Tiramisu After Midnight

by Mark David Campbell

  Enrico climbed up the ladder, bent down, and put his hand on Owen’s shoulder. “Are you all right?”

  “No, no. I’m fine.” He was still breathing heavily. “It’s just a cell phone, right? And we still have Maggie’s,” he said as if he were trying to convince himself. “It’s just, I haven’t been without a cell phone in my hand for years.”

  Enrico said nothing and stood up.

  Owen followed, shaking his head like a prize fighter who had just taken a left hook. “You know, it’s almost like a cosmic joke.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I came here to Italy to try and forget someone and move on, and it seems like fate is helping me do that.”

  By the way Owen talked, it sounded to Enrico as if he had just broken up with someone and that he and Maggie weren’t a couple after all. Enrico didn’t know what to say, so he paraphrased something Fabrizio had read to him from one of his internet seminars. “You mean that you need to let go of the past and open yourself up to new possibilities?”

  “Exactly. I just wish the cosmos would have texted me instead of destroying my six-hundred-dollar cell phone.” Owen laughed nervously. He placed the dripping device on the dock, put his straw hat on, and sat down with his feet dangling in the water.

  Enrico sat down beside Owen. Out of the corner of his eye, Enrico could see Owen watching him as he leaned back letting the water trickle down his chest and the sun lick his skin. Enrico smiled and Owen quickly looked away.

  “Do you and your brother have girlfriends?” Owen said, looking at his feet as he swirled them in the water.

  Enrico had heard that Americans were very direct, but not in quite the same way Germans were. “No,” he said and swirled his feet too.

  “Me neither,” Owen said.

  Enrico smiled. As long as Owen was asking personal questions, Enrico thought it okay to reciprocate. “Miss Maggie?” he said.

  “Oh no.” Owen waved his hand. “She’s not my girlfriend. We’re just friends.” Owen’s eye twitched slightly. “Actually, I’m gay.”

  Enrico said nothing.

  “Did you think Maggie and I were a couple?” Owen said, breaking the silence.

  “At first my brother did, but I knew right away you weren’t,” Enrico said.

  “How did you know?” Owen sounded more curious than defensive.

  Enrico shrugged, and a slow grin spread across his face. “Because I’m gay too.” He liked this frank manner of speaking. It was more like the way he and Fabrizio spoke to each other. Before Owen could respond, Enrico said, “So, do you have a boyfriend or a lover?”

  “No,” Owen said. “I mean, I did, but he kind of cheated on me.”

  “Oh.” Enrico realized their conversation had just ventured into territory that was either too painful to talk about or would open a floodgate of emotions. “I’m sorry” was all he said.

  “Ah, don’t be. I wasn’t in love with him.” Owen swished his feet back and forth. “What about you?”

  Enrico thought about that married architect. “I’ve been seeing someone, but I’m not in love with him, either.”

  Owen nodded. “The truth is, I’ve been in love with my best friend, Jessy, since we were kids.” Owen breathed in deeply and slowly exhaled. “It’s one of those friend-zone things, and I know it’s never going to happen between us.” Owen stretched his legs out straight.

  There was something both bold and shy about this guy that made Enrico want to take him in his arms. He wondered if after sex would Owen just look away, like so many of his lovers did, or would he allow Enrico to stare deeply into his blue eyes and see who was inside?

  Owen plopped his feet back into the water. “Hey, what’s that old man doing?” Owen pointed to a figure walking along the stony beach with his head bent down. “Is he looking for clams?”

  “No, that’s my papà. He’s looking for glass.”

  “Glass?”

  “Yes. See all those old stone buildings? There used to be a glass kiln right over there where the marina is, and when the lake is low like this, you can still find chunks of melted glass.”

  “What does he want with glass?”

  Enrico smirked and covered his face with his hand. “Do I really have to tell you?”

  “Yes, absolutely!” Owen laughed. “I want to know!”

  “Okay then. I’ll tell you the story.” Enrico threw Owen a coy grin. “There once was an old witch who took this beautiful young princess and locked her in a tower.”

  “Wait a minute, you’re making this up.” Owen nudged Enrico with his shoulder.

  “No.” Enrico chuckled. “Tata used to tell Fabrizio and me this when we were little. Anyway, the old witch was very jealous, and she cast a spell on the beautiful young princess so that if she ever left the tower, she would turn to glass.” Enrico pointed up to the tower where Owen and Maggie were staying.

  “Okay, since Maggie is out shopping, I will assume the role of the beautiful princess,” Owen jested.

  “Oh, but wait, there’s more,” Enrico said eagerly. “One day a poor boy was walking past the tower. He heard the princess crying, and he called to her and asked her why she was so sad. She told him she was crying because she was lonely. The boy said that he would visit her every day when he came in from fishing. Which he did. One day he picked a rose at the foot of the tower and threw it up to her. She kissed it and threw it back to him. And from then on they were in love.”

  “You know, sometimes I think love is easier in fairy tales,” Owen said.

  Enrico cocked his head and looked at Owen. “Why?”

  “I guess because it comes instantly with a kiss.” Owen smiled.

  Enrico paused and looked at Owen’s lips. They were thin and pale, not rich and full like his own or his brother’s—probably because of the cool water—but all the same, he wanted to lean over and engulf his mouth with a kiss.

  “Sorry, go on,” Owen said.

  “Okay.” Enrico looked away. “The old witch soon discovered that the boy and the princess were in love and she cast another spell and sent a storm to drown the boy when he was out fishing. When, from her tower, the princess saw the boy’s overturned boat floating ashore, she was so brokenhearted that she threw herself out of the window.” Enrico paused and took a deep breath.

  “But the boy had not drowned. He was a good swimmer and eventually he swam to shore where he found his true love shattered into a million pieces of colored glass. After that, every evening when he came home from fishing, he went to the foot of the tower and collected the pieces of colored glass—the green glass for her eyes, the black glass for her hair, the white glass for her skin, but he could never find any red glass for her heart.”

  “And what happened to him?” Owen looked directly into Enrico’s eyes.

  Enrico forced a mournful smile and shrugged. “He got stuck in the past and could never find his way out.” He swallowed and looked back toward his father. “Papà, come on, it’s time to go up to the house for lunch.” Enrico turned back toward Owen. “Why don’t you go up and get changed. We’ll be along shortly.”

  Owen stood up, leaving the wet imprint of his bum on the dock. He bent over, slipped on his shoes, and picked up his towel, shirt, and drowned cell phone. “I knew I should have got the waterproof one,” he said and climbed the garden steps up to the house.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “My bags are in my room, but I still haven’t seen Owen,” Maggie said as she came back down from the tower after putting away her new clothes and having changed into a fresh pair of shorts and a T-shirt.

  Tata poured flour into the mixing bowl and looked up. “Fabrizio said he’s down at the lake having a swim with Enrico.”

  “Ah.” Maggie glanced nervously out the open kitchen door toward the garden. “Do you know when they’ll be back?”

  Tata smiled. “Don’t worry. They’ll be back at two for lunch.”

  “You sure have your boys trained well.” Maggie laughed.


  “Do you cook, child?” Tata said.

  “Not really.”

  Tata paused and looked up at Maggie. “Tell me, in America do the children go home to their mamma’s house or to their papà’s?”

  Maggie furrowed her brow as she contemplated Tata’s question. “Wow, I never thought about it that way.”

  “But make no mistake, being a good cook is not enough.” Tata smiled and went back to kneading the dough. “It’s hard work being a woman, so we have to be furba,” Tata took out a wooden roller.

  “Furba?”

  “Yes, smart, clever,” she said as she worked the roller back and forth over the dough.

  “Furba,” Maggie repeated. “I like that word.”

  “Now, there are two basic things you need to know about Italy.” Tata rolled the dough paper-thin. “Food is the way Italians communicate.” She then cut it into wide strips.

  “And the second thing?” Maggie fixed her eyes on Tata as she fed the strips of pasta into a strange device that looked like a hand-cranked paper shredder.

  “Italian men puff and blow in the street….” She turned the handle and long thin noodles emerged from the other side into her waiting hand. “But they’re all the same when they sit down at their mamma’s table—just little boys.”

  Maggie chuckled as she thought about Jessy and Owen. It was true. She often thought of them as little boys.

  Tata looked up at Maggie and smiled. “And that’s exactly why we love them, isn’t it?”

  Maggie smiled back and nodded.

  “But make no mistake, even if Italy is a matriarchal society, there’s not much choice for a woman without a husband and child. She can be a nun, a slut, or a nursemaid for the elderly.” Tata breathed in deeply and let out a slow breath. “That’s why it’s so important a woman has her own money.”

  As Tata spoke, the image of her mother’s credit card popped into Maggie’s head. She knew her mother and father had a joint bank account and her father had his business account, but she didn’t know if her mother had her own account. Then she remembered when her older sister got married her dad put twenty-five thousand dollars in her sister’s account and instructed her that the money was her personal emergency fund and that she was never to tell her husband about it. Less than three months later, her sister and her sister’s husband arrived at the house for Sunday dinner driving a new BMW.

  “They have a great financing package,” her sister’s husband explained to her stone-faced father. It was less than a year after that when her sister’s husband drove away in the BMW with another woman sitting in the passenger seat and her sister moved back in with her parents and took the bus to work.

  “As for me, I came north from Sicily to work as a servant for the boys’ grandmother. And when their mother died in childbirth, I took over their care.” Tata hung the strings of pasta on a wooden device that looked like the bare struts of an umbrella. “I poured my heart into each plate of pasta and every bowl of risotto, and as the old lady slowed down and the boys grew, things changed.”

  “What do you mean?” Maggie said as if Tata was about to impart a wicked conspiracy to her.

  “The old lady may have been the queen of the castle, but we both knew who ruled the kitchen and the dinner table. She couldn’t cook a risotto to feed to pigs.” Tata broke out into laughter, and Maggie, not knowing how to react, laughed along with her.

  Tata brushed her floured hands back and forth and picked up another strip of pasta and fed it into the cutting device. “You can say a lot about Italian men, but almost all of them know what to do in the kitchen and the bedroom.” Tata washed her hands. “But, as I’m sure you know, we women are not without our little secrets in the kitchen and the bedroom too.” Tata winked.

  Maggie felt her face harden.

  “What’s wrong, child?” Tata said.

  “The truth is I don’t know how to cook, and I’ve never really had a man.”

  Tata furrowed her brow and stared at her. “I don’t understand.”

  “What I mean to say is….” Maggie waved her hand. “I’m not Owen’s wife or girlfriend, or even his lover. I’m just his friend.” Maggie paused and swallowed the lump in her throat. “And I’ve been in love with him for years.” Strange. She had only just met Tata, but she felt as if she could tell her anything and she would understand.

  Tata smiled at Maggie like an old lady to an infant. “I see.” She patted Maggie’s cheek. “When I was just seventeen, I met a boy here at the lake and we fell in love.”

  “What happened?”

  “Let’s just say I was a poor peasant girl from Sicily, he was from an important northern family, and they had other designs for him.” Tata shrugged. “Love doesn’t always follow according to plan. Life moves forward and we accept and adapt.” Tata pursed her lips. “But when I look at my life and my two boys, even if they’re not really mine, I wouldn’t change a thing.”

  “But what man would ever want me?” Maggie said.

  “I see a wonderful young woman here in front of me. I can assure you any man would be lucky to have you.” Tata put her arm over Maggie’s shoulder and kissed the top of her head. “I think you’re stuck in liminality, my child.”

  “What’s liminality?” Maggie said.

  “It’s where you’ve left the old you behind, but you haven’t yet fully embraced the new you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, you know Owen will never be yours, but you haven’t opened your heart to the possibility of someone else yet.”

  Maggie forced a smile back at Tata. That’s exactly how she felt most of the time, stuck somewhere in betwixt and between. Maggie loved Owen, and Jessy, too, but whenever she was with the two of them, she’d always felt like she was number three. It was as if they spoke a secret language that she couldn’t quite follow. Even if they were the Terrible Trio, she knew that Owen and Jessy must take their own paths and they would leave her behind.

  “But how do I get out of this liminality?” Maggie said with desperation.

  “I thought that was what we were doing this morning in Luino—carpe diem—seizing the moment and celebrating the new you.” Tata smiled. “Now, enough morose thoughts. Roll up your sleeves and wash your hands. Tata is about to teach you how to make pasta al prato. I believe it translates as lawn spaghetti.”

  “Lawn spaghetti?”

  “Oh yes.” Tata chuckled. “You know, for most of its history Italy has been under some kind of oppressive rule: the French, the Spanish, the Austrians, the fascists, and the church, and through it all we’ve always had to make do with what we had at hand. That’s the true art of Italian cooking—simple elegance.”

  Tata pulled out a large aluminum pasta pot, filled it with three liters of water, and set it to boil. “Come outside with me.” She grabbed a pair of scissors from the drawer and they went outside into the garden.

  A few minutes later they returned with a handful of rosemary, thyme, mint, basil, and a few stalks of lavender.

  “I had no idea you could eat all of these things just growing in the yard.”

  Tata held the herbs up to Maggie’s nose. “Can you smell it? We are going to translate these perfumes and your emotions into flavors, so only think about beautiful things, like making love.” Tata flexed her eyebrows.

  “But what about the lavender?”

  “Ah, that’s my little secret. While you wash the herbs, I’ll prepare the pasta.”

  Tata added a fistful of course sea salt to the pot of boiling water. Then she put an ample palmful of pasta into the boiling water and set the timer for ten minutes. “Okay, now we chop the herbs until they are fine enough for pesto.”

  “I don’t know how to chop pesto,” Maggie said. “I’ve only ever used the stuff from a jar.”

  “Ahh!” Tata bit her knuckle. “Do like this.” She took the large chopping knife and with machinelike precision reduced the basil to microscopic flecks. “Here.” She handed Maggie the knife. “N
ow you do the same to the other herbs. Careful with the lavender, just a strand to give our sauce a very subtle high note, but no more or it will dominate the other notes like an old lady wearing too much perfume.”

  “Like this?”

  “Yes, just like that. Okay, now for the hard work.” Tata put the fine flakes of herbs in a brass mortar, held it firm, and ground it with a brass pestle until it became a green paste. “You can also use a food processor, but I like the old-fashioned way. It’s my little workout so I don’t get flabby underarms.”

  The timer rang.

  “Can you check the pasta, tesoro?”

  “How do I know if it’s ready?

  “Pick up a piece with a fork and taste it. It should be not too firm and not too soft—like a kiss.”

  “I’m hardly an expert on kissing.” Maggie laughed.

  “Close your eyes and think of some handsome boy kissing you.”

  Maggie fished out a piece of pasta from the pot and bit into it. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Owen kissing her, but instead, for some odd reason the image of Fabrizio flashed into her mind, his soft lips firm against her waiting mouth. “I think it’s right.”

  “Good. Stand back.” Tata lifted the boiling pot over to the sink and poured it into a colander. Then she bounced it up and down a few times, draining off the water, and returned the pasta to the pot and covered it.

  A beam of light sparkled in the stream of green liquid as Tata poured half a cup of olive oil into a small frying pan on the fire.

  “Okay, now we heat the olive oil to a point just before it starts to smell burnt.”

  The oil began to sizzle, and Tata fanned the air over the pan with her hand. “You can smell when it’s ready.”

  Maggie sniffed and nodded.

  “Okay, put the herbs on top of the pasta.” Tata lifted the lid off the pasta pot and Maggie spooned in the herb sauce. “Add three ripe cherry tomatoes and one tablespoon of tomato sauce for each serving.”

  “How many are we for lunch?” Maggie said.