Invitation to Italian Page 12

  “The other hand? The towel?” he coaxed her.

  “Oh, right.” She hurriedly wrapped the bath towel around herself. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t thinking, that’s what.” She tried to tuck a corner of the towel into the top edge to try to make it stay put. “You know me. I just acted on impulse…. I mean, I can’t explain why I didn’t feel the air on my body, except to say that I was just so…so…”

  “So you?” he supplied. “That impetuous way you have about you? Did I ever tell you it’s infuriating but also highly attractive?”

  “No, no, you didn’t.” She held onto the towel for dear life, fully conscious of the fact that it barely skimmed the top of her thighs.

  He put his water glass down on the counter and seemed to want to take a step toward her. Then he caught himself. “You know, for my part, let me confess—no, admit is the better word—that I didn’t come over just to see you naked—” he paused “—or even half-naked. As delightful as that is.”

  Julie saw the corner of his mouth twitch. Her stomach contracted.

  He took a deep breath. “I, too, came here looking for something that might last more than just a night.”

  “You did?” That contraction in her stomach just got bigger.

  “And I want to talk about it, I really do. But under the circumstances, I think now is perhaps not the best moment. Because just seeing you like this—” once more, his eyes drifted downward “—I am concerned that I, myself, might be doing something impetuous—which as we both know is highly out of character, but being a typical male is a real possibility.” Then he took that step—closer. And he gently rubbed the back of his index finger along her cheek, an affectionate caress rather than a prologue to something carnal.

  She felt her skin glow. “Never typical,” she joked.

  Sebastiano dropped his finger reluctantly. “You overestimate me. Watch out, or I might forget you have a patient waiting. And make you want to forget you have a patient waiting.”

  “Oh, that’s right. My patient! I can’t believe it. I nearly forgot about my patients. That’s never happened.” She was aghast.

  “Then, this is a first?” he asked. There was a glint in his eye.

  “A first,” she confirmed and turned on her heels. But she stopped, pivoted on a bare foot, and scampered back to steal a quick kiss. Then she raced down the hall to take her shower—the warmth of his lips lingering on hers.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  SEBASTIANO MADE SURE to get to the second Italian class early the next evening on Wednesday. He told himself he wanted to make sure everything was in order with the classroom—that it wasn’t locked, that the heat worked, things like that. All part of being conscientious, like any good teacher would do.

  Who was he kidding? He wanted to see Julie before class started. True, they had exchanged emails the day before, but it wasn’t the same as seeing her face to face. Her heavy patient load and his evening meeting with the Grantham Planning Board about the new hospital proposals had made that impossible.

  He could handle “impossible” for one day. Two was out of the question.

  So, he planted himself outside the classroom door to ambush her before entering. For fifteen minutes, he greeted the class members as they entered, exchanging pleasantries, trying to put names to faces. When only a few minutes remained before class was about to start, he glanced back inside the classroom and did a quick headcount. Just about a full contingent. His performance at the first class must not have driven people away.

  Then he checked his watch. Maybe she wasn’t going to come? No, she would have called or texted, he reassured himself.

  Suddenly, he heard the sound of someone running up the stairs and the fire doors at the top banged open. Julie—all movement and energy coming his way. He couldn’t help but smile.

  She skittered to a stop when she saw him. The grin that split her face mimicked his. “Sorry I’m late. I had to rush home to change my clothes for the dinner later tonight at my parents.” She took a deep breath then released it. “You’re still on for that, right?”

  He nodded, enjoying the way her cheeks were flushed from exertion.

  “Anyway, you wouldn’t believe it. On my way here I got caught on Main Street. The police had set up a roadblock to check for out-of-date car inspection stickers of all things.”

  “Yours was fine, I hope?” He could imagine a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles was just the kind of thing she’d let slip in her busy schedule.

  “Not a problem. I just take it to my dad’s garage.” She exhaled loudly one last time. “Finally, I got my wind back.” She looked at him.

  He stared at her, barely registering the movement of other students rushing to various classrooms down the hall. She might have gotten her breath back, but somehow in the process, she’d managed to take his away.

  “Oh, before I forget, thank you so much for the flowers. They came right at the end of the day.”

  “I’m so glad you got them.” He itched to move his hand toward her but held back. “I wasn’t sure if you’d make it home before class, so I had them sent to your office. I hope that was all right?”

  “It raised a few eyebrows, that’s for sure,” she answered with a smile.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She grinned more broadly. “I’m not.” She peeked over her shoulder, and when she saw the coast was clear, she furtively grabbed his hand. “They’re beautiful. Tulips are my favorite. How did you know?”

  “Some of your needlepoint pillows—the ones with the sateen stitch.”

  “Satin stitch,” she corrected. “You were listening. And the card—Happy Un-Birthday—it was perfect.”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “I am.” She squeezed his hand.

  They stared into each other’s eyes.

  “Can anyone get in on the conversation, or is this a private student-teacher conference?” Zora quipped as she leaned around Julie.

  Sebastiano briefly broke eye contact and turned to Zora. “We’re just talking hospital business.” He said the first thing that came to his head.

  “You don’t say?” Zora looked down at their clasped hands. “Things must be very chummy at the hospital.”

  Sebastiano and Julie dropped their hands to their sides. He cleared his throat. She adjusted her shoulder bag and sniffed.

  Then the buzzer sounded and Iris Phox’s voice emanated from the public address system. “Classes will commence. May you all embark on the glorious journey that is education.”

  The words only made the situation more awkward.

  Until Zora held out her arm in a gesture for Julie and Sebastiano to proceed her into the classroom. “Shall we?” she invited. “After all, even hospital matters sometimes take a backseat to learning. Besides, I wouldn’t want to mess with Iris Phox.”

  AS CLASS broke up and people started to file outside, Zora could hear Sebastiano saying goodbye to his students. “Alla prossima!” he said repeatedly as he clipped his briefcase shut. For the second class, she noticed he was dressed more casually in corduroy pants and a navy-blue ribbed sweater. He seemed relaxed, happy. The class had certainly enjoyed it, judging from the fact that no one seemed ready to leave even five minutes after the bell had sounded.

  Zora capped her fountain pen and slipped it into the side pocket of her knapsack before fitting her notebook into one of the center compartments. She might be living out of a suitcase while she was temporarily staying at her mother’s house, but she was maniacally organized when it came to managing her knapsack and her work tools. A side pocket for every pen. A red folder for handouts, a green one for homework assignments. A zipped section for her collection of cell phones—for the U.S., Europe and Asia.

  She stood up and blocked the aisle before Paul could leave. He was chatting with Julie, the two of them still seated at their desks, and she was surprised to feel a sudden pang of jealousy. She was no longer young, but Zora knew she had a certain allure for men, a tra
it that seemed to come instinctively.

  She recalled a conversation with her mother when she’d come back to pick up Katarina in Grantham after spending a sultry trip on a colleague’s sailboat in the Aegean. Zora had claimed how surprised she’d been at the offer, since she’d only met the man at a conference in Athens the week before.

  “I’m not surprised he fell for you like tons of bricks,” Lena had said in her embroidered English. “You have the confidence of a hooker.” The phrase had irked Zora. Actually, Babika had used the Slovak word postitútka for prostitute—just as insulting, perhaps more so since it sounded so prosaic.

  “Are you saying he thought of me merely as a sex object!” she remembered sniping back. True, there had been very little academic conservation on the boat, but that was beside the point.

  Lena, being Lena, had answered, “I think you are an intelligent woman, one who knows her mind—maybe too well. And that attitude attracts men like bees to honey. You see, Zora, I tell you a secret. Men think they want to be in charge, but, no, what they really want is the idea—the picture—of power. What they crave is a woman to make things happen.”

  Zora hated to say it, but her mother was probably right. What did she know about why men fell—to use another prosaic term—in love? All she knew was that she had fallen head-over-heels in love with fellow Grantham High senior Paul Bedecker. He’d been the reason she’d chosen to go to Cornell. Of course, she had made him keep their relationship a secret. Did she want the whole world—her mother, the high school teachers she scorned and the cheerleaders she mocked—to know that counterculture advocate Zora Zemanova was following her “boyfriend” around like a lovesick puppy?

  Once they got to college, Paul had painted his picture of the future. “When we graduate, we’ll go to Hollywood and I’ll write screenplays, maybe do a little television work to pay the bills—not that I would ever do that full-time—and we’ll be so happy,” he was fond of saying.

  People say lots of things when they’re eighteen. Especially Paul. Especially when it came to fulfilling his dreams. It never occurred to him that his dreams weren’t necessarily hers. Maybe he just assumed? Maybe he was smoking too much marijuana?

  So when she’d found out she was pregnant at the end of spring term freshman year, and agonized about having an abortion or not, was it any wonder she never bothered to consult him? A baby had never figured into his dreams, after all. She had loved him, but he could never be a father.

  She had broken up with him without so much as a by-your-leave. She never told him about the baby, and quickly transferred to Rutgers. At the time Lena had welcomed her home, naturally without pressing her for details. Though sometimes she’d sigh in the middle of a conversation. Oh, how Zora had hated that sigh! Still, she’d soldiered on, finishing school, working and raising a kid. And no matter what, she’d stuck to her dreams.

  But when she had unexpectedly seen Paul the week before at class, she got that same old feeling she had felt thirty years earlier. Or maybe she had never lost it? Whatever. Zora wasn’t one to spend a lot of time on internal soul-searching. She felt a yearning, and she aimed to act on it. If that was having the confidence of a hooker, so be it.

  She watched Julie stand, towering over Paul by a good four inches. The younger woman said something and smiled. Zora felt a frisson of jealousy.

  But then Julie turned to walk to the front of the class, and immediately, Zora saw the direction of her eyes…and her smiles. It was clear as daylight that Paul wasn’t in the picture. Julie had eyes only for the teacher.

  Satisfied, Zora rose and stepped toward Paul. “Hey there. Do you have some time to get together?”

  He looked at her, his eyes narrowed. Then he nodded begrudgingly. “Sure. I’ve been thinking it would be a good idea.”

  Zora beamed. He was feeling what she was feeling, too. “Did you want to get a coffee first?” she asked. They walked side-by-side past the teacher’s desk. Sebastiano waved but continued to listen while Julie talked. She glanced over and seemed relieved to see them go. Zora didn’t need to guess why.

  JULIE WATCHED Zora Zemanova leave with Paul Bedecker and felt a sense of relief when the last classmate didn’t linger. She turned back to Sebastiano. “So are you ready to face your worst nightmare?”

  “Don’t joke. You have no idea the nightmares I had before walking into class. I had convinced myself that I’d find out no one had anything to say and I’d have to end the class after only ten minutes.” Sebastiano took the handle of his briefcase in both hands. “How was I to know that an article on the Galileo show in Philadelphia would lead to a discussion of astrology, Philadelphia restaurants and ski trips to Cortina? Even I haven’t been to Cortina. Do you know how expensive it is?”

  Julie patted Sebastiano on the hand. “It’s all right. You made it. Into overtime even. And, please, if you can afford to drive a BMW, I think you can afford to ski at Cortina.”

  She saw him narrow his eyes. “Don’t worry. I’m just teasing. Anyway, the class loved you. In fact if that one student Irena had loved you any more, I was going to hoist myself out of my incredibly uncomfortable seat, march right up to her and tell her in my best Italian where she should go next.”

  “It’s true. She’s a bit much, but I don’t want to dampen her enthusiasm.”

  “A small bucket of water right in the face would hardly be out of line.”

  Sebastiano ignored her comment. He rubbed his chin in thought. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to do little grammar reviews every once in a while. Things like piacere. A few people seem to have a difficult time grasping its unique construction,” he said, referring to the Italian verb “to please.”

  She would have made more fun of him, but he seemed so earnest, so utterly adorable. Besides, he had agreed to go with her to her parents. For that he deserved a medal.

  “So, are we taking your car or mine?” he asked.

  “Why don’t we both drive. You can just follow me. That way it will be easier tomorrow morning, if you know what I mean.” She left the implications hanging about him possibly staying over at her place.

  “Yes, I do know what you mean. Two cars then.”

  He hoisted his briefcase off the desk and turned off the lights. Then he let his hand fall naturally on the small of her back. “Shall we go then?”

  She smiled. “Con piacere—with pleasure.”

  “NO, A DRINK’S NOT NECESSARY,” Paul said as they made their way through the high school’s low-ceilinged hallway. Posters for the Science Olympiad Club and a cappella singing groups vied for attention on the wall. He held open the fire door to the staircase and waited for her to go first.

  Zora frowned. She had decided to rekindle their sex life, but that didn’t mean she didn’t need a little loosening up. “Well, we could go to your place I suppose,” she offered, brushing up against his shoulder as she passed by.

  “My place would be a little awkward. I’m staying with my dad. No matter where you are in the house, you can hear the TV. Nothing like hearing a baseball game at mega decibels—all because he’s too vain to admit he needs a hearing aid.”

  They joined the other adult students trudging down the stairs. People were chatting with friends, others on their cell phones.

  “I can see where that might put a damper on the mood,” Zora admitted. “I’d say we could go to my place, but I’m staying with my mom. We’d never get any privacy. She’d be too busy plying us with cake and wanting to hear your life story.”

  Paul stopped one foot in the air, then descended slowly. “The cake is tempting, but I’m not sure about the conversation just now. Anyway, who would have thought that at this point in our lives, we would both be living with our parents.”

  “Oh, I’m not here permanently. Just stopping over for a little while,” Zora felt obliged to clarify.

  They reached the bottom of the stairs and filed out through the old wooden door along with everyone else. While other people headed down the sidewalks to their
cars, Zora made her way across the triangle of grass in the courtyard to the flagpole. In high school, students used to gather there at the end of the day. Who’d have thought at this point in her life…?

  She waited for Paul to join her. “It’s like time has stood still. I remember coming here after classes and looking for you, wondering if you’d talk to me, wondering if you ever thought about kissing me.”

  Nighttime had long fallen, but the incandescent lights over the school’s doorways and the steady glow from the streetlamps gave off enough light for Zora to notice the intense way he studied her.

  “I always wanted to kiss you. I wanted to do more than that. It was just a question of getting up my nerve.”

  “But you always seemed so cool,” Zora said in disbelief. “The editor of the newspaper. A published poet. The favorite of all the teachers. I was always on the outside, intent on doing things my own way.”

  “Exactly, totally sure of yourself. Totally intimidating. I still remember how one day you walked in with your head shaved, an act of protest for some cause—”

  “Save The Whales. I wanted to mimic their skin.” Zora re called.

  “Yeah, well, it was wild. I have never had that kind of courage. I couldn’t believe my luck when I found out you were going to Cornell, too. I thought that maybe, if I played my cards right, away from Grantham’s prying eyes, I could make a move.”

  More students exited from the building, and the swoosh sound of air-controlled door hinges could be heard in the chill of the night. Voices mingled as groups passed. The sound of cars starting up along the adjacent streets cut through the crisp evening air.

  Being back in familiar surroundings, Zora felt the old feeling of testing boundaries, being outrageous for the hell of it. She put a hand on Paul’s chest. There wasn’t an ounce of padding beneath his black T-shirt. He was so skinny, he probably weighed the same as he did in high school. She, on the other hand, had cellulite on the backs of her thighs that hadn’t been there thirty years ago. She didn’t let that stop her.