Women in Sunlight

by Frances Mayes

  An American man stands by a table of six women. Stefano pours wine as the American explains the varietal to upturned faces. Everyone tastes. Stefano seats Julia at the next table and recommends the ribollita his aunt is serving forth today. “A soup that gives you the energy to climb Mount Amiata. And let me introduce your fellow countryman. He is Chris Burns and these are his ladies on the tour of food and wine. He brings them always to my crazy father’s trattoria to taste la cucina casalinga, the home cooking. Chris, this signora is La Julia. She has come to live here.” They begin to chat, everyone half turned in their seats. They’re from Northern California, traveling for two weeks with Chris, a winemaker who takes special clients on in-depth tasting trips twice a year. San Rocco is one of their stops because of the local syrah and because Chris and Stefano struck up a friendship at a wine fair a couple of years ago.

  “I don’t want to interrupt your tasting. Great to meet you!” She reaches for her notebook, ready for a lovely solitary lunch.

  “Don’t eat alone, pull your chair over here,” Chris says. “Stefano can shift us over.” She does. She sits between Lucy, who owns pizza restaurants in Marin, and Alicia, who, with her husband, owns a chain of San Francisco wine stores. Stefano brings out chicken liver crostini and a platter of fried porcini. Chris pours her a glass of what they’re tasting. “This is juicy.” He holds a big gulp in his mouth and rotates his head in circles. “Only one year in oak.” Julia thinks he’ll go on about how the wine was produced, but he says instead, “Reminds me of the purple velvet dress my high school girlfriend wore to the prom. Just luscious. Nothing has ever been more luscious than that dress until now.” The women laugh.

  Julia takes a long taste and says, “Well! It reminds me of a bowl of hot grapes in the sun when I first kissed my college boyfriend!” They all touch glasses just as the one o’clock bell strikes. She tells them what Paolino taught her about the nanny-goat bell. Her soup arrives with their potato and speck ravioli that Chris has paired with the wine. He spears one of his onto her bread plate.

  They talk food. Just in from Florence, they have many recommendations, so many that Julia grabs her notebook. “I am dying to get to Florence,” she tells them. Then she shares the story, in brief, of how she and two friends upturned their lives and came here to learn Italian, eat, explore, and figure out what shape the future should take. Chris listens intently.

  Julia thinks, He’s cute. Cute? Is she reverting to the high school proms? But he is attractive, not in an obvious tall-golden-god way like Wade, but full of life.

  He insists that she share their braised quail with juniper berries. He hops up to open his second offering, a one hundred percent sangiovese. “Blood of Jove, that’s what sangiovese means. The Roman god. Yes, that old. Back down to the most ancient roots. The Tuscans have preferred this wine since then.” She notices his hands, too. Well formed, nails cut straight, and a firm grip on the bottle.

  He pauses every other bite to say, “Oh, this is good. This is so good.” His blunt-cut tawny brown hair keeps falling across his forehead. His face seems sculpted, all angles that complement each other. Ears—why am I noticing his ears? Usually they’re ugly and primitive—but he has such neat ones, small cockle shells against his head.

  “I’m a southern girl,” she says, “and I know quail. I was raised on smothered quail. And this is the best I’ve ever tasted.”

  Stefano is passing around the platter. “Three hours in the slow oven. Until they are almost but not quite falling apart. And you have the juniper, olives, thyme, and for goodness, the vin santo.”

  Chris is delighted that he mentions vin santo. One of the great ones is made nearby and he plans to offer it with the fig and walnut tart for dessert. Just a taste. There is much to do this afternoon.

  * * *

  —

  A few kilometers out in the country, Susan sees a sign for Borgo Santa Caterina. Since all roads are intriguing, she turns down a stone-wall-lined lane barely wide enough for the Cinquecento. If she meets a car, someone must back up. She follows a sign pointing down an unpaved road. Soon she curves into a pebble drive lined with massive lemon trees in pots. Surely one of the Medicis lived here. Flat and unadorned, the peachy stucco façade of the immense villa must be half a city block long. A discreet sign: HOTEL SANTA CATERINA. Curious to see inside, she stops for lunch.

  This has to be the seat of an aristocratic family from the 1300s—massive chestnut madie and armadi line a vast room whose windows are swagged and draped in crimson brocade, the walls hung with tapestries and brooding paintings of robust half-naked women, putti, and horses. A slender Italian—what a shiny gray suit—leads her into a dining room with arched glass doors along one side of a former limonaia. The place could be nowhere but Italy. Shiny suit comes over and offers a glass of prosecco. Luca, he introduces himself. Susan sees that the suit isn’t really mafioso; it’s beautifully cut and topstitched, obviously bespoke. She likes the pocket handkerchief of orange silk.

  One bite of the pasta with duck sauce and even a novice knows an Italian is in the kitchen. She declines a secondo and asks for a salad. Susan looks out at the garden, where roses trained on iron hoops along a wall frame views of distant volcanos and the broad valley. A few yellow buds still bloom. Is that Mermaid? Such a vigorous climber, thorns sharp enough for Christ’s crown, with flat flowers the color of lemon juice. She’s fascinated by the lack of grass in Italian gardens; it’s such a staple in southern yards. And there are no foundation plants; the building firmly meets the ground where a narrow sidewalk rings the house. Marciapiedi, Luca explains. March of feet? Drainage away from the building, she supposes.

  After lunch, Luca opens a door and gestures to the garden, pool, and spa. “The hotel is my domain; all this belongs to the inspiration of my wife, Gilda. You may find her in the spa or the cooking school right beyond.”

  “You’re the owner? My compliments! It’s a fantasy of Italy here. Do I have to wake up?” He comments that tourist season is ending and is she traveling alone? Susan tells him about Villa Assunta, which he knows, having gone to school with Grazia.

  “Please, bring your friends. You are always welcome. Take a look around. My family has been here from many centuries. We would like to escape and go to Brazil or some islands but we must stay always.”

  Susan laughs. “You know the grass is always greener,” she says, but he looks puzzled. Maybe because there’s no grass.

  Eva and Caroline will love this when they visit, especially the thermal pool paved with shiny tessellated mosaic. They’d be sparkling all over. She could pass on the red-wine bath in a copper tub and the hot gel massage tables, but even in late October, the outdoor pool that you wade into gradually, as into a pond, looks inviting. She almost sees Eva in her raspberry bikini and Caroline in a bright cover-up, hiding her extra ten, well maybe twenty, pounds, as they step into the water.

  * * *

  —

  She buttons her jacket against a wicked wind shooting through the olive grove. Sprung from everything known, she thought. How shocking to be out in the world on my own. Even sprung from the dragging heaviness of Aaron, who seemed not as dead now. More of a companionable memory. She could think now of how Aaron would love the duck. He’d use the word unctuous. He’d want to buy the girls bracelets and shoes in San Rocco. He’d want to walk all the labyrinthine streets at night. He was no longer the confused face looking at her with accusing eyes. He was all his ages again, from the long-haired protester against Vietnam to the terrified new father leaning over Eva as she was bundled up and taken from the orphanage to the taxi, to the suave business owner cinching a contract.

  How strange that we are feeling this comfortable, she muses. As though we just stepped in a boat and found the current moving us gently along.

  * * *

  —

  “Ciao, I’m just saying hello.” Susan steps inside the stone building marked La Cucina
Santa Caterina. Luca’s wife, Gilda, and an assistant scrub a marble worktable. Broth simmers on the back hob of an eight-burner blue stove. She introduces herself. “I just had a delicious lunch and Luca said I should take a tour.” Gilda, small and slender like Luca, has a narrow face and russet hair combed straight back, giving her the look of a benign fox in a storybook.

  “We are just preparing for an American group coming in today.” She gestures to the stack of lamb chops and a mound of tough-looking greens. The assistant slides a tray of focaccia out of the oven. Gilda offers an espresso and Susan is tempted to stay, but surely it would be an imposition. Instead, she asks if the school is open to nonguests.

  “We can always arrange something.” Gilda smiles. Yes, Susan thinks, it’s Italy. I’m beginning to understand. That’s the motto.

  * * *

  —

  As Susan searches for her keys, a Mercedes minibus pulls into the parking area and a group of women tumbles out. Julia! She jumps down smiling. “Julia, hey! What on earth?”

  “What are you doing here? Susan, these are friends I met at Stefano’s and they invited me to join their cooking class with a superb chef. This is Chris. He’s guiding them to all the best places in Tuscany. This is my friend Susan. We ran away together.”

  “You’ll love that cooking school. I met Gilda. It already smells good in there. Shall I come back for you?”

  “No, no,” Chris said. “I have to run back into town anyway. Dinner will be later, whatever we cook this afternoon reappears with a lot of good wines to taste. You’re all welcome.”

  “Another time, I’d love to but I’ll head home now. My dog, Archie, has been locked inside all day. Bye! Have fun.”

  * * *

  —

  Camille finds the delivered groceries by the door. Julia and Susan are still out exploring while she’s spent the day in her new studio reading art books. Archie looks in, his head tilted. She lets him out twice, but otherwise how luxurious, having a silent day to herself. They’ve been wildly busy making the place theirs, now finally, time just to be there. She’s never lived in a house that has a history longer than her own life multiplied by ten. All the weddings, funerals, tears, orgasms, baptisms, secret encounters, all the churned emotions and cooking smells, private triumphs, and birth cries seeped into the walls. (She hopes Grazia’s father didn’t choke at the kitchen table where she will have her dinner tonight.) The house must rest on bedrock reaching down to water and fire.

  In a box under the stairs, she’s found sepia images going back to the beginning of photography. Small men wearing the rough suits they were married and buried in, holding their hats and staring blankly into the future. Brides with drooping bouquets: myopic, pious, dour, but one quite lyrically beautiful leaning on a balustrade. From her spirited look, she must have been in love with the person aiming the camera, but maybe she was just one of those people who looks back at the world with zest. A couple of dead babies, propped up on pillows but with closed eyes, cotton stuffed in their nostrils, and nosegays in their little folded hands. One of a beach party. Must have been World War II era—a long table, men in wife-beater undershirts and women in heavy one-piece bathing suits. Rubberized? All raising their glasses. Smoking cigarettes. One hefty guy in suspenders makes a V with his fingers—horns, the cuckold sign—over another’s head. Grazia’s grandparents must be among them but this party is long over and who remembers? The photograph Camille loves most is of the front door of Villa Assunta. No one interferes with the image. Just the heavy, carved door. Who took it? Half open, and a crack of sunlight angles in like, she mused, a spirit. She toyed with painting something from the photos. She loved seeing them and imagining the life in each. The cracked-open door? How to paint a door? Carefully she packs the box and replaces it on the shelf under the stairs. I don’t want to paint the past. She knows that.

  * * *

  —

  “Julia will be late,” Susan announces, setting down a bag of groceries. “Much to tell. I saw a heaven of a garden. The countryside around here is sublime. You’ve got to turn into a landscape painter! Ha, I may. Not those sappy sunflower fields you see in every gallery. But, you know, the heart of this place. And they’re everywhere—paintings waiting to happen.” She tells Camille about meeting Julia, Chris’s group, the cooking school, and the duck pasta.

  “Let’s surprise her and have dinner ready. Not that she’ll be hungry.”

  “Maybe she’ll go out with Chris. He’s about her age, maybe younger. You know, it hardly registered, he’s quite attractive, but I think he has one blue eye and one kind of hazel.”

  What Colin tries to gloss over but can’t is how much he’d prefer working only from home. In London twice a month, five days each, he lives at the office. He keeps meaning to look for a studio but puts it off. He’s not sleeping on the reception-room sofa, it’s not that bad, but in a corner of the former warehouse in the revived East End. When his firm, Arkas/Wright, developed a hotel for a Saudi sheik, the client demanded that he see a completed sample room before he signed the contract. The architect on the project, Colin’s friend Patrick, designed a luxury room at the end of their office building, complete with a swirly brown and white marble bath the sheik liked. So Colin has a handsome hotel room, a bit spooky, I think, and spa bath to use, with the most comfortable bed I’ve ever touched. There’s a love seat at the end of the bed and a corner window looking out at the Thames. The drag is no kitchen, though he’s tucked a microwave into the minibar alcove. When he’s in residence, he stays crouched over his drawing table and computers in his office at the other end of the building. He steps out for dinner, usually with colleagues, then works late, a light hanging over him in the cavernous gloom. We text several times a day, talk after dinner until he falls asleep in the artificial room.

  On the Fridays he returns, we celebrate. When two people work at home all day every day, the other person begins to seem like a version of you, or you of him. With the London interruptions, we stay separate (I must) and charged. But I’m not the one doing the flight delays and the trip into the city and the haggard nights in the closed offices. A bit of solitude I revel in, but I feel terrible for him.

  Last night he was due home by nine but arrived at two a.m. The Florence airport runway is short. In strong winds, planes can’t maneuver between the hills. He had to land in Bologna, take a train to Florence and then a taxi out to the airport where he’d left his car. Then home.

  I was asleep when he got in. He fell into bed, not even showering. He smelled like jet fuel, as if he’d flown home clutching an engine. “What happened?” I’d already read his text about rerouting to Bologna. Even though I’d been roused from deep sleep, the smell turned my stomach. Metal. Fumes.

  “You don’t even want to know.” Then he was sacked out. I was awake, curled around him, until the sky began to lighten and I fell asleep. The next moment, Colin was poking my foot, leaning over the bed with a cappuccino.

  “I’m the one who should sleep in. Damn, this was bad, Kit, because the pilot almost landed in Florence. Then abruptly, and I mean abruptly, he pulled up again. Jerked up, lumbering like a giant turtle trying to fly. Several people screamed. The guy next to me roared. Like a sound in a nightmare. I was holding up the arm rests to raise the plane. We could feel the Gs dragging us down. Then the ass pilot said, Sorry, folks, in English though half the people on the plane didn’t speak it. Wind shear, he said, these things happen, folks. I hate being called folks. I was terrified. Wobbly for two hours.”

  “You must have been absolutely petrified.” When planes fall, the people on them have longer to experience what’s happening than we’re led to think. Anyone with a shred of imagination has to have flashes of fear when floating along at thirty-five thousand feet. I really hate coffee in bed. But the gesture is so sweet that I plump the pillows, scooch up, trying to look awake. Colin seems dazed, imagining (I would be) the plane soaring up over an
d over. He takes my hand and covers his eyes with it. Damp boy. Colin-face. You. Whiskery.

  “Maybe I should open a local office and restore farmhouses for foreigners. Forget this pie-in-the-sky London firm. What do you think?”

  “I think no. No way.” Restoring houses for foreigners may be Colin’s worst nightmare. Occasionally the houses become jewels, but usually the owners either ruin noble buildings with bad contemporary ideas or drive the architect to drink because they’ve studied and want historic restorations, down to the bent handmade nails. Worst may be the client who sends a hundred images of kitchens. Can we discuss these?

  The cappuccino has the same metallic taste that I noticed last night. And a couple of other times recently. I swirl around the foam and don’t drink. I didn’t drink much at all last night. No hangover—I’m coming down with something. Or was something off? No, not at Annetta’s table. Bronchitis season cometh. Colin is saying that Rick, his boss, wants him in London all of November and after that we’ll reevaluate assignments. “Do we have any zinc? And is that ominous, what Rick said?”

  “Could be. He may need me back full time. Christ.” Colin flops backward on the bed and tells me about his week: the work for the firm pouring in from Ireland, Dubai, Majorca; the friends he met for drinks; the dream he had that he was lifted in the claws of an eagle and flown over Tuscany. He has wonderful success at his firm, but we both know what eludes him. He agonizes over all the shared projects—the hospital, the university theater, the private residences of the super-rich. I’ve seen his notebooks teeming with solo designs—severe classical but super-modern museums, stadiums based on ancient amphitheaters, fantasy racetracks, bookstores, even an ideal library that I would give anything to see built. I can put my fantasies on paper. My poems, though few read them, are full realizations of my vision. His is the real world of bricks and cranes and compromise and quirky clients, an unholy marriage of art and commerce. He must get his chance.