Me and Mr. Stenner

12.

The hotel in Florence was about five minutes outside the city itself, perched on the edge of the Arno River. It had windows overlooking gardens and a pool on one side, and on the other an awninged outdoor restaurant and the river below. In the lobby of the hotel, Mr. Stenner translated for me an Italian sign that indicated how high the water had risen during the flood several years back. I looked at the mark on the sign and said, “You mean right here in the lobby?”

“That’s right,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Wow!” I said. “Aren’t you glad we weren’t here then?”

“I was here just the year before that,” he said.

“This same place?”

“Yes.”

“With the boys?”

“Yes.”

“And with Mrs. Stenner?”

“Right,” he said.

“Wrong!” I said, and grinned. “Mommy’s Mrs. Stenner. The other Mrs. Stenner isn’t Mrs. Stenner anymore.” I paused. “Is she?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

I found it difficult to make friends.

I don’t think it had anything to do with the divorce. I think I was just kind of shy. Not so much with grown-ups, but definitely with kids. We would come back from the city of Florence, and I’d mope around the pool, listening to the kids splashing at the other end of it, and wishing I could join them. The pool was about fifteen feet long — it was almost impossible to avoid making friends with any other kids who were in the pool, but I sure managed. Until Mr. Stenner popped into the water one day. Popped in? He jumped right into the middle of a game a girl and her brother were playing.

Here were these two kids splashing around and yelling at each other, the girl about seven and the boy about ten. And all of a sudden this big gangling oaf landed right in the middle of what they were doing, and disappeared under the surface of the water, and then came up an instant later squirting water out of his mouth like a fountain and looking stupid as could be.

“Hi, kids,” he said. “I’m Peter Stenner.”

“Hi,” the girl said.

“Hi,” the boy said.

They weren’t used to grown-ups being so dumb, you could tell that. But they were smiling. They liked his trying to be friendly with them.

“What’s your name?” he asked the girl.

“Marlene,” she said.

“Yeah?” he said. “Hi, Marlene. And what’s your name?” he asked the boy.

“Tommy,” the boy said.

“You guys met Abby yet? Abby, come meet Tommy and Marlene.”

“Hi,” I mumbled.

“Hi,” Marlene said.

“Hi,” Tommy said.

“What’s that game you’re playing?” Mr. Stenner asked.

“It’s a game we made up,” Tommy said. “It’s you have to swim to that side and touch it with both hands, and then you have to turn around, and kick off, and come back to this side and touch it with both hands, too.”

“Who wins?” Mr. Stenner asked.

“Nobody wins,” Tommy said. “It’s just a game we made up.”

“Mind if Abby and I play it with you?”

“Come on,” Marlene said. “But you have to touch the sides with both hands.”

“It’s not as easy as it looks, you know,” Tommy said gravely.

That’s how I got to meet Tommy and Marlene.

At dinner that night, when I saw Mr. Stenner raise his glass, I knew he was about to propose a toast, and I lifted my glass too. In Italy, they allowed me to have a little wine with dinner, it’s really a quite civilized country. I mean, not only did Mom and Mr. Stenner allow me to have wine, but the people running the restaurants never objected to it, in fact seemed to encourage it.

“Will la ragazzina have a little wine, too, signore?” the waiter always asked, and then set a sparkling wineglass on the table before me. In America, you just try to sneak a little glass of wine to your daughter without her showing an ID card and a birth certificate and a driver’s license and a passport and a vaccination mark — wow! People pop out of the kitchen, the manager runs over to the table, the headwaiter takes a fit, the FBI comes through the door with drawn pistols and automatic machine guns... forget it.

“I’d like to say,” Mr. Stenner said, “that I love being here in this time and in this place with these two people. Lil,” he said, and clinked his glass against hers, and then said, “Abby,” and clinked his glass against mine. “It’s good,” he said, and nodded, but he hadn’t sipped the wine yet, and I knew he wasn’t talking about that.

The Ponte Vecchio was packed with tourists, of course, and all of them had cameras. Whatever their nationality, they had cameras. Big cameras, little cameras, simple cameras, complicated cameras, cheap cameras, expensive cameras. They all had cameras, and they were all taking pictures. Pictures of wives, husbands, children, friends, aunts, uncles. Mr. Stenner was sure the family albums of the world were full of bad snapshots of people posing uncomfortably in front of statues of men whose names they couldn’t pronounce, smiling stiffly and squinting into the sun. “You must always take a picture with the sun over your left shoulder,” his uncle used to tell him when he was a boy. His uncle was an accountant, but no matter — “Always over the left shoulder, Peter.”

In Florence, on the Ponte Vecchio, Mr. Stenner’s idea was to take pictures of people taking pictures.

He took the first of these at the end of the street, where the barricades were set up. A fat woman in a flowered dress was kneeling, one knee on the sidewalk, taking a picture of her small son or grandson who was eating a chocolate ice-cream cone and spilling half of it down his shirt front. As Mr. Stenner took the picture, I said, “What are you doing?” and he whispered, “Shhh,” and I immediately got the idea. He was taking a picture of a person taking a picture. In that minute, I became a scout for him.

By the end of the day, he’d shot a full roll — thirty-six exposures — of people taking pictures. Of those thirty-six, I scouted at least twenty for him, tugging at his sleeve, glancing to where somebody was about to click a shutter — a man taking a picture of his wife holding their baby up against a burst of balloons; a woman in her seventies snapping a picture of her eighty-year-old husband imitating the statue behind him; an American girl in blue jeans taking a picture of another American girl in blue jeans. Anybody and everybody, so long as they were taking a picture of somebody else. I felt like a Russian spy.

When we got back to the hotel that afternoon, I said, “Well, I guess you didn’t have a chance to look for it. Taking all those pictures, I mean.”

“I looked for it,” he said.

“Did you find it?” I still had no idea what “it” was.

“Nope.”

“Well, what are you going to do?”

“Look for it in Rome.”

“Suppose you can’t find it in Rome, either.”

“I’ll find it,” he said.

“Meanwhile, can we go for a swim?”

“That’s exactly what I want to do,” he said.

“And maybe if Mommy takes a long time getting dressed, we can have a drink on the terrace together, and watch that man who’s always fishing in the river.”

The hotel had a little band there that evening, three pieces — piano, guitar, and drums. We sat in the outdoor garden, Mr. Stenner sipping at his Scotch on the rocks, and me sipping at the Florentine version of the Italian Shirley Temple. The drinks he ordered for me were different in each city. He simply asked the waiter for “un’ invenzione,” and was always quick to add, “Senza whisky,” which meant, “Without whisky.”

The Florentine invention without whisky looked like a rainbow. I’d never seen a more beautiful concoction in my entire life. It seemed a shame to drink it. I kept telling Mr. Stenner he should take a picture of it. But he didn’t have his camera around his neck. He looked very nice and tanned, and very relaxed, and he kept tapping his hand on the table in time to the music the band was playing.

Something happened then that almost caused me to die of embarrassment.

A boy came over to the table.

He bowed from the waist.

In heavily accented English, he said, “Mam’selle, you prefer to dance?”

“What?” I said.

“Voulez-vous danser avec moi?” he said, and smiled. He looked about fourteen.

“He wants to dance, Abby,” Mr. Stenner said.

“That is fine with you, m’sieur?” the boy said.

“It’s up to Abby,” Mr. Stenner said.

The boy was standing there, I could feel him getting more and more embarrassed with each passing minute, standing there like a dope with the sleeves of his sweater knotted around his neck, the sweater trailing down his back, the poor thing, standing there risking rejection!

So I nodded, and almost knocked my chair over when I got up.

His name was Henri Jacques.

Mr. Stenner later told me the boy was probably a famous American writer, since his name translated from the French as Henry James.

He was only thirteen. He told me that he lived in the town where Joan of Arc lifted the year-long English siege in 1429. He said if I ever came to France, I should look him up. He told me his father was the manager of a bank in Orleans. Then he asked me what my father did.

“He’s an architect,” I said.

“Ah?” he said.

“And a photographer,” I said.

“Ah,” he said.

“In Italy, he’s mostly a photographer.”

“Ah,” he said.

“Though in France once, he was an architect.”

I was telling the truth.

Sort of.

After dinner, Mom and Mr. Stenner chatted with his parents, while Henri Jacques and I swung on the glider overlooking the river. The same man was down there fishing. He was always there in his boat whenever we came back from the city, sitting there all alone — boat, fisherman, and fishing pole reflecting in the water.

He never caught a fish all the while we were at that hotel.

“How old are you?” Henri Jacques asked.

“I’ll be twelve next month.” I said. “He’s getting me a present that begins with an F,” I said. “When we get to Rome. He hasn’t found it yet.”

“Something that begins with an F,” Henry Jacques said.

“Mm,” I said.

“Perhaps he buys you a Fiat,” he said.

“What’s a Fiat?” I said.

“An automobile,” Henri Jacques said.

“I don’t know how to drive,” I said.

“You must learn, non?” Henri Jacques said, and shrugged.