Read Online The Orange Blossom Special by Betsy Carter - Free Book Online

going. “Good,” he’d say, not bothering to mention that by eighth grade he was doing oil on canvas and by his freshman year he’d decided that he was going to become a painter and live in Paris. All through high school, he worked for his father and stashed every penny he earned in the brass safe box that his grandfather had given him on his confirmation. By the time he was seventeen, Barone was five feet nine inches, four inches taller than Christian. On the night that he announced to his parents that he was going to Paris after graduation, he watched his father’s face turn the color of a rainy day. “Is that what you call work?” he shouted. “Over my dead body, no son of mine is going to be some highfalutin artist.” He balled his fist, getting ready to strike. But Barone grabbedhim by the wrists and pinned his arms to his sides. “There’ll be no more of that,” he said, leaving red handprints on each wrist. One week later, he sailed for Paris.
    He found a small walk-up studio with just enough room for a bed and his easel. He’d paint all morning and in the afternoons take his sketch pad and a box of colored pencils to the café downstairs where he’d sit with a sign that said LES BEAUX PORTRAITS DIX CENTIMES . Barone attracted people with his dark exotic looks and easy manner. Turned out, he’d inherited his father’s talent for sweet-talking.
    He was in Paris for three months before he met another American. That afternoon, he was sitting at the café when he heard a woman ask the waiter for
“un demitasse sil vous plais.”
The waiter scrunched his nose as though he had just smelled rancid butter, then shrugged. Once again she said,
“Un demitasse sil vous plais,”
and once again the waiter pulled away and knitted his eyebrows as if the mangled French were a physical assault. Barone knew the waiter and knew that he understood English perfectly. The woman seemed to be getting angry and Barone sensed there could be a scene. “Henri, give this lovely woman a demitasse and put it on my bill,” he said.
    â€œ
Okey dokey, Monsieur,
” said Henri, and hurried off to make the coffee. The woman turned around. She had large horseshoe-shaped lips the color of holly berries and tawny-colored hair. She wore a tight purple sweater and had, as Christian would have so eloquently said, “tits that could knock you from here to Yonkers.”
    â€œHow do you do, Miss . . .”
    â€œFran. Fran Faberge,” she said, in a fractured accent part-English part-American.
    â€œFran Faberge. What a refined name,” said Barone.
    â€œYou can tell so much from a name, don’t you think? And speaking of names, may I ask, what is yours?”
    â€œYou’re going to find this hard to believe,” he said. “It’s Barone Antonucci.”
    She laughed, an unguarded husky laugh that was purely American. And then she said the thing that he would always remember. “Get outta here. You’re as much of a Baron as I am a Faberge.”
    â€œAh, but,” he said in an exaggerated French accent, “My father is Christian Antonucci, the king of the restaurant supply business in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. And I have come to Paris to be an artist.”
    â€œYeah, well, my father is king of the royal pains in the asses in Tea-neck, New Jersey,” she said in her native accent. “Joey Moresco. Maybe you heard of him?”
    Fran, it turned out, had also come to Paris to pursue her art. She’d been a ballet dancer since she was eight years old. Her teacher at Swan Studios, where she’d studied for twelve years, had urged her to follow her dreams. “Fran,” she’d told her, “It’s in your blood. A natural like you comes along once in a lifetime.” She told her she must go to Paris, France, where the ballet was thriving, unlike in Teaneck. So Fran went to Paris where her gifts were just