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Chapel bell tower,
A corona of starlight,
Enchanted evening
-#38, In Blue Solitudes, S. Wilson-Osaki
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Seb shivered, burrowed deeper under the duvet. An unfamiliar vinegary scent tickled his nose. The pillow under his cheek felt too springy for comfort, the sheets too silky—not his usual flannel. He snaked a hand under the covers, seeking out Henry’s solidity and warmth, but his fingers skidded off the edge of the bed. He curled his arm back into his cocoon, remembering.
Not where he was, but who he was. A widower. An astronaut floating through the vacuum of space, untethered to any place or thing. A cowardly lion. He curled his legs into his chest, listened. The breathy hum of an air conditioner explained the glacial temperature. Distant voices cackled over some unknown joke. A flapping noise, the honk of a horn, a motor buzzing, the thwap-thwap of sandals on tile.
Amalfi, waiting for him.
Seb lifted the duvet an inch, peered out. His apartment in the Villa Napolitana was a humble but pristine paradise. Shades of white with Mediterranean-blue accents. Shuttered windows framed by sunlight raring to burst in. Exposed beams steepled into a vaulted ceiling. Through the rail that lined the loft bedroom, a school of ceramic fish swam across the living room wall.
Everything post-Andrea was a blur. Lucia must have given him the grand tour. He must have climbed up to the loft, unpacked his suitcase, and crawled into bed without passing Go. Seb flipped the top edge of the duvet back, eyeballed his alarm clock: 10:00 a.m. He had slept for twenty hours straight.
Certain neglected bodily functions suddenly made themselves known to him, and he half staggered, half tumbled his way to the bathroom. He stared at the bidet for a full thirty seconds before his bladder gave him no choice in the matter. Once relieved, Seb leered at the shower as if the entire All Blacks rugby team had piled into the glass stall. He stripped. Once scrubbed of airplane germs and shorn of his tumbleweed beard, he felt almost ready to tackle the coffee maker.
Then he remembered he was in Italy, where java flowed thick and hot as Vesuvius’s lava, and threw on some clothes.
He stepped out into a world so gilt and ancient it was practically sepia-toned. The sun god had scorched off all the previous day’s humidity. The warm air enveloped him but wasn’t heavy, fragrant with sea salt and citrus grove. Two storeys below, the lost-earring pool glimmered—so inviting—but for the first time in three years, Seb wanted to explore. Even if it meant tackling those stairs, which hadn’t gotten less intimidating from the top down.
A wolf whistle sounded from the far end of the terrace. Three tanned and freckled middle-aged ladies sat around a table, a game of poker in full swing. A seashell necklace had been sacrificed for chips; three sentry espresso cups guarded their stashes. Though they all wore sunglasses, two of them scoped him out while the third ground her cigarette into an ashtray and quickly lit up another.
“And who might you be, new neighbor?” With her bushel of strawberry hair and beaming smile, she looked about as threatening as Anne of Green Gables.
“Seb. Uh, I mean, Sébastien.” He shuffled in their direction but hesitated to commit.
“First day?” This from a bronze-skinned woman with cornrows who wouldn’t have looked out of place wielding a spear.
“Second, technically.”
“Well, welcome to paradise!” She nudged back the free chair with her knee. “Have a seat. Get your bearings.”
“Uh... do you have coffee?”
The redhead sprang to her feet. “Only from the cutest little shop in Positano. And you have to try the sfogliatella.” She herded Seb into his seat before disappearing into their apartment. “I’m Kath, and that’s my sister Ceri.” The smoker lifted her sunglasses to wink at him. “And this is my bestie Maya. Whereabouts are you from, Seb?”
“Canada. Montreal.”
“Told you,” Ceri drawled. Black Irish to her sister’s red, she had the hair and the attitude of a Jackie Onassis.
Sliding two of her seashells over, Maya asked, “Is that close to Edmonton? We met a couple from there in Rome.”
“Not really, no. Montreal is more like Boston, and Edmonton is more like Albuquerque.”
Maya’s laughed bubbled up like a fountain. “I see you’ve guessed we’re American.”
“Hard not to,” Ceri said, emphasizing her Southern accent. Seb guessed Louisiana.
“Not to mention the hospitality.” Seb forgot the conversation the instant Kath plunked his espresso under his nose, along with a rippled shell-shaped pastry that wrung an eager gurgle from his long-empty stomach. He accepted a fork to keep from devouring it. “Thank you for this.”
“Old habits.” Kath chuckled. “Miss my kids. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the me time...”
“... as long as she has someone to feed,” Maya finished. “You may live to regret that sfoglia-whatsits.”
Seb, whose mouth sung with flakey, creamy, orange zest-y perfection, vigorously shook his head. The ladies trilled and cooed as if they’d taken in a lost puppy. Seb had to admit there was some truth to the comparison. Then he sipped his espresso, deciding he needed some alone time with their coffeemaker.
“Is there a Mrs. Seb?” Maya asked, with a sphinxlike smile.
He swallowed hard. He hated this part. Too many land mines, each one waiting to blow up a new friendship before it started.
“No. On my own for this one. Or, well... from now on.”
“Oh, honey.” Kath was as full-on with her sympathy as her breakfast sharing, taking his free hand and squeezing her support into his palm. “Was it a breakup or the big D?”
Ceri scoffed. “Nosy parker.”
“No, no, it’s...” Seb eyed the rest of his pastry longingly, wondering if he could scarf it before he had to admit the truth. He was stereotyping, he knew, but it was an election year, and the Southern states did have something of a reputation. “The biggest D of all. The final D, you might say. My husband Henry, a few years ago.” A hundred and two million heartbeats, to be exact. Not that Seb was counting.
All three of them stilled, stared at him. Seb braced for rudeness or rejection, already warning himself that he would not let an incident ruin his vacation. Then the ladies shoved out of their seats and encircled him into a group hug so snug he reevaluated his orientation. Seb felt so mothered he was surprised when they let go without pinching his cheeks. But then he suspected they didn’t want to grab the ones on his face.
“You’re coming to dinner with us,” mama bear Kath pronounced with a solemnity that made Seb wonder if he’d be sent to his room if he defied her. Considering that’s where he’d planned to spend most evenings, it wouldn’t be much of a punishment. “We found the perfect little trattoria.”
“Down one of the side alleys,” Maya continued. “If you have some extra time, it’s worth it to check them out. We found a few hidden gems and, oh, the villas!”
“Maybe he has plans for the day,” Ceri interjected. “Like we do.”
“I don’t want to be any bother—” Seb stammered.
“Don’t be silly,” Kath reassured him, shooting her sister a look Maya cosigned. “We’re just off to Maiori for the afternoon. We’ll be back and in the pool by five.”
Maya nodded. “And what are your plans for the day, cher?”
“To be honest, I hadn’t thought any further than coffee.”
Ceri barked out a laugh. “Sounds about right. Should I deal you in, or are you itching to get going?”
“What’s your game?”
“Oxford stud.”
“Just like my first boyfriend.” The ladies cackled as Seb savored the last bite of sfogliatella. “I’ll play a round.”
“Oh, honey,” Kath sighed, pink cheeked from laughing. “You’re a keeper.”
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Seb fingered the cottony pages of his new leather-bound journal, traced the initials embossed on the cover: S.W.O. Sébastien Wilson-Osaki. He hadn’t planned on marring the pristine pages with his half-formed thoughts. Hadn’t planned on splurging on such a fancy journal, but the gift shop of the paper-making museum was packed with so many goodies that Seb couldn’t help filling his bag. He’d also bought a photo album decorated with dried wildflowers, another flower-laden strip of handmade paper to be framed, and a personalized stamp.
The words hadn’t come until he parked at one of the boardwalk cafés, ostensibly to people watch until his pizza came. The dank smell of the drying pulp still twitched his nose, the churn of the eleventh-century press echoed in his ears, and the view before him... well. It hardly took a poet to find it inspiring.
But a poet Seb was. The bustling marina, the flowerbed beach, the rows upon rows of pastel houses, the sun shimmer off the Tyrrhenian Sea all worked their magic on his writer’s imagination, kindling a desire in him only his fountain pen could quench. That and the parched pages of his journal, which drank in every word that poured out of him with bottomless thirst. The block that had stopped him for well over a year popped off as easily as a champagne cork. He’d started in the middle to keep the first pages clean, to hide his first overeager spurts, no better than his teenage scribblings. But finally something began to take form, to solidify into structure and meaning.
At long last, he had something to say.
In the throes of grief, Seb wrote to stay afloat, to keep from slitting his wrists or sailing off the nearest cliff. An entire library’s worth of sentimental drivel that first year. But if he kept forming letters into words into sentences, if he bled across pages instead of his bedsheets, he could ignore the emptiness of his house. Of his life. He would fill the Henry-shaped hole with verse after verse, a patchwork of loss that, if he was lucky, might one day become a quilt. Which it had. Seb had wrapped in it so tightly that he’d been trapped in this false comfort. By the first anniversary of Henry’s death, he couldn’t write. He didn’t want to leave the house. He insulated against the judgments and the sympathies of his family and friends. And all those words, all that ink, his grief’s masterwork, amounted to nothing more than a pile of rubbish.
He burnt every last page the day he booked his ticket to Amalfi. Dug Henry’s notes out of storage and followed his instructions to the letter. Every step he took in this golden place resounded with Henry’s approval. But Seb was here to find himself again, to cast a light on the shadow of his husband’s death. He scanned over the few pages he’d managed and smiled.
Then his pizza arrived, and his stomach wrenched back the controls.
Once refueled, he set off down the other side of the boardwalk, which extended the length of the docks between three long piers. As mesmerizing as the slow progress of distant cruise liners could be, Seb spent more time gawking at the hillside villas. Rising up in tiers of white and yellow wedding cake shades, with terracotta roofs and vaulted windows, they resembled the storybook houses he’d imagined as a child. Seb wouldn’t have been surprised if the population of Amalfi were secretly gnomes or imps impersonating people to trade tourist dollars for fairy dust. The fact that the stone arches that supported the coastal road looked like battlements, complete with castle-like watchtowers at every outward curve, only made the place seem more enchanted.
Only when he returned to the Villa Napolitana did he realize staying at the top of a hill—no matter how slowly he window-shopped up the main street—was a bad move after a day of walking. By the time he crawled up the five thousand steps to his front door, his small shopping bags of supplies sagging as if he carried bowling balls, Seb was ready to spend the rest of his vacation in a zero-gravity chair.
An artfully arranged man-bun and a thin coating of sunscreen later, he clopped back down a few circles of hell to the jewel in the Villa Napolitana’s crown: the pool. He creaked through the gate to discover Kath, Ceri, and Maya already lounging on the shallow end steps, a floating bar tray bobbing between them. Seb dropped his towel on one of the aforementioned chairs, abandoning his journal and flip-flops for the glinting waters.
A chorus of “Seb!” had him feeling self-conscious until he waded into the blue. The water, sun, and soaring peaks inspired the kind of serenity he’d only found twice before: on the shore of Lake Kawaguchi, with a postcard view of Mount Fuji in the distance, and lying in a hammock with Henry on their Hawaiian honeymoon. Henry had written Make new memories every day in block letters at the start of his notes, and it pleased Seb to realize he was living this mantra. After a few laps, he swam back to the shallow end underwater, popping up unexpectedly to spook the ladies.
Who chuckled indulgently but didn’t stir.
“G&T?” Bartender Ceri asked.
Seb laughed. “Do I have a choice?”
“I can give it to you straight.”
“Not my style.”
“That makes two of us, cher.”
Seb tittered along with them as he parked in a free space on one of the lower steps. Accepting his drink, he turned, as they were, toward the sun. He took a sip and nodded his approval. “Perfection.”
“I’ll say.” Maya lowered her sunglasses to scope someone out. Seb followed her eyeline to a balcony across the street, where an Italian gym bunny was getting frisky with his barbells.
“Is that Gerardo?” Kath purred her Rs. “He’s late.”
“Must have run out of oil,” Seb quipped. “Do you think he bastes, or does it just seep out of his pores?”
“Meow!” Maya exclaimed. “Not your type?”
“He’s strokeworthy, but I wouldn’t put a ring on it.”
“I was thinking more Stella in a How She Got Her Groove Back revival.”
“Italian edition? I could see it.” They clinked glasses. “Your man done you wrong?”
“Every single one of them.”
“When they found out about each other,” Ceri interjected.
“I try to tell them commitment’s not for me. They never listen.”
Seb nodded. “Comes with having a dick. Men experience a fifty to seventy percent attention-span reduction when they hit puberty.”
“Or, you know, when they’re born.” Kath snickered. “I have three sons.”
“My condolences.”
“Thank you. But they are five thousand miles away, and that bottle of good-time juice is still half-full.” She shook her glass, then downed the lot. “How about you, handsome? Are you feeling more Angela Bassett or Julia Roberts?”
“Kathleen Gleeson!” Ceri smacked her arm. “Sorry, Seb. Can’t take her anywhere.”
“Oh, come on,” Maya chided them. “We’re in the land of amore. What else are we gonna talk about?”
“Well...” Seb considered. “So far I’ve got the ‘eat’ part covered. Never been much for praying, being an atheist and all. And love is kind of a tall order for three weeks, so...” He swallowed back the hard knot that cinched his throat, reminding himself the point of his trip was to unwind. “I guess I’m Team Stella.”
Maya whooped in triumph, but Kath shook her head.
“Oh, honey. You don’t know what you’re in for. She’ll force more prospects on you than that old woman in Fiddler on the Roof.”
Seb broke into a few mumbled bars of “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” in place of the mantra his therapist had assigned him as the ladies dissolved into giggles.
Two bottles of vino rosso and three sumptuous courses later, the laughter continued. Ceri had led them through a maze of back alleys to a picturesque square, with a small gated chapel at one end and a wood-faced trattoria at the other. Tables sprouted like toadstools in the center, corralled on three sides by ivy-woven trellises. Garlands of fairy lights competed with the glinting stars and the fat harvest moon above. Seb wouldn’t have been surprised if the waiter had twirled a wand and poofed their dinner into existence.
He stifled a belch, scanned the detritus with a scavenger’s eye. The last spoonful of the lemon soufflé beckoned him like the arms of a new lover; even sated, he still craved more. From the luscious caprese salad to the fluffy paccheri stuffed with black truffles and burrata with seafood sauce to the grilled lamb with balsamic reduction, pillowy potatoes, and garlicky rapini, their orgy of food had ridden him hard and put him away wet. As Kath ordered them a round of limoncello as a digestivo, Seb wondered how much it would be to air-lift him back to the Villa Napolitana. He said as much to the ladies.
“That’s what all the stairs are for,” Kath sagely explained. “Working off dinner.”
Ceri scoffed. “I think we’d have to scale a few of these mountains to burn that off.”
“Or...” The predatory look in Maya’s eye gave Seb the heebie jeebies. “We could put Operation Stella into action. I see a few possibilities.”
Only Seb’s recent food intake kept him from blushing. He glanced around the square—empty except for a few elderly tourist couples and two waiters who didn’t exactly scream “friends of Dorothy.”
“Uh, where?”
“Wait for it.”
The chapel bell tolled, a bone-quaking, eardrum-blasting sound that could have raised the dead. Or brought wolves down from the mountains. On a balcony two stories up, a husky pup howled its little lungs out. Seb would have admired the dog’s “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” attitude more if he weren’t so worried he’d soon need a hearing aid. Then Andrea stepped out onto the balcony, and he almost swallowed his tongue.
Fresh from the shower, Andrea’s slick wave of hair melted into a cascade of sin-black curls that matched the whorls on his bare, buff chest. He wore a pair of soccer shorts so loud they threatened to deafen the bell-husky duo, but his toned calves and peek of iliac crest looked like a second dessert. Dry-mouthed, Seb felt as if he hadn’t eaten a bite.
The chapel bell tapered off with a halfhearted twang—still enough to give you an impromptu root canal—but the moonstruck husky kept on baying until a whistle from Andrea shushed him. After an ear rub and some overgenerous pets, he loped back into the apartment. His owner, however, wasn’t so easily dismissed.
“Sebastiano! Signore! Buona serra!” Andrea leaning over the balcony rail only further stirred Seb’s various appetites.
“Andrea!” his American chorus shouted, well-acquainted with Amalfi’s favorite chauffeur. Not that Seb had ever set eyes on the competition.
“Come and join us for a limoncello, cher,” Maya beckoned with a wink at Seb.
“Yes, Andrea, come join us!” Kath seconded.
“For you, signore, anything.” The little husky poked his head through the curtains to see what all the fuss was about, decided people weren’t interesting enough, and disappeared again. “Un momento.”
Which was all it took for Maya to pounce. “You didn’t tell us you know Andrea.”
“I don’t.” Seb wished he hadn’t had so much wine. His face gave too much away at the best of times, but liquored up, he was practically an emoticon. “He drove me from the airport.”
Kath gasped. “Are you the one who almost fainted?”
“I... no... what? It was crazy humid, and I hadn’t slept in two days. I didn’t faint. He just carried my backpack up the stairs.”
“Ahhh.” Ceri stretched the syllable into an aria. “You’re the one who stiffed him on the tip.”
“What? I...” Seb forced his alcohol-soaked brain to think back, then remembered he’d more or less blacked out mentally when they reached the top of the stairs. For some reason he kept returning to the image of a Jack Russell. “Shit.”
“Oh, honey, he didn’t mind,” Kath soothed.
“You were probably too stiff yourself to think of it,” Maya teased.
“No, wait. Listen, yenta—”
Andrea’s arrival cut off any protest Seb might have made. A fresh, skintight green shirt fit him so snugly Seb wondered why he’d bothered, his pecs stucco-ed with wisps of chest hair. He carried a black medical bag incongruous with his football stud attire, which he plunked on the free chair instead of his—firm, delectable—ass.
“I stop only for minuto. My mamma, she make baccala.”
“Just one limoncello, Andrea,” Maya urged.
“You have to toast with us!” Ceri insisted.
“Think of poor Seb, stuck with us ladies all night,” Kath said.
When Seb found his tongue, he clicked it. “Nonsense.”
“I am happy Sebastiano is with you. When he come, he look very...” Andrea mimed sleepy. “How you like Amalfi?”
Seb couldn’t quite keep his eyes from raking Andrea up and down before he replied, “Bellissimo.”
Andrea dropped his gaze, let out a bashful chuckle. The international sign for flattered but straight. A flare of disappointment shocked Seb out of the moment. He hadn’t really thought anything would come of the ladies’ efforts... had he? Was he ready for something like that? With someone who barely spoke English? He realized he hadn’t thought of Henry since lunch and was suddenly stone-cold sober.
The waiter arrived with a bottle of neon-yellow liquid and five slinky flutes. He chatted in Italian with Andrea as he poured. Though Seb didn’t understand a word, he suspected Andrea made sure they were treated right, a thought that warmed him. But not as much as the limoncello, of which he immediately took a generous sip. The tartness ripped down his throat and puckered his senses. Perfect.
“A toast!” Kath declared, shooting him a look for drinking without them. “Andrea, will you do the honors?”
“Si, si.” He appeared to give the matter serious thought. Could the future be read in the pattern of lemon rind at the bottom of a glass? Seb didn’t doubt it. “To Amalfi!”
“To Amalfi!” they cheered. “Salute!”
“Salute!”
Andrea clinked each of their flutes in turn, pausing at Seb’s until their gazes locked.
“You see, Sebastiano. In Amalfi, you are never alone.”
The clink reverberated through Seb, vibrating his limbs, jolting his nerves, until it struck the epicenter of his heart. He drank deep of the Italian elixir, never wavering from Andrea's gray-green eyes.