I sat in front of the mirror for what seemed like hours. The slick of my hair and the look of my face had to be nearing the image of godliness. Every piece of hair had to be perfectly set and every muscle of my face working in absolute unison. The smile was perhaps the most difficult part. It had to be alluring, gentle, sensitive, inviting and above all, avoiding creepiness at all costs. I had given up on smiling for photographs long ago as I thought my face looked better with a stern view to the middle distance, but that wasn’t going to work in this situation. I must have brushed my teeth seven times in thirty minutes, but the yellow stain that came from drinking sixteen years of Gatineau water had taken its toll on my mouth. My smile was shaky at best, although incessant practice made it manageable.

            The rose in my pocket stuck out red and lush, a brilliant compliment to the tailored suit. It had taken me weeks to save up for the evening, and I put attention to every last detail. The suit came free, thankfully. After all, no Italian, even if he does live in Quebec, can be without a properly made suit. Maybe it was our sense of style or the fact that pasta sauce was constantly ruining everything we wore, but clothes shopping was something of a family tradition in the Mussini household. Even the men in our family had a collection of hats, shoes and suits for any occasion or event conceivable of the human mind. My cousin Denny worked a construction job in Montreal (although my mother assumed his real job put him closer to the mob) and though most days he didn’t have enough money to pay the mortgage on his apartment, he managed to clothe his wife and six kids with more tailored linens than a prince of Arabia. The Mussinis were not big picture people. It was legend that my many great’s grandpapa had been the emperor that fiddled while Rome was being burned. 

            “Nero. Yeah, that’s the guy’s name,” my father would say, lazily sipping back on his espresso. “Now that was a true Mussini. Crazier than Mackenzie King on bath salts.”

            That was another thing about my father. He would weave tales about former prime ministers and presidents and heads of state and government that history had long forgotten and I would suggest he had too. No one really knew when he was telling the truth about FDR’s wife being a lesbian or Rob Forb being a cocaine addict or any other number of stories he was fond of telling whenever his tongue was loosened by a strong cup of coffee. It had been from his love of telling yarns that I had developed my love of history. At first it had just been an infatuation with proving my father wrong, but soon it became an obsession with the past. My room was filled with old records and movie posters from the 70’s. I had been raised by history textbooks and old clippings of National Geographic. Some days I thought I lived more in Edwardian England or Revolutionary France than in the Gatineau of the overbearing, unapologetically boring present. But then there was every so often when I would be forced into the present.

            Maria was such a catalyst for my entrance back into the twenty-first century. She was an Italian girl who lived on the other side of the Ottawa River. At first I had been drawn by her long flowing caramel hair and the smell of cannelloni that followed her along with every stride. She worked at her family restaurant on the south end and she devoted every free space of her schedule to a children’s hospital near the American Embassy. She also managed to slip in a few hours for the Young Liberals, and in my books, that made her as charming a damsel as any. I actually had met her in a meeting of the Young Liberals and it was there I had fallen in love. Seeing her speak about what Ignatieff had to do to secure the Western vote had been as close to love poetry as I could possibly stomach. Though her words transfixed me, it was difficult to not be equally stirred by her bright green eyes, her generous smile and gentle, fragile hands. There perhaps had not been a better person ever created on God’s green earth and it mattered not to me whether we were separated by a river or a thousand miles of hellfire, I would do whatever was in my power to bridge the gap.

            But now, staring at the mirror in my room, looking at my suit and rose, I was beginning to realize that the bridge was going to be long in building. I practiced a few more cheesy jokes I had found on the internet, quirky conversation starters meant to show off an aura of finesse and pizazz that I didn’t actually have and only later would discover didn’t really need. I must have nearly bankrupted the family internet supply looking up Youtube videos on how to be suave and sophisticated. Now it seemed like the hours spent studying and practicing were being flushed down the drain. I’d gained weight since my suit had been tailored and now it was starting to bust at my middle button. The rose I had in my pocket was drooping, a poor dying remnant of a lost garden. The more I looked into the mirror, the more I saw a short, overweight, possibly balding sixteen year-old Italian kid looking back at me, and although he might be popular at the National Spelling Bee, let’s face it, he wasn’t really doing too well with the ladies.

            “Ah, well,” I said, “the reservation’s paid for. What have I got to lose?”

            Obviously the first words to a long lasting, passionate, and healthy relationship.