looked up at him. She continued to look at the paintings on the easel. They were indeed the best she had seen, his mustards and olives more closely matched the matte palette of the city. The young man began to speak to the painter in perfect Italian. She was surprised as she thought he was American. She looked more closely. He wore black-rimmed glasses too large for his simple face and his hair was fuzzy at the temples where it was beginning to disappear. Still, he was young, probably just a few years older than her—surely not yet even thirty. He was short and badly dressed—not very Italian at all.

"So, are you going to buy it?" He asked her, again, in English.

She shrugged, but he pressed her: the usual questions of where she was from and how long she was in town and had she been to the Uffizi. After several days, she was learning to be evasive—San Francisco, a week or so, and a shake of the head.

"You have to see the Uffizi. Would you like a ticket? I work here." It was disappointing, really, to meet someone who worked in Florence but wasn't Italian. She also realized it was a strange response; it occured to her that it was perfectly reasonable for him to be an American working in Italy. Then he introduced himself. His name was Massimo, and he wasn't an American in Italy, he was just an Italian who had spent too much time in Kansas. This was truly disappointing—an Italian without an Italian accent. "I'm pretty good at picking up accents, I guess," he said when she commented on it. "So, did you want to go in or what?"

She bought the watercolor, and let him lead her to back entrance, where he worked in the offices. He told her to come round after she had looked through the gallery—perhaps they could fetch a drink. He seemed vaguely harmless; more important, he seemed useful. What other back doors could he open?

In truth, she had been to the Uffizi before. When she was ten, her uncle brought his brother and his brother's family—her uncle's only family—to Italy for two weeks of vacation. She barely remembered having walked these long hallways before; it all seemed vague and unfamiliar. The Birth of Venus, she remembered. In truth, she was finding that she didn't remember much of Florence from their trip—perhaps only the gelato and seeing Michelangelo's David for the very first time. Even then, she knew she wanted to come back.

She lingered in a small octagonal room that she admired without necessarily thinking much of the paintings in it. In retrospect, she recognized that her uncle may have been a lonely man, if pleasantly so. She remembered him on his own in a big house filled with art, books, and musical instruments he could not play. The clutter of it reminded her of this room, which he might have liked, back then. She wished she remembered.

The grand hallways echoed back to her the sound of her boots against the tile, a delightfully cavernous sound.

After her tour, Massimo walked her to a place on the opposite side of the Arno. The bar displayed a beautiful spread of foccaccia, olives, pasta salads, and potato chips. On Massimo's recommendation, she ordered some sort of Campari cocktail; it arrived with a twist of lemon, was bitter, refreshing. He sat across from her and put his cellular phone on the table. He spoke English to her, which made the bartender, with his slick black hair, think they were both Americans. The bartender also spoke to them in English, which bothered Elena. She was in Italy after all. She needed to practice her Italian. Also, in Italian, she could hide the fact of her stutter under the ruse of not knowing the language very well. But Massimo spoke English too well, it was easy to fall back into it. When he came into the full realization of her stutter, she looked down so as not to see the pity in his eyes—the pity and the realization, too. She knew what it looked like and she knew what it meant. She was ultimately conquerable, now.

During their second set of drinks, Massimo took a call. His Italian blended with the other Italian being spoken in the bar, so she could not always hear him, even less understand. As he spoke on the phone, she ate and thought about speaking Italian and also how she was not at all attracted to Massimo, but had allowed him to buy her two drinks now. He hung up the phone. “My friend was berating me for not taking you out to dinner,” he said. “But I can’t.”

Elena’s face grew warm. “I’m certainly not expecting you t-t-t-t-t-“ she breathed, “t-t-take me out to dinner.” The stutter made it sound unintentionally as if she did expect him to take her to dinner—the stutter was helplessness, the rest of the sentence, delivered aggressively just so she could get it out, sounded angry. She was about to be misinterpreted again, she could tell, and she didn’t want to lead him on through dinner, too, after which he might expect to kiss her.

“Well, he’s right. I should. Massimo—yes, his name is Massimo, too—always knows how to treat women. He’s better looking than I am and when we go out the women all go for him. I’m very jealous of him. He would take you out to dinner if he’d met you, but I can’t.”

Maybe dinner would not be so bad.

“You’ve been so nice to bring me here after just meeting me.”

“You make me wish I didn’t have a girlfriend.”

She suddenly felt very lucky. He had bought her drinks and he had a girlfriend, so he wouldn’t be kissing her. “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend.”

“I don’t think I wanted you to know I had a girlfriend.”

“Is that why you can’t take me out to dinner?”

“No. I just can’t. I have to go somewhere.”

“Oh. Your friend should take me out to dinner, then.” She said it with a laugh. She couldn’t believe she said it, then she couldn’t believe he agreed with her.

“He should. I can call him back.”

“But he doesn’t even know me!” By now, of course, she was hoping that Massimo would call his friend who was more handsome and knew how to treat women. She was pleased when he picked up his phone.

“You’ll like him.” Massimo held the phone up to his ear and showed his teeth, which were as oversized as his glasses and surprisingly white. He was not bad looking, just mediocre looking. She had high hopes for his friend, but when the friend showed up a half hour later he was mediocre looking, too, though impeccably dressed in a dark sweater over an even darker shirt. He had olive skin and large murky green eyes framed with thick eyelashes. She could see how some women would find him attractive, but she found him short. Still, he had an accent, which improved his looks considerably.

“What kind of food do you want?” He asked.

“Why, Italian food, of course.”

He waved his hands. “I never go out for Italian food. What’s the fucking point? I know a great Japanese place.”

She tried not to look too disappointed, but if he was going to take her to dinner, they should go to a place he liked. “OK,” she said.

“My car is outside.”

“Your car?”

"It is too far to walk.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.” She measured him.

“He’s a good driver,” Massimo #1 said.

“I drive a Volvo stationwagon.” He was young and prosperous looking, but most of all, he seemed harmless—harmless because he was trying to seem dangerous, with his black leather jacket and his cellular phone and... his Volvo.

“Well,” she said again. "That's a very safe car."

As she said goodbye to Massimo #1, he asked: "have you seen the Piazzalle Michelangelo?"

Of course, she had not.

"Call me tomorrow," he said, giving her his phone number, written on to the flap of a pack of matches. "I'll take you there." Then, as he walked away from them, he yelled back. "Don't let Massimo take you there before I do..."

[In the next episode, Elena lives her Italian fantasy—sort of.]