Ben Jackson had gained at least twenty pounds in the last few years. He was on the verge of fat, but because of his height he looked Orson Wellesian. He emerged from the rental car sweaty and pale in wrinkled linen pants, a faded T-shirt and flip-flops. He stretched his arm out to Lara with a standard paparazzi-friendly grin, then changed his mind and gave her a brief hug.
“Hey Lara, thanks so much for having me.”
Leo was getting their bags out of the trunk. He and Ben were wearing the same expensive-looking sunglasses. Their bags were identical too.
“What are you, twins?” Lara said to her brother in Italian. She was eager to show off her funny side.
“Gifts from the Cannes Film Festival. We were there last week.”
Leo threw his eyes toward Ben and whispered, “Watch out. He had an Italian girlfriend, he speaks some.”
Lara had been scrubbing the house all day and moving furniture around; she’d thrown pillows this way and that, tried a couple of different bedspreads for splashes of color. She had scattered issues of The New Yorker and The Week here and there, with a couple of Vanity Fairs for nighttime reading or in case the conversation languished. She guided them from room to room, telling a story for each one (we had to take down the wall here, see the floor? these are very old tiles, this used to be the barn, the kitchen was in the old days a communal oven, isn’t that interesting?). The two men nodded and hmm’ed in turn and when she sensed they were beginning to get restless she cut the tour short and opened a bottle of cold Leone de Castris rosé.
They had dinner in the garden, where she’d strategically strewn a whole bag of tea lights. She served a lemony Middle Eastern salad, and calamari drowned in parsley. Leo and Ben didn’t comment on the food, engrossed as they were in dissecting a number of the films they’d seen at Cannes. It was a lot of “I loved that bit, hated the ending, she was great, he sucked, oh, she is in rehab.” Lara was eager to contribute but didn’t find an entry into their tight Ping-Pong. The minute they mentioned an Indian director she managed to veer the conversation away from films. Somehow she found herself talking about the Hugging Mother, an Indian guru she’d gone to see in Kerala the previous year, right after the divorce. After only a few sentences she felt their attention waver and their silence go hollow, but it was too late to turn back. She braved it and kept on going.
“I thought, if it’s true that she can make you feel better with a hug, why not? I was going through a very bad patch, anything to make me feel saner.”
“Right,” Ben agreed politely, helping himself again to the calamari. He sure had an appetite.
“There were thousands of people waiting outside the ashram under the sun. But we Westerners had a separate, much faster line.”
“That’s total bullshit,” Leo interjected. “Why would you have a separate line?”
“First-class and second-class hugs?” Ben suggested, rounding his eyes in mock innocence.
“Whatever. I was happy, it was sweltering. Anyway, finally it was my turn and there she was, this small, round person waiting to hug me!”
Lara suddenly realized she didn’t have a punch line, an unexpected twist or a satisfactory ending to the story. The anecdote lacked a tidy structure—a bit like her life, she thought.
“Did it work?” Leo asked with an undertone of sarcasm.
Lara avoided the trap.
“No. It was just a hug, really. It didn’t change a thing.”
Ben looked at her with what she took as sympathy. He surely had put on too much weight but he still had those eyes—honey-colored killer eyes and thick eyelashes that, luckily for him, would never go away.
“I’d love to be hugged by an Indian guru,” he said. “God knows I need a hug these days.”
He and Leo exchanged a look as if they were privy to a secret. With that the conversation tapered off and turned into a long stretch of silence.
“Hey Lara, I love your shirt,” Ben said at last, uneasily, as though he felt the need to fill it in.
“Thank you. My next-door neighbor made it. She’s quite a character, actually a fantastic—”
“I already told him about her,” Leo interjected, as if to say, Please don’t start with another cute tale.
Lara wished she’d let them talk about their movie life and movie friends and had never brought up the subject of hugs. Perhaps it would have been better to play the brooding, slightly eccentric recluse, a much more interesting character to embody than the eager, chirping hostess. Was it too late now to change her persona? Why had she agreed to have a movie star under her roof? Had Leo said they were staying a week? A whole week now seemed an enormity to bear.
She began to clear the table. Ben stood up to help her collect the dishes.
“Oh God, please don’t,” she said.
“Please, I always do it at home.”
“No way. Really.”
“But why? I want to help.”
Lara gave a little laugh.
“I can’t have Ben Jackson load the dishwasher in my kitchen. I just won’t allow it.”
Ben sat down obediently and pulled out his phone. He had been checking it a few times already. Leo lifted his index fingers toward the sky.
“On the roof,” he reminded Ben.
The moon had just come up behind the church tower. The night was sweet and jasmine-scented. She loaded the dishwasher with exaggerated attention. She had read somewhere that, even when loading the dishwasher, paying attention to every tiny movement could be counted as a Zen practice. Apparently all one had to do was be aware and stay in the present moment. Despite all the yoga she had never been sure what being in the moment really meant. Yet she tried to savor sliding the plates into their slots one by one. She waited.
Adjusted her breathing.
Yes.
Maybe that was it.
The moment.
As precious as all the others that she had let go by without noticing, and now so stark in its uniqueness and unrepeatability. She stood still in front of the dirty plates and concentrated harder, waiting for further epiphany. The breeze carried Ben’s voice whispering sweet somethings into his phone while Leo sat in the dark smoking a joint and she could hear him exhale.
Then the moment passed.
Leo stumbled into the kitchen around ten the next morning, puffy and unshowered, just as Lara had finished laying the table for breakfast. She’d placed a couple of hydrangeas and English roses in a glass. It looked so lovely that she snapped a photo.
“Buongiorno! Il caffè è pronto nel thermos.”
Switching to Italian with Leo made her feel more at ease, as it seemed to create the kind of intimacy she was craving.
He slumped in the chair with a sleepy grunt and poured half the thermos in his cup. “Where is Ben?” she asked.
“He’s in the shower. Or on the phone, I’m not sure. Can you turn that thing down a bit?”
Lara lowered the volume on the radio: it was her favorite morning news program.
“That’s better. So, what’s up?” he asked, using the affectionate voice of family.
“What do you mean exactly?”
“What are your plans? Are you going to live here now?”
“Not all year round. But spend as much time as possible here in the warmer months, yes.”
Leo looked around, as if taking in the place for the first time.
“And what are you planning to do for a living?”
He meant now that her divorce had been settled, and there was no more alimony coming her way.
“Oddio … that’s a big question so early in the morning.”
“Well, that’s the question Mamma keeps asking me, which I have no answer for.”
“You two discuss my future when she calls you in L.A.?”
“Not always. But she wonders, you know.”
“Well, I was thinking I could get into a bit of real estate. You can buy property for next to nothing here.”
“That sounds good. Do you have the money?”
“Not right now. But it’s something I could get into in the near future.”
Leo gave an unconvinced nod. Lara searched for an alternative.
“I was also thinking I could go back to teaching yoga. I could organize retreats here in the summer. People would love it. They could practice early in the morning and then go for a swim. This place is ideal.”
Leo didn’t say anything, waiting for more.
“I also thought—this sounds a bit like a crazy idea but I think it could work—I could start a little flower shop. I could use this kitchen as the store. It already has street access. You know, this was the forno in the old days, where people—”
“Yes, you’ve already told me that.”
“Right. Sorry. But look how pretty this combination is.” She brushed the flowers in the glass with her fingertips. “I could make really pretty arrangements using the flowers that grow all around here. Wildflowers.”
“Yoga and flowers?” Leo said, studying the list of ingredients on the box of organic cookies Lara had put on the table. “That sounds a bit optimistic …”
“Well, I’d have to figure out the costs. I’ve only just started thinking about the future.”
He put the box down and grabbed a cornetto. “It worries me that you have no safety net anymore.”
But more than worried he sounded annoyed, as if this concern was something he didn’t want to feel responsible for. Since her divorce, Leo had strayed even further away from her. Could it be that, now that she was on her own, she had become too much of a liability?
Ben’s voice reached them from outside. He was, as ever, murmuring on the phone to someone, his conversation punctuated by a mix of short laughs and whispers.
“Is he still married?” Lara had a faint memory of a wife pictured next to him on a red carpet, a small brunette wearing sensible shoes.
“Yeah.” Leo bit into a second cornetto. “They’re having a bit of a … I’d say better not mention the subject right now.”
“Okay.” She looked around the room, searching for inspiration. “Hey, would you like me to take you two to see the cathedral in Otranto? It has an amazing floor, the largest Byzantine mosaic in the world. Would Ben like that kind of thing?”
Leo shrugged.
“I don’t know. It might be too hot for sightseeing, and I think he wanted to just chill while he was here—”
Ben walked into the kitchen. His hair was wet and combed back like a schoolboy’s. He was wearing just a faded sarong tightly wrapped around his waist. He had a big, glowing smile on his face and was still clutching his phone as if his joy was directly connected to the device.
“Good morning! What a glorious day!”
“I’ll make some more coffee,” Lara said, looking away; she found his big naked belly disconcerting.
Ben sat down and whispered something to Leo with a grin. Lara watched them as they spoke furtively. Their childish secrecy was making her uncomfortable.
“What are your plans for the day? Shall we go swimming?” she suggested. “I can take you to a lovely beach only ten minutes away, if you feel like it.”
“We were thinking …,” Ben began, eyeing Leo, as if needing his help.
Leo immediately took charge.
“How about that dressmaker you mentioned? Do you think she could make us something? We actually brought some material and shirts to copy.”
“Mina? Of course. She’ll be thrilled.”
And so was Lara. Not only to share with them that gift but also, she realized, to be rid of them, even if only for an hour.