Laura Caldwell - The Rome Affair

I hurried down the steps and ran my hands over the walls—once gray cement but now papered a pleasing sage-green. I stared at the floors, which were now covered with straw matting, on top of which sat an Oriental carpet in tones of orange and green. A bookshelf rested against the left wall, filled with my art books. The fluorescent strips no longer hung from the ceiling. Instead, a globe pendent provided a warm glow. Against the far wall was an old mahogany artists’ table with a slanted top. Two of the photo paintings I’d been working on had been clipped there.

“Nick?” I said.

“Do you like it?” He put a hand on the table and beamed at me. “It’s your painting room. It’s all yours.”

“You did this for me?”

“Yeah, yeah. I took a few days away from the office. I’ve been working like crazy.” He looked around the room with a grin. “I was thinking it needed some artwork, though. Let’s see that painting.”

I glanced down and realized I was still holding Roberto’s canvas in my left hand. “Oh, I don’t think…”

But Nick was already taking it from me and peeling off the paper. “It’s great. God, it looks like you. Who’s the artist?”

I froze. “Um…”

Nick held it against the wall, right over the mahogany table. “It’s perfect. What do you think?”

I watched my husband smiling broadly, holding the canvas painted by Roberto. Why had I been so quick to judge? Why had I assumed he was cheating again? Panic and dread surged up my throat and pushed a tear from my eye.

Nick’s grin started to falter. “Rach?”

“This is the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen.”

He looked relieved, happy. He placed the painting on the table and held open his arms.

I brushed away the tear and rushed into them.

One Sunday a few months after Rome, Nick and I were in my new basement room. The globe fixture infused the place with cozy light, while a beam of hot August sun pushed its way through the sole window into the cool. Nick lounged in the plush chenille chair we’d put in the corner, and he had the Sunday papers fanned out around him. He liked to read the business section of one, then the book section of another. He felt that Sundays were the one day he could be unorganized, capricious. I stood at my artists’ table, swiping a solvent on a black-and-white photo to prime it for painting. It was a shot of Lake Michigan, and the Chicago skyline beyond that, taken from Diversey Beach. I had already printed and painted this photo twice before, but the blues I mixed kept making the sky too cartoonlike, the teal of the lake too austere, the city too gray.

“Are you ready for that benefit coming up?” I asked Nick.

I loved afternoons like this, conversations like this. They made me forget what I’d done in Rome and how I’d never been able to confess.

Nick gave a rueful laugh. “The printers haven’t done the programs yet, and of course that’s my department.”

“Well, you’re on the board now,” I said in a teasing tone. “You’ll have to handle it.”

Nick had finally made it onto the board, but he was essentially a pledge in a grown-up fraternity. As low man on the totem pole and someone trying to make it as an official member, he’d been given much of the unglamorous work that went into planning the board’s benefits and charity balls.

“Why did you ever let me join?” he said.

I turned, a wet cotton ball in my hand, and smirked. We both knew he loved being on the board. He loved the kudos it brought him from the docs at his office and the new friends it brought into our lives. The limelight he’d grown up in was back—albeit a tiny, probationary light. The truth was we were both on trial for the board. As a result, we were busier than ever with dinners and cocktail parties and lavish benefits. It tired me more easily than it did Nick, who preferred to gripe grudgingly and enjoy every second. And ultimately, seeing him pleased made me more happy than anything else.

As I turned back toward the photo, my eyes landed on the wall, on Roberto’s painting, still hung where Nick had insisted, right above my table. My stomach swooped and sank, as it did every time I saw it.

I’d told Nick the painting was a souvenir. He took that to mean it was a symbol of a memorable Roman trip, and he wanted such a thing in the new room he’d created. But to me, it was mostly symbolic of a grave mistake. The fact that my husband had put it there tortured me.

Every once in a great while, though, when I was able to push past the guilt, the painting was a symbol of sex and confidence and desire, all of which I’d lacked for a while before Rome. But now Nick and I had those things again. The sex was passionate and the ghosts were gone. It was as if my night with Roberto had driven away the woman Nick slept with in Napa. I knew that such a thought was somehow sick and wrong—what kind of person needed a matching bout of infidelity to cancel out the other?—but the effect couldn’t be denied. I no longer thought of the woman as a goddess. I no longer felt insecure or bruised. I realized how much I loved this man, my husband, and because of that, we’d grown assured again in our relationship.

“Nick,” I said impulsively.

“Yeah, hon?”

“I want to take down this painting.”

“Your Rome painting?”

I nodded.

“It looks great in here. Why?”

I stared at its slashes of red and gazed at the girl, who seemed to be me, in the middle of it. My throat threatened to close. “I just don’t like it anymore. I don’t need it.”

When Kit and I had returned from Rome, I agonized over whether to tell Nick about Roberto. Nick hadn’t told me about his affair until a few months after Napa, but the point was he had eventually. He’d had enough respect for me, and for us, to come clean with his sins. In those weeks after Rome, I understood how impossibly difficult that must have been for him, and I cherished him all the more for it. But I found I couldn’t do the same. Not because I didn’t respect him as much, or our marriage. On the contrary, I adored him; I adored us, the way we were now, again. It was simply that we’d already been through too much. Another transgression would splinter us irrevocably.

It sounded like a cop-out to my own ears, yet in my gut I believed it to be true. And so I kept my mouth shut, and a little piece of my heart grew black from the secret, the lack of fresh air. But it was my fault, I reckoned, my cross, and I was bearing it willingly. I didn’t need the painting to remind me.

“What will we put there?” Nick asked.

“My photo paintings. I’ll be done with this one by the end of the week, and I know I’ll get it right this time.”

“Out with the old, in with the new?”

“Exactly.” If the painting was gone, maybe I could forget. Maybe I could forgive myself.

Nick stood from the chair, the newspapers crinkling. “Let me help you, then.”

Together, we leaned over the high table and each took a bottom corner of the canvas. Carefully, we lifted it higher, then together we pulled it away from the wall.

“There,” Nick said.

“Yeah.” I grinned. The wall looked clean now, ready for the future. I stowed the canvas in the closet.

Nick crossed the room and hugged me. I pressed myself into him, my arms around his back and felt myself stir. “Want to go upstairs?”

He groaned softly. “Absolutely.”

The phone rang. “Don’t answer it.” I ran my tongue up the side of his neck.

“Let me make sure it’s not the service.” Nick grabbed the phone off the arm of the big chair and looked at the display. “Kit,” he said.

I took his hand and began leading him up the stairs. “Definitely don’t answer it.”