Margot
Patricia smoothed the pleated skirt on my navy-blue taffeta Dior dress and whispered in my ear that I looked beautiful while simultaneously hurrying me toward the hotel entrance.
The terrace and garden of the Hotel Relais and Chateaux Orfila Madrid were crammed with guests dressed in couture, toting designer handbags and dripping with eye-wateringly expensive earrings and necklaces. They were all there to celebrate my imminent matrimony. Almost eighty percent of the guests were work or family obligations. The only real friends there, the kind of friends who hold your hair back when you’re puking after hitting the sangria too hard, were my sisters. I had friends, of course, but I never felt like I could be Margot with them. Who are you inviting to your parties and your boat trips, Margot or Margarita? Sometimes I pined for a huge group of friends so much it drove me nuts, friends to go out with, to have fun with and tell secrets to… I never felt comfortable with the girls I used to go out with, same with my friends from college.
When I arrived, I got a pretty insipid smattering of applause and hundreds of eyes looking me up and down. I was prepared, but, after the afternoon my mother had given me, this was the cherry on top to throw me into full panic. I smiled as I tried to shove down the already familiar sensation of drowning, as if the air was getting to my lungs through a filter that only let half through, the same way I felt whenever I had to go to a board meeting or face “society” gatherings.
I still hadn’t recovered from my mother being such a pain in the ass at her house while they were designing my personalized cocktail for the wedding. And now I had to pretend to be delighted to make small talk with all these strangers.
I tugged on Candela’s wrist and leaned discreetly toward her.
“Find Filippo, please. And do you know who Sonia is?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Slim, shoulder-length hair, big eyes like an abandoned puppy.”
“Exactly. If you see her, let me know,” I requested.
“You invited your secretary?” my mother asked.
“She’s my personal assistant, and, yes, I invited her.”
“Why on earth would you do that?”
I rolled my eyes and waved her off to go get another drink. My mother glared at me, as if trying to send threatening brain waves about how I could ruin my own life if I didn’t stop being so stubborn and act normal, but I pretended not to see her. Patricia pulled her phone out of her bag and started to type while Lady Meow stalked off.
“You never switch off. How are sales? And the blog?” I asked her.
“The website,” she corrected. “Blogs are so 2008.”
“Please spare my life.”
Patricia designed jewelry. Of course she couldn’t dedicate her life to anything less glamorous. Okay, fine, I was being shitty and jealous. The truth is she was really talented, and after Mama made her study law, I was really happy she had been so successful.
“The website is going great,” she clarified. “You should see it. Take a look and I’ll send a messenger with whatever you like. That way you can take it on your honeymoon.”
She glanced up from her phone, winked, and sighed longingly.
“I’m going to find Alberto and the kids. Enjoy your night.”
“Don’t leave me alone,” I pleaded through gritted teeth.
“I’m not leaving you alone. I’m leaving you with your prince.”
Patricia drew an arc in the air with her hand, elegantly gesturing toward him as he made his way over. Him. Candela winked and gave me a thumbs-up, and I returned the gesture. As soon as my eyes met Filippo’s, my stomach shrunk until it would have fit in my right fist, and everything was calm again. Him. My prince. I still couldn’t believe I was about to marry him.
Filippo was tall, really tall, and had hair so blond it would blind the sun. He was handsome; no, not handsome, hot. Everything about him was right, from his height to his demeanor to his tailored clothes. He had broad, toned shoulders and a cheeky smile that showed off his perfect teeth and eyes that were an incredibly deep blue. He was physically perfect, the man of your dreams for any woman who had ever dreamed of a man, and not just because of his incredible physique. It might sound cliché, but the thing I fell in love with was his smile. Well…his sensibility too, the way he was a perfectionist and how he’d always treated me like the only woman who mattered on the face of the earth since the moment we met. Not ordinary or dull. With him, I was special.
Who would’ve thought…? When we met at a soporific party at the Spanish embassy in Rome (where I had been forced to go for a work commitment because we were building one of our boutique hotels in the Italian capital), I thought he was Norwegian. Or Icelandic. Maybe Swiss. I never would have guessed he had been born there, in that city, and that he spent part of his childhood summers running around getting tan on the grounds of one his parents’ many houses in Tuscany.
He spoke to me in English. I answered him in Italian (which I don’t speak fluently, but I can get by in) when I noticed his thick accent, and he launched into a rapid, brutal monologue that I didn’t understand a word of. When he finished, he smiled. I did too.
“Let me get you a drink,” he finished off in Spanish.
Back then, I was “hanging out” with a guy I’d met years before in grad school. I wasn’t really convinced I liked him, to tell the truth, but sometimes human beings do these things: they make themselves believe that what they feel is chemistry when it’s actually just anxiety. Right before the summer, my mother had sat me down for a “polite” conversation to tell me I couldn’t be too picky about men if I didn’t want to end up alone.
But it wasn’t like that with Filippo. He was like Cupid’s arrow to me, like in the stories that inspire fairy tales. He was incredible, candid, magic, and a little nuts. I have to admit that, at first…I didn’t even believe he was hitting on me. It was too much. I figured such a good-looking guy would just be looking for someone to chat with during a boring event. When it started to become more than obvious that he had other intentions, my mind created a convoluted and twisted conspiracy that this was all a plot by other members of the board, that they had paid Filippo to flirt with me and then, in a maneuver I hadn’t quite figured out (maybe stealing confidential information from my laptop using technology only MI6 knows), used him to prove I wasn’t prepared for my role in the Ortega Group.
After he chivalrously walked me back to my hotel and asked for my phone number, I sent a message to my sister Candela telling her my suspicions, and her answer, composed entirely of curse words, snapped me out of it. All I had to worry about was the normal stuff: not getting too excited and/or him hurting me. At the end of the day, I’m not 007, I’m just an idiot with an important name.
The next day, after a work meeting, he took me to Florence to have lunch. He sent me a message saying a car would collect me outside the hotel at eleven, and…it made me really grumpy; it seemed like he was trying to impress me with a display of wealth. And I had already been through all that with a few posh Borjamaris and Pocholos who had courted me on Lady Meow’s insistence. But it wasn’t like that. He showed up in a pretty ramshackle taxi that smelled like peanuts, which took us to the train station, where we headed off to Florence. We had lunch in a teeny little place that only had about four tables and an improvised bar screwed to the wall that was no more than twenty centimeters wide. I asked him to recommend a local specialty, and…he went nuts. He made me try everything: wine, cheese, charcuterie, a bite of truffled mortadella, an incredible soup, and some crostini. Afterward, we bought gelato, even though it was February and freezing, and strolled toward the Duomo. I was stuffed. Me. A woman used to always being hungry. I didn’t think I’d ever go back to killing myself with crazy diets after meeting him. He liked to see me enjoy things.
The sun set on us standing on the Vecchio bridge, kissing.
I was so sure it was a fling, romantic but brief, that I didn’t worry about playing games or whether it would be appropriate for me to sleep with him the first night. I, the girl who ruminated on everything for days, who made pro-and-con lists and researched for months sometimes, asked him if he wanted to come up. And he said yes.
Our goodbye was incredible. They brought us breakfast in bed. We repeated, with a lot more rhythm and coordination, what we had done the night before, and we showered together, clinging to each other and kissing like only two strangers who will never see each other again can kiss. I was barely even sad to leave; I figured I was leaving the story at its climax. And it was better this way, so nothing would tarnish the memory when, decades later, I told my niece about it over mugs of warm anise.
But, surprise, Filippo called me that Monday.
“Dolcezza…what are you doing tonight?”
Never, ever underestimate an Italian. They always have an ace up their sleeve, like revealing that, actually, they live in the same city as you.
He worked for the Italian embassy in Madrid. He was thirty-three years old. He had four more or less serious relationships behind him, including his most recent ex, with whom he had discussed marriage. They had never set a date. Now she was married to a pilot, a childhood friend, with whom she had a little girl…and Filippo was her godfather. He was even perfect that way: he maintained beautiful friendships with all the women who had passed through his life. He liked good music; he was a great dancer; his laughter was booming, deep and sexy; he got really tan on vacations; he loved drinking a glass of red wine after dinner; he had the softest hands I had ever touched in my life; and…he fell in love with me. Besides his pride, I became his greatest weakness.
I don’t know how it happened, but it happened. He got down on one knee in Nara, Japan, in the fall, after a courtship of a little over two years. And finally, we were about to get married.
“Dolcezza.” Filippo leaned down to kiss me on the lips, making a chorus of guests wolf-whistle and applaud, although we both ignored it. “You look beautiful.”
“Me? Have you looked in the mirror?”
“It’s just a suit,” he beamed.
“All this is mine?” I threw him a lascivious but discreet look as I stroked his chest.
“I’ll show you everything tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Your mother told me”—and I loved the accent that all these years in Spain hadn’t managed to erase completely—“you won’t be sleeping at home today.”
I raised an eyebrow. “I don’t like that plan.”
“Your sisters are supervising everything. Everything will be fine. Plus, I’m sure that once you’re a married woman, your mother will stop meddling.”
“Patricia’s been married for seven years, and our mother still criticizes the way Patricia tells the girl to iron the crease into her kids’ uniforms.”
“But our kids aren’t going to wear uniforms.” He smiled cheekily. “They’re going to be normal, running around covered in dirt half the time, and they’ll hate their grandmother.”
“Guess they’ll take after their mother then.” We smiled. “But enough about my mother; she’ll be entertained by the open bar pretty soon. Come on…I’m going to say hi to your family and start greeting the guests. We must comply with social protocol.”
He kissed my hand where my rock of an engagement ring sparkled, and we started to stroll around, our fingers interlaced. I squeezed his hand a little when I realized that this was the first of many parties where I’d have to pretend I wanted to be there.