“Stephen?” David said.
His father nodded.
“He’s...”
He looked at his father.
“He’s fine, Pop,” he said. “Do you want more ice?”
His father nodded.
He took the paper cup from where he had left it on the sink counter. The cup was cold in his hand. He carried it to the bed. His father opened his mouth in anticipation. He saw the raw, mutilated-looking flesh inside his father’s mouth. He reached into the cup for a sliver of ice.
Last summer, they bought the Italian ices, he and Molly, from a roadside stand on the way from the airport to the hotel. Ices in a cup. Lemon ices for Molly. Chocolate ices for himself. The Sardinian sun was very hot, even so late in the afternoon. They sat in the parked Fiat eating the ices. Beyond, the green waters of the Costa Smeralda sparkled. They could hear the gentle murmur of the sea.
The villa near the hotel was magnificent.
Moorish in design, approached by a long dirt road lined with twisted cork trees, it sat in pristine isolated splendor on a point of land overlooking the bay below. A massive entrance archway framed a pair of thick oaken doors that opened onto a tiled living room, its windows shuttered against the fierce Mediterranean sun. A woodburning fireplace was on the far wall, flanked by a pair of arched doors. A clerestory ran around three sides of the living room. When they threw open the shutters, they saw a small garden in the center of which an orange tree was bursting with ripe fruit.
There was a tiled terrace at the back of the house. A flight of wooden steps led from the terrace to a private beach below, where a small blue rowboat bobbed on bluer water. A staff of three — housekeeper, gardener, and cook — stood by beaming and davening as Norman Rosen showed them through. Norman explained that they came with the house, and that their days off were Thursday and every other Sunday, just like in America. He hoped that David could be unpacked and ready for a meeting with the wops and himself by five-thirty that afternoon, and that he’d be ready to start work on the contracts first thing tomorrow morning.
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said, “these Italian lawyers are giving me a pain in the ass. We’re ready to shoot a movie here, and all of a sudden they’re finding things wrong with papers they’ve had for two months already. I hope you work well under pressure, David, I sincerely mean that. Unpack, I’ll see you at the hotel in half an hour. You just drive around the cove, you know the way, huh? Molly, as beautiful as you are, I’ll have to ask that you busy yourself elsewhere while we’re in conference, okay? See you later, David,” he said, and left the house.
For the next three days, locked into a suite at the hotel, David wrangled with the Italian lawyers. None of them spoke English. Their interpreter was a twenty-four-year-old Italian girl named Arabella. She did not know how to translate “bottom line” into Italian, but she came to work each day dressed in a blouse slashed invitingly low over her naked breasts. Her dark eyes spoke to him. He had difficulty concentrating on the monumental tangle before him. The Italians had made an antipasto of the simple contracts David and his partner had labored over for months. Norman’s director and crew were scheduled to arrive at any moment. His stars would be here in a week. The Italians shook their heads vigorously each time Arabella translated David’s thoughts to them. Whenever she fumbled for a word, he patted her hand consolingly.
On the fourth day, he retired to the second bedroom of the villa, where he began revamping the contracts at a long table Giovanni the gardener moved in from the hallway. Molly had fallen into the habit of sunning or bathing topless on the small secluded beach below. When he mentioned to her that perhaps she ought to dress more decorously for the beach, she said, “Don’t be silly, this is Italy.” But she did agree to cover up whenever Giovanni was down there raking — much to the old man’s annoyance. The revisions were difficult. David kept losing track of what his notes had meant when he’d scribbled them. The director and crew would be arriving that night, but the co-financing Italians refused to part with a single lira until the contracts were altered to their satisfaction. David worked on them all that day while Molly sunbathed and swam below. He kept thinking about the Italian translator’s magnificent breasts.
Ralph Lonigan, the film’s director, was forty-eight years old, almost forty-nine, exactly David’s age that summer, but he nonetheless seemed like a mere callow youth, perhaps because he had an unruly crop of flaming red hair on his head and a galaxy of freckles all over his cherubic face. He cornered Molly that night at a table on the candlelit terrace and explained that as a director he was naturally concerned with more than surface appearances, which was why her contradictory Irish looks and Jewish roots were so fascinating to him.
“I could have fallen over dead when Norman told me you were Jewish,” he said. “But, after all, what are appearances, anyway? Is Irish Irish if Irish is really Jewish? Do you understand what I’m saying, Molly? In my job, I’m constantly forced to delve into personality, hoping to fathom seemingly inexplicable phenomena. When I’m directing a film, I have to be able to plumb the depths of a character so that he or she will become readily accessible to an audience.”
David was sitting within earshot with Norman and an executive from Cinécitta, whose studio facilities Norman would be leasing in Rome. He listened.
“Have you ever done any acting, Molly?” Lonigan asked.
“Me? No.”
“What do you do?”
“Well... I’m a housewife.” Molly shrugged. “That’s what I do.”
“Surely you’re more than that,” Lonigan said.
“I used to be a nurse.”
“Ah,” he said.
“But that was long ago.”
“It must have been a rewarding profession. Nursing,” he said.
“Well, I suppose,” Molly said shyly.
“Helping the sick.”
“Yes.”
“You were probably very good at it.”
“Well,” she said.
“But you’ve never done any acting?”
“No, no.”
“You’re so beautiful, I thought perhaps...”
“Thank you.”
“Beautiful expressive eyes. Green,” he said. “And a marvelous mouth. You must photograph wonderfully.”
“I don’t know, I guess so,” she said, and laughed huskily.
“How old are you, Molly?”
“You’re not supposed to ask a woman her age,” Molly said, and lowered her eyes.
“We’re both grown-ups, Molly. I’m forty-eight, does that make you feel any better? I’ll be forty-nine in September.”
“Well...” Molly said, and raised her eyes to meet his.
“How old are you? Tell me.”
“Forty-four,” she said.
“You’re joking! You look ten years younger!”
“I’ll be forty-five in September.”
“When in September?”
“The sixth.”
“My birthday is the tenth.”
“How about that?” she said, and laughed.
“We ought to have a party,” Lonigan said.
“We ought to.”
“You look much younger,” he said. “I’m amazed.”
“Oh, sure.”
“So young, so vital. Do you have any children, Molly?”
She hesitated. “No,” she said.
“That must account for it. Somehow, women who’ve never had any children seem to hang onto their youthfulness.”
Molly said nothing.
“God, that mouth!” Lonigan said. “What I could do with that mouth. On film,” he said.
Molly smiled.
“And that smile! God! You’re so very beautiful, Molly.”
Rising slowly from where he was sitting, David walked over to where Lonigan was leaning toward Molly to light her cigarette. Very pleasantly, he said, “Excuse me. Molly, it’s getting late. I think we’d better start back.”