Breathing Room

“I’m not moving to town,” Isabel said firmly. “I spoke with… the owner yesterday. Would you please do your best to have the water fixed as soon as possible?”

“I will see what I can do,” Giulia said, with obvious reluctance.

Casalleone had an old Roman wall, a church bell that rang on the half hour, and children everywhere. They called out to one another in the playgrounds and romped next to their mothers along the narrow cobbled streets that wound in a maze. Isabel drew out Giulia’s card and checked the address against the sign. Although the street name was similar, it wasn’t the same.

A day had passed since she’d talked to the real-estate agent, and she still had no hot water. She’d called Anna Vesto, but the housekeeper had pretended not to understand English and hung up. Marta seemed oblivious to the problem. According to Isabel’s schedule, she should be writing now, but the issue with the water had distracted her. Besides, she had nothing to write. Although she usually thrived on self-discipline, she’d gotten up late again this morning, she hadn’t meditated, and the only words she’d written in two days had been notes to friends.

She approached a young woman who was walking across the village’s small piazza with a toddler in hand. “Scusi, signora.” She held out Giulia’s card. “Can you tell me where the Via San Lino is?”

The woman picked up her child and hurried away.

“Well, excuu-se me.” She frowned and headed toward a middle-aged man in a ratty sport coat with elbow patches. “Scusi, signore. I’m looking for the Via San Lino.”

He took Giulia’s card, studied it for a moment, then studied Isabel. With something that sounded like a curse, he pocketed the card and stomped away.

“Hey!”

The next person gave her a “non parlo inglese” when she asked the location of the Via San Lino, but then a beefy young man in a yellow T-shirt offered directions. Unfortunately, they were so complicated that she ended up at an abandoned warehouse on a dead-end street.

She decided to find the grocery store with the friendly clerk that she’d visited yesterday. On the way toward the piazza, she passed a shoe store and a profumeria that sold cosmetics. Lace curtains draped the windows of the houses that lined the street, and laundry hung on lines overhead. “Italian dryers,” the travel guide had called the clotheslines. Because power was so expensive, families didn’t have electric dryers.

Her nose led her into a tiny bakery, where she bought a fig tart from a rude girl with purple hair. When she came out, she gazed up at the sky. The high, fluffy clouds looked as though they should be printed on blue flannel pajamas. It was a beautiful day, and she wouldn’t let even a hundred surly Italians spoil it for her.

She was on her way up the cobbled hill toward the grocery when she spotted a newsstand with racks of postcards displaying vineyards, splashy fields of sunflowers, and charming Tuscan towns. As she stopped to choose a few, she noticed that several of the postcards depicted Michelangelo’s David, or at least a significant part of him. The statue’s marble penis stared back at her, both front and side views. She pulled one from the rack to examine it more closely. He seemed a little shortchanged in the genitalia department.

“Have you already forgotten what one looks like, my child?”

She spun around and found herself staring into a pair of ancient steel-framed eyeglasses. They belonged to a tall, black-robed priest with a bushy, dark mustache. He was an exceptionally ugly man, not because of the mustache, although that was unsightly enough, but because of a jagged red scar that drew the skin so tightly along his cheekbone it pulled down the corner of one silver-blue eye.

One very familiar silver-blue eye.

7

Isabel resisted the urge to shove the postcard back into the rack. “I was just comparing this with something similar I saw recently. The one on the statue is so much more impressive.” Oh, now, that was a lie.

The sun glimmered off the lenses of his glasses as he smiled. “There are some pornographic calendars on that back rack, in case you’re interested.”

“I’m not.” She replaced the postcard and set off up the hill.

He fell into step beside her, moving as gracefully in the long robes as if he wore them every day, but then Lorenzo Gage was accustomed to being in costume. “If you want to confess your sins, I’m all ears,” he said.

“Go find some schoolboys to molest.”

“Sharp tongue this morning, Fifi. That’ll be a hundred Hail Marys for insulting a man of God.”

“I’m reporting you, Mr. Gage. It’s against the law in Italy to impersonate a priest.” She spotted a harried young mother emerging from a shop with a set of twins in hand and called out to her.

“Signora! This man isn’t a priest! He’s Lorenzo Gage, the American movie star.”

The woman looked at Isabel as if she were the lunatic, snatched up her children, and hurried away.

“Nice going. You probably traumatized those kids for life.”

“If it’s not against the law, it should be. That mustache looks like a tarantula died on your lip. And don’t you think the scar’s a little over the top?”

“As long as it lets me move around freely, I don’t really care.”

“If you want anonymity, why don’t you just stay at home?”

“Because I was born a wanderin’ man.”

She inspected him more closely. “You were armed the last time I saw you. Any weapons underneath that robe?”

“Not if you don’t count the explosives taped to my chest.”

“I saw that movie. It was awful. That whole scene was just an excuse to glorify violence and show off your muscles.”

“Yet it grossed a hundred and fifty million.”

“Proving my theory about the taste of the American public.”

“People who live in glass houses, Dr. Favor…”

So he’d figured out who she was.

He pushed the steel-framed glasses up on his perfect nose. “I don’t pay much attention to the self-help movement, but even I’ve heard of you. Is the doctorate real or phony?”

“I have a very real Ph.D. in psychology, which qualifies me to make a fairly accurate diagnosis: You’re a jerk. Now, leave me alone.”

“Okay, now I’m getting pissed.” He lengthened his stride. “I didn’t attack you that night, and I’m not apologizing.”

“You pretended to be a gigolo!”

“Only in your vivid imagination.”

“You spoke Italian.”

“You spoke French.”

“Go away. No, wait.” She rounded on him. “You’re my landlord, and I want my hot water back.”

He bowed to a pair of old women strolling arm in arm, then blessed them with the sign of the cross, something she was fairly certain would keep him locked in purgatory for an extra millennium or so. She realized she was standing there watching, which made her an accessory, and she started walking again. Unfortunately, so did he.

“Why don’t you have any hot water?” he asked.

“I have no idea. And your employees aren’t doing anything about it.”

“This is Italy. Things take time.”

“Just fix it.”

“I’ll see what I can do.” He rubbed the phony scar on his cheek. “Dr. Isabel Favor… Hard to believe I’ve been to bed with America’s New Age guardian of virtue.”

“I’m not New Age. I’m an old-fashioned moralist, which is why I find what I did with you so repugnant. But