Black Elvis

Know Your Saints

13 Back in May, about the time that Larry’s fiancée, Gwen, was coming clean to him about the professor she had been sleeping with—apparently there was no book group or yoga class—his aunt Julia’s boyfriend, Frank Packard, had run his Alfa Romeo right off the side of the autostrada. Frank, whom Larry had never met, was now in a coma. “I’m just sort of waiting to see,” Julia told him over the phone, her three-thousand-mile-distant voice as clear as if it were next door. “But in the meantime, there’s lots of room here. You’re totally invited.” That night at Loch Raven Liquors, as Larry shelved case after case of Italian wines, the names began to stir music inside him. Abruzzi, Montepulciano, Veneto, Valpolicella. When he got back to his apartment—empty now, of all of Gwen’s soft things—he got online and bought a ticket, charging it to his already overburdened Citicard. Pot smoke and the sound of bad guitar strumming drifted up from the apartment downstairs; in the street, a man was shouting at his wife. “I tole you,” he said. “I tole you.” Julia was an occasional actress, in her forties, his mother’s youngest sister, and the oddball of the family, particularly in her choice of men. She had once brought a guy to Thanksgiving whose entire face was covered in Maori tattoos, even the eyelids. She’d been married, briefly, but no one had ever met the man, and she never spoke of it. Frank Packard was a different kind of choice. “He has Alzheimer’s,” she told Larry his first night at the apartment , which was on the fourth floor of a sixteenth-century palazzo, with a view of the Boboli Gardens off the tiny back terrace. Frank, who’d had a successful dental practice in Buffalo, New York, had some years ago moved to Italy with the intention of writing mystery K N OW YOU R SA INTS 14 K N O W YO U R S A I N T S novels. But he’d started to suspect that there was something going wrong with him. “It’s not too bad, yet,” Julia said. “He’s, like, sixty, seventy percent. I guess. I mean, I didn’t know him before, so I can’t be sure. Our deal is that I take care of him, help him spend his money and enjoy himself and, you know, not get lost. Then, later, he leaves it all to me.” “You have this in writing?” asked Larry, who was still jetlagged . “I guess that would have been smart,” she admitted. He asked if she was working and found out that she was spending her days in front of the Uffizi spray-painted gold and posed as an Egyptian sarcophagus, although it was becoming increasingly clear that she’d have to go home soon. Also, Packard’s ex-wife was in town. “Buzzard,” she said. “Just circling, you know?” Larry spent his first few days drinking way too much, staring cynically at tourists, and copping poses with cigarettes that he hoped would be noticed by attractive women, but weren’t. He imagined Gwen locked in a summer-long coital embrace with her new lover, taking breaks only long enough for him to explain the finer points of Marxist philosophy. Larry needed something to occupy his time, some sort of a project—otherwise his head was going to blow up. The town was full of art history graduate students giving private tours. “Performance art!” Julia cried delightedly when he ran the idea by her. “I can help you find customers. I meet people all the time. I’ll look for the dumbest faces and the nicest shoes. People with money always have good shoes.” “Let’s not call it art,” he said. “Let’s call it theft.” He doubted he’d be able to pull off the deception for long, if at all. Perhaps it would lead to a fistfight. Secretly, though, he hoped he might meet a girl, someone to take his mind off his broken heart. To his surprise, he turned out to be a reasonably good guide. No one seemed to know that “Massachusetts State” was not a real school K N O W YO U R S A I N T S 15 (he had in fact gone to Hopkins...