The Italian Lesson

The Italian Lesson

by Harry Buschman

Leo couldn’t understand it. He was forced to admit he must be undergoing some kind of erotic distress at the most inconvenient and unexplainable times.

Early this afternoon, in a crowded elevator coming back from lunch he stared down the neck of a dark haired woman carrying an umbrella. Her breasts were huge and separated by what appeared to be a chasm of incalculable depth. But it was the umbrella that aroused him. What was she doing with an umbrella on a spring day as lovely as this? Perhaps she felt she must be ready for any eventuality ...

... and then this morning at the manager’s presentation to IP Productions in the hushed board room, the swish of Martha Livingston’s legs as she restlessly crossed and re-crossed them under the conference table threw Leo completely off stride. While he waited to be called on to speak, he had visions of the regular heaving of a restless sea as it ran up the shore and ran back down again.

And then ... later that afternoon he took the bus home because of the threat of a shower. Normally he walked from the office to his apartment on the East Side, but it began to rain as he left the office. It speckled the sidewalk with water drops and put a greasy shine on the manhole covers along 42nd Street. He found a seat on the long bench behind the driver and began reading the advertisements above the windows on the other side of the bus. Three blondes in jeans from Hunter College in a fine feminine frenzy got on in a clatter of clogs. They stood in front of him talking in high spirits and swaying to the rhythm of the bus. They all wore low-rider jeans, the preferred mode of dress for undergraduate women. Their navels gyrated an inch or two from his nose. Two of them were pierced with silver rings, the other was as undecorated as the day the girl was born. Leo was transfixed––caught up in their enthusiasm and completely fascinated by their aggressive girlishness. They must have sensed his interest because without a word being spoken, the three of them turned their backs on him and crossed to the other side of the bus.

There, of course, Leo could only see their backsides, which were equally fascinating, as the girls shifted their weight from one leg to the other in the rhythm of the bus. He caught himself smiling and staring and at the same time completely aware he had ridden beyond his stop. He stood up reluctantly at last and made his way to the front of the bus. As he waited for the next stop, he looked back longingly at the young women.

It was raining heavily now, but Leo was unaware of it. He retraced the path of the bus, wondering what on earth was the matter with him. There was a thickness in his temples and an appetite inside him that he hadn’t felt for years––not since he was a boy. He thought back to the three years with Julia and so far as he could remember, their relationship never aroused in him the eroticism that had been on the boil for the past two weeks.

His apartment was just ahead and by force of habit he raised his eyes to his two living room windows on the 23rd floor. His windows were identical to all the other windows, and he thought to himself how illogical it was for people to feel it necessary to have their own space––to live a private and isolated life behind four walls in a building housing 500 people. The doorman told him there were 500 people in the building and not one of them knew the other; but they all knew the doorman and he knew each one of them by name ... especially at Christmas time.

He ducked in the lobby just as the rain began coming down in sheets and stood there looking at Salvatore in his little cubicle just inside the door.

“Hello, Mr. Pointer. You’re early tonight––you got your nice suit all wet––should have waited ‘til the rain was over.”

Leo nodded in agreement, opened his mailbox, extracted what looked like two bills and hurried to the elevator. He wanted nothing to do with Salvatore and his advice. Salvatore was always ready to tell him what he should have done after he had already done it. Leo’s wet suit didn’t bother him, he had other suits. His problem was more basic and it seemed to be growing more assertive daily. He wondered, with a wry smile, what Salvatore’s solution would be to solve the problem of his libido.

He was lucky to keep the apartment when his wife walked out. She could have decided to kick him out and stay here, but she said it was too small, she wanted something bigger, she said––something bigger uptown. Imagine, he thought, she needed a bigger apartment without him than she did with him.

He let himself in and switched on the living room light, everything looked the same as he left it this morning. He pushed the play button on his answering machine and got out of his wet suit. While listening to the machine he took a beer out of the refrigerator. Last in the litany of telephone calls, the familiar voice of Martha Livingston stopped him in his tracks ...

“ ... Just got in Leo ... thought you’d be home by now ... I want to see you about the IP Production account ... “ Her voice was low, throaty––she tumbled over her words. Leo had the distinct impression that he could hear the swish of her legs under her desk as she spoke into the phone. “ ... Would you call me at home, Leo ... please ... 627-8875 ...” She seemed to breathe deeply, just once, and then hung up.

Leo stood there in his underwear with a beer in his hand. It was the last message on the answering machine and he looked around nervously. “Martha! Good God, she wants to see me,” he mumbled. He took a sip of the beer, then looked at the can, turned around and walked back into the kitchen and emptied the beer in the kitchen sink. He wondered if it would be out of order to call Martha in his underwear. Did she really want to see him about IP Productions, or was that just an excuse? She never wanted to see him about an account before, or anything else for that matter. Now she wanted him to call her––at her home number too. She’s probably at home now, maybe waiting for the call. Yes, he thought, I’d better get some clothes on, I don’t want to call her in my underwear.

Leo got into a pair of chinos and pulled a T-shirt over his head, then, just before replaying Martha’s message, he scuffed himself into a pair of moccasins. He jotted her number down and dialed it. Martha picked it up immediately.

“Oh, Leo. You just caught me. I was on my way over to see you––we have to straighten this out, Leo––wait for me.”

“What’s up, Martha? You mentioned IP Productions.” It was all he could think of to say, and just about the time he got the last word out, she hung up.

The very thought of Martha Livingston here alone with him in his apartment aroused him, and at the same time frightened him out of his wits. Should he call out for supper, maybe some wine––and flowers! Damn it, he must have had twenty vases but no flowers. First I’ve got to clean the place, “My God! The cleaning lady hasn’t been here in two weeks!” He dashed around putting yesterday’s dishes in the dishwasher, Sunday’s Times under the sofa and his dirty laundry under the bed. There wasn’t time for anything else, “After all,” he reminded himself. “First impressions count the most.”

He barely finished dressing before the phone rang again and it was Salvatore. “Mr. Pointer? This is Salvatore down in the lobby. I have a lady down here.”

“Miss Livingston?”

“Yes, that’s who she says she is. Shall she come up? ... “Then in a lower register, he added. “Highly recommended, Mr. Pointer.”

“Send her right up, Salvatore.”

He figured he had a minute, no more. He straightened up what seemed out of place, sprayed the room with essence of pine and tried to compose himself.

The doorbell rang and Leo took a deep breath. He had to keep his pace down going to the door––after all, it wasn’t a fire or the pizza delivery man, it was just Martha Livingston. He took the last few steps at a trot.

She stood in the hall, seeming to be a head shorter than usual. She wore baggy gym pants and a sleeveless T-shirt still damp from the rain. To Leo, except for the armload of file folders she carried, she looked like somebody who might run past him in the park on a Saturday afternoon.

“Leo, I only have a minute.”

He noticed she wore no make-up either, her eyebrows had disappeared and her hair was tied in a knot behind her head. He wondered why he went to the trouble of putting on a clean shirt.

“What’s the hurry, Martha?”

“I have a week’s vacation coming,” she smiled shyly. “Wally and I are going skiing upstate. They’re still making snow at Great Gorge.” She dumped the folders on his coffee table.

“Wally?”

“Of course Wally. Wally Backman in Contracts. You know Wally, don’t you?”

“Yes, I know him, but I ...” Leo decided not to pursue it. Martha shrugged her shoulders ...

“Anyway,” she went on, “There’s the residuals. I’ve worked them out the way I think IP wants them––but you’ve got to stay on top of it, Leo. They have to be ready by the end of next week. Wally and I will be back by then, and I’ll go over it with you.”

Her presence in the room was no longer feminine, he looked at her and wondered what he ever saw in her. He wished she’d leave. “I’ll get on it. It’ll be ready. Go. Have a good time. Say hello to Wally for me.” She gave him a half smile and left closing the door firmly behind her.

Now what, thought Leo. Can it get any worse? He couldn’t remember a day as bad as this. He leafed through the folders Martha brought with her and put them back on the coffee table. He began pacing the room, then suddenly he got down on his knees and fished the Sunday Times out from under the sofa and turned to the movie directory.

He checked out the films in the porno theaters in the neighborhood, but unfortunately he’d seen them all, some even twice. But there was a Fellini at the Empire–– “La Citte Delle Donne,” ... “Hmm, never saw that,” he muttered. “Fellini, huh––gotta be X-rated.” He pulled on a turtle neck sweater, stepped out into the hall and slammed the door shut. Down in the lobby Salvatore caught his eye just as he headed for the door. “That was a quickie, Mr. Pointer. How did it go?”

The Empire Cinema was just around the corner, it catered to the once-married, under forty crowd. Most of the men came in corduroy jackets with leather elbow patches or turtle neck sweaters and sun glasses. They carried slim volumes in the crooks of their arms and if they brought a date with them, she was invariably flat chested and adenoidal. It wasn’t uncommon to see both of them using their own cell phone talking to people, who were in turn standing in the lobby of other cinemas. None of them would ever think of walking in the middle of a movie, therefore they stood in the lobby and talked to each other until a new show began. If the movie was Italian with English sub-titles, the crowd could be heard trying to speak the Italian they learned at school or in the crash language courses given for junior executives.

Leo tried to remember the movie. Fellini’s “La Citta Delle Donne,” The City of Women, or something like that. The faint smell of stale popcorn had gotten into the air-conditioning system and it turned his stomach. He edged over to the wall on the other side of the lobby and stood under a poster advertising a black and white French movie he had seen years ago when he was in college.

There was a girl standing there with a tote bag at her feet. She was the least attractive woman he had seen all day. She was small, almost child-like, thin and very intense. She wore a sort of suit, British cut, the skirt of which had worked its way around to the front so that the zipper looked liked a man’s fly. “Probably a dike,” he thought, and yet she made a half hearted attempt to stand a little straighter and fluff her hair when he stood next to her.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi, you like Fellini?”

She had no idea what he was talking about. “Fellini?” she said. “What’s a Fellini, I never had a Fellini?”

“This is a Fellini movie. “La citta,” it’s one of his later movies. Quite good.”

“As long as it’s Italian, right? That’s why I’m here, I want to keep up with the language, I’m going there this summer.”

“Why do you want to go to Italy?”

“It’s warm all the time. The food’s good too they say ... my mother’s first husband was an Italian. He spoke Italian. You speak Italian?” she asked.

“No. Can you say something to me in Italian?”

“Quando era l'ultima volta avete fatto l'amore ad una donna.” She turned away. “My name is Maureen, what’s yours?”

“Leo. Leo Pointer – what did you say to me in Italian?”

“Quando era ....”

“No, I mean what does it mean?”

“You can figure it out. You know all about Fellini movies––you’re an expert, right?”

”Well, let’s see ... it started Quando, then era, right? It means ‘In what year’ was the last ... oh, I don’t know. I give up. Maybe it’s something about the year the women got the right to vote, right?”

A chirping sound came from the tote bag at her feet. She reached into it and fished out a cell phone. “Hello,” she said. “Hi, Paula. Now? Yeah, okay––I’m not doing anything. Same place? Okay, I’ll be right over.”

“You have to go?” Leo asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “Something came up. You know how it is.”

She walked off without looking back, “Wait a minute,” Leo called after her. “What does it mean, the ‘Quando era’ thing?”

She turned and walked backwards a few steps ... “I don’t know,” she said. “Ask Fellini.”

“C’mon, Maureen––tell me.”

She smiled and slipped her arm through the strap of her tote bag. “When was the last time you made love to a woman.” She turned again and was gone.

©Harry Buschman