Laura Caldwell - The Rome Affair

I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured the gallery where I’d met Nick during a spring art festival in Bucktown, the same gallery where we had our wedding reception three years later, when Nick’s brother and our parents and our friends gathered together in that high-ceilinged room filled with jazz and champagne and sun and art.

I thought of the way Nick always looked at me, especially when I entered a room or a conversation. Nick had a way of furrowing his brows when he listened to someone speak. He was, I’d always said, one of the best listeners I’d ever met. He truly wanted to hear what someone was saying. He wanted to learn, to understand. When I spoke though, the corners of his mouth turned up in a small grin. His brown eyes softened and filled with pride.

And then I thought of Nick’s eyes and the way he’d looked at me that night in our kitchen. The night he’d told me. After his confession, he’d held me lightly by the shoulders, as if I was a balloon that might float away. He’d bent down until our eyes were even. I made a mistake, he’d said. The most awful, most cruel mistake. But I will never do that to you again. I promise. I could see the anguish in his eyes, the paleness of his skin making his few freckles stand out in sharp contrast. I promise, Rachel. I promise.

To believe or not to believe.

I crossed the room and found Roberto’s note. I fingered it. I remembered his fingers on my body. I thought of Nick’s words—I was planning a surprise for you…My wife.

I thought of our bungalow on Bloomingdale Avenue. I thought of the family we planned on having.

I took the note to the window. Outside the wind was still buffeting the people on the steps. I held my fist outside. I unclenched my hand. I watched the scrap of white float into the Roman air.

Nick was waiting for us at O’Hare when we landed, which meant he’d left the office early. I wondered if this was because he loved me, as he had said so many times over the past few months—as he’d said on the phone when I was in Rome—or because he felt guilt that he’d done it again.

“Golden Girl,” Nick said, when Kit and I reached his car.

I smiled. No matter what was going on with us, I always loved when he called me that. He was wearing a suit with a silvery tie and the cuff links I’d given him on our first anniversary. He looked the part of the elegant surgeon. I felt a rush of pride.

He hugged and kissed me, then turned to greet Kit. “How was the trip?”

“Great,” she said.

Kit was wearing the earrings her Frenchman, Alain, had bought for her. They were made of little pieces of green glass, like tiny, emerald chandeliers, and they made her hair gleam a more beautiful auburn.

Looking at those earrings, I remembered how I’d felt after Nick gave me my square sapphire engagement ring. I’d shown it to Kit, who’d expressed happiness, but I knew she’d been envious, wondering why she wasn’t the one getting married.

Now the tables had turned. Alain had told her he was being transferred back to Paris, and he would fly her there when he was apartment hunting. Kit was already envisioning herself in France and I envied her for the clean, simple beginning of it all.

“Did you have fun?” Nick asked Kit.

Her eyes shot to the ground, and she nodded. She looked guilty.

I wondered if Nick noticed, because if I was reading her right, Kit was feeling guilty because of me. She knew about Roberto. I hated myself for putting her in a position where she had to keep quiet about this. But then, wasn’t that what female friendships were based on—the ability to hear the other’s dirty little secrets, to sympathize with her, to tell the other the honest words she needed to hear, to build her back up, to make sure she no longer felt shame at what she’d done, and then to forget, forever, those secrets?

“Your chariot,” Nick said, gesturing to the navy-blue BMW he’d bought last year. “Let me get your bags. And what’s this?” He nodded at Roberto’s canvas, covered again in brown paper, which I’d carried on the plane.

“A painting.” My voice rang high. “A souvenir.”

Nick held out his hand. “I’ll put it in the trunk.”

“No, no. I’ve got it.”

Kit’s eyes shot away from us.

The ride home was filled with my chatter. Nick smiled when I told him about our delicious first-night dinner in Rome; he groaned and said, “Oh, babe,” when I recounted the meeting with the Rolan & Cavalli architects. It felt good to be with him, but I couldn’t ignore the flashes of Roberto, nor could I forget the questions—Nick, what were you doing while I was gone?

The whole time, Kit was silent in the back seat. I turned every so often and tried to draw her into the conversation, but she only smiled back, a sad, resigned kind of smile, and I assumed she was embarrassed for me. Or maybe she was thinking about her mother, about the fact that the vacation was over and it was time, again, to face the hard realities of her illness. When we dropped her off at her mom’s place—an old apartment building in River Forest that looked more like a roadside motel—I couldn’t help but remember the house they used to live in, before Kit’s dad died. It was only a few miles away, just down the street from where I grew up, but it was a well-tended Georgian, with a huge oak in the center of the front lawn.

“Thanks, Rachel,” Kit said to me. “It was a great trip.” She hugged me, avoided Nick’s eyes and headed quickly for the door.

I glanced at Nick, but if he saw something strange in Kit’s behavior, he didn’t comment. “Ready?” he said, putting the car in gear. “I’ve got something to show you.”

We exited at Armitage and wound our way to Bloomingdale Avenue, a tiny, brick street west of the city. On one side of the avenue stood the stone wall of an old rail line, the top of which now served as a planter for trees and bushes and, quite often, an impressively charming display of weeds. On the other side, a few turn-of-the-century bungalows, like ours, mixed with large, single-family homes built in the past five years.

Many Chicago residents knew nothing of Bloomingdale Avenue. After living in the city for years myself, I’d never seen it. But Nick and I took a walk one day during our engagement. We were tired and nervous about getting everything done before the wedding, and we wanted to simply be outside. It was chilly but sunny that autumn day, and we ambled this way and that, talking about the wedding and our jobs and our family and who to seat next to whom. At some point, we stumbled onto Bloomingdale, and with the sun striking orange through the trees, it seemed an enchanted avenue.

There was a For Sale sign in front of a white bungalow that had a wide front porch and a cedar-shake roof. The street and the house were like nothing we’d ever seen before, but we looked at each other and we nodded. It was as if we knew. We called a real estate agent as soon as we got home. We closed on the house a month later, just in time for our wedding.

Nick turned into the alley and parked in the garage behind our house.

He took my hand, and I followed him through our tiny back garden, just starting to bloom with daffodils, and up the wooden back stairs into the house. Nick switched on lights as he led me through the kitchen with its wood-and-glass cupboards, original to the house, and down into the basement.

It was dark on the stairs. “Nick?” I said, almost faltering as I followed him halfway down.

“Okay, stay here.” His hand slipped from mine, and I was gripped with sudden fear.

Then light flooded the basement. I blinked. This was not our dank basement with boxes of discarded clothes and books and my painting table set up into one tiny corner. This was an entirely new room.