Every Boy's Got One

Travel Diary of Jane Harris

Travel Diary of Holly Caputo and Mark Levine

Jane Harris

The mayor said yes!!!!

It seemed touch and go there to me for a while, but Frau Schumacher totally came through for us! I couldn’t tell what she was saying to the big man behind the desk—a very intimidating desk, too, with lots of important looking documents all over it, for a very intimidating man, wearing a big green shiny sash over his track suit—but Cal later translated that basically, she said, “Marry these two delightful young people or I will make you sorry.”

Cal says he doesn’t know HOW Frau Schumacher was going to make him sorry, but the mayor apparently believed her enough to make a time in his schedule for Holly and Mark.

And OK, it’s super-early in the morning for a wedding— 9A .M.—but it’s better than nothing! Frau Schumacher was right about wedding breakfasts, I guess. That’s what they do here, instead of receptions.

Now all we have to do is drive to Rome tomorrow, get the form Holly and Mark need, and drive back.

At last, we can relax a little. We went grocery shopping for food for the rest of the week (and Cal and Mark hit the liquor store, this cute little shop called La Cantinetta in Porto Recanati. Frankly, I think 14 bottles of wine, champagne, J & B, and something called limoncello might be a bit much, but it IS a wedding, after all, even if it’s just four of us attending) and then came home and hit the pool right away. At least, Holly and Mark and Peter and I did. Cal got a call from his editor or somebody, so he’s sitting in the terrazza, yakking into his cell, saying things like, “But I said you’d have it next month. No, I never said that.”

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Sounds like somebody’s a little late on a project. Ha ha.

I got the skinny on Peter while we were in the mayor’s office, too. When we walked in, I was surprised to see a girl about Peter’s age sitting on the mayor’s desk, going “Papa” in the unmistakable wheedle of a teenaged daughter. She was a pretty little thing named Annika—all big blue eyes and blonde ringlets and knobby knees—and when she saw Peter, she completely forgot about whatever favor she was begging her father for. Her eyes narrowed in that mean way only teenaged girls’ eyes can, and she went, “What are you doing here?”

And Peter was all, “I am here on official business with the mayor.”

And the girl started laughing and said, “What business can you have with my fazzer?”

And everything was suddenly SO clear to me, just from those—let me see—OK, eight little words. You know, that Peter adores Annika with a passion that cannot be denied, and that she wants him, too, but Peter isn’t considered cool enough to date in their social set, and so she has to act scornful towards him.

It was all so obvious and sad.

Then the mayor hung up the phone and went, “Annika. Shush.”

Then he and Frau Schumacher started going at it in Italian, so I used the opportunity to ask Peter who the girl was, sotto voce (Italian for “in a soft voice.” I am really getting this language down, if I do say so myself).

And he was like, his voice dripping with (obviously feigned) scorn, “Zat’s Annika. She is the mayor’s daughter. She zinks she is queen of all of Castelfidardo even zo she is not.”

And I asked Peter if he and Annika went to school together, and he told me he goes to “Internet school” because the schools in Castelfidardo aren’t “adwanced” enough for him, and that he can’t go to school back in Germany because there’s no one there for him to live with, his “fazzer” currently being “in the jail.”

In the jail! Peter’s dad—Frau Schumacher’s grandson—is in the jail!

For what, I don’t know. But now I understand why it is that Peter is able to hang around us all day. Annika, presumably, was on her (three-hour) lunch break from school. Can you imagine all the trouble American teens could get up to if we gave them a three-hour lunch break? And all of the malls were CLOSED during it? My God, civilization as we know it would break down completely.

Anyway, after the mayor and Frau S. negotiated their little compromise, there was a lot of cheering and relieved sighs (and, from Cal Langdon, a frown), so I took the opportunity to lean down and give Peter a peck on the cheek—to thank him, you know, since if he hadn’t gone and got his great-grandmother, none of this would have happened.

And, while Peter turned bright red, I had the pleasure of seeing Annika, who’d witnessed the kiss, scowl prettily.

Score one for Peter.

Poor Annika. One of these days she’s going to wake up and realize Peter was the one for her. Only by the time that happens, Peter will have his own software company and be making millions and be dating a starlet from some Fox sitcom… or whatever the Italian equivalent of Fox might be.

Cal Langdon just barked, “You’ll get it when you get it, Art,” into his phone.

God. He is so Type A. He really needs to learn to chill, like me, or he’s going to have a coronary before he’s forty.

And how dare he suggest that there’s something wrong with MY parents for staying together so long? I asked him while we were in the hallway outside the mayor’s office, out of earshot of Holly, how long HIS parents stayed together, and he said, “They were married twenty years, and are much happier people now that they’ve gone their separate ways.”

Which is all very well and good for them, but if Cal Langdon were MY kid, I’d want to get away from him, too. No wonder they split up. The North Pole and Antarctica aren’t far enough to get away from that voice: “I told you, Arthur, I will have the proposal for you when I get back. No, not the DAY I get back. But a few weeks later—yes, well, I still haven’t figured out exactly what I’m going to write about. No, not dirty diamonds. No, I’m not going to Angola—”

Some women, I suppose, might find Cal Langdon’s voice sexy. And IT is kind of deep and gravelly, in a Robert Redford kind of way.

But the stuff he SAYS with it! EW!

And OK, he’s hot. I mean, I’m not going to lie and say he’s not. All I have to do to KNOW that isn’t true is flip back to the beginning of this journal and read the part where I first saw him—God, was that really only four days ago? It seems like months—to know that initially, I thought Cal Langdon was hot.

And it’s true that even now, knowing what I do about him, he still has his moments. Like when he pried my foot out of that crevasse between the cobblestones, and his whole hand fit around my ankle.

And sometimes when he looks at me with those too-blue eyes, it seems like there’s a light shining from out of his head, like a jack-o’-lantern—a light only I can see, and which makes it very hard to maintain eye contact.

But still. In the car on the way back from Castelfidardo, I made a comment about how ludicrous it is that everything in this country closes from noon until four, sometimes five, every single day, and that really, it isn’t any wonder that America is a superpower and Italy isn’t, given that we only take half-hour lunches, for the most part.

And Mr. I Know Everything There Is To Know in the Entire Universe has the nerve to go, “Believe me, if the average temperature in America during the summer months was forty degrees Celsius, we’d be shutting down everything between noon and four as well.”

Whoa! I am sorry, but that is nothing but showing off. CELSIUS? What American knows how to tell the temperature in Celsius?

OK, enough ranting against Cal Langdon. Not while I’ve got all this delicious sun to bask in. It’s actually kind of hard to get worked up about anything, you know, with this sun beating down and the palm fronds overhead swaying gently in the breeze from the sea—carrying with it, as always, that slight hint of horse manure—and the only sounds those of bees buzzing and the crystal blue water in the pool gently rippling and Cal pecking at his Blackberry.

The sun is so hot, in fact, it seems to seep into your skin like thick heavy lotion. Really, it’s hard to tell whether it’s the bianco frizzante (SOOOOO good mixed with a little Orangina) or the sun, but I really feel, I don’t know, like nothing matters right now… not even what happens to Dr. Kovac on ER. I feel like I could just lie here forever….

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