Laura Caldwell - The Rome Affair

“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 we’d seen twice a week until recently.

Conan told me that the glorification of this woman as an Amazonian goddess was “certainly not healthy,” but it was the only way I could cope. I chose to view the woman as an otherworldly, goddess-type creature who’d floated into Nick’s path one day, led him astray for five nights, and then left our world, hopefully for the very hot hallways of hell.

Nick and I were officially back together, but I still had a hard time.

“One minute it’s like we’re back to normal,” I told Kit, “then the next he’ll say something or I’ll say something and we’ll remember.”

“And then?”

I took a bite of croissant. It was flaky and buttery but suddenly hard to swallow. “And then it’s awful.”

Sometimes I was in love with Nick, proud of how we’d weathered the storm that had swept through our lives. Sometimes—when I picked up a wine from Napa Valley or saw a TV show about infidelity—my insecurity raged. Sometimes I hated him.

“God, now I’m sorry,” Kit said. “What a sad pair we are.” She put her cup down and threw an arm around my shoulders, hugging me across the table.

I hugged her back. Throughout high school, college and my early years in Chicago, my life had been refracted through the lens of my girlfriends’ eyes, particularly Kit’s. When I got married and she’d moved, I thought I didn’t need the insights or affirmations as often. But now, to be in the company of a friend gave me an optimistic charge. A good bout of girlfriend bonding was exactly what I needed.

Over Kit’s shoulder, I saw the sun moving across the piazza and beginning to warm the gray stone man in the center of the sculpture. Water splashed from the fountain, cleansing him.

Sitting back, I raised my cup. “Let’s have a toast. To Italy, and to a wonderful few days of escape.”

“To fabulous fucking friends!” Kit said. She let out a little holler, which drew looks from the people in the bar, and we touched our cups together.

Kit and I spent a languid first day, moving from one overpriced store on the Corso to the next, laughingly enduring the saleswomen who glanced pityingly at our American fashions and wondered out loud (they didn’t know I understood) whether we could afford the skirts we were looking at.

We were giddy and goofy from lack of sleep, and this was Italy. Nothing bad could touch us. We had dinner on the Via Veneto, doted on by the rotund proprietress who was different in every way from the saleswomen we’d encountered.

“Eat! Eat!” she kept saying. “You are nothing but bones.”

Food kept appearing at our table like wrapped presents under the tree—saffron risotto with gold leaves, pink salmon drizzled green with dill sauce. So, too, the men appeared. “Married,” I kept murmuring, holding aloft my left hand, reveling in the attention but somehow proud again of my marital status, while Kit grinned and flirted and sent them away, even as they sent us sparkling decanters of chianti. We tripped home arm in arm, laughing with memories already made.