The House in Amalfi (3 page)

I didn’t know it on that sunny morning in Rome, but I had yet to experience
true
happiness. The “real thing” would not come until the following year, when Jon-Boy took me to live in the house in Amalfi. The place where, ten years later, he would die so mysteriously.

The quiet of my apartment was shattered by the insistent buzz of the intercom from the downstairs foyer, jolting me from my dreams and sending cold coffee flying from the mug. “Damn,” I said, mopping the pale chenille chair arm with a Kleenex. “Oh, damn it, who can that be?”

I ran to pick up the house phone in the kitchen and said hello, rather testily. Jammy’s sigh was like the wind gusting outside.

“Earth to Planet Zero,” she said in the high little-girl voice she has never managed to lose, which only adds to her charm and is probably the reason that, like Jackie Kennedy, she’d kept it.

I signed too, knowing why she was here and what she would tell me—again. Jammy was never a quitter. “Okay, come on up,” I said resignedly.

“I’m not coming up. You are coming down. I’m taking you out for drinks and dinner. And no, I don’t care what you have on—just throw a coat over the sweats; we’re only going to the local Italian.”

“But it’s only five thirty,” I objected, with a quick glance at the kitchen clock. “I can’t drink yet.”

“Did you never hear the old saying it must be six o’clock somewhere in the world? Now, put on some lipstick, throw on a coat, and get yourself down here, pronto. Otherwise I’ll
talk the ear off Serge and you know how he hates that. It’ll be you he gets mad at and it’ll cost you an even bigger tip at Christmas to soothe him, so hurry up, girl.”

This time there was a laugh in my sigh. Serge was the concierge. An old-guard Russian, he’d lived in this country for forty years and still spoke as little English as possible.
Difficult
would have been an easy word to describe him, but he’d been at the building far longer than I, and he was here to stay. We just had to make the best of him.

I quickly changed from the sweats (Jammy knows me only too well) into jeans and a black turtleneck, shoved my feet into boots, and glossed my pale lips. I stared in the mirror. I did not look great. Tall and so skinny the jeans bagged on me, shadowed eyes, hollow cheeks, billowing curly black hair in dire need of a cut. Dracula in a turtleneck. I dragged my long hair into an elastic band with a dismissive shrug. What did I care? No one would notice me anyhow.

“You look like hell,” Jammy said when I emerged from the elevator.

“Thanks.” I flung a bunny-lined jeans jacket over my shoulders. “A compliment is always nice.”

We waved good-bye to an indifferent Serge, and Jammy held open the big glass door while I flounced through. “I didn’t want to come anyway.” I scowled. “It’s cold and miserable out here, and besides I don’t want a drink.”

Jammy thrust out an arm and stopped me in my tracks. “Shit, Lamour Harrington, who else is gonna tell you the truth if not me?” Her big blue eyes glistened with tears—probably of anger by now.

“Okay, so you’re right,” I said, turning to hug her, “but what woman wants to hear it?”

“This woman—
you—needs
to hear it. And she also
needs
a drink.”

Jammy slid her arm through mine and we strode down the street, hip-to-hip, heads down into the wind, hair whipping wildly. Jammy’s legs were as long as my own. We were always the tallest in our class, even when I first lived next door to her, which was when Jon-Boy was still in the early days of the single-parent role and had moved us into respectable middle-class suburbia.

We lived in the smallest house on the old tree-lined block in Evanston, dotted with browning lawns and basketball hoops, and right next door to Selma and Frank Mortimer and their three kids. Jammy was my age and we became instant best friends.

Jammy’s house had everything mine lacked: a mom always there fixing meat loaf or mac-and-cheese or peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and there was always purple Kool-Aid that we got to fix ourselves. In summer, when the soft fruits were in season, Mrs. Mortimer brewed up great vats of jams and jellies, stirring and sifting as the sugary scent pervaded the entire street, making our mouths water. That’s how Jammy got her name; she was always licking out the bowls and had a permanently jam-stained mouth, sometimes for days on end. So Jammy she became instead of her given name of Jamie.

My artistic father, of course, was not happy in suburbia. He’d only moved there because he thought it was the best place for me. And he was right, though unexpectedly, it also turned out to be good for
him.
The Mortimer house became mine, lifting the parenting burden from his shoulders, so he was able to meet his girlfriends and old college cronies with whom he could talk books and music and of course, about the novel he dreamed one day of writing. He taught English at the local college and when not there could usually be found in the coffeehouse or the local bar, scribbling in a notebook. To him the written word was exactly that. Written. By hand.
He said it came out better that way than on a word processor.

Meanwhile I had practically moved in with the Mortimers. “Sleepovers” would go on for days, sometimes even as long as a week, and gradually I became part of their happy family. So you see, Dad really did do the best thing for me then. And he also did the right thing later, shocking the Mortimers to their very souls, when he said he was taking a sabbatical for a year or two and going to Italy to write his novel. And that he was taking me with him.

Of course, I was nervous about going to live in a foreign country where I didn’t know any other kids and where they didn’t even speak my language, but I was also thrilled that my father loved me so much he couldn’t bear to leave me behind.

A couple of years later, when we returned to Evanston, I picked up my friendship with Jammy exactly where we had left off. Then, when Jon-Boy returned alone to live in Italy, I became a permanent member of the Mortimer family. He came home a couple of times every year, but I was busy with school and I never visited him there. The last time I saw him was when he returned for my high school graduation.

Jammy is a sister to me, as well as a friend. We’ve suffered through each other’s teenage dramas—Jammy’s quite the drama queen—through first boyfriends and treacherous lovers. All the usual girl stuff. She’d helped me get over the awful desolation of Jon-Boy’s death, out in a sailboat off the coast of Amalfi in a storm, and the fact that he’d just “disappeared” into the sea. I was seventeen years old, getting ready for college, and already living with the Mortimers as a sort of permanent boarder. Now I just stayed on.

There was a memorial service in Amalfi’s beautiful ninth-century cathedral with its elaborate Moorish mosaic facade, but I refused at first to acknowledge Jon-Boy was dead, and I did not attend. Frank Mortimer went instead to represent me.

I had such happy memories of our time together at the little house Jon-Boy had bought there with, I suppose, some of the money earned from his novel that after he was gone for a long time I couldn’t even bear to think about it. In all these years I’d never been able to bring myself to return to Amalfi and face my “ghosts.”

There’s absolutely nothing Jammy and I don’t know about each other, and only Jammy knows the true extent of my second devastation, when my husband, Alex, was killed. She was there with me; she saw my naked soul tear apart; she stayed to pick up the pieces. She did not leave my side for weeks, telling her own husband he would just have to manage for a while because I needed her more. And good man that Matt is, he said, “Go ahead, baby; help her all you can.”

And now she’s here again, still trying to coax and bully me out of my funk and the rigid small life I’ve permitted myself, with its work guidelines and no play, because I’ve forgotten how to do that and anyway I just don’t care anymore. And also, having lost two men I loved, I can’t allow myself to be hurt again by falling for another. My life is on course. I have my work and that’s it.

Jammy steered me down a couple of side streets out of the direct path of the wind coming off the lake to a small storefront trattoria optimistically called Tre Scalini. It was the name of a once-famous restaurant on Rome’s Piazza Navona, the place Dad used to take me for their delicious
granita,
the espresso-flavored ice mixed with whipped cream.

“It’s strange how food can trigger memories,” I said, hoisting myself up on the bar stool next to Jammy and nodding meekly when she raised a questioning eyebrow. She went ahead and ordered two martinis with Ketel vodka and three Roquefort olives, shaken, James Bond fashion. “I remember the real Tre Scalini. . . .”

“In Rome, of course.” Jammy propped an elbow on the bar. She shoved her blond bangs aside and gave me that sideways exasperated blue stare. “I swear you think you’re Italian and that you never lived anywhere else but that old city. Except oh, where’s the other place?”

“Amalfi.” I turned huffily from her stare. “And I can tell you this trattoria has nothing on the real thing.”

“Then if it’s so great why don’t you just go back there?” She put two elbows on the counter now and stared angrily into the mirror behind the bar.

I hoisted my martini to her reflection in a mock toast. “Here’s to a long and happy friendship.”

She turned to me, eyes blazing. “You know what, Lamour Harrington, you are turning out to be a miserable old bitch. I don’t know what I ever saw in you. I’ve a good mind to walk out on you right now.”

For a minute I was stunned into silence; then I said, “You wouldn’t be the first. Remember Skeeter Malone? He left me at the senior prom for Melanie Damato.”

“Melanie Tomato, we called her. She had tits out to here at age thirteen and we were all sick with jealousy.”

“At least you caught up,” I said, glancing enviously at her Victoria’s Secreted bosom. “I was never so lucky.”

I caught her eye in the mirror and we grinned. “Anyhow, Skeeter Malone was a shit to do that to you,” she said, still loyal after all these years.

“Yeah, but he married those tits a few years later,” I said, taking a gulp of my martini and coughing until my eyes brimmed.

“You should see them now,” Jammy said, and then we were giggling again, silly as those two high school girls.

“Know how many years ago that was?” Jammy asked.

I shook my head. “Don’t wanna count.” I took a more
cautious sip of the martini this time, poking my fingers in it to catch an olive.

Jammy gave me a reproving shove. “Mom would have slapped your hand for that.”

“And she would have been right. I seem to have lost my manners along with everything else.”

“You haven’t lost everything else, Lamour,” Jammy said, suddenly serious. “Just your past. You—
we
—are only thirty-eight years old. There’s a lot of future still ahead of us.”

I contemplated my olives silently, then, “Trouble is, Jam, I like the past more.” She was quiet, watching me as she sipped her drink. Then I said, “Before you called, I was trying to remember how ‘happiness’ felt. I was thinking about those days with Jon-Boy in Rome, remembering what it was like to be a little kid with all that freedom, in a new and exciting world where everyone was my friend. I could feel the sun hot on my back and smell the flower in my hair; I could see my first love, Angelo, and his big, white smile. I remembered the taste of my morning
cornetto
and the cappuccino foam on my lips and the scent of lilies in the Campo de’ Fiori.” I lifted my head and looked at her. “And you know what, Jammy? I remembered
that
was a moment of true happiness.”

She rested her hand sympathetically on my arm. “But you felt that same happiness when you married Alex?” She seemed to be questioning me. “You were together for six years; you loved each other?”

I sifted through my thoughts about Alex, resurrecting him in my mind. Shorter than I, muscular, with deep dark eyes that were almost black in their intensity when he made love to me, the feel of his breath on my cheek when we’d slept together that first night, the way his body claimed my rhythm with his.

“Oh yes, I loved Alex all right,” I said quietly, “but love and
marriage are special responsibilities. The child I was in Rome was free.”

Our eyes met in the mirror again, and I took another nervous gulp of the martini. I could tell Jammy was struggling not to say the obvious: that I was free now, so why couldn’t I find that kind of happiness again?

“Let’s eat,” she said diplomatically instead, and we slid off our bar stools and headed for a table for two near the window.

A polished brass rail hung with red-checkered café curtains shut out part of the cold evening, though rain now misted the upper half of the window. Still, it was cozy in the little restaurant. A pizza oven glowed in the background and the aroma of ragù sauce and spicy sausage tempted. I ordered a bottle of Chianti, the kind in the straw flask that we used to drink illicitly at college and later we’d use the bottles as candleholders and that I don’t remember ever seeing in Rome, since Jon-Boy bought only the local white Frascati.