Flirting in Italian (12 page)

Oh my
God,
as Paige would say. After what happened between us. I really doubt that Luca’s going to be remotely helpful to me. His moods change so fast, he’s capable of making things even more difficult for me, because it amuses him. Or to make me feel bad, because I slapped him in public
.

I close my eyes. As if things weren’t complicated enough, I’ve not only pissed off the boy who might be my passport into the Castello di Vesperi, I’ve snogged him, too.

And
, I think dismally,
worst of all, I slapped him
.

Next time I see him. I’ll have to apologize. He mocked me, he was a sarcastic bastard, but I’ll still have to apologize for slapping him
.

My feelings toward Luca are so complicated they make me think of a marionette with hopelessly tangled strings. But the prevailing emotion as I finally drift off to sleep is resentment: he came after me, he kissed me, then he taunted me and managed to put me in the wrong.

Stay away from him
, I think again. And I know it’s the best advice—if I can only take it.

“Questa è una rosa,”
Catia says in a bored tone, holding a flower up in the air so we can all see it.
“Cos’è questo fiore?”

“Questa è una rosa,”
we all dutifully chant as she adds it to the bouquet she’s forming in her hand.

“Questo è un tulipano,”
she continues, holding up a plump pink tulip and adding it in turn.
“Cos’è questo fiore?”

“Questo è un tulipano,”
we chorus.

This has been going on for some time now. It’s like watching paint dry with a call-and-response segment to add audience participation.

“É questo è un mazzo di fiori!”
she says, holding up the bouquet to indicate that it’s finished. It really is very elegant. I wonder if we should clap.
“Cos’è?”

We all stumble over the response—all of us but Kelly, who rattles back
“Questo è un mazzo di fiori”
as easily as if she’d been babbling Italian in her cradle.

“
Brava
, Kelly,” Catia says, nodding approvingly. Kelly goes pink with pleasure. “You can also say
‘Questa è un bouquet.’
 ” She gives the last word a very Italian spin. “As I have already said, Italian uses many foreign words now. Like
‘fare il footing,’
which means to go jogging. Or—”

But Paige snuffles with laughter at Catia’s pronunciation of “footing,” which she says by pursing her lips together on the “foo,” drawing out the vowel and sounding, honestly, pretty silly. Kendra digs Paige in the ribs, hard, to make her shut up, drawing an “Oof!” of shock from her.

“It
is
a little ridiculous,” Catia says to our surprise as she places the bouquet in a glass vase.
“Il footing.”
She shrugs. “Why not
‘il jogging,’
after all?
‘Il footing,’
it makes no sense.”

She makes a dismissive gesture, as if she’s throwing something away. It looks so cool I long to copy it.

“But to learn a language, you must be prepared to make a fool of yourself for a while. You must make mistakes, have people correct you, even laugh at you sometimes.
È normale.
” She shrugs again. “But it’s the only way to learn. You must go out, talk to Italians, not to each other. That is why I encourage you all to make friends with my son and my daughter, to meet their friends and learn and improve your Italian.”

Paige, irrepressibly, giggles again: it’s not improving her Italian that’s the first thing on her mind, and from the lowering look Catia casts in her direction, she knows that as well as the rest of us. But Kendra and Kelly nod seriously, accepting her authority.

“Now you will all make your own bouquets,” she says, indicating that we should come up to the dining table, where a range of flowers are laid out along its length on an old cloth placed there to protect the polished surface: roses, tulips, lilies, big brightly colored daisylike flowers that Catia says are called gerberas, and fernlike greenery to soften them. “You may choose what you want and which vase to use, then I will judge them. Remember to arrange them in your hand first, like I did. It is better not to put them in the vase until the bouquet is done.”

Paige is already at the table, her head tilted to one side, pink tongue poking out a little in thought as she selects her flowers, exuding confidence from every pore.

“Her mom’s in the Junior League,” Kendra mutters to me and Kelly. “She’s all up in this whole Martha Stewart stuff.”

We nod: we don’t quite understand all the terms Kendra’s using, but we get the gist. Paige’s mum is a lady of leisure who does lots of charity lunches and flower arranging. Kendra’s mother, I get the sense, is a high-powered executive who pays someone else to do her flowers and tells them beforehand exactly what she wants. Certainly, the rest of us approach the bouquet-making challenge with much less assurance than Paige; Catia strolls out onto the terrace to sit on a dark brown wicker armchair, pulling out her phone, clearly in no rush for us to be finished. To our surprise, we actually get quite absorbed in the task. Silence falls, broken only by the sounds of us clipping the ends of flowers, muttering quietly to ourselves as we pick our vases, or flinching as we snag our fingers on rose thorns. Thirty minutes fly by; Paige is done first, though she fusses happily around her
bouquet once it’s in the vase, fluffing out rose petals, making every flower look as full and blooming as possible.

Weirdly, as we eventually step back and look at what the others have done, I realize that our bouquets are perfect reflections of our characters. I don’t know if the other girls see it too, but to me it’s blindingly obvious. Paige’s is big and luxurious and rich, a riot of bright pink roses and fluted white lilies, plumped out with glossy green leaves, tied together with twine concealed inside the faux-rustic ceramic vase to keep it in perfect shape. Kendra’s is spare and elegant, pale pastel tulips in a narrow white glass cylinder. Kelly, who was frowning in concentration the whole time, made a very conventional bouquet, everything carefully measured and in perfect alignment, the kind of thing that would get you an A grade simply because of its perfect execution.

And mine … well, I don’t know what Catia will think of mine. One thing it definitely isn’t is conventional. Paige’s blond brows shoot up in incredulity as she looks at it: she’s too nice to make a comment, but she doesn’t need to; her expression says it all.

“Allora?”
calls Catia, so slim that I can see the terrace wall between her legs in her tight white jeans as she walks. Bangles jingle on her wrists as she slips her phone back into her pocket.
“Avete finito?”

“Si,”
we sing out. Catia takes in the four vases placed on the dining table, and her eyes flicker. Dark, deep-socketed, heavily ringed today with brown eyeliner, they’re very expressive; they turn down slightly at the outer corners, which makes her look a little mournful, like a sad clown.

“Allora,”
she repeats, which seems to be a very useful
word, meaning something between “all right” and “well, then.” “Paige, very nice. You have done this before, yes?”

Paige nods, blond hair bouncing.

“
Si vede
. I can see that.
Molto bene
. Very fun, very American. Kendra”—she takes in Kendra’s vase—“
veramente elegante. Molto japonese
. It is a very Japanese style.”

Kendra’s eyes light up; she allows herself a rare, wide smile, showing dazzlingly perfect teeth and lots of pink gums.

“My mom has a lot of Japanese art,” she says. “She’ll change the scrolls over for the different seasons. So that’s sort of influenced me. I like things quite simple.”

“Very nice.” Catia nods. “The tulips are not right for what you try to do, but the style is there. You need different flowers, that is all, which you did not have today. “Kelly—” She moves along the side of the table. “You do not, I think, care about flower arranging.”

Kelly looks absolutely mortified. I grab her hand, nervous that she’s going to freak out like she did last night and run from the room. Catia’s holding up her hand in reassurance, though.

“I mean,” she says, “that you have done a very good job with something you are not naturally drawn to. I’m right,
si?
You see this as a job to be done, and you have done it. I think you did not see it as something you artistically had a plan for.”

Kelly relaxes; I loosen my grip on her hand. She even manages a self-deprecating smile.

“I’m
not
artistic,” she admits. “I just tried to make something that looked balanced.”

“It does look okay,” Catia says, smiling at her. “It looks very professional. Like in a hotel—not personal.”

This would pretty much be the worst thing that anyone could say to me about my own vase—I know exactly what Catia means, those stiff, conventional flower arrangements that sit on semicircular tables on hotel bedroom floors when you get out of lifts, probably placed underneath a gilt-framed oil landscape painting. But, looking at Kelly’s face brighten, I understand why this is a good thing to her. It means she’s done something that fits into the world she wants to join. “Conventional,” “formal,” “traditional” are all good words to her, and it makes total sense that they should be. If you feel like an outsider who hasn’t grown up knowing when to put your napkin on your lap, or that you start using your cutlery from the outside in, then making a bouquet that could go in a vase at a four-star hotel is pretty much perfect proof that you’re doing things along the right lines.

“È Violetta,”
Catia says, looking at my vase, and my heart jumps, because I instantly remember Luca calling me Violetta last night. I think I remember every word he said to me in the order of utterance, which is depressingly pathetic. I’m distracted by my memories of Luca, so it takes me some time to realize that Catia hasn’t yet passed judgment on my arrangement.

It looked a
lot
better when I pictured it in my head. I wanted to try to do something with the gerbera daisies, whose bright orange and fuchsia inspired me; they’re so glaringly colored that they almost look fake. I cut them to different lengths, messing about with them; none of
the other girls went near the gerberas. I know they’re not elegant, but there was something crazily alive about them that drew me to them instinctively. I got the big glossy lily leaves that Paige used so successfully in her bouquet, but I pierced holes in them with the scissors and pulled some of the gerberas through them to look as if the flaming orange flowers were bursting out of the bases of the leaves.

“It’s not, exactly—” I begin unhappily.

“Hmm!” she comments, reaching out to swivel the vase. “As a bouquet, it is not very good. In fact, it is very bad.” She tilts her head to one side, pulling her mouth down at the corners. “But,” she says finally, “it is interesting. Maybe even
artistico
.”

“I’m really looking forward to the painting classes,” I hear myself saying, locking on to the word
“artistico.”
“There are so many amazing views around here, I’d love to be able to paint them.”

I am surprised at myself. I was never that keen on art before—making it, that is. St. Tabby’s was a very trendy, fashionable school, so we did all the latest kind of modern art projects: papier-mâché sculptures on chicken wire, installations with silly titles, conceptual stuff, making machines to paint randomized dots on paper. Our art teacher was always making us go to Tate Modern and look at artworks that were sculptures that the artist had blown up with dynamite and then hung from the ceiling, or rooms that were completely empty apart from lights turning on and off. She had long explanations for why they were good that none of us remotely understood. I can’t remember ever doing anything as basic
as sitting down with some paints and a bunch of flowers and trying to get on canvas what you see in front of you.

Which is all I want to do right now. Nothing too ambitious or intellectual, nothing that comes with seven pages of complicated catalog notes about why the lights are going on and off in the empty room. I’d just like to try to paint some flowers. Or a stone wall. Or some grass. Something really basic.

To see if I have any talent at all.

“Molto particolare,”
Catia says, turning away from my vase. A tiny sigh escapes her lips; I may be paranoid, but I can’t help interpreting it as relief that she doesn’t have to look at my gerbera mess a moment longer.

“Molto particolare?”
echoes a high, familiar voice, and all of us girls tense up immediately as Elisa comes into the room, wearing a linen shirt over a pair of beige shorts so tiny that only someone as thin and elegant as her could get away with them; anyone else would look like a stripper in search of a pole.
“Cos’è molto particolare?”

“Elisa—” Catia starts, not looking best pleased at this interruption, but Elisa, black kohl like a sooty finger circling her eyes, a small cup of espresso in one hand, her phone in the other, wanders in, her leather sandals slapping lightly on the tiled floor. She takes in the scene at a glance, and yawns widely without even bothering to cover her lips. I see her pink tongue, the red-ribbed roof of her mouth.

“Ugh,
che noia
,” she says, looking down the dining table. “Flowers are so boring.”

“Elisa—”

“Ah, I see it!” She’s staring at my arrangement with a nasty little smile. “
Veramente particolare!
You know what this word means?” She looks straight at me, and I feel very large and under-made-up by comparison with her Italian chic. “ 
‘Particolare’?
It means strange, or odd. You say this word when you don’t like something but you don’t want to be rude.”

“Well, that’s not something
you
ever have a problem with,” Kendra snaps back, and even through my upset at Elisa’s meanness, I admire Kendra’s quick wits.

Catia clicks her tongue crossly.

“It means ‘special,’ or ‘particular,’ ” she says to me reassuringly, but we all know that Elisa’s hit the nail on the head. “And Elisa, if you don’t like flowers, you can leave us, please.”

“Oh,
stai zitta
, Mamma,” Elisa says, shrugging exactly the same way her mother does. She walks across the room and out the french windows, where she collapses as if boneless onto the wicker chair, lifts her phone, and sips her espresso while dialing a number.

“It’s like ‘darling,’ ” Paige says suddenly. She looks at our bemused faces. “My grandmother’s from Georgia,” she explains, “and there, if you want to be mean to someone, you say her bag or her hair or something’s ‘darling.’ It’s the worst thing you can say. Like you’re paying a compliment, but it’s really the opposite. Or,” she adds, warming to this theme, “if you’re talking about someone and you say ‘Bless her heart!’ that means you think she’s a total moron.”

Catia decides, visibly, to ignore Paige’s comments and her daughter’s horrid behavior. Instead, looking suddenly very tired, she says:

“There will be a light lunch in the kitchen for you all at one o’clock. Please tidy up all the flowers you have not used and put them in the big buckets with water; I will arrange them later. You may take your own arrangements to your rooms if you wish.”