by Mark Rader
“Okay,” she said. “I understand that. I do.”
He didn’t care if he saw more of Rome or not at this point. What he felt like doing was curling into a ball and sleeping away the day. But Britta said if he was going to be unhappy all day, he might as well be unhappy amid beauty and unhappy with her, and he felt too weak to resist.
First they went to the Basilica di San Clemente, with its great gold ceiling, its soft peachy frescoes in front. Then to Santa Maria, with the gorgeous ceiling, the ancient mosaics with the crudely depicted shepherds, the children with long adult faces.
The air in the churches was cool. Blocky footsteps hollowly sounded. Sitting in a pew, Britta beside him, Paul closed his eyes and let the bowl of air above him push into his shoulders, trying and failing to feel the presence of God. At the Spanish Steps, they drank iced tea and watched the people trickle up and down. Then back for a nap, an early dinner in Trastevere again, but then, instead of heading back for the night, Britta told him she wanted one last thing: to watch the sunset from the top of Gianicolo Hill.
The taxi wound up the long corridor of trees before dropping them off at the end of the road. Two African priests were having their photo taken by the Garibaldi statue, and maybe thirty, forty others stood at the edges of the plaza, looking out. During the ride, Paul slid his clip-on shades over his glasses to protect himself from the low light flaring from the gaps in trees and buildings, but up here he took them off.
This was his last night in Rome. The light was general and muted. He wanted to see everything exactly as it was.
There were no chairs or benches up here, so they stood at the southernmost tip, hands at their sides. Paul squinted west at the setting sun, bulging now as it met the horizon, then settled his eyes east, where it cast light over the city. A blocky carpet of tan and gray houses and offices and government buildings—tinted pink now—curled around the hill. Church domes bobbed above here and there, unmoving buoys in an unmoving sea. Here was St. Peter’s, tallest of all. Here the low gray turtle shell of the Pantheon, the harmonica mouth of Victor Emmanuel. The radio in an idling taxi played some peppy Italian pop tune, which was distracting—but at the moment that was a blessing. Better to skim along the surface of his senses. Better to not think.
“There were trees like that in Door County,” Britta said after a while, looking ahead at a stand of tall pines, peach-gray trunks and branches bare but for a high, wide canopy of leaves. “Weren’t there? Along the main road?”
“I don’t know. You might be right. I believe they’re called umbrella pines.”
“Ah,” she said. “That’d make sense.”
They looked back out at the city. The pale pink light was steady and general. Everything was beautiful and meant nothing.
“Good call on coming here for this,” he said.
“It’s nice, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
A long silence passed between them. The other tourists nearby had quieted too.
Then, without warning, Britta put her hand on the inside of Paul’s arm, dropped it down to his wrist, and lightly pulled his hand from his pocket. She took it in hers and rubbed her thumb over his knuckles, back and forth, back and forth. When he turned to her, her eyes were shiny.
He knew what she felt. He felt the fear and fullness too.
Three times she squeezed his hand, as if to say, Still here, still here, still here.
IV. Maura in Love
For the past ten minutes, as her son and daughter steadily dug trenches on the beach in front of her and hustled buckets to and from the water and clawed the sand like puppies, Maura Novak Williams had been sitting motionless in her beach chair, staring at the same blazingly bright page of her novel as if into a portal, trying to imagine herself saying the words that would destroy her family.
Back in Newton, before they left for the Cape, she promised herself she’d tell Harden her intentions the last night of the trip, once the kids were in bed. Then, in the morning, she’d tell them too. For a few weeks, the time to do this had always been a little bit in the future. Mercifully, always later. But now that day was today, that night was tonight, that morning was tomorrow, sometime before the checkout deadline at noon.
Six weeks ago, she’d confessed to Harden about David and he’d demanded she end it immediately. When she said she wasn’t sure she wanted to, he barked, What? And then: What do you mean? You’re leaving me?
I don’t know what I mean, she said. Which was true: she really didn’t. And when he said, in that case, they would need to go to counseling to figure this out, she’d said she wasn’t sure she wanted that either.
With every day that passed since Harden knew, she felt more inclined to do the unthinkable: ask him for a divorce so she could be with David. She had a plan for making it work, one that David had suggested. She’d ask for joint custody and move into a cheap apartment as close to Harden and the kids as possible. David would split his time between the apartment and his house in Portland, Maine and on the weekends she didn’t have the kids, she’d drive up to Portland to be with him there. With the help of email and Skype, the distance wouldn’t be so bad: every day she’d be in touch with the kids, virtually, and every other day or so she’d be with them in person, too. They’d all have to get creative to make it work, but she was nothing if not creative. I need more time to think it through—that’s where she left things with Harden. And though he was insulted by her request, he was giving her the long leash she’d asked for. Because, unlike her, he wanted them to stay together.
Since finding out about David, Harden had burned with a justified righteous anger, his resting face red and swollen. But over the past few days, up here at the cottage, he seemed to realize his best chance of changing her mind was to reverse course, to remind her, with an attentiveness and kindness she hadn’t seen from him in years, why she was making a mistake. He was a good father and not even that horrible a husband, objectively speaking—it wasn’t about that. She simply wanted David instead. In fact, just a few days before they packed the car for vacation, she told David of her decision while sitting on a bench at the park she liked to walk through at night. To which he said, This is the very best news.
The kids would be blindsided. Crushed. Sitting here fake-reading, wading out into the water, watching them play, she’d been overcome again and again by a flood of tears and waves of vertigo exactly like those she’d felt when looking down a hundred stories from the clear glass platform off the edge of the John Hancock tower they’d visited in Chicago last year. As two thin boys on inner tubes blasted each other with water guns, she thought, I’m a terrorist. Except instead of blowing up strangers, my victims will be my family. Instead of forty-seven comely virgins, David. Though it was about so much more than sex. He wanted to be stepdad to the kids, everything. And he’d be great at it, she was sure. All this could be hers, theirs, later. All she had to do was rip off the Band-Aid now. Just that one tiny, impossible thing.
She hadn’t willingly confessed: Harden had found texts from David on her phone and forced the issue. After, he’d coldly told her she was a bitch, stormed out of the house, and peeled out of the driveway in his Wagoneer. A minute later, Evan wandered into the room, hesitant but curious, and found her ugly-crying on the bed. He’d heard the front door slam. Don’t worry, she’d said. Dad’s just mad about some money stuff. Okay, he’d said, eager to believe.
Already stocked in the cottage kitchen, bought yesterday, was the pancake mix, the big carton of strawberries, and the whipping cream she would whisk until it was perfect for the dollops the kids liked on top of their pancakes, plus two bottles of cranberry juice (Ocean Spray, every other brand Evan wouldn’t drink), a thing of turkey bacon, a bag of red (never green) grapes. With love, tomorrow, she’d make a nice breakfast for everyone, as she had a thousand times before. And as Harden sat there, heartbroken, still stunned by what she’d tell him tonight, they’d eat and talk. He’d stay for the kids, be their safety net. That was the
right thing to do and Harden almost always did the right thing. She’d always respected him for that.
At some point, the world would shrink to the few cubic feet of air between their faces and she’d just need to open her mouth and say the words. Probably she’d cry in advance. Of course she would: she was already doing it now. Evan’s eyes would get big and anxious, sensing trouble. Guys, she would say, I have something very difficult to tell you. Evan would ask her, already upset, if she was sick, because he had started worrying about people dying on him lately. It started three years ago when Grandpa Don died suddenly of a heart attack and intensified again this spring when she’d told him about her uncle, Paul, the priest, who had cancer and whom Grandma was with for the summer. That’s where his mind would go. That, or he’d ask her if Paul had died, to which she would answer no, fortunately, not yet.
Thinking about her kids’ brown eyes locked on to hers—shocked, sad, vulnerable, not registering anything but I’m leaving and divorce—Maura sucked in air, her chest stuttered. Imagining details was torture but necessary: projecting the scene in all its awful detail would make her less scared to actually do it.
“Hey, Mom?” Evan said now.
Maura looked up. He was kneeling in the sand, one eye closed, Popeye style, against the sun.
“Hey, bud!” she said, overcompensating. “What is it?”
“Do we have any duct tape in the car?”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“Can you go check?”
“Actually, I know for sure it’s not there, I would’ve seen it when we packed. Do you need it for what you’re building?”
“I want to make trapdoors. Like make a hole and put tape over it? And then maybe sprinkle sand on it to camouflage it.”
“Hmm,” she said. “I bet there’s something else here you could use instead.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know—like some bark or a piece of cardboard or something?”
He tilted his head to the side, like a dog hearing a distant whistle. “Do you have anything in your purse I could use?”
She looked: in fact, she did. Two brochures from the cottage. “Would these work?”
Evan scrambled to his feet, took them, then scrambled back to his spot. What they were making was unclear to her, but she liked the pattern: from above, it would look like a target. Fully engrossed like this, locked into a state of pure play, he could be such a sweetheart. Look at his gulping boy belly, his faintly exposed ribs. The Valley Girl way he blew hair out of his eyes. Stretches of easy time like this made you forget about how hard he often was to deal with. (She’d have to make so much up to him, after this. The one who would be wounded most deeply was him.)
“Is this some sort of castle or something?” she asked.
“We’re just making moats,” Ella replied.
“A castle’s a little-kid thing to make,” Evan said.
“Though if a little kid walked by and wanted to pretend there’s a castle there, that would be okay,” Ella added.
“As long as it’s invisible,” Evan chimed in.
Quietly, for maybe a minute, they kept digging, saying nothing to each other, and the world was good.
“I really like how you two are playing together today,” Maura said. The literature said positive reinforcement was key. For any kid, but Evan especially.
Ella shrugged. “It’s easy when he’s not being mean.”
“I’m not being mean!” Evan said.
“She said you weren’t being mean,” Maura said.
“Oh.”
“By the way, just so you guys know,” she said, seizing the moment, “we should start back home in about ten minutes.”
“Noooo!” Evan said. “Fifteen!”
“Fine,” Maura said. She’d do ten and say it was fifteen: he wouldn’t know the difference. “But that’s it. I need to get dinner started soon.”
“Okay,” Evan said. “Deal.”
He sniffed twice, his allergies acting up, then wiped his nose with his forearms; his hands were so caked with sand they looked like brown sequined gloves. A seagull landed behind them, a breeze blew, the pages of her neglected novel riffled in one direction, over the stopper of her thumb. The eye of the seagull was reptilian and yellow. A villain in a feathery package. How could it be she was going to move out? Not see them every day? Not scoop them up for hugs every morning? Was she insane? But it was true she’d been without them for long stretches before. At the Blue Woods retreat where she’d met David, for example. For two weeks at her mom’s place after Don died too, and they’d all survived. It was so rarely nice like this anyway; usually she was yelling at Evan, or he and Ella were fighting. And if it was love on the table, what about the love she got from David, a love that had resurrected her as a person? It felt equally impossible that she break things off with him too.
What she’d need to learn how to do, she thought, as both children stiffly shuffled with buckets and great purpose toward the foam of the tide, was to need them a little bit less. Love them as much as ever, but need less. When kids were teenagers a little gulf often opened between them and their parents—the first steps toward leaving the nest; her moving out would merely speed up the process. It would be the hardest thing she’d have to do. But if she didn’t do it now, while she had this clarity, she’d never forgive herself. Or that’s what she told herself.
Ask her a year ago whether it was possible she could leave her husband, and she would have snorted and said, Please. Never in a billion years. It wasn’t that she didn’t daydream about being with someone else or living in a sleepy bungalow alone. She’d been more unhappy than happy for many years. Frustrated with her relationship with Harden, who was so distant and difficult to talk to; worn down by all the heavy lifting it took to keep Evan on the rails; and by her job. But she knew she wouldn’t ever do anything about it. Who got everything they wanted? Real adults knew to be stoic and accept their fate.
But then, last year, the year she turned thirty-eight, that particular line of thinking had stopped working for her. Specifically, it stopped working in the patio room of the Emporium Bar and Grill, during her twentieth high school reunion back in St. Louis. She and her girlfriends—Sarah, Kris, Amity—had dove quickly into drinking, laughed too hard at the semi-embarrassing stories they decided to share, before a shrugging cynicism about kids and husbands took hold. If it was a little superficial, at least they were trying to be honest, unlike certain other people (she knew who) probably humblebragging at other tables. They weren’t here to pour their hearts out, only to do a little bonding with whatever glue did the job. So be it.
But when Alison Ranier arrived, the night utterly changed. The high school version of Alison (never Ally, she refused to answer to Ally) had been, like Maura, one of the five smartest girls in their class. She was sweet and awkward and plain: her thick glasses and baggy sweatshirts put you in mind of a sloppy mole. Because she was a threat academically but not socially, Maura liked her; it was nice to have someone who pushed her to study harder whom she also felt superior to. But as social media proved many years later, Alison was a classic late bloomer. Turns out there was a hot body under those sweatshirts and a strikingly pretty face behind those glasses. In her late twenties she wrote a series of successful YA books about an awkward teenaged girl with superpowers, one of which was optioned but never made into a movie; and along the way she married a guy who looked like a cuddly Josh Brolin who had directed a pair of well-received indie movies and was personal friends with the movie star Ewan McGregor. Alison’s public photo stream dried up suddenly, however, after a freak diving accident paralyzed her from the waist down, leaving Maura to wonder, and to aimlessly google, and to patch together a picture of Alison’s life as some dim existence, filled with quiet suffering. There had been little activity on her blog. No new books in the works. No new movies for her husband. Life as they knew it had obviously been stopped cold.
Around nine, though—very late, consider
ing the dinner had started at 5:30—Alison arrived. She was swarmed instantly by the three other formerly shy nerds she’d called her friends, leaning down to hug her in her wheelchair, rocking back and forth. Soon, this improbable incarnation of Alison held court in a beautifully stylish and expensive-looking dress, sharing—if the gaping mouths and hooting reaction of her audience was any indication—truly funny and slightly shocking things. Confident, beloved, unbroken Alison. Drinking a vodka cranberry.
It was possible that the handsome filmmaker, aware he was being watched and judged, was simply playing the part of the sweet husband and had a nonparalyzed mistress on the side. With all that access to beauty, time away on movie sets, you could imagine it. But Maura didn’t think so. Along with her small audience, he smiled and laughed—real laughter—his dark eyes molten, it seemed, with a warm, admiring love. Not once, she thought, had Harden ever looked at her this way, not even when they were dating.
Sitting in a white plastic folding chair, her third vodka tonic held loosely in her warm hand, Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” the latest in a maniacally on-theme playlist of pop songs exclusively released in their graduation year of 1988 thumping from a rented sound system, Maura felt pinned to the wall by a truth she knew but never let herself feel: that she’d never given the kind of love she’d wanted a fighting chance. A few too many painful breakups in college with art boys and music boys, and she’d sworn the whole romantic equals/partners in art idea off, already cynical by the age of twenty-one.
Before that, however, she’d been devoted to the idea of a soul mate; though she always mocked the word, she utterly believed in the idea of it. In Mrs. Alpert’s painting class she wrote a paper on Georgia O’Keeffe’s cow skull paintings, which yielded an A- but, more importantly, introduced her to the true story of the long, passionate, complex, ahead-of-its-time relationship of Georgia and Alfred Stieglitz, the famous photographer. Her mom and Don were a rare real-life love story, her first model; but Georgia and Albert had attracted her much more because they were (let’s face it) more attractive. And they were both artists—what she desperately wanted to be.