The Rome Affair. Laura Caldwell

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СКАЧАТЬ so she could be like the rest of the girls. Money was even scarcer now. Kit told people she worked “in the marketing department of the Goodman Theatre,” which was true and sounded respectable enough, but the plainer truth was she was the department secretary. She collated, she stapled, she answered phones. She made very little money. What she had usually went toward the bills surrounding her mom’s cancer treatment.

      “I’m glad to do it,” I told Kit, squeezing her hand. I was filled with a giddy feeling of promise, of a friendship renewed and, with the exception of my sales pitch tomorrow, a few days away from reality.

      Kit and I checked into Il Palazzetto, a restored palazzo near the Spagna subway station. My mother had been to Rome the previous summer with her new husband, a real-estate mogul much older than she, and they’d stayed for two months at Il Palazzetto. She insisted Kit and I would be crazy to book anyplace else. When we stepped into the small foyer, I could see why.

      The floor was a mosaic of colored stone. Sunlight flooded down the spiral marble staircase with its twisted, wrought-iron railings. On the second floor, our room had soaring ceilings, Roman columns and walls draped with gauzy, flowing fabric.

      I opened the French window of our room, just in time to catch the sight of the pristine, white sun hitting the Spanish Steps.

      I smiled over my shoulder at Kit.

      “This is going to be good,” she said. Her voice told me she was excited in a way she hadn’t been in a long time. “This is going to be really good.”

      I turned back toward the Roman morning and nodded.

      

      Nearly everyone loves Italy. An adult who says, “Oh, I adore Italy” is like a child who says “I love Disneyland.” Of course you do.

      The funny thing is that Italophiles believe it is they who have discovered Italy. They feel this love of all things Italian—the food, the ocher sunsets, the wine, the slow-moving life—which begins when they set foot on the dusty streets of Rome and ends when they head home. Every Italophile senses it is he who loves Italy more than the next, who understands her more deeply than the rest.

      Kit and I were no exception. We had only three days to spend in Rome, so instead of sleeping the day away, we pushed past our jet lag and out into the city for a walk and some coffee.

      We found a neighborhood bar in Piazza Navona, a long, U-shaped square with a tall obelisk and a Bernini sculpture and fountain in the middle. The piazza used to host chariot races, but now held cafés and strolling pedestrians.

      “God, I needed this,” Kit said as we took our seat in front of the bar, our cappuccinos and a basket of rolls in front of us. She flipped back the napkin and offered the basket to me. I took a crescent roll, and she did the same.

      “Me, too,” I said. “How’s your mom?”

      She shrugged, her taupe chiffon scarf lifting around her face. “She’s doing everything she’s supposed to, but she knows the chemo is killing her at the same time it’s supposed to be curing her.”

      “That’s horrible.” I thought how lucky I was to have two healthy parents. Healthy, divorced, never-speak-to-each-other parents, but who could knock it? “I’m sorry,” I said. Ineffective words.

      “We’ll be all right.” Kit shook her hair away from her face. That wavy russet hair was one of the things that drew people to Kit. Not just men, who were staring at her even now as they passed us on their way to work, but the women, too. Her hair was glamorous, fiery—two traits most women wanted a little more of.

      “God, look at her, will you?” Kit nodded toward a gaunt, striking Italian woman who was crossing the piazza. She wore a short black skirt and a pink shawl. Her black hair was swept up in a knot atop her head, and she clicked past us smartly in four-inch herringbone stilettos, despite the treacherous cobblestones.

      “What do you think?” Kit said. “She’s in advertising, right? Or maybe fashion?”

      “She could be a secretary. Even the civil servants here are dressed to kill.”

      “Right, but her husband has money. She’s definitely married.”

      We both peered at the woman’s left hand, and sure enough, there was a diamond ring that looked large even from a distance. “You got it,” I said.

      This was a game Kit liked to play—guessing at people’s lives, then inserting herself mentally into those lives as far as she could. It was what had led her to acting.

      Kit turned back to me. “Speaking of being married,” she said, “how’s Nick?”

      “Fine. I think.”

      “You think?” Kit’s eyes narrowed in concern.

      After Nick’s affair last year, which took place over the span of a weeklong medical seminar in Napa, he had confessed months later. It was a Tuesday night, and I was slicing a tomato for salad. The time was 8:07 p.m. I remember this, because I held the knife in one hand and the large tomato in the other. The tomato’s juice was seeping like blood, and it suddenly seemed obscene, morbid. I checked the microwave clock, wondering if I had a few minutes before Nick came home to make something else, something more benign like spinach salad.

      I hadn’t heard the door open, but I heard the creak of a floorboard in our house on Bloomingdale Avenue. Nick stepped into our kitchen and began crying so hard, his immaculate doctor’s hands cradling his face, that I thought someone had died. He had no idea why he’d done it, he said. He could only say that he wanted—needed—something new. He had felt it like a constant, terrible itch. But now the only thing new was how much he hated himself. I stood silently through his confession. When I found my voice, I begged him to tell me it was only one night. I might be able to deal with only one night. Nick shook his head and cried some more.

      I made him move out for three months. I walked around stripped bare, so that the most mundane things inspired tears. During that time, I realized that infidelity is about much more than the physicality of the act. Of course, the physical can’t be ignored. The raw images of Nick with some other woman—their mouths clinging, bodies locked—hounded me, even made me do the clichéd run to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Despite my mental gymnastics to avoid such thoughts, I always imagined the woman as gorgeous, maybe with gleaming, honey-colored hair and a strong, tanned body. This helped, strangely, because it gave some reason to what Nick had done. He had been lured in by someone stunning—someone tall and blond and entirely different from me, with my small frame and dark hair.

      She wasn’t anything special, Nick told me at least a hundred times, just someone he met at a Napa restaurant. He knew it was his fault, not hers, but he still hated her now that it was done. He hated Napa. He hated the restaurant where he’d met her.

      It was at this point in these discussions I always held up my hand. “Stop. Please,” I’d say. Although I had an image of her in my mind, I didn’t really want to know about this woman. I didn’t want to hear about the restaurant where she waitressed or maybe that she was supporting a child or that her sister had died the previous year. I didn’t want anything to overly personalize her.

      I stayed with him because, unlike Nick, I did not want something new. I wanted him, and us, and a family, and everything I’d invested in. Before he’d told me, we’d been ready to get pregnant. But instead of a baby, Nick’s infidelity got us a therapist, Robert Conan, whom СКАЧАТЬ