End of Manners Read Online Free

remembered Sam Jordan. A slim thirtysomething blonde with piercing blue eyes and a very good body. I had checked her work online after we had met hoping it wouldn’t be as good as her looks. But it was.
    When I got home that night I googled Sam Jordan once more and went through her portfolio. Her portraits were stunning. The landscapes were like paintings, brushstrokes on a canvas, brilliant use of the light, splashes of vibrant color. The images were bold, ironic and poetic at the same time. She would be good in Afghanistan. The minute Imo Glass and the photo editor saw this portfolio, they would forget all about me.
    I was exhausted and I had a long list of shots for the following day. Gelato, mousses and sherbets, which are particularly hard work as they tend to ooze and need to be shot very quickly. I dozed off in front of the TV. Fragmented images of the tofu blueberry cheesecake kept creeping back into my sleep like a song I couldn’t get out of my head, but the vivid colors were those of Sam Jordan’s photos. I sprang up from the sofa around midnight, possessed by an unusual fury, and dialed Pierre’s number. I got his voice mail this time.
    “Pierre, it’s me. This is crazy, I can’t believe you didn’t get my earlier message. I rang this morning to tell you I was going to take the job. Now I get this message about Sam Jordan. What the hell is going on here?” The more I lied, the more confident I became.
    “I even sent you a text three hours ago. Were you joking or what? Don’t you dare alert anybody. This isn’t funny anyway.”
    I hung up the phone without even saying good-bye.
    A power move—I knew from when it had been done to me one time too many.

    MY PARENTS MET in the early sixties, a time when an Irish girl was a rare and exotic thing for a young Italian to come across. They met in Rome in Babington’s Tea Rooms at the feet of the Spanish Steps, the only place in Italy where one could get proper English tea and cucumber sandwiches. My father was staying with his uncle at the time, theoretically looking for a job after graduation, in actuality loafing around, toying with the idea of being a poet. Every afternoon he would pop in there because he loved anything foreign and because the tearoom was next to the house where Keats had died, which enhanced the romantic flavor of his fruitless afternoons. My mother was a young university graduate student on her first holiday abroad—she came from a modest family in southern Ireland and knew very little of the world. She was staying in a cheap pensione by the train station, counting every lira she spent and falling in love with all that was Italian. But on that rainy afternoon she was longing for a proper cup of tea and a scone. It took my father two minutes to invite himself to her table. He wanted to fall in love with someone different; she was dreading the idea of going back home, to the drab, smelly rented room she had in Dublin. They didn’t speak the same language and talked in broken French. This thrilled them even more.
             
    In their honeymoon pictures my mother smiles on a bridge in Venice in a short-sleeved yellow sweater and a checkered skirt, a headband holding her curly red hair in place. My father looks thin, more interesting than handsome, impeccably dressed despite the little money he was making at the time as a public school teacher, surrounded by the flurry of pigeons that every shot in Piazza S. Marco includes. Every year afterwards, on their wedding anniversary, the two of them would travel from Milan to Rome and would go back to Babington’s for high tea; even when the trip and the tearoom’s pricey meal had become too expensive, they still made a point of going. They said they feared it would jinx their marriage otherwise; I think it cheered them up to keep this one extravagance. They maintained the ritual till Leo and I were out of school and had left home. By then the traveling had become too tiring and the joke