Full of Grace (6 page)

I was saving my energy for more urgent things—feeding Michael and finding out what was on his mind.

It was still in the mideighties. Luckily, there was no rainstorm in sight. But it was oppressive. I decided the air would be most comfortable if it was moving, so I brought a fan outside with a long extension cord and positioned it on the brick wall.

“Freaking mosquitoes,” I said to no one, and slapped my leg, reducing the population by one and only a hungry one.

Little clay pots of burning citronella would keep the nasty things at bay. I took a pack of six from the cabinet over the refrigerator and encircled the table with them. Next I set the table with red-and-yellow batik linens I had bought ages ago in Thailand and put a hurricane in the center of the small round table. How was I going to convince him he was in southern Italy?

“I’ll break up some Parmesan in a little bowl and drizzle it with olive oil. And music. I’ll play that new CD, um, what the heck is the name of it? Il Divo!”

I continued talking to myself, working out the logistics for the night. The phone rang, scaring me half to death, and I hurried back inside to answer it.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s me. Do you mind if I go to the gym for an hour?”

“No problem. I’m building a little theater here for us.”

“Dinner outside?”

“Yep.”

“What country?”

“Italy. No, wait. Sardinia.”

“Ah, so I’m going with you after all. White or red?”

“A good Chianti or a Pinot.”

“What are you cooking?”

“It’s a surprise, Mr. Wonderful. I’ll see you later.”

I hung up, leaned against the kitchen wall and said to the thin air, “God, I sure do love that man.”

The smells of sautéing shallots and mushrooms welcomed Michael home, and sweaty as he was from working out, he grabbed me and kissed me all over my neck and face.

I jumped and shrieked, “Take a shower! You smell worse than a skunk.”

“No, I don’t! I smell good! Come here!”

“Trust me on this,” I said. “You absolutely reek.”

“Does that mean no predinner nooky?”

“Definitely not! Go!”

Within the hour, we were enjoying the cool of the evening and popping the cork on a second bottle of wine.

“So you hated that, right?”

“Yeah. You little Italian girls should get somebody to teach you how to cook. Seriously.”

“Yeah, sure. Well, now that you’ve taken a break from stuffing your face, tell me, how was your day?”

“The normal. It was a bad day for the mice and a good day for mankind. Do we have any more risotto and veal? A little more sauce?”

“You know it. I can’t cook for any less than twelve. The food gene.”

I took his plate and refilled it. Michael resumed eating with gusto and was wiping up the sauce with a hunk of Italian bread as he attempted to explain his current work.

“We’ve got this experiment going on that shoots gold nanoparticles loaded up with reagents that are capable of…Grace?”

“Hmm?”

“I see that dull look in your eyes…”

“Sorry. Please. The bottom line?”

“It’s gonna cut tumor growth in cancers. Which is fascinating. But in about, who knows…five years? They’ll have little nanobots that they can inject into Joe Blow and they will go directly to the site of old Joe’s tumor, obliterate it, and
poof!
No tumor! No cancer! All done in about three or four hours! As opposed to stem cells that the body can reject for all kinds of reasons and that still take forever.”

“I’m sorry, but are you not working in stem cells?”

“Yeah, but this is a totally different approach that has every
body buzzing. There’s another team of guys working on all these experiments—nanotechnology—could absolutely beat stem cells to Stockholm this year.”

I assumed he was referring to the Nobel Prizes.

“Michael? Are you thinking about switching fields?”

“No! No way. But I have to tell you, Grace, this is some awesome, awesome stuff.”

“Man. Don’t you just…I mean, sometimes isn’t it completely amazing to be doing this work now? I mean, are we really on the edge of curing about a billion diseases?”

“A billion and one. I’m telling you, baby, it’s happening so fast we can hardly keep up with our own progress and the implications of it all. These guys at the Mayo Clinic just finished up a study on spinal-cord nerve regeneration, and it worked. Well, it worked on lab mice anyway. Now the trick is to get to the place where it’s safe to do trials on humans.”

“And funded.”

“Yeah, there is that little caveat. So tell me the truth. Is your old man still raging about my allegiance to stem-cell research?”

“What do you think? It doesn’t matter, Michael. He can get up on his hind legs and bark like a fox and it doesn’t change the way I feel about you, okay?”

Michael reached across the table, took my hand in his and then covered it with his other hand. A small breeze moved across the courtyard, ruffling the tablecloth and my hair. It was dark as pitch and in the candlelight Michael’s face appeared more angular and masculine than in the light of day. There were dark smudges under his eyes. I hadn’t noticed them earlier, but I wrote them off to fatigue.

“Well, tell Big Al to tell his priest that stem cells are going to be ancient history before they can get them to work consistently.”

I leaned across the table and whispered, “Good. But you’re the only man I’ve ever known who would use this irresistibly romantic moment to launch a discussion about science versus religion. Any other man, after this gorgeous dinner, would be trying to see what color my panties—”

He put his finger to my lips.

“I’ll get to your panties, Miss Russo. Listen, especially embryonic stem cells. Go tell Big Al that there’s a bunch of guys down in Sydney who figured out that olfactory stem cells do the same job, and get this—the study was funded by the Catholic Archdiocese for a mere hundred thousand.”

“Big Al wouldn’t know what you’re talking about. Olfactory? Isn’t that where lots of people put together fuel equipment on an assembly line?”

Michael looked at me with a wide grin and shook his head. That look said,
And you don’t either
. This didn’t offend me in the slightest. I knew that Michael was a genius and he was going to save the world. Okay, he would be a cog in the wheel that saved the world. But he did have the most splendid mind I had ever known.

Later, Michael was upstairs and I was just finishing up the dreaded dishes—there’s nothing like that extra glass of wine to ruin your enthusiasm for cleaning a kitchen—and I heard him turn on the news. We had truly become like an old married couple. We went to work, came home, ate dinner, cleaned up, watched the news and went to sleep. I loved it—each and every day and night was so happily anticipated and I knew it was because of Michael. Michael thrilled me. This was real love—romantic love, physical love, intellectual love, companion love—you could name it anything you wanted to and it was the same thing—still growing stronger and deeper with no resistance from either side.

I heard the toilet flush and thought I had better move myself upstairs if I had hopes for any ooh-la-la that night. Then I heard it flush again and again.

“Michael? Are you okay?”

No answer.

I rushed up the steps and found him on the floor of the bathroom. He had obviously been vomiting.

“Michael! What in God’s name…? Do you need a doctor?”

“I am one,” he said. “Just help me to bed.”

He was weak and unsteady on his feet as I helped him up and walked him to the bed. His arm was around my shoulder and mine was around
his waist. I knew he had consumed a fair amount of wine, but no more than I had, and I felt fine. He got under the covers and I pulled them over him.

“What can I get you, baby?”

“Nothing,” he said. “I’m a little dizzy. Probably worked out too long…something…the heat? Who knows?”

I relaxed as I heard him diagnose himself. That was a sign that things weren’t too far from normal. I turned off the television, tiptoed to the bathroom to get him a cold cloth and a glass of water to sip, and tiptoed back.

“All my good veal wasted!” I said in a whisper.

The corners of his mouth turned up even though his eyes were closed. “Only a Russo would think about that,” he said.

“Only a Higgins wouldn’t!”

I decided to sleep on the couch that night, thinking that if he had the whole bed to himself, he would be more comfortable. But I had the worst night’s sleep I’d had in years. I got hot and pushed off my quilt. Then the air-conditioning kicked in and I got cold. The quilt was on the floor, and by the time I was resituated, I was half-awake. And when I finally slept, I had the strangest dream.

I was in the car with Michael and we were going over the bridge to Mount Pleasant. The car was going too fast, and when I looked over, Michael was gone. Then the steering wheel was gone. The next thing I knew, the car was falling down to the Cooper River with me in it. I was screaming in the dream and woke up with a jolt, drenched in sweat. What the hell was that all about?

I
n July, it is often said that the only thing that separates Charleston, South Carolina, from the bottom floor of hell is the flapping of a flimsy screen door. May I just say that the poetic souls who say this have yet to visit Sardinia? America understands and embraces air-conditioning. Sardinia, Italy, does not. And it was just as hot and humid.

The very first thing that struck me about Sardinia was its landscape. As we circled low and around, preparing to land, I felt like I had been thrown back two thousand years. Huge juts of granite, smoothed by millennia of salt and wind, lurched upward from the earth. Some resembled animals and others looked like objects. The landscape was craggy and arid. I would not have been at all surprised to see herds of goats or sheep led by ancient bearded men in long homespun caftans and turbans navigating the scrub growth and sharp pitch of the hills. Sardinia was biblical, exactly as you would imagine the world looked when Abraham walked the earth.

While I waited at the Olbia Airport for my driver, I perspired, furiously slapped bugs and felt the humidity do its worst on my hair just as if I were in the Lowcountry. I stood for a long while in the sticky morning air, my cartons of work-related materials stacked next to my own luggage. If the driver didn’t show up soon, the extra day I had planned for myself before the arrival of the group would be wasted. My mood be
came darker. I crinkled my nose at passing workmen who hadn’t bathed with enough vigor and gave pitiless stares to women with wailing children on their hips. I will admit that I recognized I was behaving a bit like a princess. But it had been a long trip and I was overtired and really cranky.

Finally, the hotel car appeared and I was en route to a cool shower, some breakfast and finalizing the details of the trip, which, when done, would result in a massively improved disposition.

The slow beginning at the airport was the opposite of my hotel arrival. The courtyard of the Cala di Volpe was cool and serene. From the minute I stepped foot from the car, I knew my troubles were over. Built by the Aga Khan in the early sixties, the hotel was designed as a playground for the very wealthy or those with a certain celebrity. Every detail was unique, especially the floral arrangements all around the lobby and the large chunks of colored glass built into the walls, the sunken lobby bar, the hand-hewn archways of timber—the amount of thought and design that went into each square inch of the property boggled the mind. But that was Italy in general—the food, the architecture, the wine, the art—the whole Italian style of just about any area of living knew no peer. At least in the opinion of this humble Italian girl.

I took in all these details as the smelling-swell concierge at the reception desk took my passport and exchanged pleasantries with me. This guy had his own subtitle—Signore Hottie. He was tall and olive-complexioned, and his dark eyes were so filled with mischief they could have belonged to the devil himself. Massimo Floris was simultaneously all-business and sex appeal. I had expected he would be enthusiastic in his assistance, but I had not expected Massimo to be so…I don’t know except to say that he reduced me to lewd thoughts and schoolgirl giggles.

“Signorina Russo!
Che bella! Buon giorno!
A cappuccino? I make it for you with my own hands!”

Just so you know,
che bella
meant he thought I was a babe. As addicted to Michael Higgins as I was, it was all I could do to keep a straight face and a loyal heart. Massimo was a walking aphrodisiac. Then I re
minded myself that Italian men think all women are babes, no matter what their age or girth, countenance or manner, status or means. If they have a pulse and breasts, they are worthy of carnal consideration.

“Thank you,” I said, snickering internally. “Caffeine is just what I need.”

He disappeared for a few minutes, and when he returned he handed me the cup and saucer. Don’t you know he had somehow produced a miniature replica of palm-tree fronds in its foam?

“The cappuccino is for free, but for the artwork is twenty euros,” he said with a wide grin, revealing perfect teeth.

“In Vegas they comb in a king and queen of hearts,” I said, lying off the top of my head.

“
Sì?
This is true? Playing cards or portraits?”

“Neither. It’s not true. I was just kidding. Sorry. Dumb joke.”

He smiled again. “It’s okay. We like jokes at the Cala di Volpe. Now how may I help you prepare for the arrival of your guests, bella?”

To hell with them. Let’s run away and do something wicked.
That’s what I was thinking with a laugh every time I looked at his face. Shoot. It wasn’t dangerous, it was just flirting, and believe me, Italian men don’t know how to talk to women without exuding some very powerful pheromones. They have to be the most virile and dangerous creatures on the planet.

The morning was spent going through the hotel together, touring all the shops and meeting rooms and, most important, making sure that every guest would have a view of the water and that the board president had the nicest suite. (All those beds! What a waste! I’m kidding, all right? I was committed to Michael; I wasn’t Mother Teresa of Calcutta, okay?) Then, in descending order of board position, ego, donor history and donor potential, rooms were assigned. But with a high-season basic rack rate of fourteen hundred euros a night, the rooms ranged from glorious to spectacular. The marble bathrooms were stuffed with Acqua di Parma soaps, shampoos and body lotions. And, not to worry, breakfast was included. Like we used to say in New Jersey,
Such a deal
. Honestly, some people might have said the rooms weren’t that fantastic, but they
all fit the style of the hotel, which was a little rustic, somewhat resort-like and a little spare. Italian Opulent Zen.

Speaking of opulence, just yesterday, at Saks Fifth Avenue in Charleston, I had picked up tons of sunscreen products for men and women that were to be put together in Burberry tote bags and labeled by guest name. In addition, each guest was to receive gourmet chocolates, a nice bottle of champagne, a book about Sardinia and a video that gave an overview of the history of the island to take home. The biggest dogs would have flowers in their rooms and monogrammed bathrobes. This was all included in the cost of the trip. But somehow finding these luxury goodies neatly displayed in their rooms on arrival made them feel they were special and therefore somehow entitled to something extra. After assembling the bags in my room while munching on a panini, I called the bell captain. When he arrived, we loaded up the trolley and took them down to the lobby. Massimo’s part was to deliver them to the rooms.

“We’re going to take extra care of your guests, Signorina Russo. You don’t have to worry about one thing.”

“Well, I’m sure you have been through this a thousand times, but since I don’t really know this group, I’m a bit nervous.”

“Don’t worry. You’ll get old too quick! Worry makes little lines—”

And with that, I felt someone tap my elbow. It was Dr. Geraldine Post.

“Hi! Grace? I’m Geri Post,” she said, and extended her hand for me to shake. “We meet at last!”

“Oh! I’m so glad you’re here!” I shook her hand soundly. I would’ve known her anywhere. She was in her midfifties, short in stature with cropped gray hair. She wore khaki pants and a tucked-in khaki shirt. She had a red baseball hat from the Galápagos Islands and her wire-rim glasses were insured against loss by the strap around her neck, printed with tiny turtles. Neat and tidy. A neat and tidy pixie, built for speed, dressed for action.

“Do you have your room yet?”

“Nope! Just got here.”

Massimo looked up and said, “Ah! Dr. Post. Welcome to the Cala di Volpe. My colleague will take your bags to your room, and may I offer you a cool drink of something? Wine? Lemonade?”

She was awfully perky for someone who had just crossed the Atlantic, sleeping in a seat designed to barely hold people with severe eating disorders.

“A Coca-Cola would be great,” she said. “We’re from Atlanta, you know!”

Massimo looked at her with a tiny question on his face that was almost instantly hidden behind his mask of professionalism. Italians knew that Coca-Cola came from America, but there was no significance in getting more specific. Atlanta? Peoria? Chicago? I mean, did Italy care about anything besides Italy? A cure for cancer would be good, but where Coke came from? The average Italian could not have cared less.

“Come, let’s sit on the terrace,” I said. “It’s beautiful outside.”

The glass doors parted automatically and the harbor of La Costa Smeralda—the Emerald Coast—was before us.

Dr. Post stood rooted to her spot, hands on her hips, looking out into the distance. “Whew!” she said. “There must be ten to twenty colors of blue in that water. Beautiful.”

“Yeah, it’s pretty breathtaking,” I said. “Gorgeous blue water, mountains in the distance…just like the brochure.”

My travel-speak broke the spell and she looked at me, shaking her head. Then she reached into her oversize shoulder bag and pulled out an envelope. “Here’s my suggested itinerary for the week. Let me know what you think. ASAP, okay? Sorry I never got to Charleston.”

“Oh, that’s okay. Actually, it’s nice to have this little slice of time to review and I’m sure whatever you have planned is fine.”

“Well, first it was my dog-sitter. I especially hate leaving Hambone at the kennel because he gets cage anxiety, you know what I mean?”

“Hambone?”

“Yeah, he’s an old bloodhound—got too old to hunt, so I took him from a friend who runs a hunt club up near Clarksville. Anyway, he’s a drooler but I love him. Drools on everything. So finally the sitter shows up and she’s got a cast on her leg from her toes clear up to Bangor,
Maine. So I say to her, This ain’t gonna work, sister, and she says she’ll be fine. But I’m not so sure, so I hung around for the next two days so my mind could rest. Turns out she gets around just fine and dandy.”

Hambone the drooler was in good hands and the world can rest easy now.

“So you just have the one dog?” I said.

“What? Oh, Lord no! I’ve got Hambone, Alvin and Bessie Mae, my two Scotties, Elvis and Liberace, my two old fat toothless Persians, and Scarface, my parrot.”

“You have a parrot? Can he talk?”

“Are you kidding? He never shuts up! Every time I give him a treat he tells me I’m wonderful. I love him.”

She went on and on about her pets, the Cokes arrived, I shook the itinerary in the air and she finally stopped yakking. We began to go over it.

“Okay,” I said, “tomorrow night at seven-thirty, we have cocktails in the bar by the pool, and dinner is at nine at Da Gianni Pedrinelli.”

“And I suspect it’s a nice place, this Gianni Pedrinelli joint?”

“Massimo, the concierge who looks like a movie star, says it’s the finest fish on the island.”

“Then I’ll bet it is. And first thing the next morning, we take the group to the Cathedral of Cagliari and have lunch around the piazza. I’ll ask Mr. Hollywood for a lunch recommendation.”

“Good idea. I’ll come, too. Then we can come back to the hotel for a swim and a siesta or what? Golf? You know somebody will show up with clubs, right? Probably half the men. I’ll ask Massimo about a golf course. I know there are some guys who travel the world trying to play every golf course there is. My father plays. Personally, I don’t get it.”

“Me either. Takes too much time and you don’t learn a thing. Boy, it sure is hot here, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. It’s almost one hundred. The U.S. didn’t corner the market on heat, right?”

“No. We surely did not. But Sardinia sure is gorgeous. This is work?”

“Right?”

She laughed and shook her head.

That night I had a long bubble bath, and swaddled in the hotel’s velvet cut terrycloth bathrobe, I had a small feast delivered from room service. My room was so beautiful that I hated Michael not being there. He would have loved it. We both loved the water and the Mediterranean was so different from the Atlantic around Charleston. It was at least fifteen degrees cooler and clear, like a piece of handblown glass. No sharks—a meaningful selling point for my money. But the water had jellyfish and prickly sea urchins, so you would be well warned to watch where you went. No, Michael would have loved this place and I knew it. I pulled back the sheets and slipped in. Linen. Oh, how I loved linen sheets! There was something so natural about them. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought they were cooler to sleep in during the summer and somehow warmer in the winter. They were so impractical I would probably never own them, never mind the expense. But for the next few nights, I could wrap myself in gorgeous Italian linen and pretend to be a real
principessa
. It was just one more imagined bonus of my crazy job.

I tried to call Michael. There was no answer at the house and his cell phone didn’t answer either. I left messages in both places and told myself he was all right. Surely someone would’ve called me if something had happened. But who? A neighbor? One of Michael’s friends? Maybe something happened to his mother. The thought of Michael dealing with his mother’s illness or death alone was so upsetting that I finally took a sleeping pill and washed it down with a dose of vodka from the minibar. This was the major drawback of my job—I might have been sleeping in Italian linen, but I was sleeping alone, incommunicado with the outside world.

The next morning, I was up at six, showered, dressed, fed and in the lobby by eight. Guests began to trickle in. No doubt the Olbia Airport was littered with GIVs and GVs, and rolling racks probably groaned under the tonnage of designer luggage. I was there to greet them with Massimo and Geri at my side.

The board president, Stan White, and his wife, Liza; Harvey and
Marilyn Gross; and Dylan Holmes and his meaningful other, Caroline Sutter, were the first to check in. At first glance they all seemed nice enough. Liza White and Marilyn Gross were Stan and Harvey’s original wives, but Caroline Sutter was at least thirty years younger than Mr. Holmes. Liza and Marilyn had endured numerous surgical procedures—lifting, tucking, peeling, enhancing and paralyzing—and Caroline Sutter was oblivious. In minutes I realized that Liza and Marilyn were barely speaking to Caroline the Younger, and by that evening the reason was obvious.