One Summer Day in Rome

by Mark Lamprell

  “But, signora…” said Beak-Nose.

  Lizzie glanced at Constance and noticed that she was pale. “Go find a seat, girlie,” she said, “and don’t worry. Scary old ladies always get what they want.”

  Constance had never been more grateful for Lizzie’s bossy streak. She retreated to an uncomfortable plastic bench and sat watching the world go by while Lizzie escalated her demands to various British Airways officials who attempted to appease her. Eventually, after threatening to have her (completely fictitious) cousin Lord Fairnsworth deregister the airline, Lizzie gave up on British Airways and canvassed every other airline that flew into London.

  Half an hour later she emerged from the throng and collapsed on the bench next to Constance. “Apparently,” she said, “scary old ladies don’t always get what they want. The earliest we can get out is tomorrow. Sorry.”

  “It’s this place, Lizzie,” said Constance, smiling. “Roma—just when you think you’ve finished with her, you find she’s not finished with you.”

  They returned, a little worse for wear, to the Hotel Montini. Bronco was nowhere to be found, but young Marco was sitting at the reception desk, lost in a video game. Constance was almost upon him when he raised his eyes from the screen. His face lit up.

  “Contessa!” he said. “I thinked you go home.”

  Behind her, Lizzie wrangled the luggage into the foyer.

  “So did I, Marco,” she said, “but I’d like my room back, please.”

  “I beg your pardon, Contessa,” said Marco, “that room is taken, but there is one next to her, almost the same.”

  “Our room has gone already?” said Constance. “Who has taken it?”

  * * *

  In the blue-tiled suite, August sat up in the bed, naked and alone. He flattened the sheet that covered him to the waist, breathed into his hand, and smelled his breath. It didn’t stink, but it wasn’t exactly minty fresh either. He began to deliberate whether to get out of bed and clean his teeth when Alice appeared at the bathroom door wearing nothing but a towel. His brain emptied. Had anyone offered him one million pounds to add one plus one, he would have been completely incapable of answering “Two.”

  His lips curled in a funny kind of half grin. Alice flashed him a brief, nervous smile in return. She walked to the edge of the bed. He took her hand and pulled her gently toward him. They lay side by side, facing each other, a sheet and a towel between them. Breathing shallow and fast, he watched the pulse beat in her neck. She ran her fingers across his jaw, his clever, crooked mouth. In one continuous movement, August ripped the sheet from under Alice, straddled her, and pulled open her towel so that their bodies were revealed to each other.

  August chuckled softly into her neck. He had not kissed her clavicle three times before they both surrendered any pretense of restraint. Quickly he slid into her, and they twisted and banged their bodies together, slippery and joyful as otters.

  * * *

  Next door, Marco had successfully installed Constance and Lizzie in the room that they had originally rejected, while downstairs Bronco had been roused from an emergency nap to man the front desk. He looked up to see Meg walking back into the foyer, with Alec.

  Bronco felt his forehead to gauge his temperature. He was okay. He had heard of a gelateria near the Fontana di Trevi that was selling green-tea gelato. He decided to hunt some down before the day ended and focus on the promise of this to get through whatever fresh horror was about to unfold. Was this the dead husband or some new fellow she had brought with her? Professional intuition told him it was the dead husband, not so dead obviously.

  “Signora!” said Bronco, conjuring a smile. “And signore!”

  “Bronco!” said Meg.

  Bronco looked at Alec. “You are back!” he exclaimed. Then, turning to Meg, said, “He’s back!”

  “I’m back,” said Alec, realizing that this was indeed the same fellow who had kissed his bride eighteen years before. He wondered, briefly, why the intervening years had been so unkind to him.

  “Is our old room still empty?” said Meg.

  “It has just been occupied, I’m sorry,” said Bronco, “but there is one next door, almost the same.”

  Young Marco appeared and took Meg and Alec up to a penthouse room that was indeed identical to the one next door, except for the color of the red-tiled floor. Marco was beyond thrilled with the size of his tip and lavished praise and thanks on his elegant American guests. The boy’s hyperbole made Meg smile. Alec could not recall the last time he had seen his wife smile in such an uncomplicated way.

  Marco left, and Meg hovered next to their luggage. Overwhelmed by the thought of dissecting their relationship, she wanted to lie on the bed and pretend that the previous forty-eight hours had never happened. Now that they had the time and place to talk, it seemed to Alec that there was nothing for him to say, except Sorry and Let’s give it another shot, which he had already said. They had agreed to scale a mountain together, but both were suddenly incapacitated by the enormity and ambition of the venture.

  Alec opened the doors to the terrace and walked to the balustrade overlooking the piazza. A small group of musicians were setting up their instruments on the steps of the fountain below. A complaining girl dropped an armful of music stands. A boy grappling with a double bass stopped to help her. Alec sensed a presence standing next to him and realized that Meg was by his side. He felt an impulse to put an arm around her shoulder but worried that it would seem presumptuous.

  “Is it okay to…” He paused. “Can I touch you?”

  Meg flinched. It was the saddest question he had ever asked her.

  “I don’t know why I…” She paused.

  “What?”

  “Why I act the way I do.”

  Alec had spent a great deal of time over the years being irritated by his wife’s antics but had never given a great deal of genuine consideration to the cause of her behavior. Looking down at the musicians, he suddenly realized that during their lives together he had accumulated a portrait of her, of how she was formed, that actually went a long way toward explaining why she acted the way she did.

  Meg had been raised on her family’s outback station, larger than some European countries, with four older brothers. They were big, confident boys, and while they celebrated their little sister for her prettiness, they dismissed her usefulness on the property. Meg retaliated at first by trying to match them, mustering cattle and mending fences, just like they did. But they were bigger, stronger, older, and ultimately more effective at stock and station work. So Meg became the smart one, the funny one, the outrageous one.

  He remembered, in the early days of their relationship, traveling to Australia with her and watching her work so hard with her family, to make them laugh, to sparkle, to be the star attraction. He had wanted to hold her and whisper in her ear, “You don’t need to impress anyone.”

  But she did. And God knows, she impressed him. She was so funny and gorgeous and clever and fabulous. He pursued her like he pursued nothing else. He didn’t care about his career or money or where he lived—she was enough; she was everything. Until she wasn’t.

  Once he had possessed her, it slowly dawned on him that he could not intoxicate himself with another person and let that be his life. Over the years, he had let her know of this epiphany in infinitesimally small increments. A restrained smile. An irritated curve of the lips. A brief but exasperated squint. Meg had collected all his feedback and dutifully collated it. In response, she became more dramatic, more outrageous, more captivating. The more he withdrew, the harder she worked.

  God, he thought, I have brought us here.

  “It’s my fault,” he said.

  Meg turned to him, uncertain what he meant.

  But he knew exactly what he meant; he had hated her family for making her work so hard to be loved. And now he realized that this was precisely what he had done.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I think we’re beyond apologies,”
said Meg.

  “No. I really need to tell you I’m sorry.”

  Meg looked out over the piazza.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said.

  * * *

  Lizzie had ordered cucumber slices for Constance’s eyes, which were finally beginning to settle. In their green-tiled room, both the old ladies had retired for a lie-down. They dozed, exhausted, but buzzed in and out of wakefulness, as if they were expecting an alarm to go off or a visitor to arrive. Constance turned on her side, letting her cucumbers fall away. She watched Lizzie’s lying on her back, blinking slowly at the ceiling. Gradually the time between blinks grew longer and longer until Lizzie’s eyes no longer opened. Constance observed the rise and fall of her chest and was about to give thanks that at least one of them was sleeping, when an orchestra started to play in the piazza below.

  Lizzie opened her eyes and listened. It wasn’t a very loud orchestra. It wasn’t a very good one either. They appeared to be attempting Haydn. She turned to find Constance smiling at her. Without discussing it, they each hoisted themselves up and shuffled out to the terrace for a look. Emerging into the harsh light, Constance stopped and went back to retrieve her sunglasses.

  Lizzie looked down at the orchestra and immediately felt more kindly disposed toward them. They weren’t an orchestra at all but an expanded string quartet: three violinists, a cellist, and double bass player, all in their early teens, struggling courageously with their instruments and the music. The poor fellow with the double bass looked like he was trying to stop it from escaping. Constance appeared next to Lizzie, observing the spectacle from behind her giant glasses. A man carrying a large bunch of burgundy roses was moving through the crowd.

  “Is that Horatio?” said Constance, peering.

  Lizzie recognized him immediately. He was arriving to take her to tea as they had arranged the previous evening.

  Constance turned to Lizzie and saw that she was rattled. Horatio looked up at the terrace and spotted them. He waved. They waved back. Lizzie felt foolish and embarrassed, mortified that Constance’s eagle eyes would be registering her heightened state.

  “We arranged to meet,” said Lizzie.

  “That must have been some dinner,” said Constance dryly.

  “Oh, stop it,” said Lizzie.

  Constance smiled.

  “I left a message with reception when were leaving this morning,” said Lizzie, “telling him I wasn’t here, that I’d had to leave.”

  “But you are here,” said Constance.

  “I know. He’s going to think I’m standing him up.”

  “Standing him up? How old are we? Sixteen?”

  “You are in no position to be making fun of me, particularly when you are looking like an enormous fly in those ridiculous glasses.”

  “Better freshen up that lippy and get down there,” said Constance, winking through her polaroid lens.

  “Did you just wink at me?”

  “I never wink.”

  “You must come too. Horatio would love to see you, I’m sure.”

  “Let’s get one thing perfectly clear,” said Constance. “I am not coming with you. You’re flying this one solo, girlie. Now go.” She pointed to the door and in her best, scariest pirate voice said, “Go!”

  * * *

  In the room next door, August and Alice lay on the bed, gleaming with sweat. Alice was making a study of how light interacted with the interior of August’s ear to produce various shades of pink while August stared at the ceiling, wondering whether it had been finished with horsehair plaster. Alice briefly entertained the idea of covering her nakedness, but the obstacles to achieving this seemed insurmountable. Her towel was scrunched between the mattress and the headboard, and the sheet was on the floor next to August. She would have to exert herself if she wanted to reach either the towel or the sheet, and she was categorically incapable of any further exertion. Music drifted up from the piazza.

  “Music,” said Alice redundantly into August’s ear. She watched lines at the side of his eyes crinkle into a smile. He sat up and peeled off the bed, absconding with the sheet, which he wrapped around himself as he padded to the terrace doors.

  “Hey!” she protested.

  August disappeared through the doors, unmoved.

  Alice supposed she should muster herself to join him. She rolled off the bed in a sort of commando maneuver, put her feet on the floor, and was about to launch forth when her toe caught the edge of the rug. She tripped and fell. As her knee hit the rug, she heard a crack. She hoped that it wasn’t her kneecap, which hurt but was not proportionately painful. Alice sat up to inspect her injuries. Having satisfied herself that she had fractured no bones, she pulled back the rug and discovered that one of the tiles had dislodged.

  Alice wrapped herself in a towel and limped on the terrace with the loose tile.

  “Look at this,” said August, leaning over the balustrade, looking into the piazza. Alice joined him.

  “An orchestra,” said Alice.

  “Not them—them,” said August, pointing at an old man who presented an enormous bunch of roses to an old lady and kissed her hand.

  “Oh, how sweet,” said Alice. “I bet they’ve been together for, like, fifty years.”

  August turned to Alice and saw that she was holding a small floor tile.

  “You don’t know how to fix tiles, do you?” she said, handing it to him.

  “Sure do,” he said and, as a joke, without giving it any thought, started to fling the tile into the air above the piazza. He was about to release it when he realized, however, that his small projectile was quite likely to brain someone below. In the final, crucial second, he pivoted on his foot and flung it the other way, up onto the roof behind them.

  He had meant to impress her with his spontaneity and wacky derring-do, but he was already regretting his action as the blue tile arced through the air. It almost cleared the peak of the roof but clipped a chimney, landed, and clattered back down the tiles on a new trajectory. They could hear it land with a dull thud on something next door but could not see anything because of the vine-encrusted trellis that divided the terraces. Alice punched August on the arm.

  * * *

  Constance had been waving farewell to Lizzie and Horatio as they headed off to tea, when she heard on object land on the terrace behind her. She walked over to a potted lemon and discovered, sitting in the soil at its base, a blue tile. A quarter of a century had passed since it had been in her possession, but she recognized it immediately.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The Dream

  THERE ARE MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN AND EARTH, HORATIO, THAN ARE DREAMT OF IN YOUR PHILOSOPHY.

  —William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  The human genome contains all the genetic information you need to make a person. The information is encoded as DNA sequences within twenty-three chromosome pairs in cell nuclei as well as a small DNA molecule found within individual mitochondria. Its total length is over three billion base pairs, yet the differences among individual humans only vary within a range of 0.1 percent. Further differences could be accounted for by the extensive use of alternative pre-mRNA splicing, but here’s the take-home message: regardless of race, color, creed, or credit rating, people are, by and large, 99.9 percent identical.

  All humans are alike, and some are more alike than others. Some humans share combinations of gene sequences that remain uncannily intact through generation upon generation of reproduction. Indeed, this was the case with Alice, Alec, and Constance.

  Had the dividing trellises between the penthouse rooms of the Hotel Montini magically blown away, Alice might have turned right and spotted her mother’s brother, Alec, with her boisterous Australian aunt, Meg. She had not seen them since one Thanksgiving in her early teens when her mother had made a sotto voce comment about Uncle Alec giving up on architecture to become a “shopkeeper.” Relations had cooled since then, and communications were limited to an annual exchange of Christmas cards.

 
Had Alice turned left, she might also have recognized her grandfather’s sister, Constance. She had only met her great-aunt a couple of times as a child, but her mother never failed to drop their aristocratic English connections into conversation whenever the opportunity arose. Constance loomed large in family folklore.

  My purpose in gathering the three of them on the roof of the Hotel Montini was merely to facilitate the efficient execution of procedure. When you are a specialist, as I am, in matters of the human heart, much of your work occurs in microcosmic realms. Harnessing the right wavelength will carry you far. Forging allegiances with certain colonies of bacteria is essential, as well as enlisting the assistance of sometimes unhelpful viruses. Inside the twisting canyons of human DNA sequences, wonders can be accomplished. For my part, it is simply more effective to work on people who share the same DNA sequences, rather like working on the same make of car. I have found over the years, however, that under these circumstances—when like is gathered with like—serendipities occur. When Constance picked up the blue missile sitting at the base of her lemon tree, for example, it was one outcome among millions that might have occurred as a consequence of August throwing the tile. But it just happened to be the right one.

  * * *

  Holding the small blue square, Constance could have sworn it was vibrating, very softly, in her hand. She wondered whether it was an omen. Had it returned to her for some kind of purpose? Was she supposed to put it in her bag and take it back to London? She had taken it originally for luck, and the tile had brought her luck, certainly, but the luck had been bad as well as good. She counted the years that it had been in her possession as the most tumultuous of her life. No, she decided, I have done quite enough living in interesting times.

  With the tile in hand she padded back through her room into the hall and knocked on the door of the blue-tiled suite. There was no answer. Without thinking she put her hand on the door handle and turned it. The door opened. Constance peered inside. Observing the stripped and disheveled bed, she called a timid, “Hello?” Again, there was no answer, but she could see that the rug next to the bed was peeled back, revealing the space where the tile belonged. She walked into the room and, taking care not to strain her back, bent and fitted the tile into the hole.