One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  He caught up with her at the bottom of the hill, but there was no opportunity to argue because a man opened the front gates and discovered them. He directed an invective of Italian at them but quickly established they were foreigners. In English he demanded to know what they were doing there and how they got in.

  Together they tag-teamed a story about another man who had arrived earlier. The fictitious man had said that he was a gardener and let them in. Normally, or in the “normal” that they had established during the two days of their acquaintance, August would have taken a wicked pleasure in the ease with which they were able to fabricate details together, but this just felt tired, another deception he had dragged Alice into.

  They collected her backpack and returned to the motorino to discover that some joker had left a melting gelato on the seat. Alice went into a shop, bought some water and tissues, and cleaned it. August tried to help, but she insisted on doing it herself, so he watched her, fuming silently.

  At the Termini station, Alice collected the ticket that she had booked the day before, and August carried her backpack down the long station to her train carriage. Their conversation was perfunctory, concerned solely with the business of her departure. Which station, which carriage, which seat. Alice climbed into the silver carriage and turned to take her backpack from August. She reached down, but he did not hand it up.

  “You know how you said love isn’t lists?” he said.

  She nodded.

  “Then why are you going back to him?”

  Because you didn’t ask me not to, she wanted to say. Because when I said, “Love isn’t lists,” all you said was, “Hey.”

  “We agreed that I would stay for another day, and I did. Well, almost a day,” she said, acknowledging that it was only 10:00 A.M. “I’ve had a really cool time.”

  A really cool time? August thought, wounded and bewildered.

  “Yeah, me, too,” he said breezily.

  Alice thought she might faint. She took hold of a guardrail, without urgency, so as not to draw attention to her state.

  “Well, ciao,” she said.

  “Yeah, ciao,” he said, and he handed her backpack over. Alice disguised the effort required to take it with a sunny smile.

  “Okay, I’m going to sit down now,” she said.

  “Safe travels,” he said as if she were an elderly aunt on a day trip to Brighton.

  Alice carried her backpack down to her seat and hoisted it into the overhead locker. She sat down next to a girl who was scratching the star tattoos covering her arm and reading a Zodiac guide in an Italian gossip magazine.

  New Alice would get off the train right now, she thought. She would run after him and tap him on the shoulder and declare herself. But there was no New Alice or Old Alice; there was just Alice. And she loved him too much. She simply did not have the courage to declare herself because if he did not love her back, she would not survive it, she would crack open, she would evaporate. What she was feeling was too big, too dangerous to declare. Only a fool would allow herself to be this vulnerable. In less than two days she had completely lost herself to this man. Love, she realized, was madness and oblivion. She had almost vanished. Her only hope was to stay on the train, to go to Daniel, to tell him the truth, to break off their engagement, and move on.

  August tapped her on the shoulder. She looked up at him and watched him as he lowered himself to squat in the aisle next to her. He did not look into her eyes but studied the armrest next to her.

  “I was thinking I should tell you something,” he said quietly.

  “What?” said Alice.

  The tattooed girl next to her put down her magazine and looked across; clearly something interesting was about to happen.

  “I … er … I’ve never said this to anyone,” he said as an obese lady in a purple dress barreled down the aisle toward him. He stood up and stepped back for her to pass. She flopped into the seat opposite Alice, panting and smiling. He squatted back down. Ignoring his attentive audience of three, he focused on the armrest once again.

  “You’ve never said what to anyone?” said Alice.

  “That I loved them, that I had fallen in love with them.”

  The fat lady and the tattooed girl exchanged a look. Neither spoke English, but they both understood what was being said. The only person who did not understand, or could not take it in, was Alice. It felt to her as if time had suspended. When August eventually looked up at her, his eyes were glassy.

  “So I’ve fallen in love with you,” he said. “That’s what I thought you should know.”

  Alice emitted two strange, startled gasps. She sank her head into her hands.

  “That’s such a relief,” she said, “that you feel it, too.”

  She looked up at him, overcome and exhausted, as if she had returned home from a long journey. Plump tears sprang from her eyes, and she smeared them across her cheeks. They stood and threw their arms around each other and kissed. The fat lady and the tattooed girl looked very satisfied, as if they had brokered the deal themselves.

  The carriage lurched, and the train began to move. August retrieved her backpack and hurried down the aisle with Alice behind him. The guard rebuked them as they leaped from the Florence-bound train for the second time in less than twenty-four hours. On the platform, August pulled Alice toward him and kissed her again. He forgot to think about how to kiss, or what parts to use or not use. There was no technique. There was just kissing. He pressed into her, she pressed into him, both in the moment, the long, glorious moment.

  Eventually, they stopped kissing and realized the train had left the station. August started to lift Alice’s backpack, but she insisted on carrying it herself and hoisted it onto her back. They joined hands and walked back down the platform.

  “So what’s your name?” she said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know your name.”

  He realized she was right. He felt like they had spent a lifetime together but they had, surprisingly, held to his edict that they not exchange names, e-mails, or phone numbers.

  “August,” he said.

  “Hi, August. I’m Alice,” she said, extending her free hand. He took it and they shook as they walked along.

  “Hi, Alice. I’m August,” he said.

  “August,” she said, playing with the word as she enunciated it. “Can I call you Gus?”

  August stopped dead and looked at her.

  “August is lovely,” she said quickly. “I can call you August,” she added, suddenly concerned that she had said the wrong thing.

  August cleared his throat. “No,” he said croakily, “Gus would be fine.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Leonardo da Vinci Part Two

  THE LAW OF LOVING OTHERS COULD NOT BE DISCOVERED BY REASON BECAUSE IT IS UNREASONABLE.

  —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

  Wearing an enormous pair of dark glasses, Meg checked out of the Hotel San Marco and left Alec’s bag with reception. She had briefly contemplated cutting up his clothes, but she had a plane to catch and a detour to make before she went to the airport, and she simply did not have the time. She asked the doorman to instruct the taxi driver to head for the Colosseum. She did not want to go there. She wanted to go to the hotel where she and Alec had stayed almost twenty years before, but she could not remember the name of the hotel or where it was exactly, only that it was a five-minute stroll from the Colosseum. She hoped inspiration would come once she was circling the ancient amphitheatre.

  In the backseat of the taxi, Meg stared at herself in the half-mirror of her window. “No more tears,” she said to her reflection.

  “Scusi, signora?” said the taxi driver.

  “Nothing,” said Meg.

  Traveling down the Via dei Fori Imperiali, the Colosseum loomed in front of them. She marveled, not for the first time, that there it was, smack-bang in the middle of Rome with traffic whizzing around it. Something about the angle of their approach triggered a memory. She rec
alled walking this way, with Alec, years before and looking up at the mighty structure from a similar perspective.

  “Stop,” she said.

  The driver pulled into the curb. Meg looked out through the front window, getting her bearings. She gesticulated for the driver to turn up the Via Cavour; they turned left, right, doubled back, took a couple of wrong turns, but Meg knew she was near. When they passed the Via dei Serpenti and glimpsed the great façade of Santa Maria ai Monti, she knew that once again Rome was delivering up her secrets.

  Bronco had just seen off the two old English dames when a flash of light on the side of Santa Maria attracted his attention. A taxi had pulled into the piazza, and the sun bounced off the passenger window as the door opened. A woman got out and started to walk toward him. His blood ran cold. He could not believe it. It was her.

  Meg walked toward the man standing still outside the Hotel Montini, staring at her. It couldn’t be him, surely, she thought. She had remembered a fine-figured, flashily handsome specimen. The fellow in front of her was thick-middled, sad-faced, and looked rather unwell. Cataracts of defeat clouded his eyes. All that remained of his former glory was a luxurious handlebar moustache.

  “Bronco?” said Meg.

  “Si,” said Bronco.

  “You won’t remember me. I stayed here a long time ago,” she said. “Almost twenty years ago.”

  Bronco wanted to laugh and weep. Remember her? Oh, that he could forget. She had kissed him, just once, playfully, in front of her new husband. Their lips had touched for no more than a second, but it was long enough to imprint her on some part of his brain over which he had no control. He had been, until that moment, the undisputed Casanova of the Hotel Montini. On any given day he would sleep with at least one, sometimes two, sometimes three, and on one memorable day, seven—yes, seven—adoring female guests.

  After she left, he had continued with his dalliances but found himself imagining more and more that he had been making love to the willowy Americana with the golden curls. Eventually, she had inhabited all his fantasies. On the rare occasion that he was forced to relieve himself in the shower, she would appear before him, no matter how hard he tried to conjure the voluptuous brunette on Channel 5. At first he thought it was a sign. That maybe she was on the other side of the world, imagining him. He thought of going to America to look for her. He thought that she might one day come looking for him. He thought this for a long time, but he did nothing about it.

  Months passed, then years. He let go of the silly idea that she would appear. She had never expressed the slightest interest in him. She was a creature of his imaginary world, not his real one. By what fantastical means did he think she would come? Released from the chains of hope, he made friends with gelato. He stopped refusing his nonna’s second serving of pasta. He grew wide-hipped and bald. It took twenty years, but finally Bronco found peace.

  And now, here she was, standing before him. He had staved off the colpo d’aria, but he had no idea how he would survive this.

  “I think I remember,” he said, pretending professional detachment. “It was on your honeymoon, si?”

  “Yes,” said Meg.

  “And the young signore, allora, not so young anymore, I suppose,” he corrected. “How is he?”

  Meg shook her head. “Gone,” she said.

  It was only one word, but Bronco could tell that she was heartbroken, that he must have died tragically somehow, from a lingering disease, in her arms.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said. “You haven’t changed, signora.”

  “Neither have you,” said Meg.

  “Thank you for that lie,” he said. “You are very kind.”

  “Bronco,” she said, “I want to ask a favor…”

  Minutes later they were standing in the room that Constance and Lizzie had just vacated. Meg put her vintage Gucci shoulder bag on the unmade bed and produced a small square parcel of tissue. She unwrapped the tissue and revealed the shimmering square of blue tile that matched the tiles covering the floor.

  Bronco remembered now that this was why she had kissed him. She had discovered, under the rug, that one of the tiles was loose and asked if she could take it as a memento. It was highly irregular, of course, but it was under a rug, and there was a chance that she might sleep with him, even though she was on her honeymoon, so he had said yes.

  “Signora,” he said, “you can keep the tile. You don’t have to give her back.”

  “Thank you,” she said, “but I don’t need it anymore.”

  Meg started to scan the floor to see where a tile was missing. Bronco flipped back the rug to show her. Kneeling down, she returned her treasure to its place and covered it with the rug. It was all over so quickly, too quickly. She pulled back the rug for one last look at this thing that had lived three lives during the nineteen years of her custodianship: the first as a talisman; the second, having incrementally lost its significance, as anonymous junk, lugged around for years in depths of various bags; the third as a mystery candidate, emerging from her jumble of samples as the special one. No wonder she had been convinced it was so important. It was. She was not so foolish as to lay the blame for her current troubles on an inanimate object, but if it had not been for this tile …

  Meg gathered herself and flipped back the corner of the rug. Bronco offered his hand to help her up, and she took it. It was lovely to touch her, having worshiped her all these years, but not thrilling, not electric, as he had imagined it would be, just a little bit sad.

  An hour later Meg was sitting in the business-class lounge, watching the workers on the tarmac loading and unloading planes up and down the runway. She began to think about the children, what she would tell them, when, and how. A man’s hand rested on hers. She turned to see Alec perched on the armrest of the empty seat next to her. For a second, she thought she had imagined him.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I thought you were running off with Stephanie.”

  “I’m not. I don’t…” He paused, casting for a phrase that would not inflame her.

  “What?”

  “Love her,” he said, failing to find it.

  Meg’s eyes wandered around the room, looking everywhere but at him. She was certain, now, that he had gone to her. And 90 percent certain that he had slept with her. She was also certain that she must let this go, that if she were to cross-examine him, she would incinerate with fury and vanish into a desire of vengeance. If they had any hope of moving forward, she must let this particular aspect of his betrayal fall away. Right here, right now.

  “So?” she said.

  “I’m coming back,” he said.

  “You’re coming back because you don’t love her?”

  “Because I love you.”

  “That’s not what you said last night.”

  “I was wrong. I was angry. I thought I meant it, but I didn’t mean it. You know me, I’m … I don’t know what I am.”

  “So you were right about not loving her and wrong about not loving me?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “Tell me what is.”

  Meg looked out the window. She could feel tears coming, but she was determined as hell not to let them escape. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what it takes. I don’t know how we ended up here.”

  “We screwed up, both of us,” he said. “We stopped taking care of each other. It stopped being important.”

  “Maybe we should stop for good.”

  Alec said nothing.

  “It’s hard,” she said. “And boring. Being married for twenty years. What if we struggle on for another twenty?”

  Alec left his perch on the armrest and sat down next to her. He lowered his voice. “Do you love me?” he asked.

  Meg did not respond. She kept looking out the window.

  “Meg, look at me.”

  Meg kept looking out the window. If she looked
at him, she did not know what would happen to her. By way of compromise, she turned slightly, looking at the lamp next to him.

  “Do you love me?” he asked again.

  She nodded briefly and looked back out the window.

  “So let’s try,” he said.

  Meg turned and, for the first time in a very long time, actually held his gaze. He was taken aback.

  “How?” she said.

  He didn’t know how exactly. He knew they needed to talk. He knew what they needed to say to each other would take longer than the long flight back to Los Angeles. He knew that once they got home, children and work and other stuff would take priority and that their only chance was to not allow this to happen.

  “We need to go somewhere,” he said.

  “Where?”

  He didn’t know where.

  “Where?” she asked again.

  And then it dawned on him.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The Gravitational Pull of Blue Tiles

  THY FIRMNESS DRAWES MY CIRCLE JUST, AND MAKES ME END, WHERE I BEGUNNE.

  —John Donne, A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

  While Lizzie berated an airline clerk at the first-class counter, Constance stood by her side, masked by a massive pair of round sunglasses that made her look like a giant insect. She had forgotten to pack a pair of her own, so Lizzie had sent young Marco from the Hotel Montini to procure some. Sadly, his tastes were not as refined as Constance had hoped. They were, however, a step up from the monstrous red swellings through which she was attempting to see, so she did not complain.

  “Please listen very carefully,” said Lizzie to the beak-nosed clerk in her best terrifyingly British voice. “I am not interested in any more of your helpful suggestions. I am only interested in two tickets to London, and I insist that you put us on the very next flight. Or else.”

  “But, signora,” said Beak-Nose, sounding like reason itself, “you are not booked.”

  “Then get us a booking,” said Constance as if he had not explained to her five times already that all the flights to London were full. Lizzie had even condescended to fly business class but to no avail.