Imperfect Pairings by Jackie Townsend
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An encounter with an Italian leads a woman down a path of love and self discovery.
Smart,
career driven Jamie had not intended to fall in love. And to a
foreigner no less, an Italian who doesn't reveal his heritage at first.
Jack is short for John, he tells her, but she soon discovers that John
is short for Giovanni. Insanely handsome and intense but unreadable,
Giovanni is a man of few words. When after two months together she
accompanies him to his cousin s wedding in Italy, Jamie learns that he
hasn't been back to the troubled family estate in ten years, but with
one step upon the rich Italian soil covered in ancient vines, it's as if
he never left. Suddenly his language is no longer her language, and
Jamie is drawn inexplicably into an Italy that outsiders rarely see--a
crumbling villa, an old family scandal, a tragic mother, an estranged
father, and a host of spirited Italian cousins. Jack is finally forced
to face the destiny he's been renouncing; and Jamie makes a rash
decision, unaware that it will change her life forever.
Chapter
1
LA
MAMMA
The
wheels lift off the tarmac and suddenly his name is not one syllable
but three: Jack, now a melodic Giovanni, as it might be sung in an
Italian opera. This is somewhat baffling for Jamie, who until this
moment had known him as a man who kept his heritage secured in the
vault of his boot-shaped soul. He’d get struck with a primal need
to eat pasta every once in a while, but otherwise, if Jamie mentioned
an Italian restaurant for dinner, he’d redirect the discussion to
Chinese or Thai. If an Italian tourist asked him in struggling
English for directions on the street, he’d answer in struggling
English. He has American friends, at work at least. In fact, when she
first met him she’d thought he was American. On his voice mail he
sounds American. No Rs are rolled.
Jack
is short for John, he tells people. True, but John is Gian in
Italian, short for Giovanni, the name she’d discovered on his
passport only this evening. This was just before they boarded their
Alitalia flight, when the stewardess greeted the Italian couple
before them with a “buona sera e buon viaggio,” and then
proceeded to greet Jack with a “Good evening and welcome.”
Vaffanculo brutta stronza non vedi che sono italiano pure io
came rumbling through Jamie’s inner ear. “Buona sera
signorina,” is what the stewardess then heard, in Giovanni’s
very polite but make-no-mistake-about-my-identity voice. “Scusi,
scusi, mi scusi,” the goddess clamored. “Nessun problema,”
he assured her, and the two fell into a melodic exchange while Jamie
stood there staring because she never heard Jack’s voice so
natural, so content before.
After
the plane levels off and they finish their first glass of business
class prosecco (upgrades via Jamie’s unused, ever-growing stock of
American Express points), the little fight they’d gotten into in
the terminal, perhaps their first, is long forgotten. (He had
insisted on holding her ticket and passport. “This may be my first
trip to Italy, she’d scoffed, “but it’s not as if I’ve never
flown before.” The weird thing she still can’t get over is that
she’d given in and handed them to him.) Now their seats are
extended far back and Jack/Giovanni is talking more than she’s ever
known him to, perhaps more than she ever wanted him to, because
something about the word great-grandfather makes her sleepy. Bisnonno
is how they say it in Italian. “Bisnonno made a fortune in steel.”
Apparently
her affliction crosses languages: she immediately yawns and her eyes
fill with water––“must be that all-nighter at work,” she
says, but Giovanni continues, “He bought Villa Ruffoli in the 1920s
as a summer home for his extended family, a way for everyone to
convene and escape the city’s suffocating heat.” In fact, I
should get out my briefcase and start drafting those e-mails.
“…Bisnonno
had four sons…” Something in the fervent rise and fall of his
voice, more so than his words, is absorbing her subconscious. Like a
dream, snippets are getting through. “…Federico ran sales out of
Milan, Peter went to the war, another took over operations in Asti,
and my grandfather, Nonno Giacomo, became CEO with headquarters in
Torino. There were uncles and second cousins in Milano and Abruzzi,
Godparents in Rome...” At one point Jamie has to tell him to go
back a couple of generations, because she’s lost.
“And this is just my mother’s side…” he turns at her and
smiles that taunting, alluring smile, and just like that, it’s as
if he’s reached in and touched her heart. “Go on,” she tells
him.
“I’m
boring you.”
“Please.”
Gazing
at their entwined hands, he continues. “There were never less than
twenty people at the dinner table. Nonno Giacomo sat at the head, me,
the oldest grandchild, to his right, always. It was my job to taste
the wine in case it tasted like vinegar.” He looks pointedly at
Jamie here. “It often tasted like vinegar.
“The
meal was chaos, always a plethora of debates going on at once: which
cow produced the best cheese, politics I didn’t understand, why the
farmer screwed up the wine or the cook ruined the chicken; the latest
scandals at the company, who was sleeping with whom. Meanwhile, Nonno
Giacomo, bored by all this nonsense, entertained himself by doodling
on paper napkins that he would pass to me under the table. I’d have
to use all my strength not to burst out laughing at some of those
sketches of Zia Maddalena’s breasts. When the meal was over, my
cousin Luca would run around drinking up the dregs of wine left in
glasses.”
Jack
relaxes back in his seat and smiles at a thought.
Or
is he frowning? She can never tell.
She
orders more prosecco.
Their
heads fall together.
“You’ve
never tasted real milk, Jamie. There was no need to leave the
property. We had cows and cattle sheds and made our own butter. Live
chickens and pigs, too,” and when her eyes don’t scream with
envy, “You’ve never tasted real pork, Jamie.”
“Do
I want to?”
“We
ate fruit right off the trees: apples, plums, cherries, hazelnuts…”
“Peaches?
I love peaches.”
“You’ve
never sucked on a real peach, Jamie.” And from his eyes she can see
that she hasn’t.
“We
had our own vineyards and made our own wine.”
They
fall quiet for a time; he remembering it all, Jamie imagining him
remembering it all.
“Ah,
well,” he sighs, and then reaches for his La Stampa in the
seat back pocket in front of him.
“Ah
well what?”
He
is closing back up, as he can do. “Jack?”
“It’s
all gone,” he shrugs.
“Gone?”
“Everything.”
She
clears her throat. “Everything?”
“I
still can’t believe it.”
“Even
the cows and the milk?”
“Gone.”
“The
peach trees?”
“Gone.”
“Chickens?”
“Jamie,
basta, enough.”
“What
happened?”
“It
was a long time ago. I was away in the States at MIT.”
“You
must know something.”
“We’re
Italian.”
“That’s
not an answer.”
His
eyebrow goes up. “Have you ever been to Italy?”
“Really
Jack, what happened?”
“There
was finger pointing…accusations…the war made them rich, and when
the war was over, when they had to really manage things, well, the
truth came out––they were mis-managing everything. Nonno’s
brothers blamed him, as CEO. Nonno blamed his sons-in-law—my father
and Zio Marco—who then blamed each other. To tell you the truth, I
didn’t want to know. I didn’t really care. I only felt sorry for
Nonno Giacomo because he died with nothing. The vast empire of
Ruffoli property was sold, and all he had left were some vines, a
crumbling villa, and my mother to look after him; the villa’s
surrounding land had been redeveloped into apartments, and those that
weren’t sold were piece-mealed off to family members as some paltry
kind of inheritance.”
He
falls silent.
“And
your father?”
“Napoli,”
he says, after a dark moment. “He went back to Napoli.”
“So
they’re divorced?”
“Nonno
wrote me a poem the day I left for MIT…” he says, not so much
ignoring her question as refusing to acknowledge it. His parents are
Catholic, of course they’re not divorced. “…It never occurred
to me until years later, after the dust had settled and I re-read the
poem, how talented he was.” He pauses, as if reciting the verse in
his mind, and it occurs to Jamie that Jack may have left the wedding
invitation, the impulse for this trip, out for her to see on purpose.
He
clears his throat of whatever emotion got caught there, and then the
plane suddenly roars from below for no apparent reason. They catch
and hold eyes in the moment of uncertainty. A flicker of something,
fear, could he be afraid, she wonders, and in a gesture that feels
apart from her, she reaches out and touches his cheek. Her fingers
follow the curve of his jaw and settle on his chin. There is a tiny
crevice there, a small crack or fissure, and she spends an abstract
moment contemplating this little part of him. Then the roaring
subsides, and her hand moves back. She stares at it a moment
wondering what just happened, then clambers out of her seat to get
her briefcase from the overhead compartment.
***
“You
know what to do?” he says, at last handing her her passport when
they arrive in Italy. Without bothering to respond, Jamie takes it
and steps into the line for aliens while Giovanni proudly heads off
to the line for nationals. This feels odd, because he is the alien,
isn’t he? It doesn’t occur to her until they meet up on the other
side again that no, in fact it is she, the frequent flyer who’s
never traveled outside the States except to Mexico that one time, who
is the alien now. The americana.
Jack,
for his part, is no longer Jack but Giovanni. Jamie must keep
reminding herself, as it says so on his passport, and now in his
demeanor as well. If he’s not at ease in the hapless, chaotic
disorder of his native land then he’s certainly resigned to it,
methodical in his step, knowing exactly what to do and where to go.
Jamie
drank too much prosecco on the plane. Is it just her, or are the
people here smaller? She actually asks him this in an attempt at
humor, for he seems nervous and it’s making her nervous. Why is she
nervous? She’s never had problems meeting the proverbial mother
before. Sure, there’s going to be a language barrier, but no doubt
there’s already going to be a language barrier, the one inherent in
the relations between any mother and the woman her son brings home,
and these thoughts aren’t helping Jamie stay calm. By the time she
follows Jack out the sliding custom doors, her heart is beating
wildly.
A
blinding moment, her first in Italy, one in which there are flashing
bulbs and wild applause, stylish crowds and sleek architecture. They
are in Milan, after all, fashion capital of the world; but the world
that then comes to life is in the form of a dreary terminal stinking
of burnt coffee and toasted cheese. No crowds, just a few clusters of
young Italians wandering around in dark leather and piercings,
aimless and self absorbed. They make Jack’s mother easy to spot—no,
Giovanni’s mother—though Giovanni seems to be, for the moment,
pretending it is not his mother, this tear-stricken woman leaning so
anxiously against the low gate that Jamie fears it might toppled
over.
She
is pretty, Jamie notices right off, despite the wrinkles and the
roundness. Heirlooms cling to her neck and fingers; her skin is
golden, her hair a pearlish-gray. Her light features are a northern
quality, Jack had informed Jamie with pride on the plane. When Jamie
had inquired about his own features––a darker bronze––he’d
responded with some foreboding, “My father’s from the South.”
Cheeks
are kissed over and over.
“Mamma,
ma dai, mamma,” in a tone part revel, part pity, Giovanni at
last extracts himself from La Mamma’s embrace and motions for
Jamie, who steps in. “La mia fidanzata,” he says.
Jamie,
with a “Ciao” stuck in her throat says, “Hello,”
idiotically.
La
Mamma glances at Jack as if for translation, then leans in for those
kisses Jamie finds so awkward––which side comes first, how many,
exactly. By the time La Mamma steps back to examine this tall ginger
woman from head to toe, toe to head, Jamie is blushing in all
directions. Some conclusion is made, seemingly, because at once La
Mamma takes Jack’s arm and the two walk rapidly on, she in her
rubber shoes and thick stockings, Jamie trailing in new sandals that
keep slipping off her feet.
At
one point they turn and ask if she would like to prendere un caffé
at the airport bar. “I would love to,” is her gracious
response, hidden beneath a caffeine-desperate smile. And they weren’t
kidding about the “prendere” (to take), because that’s
essentially what drinking coffee is here. Jack pays at the register,
hands his ticket to the barista, and one minute later three tiny cups
are sliding along the counter at them. Jack “takes” his, loads
sugar into it, and drinks it in one gulp. “Ancora?” La
Mamma says, also done.
Jamie
looks at her thimbleful, thinking, this will not be enough
caffeine.
“Sta
male?” La Mamma asks. Is something wrong with her? Yes, there
will be, when Jamie soon discovers that there is no lingering or
dawdling over coffee in this country.
They
move on through the terminal that seems both empty and yet chaotic at
the same time. The few present are crowded with their overflowing
luggage carts at the elevator bank because one of the lifts is
broken, while others seem lost. Jack leads them on a search for the
stairs that have gone mysteriously missing. Circling back to the
lifts just in time for the doors to magically slide open, they shove
on. The ride down is slow and harrowing, what with Jamie’s mind
still ruminating on Jack’s fidanzata reference. It sounds
perilously close to fiancé, and an alarm has sounded in her head.
She and Jack are in no way engaged. In fact, they have been together
only two months and she has yet to call them a couple, let alone act
like they are headed down some path of commitment.
He
had overwhelmed her, certainly. Jamie hadn’t expected to fall in
love so definitively, to love someone so completely as to make even
the word love sound ridiculous, and utterly redundant. The
only hope now is to keep reminding herself that this is not the first
time she’s fallen in love. She’d been overwhelmed those other
times, too, hadn’t she? Love does not give him claim to her soul,
after all, and anyway, she has a Partnership to achieve at the firm,
money to accumulate, goals and milestones to reach.
Dai,
muoversi. (Come on, move.)
It
is a tiny Fiat Panda in which Jamie sits squeezed in back with the
luggage that won’t fit in the trunk. “Che cosa fai mamma?”
he says after his mother, who has jumped from the car because she
forgot to pay the parking ticket.
“Fidanzata?”
Jamie leans in and whispers in his ear.
“Girlfriend,”
he responds, pensively looking out for his mother.
“Just
checking.”
“In
Italian it means girlfriend.”
“I
heard you the first time.” She sits back, unsatisfied. Girlfriend
doesn’t sound right either, but she is too tired to think or talk
rationally. The morning haze is like a drug. She is asleep before
they exit the parking structure.
A
convulsive verbal exchange floats into Jamie’s subconscious,
intermixed with loud, abrupt silences. The Alps soar past the Fiat
window in a gray, misty blur, however faintly. She is awake now, and
they are practically hydroplaning on the Autostrada toward Torino, a
straight shot of dreary farmland, factories, and lime green gas
stations. At A26 they turn off and head toward Alessandria, where the
land is at first flat and wet, then jade and undulating. The fog
begins to lift, a pink sun overtakes the sky, and the hills grow
wavier, a richer green. Clusters of terra cotta emerge on distant
hills along with castles and campanili that don’t seem
entirely real, until they get closer, and then they still don’t
seem real.
La
Morra, Barolo, Verduno, Cherasco, Roddi, Grinzane… Signs point
crooked arrows in all directions. “Barolo, like the wine?”
“Yes,
Jamie.”
“I’d
said it was orange,” she muses.
“Brown.”
“Whatever.
You fed it to the lamb. I remember that.”
He
smiles somewhat deliciously at her in the rearview.
“Che
cosa?” La Mamma wants to know what they are saying to each
other.
He’d
been braising a lamb shank one night, Jamie thinks back. A few hours
in the oven and counting, her entire apartment radiating in its
tender, juicy fumes, suddenly Jack grabbed his keys and rushed out
the front door. “Now this is a wine,” he said twenty minutes
later upon his return with a bottle of Barolo. “Moncrespi,”
she said, reading the label.
“Mon-crrrrrrresss-pi!”
he’d corrected with a vehemence that startled her. She’d asked
him if the embellishment was necessary. It’s not embellishment,
he’d said, it’s correct pronunciation, and yes, it’s necessary.
She’d handed him the bottle opener without further comment, for
she’d already had a flogging that day by her client and needed a
drink. He opened the bottle while she got out glasses, but instead of
pouring her a glass, he’d opened the blazing oven and poured the
lamb a glass before setting the bottle aside and insisting she wait
for the wine to open up. She studied him, then the wine-soaked lamb,
considering a martini. When Jamie wanted something, she often wanted
it now; but this man had a way of making her wait, and if he could
wait she could wait. An hour later, the lamb done, she’d taken her
first real sip, making a conscious effort to understand what she was
drinking. She was thirty-two. Maybe it was time.
“It’s
dry,” she’d said.
“Look
at the color.”
“Brown?”
“Amber,”
he’d said, gazing into the glass with eyes just as brown, just as
amber. It was a haunting look, the one he had turned and given her,
the same look exuding from him now, she imagines, as he speeds
intently into the distance before him. That look sends her stomach
into turmoil, or perhaps it’s the road, which has grown narrower
and windier. She rolls down the window. The air smells of earth and
tar, the sun has gone missing again, and grape vines are everywhere,
clinging to the hillsides sweeping up and down all around them.
Uninspiring yet pleasant farmhouses and villas are sprinkled among
those hills, and Jack is announcing their names, friends or foes, the
Crespi Vineyard one of them, as in Mon-crrrrrrresss-pi! There
don’t seem to be any visible markings or signs, no elaborate Napa
Valley-styled entrances. Their families go way back, Jack is telling
her now, as if she’d understood what he and his mother had been
saying. Whose families?
The
light dims suddenly; the road levels off with a vibration so jarring
Jamie braces her breasts with her forearm as their car bounces over
the cobblestones, and Jack is pointing out something seemingly
critical. She looks up and around for a castle or a campanile—instead
it’s a newspaper kiosk where he buys his Gazzetta Dello Sport.
This is the main town, he explains, a curved incline of shops tucked
inside stone where the sun apparently can’t reach. Only a few
locals in coats trudge up the road. Otherwise the place feels barren,
cold even though it is June, the beginning of the warm season.
“Bar,”
she says unconsciously at a lonely shop sign, thinking about a
pre-dinner cocktail, but then remembering the airport. Not that kind
of bar.
They
are winding again, ascending. The road is narrowing farther, as if
that were possible, and is generously lined with trees and hedges.
Jack pulls over to let a car coming from the opposite direction pass.
A few more turns and they are confronted by an iron gate with a
rusted Villa Ruffoli emblem dangling off the front. Jack gets out of
the car to straighten the emblem and type in the code, then hops back
in, grips the steering wheel and mumbles in Italian while the gate
swings too slowly open.
Jamie
can’t help thinking back to how little she knows Jack, or Giovanni,
or whatever his name is, and this place he calls home. Back in San
Francisco, outside of their time together, their lives remain
distinct and separate. They don’t probe into each other’s pasts
or origins and make it a point not to cross paths at work. He is a
senior engineer at L-3, and she is a consultant for Norwest
Aerospace, which is in the process of acquiring L-3. Jamie is in
charge of the financial integration of the two entities, and although
the merging of the engineering operations, which includes Jack’s
group, is her peer’s responsibility, her relationship with Jack is
still a serious no-no.
She’s
not sure how she let it happen. They’d met at a bar where both
firms were celebrating the project kickoff, a get-to-know-each-other
kind of event. She’d spotted him the same moment he’d spotted
her, in what became an other-worldly sensation, as if some foreign,
intoxicating gas had filled the air. That’s what it was, she’d
had to stop and check herself, a purely chemical sensation. It had
attacked all organs save her mind, which was still intact apparently,
because she could read right through his unreadable expression; the
frown that wasn’t a frown at all, but a smile, one that seemed, if
she wasn’t mistaken, to be meant only for her. He was tall, the
supple leather of his jacket seamless with the skin on his neck and
face, as if his features had been carved from some rare, precious
stone.
Walk
away. The rejection will hurt. (In her experience with handsome men,
they tended to stay clear of light freckles and red hair.) Anyway,
none of this mattered, because it was against firm policy to date a
client, and Jamie was a play-by-the-rules gal; but after a couple of
drinks, lo and behold, there she was letting her arm brush softly
against his, accidentally. When they finally did get a conversation
going he didn’t laugh at her sarcasm; he could only stare at her
with an odd sort of wonder as she nervously rambled on. Her
belligerent American co-workers thought him snobbish and aloof, but
she didn’t know what to think of him. He was quiet and intense, had
no trace of an accent, and it didn’t occur to her that he was a
foreigner. Not until a week later, that is, when he’d invited
people over to his apartment for the European Champions League game.
Jamie was the only guest without an H-1 visa or second language; not
to mention that her passport had only one stamp on it. She’d sat
and watched, but didn’t understand the game’s nuances. The wild
adrenaline rush of everyone standing up after sixty-five minutes and
screaming, “Gooooaaaaallllll!!” at one p.m. on a workday, had
been a complete and utter revelation.
Theirs
is an unspoken agreement, she reminds herself now, as Jack…Giovanni
squeezes the car through the narrow roadway, to lay no claims upon
each other. And anyway, apparently there’s no longer anything to
claim, as he had explained to Jamie on the plane, though he never did
elaborate on the bankruptcy, and his manner in that moment had been
so intense that Jamie isn’t sure she ever wants him to. All he
could say was that Villa Ruffoli is not in any way what it once was,
and that is the reason why he has not, in the decade since, returned
to the place he once called home.
Title: High Stakes Gamble
